MARXISM AND THE LITERARY CRITIC
“… Difficulties encountered when writing the truth”
At the origins of the Marxist theory of literature there are three celebrated and canonic texts. Two of them are citations from Engels’ letters; the third is contained in a short essay by Lenin. Engels wrote to Minna Kautsky in November 1885:
I am by no means an opponent of tendentious, programmatic poetry (Tendenzpoesie) as such. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, and the father of comedy, Aristophanes, were both strong Tendenzpoeten no less than Dante and Cervantes; and it is the finest element in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe that it is the first German political Tendenzdrama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, are all Tendenzdichter. But I believe that the thesis must spring forth from the situation and action itself, without being explicitly displayed. I believe that there is no compulsion for the writer to put into the reader’s hands the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he is depicting.
Writing in English to Margaret Harkness, at the beginning of April 1888, Engels was more emphatic:
I am far from finding fault with you for not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a “Tendenzroman” as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author. That is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.
By virtue of this principle, Engels defends his preference of Shakespeare over Schiller, of Balzac over Zola. The third text, however, is altogether different. In his essay on “Party Organization and Party Literature,” published in Novaia Jizn in November 1905, Lenin wrote:
Literature must become Party literature.… Down with un-partisan littérateurs! Down with the supermen of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat, “a small cog and a small screw” in the social-democratic mechanism, one and indivisible—a mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the whole working class. Literature must become an integral part of the organised, methodical, and unified labours of the social-democratic Party.
These injunctions were put forward as tactical arguments in the early polemic against aestheticism. But cited out of context, Lenin’s call for Tendenzpoesie in the most naked sense, has come to be regarded as a general canon of the Marxist interpretation of literature.
Clearly, there is between Engels’ pronouncements and the Leninist conception a profound divergence in bias and drift of argument—if not a formal contradiction. The kinds of critical response and sensibility engaged by the literary work are, in the respective instances, wholly different. This disparity has not escaped the awareness of Marxist theoreticians. Georg Lùkács has twice attempted to reconcile Engels’ defense of the poet’s uncommitted integrity with Lenin’s demand for total partisanship and aesthetic discipline. In his major essay on Engels as a theoretician and critic of literature (1935), Lukács quotes from the letter to Minna Kautsky and proposes an intricate gloss. He argues that the type of Tendenz (Edmund Wilson renders this crucial term by “tendency” but “thesis” and “programmatic bias” are closer) which Engels would find acceptable is, at bottom, “identical with that ‘Party element’ which materialism, from the time of Lenin on, encloses in itself.” According to this analysis, Engels is not objecting to a littérature engagée as such but rather to the mixture “of mere empiricism and empty subjectivity” in the bourgeois novel of the period. Obviously dissatisfied with this treatment of the problem, Lukács reverted to it in 1945, in his “Introduction to the Writings on Aesthetics of Marx and Engels.” Here he contends that Engels was distinguishing between two forms of littérature à thèse (it is significant that the English language and its critical vocabulary have developed no precisely equivalent expression). All great literature, in Lukács’ reading has a “fundamental bias.” A writer can only achieve a mature and responsible portrayal of life if he is committed to progress and opposed to reaction, if he loves the good and rejects the bad.” When a critic of Lukács’ subtlety and rigor descends to such banalities—banalities which directly challenge his own works on Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy—we know that something is amiss. The attempt to reconcile the image of literature implicit in Lenin’s essay with that put forward by Engels is a rather desperate response to the pressures of orthodoxy and to the Stalinist demand for total internal coherence in Marxist doctrine. Even the most delicate exegesis cannot conceal the plain fact that Engels and Lenin were saying different things, that they were pointing toward contrasting ideals.
This fact is of signal importance in the history of Marxist literature and Marxist literary criticism. Time and again the ideal of a literature in which “the opinions of the author remain hidden” has clashed with the Leninist formula of militant partiality. According to the choice which they were compelled to make, even unconsciously, between Engels’ aesthetics and Lenin’s, Marxist critics have split into two principal camps: the orthodox group and those whom Michel Crouzet has aptly called the “para-Marxists.” Zhdanovism and the First Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934 rigorously proclaimed the orthodox position. In his address to the Congress, Zhdanov deliberately chose Engels’ own terms but rejected Engels’ meaning in the name of Leninism:
Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being “tendentious.” Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political.
Bukharin followed suit and declared that Tendenzpoesie and poetry recognized as of the first rank on purely formal grounds would, more often than not, prove to be one and the same. In evidence, he cited names which recur incessantly in Marxist poetics: “Freiligrath and Heine, Barbier and Béranger.”
