4. Anti-Communist Aesthetic Ideology

The Aesthetics of the Vital Center

Let us now turn to the problem of “art” as it appeared in anti-Communist politics. We must start here by acknowledging the fact that anti-Communist aesthetic ideology was born at the intersection of the politics of anti-Communism and the aesthetics of high modernism. When it comes to a definition of art, at the heart of this aesthetic ideology we find one single proposition: according to its very essence, art is anti-Communistic. And this is where some of the complications can be clearly articulated as internal contradictions of this discourse: while art as such is anti-Communistic, not everything that is anti-Communistic is actually art. The problem of this aesthetic ideology is to articulate the implications of the irreversibility of this statement.

Its task is to find a definition of art that will reconcile two seemingly paradoxical statements: on the one hand, it asserts that art is not political; nevertheless, it also claims that art is anti-Communistic. The first statement (“art is not political”) reflects the consensual agreement of the 1950s that art cannot be reduced to a political message—that is, art is not “propaganda.” This distinction between art and propaganda was the politicized version of the foundational division of modernist aesthetics between high art and mass culture. Both propaganda and mass culture had to be excluded from their respective fields in order to create the proper terrains of political truth and high art. The second proposition, “art is anti-Communistic,” is an equivalent of the first: since art is not political (it is actually decidedly apolitical to the degree of being antipolitical), it has to renounce any Communist message, because a Communist message is always political. The problem of Communism, thus, enters the field of aesthetics in a slightly displaced form: it is not directly Communism that is a threat, but reducing art to mass culture through a populist political message. Due to this displacement, “politics” as such becomes a threat to art. The inherent difficulty of this position is to explain how it is possible that the relation of art and politics can be simultaneously an opposition (since art is apolitical) and an essential agreement (since apolitical art is anti-Communistic).

Thus, we can provide a more emphatic formulation of the foundational paradox: while art as such is anti-Communistic, “anti-Communist art” is a contradiction in terms. Although the “the politics of apolitical art” can be easily translated into an anti-Communist message, it is somewhat troubling that the symmetrical conclusion has to be true as well: the renunciation of all political content should also imply the rejection of anti-Communist politics. How is it possible that the simultaneous suspension of Communist and anti-Communist politics within the aesthetic field should still serve the politics of anti-Communism? The answer is self-evident: by depoliticizing (i.e. “naturalizing”) the anti-Communist position. Accordingly, the function of art is defined as the revelation of an apolitical freedom. Thus, the ideological work of anti-Communist aesthetic ideology consists of the neutralization of the anti-Communist position as nonpolitical and merely “artistic.”

But at this meeting point of anti-Communist politics and modernist aesthetics we encounter yet another significant complication: namely, that political realism and the aesthetics of antirealism do not merely coincide historically—they form an essential alliance. While the politics of the vital center is a politics of realism (in Arthur Schlesinger’s words, a critique of the political “sentimentalism” of the fellow-traveling left), its aesthetics is the renunciation of all forms of artistic realism.¹

In order to unpack the implications of this duality, let us now briefly return to our discussion of Schlesinger’s The Vital Center and Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination in Chapter 2. The two authors start from opposing positions but arrive at identical conclusions. While Schlesinger’s primary objective is to define the political coordinates of the politics of the center, Trilling defines this liberal center on the basis of an analogy with literary complexity. It is more than just a coincidence that Trilling’s book singles out three opponents in order to formulate a properly anti-Communistic aesthetics: a literary adversary (Theodore Dreiser and naturalism), a critical adversary (V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought), and a political adversary (ideological politics and Stalinism). For Trilling, the common element in authentic art, criticism, and politics is a certain kind of “complexity” which, therefore, emerges as a simultaneously aesthetic, critical, and political category.

One of the central categories of Trilling’s redefinition of liberalism is “reality.” As the argument goes, political realism demands that the aesthetics of realism become more realistic than naturalism by abandoning mere mimetic representations of empirical reality. We could say that Trilling redefines traditional “American metaphysics” in accordance with what Dolan called “Cold War metaphysics.”² In the opening essay of The Liberal Imagination, entitled “Reality in America,” Trilling writes: “In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. And that mind is alone felt to be trustworthy which most resembles this reality by most nearly reproducing the sensations it affords.”³ This is why later on in his book Trilling extols Henry James’s “imagination of disaster” and calls for a “moral realism” that moves beyond the crude opposition of reality and mind, and leads to a “perception of the dangers of the moral life.”⁴ This catastrophic moral realism is the aesthetic principle which defines the (apolitical) source of liberal politics. The move beyond aesthetic realism serves the purposes of political realism.

If we examine the role art plays in Schlesinger’s definition of anti-Communist politics, we find a similar scenario. When Schlesinger “politicizes the aesthetic” and defines the kind of art that can effectively resist totalitarian oppression, he calls for an ambiguous complexity that transcends in artistic merit the products of state-sponsored social realism. But when he turns to politics, he calls for the exact opposite, an honest realism of facts. This is how Schlesinger defines the ultimate goals of his politics: “The new radicalism seeks to fight for honesty and clarity in a turbulent and stricken society, to restore a serious sense of the value of facts, of the integrity of reason, of devotion to truth.”⁵

In accordance with the general descriptions of his times, in Schlesinger’s text Soviet strategy is defined by a split between reality and appearance. But Schlesinger describes the Soviet attitude toward art in the following manner: “The totalitarian man requires apathy and unquestioning obedience. He fears creative independence and spontaneity. He mistrusts complexity as a device for slipping something over on the régime; he mistrusts incomprehensibility as a shield which might protect activities the bureaucracy cannot control.” In other words, art is by definition impossible under totalitarianism, and thus “Soviet art” is yet another contradiction in terms. For example, the problem with Picasso and Stravinsky is that “they reflect and incite anxieties which are incompatible with the monolithic character of the ‘Soviet person.’ Their intricacy and ambiguity, moreover, make them hard for officialdom to control.”⁶ Schlesinger dismisses Communist art in the following terms: “The conclusion is clear. Let artists turn their back on Europe. Let them eschew mystery, deny anxiety and avoid complexity. Let them create only compositions which officials can hum, paintings which their wives can decipher, poems which the Party leaders can understand.”⁷

While the proper form of art is complexity, incomprehensibility, and ambiguity, its content is the anxiety of democratic freedom. In other words, art is only possible in a free society. But if it is only possible in a free society, it is essentially an expression of the (social, political, and existential) conditions of its very own production. On the one hand, Soviets have simplistic theories of art (so that even officials can hum their melodies) but unreadable political strategies (no one can interpret the strategies of the CPUSA). On the other hand, Americans have complex theories of art celebrating incomprehensibility, but their honest and clear politics is based on a realistic conception of facts, reason, and truth. This alignment of the aesthetics of antirealism with the politics of realism, however, was not just a superficial contradiction. My point is not to argue that this opposition could discredit Cold War liberalism. Rather, in what follows, I would like to show that the definition of political representation in anti-Communist discourse was based (in a fundamental and not merely accidental sense) on a particular definition of aesthetic representation.

