BOOKS
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longs to the South, to an abiding and in the end perhaps dominating
tradition.
Coming from someone as intensely implicated in the fate of his
culture as Faulkner is, we must, I think, recognize again what a force for
truth art can be, and how an artist who is faithful to his art is likely to
be faithful to his intelligence and humanity as well. With all its im–
perfections, '
The Town
represents a great novelist's dedication to those
values-seriousness, wit, style-toward which his art aspires and by
which it will again immortalize itself.
Steven Marcus
CRITICS OF IDEOLOGY
POLITICS AN.D THE NOVEL.
By
Irving Howe. Horizon Press. $3.50.
In the course of his essay on Dostoevsky in
Politics and the
Novel,
Mr. Howe quotes the Russian critic Chernyshevsky as saying
that "Literature in Russia [in the nineteenth century] ' constitutes al–
most the sum total of our intellectual life." Now there is a sense in which
it can be said-it has been said often lately-that in America today it
is literary criticism which constitutes, if not the sum total then a great
deal of our intellectual life, providing at one end of the spectrum for
the tidy explication of texts which serves to advance careers even as
it keeps one's glance averted from the unmentionable crises we are
living through, and, at the other, for refinements of ideological specula–
tion in lieu of more actionable modes of political choice. Putative theo–
logians write essays on, say, Nathanael West to limber up for their more
philosophical labors, which, as likely as not, will turn out to have a
distinctly "literary" cast-all rhetoric and no belief. Romantic writers
with a taste for violence and guilty eroticism write "mythic" essays on the
dark psychoanalytic corners of literature in place of a poetry for which
they haven't the flair. And our distinguished liberals develop a fetish–
ism for "the conditioned" which, far from its ostensible role in correct–
ing literary taste, verges on an outright fear of experience. In criticism,
it seems, everything is permitted: a religiosity without belief, the af–
fectations of poetry without the vision, a politics without content.
One of the virtues of Mr. Howe's new book-this
is
one virtue
among many-is that it is written with a full awareness of the ideological
motives underlying our critical activity and does not seek to disguise
its
