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whatever contribution it could to the overthrow of bourgeois society.
The first Marxist critics simply criticized that society through litera–
ture. Granville Hicks's
The Great Tradition
(1935) used American lit–
erature in particular. Its putative great American tradition was that
of proletarian, revolutionary literature. Hicks searched the nineteenth
century for writers in sympathy with the common man and critical
toward business civilization. These he elevated and connected with
the proletarian novels being written in the 1930s as a "fulfillment of
I
the [radical] spirit" of the earlier literature. Together the old and
I
new, he proclaimed, pointed to a revolutionary future.
The crudities of such an approach were apparent at the outset.
\
Hicks's great, proleta,rian tradition was at best a minor strain in
American literature; his approach, moreover, was hopelessly inade-
quate to deal with first-rate literature. Something more sophisticated
was called for, and the continental theorist Georg Lukacs supplied it.
In
Studies in European Realism
(1948), he largely set aside the political
intentions of the writer. Emile Zola, for example, may have been a
"writer of the left," but he was less useful to revolution than the roy–
alist, Balzac, whose work could be treated as an expose of the rotten
core of bourgeois society. Lukacs's departure did not entirely alienate
him from a critic such as Hicks, for in addition to sharing a revolu–
tionary purpose, both championed realism. But Lukacs recognized
the need to write about art in terms that would satisfy the intellectual
class with something more than the transposition of political slogans
to literature. His ability to develop a respectably complex theory ac–
counts for his current popularity among Marxist poststructuralists.
The still greater subtlety of deconstruction lies in its virtual
abandonment of explicit politics. Radical ideas are no longer alluded
to except through the invocation of certain apparently literary terms.
For example, works of literature that have come to make up the
canon of accepted masterpieces are referred to by deconstructionists
as "privileged texts," the implication being not only that these works
hold a special position in literature, but also that because of this they
deserve the same suspicion and resentment that a revolutionary would
be expected to direct at social privilege.
In a similar way, other terms used in deconstruction symboli–
cally mime revolutionary struggle, producing a symbolic drama in
which a liberation struggle is conducted in the name of subjectivity
and indeterminacy of meaning in the face of "authoritarian," "reac–
tionary," "hierarchical," "tyrannical," "imperialistic," or "hegemonic"