Anti-Communist Modernism

In order to explain its ties with anti-Communist politics, I want to highlight here two aspects of modernism: on the one hand, its constitutive exclusion of mass culture (what Andreas Huyssen called the “Great Divide”) and, on the other, its principle of self-transcendence (which, following Fredric Jameson, we could call the “modernist Sublime”).⁸ While the first move established the external limits of modernism as it divided the field of the aesthetic between art and non-art, the second move instituted an internal limit in the form of the principle of its self-transcendence. In early Cold War cultural discourse, the terrain within which the sublime moment of modernist art could appear was first produced by the radical exclusion of mass culture (that is, the sphere of culture that cannot or does not aspire for the same sublime transcendence). Once this terrain was established, the moment of sublimity was politicized as the moment of universal freedom and the inherent anti-Communism of pure art.

We witness here the parallel construction of the two fields, anti-Communist politics and modernist aesthetics, through two separate exclusions that were nevertheless articulated as equivalent. As we have seen earlier, anti-Communist politics was based on the definition of the proper field of representation established through the primary exclusion of a heterogeneous element from the field of politics (Communist totalitarianism) as it threatened the very symbolic framework within which democratic politics could take place (that is, it threatened the principle of political representation as such). At the same time, modernist aesthetics was understood to be based on the exclusion of mass culture from the field of real art. This exclusion defined the proper field of aesthetic representation in excess of mere mimetic representation (hence the necessary move toward nonrepresentational, nonobjective art). Culture was, thus, divided into two spheres: “mass culture,” which is not more than mere culture, and “high art” which according to its own logic strives toward a transcendence of culture.

The two exclusions (the political and the aesthetic) follow the same logic: in order to maintain the purity of politics and the purity of art, something must be excluded. Both exclusions are legitimized by the inner logic of the field they institute. That is, one of them is political and, therefore, it belongs to the very essence of politics as such to exclude the heterogeneous element (since it is not really political but a criminal conspiracy); the other is aesthetic and, therefore, the exclusion of mass culture can be legitimized in purely aesthetic terms (without necessary reference to external fields) since only that which is not really art anyway will be excluded. The elements that are not really political and those that are not really aesthetic have to be excluded, although the fields of politics and art are only constituted by these very exclusions. In early Cold War cultural discourse, we find that these two exclusions are aligned and declared to be equivalent, since the high art/mass culture divide is politicized according to the freedom/totalitarianism opposition.

Let us now examine in more concrete historical terms how the aesthetics of modernism meets anti-Communist politics. As the aesthetic and political distance separating Bertold Brecht from Ezra Pound also demonstrates, it would be a mistake to assume that modernism could be reduced to the realization of a unified political program. Right away, it should be clear that we have to approach modernism as a potential surface for contesting political inscriptions. In this regard, it is a rather telling historical fact that the dual division of political culture along the lines of Communism/anti-Communism was projected onto the modernist art/mass culture divide in all possible variations. Whereas Senator George Dondero of Michigan argued that modernism is merely a Communist conspiracy, Clement Greenberg sought to define it as the very essence of Americanism. On the other hand, while the Gathings Committee tried to define mass culture as a Communist conspiracy, representatives of the pulp industry argued that it was the most important means of the democratization of American culture.⁹ As a result, we can easily find examples of all possible political judgments: modernism could be judged Communistic as well as anti-Communistic, just as mass culture could be judged in the same opposing terms. What emerges in the postwar period is the final consensus according to which modernism had to be institutionalized as clearly anti-Communistic.

Jane de Hart Mathews has argued that the identification of modern art with Communist conspiracy proceeded through three stages. First, we witness an “opposition to social commentary in predominantly representational art.”¹⁰ In this case, the object of criticism was clearly located on the level of content, fully within the traditional field of representation. As a second step, we see a shift toward a growing concern with the political affiliation of the artists. This new orientation, however, removed the target of anti-Communist critique from the field of aesthetics. If a painter, for example, is proven to be a Communist, no matter what and how he paints, he should not be able to exhibit his works. Finally, “the objection to modern art as Communist conspiracy…involved a yet more ‘sophisticated’ thought process, for the assumption was that rejection of traditional ways of seeing and space inherent in vanguard style of painting implied rejection of traditional world views.”¹¹

As we can see, the anti-Communist political critique of art moved from the criticism of content to the person of the artist and then returned to the aesthetic field by politicizing the form of representation. Since modern art emphasized the problem of representation by moving beyond objective content, “form” as such became the central issue. It was no longer the potential Communist content that counted the most, but the subversion of the traditional field of artistic representation, which could serve Communistic interests. As Mathews’s language suggests, the fact that art can question “traditional ways of seeing and space” by moving beyond classic forms of representation was interpreted as the undesirable political moment of art.

Although the attack on modern art was one of the most dominant cultural trends of the late forties, ultimately it was the exact opposite tendency that came to dominate public discussions of American art. At some point, in spite of the fierce opposition, the redefinition of the field of representation had to be accepted and even celebrated as the inherently American tendency of art history. Although scholars disagree about the exact moment of the victory of modern art in America, it is clear that by the second half of the fifties (especially after McCarthy’s demise) it was no longer acceptable in mainstream discussions to equate modern art with Communism.¹² The most important thing for us, however, is not so much the exact historical moment of this redefinition but the logic behind it.

At the risk of simplifying matters, we could say that this argument had four important logical steps. First, following the same movements that were so clearly formulated in Schlesinger’s work, art as such had to be redefined as both politically and aesthetically the art of the center: in order to be authentic art, it had to go beyond both political and aesthetic extremes. Second, as an attempt to establish a genuinely American artistic tradition, the center had to be redefined as the authentic expression of Americanism. Third, this American national tradition had to be reinterpreted as the representative of universal values. Finally, the universal content of American art had to be equated with the modernist sublime, the self-transcendence of the aesthetic field of representation toward universal freedom. Again, we can see that the move beyond representation is the political moment within art, but instead of being a (Communist) threat to the established order, it was now redefined as the universality of human freedom.

These four logical steps can be easily traced in the cultural discussions of the late forties. Let us first consider the constitution of the “center” in aesthetic terms. We must point out that it is not always easy to speak of this topology of aesthetic values without direct reference to political categories. The same way the politics of the center had to be situated between the extremisms of the left and the right, art had to occupy the center located midway between extreme aesthetic positions, but the available aesthetic positions were often directly related to the political left/right opposition. To put it briefly, the general formulation of the available extremes offered the following choices: on the one side, we find American nationalism, realism, emphasis on content, and the political right; on the other side, we have European internationalism, abstraction, the primacy of form, and the political left. While a more detailed analysis of the era would have to uncover quite a number of different linkages between these categories, the liberal politics of the center, as it became the dominant political discourse of the fifties, was necessarily dependent on this twofold distribution of aesthetic categories.

