| [For more critical excerpts, see here.]
Political Literary Criticism, Excerpts: 1883-2003
from works on political, social, and cultural criticism of imaginative literature
with a special emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda
I agree with much but not nearly everything I've chosen to excerpt in this section. As far as the books as a whole go—as they seem to me—many are very good, plenty are solid, some are mixed, some are less insightful or unfortunate in part. On the whole, in my judgment, the books make some thoughtful and useful exploration of imaginative literature and its relation to society, individuals and social and political change. For more excerpts and an extensive bibliography, see Imaginative Literature and Social Change.
1883 William Morris, On Art and Socialism
1885, 1888 Frederick Engels, Letters
1898 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?
1903 Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist
1905 Vladimir Lenin, "Party Organization and Party Literature," in Novaia Jizn
1914 Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama
1924 Morris Edmund Speare, The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America
1926 W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000
1927 Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920
1928 Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
1931 Edmund Wilson, Axel"s Castle
1932 V. F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature
1934 John Dewey, Art as Experience
1934 Max Eastman, Art and the Life of Action
1935 Joseph Freeman, "Introduction," Proletarian Literature in the United States
1936 James T. Farrell, "Literature and Propaganda," A Note on Literary Criticism
1939 Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Criticism
1940 Roger Dataller, The Plain Man and the Novel
1940 Edmund Wilson, "The Historical Interpretation of Literature," The Triple Thinkers
1941 Joseph Warren Beach, "Art and Propaganda," American Fiction: 1920-1940
1941 Kenneth Burke, "Literature as Equipment for Living," The Philosophy of Literary Form
1941 Kenneth Burke, "The Nature of Art Under Capitalism," The Philosophy of Literary Form
1942 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds
1943 George Orwell, "The Freedom of the Press"
1947 Philip S. Foner, The Social Writings of Jack London
1948 Alex Comfort, The Novel and Our Time
1949 James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," Notes of a Native Son (1955)
1950 Ann Petry, "The Novel as Social Criticism," African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000
1953 Gilbert Highet, "The Pleasures of Satire," People, Places, Books
1955 Joseph L. Blotner, "The Novel as Political Instrument," The Political Novel
1955 Ralph Ellison, "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," Shadow and Act (1964)
1956 Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States--1900-1954
1957 Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel
1957 Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History
1958 Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns--From Rebellion to Conformity
1958 George Steiner, "Marxism and the Literary Critic," Language and Silence (1967)
1962 Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry
1963 Vernon Hall, Jr., A Short History of Literary Criticism
1963 Robert E. Spiller, Ed. et. al., Literary History of the United States
1964 Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction
1965 Eudora Welty, "Must the Novelist Crusade?" (1965), The Eye of the Story (1978)
1969 Maxwell Geismar, "Introduction," New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (Ed. Joseph North)
1973 Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism
1977 Maxwell Geismar, Reluctant Radical: A Memoir [first published 2002]:
1978 John Colmer, "The Writer as Critic of Society," Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society
1980 Mary McCarthy, Ideas and the Novel
1980 Edward Said, Ed., "Preface," Literature and Society
1980 Michael Wilding, Political Fictions
1981 Toni Cade Bambara, "Foreword," This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa, Eds.)
1983 Terry Eagleton, "Conclusion: Political Criticism," Literary Theory: An Introduction
1983 A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda
1983 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions
1986 Ishmael Reed, "Which State?" Writin' Is Fightin'
1987-1999 Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, biographies, etc...
