The Intellectuals' Tradition
William Phillips
I
1.
T IS GENERALLY RECOGNIZED
that in the course of its alienation
from society modern art has developed a highly-organized regime
of its own; yet the implications of this fact have hardly been ex–
plored in critical writing. Traditional criticism, at least of the
more formal variety, has tended to f etishize the idea of detachment
to the point of regarding the individual writer, rather than the
creative grouping, as a whole, as the unit of alienation. While, at
the other extreme, the historical-or Marxist-school of criticism
fixed the meanings and mutations of art in the social pattern; and
though it granted a separate status to intellectual activity, its
emphasis was almost completely on historical determination.
The Marxist approach was, of course, primarily concerned
with the political and ideological origins of esthetic movements.
And its doctrine of art as one of the modes by which society be–
comes conscious of itself--class conscious in the present system–
was undoubtedly an advance over such traditional mystifications
as the idea that a work of art amounts to the sum of its parts. Yet
the Marxist theory, it seems to me, is a kind of half-truth, over–
stressing the correspondences between the historical context and
the work itself, and leading to endless theoretical maneuvers as its
exponents attempted to hold on to the autonomous values of litera–
ture in the very act of denying them. The apparent contradiction
was never resolved.
For, surely, the art of the past is too full of ambiguities and
obsessive designs to be regarded simply as an articulation of class
needs-unless, of course, one is ready to accept the doctrinaire
principle that anything short of a revolutionary view is an instru–
ment of conservative opinion. What class is served, for example,
by Balzac's research into the patterns of status and intrigue, or by
Poe's experiments in sensation? Considered as a whole, modern
literature is a continual recoil from the practices and values of
society toward some form of self-sufficiency, be it moral, or physi–
cal, or merely historical, with repeated fresh starts from the bohe–
mian underground as each ne:w movement runs itself out; yet no
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