THE FOUNDING FATHERS
21
ideas about literature and individual writers. No more than science
cangive a ready-made estimate of any new theory in physics. It would
be mode fruitful, therefore, to speak of
Marxist criticisms
in the plural,
or of
ventures in Marxist criticism,
especially since it has yet to be
demonstrated that only one code of beliefs or one kind of insight into
art is compatible with the philosophy of Marx. From this point of
view I would regard, for example, Edmund Wilson's recent article
on Flaubert as a contribution to Marxist criticism, for despite Wilson's
disavowals of "Marxist criticism" he has certainly brought into his
writing many of the values and much of the outlook of Marxism.
And insofar as his observations are sensitive and exact, it would be
a form of Marxist megalomania to consider them opposed to Marxism.
If some other critic, claiming to be a Marxist, wishes to question the
validity of Wilson's interpretations, he would have to show not only
that Wilson has violated the materialist approach to literature, but
that he has failed to light up the full complexity of Flaubert's writing.
Failing any rule-of-thumb criteria, we must conclude that an analysis
of literary problems or of specific writers which
flows from or is con-
sistent with
a materialist version of society is a form of Marxist criti-
cism--at least, in its infant stage.
Aside from any principled objections, there is at present wide-
~pread aversion to the tone of Marxist criticism. And not without
justification, for much of what has gone by the name of Marxist
criticismhas been but a form of scholasticism in overalls. But it would
be merely a sign of our own lack of discrimination if we were to lay
the sins of the pretenders at the door of Marxism itself. For once
criticismenters into the swim of social life, once it takes up the cudgels
against all modes of academicism which work to freeze the present
withinitself-when it seeks to affirm, in its own way, the values which
literature rescu.es from society-criticism should share in the imagina-
tivepossibilities which literature has always enjoyed.
