THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
21
of our politics; but surely some of the recent literary trends and
fashions owe something to the more general intellectual drift toward
conformism. Not, of course, that liberalism dominates literary life,
as it dominates the rest of the intellectual world. Whatever practical
interest most literary men have in politics comes to little else than the
usual liberalism, but their efforts at constructing literary ideologies–
frequently as forced marches to discover values our society will not
yield them-result in something quite different from liberalism.
Through much of our writing, both creative and critical, there run
a number of ideological motifs, the importance of which is hardly
diminished by the failure of the men who employ them to be fully
aware of their implications. Thus, a major charge that might be
brought against some New Critics is not that they practice formal cri–
ticism but that they don't; not that they see the work of art as an
object to be judged according to laws of its own realm but that, often
unconsciously, they weave ideological assumptions into their writings.
s
Listening last summer to Cleanth Brooks lecture on Faulkner, I was
struck by the deep hold that the term "orthodox" has acquired on
his critical imagination, and not, by the way, on his alone. But
"orthodox" is not, properly speaking, a critical term at all, it pertains
to matters of religious or other belief rather than to literary judgment;
and a habitual use of such terms can only result in the kind
()f
"slanted" criticism Mr. Brooks has been so quick, and right, to
condemn.
Together with "orthodox" there goes a cluster of terms which,
in their sum, reveal an implicit ideological bias. The word "tradi–
tional" is especially tricky here, since it has legitimate uses in both
literary and moral-ideological contexts. What happens, however, in
3 This may be true of all critics, but is most p erilous to those who suppose
themselves free of ideological coloring. In a review of my Faulkner book–
rather favorable, so that
~o
ego wounds prompt what follows-Mr. Robert
Daniel writes that "Because of Mr. Howe's connections with . . . the
Partisan
Review,
one might expect his literary judgments to be shaped by political and
social preconceptions, but that does not h appen often." Mr. Daniel is surprised
that a critic whose politics happen to be radical should try to keep his literary
views distinct from his nonliterary ones. To be sure, this is sometimes very dif–
ficult, and perhaps no one entirely succeeds. But the one sure way of not suc–
ceeding is to write, as Mr. Daniel does, from no very pressing awareness that
it is a problem for critics who appear in the
Sewanee Review
quite as much as
for those who appear in
Partisan R eview.
