CRITICISM
25
whose ethos of the city is epitomized in
The Bridge.
The differences are
obviously there, but so is the influence, and Hayes should not be stig–
matized for this influence. There may be disagreements about the degree
and nature of the influence, but on the ground that Crane's ideology is alien
to ours, such an accusation cannot hold water.
It
is patent that the variety of objectives in revolutionary literature
creates a diversity of specific influences and uses of tradition. Different
schools and currents of revolutionary writing do in fact appear. The job
of criticism is to clarify the aims and premises of each current, to relate
one to the other, and to encourage some rather than others. It must
fight those currents that are moving away from the aims of Marxism. And
it is in the interaction between the critical and creative faculti·es that a
greater consciousness of creative methods will emerge.
DISCUSSION
Newton Arvin:
With the spirit of Mr. Phelps and Mr. Rahv's article on cntlcism
it seems to me difficult not to agree. In reaction from the solipsistic resthe–
ticism of the
Dial
school and the inane eclecticism of the liberal and indi–
vidualist critics, the small group of serious Marxist critics and reviewers
have done much to bring back or to call into being a healthy consciousness
of the external world, an awareness of the inescapable social responsibilities
of the writer, and a sense of the need for rigorous, unimpressionistic anal–
ysis. But probably no one feels that this is enough, and what Mr. Phelps
and Mr. Rahv seem to be pointing to is a fuller realization-a now
extremely desirable realization-of the possibilities of the dialectical method.
Too much of what passes for Marxist criticism in this country has been,
as they _suggest, unilateral, one-dimensional, and absolutistic; too little of
it has taken real advantage of the richly dynamic naturalism of the Marxian
tradition; too little of it has kept alive the spirit, for example, of Marx's
own note on Greek mythological poetry or of his enthusiasm for such a
book as
Tom ]ones.
There has been too strong a tendency to deal with
literary problems in terms of crude alternatives:
either
a writer's work: is
generally. acceptable (perhaps mainly on political grounds),
or
it is inac–
ceptable and even mischievous;
either
ideas (in this case literary or critical
ideas} are easily stateable in materialistic or revolutionary terms,
or
they
are survivals of bourgeois ways of thinking.
To say that these are crude alternatives is by no means necessarily
•
The Port of New York,
Partisan Review, No. 6.