1987 Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature
1988 Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture
1988 Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s
1989 D. J. Taylor, "Writers, Politics and Society," A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s
1989 Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," Harpers
1990 Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work
1990 Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work
1991 Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Novel's Next Step," Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Philomena Mariani, Ed.):
1993 Barbara Foley, "Art or Propaganda," Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
1993 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
1994 Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature
1994 Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change
1995 Sharon M. Harris, Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797-1901
1995 Jane Smiley, "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece'," Harpers, December
1998 John Whalen-Bridge, Political Fiction and the American Self
1999 Barbara Kingsolver, Bellwether Prize, www.bellwetherprize.org
2000 Kathryn Hume, American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960
2002 B. R. Meyers, A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
2003 Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War
2002, April 6 John Pilger, "Hollywood Hurrah," www.zmag.org
2002, June 26 John Pilger, "Our Writers' Failure (I)," www.zmag.org
2002, July 26 John Pilger, "Our Writers' Failure (II)," www.zmag.org
2002, September 29 Arundhati Roy, "Come September," www.zmag.org
2003, November 10 John Pilger, "The Silence of Writers," www.zmag.org
2004, January 1 Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel, "The Plot Thickens at the New York Times Book Review," www.poynter.org
2004, March 8 Andrew O'Hehir, "'The Fountain at the Center of the World' by Robert Newman," www.salon.com
2004, May 27 Heather Lee Schroeder, "Political fiction inspires thought, debate on issues," Capitol Times, www.madison.com
2004, June 30 Ardain Isma, "Novel Injustices: Whither the Contemporary Novel?" www.justresponse.net
2004, October 1 Ira Chernus, "Presidential Fiction: The Story Behind the Debates," www.tomdispatch.com
2004, October 10 Fred Kaplan, "Truth Stranger than 'Strangelove'," New York Times
2004 Larry Beinhart, "Politics & Mysteries," www.thelibrarian.biz
(1883) William Morris, On Art and Socialism: “You may well think I am not here to criticize any special school of art or artists, or to plead for any special style, or to give you any instructions, however general, as to the practice of the arts. Rather I want to take counsel with you as to what hindrances may lie in the way towards making art what it should be, a help and solace to the daily life of all men…. Since I am a member of a Socialist propaganda I earnestly beg those of you who agree with me to help us actively, with your time and your talents if you can, but if not, at least with your money, as you can…. Help us now, you whom the fortune of your birth has helped to make wise and refined; and as you help us in our work-a-day business toward the success of the cause, instill into us your superior wisdom, your superior refinement, and you in your turn may be helped by the courage and hope of those who are not so completely wise and refined. Remember we have but one weapon against that terrible organization of selfishness which we attack, and that weapon is Union” (108-127).
(1885) Frederick Engels, Letter to Minna Kautsky (1885), in Literature and Art [Marx and Engels], 1947 (also excerpted and translated somewhat differently by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967): “It is always bad for an author to be infatuated with his hero, and it seems to me that in this case [Minna Kautsky’s novel Old and New] you have given way somewhat to this weakness… I am not at all an opponent of tendentious poetry as such. The father of tragedy, Aeschylus, and the father of comedy, Aristophanes, were both decidedly tendentious poets, just as were Dante and Cervantes; and the main merit of Schiller’s Craft and Loves is that it is the first German political propaganda drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who are writing splendid novels, are all tendentious. But I think that the bias [thesis] should flow by itself from the situation and action, without particular indications [explicit display], and that the writer is not obliged to obtrude on the reader the future historical solutions of the social conflicts pictured. And especially in our conditions the novel appeals mostly to readers of bourgeois circles, that is, not directly related to us, and therefore a socialist-biased novel fully achieves its purpose, in my view, if by conscientiously describing the real mutual relations, breaking down conventional illusions about them, it shatters the optimism of the bourgeois world, although the author does not offer any definite solutions or does not even line up openly on any particular side…. And in Stefan you showed that you are able to view your heroes with that fine irony which demonstrates the power of the writer over his creation.”
(1888) Frederick Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness (excerpted by George Steiner in “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” 1958, in Language and Silence, 1967): “I am far from finding fault with you for not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a ‘Tendenzroman’ as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author. That is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.”
(1898) Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?: “This investigation has brought me to the conviction that almost all that our society considers to be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and good art and the whole of art, is not even art at all but only a counterfeit of it…. In our society the difficulty of recognizing real works of art is further increased by the fact that the external quality of the work in false productions is not only no worse, but often better, than in real ones; the counterfeit is often more effective than the real, and its subject more interesting… There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its counterfeit—namely, the infectiousness of art…”
(1903) Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist: “‘The novel must not preach,’ you hear them say. As though it were possible to write a novel without a purpose, even if it is only the purpose to amuse. One is willing to admit that this savors a little of quibbling, for ‘purpose’ and purpose to amuse are two different purposes. But every novel, even the most frivolous, must have some reason for the writing of it, and in that sense must have a ‘purpose’. Every novel must do one of three things—it must tell something, (2) show something, or (3) prove something. Some novels do all three of these; some do only two; all must do at least one…. The third, and what we hold to be the best class, proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man. In this class falls the novel with the purpose, such as ‘Les Miserables’. And the reason we decide upon this last as the highest form of the novel is because that, though setting a great purpose before it as its task, it nevertheless includes, and is forced to include, both the other classes…. [The novel] may be a great force, that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nations” (203-207).
