An Esthetic of IVligration
THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT,
by Stephen Spender.
Houghton Mifflin.
$2.00.
If the "destructive dement" is a state of despair, of com-
plete unbelief, presupposing a tendency in the artist to seek
a haven in the subjective and individualistic,
then Stephen
Spender is still half way immersed in it. One could quarrel
about the complete meaning of his poems, but his criticism.
as exemplified in this study of modern writers and beliefs,
is sufficiently lucid to preclude uncertainty.
In this book, at
least in its programmatic part, he releases the predicament
{)f a particular group of writers, in the same way as Eliot
released the larger predicament of a whole generation in
The fVaste Land.
And in his search for a valid solution he
seems nearly as helpless, with this difference: Eliot fell back
into the past, while Spender strains toward the future.
In showing that the political-moral
subject is the con-
sistent tradition of modern literature-and this he establishes
in a series of admirable essays on James, Yeats, Eliot, Law-
rence, Owen, and Auden-Spender
affirms the significance
to writing of political and economic movements and events
("the war, revolutions, the economic crisis"). Nevertheless.
his thought flounders hadly when approaching the actual
present. On the one hand we are told that it may now be
possible to discover a system of values that are "objective
and social," as real in the world of society as "Nature is
real," and that it is necessary to "turn the reader's and wri-
ter's attention outwards from himself to the world" ; and on
the other that the artist "is concerned with a change of
heart," not with social systems: this leads him, in his anal-
ysis of van der Post's novel,
In A Province,
to a defense of
the Christian notion of individual salvation as the basis for
revolutionary change. Here Spender's second self altogether
surrenders to the conventional idea that consciousness deter-
mines social being. Humanity is thus conceived as an abstrac-
tion dwelling in each man, rather than as the ensemble of
the conditions of society.
Fortunately for the analyst, however, the surrender and
its cause are equally transparent.
Spender adopts no philo-
sophical and political viewpoint that could explain and pre-
dict the direction of those political events that had become
so important to him as "subject-matter" (a term revealing
in its limitations) as well as furnish him with the impulse
and possibility of an intelligent share in their shaping and
fulfilment. In point of fact, he makes much of the incom-
patibility of art with a viewpoint so definitive. This is rei-
terated until it emerges as the rationale for rejecting Com-
munism in its scientific meaning, while accepting it-quite
seriously now-as the heart's desire, if you will, of Stephen
Spender. This last is important,
for it worries him· to think
that his book could possibly be construed as a plea f~r his
beliefs (read: desires), and, in his apprehension, he repeated-
ly warns the reader against such an error. At bottom, it is
this subjective conception of Communism that explains the
sketching of a liaison between Freud and Marx, as well as
the references to it as "an historic act of the will" which
makes Communists "reach forward and forcibly impose on
the present the visualized, completed social system of the
future." Regardless of the moral excellence of such a will,
Communism is herewith reduced to a fantasy. It seems to
have utterly escap'ed Spender that the abolition of classes is
already implicit in the economic make-up of present-day
society: that Communism is a process encompassing both the
daily struggle and its future synthesis; that the means em-
played to attain it, though not of an ultimate character, are
also ends; and that' the volition involved, while exerting a
reciprocal influence, is basically a reflection in consciousness
of the immanence of the new social system within the one
now- existing.
With the progress of Spender's argument,
his confusion
mounts. Amidst this welter of outworn idealist preconcep-
tions, the most arbitrary notions take on the proportions of
sacrosanct truths. If Communism is an act of the will, or
subjective desire, whereas literature,
conversely, is endowed
with the quality of objectivity, then it follows that a Com-
munist esthetic amounts "to an assertion of knowledge the
writer does not possess, and which the reader knows he does
not possess ....
For example, to say I am on the side of the
proletariat,
that I shall fight for their cause, may be just.
To say that the proletariat
is better than any other class,
that the proletarian revolution is the historic destiny of man-
kind, is to blind myself as an artist ....
My argument is
that asa man of action it may be necessary to assume this
knowledge, but that as an artist, it is not only wrong, it is
impossible to do so."
What quickfire judgments from one who is warning us
against exactly that! If Spender were not thinking in abso-
lutist moral terms, it could not have occurred to him that
the conception of the proletariat as the "better" class means
anything more than that the proletariat
alone is the really
revolutionary class. Moreover,
why this dichotomy between
the individual as citizen and the individual as artist? How
does Spender
know
that the revolutionist, whether as artist or
man of action, does not actually
know
that the proletarian
revolution is an historic necessity? To disprove this convic-
tion he would have to disprove Marx's economics and pol-
itics, against which, of course, he is scarcely equipped to
bear arms. Hence we are left with the gratuitous assumption
that the true artist is somehow assured of a fund of instan-
taneous knowledge of a special type, and that it is through
this superior and
different
knowledge that Spender is pre-
vented from putting any faith in the claims of Marxism.
This knowledge, in fact, tells him that certain things cannot
possibly be known to him. However, what Spender is really
doing here is immolating the objectivity of Marxism on the
altar of the objectivity of art. A victim to a contradiction
(between art and Marxism) of his own making, he is com-
pelled by the logic of his position to commit the final ab-
surdity of separating a subject from its problems, a theme
from its necessary resolution, and experience from its termini
and bounds in any given sector of history.
I realize that, in a sense, my argument against Spender's
theories has somewhat run ahead of the specific irritant. He
is so far from being a throretician that it takes a good deal
of effort on the part of the reviewer to piece together from
a diversity of contexts ·the underlying consistency-it
would
be truer to say, inconsistency--{)f attitude,
of which the
author is but half-aware. And if it seemed necessary to isolate
some
of his ideas and blast them, it is not from a desire to
discredit their proponent, but because of the objective danger
of such ideas, that, once launched, tend to assume a life of
their own. To my mind, what is really fundamental
to
Spender in this volume is his rejection of introspection and
sensibility as ends in themselves, and the stress he puts on
the social factor in esthetic relations and on the "moral
significance" of the political movements of our time. As
against these, much of the rest of the pattern seems but the
expression of a conflict of elements, the self-contradictory
esthetic of migration from one ideological climate into an-
APRIL,
193
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