@prefix vivo: . @prefix edm: . @prefix ns0: . @prefix dcterms: . @prefix skos: . vivo:departmentOrSchool "Arts, Faculty of"@en, "English, Department of"@en ; edm:dataProvider "DSpace"@en ; ns0:degreeCampus "UBCV"@en ; dcterms:creator "Das Gupta, Kalyan"@en ; dcterms:issued "2010-06-11T19:21:46Z"@en, "1985"@en ; vivo:relatedDegree "Doctor of Philosophy - PhD"@en ; ns0:degreeGrantor "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:description """This dissertation politically analyses the principles of literary evaluation (here called "axiology") argued and applied by the English critics Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton. The paradoxical fact that all three claim to be working within a Marxist framework while producing mutually divergent rationales for literary evaluation prompts a detailed examination of Marx and Engels. Moreover, since Caudwell and Eagleton acknowledge Leninism to be Marxism, and, further, since Eagleton and I both in our own ways argue that Trotskyism--as opposed to Stalinism--is the continuator of Leninism, the evaluative methods of Lenin and Trotsky also become relevant. Examined in light of that revolutionary tradition, however, and in view of the (English) critics' high political self-consciousness, the latter's principles of "literary" evaluation reveal definitive political differences between each other and with Marxism itself, centrally over the question of organised action. Thus, each of the chapters on the English critics begins with an examination of the chosen critic's purely political profile and its relationship to his general theory of literature. Next, I show how the contradictions of his "axiology" express those of his politics. Finally, with Hardy as a focus, I show the influence of each critic's political logic on his particular "literary" assessment of individual authors and texts. The heterogeneity of these critics' evaluations of Hardy, the close correspondence of each critic's general evaluative principles to his political beliefs, and the non-Marxist nature of those beliefs themselves all concretely suggest that none of the three English critics is strictly a Marxist. I do not know whether a genuinely Marxist axiology is inevitable; however, I do admit such a phenomenon as a logical possibility. In any case, I argue, this possibility will never be realised unless aspiring Marxist axiologists seek to match their usually extensive knowledge of literature with an active interest in making international proletarian revolution happen. And, since it can only happen if it is organised, the "Marxist" axiologist without such an orientation will be merely an axiologist without Marxism."""@en ; edm:aggregatedCHO "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/25578?expand=metadata"@en ; skos:note "PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY EVALUATION IN ENGLISH MARXIST CRITICISM: CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL, RAYMOND WILLIAMS AND TERRY EAGLETON by KALYAN DAS GUPTA B.A. (Hons.), Calcutta University, 1975 M.A., The University of Saskatchewan, 1978 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE^IVEftSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA MAY 1985 (S) Kalyan/JDas Gupta, 1985 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make i t freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It i s understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of E ngl i s h The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 D a t e 26 April 1985 -6 C3/81) Abstract Principles of Literary Evaluation in English Marxist Criticism: Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton Supervisor: Dr. Graham Good This dissertation p o l i t i c a l l y analyses the principles of literary evaluation (here called \"axiology\") argued and applied by the English c r i t i c s Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton. The paradoxical fact that a l l three claim to be working within a Marxist framework while producing mutually divergent rationales for literary evaluation prompts a detailed examination of Marx and Engels. Moreover, since Caudwell and Eagleton acknowledge Leninism to be Marxism, and, further, since Eagleton and I both in our own ways argue that Trotskyism—as opposed to Stalinism--is the continuator of Leninism, the evaluative methods of Lenin and Trotsky also become relevant. Examined in light of that revolutionary tradition, however, and in view of the (English) c r i t i c s ' high p o l i t i c a l self-consciousness, the latter's principles of \"literary\" evaluation reveal definitive p o l i t i c a l differences between each other and with Marxism i t s e l f , centrally over the question of organised action. Thus, each of the chapters on the English c r i t i c s begins with an examination of the chosen c r i t i c ' s purely p o l i t i c a l profile and its relationship to his general theory of literature. Next, I show how the contradictions of his \"axiology\" express those of his p o l i t i c s . F i n a l l y , with Hardy as a focus, I show the influence of each c r i t i c ' s p o l i t i c a l logic on his particular \"literary\" assessment of individual authors and texts. The heterogeneity of these c r i t i c s ' evaluations of Hardy, the close correspondence of each c r i t i c ' s general evaluative principles to his p o l i t i c a l beliefs, and the non-Marxist nature of those beliefs themselves a l l concretely suggest that