THE FOUl·iDING FATHERS
an old one. Its modern fonn is to regard Marxism, on the one hand,
and literature on the other as absolutes: Marxism as a closed philoso-
phical and political system, and literature as a series of mutations in
taste and sensibility, in the last analysis, as a mysterious essence taking
different shapes at different times. Yet there is no law of Marxism
which requires a critic to efface the unique qualities of literatur:e;
while the exemption on the part of most traditional criticism of these
unique qualities from mundane analysis has brought us to the impasse
where, although we have been zealously guarding the values and
meaning of literature, we have still arrived at no way of explaining
the meaning of the values or the value of the meanings. Marxism has,
therefore, at least an experimental claim to our attention.
Not that there has been any lack of talent on the part of indi-
vidual critics; on the contrary, much of our criticism is studded with
remarkable insights of sensibility and judgment. The fault lies, rather,
in the assumptions about literature with which criticism has started.
With some exceptions and with countless variations, mode'rn criticism
has been either fonnalist or impressionist; and formalism is based on
the idea that literature is composed of fonnal structures, while im-
pressionism regards literature as a body of irreducible essences, pri-
vately conceived and defying analysis. So long, therefore, as we retain
these conceptions of literature we are committed to some variety,
however disguised, of impressionism or fonnalism; and to tack on a
study of social backgrounds is merely to raise anew the question of
how a personal vision, contained in a purely fonnal structure, can
be related to the hum-drum business of society.
If, however, we regard literature primarily as a body of percep-
tions, ideas, feelings and values, whether they be expressed through
myths and symbols or through documentation, new vistas of criti-
cismopen before us. Not that poetic qualities or fonnal harmonies
would be ignored, but rather they would be seen as the medium
through which some value, however fleeting, is expressed-as the
tonality of a statement. Nor is this to deny what Trotsky wisely
called"the laws of art": the ways in which the nature of the medium
not only gives
timbre
to the ideas and feelings of the writer but
actually modifies them. Each medium has its own
formal values.
Yet
these, too, are historical-is not the autumnal sensibility of Eliot a
kindof comment on the state of society? And is not Eliot's sensibility
of a piece with his ideas?-with the result that, together, they make
up a single set of values.
In this sense, literature, like science, is a materialistic medium,
for its materials are drawn from man's experience and its discoveries
revealunsuspected relations within that experience. Each new discov-
19