(1905) Vladimir Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature,” in Novaia Jizn: “Literature must become Party literature…. Down with un-partisan littérateurs! Down with the supermen of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat, ‘a small cog and a small screw’ in the social-democratic mechanism, one and indivisible—a mechanism set in motion by the entire conscious vanguard of the whole working class. Literature must become an integral part of the organized, methodical, and unified labours of the social-democratic Party.”
(1914) Emma Goldman, The Social Significance of Modern Drama: “[George Bernard Shaw wrote,] ‘I am not an ordinary playwright in general practice. I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its moral. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England to-day with abhorrence. I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinions in these matters’” (96).
“This confession of faith should leave no doubt as to the place of George Bernard Shaw in modern dramatic art. Yet, strange to say, he is among the most doubted of his time. That is partly due to the fact that humor generally serves merely to amuse, touching only the lighter side of life. But there is a kind of humor that fills laughter with tears, a humor that eats into the soul like acid, leaving marks often deeper than those made by the tragic form….
“‘Major Barbara’ is one of the most revolutionary plays. In any other but dramatic form the sentiments uttered therein would have condemned the author to long imprisonment for inciting to sedition and violence.
“Shaw the Fabian would be the first to repudiate such utterances as rank Anarchy, ‘impractical, brain cracked and criminal.’ But Shaw the dramatist is closer to life—closer to reality, closer to the historic truth that the people wrest only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take” (107).
(1924) Morris Edmund Speare, The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America: “The political novel has now become definitely established as a genre in English letters… It is a literary form which found its sources in that large parent body of English imaginative thought of an earlier century, a parent body which gave rise, in the nineteenth century, to so many diversified types of novel writing. In the twentieth century it has already challenged the attention of several of the most thoughtful English and American writers. A history of what novelists have already done must, perforce, energize the novelists of to-morrow to try their hands, in turn, at a peculiarly fascinating medium of expression, and one which is but in its first stages of development….
“What is a political novel? It is a work of prose fiction which leans rather to ‘ideas’ than to ‘emotions’; which deals rather with the machinery of law-making or with a theory about public conduct than with the merits of any given piece of legislation; and where the main purpose of the writer is party propaganda, public reform, or exposition of the lives of the personages who maintain government, or of the forces which constitute government. In this exposition the drawing-room is frequently used as a medium for presenting the inside life of politics. This is my definition of a genre in English letters whose history I shall attempt to trace…” (viii-ix).
“In the political world [an author] had to know his material not as a reporter knows the facts which he has covered in an ‘assignment,’ nor even as some scholar probes and garners the fruits of his study, but rather as the fisherman knows the sea or the ploughman follows his furrow. To be able to wed politics to art and bring about a consummation where neither the first became tractarian or statistical nor the other too honey-sweet, required not only an imagination of a particularly high order, but a knowledge of material which had been gathered at first hand, with the accuracy which only a participant himself could possess. One had to be able to think in political formulae, to adorn his thoughts in the natural imagery of the political life. Then only could he interpret it intelligently and interestingly to the reader” (15).