none of the three English c r i t i c s is sljLctly a Marxist. I do not know whether a genuinely Marxist axiology is inevitable; however, I do admit such a phenomenon as a logical possibility. In any case, I argue, this possibility w i l l never be realised unless aspiring Marxist axiologists seek to match their usually extensive knowledge of literature with an active interest in making international proletarian revolution happen. And, since i t can only happen i f i t is organised, the \"Marxist\" axiologist without such an orientation w i l l be merely an axiologist without Marxism. i i Contents Abstract of Dissertation i i Table of Contents i i i List of Abbreviations iv Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Nature, Purpose, and Methodology of the Project 1 A Brief Survey of Literary Axiology from the Past to the Present . 10 Marx and Engels: Base-Superstructure, Class, and Partisanship . . 36 Lenin and the Party Question 81 Trotsky and the Defence of the First Workers' State 91 Notes 114 Christopher Caudwell 131 Caudwell's Politics and His General Theory of Literature 131 Caudwell's Principles of Literary Evaluation 153 Caudwell's Evaluation of Hardy 179 Notes 194 Raymond Williams 203 Williams' Politics and His General Theory of Literature 203 Williams' Principles of Literary Evaluation 225 Williams' Evaluation of Hardy 274 Notes • ' 299 Terry Eagleton 310 Eagleton's Politics and His General Theory of Literature 310 Eagleton's Principles of Literary Evaluation 331 Eagleton's Evaluation of Hardy . 355 Notes 366 Conclusion 371 Notes 380 Bibliography 381 Appendixes 401 Appendix A 401 Appendix B 403 Appendix C 406 i i i List of Abbreviations and Short Titles Note: Some frequently-used t i t l e s have been abbreviated in two different ways. Within a sentence, they have been written as a short t i t l e ; outside a sentence, or when used parenthetically at any point, they have been written in the form of a letter-abbreviation. Anatomy \"Archetypes\" Bate \"Beauty\" Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. \"The Archetypes of Literature,\" by Northrop Frye. Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts. \"Beauty: A Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In FS. BJA British Journal of Aesthetics. 'Breath of Discontent' \"The Breath of Discontent: A Study in Bourgeois Religion,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In FS. CA Capital CC Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, by Leon Trotsky. Capital: A C r i t i c a l Analysis of Capitalist Production, Vol. I, by Karl Marx. Same abbreviation used for the book as a separate publication and for excerpts from the book in Marx/Engels. The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams. 'Celine\" CI \"Celine and Poincar€: Novelist and Politician,\" by Leon Trotsky. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton. Class and Art Same as CA. iv V \"Consciousness\" CPGB Criticism and Ideology CS \"Culture\" Culture and Society Demetz \"D.H. Lawrence\" DIB Doyle Draper EN Fischer Fokkema and Kunne-Ibsch FS The Function of Criticism \"Consciousness: A Study i n Bourgeois Psychology,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In FS. The Communist Party of Great Britain. Same as CI. Culture and Society: 1780-1950, by Raymond Williams. \"Culture and the Soviet Bureaucracy,\" by Leon Trotsky. Same as CS. Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism. \"D.H. Lawrence: A Study of the Bourgeois Artist,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In _S. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, by Raymond Williams. Brian Doyle, \"The Necessity of Illusion: The Writings of Christopher Caudwell.\" Michael Draper, \"Christopher Caudwell's Illusions.\" The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, by Raymond Williams. Michael Fischer, \"The Literary Importance of E.P. Thompson's Marxism.\" D.W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics. Further Studies in a Dying Culture, by Christopher Caudwell. The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism, by Terry Eagleton. Furbank P.N. Furbank, ed., Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy. Introd. Terry Eagleton. v i Hess Hyman Illusion and Reality Introduction IR JAAC Lenin \"Les Javanais\" Lifshitz Literary Theory Long R LR LT Manifesto Margolies Marx/Engels \"Mayakovsky\" \"Men and Nature\" Hans Hess, \"Is There a Theory of Art i n Marx?\" Stanley Edgar Hyman, \"Christopher Caudwell and Marxist Criticism.\" Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, by Christopher Caudwell. Introduction to Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58: A Contribution to the Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy, by Karl Marx. Illusion and Reality Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Lenin on Literature and Art. \"A Masterly First Novel: Jean Malaquais's Les Javanais,\" by Leon Trotsky. Mikhail L i f s h i t z , The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx. Literary Theory: An Introduction, by Terry Eagleton. The Long Revolution, by Raymond Williams. Literature and Revolution, by Leon Trotsky. Literary Theory. