18
PARTISAN REVIEW
that his plays are significant historical documents is not only academic but
an obfuscation of Shakespeare's power.
Another difficulty confronting Marxian critics is the servile role
assigned to it by many of our writers. The critical faculty is narrowed
down to the writing of what amounts to little more than publicity for new
proletarian novels and plays. Criticism is not primarily responsible
to
individual writers, but to the general reading public and to literature u
a whole. It is by no means obligated to herald each third rate poem
as
a
boon to the proletariat. Its main concerns are with creating a new
~thetic,
with revaluating literary history, and with advancing proletarian
art.
The search for new creative methods so prominent in a new literature
puts the stress on the critical faculty, not only in critics but in every poet
and novelist. In this sense, the tasks of the critic in this particular period
are perhaps even more complex than those of the creative writer.
2:
What kind of a weapon
is
artf
Art, like every other form of
communicative activity, is a social instrument and hence an instrument in
class struggle. This is an axiom of Marxism. But the problem for
criticism is to differentiate between the uses of literature and those of
other·social instruments. Many errors and vulgarizations are due to the
failure to define these differences.
One common assumption is that literature, in its normative character,
is as direct a weapon as political and economic writing. By this we mean
that literature is assumed to be capable of presenting as explicit a program
of political action as, for example, newspaper articles or pamphlets. Some
literary forms may approach this type of directness, but if tQis were
to
become a criterion of revolutionary literature, it would result in quantitative
standards (in the sense that books would be judged by the
number
of read–
ers who respond to them), and a consequent pressure u;:-on literature to shed
its specific artistic qualities. It is obvious that quantitative standards ulti–
mately lead to pulp writing. Now the desire on the part of many Marxists
~
to avoid pulp proletarian literature as well as to retain quantitative stan-
dards leads to a contradiction, vitiating any hope for consistent evalua–
tions.
If
it is assumed that a poem should invariably have as direct an
agitational effect on as wid·e a mass of readers as possible, the poet will tend
to use his poetry as a vehicle for expressing a meaning nowise different
from the logical meaning of straight political writing. What happens
further is that the poet necessarily eschews large area of experience that
have but an indirect ·relation to the political ideas he is illustrating, and
fails to develop a mode of individual perception.
It seems to us that a clear definition of the way art acts as a weapon
is in order. First, literature influences principally those who are suscept–
ible to artistic mediums. Secondly, it is not a system of signposts, but an