The orthodox school, orthodoxy being in this case a political rather than an historical notion, has its journals both in Russia and in the West (Soviet Literature and La Nouvelle Critique are prominent examples). It has its primers such as André Stil’s Vers le réalisme socialiste, Howard Fast’s Literature and Reality, and the compendious theoretical pronouncements of Aragon. In England it has found expression in some of the writings of Jack Lindsay and Arnold Kettle. The purest strain of orthodoxy in German Marxism has been embodied in the poems and essays of Johannes Becher. Becher stated in 1954: “Primarily I owe it to Lenin that I gradually learned to see things as they really are.” The invocation of Lenin is, indeed, the invariable talisman of the orthodox critic.
In the Soviet Union itself, orthodoxy assumed the dour and turgid guise of Zhdanovism and Stalinist aesthetics. To it we owe the most consequent and tragically successful campaign ever waged by a political régime to enlist or destroy the shaping powers of the literary imagination. Only those impelled by professional interest to wade through the official critical journals and state publications of the Stalinist era can fully realize to what levels of inhumanity and mere verbiage belles-lettres and the art of the critic can descend. The pattern is one of desperate monotony: interminable discussions as to whether or not this novel or that poem is in accord with the Party line; strident exercises in self-denunciation by authors who have, through some momentary failure of agility, taken an “incorrect” position on some aspect of socialist realism; incessant demands that fiction, drama, and poetry be forged into “weapons for the proletariat”; glorifications of the “positive hero” and condemnations, at times hysterical in their puritanism, of any hint of eroticism or stylistic ambiguity. The ideal of Zhdanovism was, precisely, the reduction of literature to “a small cog and a small screw” in the mechanism of the totalitarian state. By hazard of genius or partisan anger, such a literature could (though, in fact, it did not) produce something of the order of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Any work of more genuine complexity or impartiality constitutes a potential threat to “the organised, methodical, and unified labours” of the Party. Under such circumstances a critic has only two functions: he is an interpreter of Party dogma and a discerner of heresy. This, precisely, was the inglorious and ultimately suicidal role of Fadeyev.
But neither imprimatur nor anathema are the critic’s job of work. What authentic critical impulses did survive went underground into scholarship. Remnants of the liberal imagination took refuge in the craft of the editor and the translator. Thus we find, even during spells of ideological terror, competent translations and discussions of Shakespeare and Dickens, of Molière and Balzac. The war somewhat attenuated the dreariness of the Soviet literary scene. Private anguish and patriotic fervor coalesced with the political necessities of the moment. But there was no evolution in criticism to match the achievements of novelists and poets. The war, in fact, reinforced the Leninist-Zhdanovite thesis that literature is an instrument of battle, that its ultimate values lie in the rhetoric of persuasion and total commitment.
Essentially, therefore, the orthodox wing of Marxist literary criticism and theory, the Leninist espousal of Tendenzpoesie as the ideal for both writer and Party, has proved barren. There are very few examples of wholly orthodox, yet valid and creative, applications of Leninist principles to a literary text. Perhaps the most distinguished occur among the critical writings of Brecht. These writings should be considered apart from his plays across which there usually falls the brightening shadow of heresy. Brecht’s “Five Difficulties Encountered when Writing the Truth” (1934), has real urgency and conviction. It exemplifies the dictum of another Marxist critic that literary criticism and the study of poetics is the “act of strategy in the literature-battle (im Literaturkampf.)” Brecht’s most fascinating exercise in critical orthodoxy, however, came much later, in 1953. It is a dialectical examination (presented in the guise of a discussion between producer and actors) of Act I of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The problem is posed in Leninist terms: how should the scene of the plebeians be interpreted and acted so as to yield the fullest measure of political insight—of insight compatible with a dialectical interpretation of history? In the course of discussion, a high degree of critical intelligence and an acute awareness of theatrical means are brought to bear on the Shakespearean text. The final exchanges are particularly illuminating:
R. Do you believe that all this and more may be “read out” of the play?
B. Read out of and read into.
P. Do we propose to perform the play because of these insights?
B. Not for that reason alone. We want to have the pleasure and convey the pleasure of dealing with a piece of illumined (durchleuchteter) history. We wish to experience, to live, a piece of dialectic.
P. Is that not a somewhat esoteric notion, reserved to the initiate?
B. By no means. Even at the panoramas shown at public fairs and when hearing popular ballads, simple folk, who are in so few respects simple, enjoy stories of the rise and fall of the mighty, of the cunning of the oppressed, of the potentialities of men. And they seek out the truth, that which “lies behind it all.”
