20
PARTISAN REVIEW
relation is the most complicated question of all criticism, and lies at the
foundation of the Marxian esthetic. It is naturalfy impossible at this
time to exhaust all the facets of the problem, but a few pointers may be
attempted.
In the first place, let us defiue the terms ideology and form.
It
is
confusing to pin a
general
ideology, with all its philosophical and political
connotations, upon any particular work. Take a novel like Faulkner's
Sanctuary.
Evidently the book does not present the author's "ideology,"
in the sense that it does not tell us about his general political opinions,
his economic beliefs, his attitude to all the questions stirring the South;
in fact, it does not even give us anything like a complete view of his
esthetic opinions. What it does give us is not ideology directly, but
specific content
in the shape of attitudes toward character, painting of
moods, patterns of action, and a variety of sensory and psychological
insights. These patterns naturally contain within themselves the implica–
tions of a larger world-view (ideology), which the critic may deduce.
But the point must be made that
this specific content is not identical with
any immediately recognizable reactionary or progressive non-literary pro–
gram operating in the South today.
The question now is: What is the relation of the
specific content
to
its form*? It seems to us that there is no possible way in which the
farm-by which we mean the idiom, the structure, the method of selection,
the tonal values of the prose, etc.-can be separated from the specific
content of any given chapter in the novel. For the power ot. the specific
content inheres in the form in which it is shaped. Restated m a different
form, this content becomes a new content. The conclusion is that we are
judging a novel only when we are judging its specific content, and not
when we judge the general ideology to which it may, by implication,
be
most closely linked. In the case of Proust, for instance, it is misleading
to assume that his values are the va.lues of bourgeois ideology as the
phrase is used in most contexts. The specific content of Proust shows
many insights into bourgeois social relations that are far removed from the
way the normal bourgeois sees them. Many Marxian critics
obs~rved
this,
but what they have done is to isolate this quality of Proust from the
myriad of other "presences" that make up his work. Proust's specific
content contains so much more, that a distortion ensues when a discussion
of his work confines itself to his insight into bourgeois social relations.
• Most people mean "technique" when they speak of form, but this word, not
so definite a term as form and replete with associations in non-creative fields,
is
used so vaguely as to mean everything and nothing.
