40
PARTISAN REVIEW
of such a hero would not reconcile the spectator or reader to capitalism but
would rather heighten the significance of the cause inspiring such for–
titude and nobility. In the present era only that is heroic which embodies
the struggle of the producing masses against their plunderers. The in–
dividualist hero is no longer truly real, for reality belongs only to that
which is necessary. There is and there can be no affirmation in bourgeois
literature today. And when theoreticians do
infJent
a modern bourgeois af–
firmation, it inevitably turns into a rationale of fascism. Thus in Mr.
J. Donald Adams' hands a conception of art as optimism is almost auto–
maticaly transfigured into a storm-trooper showing off his biceps (see his
front-page review of Paul Engle's book
pf
poems,
Amfrican
s~ng,
in the
New York Times,
Section 5, July 18, 1934). Clearly, the class struggle
has a wonderful way of filling with an immediate political content the
seemingly innocent speculations of scholars and theoreticians, even literary
theoreticians.
At bottom, however, Krutch's definition of the purpose of art
in
general is an admission of the function of contemporary bourgeois art.
What we really have here is a recognition of this function and a crude
attempt to counter the Marxist ·exposure of it by wiping out the par·
ticular historical context in which it operates, thus making it the property
of all art. Bourgeois art does indeed try to reconcile the masses to capital–
is~,
yet by applying his chloroforming technique, Krutch manages
to
obscure this fatal meaning. The artist ostensibly makes existence "tolerable
to those who are compelled to accept Things
As
They Are." But the
plain fact is--as a glance at any newpaper will show-that economic con–
ditions compel the masses to revolt against, not to accept, things as they are.
In aesthetics this compulsion to revolt is proven in practice by the emer–
gence of revolutionary art, which obviously 'cannot and does not conform
to
to Krutch's definition of artistic direction and purpose. To this actual
breach in his theory Krutch, of course, has only one answer to make to
him: non bourgeois art is tantamount to no art at all.
It would, none the less, be the grossest error to imagine that by thus
defining the social effect of bourgeois art in general, we have exhausted our
critical relation to it. This is what is being done by the "left" doc–
trinaires, whose over-simplifications and gestures of curt dismissal from
the viewpoint of ideology and creative method alike, give the critical re–
actionaries an opportunity to confuse the issues. While as a broad gene–
ralization it is true, for example, that bourgeois literature justifies
the
status quo, it is also true that this process takes the most contradic-
