6
PARTIS.4N REVIEW
merry
ha-ha
(or should one say Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho ?) which the liberal gentile
hands those who believe that Jews, Negroes and other "inferior" Taces are
more corrupt, mysterious, cunning, sensual and patient than the "faustian"
hero.
But the author did not directly flaunt the
bea:K~d b~nner
of
the
race, the Jewish "soul," the Yiddish 'murk, the "kike" grin. He invented
a character named 'Eugene 'Gant and another named
Abraham.)o~es;
and,
.as
we ki1ow, an author is not responsible for
his
_.char ..a:cters---:even when,
as in this case, it is ·hard to locate the point at which the
c~racter
·stops
talking and the author begins. He has given[ us
"art,"
and now the
illusions of the anti-semite, the blind, stupid, blundering confusion of
fantasy with fact, the depiction of subjective "murk" as objective reality,
the babbling about the specific as if it were the general becomeS
~acred
and
inviolate. You may laugh at the "critical" nonsense of Gregor Strasser;
you may not scoff at the "creative" nonsense of Thomas Wolfe.
How careless of Dreiser to write his infantile opinions about the Jews
to Hutchins Hapgood! Why did he speak directly, "critically," in his
own name, and rouse the ire of the Jews, ·the
libe~als,
the radicals?
If
he
had only placed those opinions in the mouth of a "character"; if the libel
had only come from "Gregory Butterfiddle," or better still, "Jake Cohen,"
no one would squawk.
It
would no longer be sentimental confusion, but
"creative writing," holy, infallible, "sincere."
Under the corrupt standards of current bourgeois aesthetics, the
"creative" artist may slander workers, Negroes, Jews, anyone he likes;
he may give way to his most reactionary impulses, yet not be called to
account as he would be if he spoke directly. The "creative" writer is re–
lieved of the responsibilities which, where art is sound, he has always
had from the Greeks to our own day. He is treated as a priest who speaks
from on high, the sacrosanct oracle whose god is "art."
But there is ·a difference between true art and "murk," whether that
murk be bourgeois or proletarian. There is a difference between character–
drawing and carricature. One does not think of Joyce's
Bloom
primarily
as a Jew, but as a certain type of intellectual who happens to
rA
~
Jew.
Proust's
Bloch
is offset by
Swann..
Shylock is not wholly a repulsive
character; he is redeemed by a certain nobility; and Shakespeare does not
editorialise as narrator about the race as a whole.
A writer may dissociate himself from his character provided he does
so
in the noflel itself.
How he does it is the secret of art. But he cannot
dissociate himself from the effect which his work creates. He selects the
theme, the characters, the setting, the action, the dialogue; he chooses all,
describes all, evaluates all, consciously and unconsciously. We know that
two authors describing the same character will create two different, even
