22
PARTISAN REYIEW
interaction of talent and ideology, which permits the development
of a great literature.
When ideology limits talent, as is the case with
reactionary writers, this interaction becomes most disadvantageous. Com·
mitted to the conception that all Jews are blackguards and Shylocks, the
fascist writer cannot possibly give us a representative picture of a Jew
as a character in fiction. When T. S. Eliot entered his Anglo-catholic
phase, his ideology set up a wall between his poetic talent and its realiza·
tion, with the result that, as is generally admitted, his recent poetry is
inferior to his early work. The specific content of his religious verse does
not contain the realness of
Prufrock
or
The Waste Land.
When he faces
the task: of evaluation, the Marxian critic must not only take into consi–
deration all these relations between ideology and content, but must also
fasten his attention upon all the particulars which gives any work its actual
quality. The two tasks go hand
tn
hand. The isolation of the first from
the second makes for political discussions of literature, not criticism; the
isolation of the second from the first makes for estheticism.
The Marxian method in criticism cannot be considered a purely sociolo–
ological one. It is a method of correlating all factors, including the psycho–
logical. Yet. it is not an haphazard pluralism, but a method which sees the
class factor as the determinant.
4:
The making of revolutionary literature.
The class struggle as
an economic and political reality is the
directive image
of revolutionary
literature, but around that center the artist builds a network of human
experience in all its multiplicity. The
cla~s
struggle is not a mold into
which the artist stuffs experience; it is the reality giving coherence and
structure to wide ranges of life. Those artists who d.o not understand
this are guilty of an excessive rationalism which makes them present reality
geometrically, rather than as a living flux. This excessive rationalism is
perhaps responsible for. more bad revolutionary writing than any other
single defect. Any editor of a proletarian magazine can testify to this.
It
is also at the root of a vulgar ultilitarian attitude to writing which at
times shows itself in our criticism. In looking for a conscious
manipula–
tion
of experience, the critic ceases to respond to the deeper sources of the
creative process.
There are still too many writers and readers who see class conflict
in literature only at the point of physical collision between bourgeoisie
and proletariat. This idea leads to the
summarizing
of the r!ch back–
grounds of workers' lives up to the terminal of open strife, as in strikes,
demonstrations, and other overt political acts. But it is the combing of
the vast and complex background behind these overt acts that would give
us epics of working class experience. Despite many successful, but largely
marginal, approaches to this theme on the part of middle class and many
