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The Marxist Criticism of Literature, 1947
The Marxist Criticism of Literature, 1947
The Marxist Criticism of Literature, 1947
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THE MARXIST CRITICISM
OF LITERATURE1
By STANLEY EDGAR HYMAN
In the Renaissance, the Classical view of the social origin and function of
poetry was revived. Lodge, in his "Defence of Poetry" against Gosson's
"School of Abuse," quotes approvingly the theory of "Donate the gramar-
'This essay, as it will appear in my forthcoming book The Armed Vision (Knopf),
is the background section from a chapter built around the work of Christopher
Caudwell, the brilliant young English critic killed in his twenties, fighting on the
Loyalist side in Spain. The inclusion of his work, which seems to me the most
impressive Marxist criticism yet written, would considerably brighten the gloomy
picture here sketched out. For readers interested in making the comparison, his
most important book, Illusion and Reality, has recently been reprinted by Lawrence
and Wishart in England.
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THE ANTIOCH REVIEW
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MARXIST CRITICISM
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MARXIST CRITICISM
II
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MARXIST CRITICISM
Franz Mehring, his biographer, adds: "In his literary judgments he was
completely free of all political and social prejudices." He also thought
highly of Goethe, Lessing, Homer, and Dante; learned Russian in order
to be able to read Russian literature in the original, particularly Pushkin;
and learned Spanish in order to be able to read Calderon and other
classics. In his youth he had been a Romantic poet (not a very good one),
and when he and Engels, who both loved Heine's work, were disturbed
by Heine's political foibles, he reminded Engels that we could not demand
of poets what we demand of ordinary people.
Nevertheless, in his youth as a disciple of Hegel he had acquired the
Hegelian doctrine of the inevitable decadence of art in modern times, as
an inferior way of freeing the spirit, better suited to the childhood of
mankind. This idea stayed with him, unconsciously transformed into a
concept of the inevitable decadence of art under capitalism. "Capitalist
production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, such as
art and poetry," he wrote, and his bitterest fury was reserved for the bour-
geois view of art as a commodity. One of the charges against the
bourgeoisie in The Communist Manifesto is that it has converted poet
into "paid wage laborers," and Marx writes in an ironic article: "even the
highest forms of spiritual production are recognized and forgiven by the
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THE ANTIOCH REVIEW
And this art then goes beyond its social relations. Marx adds:
The difficulty is not in grasping the idea that Greek art and epos are bound
up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding
why they still constitute with us a source of aesthetic enjoyment and in certain
respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.
It was in this sense of great art transcending both the limitations of
its social origins and the artist's views that Marx thought so highly of
Balzac, who in terms of the decadence of bourgeois art and his own mon-
archical-Catholic-reactionary beliefs, should have been destestable to Marx.
In Capital and in his correspondence, enthusiastic references to Balzac are
frequent, and Lafargue reports that "he proposed to write a critical work
on La Come'die Humaine when he had finished his economic work." His
economic work was never finished, and this book on Balzac, which might
have been the Marxist aesthetic to prevent, if only by authority, nine-
tenths of the idiocy of later Marxists, was never written.
Marx's co-worker, Frederick Engels, not only wrote more specifically
on the dangers of oversimple sociological analyses, but devoted the most
famous of these warnings, the i888 letter in English to Margaret Hark-
ness, to the topic of Balzac. He wrote:
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MARXIST CRITICISM
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MARXIST CRITICISM
III
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world," Marx wrote in
Theses on Feuerbach; "our business is to change it." This turned out to
be not quite so sound a principle when applied to literature by contem-
porary Marxist critics (only a few of whom, for lack of space, can be
touched on here). In America it led chiefly to the straight political dis-
tortion represented by men like V. F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, and
Michael Gold. Calverton, the first and worst of the local Marxist literary
historians, published in I932 The Liberation of American Literature,
which tears through our literature slaughtering Emerson, Thoreau, Mel-
ville, and Hawthorne, to announce that Whitman was our first poet and
Twain our first important prose writer, and the only important contem-
porary writers are the "exponents of the proletarian outlook": John Dos
Passos, Michael Gold, and Charles Yale Harrison. Granville Hicks's The
Great Tradition, published a year later, is the same sort of thing, me-
chanical class-anglings based on the political criteria of the I930's rather
than on those of his subjects' own time, culminating in the same paean
to writers like Dos Passos and Gold. If better informed and less nervy
