20
PARTISAN REVIEW
ery rejects some old value: hence the act of creation is an act of
judgment,-of criticism, be it social or moral or purely sensual.
Thus the
values
of the individual writer, whether negative or positive,
are his reaction to the values of society, either directly or in terms of
the conditions which have created them. Where, as in most works,
there are ambiguities, it
L'3
obviously a case of the writer's having
incompletely broken with the existing conventions; but a writer of
any importance has a distinctive accent for he is trying to build some
new values on the foundations of the old ones. It is, therefore, the
values of literature which criticism must evaluate.
Such a conception of literature would save us from the pitfalls
of formalism and impressionism. For it is these critical methods which
rest on the tautology that litf:rature is the sum of its formal qualities,
and it is to these methods that we must return if we reject the idea
that literature is a body of human values.
Where does Marxism come in? To begin with, Marxism is a
materialist view of society which regards ideas and values as historical,
on the premise that the way men think and feel is a result of the way
they live. And Marxism seeks to alter the way men think and feel by
altering the way they live.
In
this sense, the Marxist philosophy is
a radical criticism of society, of its values and the conditions which
give birth to and sustain them. But these are, after all, the primary
tasks of literary criticism: to analyze and to judge literature; and it
is at this point that Marxism is relevant, for it supplies a method not
only for finding the social origins of values but also for determining
their contemporary significance.
To illustrate: take Valery'S idea of the universal man: an idea
which might be enjoyed purely as a daring speculation-a poem.
The Marxian method, however, by directing us to Valery's intellec-
tual environment, would suggest a possible relation between Valery's
paralysis of scepticism and the fact that his universal man, occupied
solely with the mechanics of thinking, makes no specific contribution
to thought. And his peculiar scepticism, which might be traced to the
exhaustion of an entire tradition, is of a piece with the suspension of
belief which the modern flight from romanticism has produced. Sim-
ilarly, the values of Malraux, however distinctly they may be moulded
by his sensibility, can be seen to be a stylization of certain adventurist
political trends-a factor which can hardly be ignored in any finished
judgment of Malraux.
Since, however, Marxism is not a closed system, nor a formula
for declaring that
all
ideas inspired by other ways of thinking are
false-since, for literature, at any rate Marxism is a
method,
it would
be misleading to speak of Marxist criticism as an airtight system of