One of the clearest formulations of this centrist aesthetics can be found in George Biddle’s article “The Artist on the Horns of a Dilemma” published in the New York Times Magazine.¹³ Biddle formulates the fundamental dilemma of the American artist as a false choice between “Modernism without content or Traditionalism without form.”¹⁴ He argues that both aesthetic and social components are endemic to art, but excessive concern with only one of them is going to damage the final product: “As long as a painter is preoccupied with esthetic values, his work may lack vitality, but there is a conscious effort to maintain the esthetic standard. If, however, a social creed or the pressure of business contact is his immediate concern, his esthetic standard may rapidly deteriorate.”¹⁵ This is why it is important to point out that Biddle’s objective is not to provide an apology of modernism. As a first step, for example, he distinguishes “modernist” from “modern” art and claims that the former is “a style and school like any other,” prone to the same academic tendencies that characterize institutionalized art in general. Consequently, no absolute aesthetic or political value can be attached to modern art: “We must, however, guard against the fallacy that the exponents of Modern art are today either liberal or modern.”¹⁶

Biddle’s warning shows that in its institutionalized form modern art does not necessarily represent “progressive” values either in politics or in aesthetics. But for Biddle the choice between “fashionable Modernism” and “deadening realism” is a false choice, since it is the center that counts: “This is the dilemma which confronts the artist and pubic today; or, more accurately, these are the twin reefs, the Scylla and Charybdis, which he must avoid in that narrow channel between functioning vulgarity and sterile estheticism. He will need courage and discipline to create a vital expression in the grand manner. Whether his chosen style is Traditional or Modernist, is vastly unimportant.” Therefore, the conclusion is “that all creative artists today of any worth or stature must show in their work evidence of the influence of both traditions.”¹⁷ Although Biddle’s text predates Schlesinger’s book, we find here an explicit definition of the aesthetics of the vital center: “a vital expression in the grand manner” is only possible if the artist simultaneously avoids “the Scylla and Charybdis” of aesthetic extremes by using both traditions.

In a series of articles published in the late 1940s on the pages of the New York Times, Howard Devree spoke up for modern art in similar terms. In “Straws in the Wind,” Devree argued that the exhaustion of the modern movement in Europe created a unique opportunity for American art, but the simultaneous attacks on surrealism and regionalism in America had to be balanced in order for this chance to realize itself.¹⁸ Rehearsing a few common formulas, Devree continues by claiming that nationalist regionalism (“hard and photographic”) and international modernism (“the sterile surface patterns of nonobjectivism”) represented the two extremes that a genuinely American tradition must avoid. In Devree’s case, however, the aesthetic extremes were clearly marked by political orientations, and the aesthetics and the politics of the vital center fully coincided. As Devree warns in the standard language of his times, “the outworn formulas of academicism on the right and the stereotypes of the new academicism of the left” must be avoided. His conclusion is that although “there is an essentially abstract basis for all art,” the American artist of the future will have to produce art that is “the deeply felt expression of a time, a place and the spirit of an era that looks forward.”¹⁹ In other words, he moves beyond realism by saying that art as such has an abstract basis, but at the same time he tries to anchor this abstraction in the particular conditions of its production. The result is either a new kind of realism or a new kind of abstraction. But perhaps the best way to describe this redefinition of art is to discover in it a rearticulation of the relation of realism and abstraction: abstraction gains a certain realistic power.

In “The Old That Leads to New,” as a continuation of his argument from the previous week, Devree writes about the necessary compromise between the indiscriminate conservative critiques of modern art and the excesses of modernism.²⁰ The rhetoric of the center is indeed hard to miss: “Between these two extremes lies the answer. Toward an equilibrium the modern movement has been struggling, against the harsh and frequently ignorant reactionary criticism on one side and against the excesses generated in the heat of progress among some of its own misguided followers on the other hand.”²¹ He repeatedly asks for a “true balance between reactionary formulas on one side and excesses on the other.” Again, Devree’s conclusion is that true art must transcend the realist paradigm: “We have learned much of the abstract basis of all art and that the finding of that basis means a constant search for the essence and the underlying truth instead of being content with mere resemblance and surface reality.”²²

In what could be hailed as the aesthetic version of Henry R. Luce’s “The American Century,” Clement Greenberg announced in 1948 the historical triumph of American art in the following terms: “the conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.”²³ Although for Greenberg this relocation of the center of the art world into New York also meant the victory of modern art in general, quite a few of his contemporaries disagreed and relentlessly insisted on the necessity of defining the American tradition in representationalist terms. Mathews, discussing the traditional definitions of American art of the 1930s and 1940s, writes: “A majority of Americans, literal-minded in their taste, continued to assume that American art must be representational.”²⁴

Lionel Trilling provided a forceful expression of the same thesis in relation to literature in his attack on V. L. Parrington. As Trilling charges, Parrington’s aesthetics can be expressed by the simple formula: “Fig. 1, Reality; Fig. 2, Artist; Fig. 1’, Work of Art.”²⁵ The aesthetics of this simple mimesis was directly linked to a certain political ideal of democracy which is supposedly equally realistic: “It does not occur to Parrington that there is any other relation possible between the artist and reality than this passage of reality through the transparent artist; he meets evidence of imagination and creativeness with a settled hostility the expression of which suggests that he regards them as the natural enemies of democracy.”²⁶ This underlying assumption that the move beyond realistic representation is the natural enemy of democracy also suggests that the relations of aesthetic and political notions of representation are intricately intertwined.²⁷

Thus, proponents of modernism had to make the case that rather than being a threat to democracy, modern art was actually the fullest expression of the very freedom that is the foundation of democracy. Nevertheless, this move did not mean that the specifically American nature of art had to be renounced. Quite the contrary, the point was to redefine the meaning of America in such a way that the move beyond representation was no longer an embarrassing European development imitated by half-talented Americans. Consequently, the meaning of America could no longer be reduced to what merely “appeared” to be American. Rather, it had to be defined as that which is American according to its universal essence. The solution to the problem was that American national identity had to be equated with universal freedom, and the function of art had to be defined as the expression of this human freedom.

Probably one of the most explicit contemporary expressions of the rearticulation of American art as universal art can be found in Edward Alden Jewell’s article “When is Art American?”²⁸ In the background of this article, we find the attempt to redefine nationalism as a form of universalism. Jewell argued for an internal transcendence of the nationalist paradigm: rather than an end in itself, the national content of art had to be redefined as the necessary means for the communication of universal messages. This rearticulation, however, also makes it clear that the move from national to international art is not enough:

This brings me once again to a distinction of pressing relevance to the whole problem of “native” expression in art: the distinction between art that is “international” (too often merely a facile hodge-podge of undigested derivations) and art that is “universal.”…“International,” like “national,” has always a kind of political connotation. It refers to politically separated groups rather than to humanity; whereas “universal” art roots of [sic] individual experience and for that reason may have a profound appeal for individuals everywhere.²⁹

According to general usage, “national” art in America denoted the regionalist art of the thirties, while “international” art essentially meant the cosmopolitan cultural hegemony of Parisian modernism. The invention of universal art made it possible to simultaneously return to national roots and transcend both the national and the international paradigms. It is an essential part of Jewell’s argument that the move beyond the international is not a simple negation of national particularity. Rather, the particularity of the national experience had to be reinterpreted as the carrier of the universal human experience:

But does this mean that universal art may not also be distinctively American art? By no means. Art to be American in the only sense worth talking about is the creative expression of the individual, the individual creating art out of his own experience, the individual who acknowledges first of all the citizenship of selfhood. This true objective is within, not without. And following that objective the artist, if he be American, will without deliberate attempt, create American art—American art not superficially so, but in the deepest, universal, sense.³⁰

The universal appeal of “distinctly American art,” however, was not as self-evident as Jewell’s words might suggest. Although middle-class hostility toward modernism had a long history by the middle of the twentieth century, we can safely claim that two basic paradigms of these attacks were the moral and the political rejection of modern art.³¹ The problem with the historical avant-garde was that it combined political and aesthetic radicalism and completely rejected bourgeois standards. As many commentators of the modernist movement observed, however, one of the paradoxes of the institutionalization of modernism in the 1950s was that it came to represent both politically and culturally the exact opposite of what appears to have been its historical mission.³² In the early Cold War context, the moral critique of the cultural effects of modernism prepared the ground for the political attack, which was an attempt to appropriate the anti-modernist attitude of the middle class for anti-Communist purposes. For example, Alice B. Louchheim, surveying the debate about modernism in 1948, complained in the New York Times of the tendency to reject modernism based on “abstract moral judgments”: “the ethical approach leads from general assumptions to lofty conclusions and seems, en route, to have overlooked the paintings in question.” Louchheim concluded that “Even if one admits a connection between esthetics and ethics, I think the fallacy of this year’s moral attacks lies in the fact that ethical judgments have obscured the best of the works of art of our time.”³³

The inherent contradictions of the political appropriation of these ethical judgments, however, were immediately apparent to contemporary audiences, since the equation of modernism with Communism seemed to imitate the evil it attacked in a rather obvious and paradoxical manner. In “Modernism under Fire,” Devree considered the contradictions of the political arguments brought against modern art in the following terms: “Modern art, which has withstood charges that it is distorted, unintelligible, unreal, specious, ugly, et cetera, has in recent months been faced with a new and most fantastic charge of all—that it is Communist…somehow possessed of the devil and, through the extensions of esthetic frontiers, dangerous to American culture and realism, to say the least.”³⁴ The article clearly demonstrates the standard argument brought forth in defense of modernism against anti-Communist attacks. Speaking of a “fog of contradictions,” Devree points out that it is absurd to call modern art Soviet propaganda when the USSR only endorses socialist realism. As a matter of fact, Devree claims that “it is the sturdy individualism, the refusal of modernism to become propaganda or to cater to the aneċal and the illustrative that have led to its suppression under totalitarian governments.”³⁵ Emily Genauer tried to expose the very same contradiction at the heart of the anti-Communist critique of modern art when she spoke of George A. Dondero, senator from Michigan, in the following terms: “It is a paradox, and a frightening one, to behold an elected representative of the people naively and inadvertently following the Moscow line about art, and demanding that the communist techniques of constraint be applied to American artists and critics.”³⁶

In the course of her article, Genauer quotes one of her interviews with the senator, who said that:

Modern art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our great material progress. Art which does not portray our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies.³⁷

William Hauptman summarized Dondero’s charges in the following terms: “modern artists who advocate freedom to experiment in a nontraditional style were charlatans because 1) they really could not draw; 2) they were insane; 3) they were involved in a plot to make the bourgeoisie nervous; and 3) they were committed to degrade their art for the purpose of communist propaganda.”³⁸ We encounter here the same problem that Trilling identified in his reading of Parrington: if art is not immediately accessible, it is automatically understood to be undemocratic. Of course, what Dondero adds to this “anti-elitist” formula is that such an art also must be clearly antidemocratic, in which case it must serve the interests of Communism. Naturally, Dondero was aware of the complications that liberal critics like Devree, Genauer, and Barr expounded as the fundamental contradiction of his position. But, as Mathews explained, there was an easy solution: “To be sure, socialist realism prevailed in Russia itself. But the art of the Revolution had been cleverly retained for subversion abroad.”³⁹ According to this argument, at the heart of aesthetic antirealism, we find communist political realism at its most devilish extreme.

Ultimately, this anti-Communist attack on modernism threatened to lead to a general rejection of modernism by both Communists and anti-Communists. Writing in the South Atlantic Quarterly, R. B. Beaman formulated in the clearest manner the paradoxical situation of modern art caught between two deadly enemies:

Today the cubist witch, like that dread lady of old Salem, feeds bountifully again on fear of the unknown. The weird cacophonies and twisted watches of the modern arts harbor God knows what threat to law and order, probably communism itself—almost certainly communism. Let ignorance of actual Communist art direct this fear long enough and all modernism will be banned from the colleges and outlawed, together with the Communist party, from the face of America. One pictures Mr. Rockefeller, active sponsor of the Museum of Modern Art, seated on a log beside Mr. Prokofiev, both staring in utmost perplexity at the cubist witch, the one trying to imagine how he ever became confused with communism and the other equally amazed to discover that he is a “decadent bourgeois.”⁴⁰

As Devree pointed out in “Modernism under Fire”: “the cubist witch is called bourgeois art in Russia and Communist art in America.”⁴¹ Alfred Frankfurter of Art News formulated the double reversal inherent in this situation in the following terms: “Only a great, generous, muddling democracy like ours could afford the simultaneous paradox of a congressman who tries to attack Communism by demanding the very rules which Communists enforce wherever they are in power, and a handful of artists who enroll idealistically in movements sympathetic to Soviet Russia while they go on painting pictures that would land them in jail under a Communist government.”⁴² It was this reversed mixture of aesthetic and political categories that the liberal discourse of anti-Communism had to straighten out by redefining the terms in a clear opposition.

Politics and the Novel

As we move from these popular discussions of the politics of modernism in the arts to the field of literature, we need to trace the emergence of the same logical arguments. It is customary to speak of literary criticism in the 1950s in terms of an institutionalized compromise between the New Critics and the New York intellectuals.⁴³ What concerns us the most is that the opposition of the two critical camps reproduced the basic terms of the cultural politics of the vital center. On the one hand, New Criticism had its roots in antimodern Agrarian regionalism which displayed politically conservative, even right-leaning tendencies. After the war, this conservative regionalism had to be redefined as international, formalist, modernism. On the other hand, the New York intellectuals started out in the thirties as Communists. By the second half of the thirties, they became Trotskyites, then Cold War liberals, and in the sixties cultural conservatives.⁴⁴ On the level of their literary priorities, it was clear that the New Critics were primarily concerned with poetry, while the New York intellectuals were predominantly preoccupied with novels. But in spite of their continuing disagreements, the New Critics and the New York intellectuals agreed on two crucial points: they both asserted the relative autonomy of art in relation to politics, and they both held that this autonomy defined the social function of art. In other words, literature was always beyond politics, but by moving beyond politics it fulfilled an essentially political task.