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. David N. Margolies, The Function of Literature: A Study of Christopher Caudwell's Aesthetics. Marx/Engels on Literature and Art. \"The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky,\" by Leon Trotsky. \"Men and Nature: A Study i n Bourgeois History,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In FS. v i i \"Mirror\" ML MLC Morawski \"Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,\" by V.I. Lenin. Marxism and Literature, by Raymond Williams. Marxism and Literary Criticism, by Terry Eagleton. Stefan Morawski, Introd. to Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. MT NLH \"Pacifism and Violence\" \"Party Literature\" PL 'Poet and Rebel' P o l i t i c a l Unconscious Poverty of Theory Prawer Preface The Prophet Unarmed \"Reality\" Modern Tragedy, by Raymond Williams. New Literary History. \"Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In S. \"Party Organisation and Party Literature,\" by V.I. Lenin. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, by Raymond Williams. \"Tolstoy: Poet and Rebel,\" by Leon Trotsky. The P o l i t i c a l Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, by Fredric Jameson. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, by E.P. Thompson. S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy, by Karl Marx. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky: 1921-29, by Isaac Deutscher. \"Reality: A Study in Bourgeois Philosophy,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In FS. v i i i Romance and Realism Romance and Realism: A Study in English Bourgeois Literature, by Christopher Caudwell. RR RSDLP _S Schiff \"Shaw\" Slaughter Romance and Realism. Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Studies in a Dying Culture, by Christopher Caudwell. \"Marxist Literary Criticism,\" by Terry Eagleton. In Hilda Schiff, ed., Contemporary Approaches to English Studies. \"George Bernard Shaw: A Study of the Bourgeois Superman,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In JS. C l i f f Slaughter, Marxism, Ideology and Literature. Solomon SSFR State and Revolution \"The Strangled Revolution' The Stubborn Structure \"Tolstoy\" \"Tolstoy and Labour\" Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. Reply to the Guardian: The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited. Spartacus Youth League pamphlet. The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, by V.I. Lenin \"The Strangled Revolution: Andre Malraux's The Conquerors,\" by Leon Trotsky. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society, by Northrop Frye. \"L.N. Tolstoy,\" by V.I. Lenin. \"L.N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement,\" by V.I. Lenin. Trotsky Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art. Tucker Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. , 1978. ix Walter Benjamin WB Wellek \"Wells\" Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, by Terry Eagleton. Walter Benjamin. Rene Wellek, \"Marx and Engels.\" \"H.G. Wells: A Study in Utopianism,\" by Christopher Caudwell. In S. WR Women and Revolution. Acknowle dgment s Dr. Graham Good, my supervisor, and Dr. Herbert Rosengarten, a professor not always directly involved in my particular project, provided many-sided support throughout my programme. Dr. John Doheny and Dr. Fred Stockholder commented usefully on the various drafts. Two friends, Cheryl and Peter, early offered some invaluable advice and joined several other friends in providing crucial material and moral support. And my secretary-friends in the department, especially Ingrid Kuklinski and Rosemary Leach, helped me through many rough times. Finally, I would like to thank my mother for everything by dedicating this dissertation to her, Urmila Das Gupta. x - 1 -Introduction Nature, Purpose, and Methodology of the Project This dissertation is intended as a contribution to the Marxist debate on how to judge literature. It attempts to analyse and systematise, from a Marxist viewpoint, the literary-evaluative principles theorised by certain self-described Marxists i n England. The examination here focuses on a number of contradictory p o l i t i c a l tendencies and conclusions in their work. These are viewed in light of decisive historical lessons, drawn from the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. My purpose is to show—I believe for the f i r s t time in synthetic form—the p o l i t i c a l implications of these contradictions for a Marxist theory of literary value. (For economy, I have extensively used the term \"axiology\" to refer to the theory of literary and other values.) My dominant presentational strategy is negative and theoretical: I offer what is mainly a critique of the methods of (chiefly) Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, and Terry Eagleton. In part, this is a limited attempt to redress, from a Marxist perspective, a long-standing general academic imbalance. This imbalance was noted even quite recently by, for instance, a prominent non-Marxist c r i t i c : \"Very l i t t l e has been done to study the actual process by which great c r i t i c s have arrived at their valuations of specific works of art.