Christopher Lasch
MODERNISM, POLITICS, AND PHILIP RAHV
Philip Rahv once wrote that American Transcendentalism
"declared itself most clearly and dramatically in the form of the essay–
a form in which one can preach without practicing." Rahv's own
writings-a selection of which has now been published in a new
edition-show the essay form in a more attractive light: argumentative,
embattled, partisan in the best sense. Rahv never wrote anything the
consequences of which he refused to accept. As a lifelong critic of the
academic mind, which disguises timidity as objectivity, Rahv under–
stood that literature and literary criticism, even when deliberately
designed
to
give no offense, have political repercussions; instead of
trying to deny this, he welcomed it as a condition of his craft. Having
no use for purely formalistic styles of criticism, he insisted that
literature attempts to describe and criticize the real world-not simply
to express the author's inner state of mind or to satisfy a set of formal
requirements-and that it must be judged accordingly. Refusing to
distinguish between poetic truth and some other kind of "objective,"
scientific truth, Rahv held literature to the same standards applicable
to
any other mode of understanding historical reality. Thus he believed
that American literature remained limited and stunted precisely
because so much of it confined itself
La
personal experience, rarely
penetrating the larger world of history, politics, and collective
experience-the "constructive labor of curbing the chaotic forces in
man and nature alike."
His grasp of the interplay between politics and culture made Rahv
equally scornful of the "New Oiticism" and of Socialist Realism and
other left-wing formulas. The New Oiticism trivialized literature, in
Rahv's view, by making a fetish of the text and ignoring the historical
context in which art originates. The communist literary critics of the
1930s, on the other hand, treated art as a direct product of class interest,
crudely ideological in its content and purpose. Their call for a
proletarian culture amounted in practice-such was Rahv's retrospec–
tive judgment-to a demand that writers subordinate their own point
of view
to
that of the Communist party.
