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did try to explain, over and over again. For example, Rahv and
William Phillips argued in 1937 ("Some Aspects of Literary Criti–
cism,"
Science and History)
that a criticism "unconscious of its own
history"-a history deeply colored at every point by the work of the
modern masters-condemned itself to swing from one politico-critical
fashion to another, endlessly oscillating between a modish alienation
and equally modish and shallow commitments to political activism.
Because Rahv identified modernism so closely with historical as
opposed to merely analytical thinking, he found in writers like
Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot the most highly developed aware–
ness of the historical situation of modern man. Marx's analysis of
modern alienation, he thought, received unwitting support and confir–
mation from such writers. Thus Dostoevsky'S later novels, conceived at
least in part as a refutation of the utopian illusions to which Dosto–
evsky himself had subscribed as a young man, unintentionally drama–
tiled the dissolution of older social forms, the demoralization of the
Russian ruling class, and the bankruptcy of its ideas and institutions. A
novel like
The Possessed,
"counterrevolutionary ... in its manifest
intention and content .. . actually depicts in terms of felt experi–
ence ... the total disintegration of the traditional order and the inevi–
tability of its downfall." Eliot's poetry, traditionalist in its overt ideo–
logical content, invited the same interpretation. In distinguishing
between the manifest and latent meanings of the modern classics, Rahv
followed D.H. Lawrence's injunction to "trust the tale rather than the
artist" -an eminently sound, indeed a generally accepted principle of
literary criticism.
Rahv valued the modernist tradition not only for its depiction of
social disintegration, religious collapse, and personal alienation, but
as a defense against parochialism and literary nationalism.
It
is no
accident that his interest in modernism took shape in the period of the
Popular Front, when American Stalinism allied itself with a nostalgic
celebration of the American past, the flattery of the folk, and a quasi–
official culture of populistic nationalism. In Rahv's eyes, the culture of
the Popular Front invoked progressive symbols and rhetoric on behalf
of a politics of accommodation-a combination that came to flower, it
might be added, when the Communist party during World War II
joined the Roosevelt administration in urging labor to call off its
struggle for better working conditions and in exhorting workers, in the
interest of revolutionary solidarity with the Soviet Union, to become
"soldiers of production." Frederick Crews's inability to grasp the
connection between Rahv's Marxism and his "highbrow" defense of