The most striking fact of the early postwar period is that the whole genre of the novel occupied a precarious position. It was not until the late forties that critics started to worry about the discrepancies between the critical arsenal accumulated to tackle the intricacies of poetry and the almost complete lack of a standardized critical language to deal with the novel.⁴⁵ There was an urgent need to invent or reinvent the critical language of the novel which, of course, also meant that the novel itself had to be reinvented. This critical neglect of the novel was usually explained as a suspicion of popular entertainment and social commentary. The two major methods of redefining the novel beyond simplistic realism were, on the one hand, the relegation of the merely realistic to the field of mass culture and, on the other, the construction of the category of the “romance” as a nonrealistic novel.

Let us now briefly examine the way some of the most illustrious New Critics and New York intellectuals attempted to redefine the novel in relation to the anti-Communist consensus of their times. The most sustained contemporary effort at isolating the purely aesthetic component of literature can be found in René Wellek and Austin Warren’s The Theory of Literature (1949). But we need to ask the following question now: What is the relationship of this argument to anti-Communist politics? Surveying the smoldering ruins of European criticism, Wellek and Warren conclude their work with the same diagnosis that formed the basis of both the political and cultural reinventions of America’s global position. In short, they diagnose the transference of the center of power from Europe to America: “One cannot yet anticipate the way in which European literary scholarship will be reconstituted. But it seems probable that, in any case, leadership has passed to the United States.”⁴⁶ In more concrete terms, they specify their meaning by speaking of America’s historical chance to become the land of authentic literary criticism: “Here there is a chance…to reconstitute literary scholarship on more critical lines: to give merely antiquarian learning its proper subsidiary position, to break down nationalistic and linguistic provincialism, to bring scholarship into active relations with contemporary literature, to give scholarship theoretical and critical awareness.”⁴⁷ The methodological shortcomings of European criticism (“antiquarianism”) are linked with historical shortcomings (an inability to engage contemporary literature) and the political failure of nationalistic paradigms.

Of course, what the very same text also bears witness to in an oblique way is that this reinvention of American criticism did not necessarily reflect traditional American values. It is an intriguing historical fact that Wellek and Warren conclude their work with the following disclaimer: “It has been objected to such a program as ours that it asks for a reform of homo Americanus, that it ignores his preoccupation with the job, his ideal of efficiency, his belief in teaching anybody and everybody, his inborn positivism. This objection we do not grant. While we all hope for a change in man, and in the American specifically, the scheme proposed is not Utopian nor does it contradict fundamental American traditions.”⁴⁸ On the very last page of the book, they formulate their position in even more evocative language: “A turn toward the study of theory and criticism is neither ‘idealistic’ nor un-American.”⁴⁹ This suggestion, that literary theory in general could be perceived as “un-American,” reflects the troubled move from national to global politics, as we have outlined it in previous sections. The scholarly study of literature was redefined by Wellek and Warren as a global and universal study of literariness rather than the investigation of the realistic representations of the “American Scene.” But, as we can see, this overcoming of the nationalist paradigm had to take place in the name of American traditions.

A striking feature of Theory of Literature is that it aims to define the properly aesthetic component of literature by reference to the particular and universal aspects of art. The problem of universality is elaborated by Wellek and Warren on the level of the scholarly study of literature as well as that of the onto-phenomenology of the literary work of art. In the first case, the authors claim that the proper object of study is the “nature” of literature. The “function” of literature can be derived from its “nature,” and the “evaluation” of literature is based on the relation of its essence and function. They claim that the scientific model of establishing universal laws is just as mistaken as the exclusive attention paid to the particularity of a given piece of art. Rather, one could say that the proper object of inquiry is the “concrete universality” of the aesthetic as it manifests itself in a particular work of art. It is precisely the articulation of this structure that renders their work exemplary.

It is now clear how the nationalist paradigm of literary analysis is to be transcended. The argument presented in the chapter entitled “General, Comparative, and National Literature” attempts to articulate the universal problem of literature in relation to national particularity.⁵⁰ The authors argue that comparative literature cannot be reduced to a comparison of two or more national literatures. They claim that comparative literature has to move beyond this international paradigm toward a genuinely universal study of literature “by identifying ‘comparative literature’ with the study of literature in its totality, with ‘world literature,’ with ‘general’ or ‘universal’ literature.”⁵¹ Just as the stratified aesthetic object has to be studied in its totality as a work, the meaning of literature also needs to be extended to include all of its global manifestations. But the question of nationality is not dismissed by the move toward the global. Quite to the contrary, its position is reformulated as “central”: “Indeed, it is just the problem of ‘nationality’ and of the distinct contributions of the individual nations to this general literary process which should be realized as central.”⁵² The dialectical conclusion is that the “Universal and national literatures implicate each other.”⁵³

When Wellek and Warren turn to a discussion of the novel, they start by acknowledging the inferior status of novel criticism.⁵⁴ They continue to enumerate the general reasons for this state of affairs and warn against two extremes: on the one hand, the novel should not be perceived as mere escapism, but neither should it be reduced to a historical document. They blame the Platonic suspicion of imitation as mere deception for this continuing suspicion of the genre and add that “the earnest writer of novels…knows well that fiction is less strange and more representative than truth.”⁵⁵ They argue that “realism” is a mere artistic tool rather than the exclusive terrain of novelistic discourse. Therefore, the criticism of the novel should not be concerned with a choice between reality and illusion, but with the totality of the world created by the given piece of fiction.

The political significance of the autonomy of the aesthetic can be explained according to the same logic. Here autonomy means that the aesthetic field has its own law: “Its prime and chief function is fidelity to its own nature.”⁵⁶ Wellek and Warren are careful not to reduce their position to a simple negation of the political and philosophical relevance of literature. For example, discussing propaganda they reject extreme positions which either claim that art cannot be propaganda at all or that all art is propaganda.⁵⁷ In their definition, propaganda is a persuasive purveyor of truth rather than its aesthetic discovery. If we take “propaganda” in its broader meaning, we could maybe call artists “responsible propagandists”: “The view of life which the responsible artists articulates perceptually is not, like most views which have popular success as ‘propaganda,’ simple; and an adequately complex vision of life cannot, by hypnotic suggestion, move to premature or naïve action.”⁵⁸ In fact, art and propaganda designate two distinct ways of relating to truth: in the case of propaganda truth is already given, it only has to be communicated; in the case of art, the truth needs to be discovered through the aesthetic experience. That is, ideological components can appear within a work of art, but they can only function as components of a structured whole whose artistic value cannot be judged on the basis of a single element.

In his attempt to restore the centrality of the “literary idea,” in contrast to Wellek and Warren, Lionel Trilling criticized the idea of “pure art” and argued that this purity is a mere critical fantasy: “Say what we will as critics and teachers trying to defend the province of art from the dogged tendency of our time to ideologize all things into grayness, say what we will about the ‘purely’ literary, the purely aesthetic values, we as readers know that we demand of our literature some of the virtues which define a successful work of systematic thought.”⁵⁹ Since in the final analysis Trilling might be much closer to his opponents than he believes, we could say that he is trying to find here a different way to formulate the inherent political relevance of literature. One of the clearest signs of Trilling’s opposition to New Critical methodology was his attempt to redefine the novel as the most important genre of the period.⁶⁰ The most direct formulation of the central position of the novel occurs in the famous concluding lines of the essay “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”: “For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years.”⁶¹ Trilling’s essay reflects a sense of crisis and impending catastrophe as it points toward the novel as the guiding light in this dark age. The cultural and political function of the novel is to prevent the corruption of liberalism by moving beyond mere realism (championed by totalitarian systems) to the kind of moral realism that always reminds us of the corruptibility of human nature and questions all forms of politics conducted in the name of moral righteousness. But in order to fulfill this function, the novel must move beyond the classic forms of realism.