\"* The overall tenor of this work is polemical, not expository. I make no attempt to trace in detail the development of the various Marxist literary and c r i t i c a l theories across the world through history, but merely use 2 specific concepts from them. - 2 -My focus on (ostensible) Marxists and on (their) theory is important to understand. I aim to verify the claimed Marxism of Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton, primarily as expressed in the theoretical formulations within the specifically axiological parts of their work. These theoretical formulations are found in two forms: (1) as attitudinal qualifiers implicitly colouring judgments on particular works or authors and (2) as generalisations about literary value ex p l i c i t l y presented as position statements. I examine the internal consistency of these formulations, the overall relationship of each c r i t i c ' s formulations to the experience and logic of revolutionary Marxism from Marx to Trotsky, and the relationship of each c r i t i c ' s axiological formulations to his own p o l i t i c a l views and logic. That last'enterprise offer's one'way\"of • verifying the claimed Marxism of these c r i t i c s , both p o l i t i c a l l y and axiologically. Though this is not a task of decisive importance to the broader task of social, economic, and p o l i t i c a l revolution, i t is a relevant one: the class struggle does not leave the realm of ideology unaffected, nor does the ex p l i c i t l y p o l i t i c a l motive of so-called Marxist criticism make i t possible for the broader struggle to remain insulated from that ideological realm. Many c r i t i c s themselves make a p o l i t i c a l issue out of Marxist \"litera r y \" theory and largely articulate their own evaluative principles in terms of i t . Williams and Eagleton are two examples of such c r i t i c s . When Marxist method thus becomes a p o l i t i c a l issue in such a polemical activity as literary criticism, p o l i t i c a l c l a r i f i c a t i o n acquires a relevance substantially greater than what most \"literary\" criticism is routinely accustomed to. My motivating premise here has been that,in such e x p l i c i t l y p o l i t i c a l debates, be they conducted within the \"cultural\" realm or elsewhere, the Marxist method has the right to be defended against distortions—above a l l against those perpetrated by self-professed Marxists--before being judged. My immediate objective in this p o l i t i c a l c l a r i f i c a t i o n is therefore to verify the consistency of particular c r i t i c s who claim, in one way or another, to be working within the framework of Marxism; in the course of this examination, however, and through i t , I also hope to re-confirm the relevance of Marxism to the social struggle for proletarian revolution in general,and to \"literary\" evaluation in particular. One c r i t i c who attacks Marxism on the basis of distorted interpretations and avowedly un-Marxist representatives is F.R. Leavis. - 3 -After having sarcastically pleaded \"guilty to the familiar charge—I have not minutely studied the Bible,\" Leavis proceeds to dismember the liberal Edmund Wilson as a \"good index\" of a Marxist c r i t i c . He then continues the quixotic massacre, of everyone from A.L. Morton and Granville Hicks (both apologists for Stalinism, a politics inimical to Marxism) to Prince Mirsky: \"We have no i l l u s i o n s . There is a choice; we must speak or die: Stalin or the King by Divine Right?\"^ \"What are these 'classes,'\" he rhetorically asks, challenging a basic analytical tool used by Marxism. And he answers: \"Class of the kind that can justify talk about 'class culture' has long been extinct.\"^ Yet, as one veteran specialist on precisely such questions—E.P. Thompson—has correctly remarked, \"As the world changes, we must learn to change our language and our terms. But we should never change these without r e a s o n . I have argued that Marxists have no reason to reject Marx and Engels' use of the category of and specific observations about \"class.\" In defining my task, I have merely sought to extend to a specific theoretical area (axiology) a particular -analytical method geared to specific p o l i t i c a l interests (Marxism). However, within literary theory, a general connection between \"literature\" and \"politics\" has long been recognised. \"For to insist that literary criticism i s , or should be, a specific discipline of intelligence,\" says one c r i t i c , \" i s not to suggest that a certain interest in literature can confine i t s e l f . t o the kind of intensive local analysis associated with 'practical c r i t i c i s m ' — t o the scrutiny of the 'words on the page' in their minute relations, their effects of imagery, and so on: a real literary interest is an interest in man, society, and c i v i l i s a t i o n , and i t s boundaries cannot be drawn; the adjective is not a circumscribing one.\" - 4 -Elsewhere the same c r i t i c observes, \"The more seriously one is concerned for literary criticism, the less possible does one find i t to be concerned for that alone . . .; special duties are not ultimately served by neglect of the more general.\" If the reader is shocked to learn that this firm advocate of \"social\" criticism is the same person as our recent derider of class analyses, I can only point out that the apparent contradiction is not mine but that of F.R. Leavis and the particular class—the petit bourgeoisie—he speaks for.^ And, in part, that is precisely the contradiction that, as I hope to show, a l l three principal objects of this study exhibit as well. At about the same time that Leavis was pinning the liberal Wilson with the latter's own logic, announcing, \"There ±s_, then, a point of 7 v x view above classes,\"' the Prague semiotician Jan Mukarovsky was stating, \"above a l l the c r i t i c is always either the spokesman or conversely the antagonist or even a dissident from some social formation (class, environment, etc.).