But this “living of the dialectic” and the free play of irony and sensibility over the literary text are exceedingly rare among those Marxists who have adopted Lenin’s response to literature, as set forth in Novaia Jizn, rather than Engels’. (The restriction is necessary, for elsewhere—in the two short essays on Tolstoy and in remarks made to Gorky—Lenin took a subtler and more tolerant view of poetic freedom.)
II
Of far greater importance, both with respect to past accomplishment and future influence, is the work of the para-Marxist school of criticism and aesthetic theory. It embraces a wide range of attitudes and values—from those of the early Edmund Wilson, whose Marxism was in essence an extension of Taine’s historical and social determinism, to those of Theodor Adorno, a critic at times on the verge of orthodoxy. What do the para-Marxists (or we might call them, the “Engelians”) share in common? The belief that literature is centrally conditioned by historical, social, and economic forces; the conviction that ideological content and the articulate world-view of a writer are crucially engaged in the act of literary judgment; a suspicion of any aesthetic doctrine which places major stress on the irrational elements in poetic creation and on the demands of “pure form.” Finally, they share a bias toward dialectical proceedings in argument. But however committed they may be to dialectical materialism, para-Marxists approach a work of art with respect for its integrity and for the vital center of its being. They are at one with Engels in regarding as inferior the kinds of literature which, in Keats’s phrase, have a palpable design upon us. Above all—and it is this which distinguishes them from the orthodox—para-Marxists practice the arts of criticism, not those of censorship.
For evident reasons, these critics have flourished principally outside the immediate orbit of Soviet power. The one exception is, however, decisive. Georg Lukács stands as a lone and splendid tower amidst the gray landscape of eastern European and Communist intellectual life. His stature as a critic and theoretician of aesthetics is no longer in question. In capaciousness of intellect and breadth of performance, he ranks with the master-critics of our age. No contemporary Western critic, with the possible exception of Croce, has brought to bear on literary problems a philosophic equipment of comparable authority. In no one since Sainte-Beuve has the sense of history, the feeling for the rootedness of the imagination in time and in place, been as solid and acute. Lukács’ writings on Goethe and Balzac, on Schiller and Hegelianism, on the rise of the historical novel and the dark upsurge of irrationalism in German poetry, are classics. Few have spoken with finer discrimination of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. The very massiveness of his labors—a collected edition would run to more than twenty volumes—constitutes something of a miracle: the growth and endurance under Communist rule of an independent aesthetics, of a large body of practical criticism which diverges time and again from Leninist and Stalinist orthodoxy. The end of Lukács’ personal Odyssey is, at present, in tragic doubt.* But his accomplishments lie beyond the reach of political attainder. They demonstrate that Marxism can yield a poetics and a metaphysic of the highest order.
Any consideration of the “Engelian” strain in Marxist literary criticism leads inevitably to Lukács. Much of his work may indeed be regarded as a broadening of the famous distinction between Balzac and Zola which Engels proposed to Miss Harkness. But I want to consider Lukács’ complex and voluminous criticism in another essay, and draw attention here to a number of lesser-known critics all of whom are Marxists in substance and methodology, yet none of whom would subscribe to the Leninist image of literature as a cog and screw in the Juggernaut of the proletariat.
Around the hard core of French Stalinism, a harsh and disciplined cadre oddly untouched by the “thaw” of 1953–54, there has always flourished a large and animated world of intellectual Marxism. Its leading figures, such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, have often inclined toward the vortex of total adherence. But they draw back in the final moment, seeking to establish an ideological position which will be outside the Party—but not hostile to it. From both the dialectical and the practical point of view, such an attempt is doomed to ambivalence and failure. But the making of it charges French intellectual life with rare intensity and gives to abstract argument the strong pertinence of conflict. In France, even old men are angry.