Since Trilling has always been sensitive to the constitutive paradoxes of liberal democracy, it is no surprise that he considers the politics of modernism precisely from this perspective. In “The Meaning of a Literary Idea,” he suggests that the move beyond realism in high modernism does not necessarily guarantee political liberalism: “For it is in general true that the modern European literature to which we can have an active, reciprocal relationship, which is the right relationship to have, has been written by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the tradition of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, Proust and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide—these men do not seem to confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.”⁶² Conversely, Trilling also questions the value of contemporary American fiction precisely in these terms: to the degree that authors choose to be explicitly liberal and democratic, they might turn out to be good American citizens, but they are likely to produce uninteresting literature. The relationship between good literature and liberal democracy cannot be reduced to a mechanical reproduction of the democratic ideals in a fictitious terrain.

But the best formulation of the paradoxical nature of the “politics of the novel” comes from another New York intellectual. In Politics and the Novel (1957), Irving Howe analyzes the contradictory nature of the category “political novel” and argues that the paradoxical political task of the novel is precisely to transcend politics. After rehearsing some of the difficulties inherent in precise generic definitions, Howe defines the “political novel” as constituted by an internal tension between experience (always concrete, stemming from life, and operating on the level of emotions) and ideology (constituted by abstract political ideas): “The conflict is inescapable: the novel tries to confront experience in its immediacy and closeness, while ideology is by its nature general and inclusive.”⁶³ Later on, Howe uses even stronger language to express this internal tension: “Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something other than itself.”⁶⁴ This internal warfare between concrete experience and abstract ideology pushes the political novel beyond itself, toward a transcendence that can no longer be called political: “The political novel turns characteristically to an apolitical temptation.”⁶⁵

It is precisely by “becoming something other than itself” that the novel gives way to the romance here. The most significant expression of the romance thesis is to be found in Richard Chase’s book The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). This book is important for us because it identifies the move beyond classic forms of realism as the essence of a genuinely American literary tradition. In other words, we see here a very clear formulation of the thesis that the move beyond realism is simultaneously a move toward universal truths and the expression of a genuinely American tradition. Whereas the English novel displays a tendency toward “absorbing all extremes, all maladjustments and contradictions into a normative view of life” and it is primarily an “an imperial enterprise, an appropriation of reality with the high purpose of bringing order to disorder,” American novels “explore” the radical contradictions of their culture and “discover a putative unity in disunity” and “rest at last among irreconcilables.”⁶⁶ This amalgamation of fiction and reality, in turn, ensures that the romance gives fiction “a universal human significance” while still maintaining “local significance.”⁶⁷ Therefore, the romance is capable of penetrating truth otherwise inaccessible to traditional novels: “The inner facts of political life have been better grasped by romance-melodramas…than strictly realistic fiction.”⁶⁸ By moving beyond politics toward the realm of universal morality, the romance is actually more realistic politically than the novel, because it is capable of investigating the moral foundations of politics.⁶⁹

Thus, we can see now how the four logical steps behind the anti-Communist appropriation of modernism (defined in the previous section) can be applied to the field of literature as well. First literature had to be aligned with the politics and aesthetics of the center. In terms of available critical discourses, this center was defined as the common ground between New Critics (on the right) and New York intellectuals (on the left). Second, this center had to be occupied by a genuinely American literary tradition. The establishment and institutionalization of the field of American studies served precisely this purpose. Third, this American national tradition had to be interpreted as the expression of universal aesthetic and moral values. And finally, the universal content of American literature had to be equated with the modernist sublime. In this particular case, the self-transcendence of novelistic discourse through the romance pointed toward the poetry of a sublime anxiety. What is at stake in this aesthetic moment is again freedom and the anxiety produced by contradictory cultural determinations that are specific to a given culture.

Anti-Communist Popular Fiction

Bernard Rosenberg opened his 1957 anthology of essays devoted to mass culture with the observation that the political left, right, and center have clearly defined aesthetic views on mass culture:

The political lines that have crystallized are approximately these: radicals (Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe) who, like the arch-conservatives (Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, Bernard Iddings Bell), although for opposite reasons, are repelled by what they commonly regard as vulgar and exploitative, and the liberals (Gilbert Seldes, David Riesman, Max Lerner) who take a predictable position in the middle. The parallel between left, right, and center in politics and in the “popular arts” is virtually perfect.⁷⁰

In fact, Leslie Fiedler’s essay from the same anthology, “The Middle against Both Ends,” suggests that this liberal center entertained an undemocratic attitude towards mass culture: “We live in the midst of a strange two-front class war: the readers of the slicks battling the subscribers to the ‘little reviews’ and the consumers of pulps; the sentimental-egalitarian conscience against the ironical-aristocratic sensibility on the one hand and the brutal populist mentality on the other. The joke, of course, is that it is the ‘democratic’ center which calls for the suppression of its rivals; while the élite advocate a condescending tolerance, and the vulgar ask only to be let alone.”⁷¹

These points clearly demonstrate that we are dealing with political as well as aesthetic definitions of the center. While the field of politics was divided among leftist radicals, right-leaning arch-conservatives, and centrist liberals, the field of culture was divided among highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow artifacts. From the perspective of the sentimental democratism of middle-brow culture, the two fields can be clearly aligned on the basis of the coincidence of the two centers: middlebrow aesthetics and the politics of the center should be identical. In case of the middlebrow, the political opposition to extremism was reflected in the simultaneous rejection of modernism and mass culture. Quite often, anti-Communist cultural imaginary conceived of the relationship of the two fields in the following way: highbrow modernism = leftist extremism, middlebrow sentimentalism = liberalism, mass culture = right wing extremism.⁷² From the perspective of modernist liberalism, however, the problem with this formula was that the middlebrow had absolutely no aesthetic legitimacy. For them, the politics of the liberal center had to be aligned with modernism.

The symmetrical juxtaposition of the external political crisis (international Communism) and the internal cultural crisis (mass culture) led to a general suspicion of simulation. The problem of “simulation” appeared in both fields as the return of the excluded element that threatens the principle of representation: as we have seen, the excluded Communist represented the apolitical (criminal) agency which through deceit and imitation undermined the very practice of democratic representation; at the same time, high art was threatened by the mere imitation of art. Communism and mass culture emerged as the internal subversions of the fields of politics and aesthetics through deceitful imitation. While Communism was the simulacrum of politics that tried to do away with democracy, mass culture was the simulacrum of culture threatening the very existence of real art.

