26
PARTISAN REVIEW
to give comfort to the supporters of an anarchic or irresponsible relativism.
It is not to deny the obligation of arriving at clearcut judgments, of con·
stantly making sharper and sharper (not less and less sharp) distinctions,
and of carrying on unremitting struggle against what is ·really regressive,
destructive, or obscurantist in certain ways of thinking and writing. There
may well be situations, moreover, in which it is practically more important
to discredit certain writers and certain ideas than to keep the dialectical
scales in fastidious balance. This is only to say that literary criticism is
but one activity among others, and that it must sometimes yield-for it
cannot be carried on in a woodland castle-to more pressing and more
Jesperate necessities. But it has a life and a utility of it own, and these
can best be realized when it is allowed to •explore it own territory,
the history and the present practice of the literary arts, with a certain
freedom and liberality.
If
it is to serve a more than merely literary pur·
pose, a social and historical purpose, in the long run it will do this best
if in the short run it is allowed to move its limbs with the minimum of
external ·restraint.
This free movement is exactly what dialectics does not simply con·
done but demand. In the study of literature, as in the study of economics,
no manner of thinking is more sterile and therefore more injurious than
thinking in a straight line on one level: this,. in fact, has been the vice
of too many bourgeois critics as it has been of too many bourgeois econ·
omists. A thoughtful Marxist critic will be far more sensitive than any
buorgeois critic can be, to the number of different forces that have always
to be taken into account, and the concept of creative contradictions
will
be ever-present to him. It is fundamenfal to Marxism, I suppose, to
recognize the progressive nature of capitalism in its beginnings and in its
prime, and to emphasize the contradiction between its positive achievements
and its wastefulness, its duplicity, and its inhumanity. Comparable contra·
dictions are present in the work of all the really interesting and memorable
writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of course,
with
many qualifications, in the writers of ou·r own time, both individualistic
and revolutionary. Part of the critic's task is to get this complex interplay
of creative and destructive, of fruitful and sterile elements into the truest
possible
focus;
and if, in this process, he cannot dispense with historical
learning and an austere logic, no more can he dispense with intuitive tact
and an imaginative skill in dealing with intangibles. The correctest political
thinking in the world will avail him but little at this point.
The result of criticizing both the writers of the past and those of
the moment in a close but dialectical manner is, among other things, to add
a dimension to the truth of the Marxist position, and thus enormously
to enrich the intellectual and spiritual resources available to the writers