There are significant elements of the para-Marxist position in Sartre’s writings on literature. But the work of Lucien Goldmann offers a purer and more stringent example of dialectical criticism. His massive treatise Le Dieu caché (1955) has led to a major revaluation of the role of Jansenism in seventeenth-century literature. If there has, during the past three years, been an affaire Racine in French criticism and scholarship, Goldmann is in part responsible. His gnarled and intricate argument—the aura of Hegelianism having fallen across the directness of a French style—seeks to relate the “tragic vision” of Pascal’s Pensées and Racine’s dramas to an extremist faction in the Jansenist movement. Goldmann’s view of religion, theology, and literature is that of a classical Marxist. He sees in a philosophy or a poem an ideological edifice—what Marx called ein Ueberbau—whose foundations are economic, political, and social. He demonstrates, with a wealth of textual erudition, how elements of class strategy entered into even the most subtle and unworldly of seventeenth-century theological conflicts. But like Engels, and Marx himself, Goldmann insists on the radical complexity of the ideological structure, on the fact that relationships between economic forces and philosophic or poetic systems are never automatic and unilinear. This gives to his treatment of Racine’s career a persuasive subtlety. The Racine who emerges from Le Dieu caché is a poet anchored in history. It is no longer possible, for example, to ignore the relations between the darkening of his world-view and the period of disillusion which seized on French Jansenism after 1675. Frequently, moreover, Goldmann arrives, through a process of dialectical analysis, at conclusions sanctioned by scholars of a wholly different conviction. Thus he sees in the problem of the chorus in neo-classical tragedy a direct reflection of the fragmentation of post-feudal society, the metamorphosis of a unified community into an aggregate of monades sans portes ni fenêtres. This accords precisely with the views of Tillyard and Francis Fergusson. At his finest, Goldmann is simply a critic responding with mature admiration to a great text. Commenting on Phèdre’s decision to rise from her chair (Act I, scene iii), he observes: “One approaches the universe of tragedy on one’s feet.” Quite so, and Bradley might have said it.
At times, however, Goldmann’s Marxism or, more strictly speaking, his materialist left-Hegelianism, does obtrude on the integrity of his judgment. He oversimplifies the structure of Racinian drama by seeking to impose on it a constant pattern—the triad of hero, society, and “hidden God”:
The solitaires and nuns of Port-Royal, in effect, conceived of life as a spectacle enacted before God; the theatre was in France, until Racine’s arrival, a spectacle enacted before men; it sufficed to achieve a synthesis, to write for the stage the spectacle performed before God and to add to the habitual human audience the mute and hidden spectator who devalues and replaces that audience, for Racinian tragedy to be born.
It is fascinating to note that Goldmann’s orthodox opponents have rejected his treatment of Racine as excessively schematic. Writing in La Nouvelle Critique (November 1956), Crouzet points out that Goldmann has neglected the question of genre and poetic diction in neo-classicism. In so doing, he has reduced complex poetry to the bare bones of prose content. “Form and content constitute a unity, but a unity of contradictions,” said Bukharin in a notable aphorism. Authentic Marxist criticism, says Crouzet, “could not lead to such a dessication of art.” He goes on to claim that in para-Marxism two vices necessarily coalesce: subjectivism and a mechanistic view of literature. Yet even in making these charges, Crouzet and his Leninist colleagues are ill at ease. They ask, with genuine worry—where is the true Marxist interpretation of Racine? Why has critical orthodoxy produced so little of value? Constantly, the Party intellectuals, of whom H. Lefebvre is easily the most eminent,1 have to admit to their own failings. Outside Lefebvre’s works on Pascal and Diderot, official French Marxism has produced little of critical substance. Pierre Albouy’s Victor Hugo, essai de critique marxiste (La Nouvelle Critique, June–August 1951), is tedious and inferior work. Though they deplore its heresies, French Communists recognize in Le Dieu caché one of the most distinguished attempts yet made to apply dialectical materialism to the high noon of French literature.
Nothing in Goldmann’s book caused greater concern among orthodox Marxists than an entry on the errata et addenda page. In it, Goldmann declares that when referring to Lukács (which he does constantly), he has in mind Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, a famous essay published in 1923 but long since condemned as erroneous by the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. and by the author himself. It is to this very same essay, however, that Walter Benjamin, the most gifted of the German “Engelians,” owed his conversion to Marxism in 1924.
Both as a stylist and thinker, Benjamin is difficult to characterize. In him, more perhaps than in any other Marxist, the texture of language precedes and determines the contours of argument. His prose is close-knit and allusive; it lies in ambush, seizing on its subject by indirection. Walter Benjamin is the R. P. Blackmur of Marxism—but of a Marxism which is private and oblique. Like Rilke and Kafka, Benjamin was possessed by a sense of the brutality of industrial life, by a haunted, apocalyptic vision of the modern metropolis (the Grosstadt of Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge). He found his feelings verified and documented by Marx’s theory of “dehumanization” and Engels’ account of the working class. Thus, Benjamin’s essay “On Certain Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939) is, essentially, a lyric meditation on the brooding immensity of nineteenth-century Paris and the concordant solitude of the poet. The same impulse underlies his admiration of Proust—an admiration obviously suspect from the point of view of the Party. Benjamin’s two principal essays, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924-1925) and “The Origin of German Tragedy” (1928), are among the most difficult and closely argued in modern European criticism. But if there is in them anything dialectical, it pertains to what Adorno, Benjamin’s friend and editor, has called “the dialectics of fantasy.”