Historically speaking, however, we have to insist on the point that the twofold division of cultural production between highbrow and lowbrow is not sufficient. Already in one of the earliest contributions to the highbrow-lowbrow debate, Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming of Age (1915), we find a conscious program to establish three separate positions. Brooks defines the split between highbrow (which he identifies with theory, culture, and the feminine) and lowbrow (practice, business, and the masculine) as constitutive of American identity: “Human nature itself in America exists on two irreconcilable planes, the plane of stark theory and the plane of stark business.”⁷³ He argues that one of the reasons why there is always something “wanting” in American literary works is that this split erected an insurmountable barrier between social and personal genius.⁷⁴ Celebrating Walt Whitman as the center of the middlebrow canon, however, he suggests that things could be otherwise.

But Brooks argues for a successful synthesis of the two extremes in a genuinely American middlebrow culture. He speaks of “the rudiments of a middle tradition” which is “just as fundamentally American as either flag waving or money grabbing.”⁷⁵ He calls this middle ground “the focal center in the consciousness of [a nation’s] own character.”⁷⁶ Brooks displays a conscious effort to formulate the basic premises of a cultural politics of the center that should represent the essence of national character. In Brooks’s case, by the 1940s, this plea for a “focal center” turned into an uncompromising nationalistic attack on literary modernism in the name of middle-class values. In On Literature Today (a lecture delivered at Hunter College in 1940), Brooks makes it clear that highbrow modernism is simply the enemy of the American spirit.⁷⁷ Brooks works with a familiar set of oppositions: on the one side, we find modernism that stands for negativity, ugliness, chaos, international values, urban hatred of the countryside, formalism, and the “death-drive.” On the other side, we have “primary” literature, which is positive, concerns itself with the beauty of life and the goodness of human beings, and remains provincial in the good sense.

Although Dwight Macdonald’s famous attack on the so-called “Brooks-MacLeish Thesis” (as Archibald MacLeish held similar views about contemporary literature) rejects the content of this critique, ultimately he reaffirms its ideological form by fully canonizing the threefold division of culture. Macdonald’s most famous formulation of his theory of mass culture can be found in “Masscult and Midcult.”⁷⁸ This article, clearly written out of a sense of cultural crisis, defines the threat posed by Masscult as the false and deceitful universality of democratic equality. But the important point for us is that the logic of the simulacrum emerges in the form of the Midcult as a result of the radical exclusion of Masscult from the terrain of art.

As a first step, Macdonald establishes the fact that Masscult is not art. The historical opposition between high art and mass culture is explained not as the difference between successful and failed art, but as the difference between art and its negation. That is, the distinction is not internal to the field of art: “Masscult is bad in a new way: it doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good.… It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.”⁷⁹ But the dialectical synthesis of art and its negation is not the happy marriage of extremes, but the total destruction of art through its empty simulacra:

A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form—let us call it Midcult—has the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain—to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.⁸⁰

As we can see, Macdonald’s cultural discourse was split between essence and appearance in the same way as the political metaphysics of the Cold War. As Macdonald put it: “The special threat of Midcult is that it exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde.”⁸¹ Midcult pretends to be avant-garde art and infiltrates the cultural field of high art in order to subvert this field from within and substitute the negation of art for genuine high art. And this attack on art cannot even be isolated anymore as a local problem since it is happening everywhere. In Macdonald’s more evocative words: “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.”⁸²

The specificity of the threat posed by Midcult can thus be explained by reference to two familiar categories: on the one hand, it is a mere simulacrum and, on the other, it stands for a false universality. Macdonald uses rather suggestive language and repeatedly points out that Midcult only pretends to be art. It is characterized by a certain ambiguity and deceit as it undermines the field of aesthetic value from within. Midcult is the mode of appearance of non-art or anti-art within the field of art: “The enemy outside the walls is easy to distinguish. It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. For it presents itself as part of High Culture. Not that coterie stuff, not those snobbish inbred so-called intellectuals who are only talking to themselves. Rather the great vital mainstream, wide and clear though perhaps not so deep.”⁸³ The populist rhetoric of the middlebrow appropriates certain elements of highbrow only to drag it down to a democratic common denominator: “Midcult is not, as might appear at first, a raising of the level of Masscult. It is rather a corruption of High Culture which has the enormous advantage over Masscult that while also in fact ‘totally subjected to the spectator,’ in Malraux’s phrase, it is able to pass itself off as the real thing.”⁸⁴

This subversion of art happens in the name of central and universal human values: “Technically, they are advanced enough to impress the midbrows without worrying them. In content, they are ‘central’ and ‘universal,’ in that line of hollowly portentous art which the French call pompier after the glittering, golden beplumed helmets of their firemen.”⁸⁵ Macdonald quotes Thornton Wilder as a quintessential middlebrow to illustrate his point: “‘There is something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.’ The last sentence is an eleven-word summary, in form and content, of Midcult.”⁸⁶ As Macdonald makes clear, “The Midcult mind aspires toward Universality above all,” but this universality of human essence is disqualified by its lack of artistic form.⁸⁷

If we revisit Clement Greenberg’s classic 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” from this perspective, it is striking to what extent he also relies on the language of the simulacrum. This is more than just mere rhetoric, since the very logic of the exclusion of kitsch is justified in these terms: “Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility.… Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.”⁸⁸ In other words, kitsch is the persistence of the same harmful essence throughout all possible stylistic manifestations that are mere simulacra of genuine culture.

In order to establish the field of pure art, what needs to be excluded from the field of the aesthetic is non-art masquerading as genuine art. Greenberg’s language even suggests a deliberate victimization of the “dupes” of mass culture: “Traps are laid even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture.”⁸⁹ Later he adds: “Kitsch is deceptive. It has many levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naïve seeker of true light.”⁹⁰ In a familiar turn of the argument, we find out that kitsch (just as the external political enemy) is building a global empire of anti-aesthetic deception: “Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national-cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after the other, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.”⁹¹

But beside the aesthetic reason (the fact that it is a mere simulacrum of art), there is also a political justification for the attack on kitsch. This time, the problem is that it has disturbing ties with totalitarianism: “The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.”⁹² While the exclusion of kitsch can be justified on purely aesthetic grounds (since it is non-art), the political argument further reinforces the necessity of this exclusion. The exclusion of kitsch from the field of aesthetics is linked to the exclusion of totalitarianism from the field of politics. The political argument functions as the ultimate justification of the aesthetic judgment on kitsch.

The status of anti-Communist literature has to be understood in this context. The anti-Communist canon was constructed on the basis of a threefold division of cultural products: at the top of the hierarchy, we find anti-Communist modernism; at the bottom, we find anti-Communist popular culture. Between these two extremes, the grand classics of anti-Communism occupy a dubious cultural position. Due to its overtly political nature, anti-Communist literature was always on the verge of being propaganda, so its artistic status was always rather precarious.