“We deal here with a genre of the novel which, if excellently developed, must make its appeal to the reader not primarily as a social force but as an intellectual force. Dickens and Thackery, in 19th century literature are, for example, essentially social writers. Their men and women, for the most part persons out of everyday life, may even be portrayed before us as monsters of a caricature…yet…they live in our minds long after we have forgotten the plot in which they appeared; they seem to be creatures of flesh and blood, more true to our everyday life than are one half of our acquaintances. The social writer throws an air of common humanity about his creations; he deals with incidents that are not unusual to the daily lives of all of us; his streets, and homes, and schools, and interiors we have visited and known for many years…
“But the writer in the world of politics is not dealing with a common humanity…. By the very reach and grasp which the genre of the political novel possesses, it is the most embracing in its material of all other novel types… Wars, industrial adventure, economic adjustment, commercial progress, diplomacy in foreign lands, social experiences of every kind, education, art, science, discovery and exploration, expansion and internal development—all are grist for his mill, all may be gathered into his dragnet, if the writer pleases to make use of them…
“And yet, peculiarly enough, in spite of the fullness of representation which this material allows its writer, in spite of the reach of the arc of life which he may include in a single work in this milieu, the political novelist must, indeed, be the most selective of all novel writers. Dickens and Thackeray, and Henry James, as social writers, deal with men and women as men and women: the variety of common human emotions they may report is endless, and the more usual and familiar they are to us the better it is for those writers. But the political novelist, if he is to be true to his craft, must be dominated, more often than not, by ideas rather than by emotions…the presentation of powerful forces working across large areas, of customs and forces potent in their influences upon the national life, and not the simple habits and prejudices and country-church yard epithets of an unsung humanity. That is what we mean by an intellectual interpretation of the novel, not a social one….
“There is yet another aspect in the contrast between the political novelist and the work of the social writer. The latter, by the very nature of his material, uses scenes, passions, and moods all of which fall within the shadow of an ordinary reader’s ordinary life. They may appeal, therefore, instantly to his comprehension; they lie at once within the range of his interpretation; they call forth his natural sympathies. The extent which this common, social appeal of the novelist makes upon the reader’s own experiences marks often the measure of his subsequent popularity. But in the political novel the most dramatic and the most productive characters are, by their very greatness, the more removed from the ordinary world of ordinary men and women….
“The political novelist has, therefore, by the intellectual milieu in which he is at work, many difficulties to overcome before he may draw a spark and then fan it into a flame of enthusiasm in the minds and hearts of the reading class, which is everywhere a democratic class. He finds that success in this field requires that he perform adequately a two-fold task: he must not only be able to create his character, and paint his situation accurately, but he must also bring down from the heights on which they live both character and situation; he must translate both for us into our own experience and embody them in such forms that we may understand them and be fascinated by them. The act of doing so may not require a greater technique than that employed by the social writer; but it is an entirely different technique. The former writes of things and in language so that he who runs may read; he does not have to educate his audience as well….
“And if he succeeds in endowing his characters and his situations with warmth, color, and vitality, and if his world of statesmen, diplomats, and all lesser figures—man, woman, and idealized youth—are spread in an intelligible pageant before us, there is yet a philosophy of politics, so to speak, to represent in a legitimately artistic manner….
“The attempt, then, to combine impersonated characters with fiction, and to add to the result some significant political or social moral, aside from acting as a check upon the genius of every writer in this field except only the greatest writer…is fraught with peril. It is unfortunate indeed that in this milieu the critic is swift to find what may easily be termed ‘propaganda’ when it is actually nothing but an impassioned view of some political ideal of the novelist’s… It is not difficult to make out a case for the statement that in a sense all art is propaganda… How far one may keep one’s self out of a book where ideas are brought into full play, how far one may present sharply and appealingly and yet not be accused of ‘bringing firearms into an orchestra,’ is a difficult question to answer. Someone has said that one of the main tendencies in American literature since 1870 has been its use as an instrument to agitate, and to carry out investigations and reforms of various kinds. Has then all that recent literature—and particularly the novel of the last five decades—been forever damned as works of art? […] Has that destroyed their validity as great artists?
“In one form or another what may seem the illegitimate marriage of Beauty with Use will always be a skeleton in the novelist’s closet, which he must either destroy or disown…” (21-28).
“So vast and varied is the [American] landscape, that we have already taken for granted the fact that ‘the great American novel’ will never be written because no such work could ever contain a picture of the energy of New England with the charm of the South, and reflect the buoyancy of California and the intrepidity of the middle West. And yet, in the genre of the political novel there seems to be offered the one great vehicle where something of the fusion of north, south, east, and west may take place, and where the writer may produce in fiction what is truly typical of the American people just as Walt Whitman produced it in poetry. Here is a form which offers a great latitude of plot development, permits an untold variety of background, and can present countless numbers of national and local types each novel in situation. And in spite of all this flexibility of content, the political novel must deal with one thing common to all,—the great Experiment of popular democracy in America” (335).
