PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES
7
Marxian criticism, and some of our revolutionary editors and cntlCs, un–
fortunately, in their endeavor to strike the proper note in their relations
with fellow-travelers, frequently seem unable to distinguish between diplo–
macy and analysis, or between those who lead and those who trail behind–
not that diplomacy has no place in literary criticism, but, generally speak–
ing,
it should be prlt in its place.
It should not be assumed that by elimination those writers who do not
swing in either of these two directions have solved the problems of revo–
lutionary writing. There is a large and diverse group who plunge into
easy
forms, drifting on the current of chance, widlOut any sharp 'Conscious–
ness of their problems. The implication of their practice is that for the
purposes of rcyolutwnary literature, one form is as good as another, and
that in general the old forms can be taken over bodily. For all practical
purposes, they, as 'veIl as the other groups, have shown little audacity
in reaching out for the vast raw material of art that the proletarian
struggle is tcnstantly. erupting.
Problems and Pioneers
In this editorial, some of our problems have been implicitly touched
upon. In the main they consist of: 1) The degree of the writer's aware–
ness of
strata
in his audience, 2) The method of imaginatively' assimilating
political content, 3) The differentiation between class-alien and us–
able elements in the literature of the past, and 4) the development of
Marxist standards in literature.
Not a few proletarian writers have grappled with these· problems.
In his recent series of articles on
Revolution and the Novel
in the
New
Masses,
Granville Hicks has probed these problems in fiction. However,
though Hicks has helped to clarify our approach, his method of classifying
unimportant details, as well as his choice of critical subjects, is removed
from the way the writer faces these problems. The writer does not
decide
a priori
whether he will write a dramatic or complex novel; his
choice is determined by a number of psychological and thematiC factors.
In general Hicks has given us a class analysis of the more obvious ele–
ments in fiction without first establishing essential Marxian generalizations
about the relation of method to theme and form in terms of expanding
audiences and new stanadrds.
Obed Brooks is another critic who has concerned himself w;th some
aspects of these problems. Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman are the
earliest pioneers of Marxian criticism in America, and their work has
been mostly in the nature of direct
general
class wariare against bourgeois