Only once did he approach a problem from a thoroughly Marxist bias. The result is of extreme interest. In a paper entitled “The Work of Art in the Era of its Technical Reproducibility” (1936), Benjamin proposed to consider neither proletarian art nor art in a classless society, but rather the evolution of art “under prevailing modes of production.” The ambiguity in the word “production”—the industrial process in general and the “reproduction” of art works in particular—is relevant to his theme. Benjamin clearly preceded Malraux in recognizing the “materiality” of art, the dependence of aesthetic sensibility on changes in the setting and reproduction of painting and sculpture. He wonders, as did Schiller, whether the history of technology might not be matched by a corresponding “history of perception.” The essay contains yet another seminal idea. Benjamin refers to the strident support which Marinetti and Italian Futurism gave to the invasion of Ethiopia. He suggests that it is of the essence of Fascism to beautify the outward trappings and actual inhumanities of political life. But all efforts toward the “beautification of politics” (die Aesthetisierung der Politik) lead fatally to the image of “glorious war.” Communism, on the other hand, does not render politics artistic. It makes art political. That way, according to Benjamin, lie sanity and peace.
This is a complex notion, either to apprehend or to refute. Benjamin did not live to clarify it further. Like Christopher Caudwell, whose work does by comparison strike one as rather drab, he fell victim to Fascism. Theodor Adorno has observed that Benjamin injected dialectical materialism into his own system as a necessary poison; around this foreign body and creative irritant his sensibility crystallized. So far as literature goes, Adorno himself presents a case of lesser interest. His importance lies in the application of Marxist principles to the history and aesthetics of music.
Sidney Finkelstein, one of a small yet interesting group of American Marxists, is also primarily a critic and sociologist of music. “The forms of music,” he writes, “are a product of society.… The validity of a musical form does not rest upon its ‘purity,’ but upon the easy communication it offers, in its time, for stimulating ideas.” In Art and Society, however, Finkelstein has ranged more widely, and his book is illustrative of a classical strain in Marxist theory—the alliance between the new culture of the proletariat and ancient folkways. “I have used a philosophic system,” he declares:
It is the body of Marxist thought, which can be described simply as springing from the fact that ideas can only be understood in connection with the material realities of life, and the realities of life can only be understood in terms of their inner conflicts, movement and change. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels say, “Men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life.” This is the general approach I have tried to apply to art.
The art forms in which Finkelstein sees the most enduring value are those which are rooted in popular modes. Thus, he argues that Bach’s fugal style derived its strength and clarity from the fact that it was based on the division into voices and contrapuntal parts of current folk song. Correspondingly, much of the best in American literature—Mark Twain, Whitman, Sandburg, Frost—would stem from folk rhetoric and the tradition of the popular ballad. Finkelstein discerns in the abstraction and “difficulty” of modern art a direct consequence of the estrangement between the individual artist and the masses. He concurs with Engels in believing that this estrangement was brought on by the commercial aesthetics of the bourgeoisie. Revolted by the “tawdry cheapness” (Ezra Pound’s phrase) of bourgeois taste, artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lifted anchor and put out to sea. There they dwell in a world increasingly private and increasingly divorced from the maturing energies of communal life.
But in stubborn dissent from Zhdanovite orthodoxy, Finkelstein persists in admiring such lone voyagers as Schoenberg, Proust, and Joyce. He regards Ulysses not as Radek did at the Writers’ Congress in 1934—“A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope”—but as a tragic, perhaps self-defeating protest against the “shallowness and dishonesty of the tons of verbiage” disgorged by the commercial literature of the day. One of Finkelstein’s most original notions bears on the nature of Romanticism. He seeks to distinguish between negative and positive strains in Romantic sensibility. With the former he associates Dostoevsky. This is a point of some importance. The problem of how to approach Dostoevsky is the moment of truth in all Marxist criticism. Not even Lukács has been able to disengage himself from the Leninist and Stalinist condemnation of the Dostoevskyan world-view as one implacably hostile to dialectical materialism. A Marxist critic who dealt with the works of Dostoevsky, prior to 1954, was by that mere action giving proof of real courage and independence. In reference to The Brothers Karamazov, Finkelstein says of Dostoevsky that
by emphasising the irrational over the rational, hinting at subconscious drives which could be neither understood nor controlled, he led to the climax of romanticism in which the artist and human being cuts himself off completely from the world as unreal.
