MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
7
opposite effects. This is true in the play, where the author as such does
not appear at all; how much· more true in the novel, where part of the
effect is created not by giving the words or thoughts of a character, but by
the author's direct intervention. In this sense, the author may be said
to be, willy nilly, a central character in his novel. Abe Jones' grin was
described as
Kike
not by Eugene Gant but by the narrator.
Perhaps Thomas Wolfe is utterly free of Eugene Gant's prejudices
about Jews, women, Frenchmen, etc. He may say: "I am describing an
imaginary character and I am not responsible for his emotions, thoughts
and actions." He may say this, and we must believe him.
It
would be
foolish for anyone tO\ accuse Wolfe of race prejudice if he openly and
specifically denied it. But we have the right to say: "Whatever you may
believe in your private life, you wrote this section of the novel so ineptly,
you intervened editorially so often in the story, you so mingled the words
of narrator and character, that, whatever your intentions may have been,
the net effect of that part of your story is anti-semitic."
Reason and Image
This, indeed, is the function of the critic, who is primarily concerned
not with intention but with effect. The author cannot help infusing his
imaginary world, which cannot be separated from the real world, with
his emotions. He may say:
"This is how these people appear to me." Why may not the articu–
late reader who is called "critic' 'say: "And this is how your book appears
to me? Moreover, I know the kind of people you describe, and you have
falsified their characters, and you have used them as symbols of their race
or class. You may not have intended such a generalization-but in failing
to make clear what you were doing, in failing to dissociate yourself from
the Hero, in echoing his ideas through those passages in which the anony–
mous narrator speaks, you become responsible for the impression you con–
vey. We may not question your intentions, of which you alone have certain
knowledge; we may be sure that some of your best friends are Jews--but
in that case you've done a damn bad piece of writing which is false not
only to the facts but to your own best intentions."
Needless to say, disagreement with Wolfe's treatment of the Jew in
nu sense constitutes an evaluation of his work as a whole. Great writers,
whose work belongs to the finest treasures of world literature, have created
images ot the Jew distorted by class relationships and literary traditions–
among them Pushkin, Gogo!, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. It is the business
of the Marxist critic to trace the social and literary bases of such distor–
tions; and six years ago Joshua Kunitz did so in a brilliant little volume
which analysed the changing status of the Jew in Russia and its reflection