(1926) W.E.B. DuBois, African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.): “…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.”
(1927) Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920: “I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development of American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic; and the main divisions of the study have been fixed by forces that are anterior to literary schools and movements, creating the body of ideas from which literary culture eventually springs. The present volume carries the account from early beginnings in Puritan new England to the triumph of Jefferson and back-country agrarianism. Volume II concerns itself with the creative influence in American of French romantic theories, the rise of capitalism, and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial order; and Volume III will concern itself with the beginnings of dissatisfaction with the regnant middle class, and the several movements of criticism inspired by its reputed shortcomings….”
“That our colonial literature seems to many readers meagre and uninteresting, that it is commonly squeezed into the skimpiest of chapters in our handbooks of American literature, is due, I think, to an exaggerated regard for esthetic values. Our literary historians have labored under too heavy a handicap of the genteel tradition—to borrow Professor Santayana’s happy phrase—to enter sympathetically into a world of masculine intellects and material struggles. They have sought daintier fare than polemics, and in consequence mediocre verse has obscured political speculation, and poetasters have shouldered aside vigorous creative thinkers. The colonial period is meagre and lean only to those whose ‘disedged appetites’ find no savor in old-fashioned beef and puddings. The seventeenth century in America as well as in England was a saeculum theologicum, and the eighteenth century was a saeculum politicum. No other path leads so directly and intimately into the heart of those old days as the thorny path of their theological and political controversies; and if one will resolutely pick his way amongst the thorns, he will have his reward in coming close to the men who debated earnestly over the plans and specifications of the Utopia that was to be erected in the free spaces of America, and who however wanting they may have been in the lesser arts, were no mean architects and craftsmen for the business at hand. The foundations of a later America were laid in vigorous polemics, and the rough stone was plentifully mortared with idealism. To enter once more into the spirit of those fine old idealisms, and to learn that the promise of the future has lain always in the keeping of liberal minds that were never discouraged from their dreams, is scarcely a profitless undertaking, nor without meaning to those who like Merlin pursue the light of their hopes where it flickers above the treacherous marshlands.”
“This much is clear [as of 1920]: an industrialized society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick concern for human rights, that was the novel bequest of our fathers who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt….”
(1928) Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world…. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. I am aware that the word ‘propaganda’ carries to many minds an unpleasant connotation. Yet whether, in any instance, propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published. In itself, the word ‘propaganda’ has certain technical meanings which, like most things in this world, are ‘neither good nor bad but custom makes them so.’ I find the word defined in Funk and Wagnalls’ Dictionary in four ways: …‘“Propaganda” in its proper meaning is a perfectly wholesome word, of honest parentage, and with an honorable history…’”
(1928) Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.): “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.”
(1931) Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930: “I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers, who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920-30, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve us as guides. …the private imagination in isolation from the life of society seems to have been exploited and explored as far as for the present is possible. Who can imagine this sort of thing being carried further than Valéry and Proust have done? And who hereafter will be content to inhabit a corner, though fitted out with some choice things of one’s own, in the shuttered house of one of these writers—where we find ourselves, also, becoming conscious of a lack of ventilation?
“The reaction against nineteenth-century naturalism which Symbolism originally represented has probably now run its full course, and the oscillation which for at least three centuries has been taking place between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity may return toward objectivity again: we may live to see Valéry, Eliot and Proust displaced and treated with as much intolerance as those writers—Wells, France and Shaw—whom they have themselves displaced. Yet as surely as Ibsen and Flaubert brought to their Naturalistic plays and novels the sensibility and language of Romanticism, the writers of a new reaction in the direction of the study of man in his relation to his neighbor and to society will profit by the new intelligence and technique of Symbolism. Or—what would be preferable and is perhaps more likely—this oscillation may finally cease. Our conceptions of objective and subjective have unquestionable been based on false dualisms; our materialisms and idealisms alike have been derived from mistaken conceptions of what the researches of science implied—Classicism and Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism are, in reality, therefore false alternatives. …our ideas about the ‘logic’ of language are likely to be very superficial. The relation of words to what they convey—that is, to the processes behind them and the processes to which they give rise in those who listen to or read them—is still a very mysterious one. We tend to assume that being convinced of things is something quite different from having them suggested to us; but the suggestive language of the Symbolist poet is really performing the same sort of function as the reasonable language of the realistic novelist or even the severe technical languages of science” (231-234).