than Calverton's book, it is more given to cheap cracks like calling
Faulkner "the Sax Rohmer of the sophisticated." Hicks's second book,
Figures of Transition, a study of British literature at the end of the last
century, is more modest and sensible but even less concerned with aesthetic
values, and generally no improvement. Michael Gold has never written a
book on literature, but the collections of his Daily Worker pieces, Change
the World and The Hollow Men, make it clear that not only is he the
most ignorant and provincial of all the Marxist critics, a heroic warrior
against Gilbert and Sullivan, but probably the least adequate Marxist. He
is rather a sentimental and idealistic bourgeois radical of an earlier cen-
tury, and the picture of Marx's reaction to his passionate love for Rous-
seau, "the father of Democracy," or Eugene Sue's "epic melodrama to
strengthen the heart and hand of the revolutionary workers" (which
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MARXIST CRITICISM
IV
The picture of British Marxist criticism, with the exception of Caud-
well, is about as bad as that of America. None of the straight political
critics is as egregious as Calverton or Gold, and they are all much better
read, but, on the other hand, none of the men combining Marxist insights
with aesthetic concern have produced books of the calibre of American
Renaissance. Of the first group, typical examples are John Strachey, Ralph
Fox, and T. A. Jackson. Strachey, the first of them, in the "Decay of Capi-
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THE ANTIOCH REVIEW
of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others, but his formal criticism and literary
pamphleteering, published in English in On Guard for the Soviet Union
in 1933 and Culture and the People in 1939, is greatly disappointing;
wholly political and unimaginative. Other Soviet criticism by the older
generation ranges from the militant leftism of Karl Radek, announcing
that Joyce's work is "a heap of dung," to the moderation and good sense
of Anatol Lunarcharsky, cutting the Gordian knot of a Soviet controversy
over whether Shakespeare was a spokesman for the feudal or the bour-
geois class by announcing that he wasn't a spokesman for any class, but
a great and conflict-ridden artist living in a great and conflict-ridden time.
For many years, Soviet criticism was largely devoted to battles be-
tween Lefts and Rights, Futurists and Formalists, Constructivists and
Proletcultists, On-Guardists and At-Your-Postites, Social-Commanders
and Anti-Social Commanders, a man announcing that Eugene Onegin
would have been written without Pushkin and another man countering
that anyway no literary works could compare with revolutionary mani-
festoes, so that it was a rare literary critic who got a piece of criticism
written. Within the past decade, however, Soviet criticism seems to have
improved somewhat, and the recent controversies by the younger critics
have at least been on issues of serious concern to Marxist criticism, defi-
nitely transcending Soviet literary politics. The chief of these was the cam-
paign against "vulgar sociology" in 1936 and 1937 which soon turned
into a much more fundamental controversy over relative vs. absolute
standards in Marxist criticism. It warrants some space.
The critics of "vulgar sociology" defended absolute criteria, under
the aegis of Lenin, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov; proposing the eval-
uation of works of art in terms of timeless political values: i.e. were they
"for" or "against" the "people"? The group was more or less led by
Mikhail Lifschitz of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, the compiler of
Marx's writings on art and author of a summary, The Philosophy of Art
of Karl Marx, which, although generally useful, distorts Marx to make
him an absolutist and enemy of "vulgar sociology" (neglecting even to
mention, say, his views on Balzac). His camp included V. Grib, the
author of an equally simplified study "capturing" Balzac; Mark Rosen-
thal, editor of the monthly Literary Critic and sponsor of the deathless
syllogism that since great artists were anticapitalist at any time, and
Timon's speeches against gold show that Shakespeare was anticapitalist,
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THE ANTIOCH REVIEW
A few examples of Soviet criticism of this sort give cause for hope.
One is an essay called "Bacon in Shakespearian Surroundings," by Luna-
charsky, part of an unfinished book on Bacon, (published posthumously
in International Literature, 1936, No. i). It is a brilliant and imaginative
study, very much in the tradition of modern criticism, defining two
Shakespearian progressions, the "melancholy," Jaques to Hamlet to Pros-
pero, and the "cynical," Richard III to Edmund to lago, and then inter-
preting Bacon's mind and character against the pattern of those two
movements. A piece even more impressive is J. Kashkeen's "Ernest Hem-
ingway" (International Literature, I935, No. 5). It is a really remarkable
study of Hemingway's work, perhaps the best written to date, revealing
a thorough knowledge and understanding of American literature (Kash-
keen deals with the influence of writers from Thoreau to Gertrude Stein
on Hemingway); a brilliant comparative method (he discusses Heming-
way in terms of Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Celine, Eliot, and innumerable
others); great sensitivity to style; and a genuine understanding of the
nature of Hemingway's power and depth as well as of his limitations.
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