In the poetry of Aragon, on the other hand, he sees the “positive value of romanticism,” its kinship with the liberal instincts and sensuous vitality of the masses.
One could examine a host of other figures among critics and historians of literature to illustrate varying strategies within the larger context of the Marxist tradition. But the essential point can be made quite simply: outside the rigid bounds of Party ideology, there are numerous critics and philosophers of art whose work is either centrally or in substantial measure conditioned by the dialectical method and historical mythology of Marxism. Among them there are theoreticians and practical critics whom anyone seriously concerned with literature would be wrong to ignore.
III
The struggle between Leninist orthodoxy and para-Marxism is bitter and incessant. It has compelled Soviet publicists to query the writings of Engels himself. They cannot accept his distinction between Balzac and Zola and yet adhere, at the same time, to Lenin’s axiom that the supreme virtue of art lies in its explicit revolutionary bias. Hence Boris Reizov’s curious and tormented book, Balzac the Writer. Once again, it takes up the vexed problem of the Harkness letter concerning which, as Fadeyev ruefully conceded in his “Notes on Literature” (February 1956), “some confusion reigns.” It will be recalled that Engels judged Balzac “a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas, passés, présents et à venir.” He did so despite the fact that Balzac was a Legitimist and a Catholic of a somber and reactionary cast:
That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.
Out of this famous passage has arisen the theory of dissociation between ideology and poetic vision. “The history of literature,” remarks Lucien Goldmann, “is full of writers whose thought was rigorously contrary to the sense and structure of their work (among many examples, Balzac, Goethe, etc.).” But at the same time, this pronouncement by Engels and its corollary—“The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art”—pose a drastic challenge to the Leninist ideal of Party literature. If a reactionary novelist, in fact, achieves greater realism than one whose views were explicitly “progressive,” the entire conception of the ideological commitment of art is put in doubt. To resolve this dilemma, Reizov is compelled to infer that Engels may have been mistaken; one need hardly comment on the weight of anxiety behind such a supposition. He perceives in Balzac’s world-view
direct links with the revolutionary philosophy of the French Encyclopædists.… Balzac remains a true successor of the French revolutionary philosophers—whatever his own political declarations.
Historically, of course, this is nonsense. But it does constitute a desperate attempt to reconcile Engels’ views and, a fortiori, those of Lukács, with Leninist orthodoxy. For as Valentin Asmus wrote, in an important paper on “Realism and Naturalism” (Soviet Literature, March 1948), Lenin, in contrast to Engels, saw in a “direct and frank assertion” of tendentiousness “the chief difference between the proletarian writer and the bourgeois apologist of capitalism.”
That the “proletarian writer” has, until now, produced little of enduring value, is a fact of which Soviet critics are recurrently aware. In his notorious intervention at the second Congress of Soviet Writers in 1955, Sholokhov ventured to assert that it was the principal task of contemporary Russian literature to escape from official mediocrity and render itself worthy of its inheritance. This has also been Lukács’ persistent contention. Hence his unwillingness to deal, at any length, with Russian fiction and poetry of the Stalinist era. But to an orthodox critic such an attitude verges on treason. If Lenin is right, even the most mediocre of post-revolutionary literature is intrinsically more useful to the modern reader than are classics written under feudalism or the rule of the bourgeoisie. As Zhdanov categorically proclaimed: Soviet literature is, by definition, “the richest in ideas, the most advanced, and the most revolutionary.” A critic who devotes the vast majority of his writings to the works of Schiller, Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin, and Tolstoy is obviously yielding to counter-revolutionary temptations.
This is the crux of the long-muffled but now open and murderous campaign waged against Lukács by the Communist hierarchies of eastern Europe. Lukács’ brief role in the Hungarian insurrection merely dramatized or, to use a Marxist term, “objectified” the inevitable conflict between an orthodox and a para-Marxist interpretation of history. Joseph Revai, the Hungarian Zhdanov, launched the assault on Lukács in 1950. In a pamphlet entitled Literature and Popular Democracy, he asks:
What could Hungarian literature gain from the pass-word given it by Lukács in 1954: “Zola? No, Balzac!”? And what could it gain from the slogan put forward by Lukács in 1948: “Neither Pirandello nor Priestley, but Shakespeare and Molière”? In both instances—nothing.