(1932) V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature: “Genuine proletarian criticism has seldom sought to deny the importance of literary values because of its desire for social significances. On the contrary, except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics….
“The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary [critic]. No revolutionary critic, for example, should deny that art in itself, in whatever form, is a trade just as pottery-making is, and as a trade it has its technique which has to be mastered if that which is produced is to be worthwhile. Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning, just as apples in a revolutionary country as well as in a reactionary country have to be good apples before they can be eaten with enjoyment. The fact that the pottery or the apples are the products of a revolutionary culture—that is, made or grown by revolutionists—does not itself, or by any kind of special magic, make them good. It simply gives them a new form of ideological identification… [Great revolutionary] films are great not because they are [only progressive in ideology] but because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve.
“The revolutionary proletarian critic does not aim to underestimate literary craftsmanship. What he contends is simply that literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. If proletarian literature fails in so many instances in America, it is not because it is propagandistic—most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw—but because it is lacking in qualities of craftsmanship.
“In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.
“Proletarian writers are not necessarily proletarians…but they are writers who are imbued with a proletarian ideology instead of a bourgeois one. They are writers who have adopted the revolutionary point of view of the proletarian ideology in their work. That often they fail in such expression is inevitable in a transitional stage of society in which we are living in today. This much should be clear, however, and that is that proletarian writers are not to be confused with literary rebels. Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing, that is proletarian, writers believe in revolt in life. The literary rebels, for example, who became the advocates of free verse as opposed to conventional verse must not be associated with proletarian writers, who are opposed to the society in which we live and aim to devote their literature to its transformation. Proletarian writers, then, are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt. As a group they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life; and that until its private-property basis is destroyed and replaced by the social control of all property, the human race will never be able to escape the horrors of unemployment, poverty, and war.
“More than that, proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one” (459-462).
(1934) John Dewey, Art as Experience: “The moral office and human function of art can be intelligently discussed only in context of culture. A particular work of art may have a definite effect upon a particular person or upon a number of persons. The social effect of the novels of Dickens or of Sinclair Lewis is far from negligible. But a less conscious and more massed constant adjustment of experience proceeds from the total environment that is created by the collective art of a time…” (344).
“The theories that attribute direct moral effect and intent to art fail because they do not take account of the collective civilization that is the context in which works of art are produced and enjoyed. I would not say that they tend to treat works of art as a kind of sublimated Aesop’s fables. But they all tend to extract particular works, regarded as especially edifying, from their milieu and to think of the moral function of art in terms of a strictly personal relation between the selected works and a particular individual. Their whole conception of morals is so individualistic that they miss a sense of the way in which art exercises its humane functions. Matthew Arnold’s dictum that ‘poetry is a criticism of life’ is a case in point…” (346).
(1934) Max Eastman, Art and the Life of Action: “In one issue of the New York Times—May 10, 1933—we learned from the Mexican Bolshevik artist, Diego Rivera, that ‘art which is not propaganda is not art at all,’ and from Hitler’s Minister of Education that ‘it is no longer art for art’s sake in Germany, but art for propaganda’s sake—otherwise it is not art.’ The German Bolshevik artist, George Grosz, had already declared that ‘The artist of our day, if he does not want to be an empty runner…can choose only between technique and class-struggle propaganda.’ And Mussolini recently expressed the same view by refusing to open the Style Show at Turin until all the slim girls in the mural had been washed down, and issuing an instruction to the press to accept for publication only such representations of the female figure as exemplify the ‘fully developed bust and hips appropriate to the fascist girl and mother.’ It seems well agreed on both sides of the barricades, that in the future at least art is to be crudely purposive, and the artist’s prestige to depend upon his service to a social or political cause” (3-4).
