a genre for everyone

Having just finished Edmund Wilson’s book Axel’s Castle (which I really should have read 20 years ago, since I was interested in these themes even more intensely then), my sense has only increased that he’s at his best when writing reviews on individual authors. The book is excellent, of course, but not really qua book in my opinion. It could just as easily have been a series of individual reviews on Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Stein, etc. The conclusion is better than I was expecting, but doesn’t quite succeed in tying everything together the way a bona fide book should do.

Wilson’s career path matched his talent, too. He was a magazine writer, never a university professor.

And this leads to the somewhat obvious but still rather profound point that authors tend to be at their best in one specific genre. (There are cases of rare versatility where several different genres are mastered, but it’s never all of them.)

Nietzsche is at his best in the long aphorism. His one-liners are often great too, but at times it sounds like he’s trying too hard to be a 17th century Frenchman. His long, uninterrupted blocks of text (more common in the early books) dull his style somewhat. But he’s unbeatable when it comes to 400-word segments of text.

Leibniz is at his best in the 10-page metaphysical treatise. I tend to grow bored with the New Essays on Human Understanding and the Theodicy, and would be perfectly happy if he had never tried to write anything book-length at all. But no one, absolutely no one, can devise complete philosophical systems in 10 pages the way Leibniz can.

As for Heidegger, this may surprise you, but I think he’s at his best in the undergraduate lecture course. Other than his doctoral and habilitation theses, he published only two full-blown academic books (Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), and though the former is a hyper-classic and the latter a classic, he doesn’t seem fully at ease with himself in either case. We know what a tough time he had writing his magnum opus: having to write it under pressure, and then never really finishing it. And the Kant book, though famously excellent, is not as lively as his lecture courses. I think Heidegger was at his best when in total authority in front of a room of overawed undergrads. Nothing wrong with that; we all have different ways of finding our personal comfort level in doing our best work. The Marburg courses in particular are some of the best philosophical pedagogy we’ve ever seen, despite the moments of pedantic condescension.

Descartes is at his best in the personal meditation format. No one does it better.

Hume, the essay format.

Bruno, the comic dialogue.

In Plato’s case, it’s too obvious to say.

The interesting thing is that, in many of these cases, these authors were driven into their most comfortable genre by the pressures of circumstance, not by free choice after examining all available options. Finding your voice may require having a heavy layer of rock pressed upon you first.