Lukács’ concentration on Balzac and Goethe, suggests Revai, is dangerously obsolete. The dissociation between a writer’s ideology and his actual works is no longer admissible. If a novelist seeks to convey an adequate image of reality, he must, indeed he can only, do so within the tenets of Marxist-Leninism. Revai hints that, in the final reckoning, Lukács places “pure” or “formalistic” literary canons above Party and class interests. From this would logically follow his inability to recognize the pre-eminence of Soviet literature.
On the surface, this might appear as a debate between a Zhdanovite hack and a great critic. But the real conflict lies deeper. It is, once again, a confrontation between the “Engelian” and the Leninist conceptions of art and the role of the artist in a revolutionary society. Lefebvre saw this as early as 1953. Taking issue with Lukács, he went on to state in his Contribution à l’esthétique that Engels had not yet grasped the problem of Party literature. The whole debate has been further clarified in the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising. In a recent pronouncement, Revai charges Lukács with being one of those who “under the guise of the struggle against Zhdanovism,” a struggle rendered semi-respectable by the “thaw” in the Soviet Union, “in fact are trying to destroy Leninism.” If we understand by “Leninism” the theory of literature outlined in 1905, Revai is undeniably right. For that is a theory which neither Lukács, nor any other responsible critic, can accept.
In only one domain has there been a rapprochement between orthodox and para-Marxist criticism. During the period of “de-Stalinization,” the forbidden ground of Dostoevskyan studies was reopened to Marxist scrutiny. We owe to this fact a distinguished essay by Vladimir Yermilov (Soviet Literature, February 1956). Its critical assumptions are plainly derived from Engels. Yermilov observes a radical dissociation between Dostoevsky’s sense of human suffering and his hostility “to any attempt to find effective ways of struggling for the liberation of man from that injury and insult.” He seeks to substantiate this general interpretation by a close reading of The Idiot. Acutely, he sees in that novel a parable on the cruel majesty of money and a “right-wing critique of capitalism.” In points of detail, Yermilov is often indiscriminate. One leaves his essay with the odd feeling that The Idiot is a posthumous work by Balzac. But there is no doubt that Yermilov’s conclusion represents a notable change in the tone of Soviet criticism:
Mankind cannot overlook a writer who, in spite of the official lies of his time and reactionary tendencies in his own outlook, found in himself the strength to protest against humiliation and insult.
To find a comparable acknowledgment, one must go back to Lunacharsky and the Dostoevsky centennial of 1920–1921.
A few months after the appearance of Yermilov’s essay, French orthodox criticism followed suit. G. Fridlander’s discussion of The Idiot (La Nouvelle Critique, May 1956) contains little of importance. He too believes that the “progressive reader” will know how to distinguish between Dostoevsky’s accurate depiction of social and psychological conflicts in bourgeois society and his erroneous, reactionary point of view. The startling element in the piece comes at the outset. Here, Fridlander finds it necessary to inform his Communist reader that Dostoevsky was born in such and such a year, that he spent some time in Siberia, and that he wrote a number of novels among which Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and so on. Such candor speaks volumes.
IV
The problems we have touched upon so far are internal; they engage Party doctrine and varying modes of dissent. Let us now ask the larger question: what have Marxism, as a philosophy, and dialectical materialism, as a strategy of insight, contributed to the resources of the literary critic? To what aspects of the Marxist performance will a future Saintsbury address himself when writing a history of modern criticism?
First, there is the concept of dissociation—the image of the poet as Balaam speaking truth against his knowledge or avowed philosophy. “There is nothing absurd,” argues Goldmann, “in the notion of a writer or poet who does not apprehend the objective significance of his own works.” Between his explicit ideology and the representation of life which he in fact conveys, there may be a contradiction. Engels put forward this idea with reference to Goethe and Balzac. It throws light also on Cervantes and Tolstoy—whether we approach the latter via Lukács or Isaiah Berlin. Thus, in both Don Quixote and Anna Karenina the rhetoric of prior intent goes against the grain of the actual narrative. In a good deal of major literature, we are made aware of the latent paradox and tension generated by such internal contrariety. Hence the curious, but suggestive, affinities between a Marxist reading of Balzac and William Empson’s recent revaluation of Tom Jones. Where Empson perceives the complex play of irony, the Marxist would observe a dialectical conflict between a poet’s thesis and his actual vision of things.