(1935) Joseph Freeman, “Introduction,” Proletarian Literature in the United States, Granville Hicks, Ed., et. al.: “To characterize an essay or a book as a political pamphlet is neither to praise nor to condemn it. Such pamphlets have their place in the world. In the case of the liberal critic, however, we have a political pamphlet which pretends to be something else. We have an attack on the theory of art as a political weapon which turns out to be itself a political weapon…. The liberal critic, the Man in White, wants us to believe that when you write about the autumn wind blowing a girl’s hair or about ‘thirsting breasts,’ you are writing about ‘experience’; but when you write about the October Revolutions, or the Five Year Plan, or the lynching of Negroes in the South, or the San Francisco strike you are not writing about ‘experience.’ Hence to say; ‘bed your desire among the pressing grasses’ is art; while Roar China, Mayakovsky’s poems, or the novels of Josephine Herbst and Robert Cantwell are propaganda …. If you were to take a worker gifted with a creative imagination and ask him to set down his experience honestly, it would be an experience so remote from that of the bourgeois that the Man in White would, as usual, raise the cry of ‘propaganda’” (9-12).
(1936) James T. Farrell, “Literature and Propaganda,” A Note on Literary Criticism: “I think that literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence. It is this duality, intrinsic to literature, that produces unresolved problems of literary criticism” (3). “I suggest that in the field of literature the formula ‘All art is propaganda’ be replaced by another: ‘Literature is an instrument of social influence’…. [Literature] can be propaganda—in the more limited sense of my definition of propaganda; and it can sometimes perform an objective social function that approaches agitation. However, it often performs neither of these functions and yet does perform an objective social function… I am making these distinctions on the grounds of strategy and clarity, so that we may know what we are doing and what we are talking about. A leading critical confusion—as I have said—has arisen from using the word propaganda in various senses; then from hitching literature sometimes to one; sometimes to another, of these meanings; and finally from thinking that we have always had the same meanings in mind and that these meanings exhaust the roles that literature plays objectively in society, and subjectively upon the individual consciousness of the reader. In so doing, we have produced wasted polemics; and in confronting critics who oppose Marxism, revolutionary criticism has led with its chin; is it any wonder that opponents have leaped at it when such opportunities were offered?” (169-171).
(1939) Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Criticism: “Socialist criticism in America may conveniently be dated from the founding of the Comrade—‘An Illustrated Socialist Monthly’—in 1901…. The Comrade appeared at the beginning of the muckrake era. It was superior to the muckrakers in the clarity of its vision as to the basic cause of social evils and the way to cure them…. 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.1 Consider the essays and lectures on the contemporary theatre by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Miss Goldman made no bones about her intentions. Her essay on ‘The Modern Drama’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911) was frankly a salute to its subject as an instrument for the dissemination of radical thought.” (1”’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”) (289-292).
“The socialist’s affinity with realism was stated forcefully in the leading editorial of the Masses in February 1911—the second issue of a magazine…which was a successor, on a more mature and ‘politicalized’ level, to the Comrade. It said: ‘It is natural that Socialists should favor the novel with a purpose, more especially, the novel that points a Socialist moral. As a reaction against the great bulk of vapid, meaningless, too-clever American fiction, with its artificial plots and characters remote from actual life, such an attitude is a healthy sign …’”(289-290).
“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…” (302).
“The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today…. Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature… (330-331).
“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…. (358-359).
“[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. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. 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….” (384-387).
(1940) Roger Dataller, The Plain Man and the Novel: “The propaganda novel is quite simply a story with a purpose. Not that every novel may not be interpreted as a story with a purpose; but there are some authors whose educative mission burns so ardently within them that it becomes impossible to consider any kind of writing save that of direct entreaty. There is little masking of the challenge. The banners flutter, the trumpets blare. The slogan flies to its appointed target. ‘And now, men and women of America,’ cries Mrs. Beecher Stowe, at the conclusion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘is this [slavery] a thing to be trifled with, apologized for, and passed over in silence? Farmers of Massachusetts, of New Hampshire, of Vermont, of Connecticut, who read this book by the blaze of your winter-evening fire; strong-hearted, generous sailors and shipowners of Maine—is this a thing for you to countenance and encourage?’ Such is the voice of the authentic propagandist. The pointed moral, and a tale adorned thereby.” “It would be erroneous to suppose, however, that every type of propagandist found a field so favourable for opportunity as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. All too often in history the reformer has been compelled to clothe his meaning in parable and allegory. This was Rabelais’s method in dealing with the corruption of the mediaeval Church, and that of Swift and Voltaire with the vileness of eighteenth-century government. The heavy-witted saw only the facile story: the man of critical intelligence the rapier point beneath.” “The propaganda story, then, from sheer pressure of events, may shape itself to the half-concealed, the oblique approach. Perhaps the most famous example of this method is to be found in Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Primarily, Dead Souls is as much concerned with the problem of chattel slavery as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but Gogol’s treatment is as far removed from that of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe as the timber profusion of eighteenth-century Moscow from the primly ordered architecture of Hartford, Connecticut…” “How many real Socialists did [Upton Sinclair’s] The Jungle make? It is difficult to say. Very few indeed, if municipal elections between 1906 and 1936 count for anything. But perhaps the sum total of literary influence cannot be assessed by the mathematical habit. That Charles Dickens assisted the reform of the Poor Law, and Charles Reade that of the Victorian prison system, is undeniable; but exact measurement is beyond the reach of even the most ardent of social investigators. Such novels influence; but downright conversion is another matter. It is doubtful indeed if a novel of propaganda ever really converted anyone. That it may emphasize an atmosphere in which conversion becomes possible is perhaps as far as the Plain Man would care to go” (35-46).