Nevertheless, there did exist a tolerated middle ground in the fifties between high modernism and mere propaganda. The absolute center of this anti-Communist literary canon was George Orwell’s 1984. The second place went to Arthur Koestler, with such works as Darkness at Noon (1940), The Yogi and The Commissar (1945), and The Age of Longing (1951). Koestler was closely followed by authors such as Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, and André Malraux. As we can see, the literary canon of anti-Communism in America was mostly composed of European authors who were themselves disillusioned ex-Communists. It is, in fact, really difficult to find positive estimates of American anti-Communist novels at all. In this context, the most often discussed American works are Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey (1947) and Irwin Shaw’s The Troubled Air (1951). The criticism concerned with anti-Communist fiction was clearly troubled by the difficult articulation of aesthetic and political judgments. Basically every discussion of these texts foundered on the same conclusion: “sound in intellectual conception but deplorably weak as a novel.”⁹³

Below the level of these works, we find anti-Communist popular fiction, which otherwise remained almost completely invisible in the works of these critics. Nevertheless, it is easy to see what is ideologically wrong with anti-Communist popular fiction from the perspective of these aesthetic considerations. The most direct contemporary example of the general argument against anti-Communist fiction can be found in Charles I. Glicksberg’s 1954 article entitled “Anti-Communism in Fiction.” Although the article is mostly a set of plot summaries, it nevertheless displays the most common arguments of this line of criticism. The text opens with the rather telling comparison of anti-Communist fiction with the proletarian novels of the 1930s. While anti-Communist and proletarian novels have different ideological orientations, the reasons for their failure are the same: by emphasizing political commitment they deny the essence of art. The political judgment on art has to be derived from the judgment whether it is true to its universal essence or not. To the degree that anti-Communist fiction fails to be art, it fails in its political mission as well.

After surveying the works of Koestler, Silone, and Orwell (the generally accepted although always criticized anti-Communist canon), Glicksberg considers the lesser authors in the following terms:

Other writers of fiction have attempted to grapple with the theme of Communism, but the work they have produced is generally feeble in invention, undistinguished in character, lacking in imaginative depth and dramatic tension.… Though these novelists are undoubtedly moved by a profound urge to make the truth prevail and by a genuine desire to uphold those values that make room for freedom, the fiction they concoct about Communism is neither fantasy nor parable but a laboriously constructed fairy tale, abstract and lifeless.… The trouble with most anti-Communist fiction is that it is too violently biased in temper; its satire lacks the edge of irony; everything connected with Communism is reduced to a black and white pattern.⁹⁴

We can see that Glicksberg expresses sympathy with the political sources of this kind of fiction, but he dismisses these authors on basic aesthetic grounds. There appears to be a problem with their conception of “reality”: it is simplistic and, therefore, propagandistic. They start with the truth of freedom, but they fail to transpose it successfully into the field of the aesthetic. Instead of an “imaginative realization” of this truth, we receive a fairy tale which is neither properly imaginary nor properly realistic.

Glicksberg further explains these objections in the conclusion of the article when he writes:

The contemporary literary debate over Communism reaches to the roots of human conscience and is concerned over ultimate values. The writer who projects this debate in fiction must avoid presenting a study in black and white, counterpoising evil against virtue, Satan against God.… The supreme error lies in perverting literature to serve propagandistic purposes. The anti-Communist writer of fiction neglects the problem of form, of objectivity, of psychological truth, while he proclaims his faith and seeks to confound the enemy. Thus, in concentrating on ways and means of combating the evil of Communism, the novelist runs the risk of compromising his integrity, his vision of truth. Fighting fire with fire, poison with poison, he loses sight of his goal and gradually abandons his position as artist.⁹⁵

All of the obligatory clichés of liberal criticism are put on display here. The opposition of art and propaganda is rendered in explicit terms. On the side of art we have irony, form, objectivity, psychological truth; on the side of propaganda, we find violent temper, simplification, and demonization of the enemy. The unsymmetrical definition of Cold War enmity surfaces in this last paragraph, which renounces the imitation of the enemy as a legitimate method of fighting totalitarianism. Anti-Communist fiction as propaganda is “fighting fire with fire, poison with poison,” when the most important weapon in the cultural Cold War is the universality of pure art, which reveals “the truth about the condition of man, his cosmic destiny, his tragic predicament.”⁹⁶ By misconstruing its aesthetics, anti-Communist fiction assumes totalitarian methods.

Based on Glicksberg’s critique, the question that I would like to raise in the following three chapters is the following: What does it mean to understand anti-Communist fiction as a field of representation? In the cultural topology of anti-Communist liberalism, the name “anti-Communist fiction” designates a hardly visible terrain of cultural production whose existence is, of course, acknowledged, but it is located beyond the “great divide.” Being beyond this great divide, anti-Communist fiction is reduced to a certain kind of cultural immanence without the sublime self-transcendence of art.

As we can see in Glicksberg’s analysis, anti-Communist fiction is often defined by critics as the aesthetic corruption of a political truth. In other words, anti-Communist fiction can be defined as a fictional field of representation within which the political truth of its own institution can only emerge in a distorted form. Even if it is politically correct, anti-Communist fiction is by definition aesthetically unacceptable. The basic failure of this kind of fiction is precisely that it fails to translate its political truth into an aesthetic method: it cannot successfully aestheticize its politics. This split between political truth and its aesthetic perversion is explained as a false conception of reality that makes it impossible to render extra-aesthetic reality in an adequately complex form. In other words, this kind of fiction fails to connect the politics of realism with the aesthetics of anti-realism in a sufficiently sophisticated manner.

Mostly, anti-Communist fiction appears to remain on the level of a literary “Donderoism” and imagines that the same democratic principles apply in politics and aesthetics. While anti-Communist modernism separates this politics and aesthetics on the level of representation only to reunite them as ideological equivalents, anti-Communist popular fiction attempts to make an aesthetic method out of its politics (without necessarily succeeding in this mission). And it is on this level that the connections between anti-Communist politics and anti-Communist fiction can be articulated. To the degree that this kind of fiction professes that political and aesthetic representation follow the same logic, the anti-Communist ideology that provides the consistency of its world is simultaneously a political and an aesthetic ideology. These novels defined a certain field of fictional visibility the same way anti-Communist political ideology defined politics as a field of representation. What needs to be examined in more detail are the limits of representation as they are articulated in this kind of fiction.

Thus, what has to be explained is the way these works account for the emergence of the field of representation (as a field of fiction) within which they can appear as authentic representations of reality. The key to this problem is that there is always a privileged sublime object that marks a limit of representation; but by marking this limit, this object also accounts for the possibility of the emergence of the whole field. Without the original figure of the catastrophe, there could be no nuclear holocaust fiction, but the catastrophe itself represents that which can never be fully represented even in these works. Without the figure of the stolen secret, there could be no spy novels, but the secrets of democracy must remain secret forever and their content can never be fully exposed within the field of fiction either. And without the unreadable enemy, there could be no political novels, but neither can the principle of political unreadability be fully eradicated in these novels. As we can see, these objects, as figures of ideological investments, become the conditions of whole genres. Of course, the kind of politics a particular novel will advocate within the field opened up by its original figure cannot be logically deduced from the figure itself, but we can be sure that whatever this politics might be, it will have to be articulated in relation to this figure.