WASTE LAND TO FLOWER GARDEN
41
tory forms, sometimes even to the extent of
und~rmining
its own class
foundation.
Bourgeois literature is by no means homogeneous. The central cleavage
one notes in it is the cleavage between commercial and intellectual art. It
is the commercial writers who command the largest market and who af–
fect the masses directly; they are the open instrument of propertied class
interest in letters. On the subjective side this is reflected in the moronic
level of this body of writing and its utter lack of integrity-In dealing
with mass propaganda the bourgeoisie takes no chances. The literature
representing the advanced intellectuals, however, by and large presents a
somewhat different condition. Here we are not confronted with shallow
optimism and an open cash-valuation of life, but with an art that ar–
ticulates despair, that slashes certain forms of philistinism, and that even
indulges in virulent social criticism (usually not stated in class terms,
but deflected through various crooked mirrors).
It
is clear that this
negative art, replete with the ideological moments of petty-bourgeois class
vacillation, both retards and accelerates the radicalization of intellectuals.
There are literally thousands of people to whom this negative art, by im–
mersing them in an atmosphere of disillusionment, served as an introduc–
tion and a stimulus to social insurgence, and at the same time there are
thousands whom it insulated from such activity. Hence no analysis of
this art can lay claim to Marxism unless it proceeds from a grasp
of its historical connections, class moods and movements.
This middle class literature of despair-from Gustave Flaubert to E. E.
Cummings-is indeed a protest against the bourgeois way of life that fell
short of becoming conscious of its real motivation. Its source does not lie
in a mystical
mal~djustment
"between the human spirit and the natural
universe" but in the corrupt state of a parasitic social system. Writers
attacked the philistinism of the modern life-process, but failed to chal–
lenge the predatory social order which is the matrix of this philistinism.
By reason of this crucial frustration, their criticism of society went amiss;
it could not strike the rockbottom of class reality. In the long run these
literary iconoclasts proceeded to
idealize
the negations they had established,
and ended up by capitulating to various aesthetic dogmas. Take Joyce's
aesthetic ideal, the perfect stasis, which is a good example of idealized ne–
gation. The perfect stasis, Joyce tell us, "awakens or ought to awaken ..•
an aesthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal pity or an ideal terror,. a stasis
called forth, prolonged and a last dissolved by the rhythm of beauty."
Stuart Gilbert defines its psychological effect as "arresting the mind and