(1940) Edmund Wilson, “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” later published in The Triple Thinkers: “I want to talk about the historical interpretation of literature—that is, about the interpretation of literature in its social, economic and political aspects. To begin with, it will be worth while to say something about the kind of criticism which seems to be furthest removed from this. There is a comparative criticism which tends to be non-historical. The essays of T. S. Eliot, which have had such an immense influence in our time, are, for example, fundamentally non-historical. Eliot sees, or tries to see, the whole of literature, so far as he is acquainted with it, spread out before him under the aspect of eternity….”
“Another example of this kind of non-historical criticism, in a somewhat different way and on a somewhat different plane, is the work of the late George Saintsbury. Saintsbury was a connoisseur of wines; he wrote an entertaining book on the subject….”
“There is, however, another tradition of criticism which dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the year 1725, the Neapolitan philosopher Vico published La Scienz Nuova, a revolutionary work on the philosophy of history, in which he asserted for the first time that the social world was certainly the work of man, and attempted what is, so far as I know, the first social interpretation of a work of literature….”
“In the field of literary criticism, this historical point of view came to its first complete flower in the work of the French critic Taine, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The whole school of historian-critics to which Taine belonged—Michelet, Renan, Sainte-Beuve—had been occupied in interpreting books in terms of their historical origins. But Taine was the first of these to attempt to apply such principles systematically and on a large scale in a work devoted exclusively to literature. In the Introduction to his History of English Literature, published in 1863, he made his famous pronouncement that works of literature were to be understood as the upshot of three interfusing factors: the moment, the race and the milieu….”
“To Taine’s set of elements was added, dating from the middle of the century, a new element, the economic, which was introduced into the discussion of historical phenomena mainly by Marx and Engels. The non-Marxist critics themselves were at the time already taking into account the influence of the social classes… But Marx and Engels derived the social classes from the way that people made or got their livings—from what they called the methods of production; and they tended to regard these economic processes as fundamental to civilization.”
“The insistence that the man of letters should play a political role, the disparagement of works of art in comparison with political action, where thus originally no part of Marxism. They only became associated with it later. This happened by way of Russia, and it was due to the special tendencies in that country that date from long before the Revolution or the promulgation of Marxism itself. In Russia there have been very good reasons why the political implications of literature should particularly occupy the critics. The art of Pushkin itself, with its marvelous power of implication, had certainly been partly created by the censorship of Nicholas I, and Pushkin set the tradition for most of the great Russian writers that followed him. Every play, every poem, every story, must be a parable of which the moral is implied. If it were stated, the censor would suppress the book as he tried to do with Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, where it was merely a question of the packed implications protruding a little too plainly. Right down through the writings of Chekhov and up almost to the Revolution, the imaginative literature of Russia presents the peculiar paradox of an art that is technically objective and yet charged with social messages. In Russia under the Tsar, it was inevitable that social criticism should lead to political conclusions, because the most urgent need form the point of view of any kind of improvement was to get rid of the tsarist regime. Even the neo-Christian moralist Tolstoy, who pretended to be non-political, was to exert a subversive influence…. Even after the Revolution had destroyed the tsarist |
