52
PARTISAN REVIEW
Blackmur is right when he says that "no observation, no collection of
observations, ever tells the whole story"; he is merely silly when he tries
to back this up by a super-relativism denying any kind of objectivity to
any knowledge, and then in the next breath stating that "there will
always remain, quite untouched, the thing itself." The whole story is
never told because there are always new contexts into which we may fit
the work, and because history is not static but always presenting new
problems, new aims, new interests, into whose relation we endeavor to fit
the work. But just what contexts we shall consider relevant in the ap–
proach to literary works depends finally upon a judgment of value.
In this sense we find in literature also what we take there.
If
we
have dominant interests, today, integrated through political aims, how
absurd to imagine that we will avoid politics in literary appreciation and
criticism (as if Dante were a non-religious or for that matter non-political
poet). Literature is neither ,above nor aside from, but part of life.
Not seeing this so simple and' lucid platitude is the original fallacy of
both "pure art" and crude reductionisms.
But when we recognize that what establishes relevance in criticism
involves finally an evaluation, we are at the borderline .which separates
significant statement from expression. And it is on the far side of the
border that there lies a great part of what is written in this collection
of Mr. Zabel's. Doubtless these critics
thin~
that they are writing about
works of literature and about aesthetic problems. Actually, literary works
and problems are often only accidental stimuli which provoke elaborate
verbalizations of their responses to experience in general. Their "subject"
might equally well be food or subways or the difficulties of getting a
steady job.
From this last point of view, it would be absurd to talk about
"literature." We must judge these essays 'and their authors psycholog–
ically and socially. These writers are all, of course, middle-class intel–
lectuals. Not unexpectedly we find them in their essays reflecting and
projecting the maze of currents and drifts which momentarily have .
swept along this or that section of the middle classes during the past
twenty years. Humanism, Americansm, traditionalism, regionalism, Stal–
inism, agrarianism, omnivorous liberalism, all have their spokesmen in
Babbitt or Mencken or Winters or Ransom or Gregory or Tate or Lovett.
Some few of the elders (the now dead Babbitt and More, Mencken ... )
have smugly found niches still preserved for them at the customary price
of reconciliation to things as they are. The rest, most at any rate of them, '
search for a home, understanding neither the pitfalls of the road nor
the conditions for secure occupancy. They feel muddled. They cannot
make up their minds. They don't like "doctrines" (often using the pre–
tense of not liking "doctrines" in the "approach to literature"): that
is, they haven't the courage to accept a clear and determined moral and
social program. But the next moment they become regionalists (Ransom)
or traditionalists (Winters) or Stalinists (Burke, Gregory, Cantwell,
Cowley), preferring as a rule to do the dirty work of corrupt and reac–
tionary social movements under the banner of: literary criticism.
