Some General and Political Literary Criticism Excerpts   The first dozen quotations below may be found in Writers on Writing by Walter Allen or Novelists on the Novel by Miriam Allott –     “Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author’s idiosyncrasy may prompt? The objections to Stern’s wild way of telling Tristam Shandy lie more solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the fact of interruption. The dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in their own minds. They are like the topers of ‘one liquor’.” –George Eliot   “It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us…. [Readers say,] ‘Give us in the persons represented, the subjects of the bewilderment (that bewilderment without which there would be no question of an issue or of the fact of suspense, prime implications in any story) as much experience as possible, but keep down the terms in which you report that experience….’ Experience, as I see it, is our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures – any intelligent report of which has to be based on that apprehension…. My report of people’s experience – my  report as a ‘story-teller’ – is essentially my appreciation of it…. The whole thing comes to depend…on the quality of bewilderment characteristic of one’s creature, the quality involved in the given case or supplied by one’s data.” –Henry James   “’Oh! It is only a novel!’…she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is…in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” –Jane Austen   “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” –T. S. Eliot   “A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.” –Nathaniel Hawthorne   “Of course, you must appear to digress. That is the art which conceals your Art. …provide [the reader] with what he thinks are digressions – with occasions on which he thinks he may let his attention relax….  But really not one single thread must ever escape your purpose.” –Ford Madox Ford   “It is always dangerous to write from the point of ‘I’. The reader is unconsciously taught to feel that the writer is glorifying himself, and rebels against the self-praise. Or otherwise the ‘I’ is pretentiously humble, and offends from exactly the other point of view. In telling a tale it is, I think, always well to sink the personal pronoun. The old way, ‘Once upon a time,’ with slight modifications is the best way of telling a story.” –Anthony Trollope   “…that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic…it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force – its grasp of reality and truth isn’t strong and disinterested…[and often]…isn’t a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful, report of things on the novelist’s, the painter’s part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part – and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date.” –Henry James   “When one is impelled to write this or that, one still has to consider: ‘How much of this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotion and superfluous energy – how much remains that is truly belonging to this ideal character and these ideal circumstances?’ It is in the laborious struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for it, that the road to correction of faults lies. (Perhaps I may remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you.)” –Charles Dickens   “I have read your story ‘On the Road’. If I were the editor of an illustrated magazine, I should publish the story with great pleasure; but here is my advice as a reader: when you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder – it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.” –Anton Chekhov   “What is a novel but a peculiar and as yet unheard-of event? This is the proper meaning of this name; and much which in Germany passes as a novel is no novel at all, but a mere narrative, or whatever else you may like to call it.” –Goethe   “A literature which is content with ‘describing things’, with offering a wretched summary of their lines and surfaces, is, in spite of its pretention to realism, the furthest from reality, the one which impoverishes us and saddens us the most, however much it may talk of glory and grandeur, for it abruptly sever communication between our present self, the past in which objects retain their essence and the future in which they encourage us to search for it again. But there is more…a great writer…interprets [reality]. The duty and task of a writer are those of an interpreter.” –Marcel Proust   “Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.” –Audre Lorde   “I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency.” –Toni Cade Bambara   “One thing is clear: ours is a period when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities. Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists.” … “Whether a writer is black or white, in South Africa the essential gesture by which he enters the brotherhood of man – which is the only definition of society that has any permanent validity – is a revolutionary gesture.” –Nadine Gordimer   “Resistance narratives…contribute to a larger narrative, that of the passage from genealogical or hereditary ties of filiation to the collective bonds of affiliation…. The connection between knowledge and power, the awareness of the exploitation of knowledge by the interests of power to create a distorted historical record, is central to resistance narratives…. Resistance literature, as this study has attempted to show, has in the past played a vital role in the historical struggle of the resistance movements in the context of which it was written. That same literature continues to enlist readers and critics in the First as in the Third Worlds in the active reconstruction of interrupted histories.” –Barbara Harlow   “I think the writer’s responsibility is to tell the truth. The aim is to try and tell the truth – any kind of truth. It can be a very tiny truth. Truth means not that you read the book and think, ‘Ah, yes, I make a cup of tea exactly that way.’ It’s not that. It has to be truth without generalization, without cliché, and without simplification – which is almost impossible. But that’s the nice thing about the novel. The aim is way out of everybody’s reach, so you keep on writing them just in case.” –Zadie Smith   “The current literary establishment, which denies that it exists, is not only a powerful influence upon American intellectual and cultural trends but on political trends as…. The problem with the current literary-industrial complex of publishers, critics, writers, and slowpoke academia is that it can see cultural repression when it happens in other states but can’t recognize it when it’s practiced by its own state, the literary state….       “In 1976, ten years ago, a group of white and nonwhite ethnic writers decided that, instead of engaging in a time and energy consuming confrontation with the commercial literary institutions, we could best serve the literature we championed by establishing new institutions. We began the Before Columbus Foundation, devoted to the promotion of multiethnic literatures. The Before Columbus Foundation distributes books and magazines published by more than two hundred multiethnic presses and, beginning last year, represented these presses at international book fairs….       “We are not in opposition to the literary state; we’d like to enter into a dialogue with it. We’d like to cooperate with it. We’d like it to join us in projecting the United States as a planet-nation – a nation that is generated by diversity and cultural exchange between people from different backgrounds….       “We are not crude writers engaged in ugly rhetoric against things we disapprove of. We’re merely requesting that the literary industrial complex face up to the important changes that have occurred in American literature since the 1960s.” –Ishmael Reed   “In my view…the great artists are those who have gone beyond the confining web or cocoon of their past, who have been able to look through their world and really understand it. This is perhaps the acid test of maturity: to outlive, to go beyond those entangling bonds of youth and accepted status. Then only do we become ourselves and know who we are; then only do we confirm our judgments by our own inner authority rather then by tribal law or custom.” –Maxwell Geismar   “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial – all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called “protest novel,” especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about their lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism.” –Ralph Ellison   “Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or woman with a conscience.” –Ann Petry   “Propaganda itself is preferable to shallow, truckling imitation. Negro things may reasonably be a fad for others; for us they must be a religion. Beauty, however, is its best priest and psalms will be more effective than sermons.” –Alain Locke    “…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” –W. E. B. DuBois   Bernard Smith, from Forces in Literary Criticism –   “The aims of socialist critics were propagandistic, and it was inevitable that they should be paramount in a time when American critical systems were divided between art for art’s sake, art for morality’s sake, and various compromises between those two exhausted theories of esthetic purpose.… (‘Propaganda’ is not used here as an invidious term. It is used to describe works consciously written to have an immediate and direct effect upon their readers’ opinions and actions, as distinguished from works that are not consciously written for that purpose or which are written to have a remote and indirect effect. It is possible that conventional critics have learned by now that to call a literary work ‘propaganda’ is to say nothing about its quality as literature. By now enough critics have pointed out that some of the world’s classics were originally ‘propaganda’ for something….) “Its militancy is the most obvious characteristic of American criticism since the war. In the whole of nineteenth century there was only one critic, Poe, who was deliberately and consistently disputatious. No one else made polemics the basis of a critical method. Whitman was a maverick, but he was exclamatory rather than argumentative. Now, however, it is customary for critics to be bellicose, and there are few who have let politeness stand in the way of controversy. The reason is not hard to find. Criticism in our time has been largely a war of traditions – a struggle between irreconcilable ideologies….” “There was one critic who apparently possessed all the virtues – fine taste, poetic sensitiveness, intellectuality, an experimental inclination. His literary scholarship was beyond dispute, his writing deft and memorable. He was, moreover, a poet of the first rank, which gave his criticism of the art an extraordinary authority. He was universally respected: by Pound, by the later expatriates, by the impressionists of the Dial, by the Hound and Horn group. This critic was T. S. Eliot. His volume of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, is still considered to be one of the truly distinguished works of esthetic criticism produced in this century…. The reader will note that he is here described in the past tense. His works are many now, but The Sacred Wood alone is a consideration of esthetic problems. In the rest the emphasis is on the esthetic effects of moral and social beliefs. His development is one of the ‘consequences’ touched upon in the following chapter….    “[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’ Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive…. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….   “Eliot spoke of alternatives, not of choices…. He believes that one of the alternatives has greater value, is nobler, is in a sense more real, than the other. The question is therefore not simply one of personal taste. It is a question of evidence and reason. But the alternative he favors admits of no evidence and derogates from reason. His philosophy is, in the last analysis, wholly mystical. It is not capable of being tested and verified and improved. The alternative he rejects is, on the other hand, the one that is favored by those who are determined to be as scientific as one can be in a non-physical field. The literary criticism of the neo-classicists is a criticism composed of obiter dicta inspired by intangible emotions. The literary criticism of the materialists stands or falls by the findings of the social scientists, psychologists, and historians. Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind.”