Secondly, there is the intricate, yet ultimately persuasive, distinction which Marxist theory draws between “realism” and “naturalism.” It goes back to Hegel’s reflections on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hegel found that in the Homeric epics the depiction of physical objects, however detailed and stylized, did not intrude upon the rhythm and vitality of the poem. Descriptive writing in modern literature, on the other hand, struck him as contingent and lifeless. He threw out the illuminating hint that the industrial revolution and the correlative division of labor had estranged men from the material world. Homer’s account of the forging of Achilles’ armor or the making of Odysseus’ raft presupposes an immediacy of relationship between artisan and product which modern industrial processes no longer allow. Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger. This idea greatly influenced Marx and Engels. It contributed to their own theory of the “alienation” of the individual under capitalist modes of production. In the course of their debate with Lassalle and of their study of Balzac, Marx and Engels came to believe that this problem of estrangement was directly germane to the problem of realism in art. The poets of antiquity and the “classical realists” (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac) had achieved an organic relationship between objective reality and the life of the imagination. The “naturalist,” on the other hand, looks on the world as on a warehouse of whose contents he must make a feverish inventory. “A sense of reality,” says a contemporary Marxist critic, “is created not by a reproduction of all the features of an object but by a depiction of those features that form the essence … while in naturalistic art—because of a striving to achieve an elusive fullness—the image, also incomplete, places both the essential and the secondary, the unimportant, on the same plane.”
This distinction is far-reaching. It bears on the decline of French realism after Balzac and Stendhal, and tells us something of Zola’s obsessive attempt to make of the novel an index for the world. By virtue of it, we may discriminate between the “realism” of Chekhov and the “naturalism” of, say, Maupassant. Through it, also, we may ascertain that Madame Bovary, for all its virtues, is a slighter thing than Anna Karenina. In naturalism there is accumulation; in realism what Henry James called the “deep-breathing economy” of organic form.
Thirdly, Marxism has sharpened the critic’s sense of time and place. In so doing, it has carried forward ideas initiated by Sainte-Beuve and Taine. We now see the work of art as rooted in temporal and material circumstance. Beneath the complex structure of the lyric impulse lie specific historical and social foundations. The Marxist sensibility has contributed a sociological awareness to the best of modern criticism. It is the kind of awareness realized, for example, in Lionel Trilling’s observation that Dostoevskyan plots originate in crises in monetary or class relationships. Through the perspective implicit in Marxism, moreover, historians and critics of literature have been led to a study of the audience. What can be said, historically and sociologically, of the Elizabethan spectator? In what respect was the Dickensian novel a calculated response to the evolution of a new reading public? Without the presence of the Marxist element in the “spirit of the age,” such critics as L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart might not have arrived at their own understanding of the social dynamics of art.
The final point is the most difficult to make. It may give rise to misunderstanding however cautiously I put it. But it is simply this: Marxist-Leninism and the political régimes enacted in its name take literature seriously, indeed desperately so. At the very height of the Soviet revolution’s battle for physical survival, Trotsky found occasion to assert that “the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.” Stalin himself deemed it essential to add to his voluminous strategic and economic pronouncements a treatise on philology and the problems of language in literature. In a Communist society the poet is regarded as a figure central to the health of the body politic. Such regard is cruelly manifest in the very urgency with which the heretical artist is silenced or hounded to destruction. This constant preoccupation with the life of the mind would alone serve to distinguish Marxist autocracy from other species of totalitarianism. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs—but a tribute nevertheless.
Let us, moreover, distinguish Marxism and the philosophy of art of Marx and Engels from the concrete actualities of Stalinist rule. If we do so, the dread gravity of the Marxist view of literature should remind us of certain truths which few Western critics, with the exception of Ezra Pound and Dr. Leavis, seem willing to affirm. The health of language is essential to the preservation of a living society. It is in literature that language is most truly challenged and guarded. A vital critical tradition, vital even in its polemics, is not a luxury but a rigorous need. The abandonment of values under the pressures of commercialism, the failure of the journalist-critic to discriminate between art and kitsch, does contribute to a larger decay. For all its obscurantism and inhumanity, the Marxist conception of literature is neither academic, in the manner of some of the “New Criticism” practiced in America, nor provincial, as is so much of current English criticism. Above all, it is not frivolous. The genuine Marxist critic—as distinct from the Zhdanovite censor—cannot look upon literature in the light of that French idiom, proverbial of frivolity, ce n’est que de la literature.
[* This is, fortunately, no longer the case. Lukács survived the aftermath of the Hungarian rising and has lived to see eastern Europe assume new and complex shapes of national feeling. Whether this resurgence of energies founded, essentially, in the nationalistic, agrarian past brings him comfort is, of course, another matter.]
1 On June 22, 1958, Lefebvre was ‘temporarily” expelled from the Party. He was accused of “revisionism” and he is now an independent Marxist.