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PARTISAN REVIEW
own ideological ambitions behind literary euphemisms. In
Politics and
the Novel
he inquires into the means by which "the hard and per–
haps insoluble pellets of modern ideology" have been absorbed into
important fictional works. The bulk of his criticism is focused on
novels by Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hawthorne, and
James, with shorter commentaries on Henry Adams, Malraux, Silone,
and Orwell. Thus the ambiguous conjunctive of his title states at the
outset the literary-ideological equation which he has assigned himself
to explore. There is nothing either pedantic or forced
in
the resulting
inquiry. Mr. Howe is not concerned to define a genre of "political novel,"
nor is he interested in judging literary works by political standards.
"When I speak in the following pages of the political novel," he notes
in his Introduction, "I have no ambition of setting up still another rigid
category. I am concerned with perspectives of observation, not categories
of classification."
The problem, then, is to explore these perspectives and still not vio–
late the integrity of the literary imagination, for it is in such violations
that an explicitly ideological criticism of literature has discredited itself
over the past few decades-though it might be noted in passing that such
violations have not been objected to so long as critics maintained the
appearance
of critical integrity (i.e., sticking to the text) and kept their
ideological values underground. I am not sure that Mr. Howe does not
set up a false expectation in this regard when he remarks in his Preface
that his "interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony
than in the literary problem of what happens to the novel when it is
subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology." To be
sure, the
literary problem
of writing novels on political themes is dis–
cussed again and again, often brilliantly and in great detail, and with
an admirable insight into the historical contingencies which modify the
literary problem from one generation to another. Mr. Howe has an
especially keen eye for the boundaries beyond which ideological pres–
sures must be resisted within the literary work; some of his most acute
literary
criticism is concerned with novels which have been violated
by their authors through an insufficient transformation of ideological
obsessions into novelistic strategies.
Under Western Eyes, The Blithedale
Romance, Virgin Soil, The Conquerors, Democracy--these
and other
works receive a sensitive analysis which traces out the literary features
in each work that have been disabled by ideological bias. (His dis–
cussion of
Darkness at Noon
ought to close that subject for good. ) Still,
the weight of Mr. Howe's book lies elsewhere, not exactly beyond the
"literary" problem, yet by no means circumscribed by what is implied by
that term.