\"^ I believe that the implications of that observation have been scrutinised most thoroughly by Terry Eagleton. From his f i r s t major theoretical work, Criticism and Ideology, to his latest, The Function of Criticism, Eagleton has consistently and persuasively argued that \"fc]riticism is not an innocent discipline, and never has been\"^: \"[t] he difference between a ' p o l i t i c a l ' and 'non-p o l i t i c a l ' criticism is just the difference between the prime minister and the monarch: the latter furthers certain p o l i t i c a l ends by pretending not to, while the former makes no bones about i t . . . . It is a distinction between different forms of p o l i t i c s . . . .\" Consequently, he points out, \"£t]here is no way of settling the question of which politics is preferable in literary c r i t i c a l terms. You simply - 5 -have to argue about politics.\"10 Specifically, this means that \"[tjhe problem of a 'Marxist aesthetics' is above a l l the problem of a Marxist pol i t i c s . \" 11 Mark Roberts, in The Fundamentals of Literary Criticism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974, p. 69), has \"extended\" the above argument's validity from interpretation to evaluation. I place \"extended\" i n quotes, however, not only because Roberts' book pre-dates Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology but also because his conception of evaluative relativism remains abstractly philosophical: i t largely ignores the existence—not to mention importance—of actual social and p o l i t i c a l interests. Nevertheless, he phrases one logical implication of Eagle-ton's argument simply and well: \"If my view of the world, its nature and constitution, i s radically different from yours, shall I not place a different value from you upon works of literature that deal particularly with those matters upon which our views most noticeably differ?\" This dissertation is an attempt to invest this relativism with the specific p o l i t i c a l dynamic of Marxism, always—implicitly or e x p l i c i t l y — i n effective combat with libe r a l humanism. For, as Fredric Jameson has observed, \"the bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as i t is on the p o l i t i c a l : which does not mean that i t has lost i t s prestige or ideological potency. On the contrary: the anti-speculative bias of that tradition, its emphasis on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relation-ships i n which that item may be embedded, continue to encourage submission to what is by preventing i t s followers from making connections, and in particular from drawing the otherwise unavoidable conclusions on the p o l i t i c a l level.\"12 - 6 -In setting myself this f a i r l y delimited task, I have obviously rejected, for various reasons, numerous other, related tasks. Of these, perhaps the two most likely to engender dissatisfaction are my refusal here to substantially \"apply\" my own theory to actual \"literary\" texts and my principled refusal to negate the logic of my own argument by attempting to posit a more detailed \"alternative\" axiological model than I deem historically possible at the moment. The refusal to posit a detailed alternative is argued out and defended in the body of my dissertation, especially in the Introduction. The refusal to be a \"practical c r i t i c \" here is motivated partly by space considerations, but also partly by ideological and historical ones, outlined below. I believe that, in general, \"pure\" theory, within conjuncturally determinate bounds of reason and potential v e r i f i a b i l i t y , can prove rewarding. It can allow one to step back from the frequently hypnotic power of individual words, passages, or texts, to ponder broad structural, ideological, and historical relationships and significances. And i t can enable even the \"practical c r i t i c \" to then resume his or her specialty with a qualitatively enriched, more comparative approach. Besides, while I grant the complete legitimacy and importance of empirical projects, I also note that the heyday of \"practical c r i t i c i s m \" — i n the mode of I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and the American New Critics—seems at least for the nonce to be over and to be giving way to generally more theoretical enterprises, even among non-Marxists. Witness, for instance, the rise to eminence of structuralism, phenomenology, semiotics, and deconstruction. Moreover, the work of Terry Eagleton in particular shows that, these days, even so specialised a f i e l d as Marxist literary axiology has reached - 7 -sophisticated self-consciousness. The very emergence of that f i e l d thereby i t s e l f provides grounds for being discussed theoretically—that i s , for being discussed at its own level and in i t s own terms. Finally, with Eagleton, I am convinced that at this point in time, the expected aim of Marxist criticism \"to subvert the very ideological apparatuses of class-society . . . w i l l not be greatly furthered by yet another Marxist interpretation of George E l i o t \" h e n c e my self-restriction here to theory. Within this s e l f - r e s t r i c t i o n , moreover, projects other than my particular one are and were possible but remained unincorporated. These, too, should be adumbrated here, for their deliberate exclusion defines the limits of my actual exercise's goals. As explained above, my aim is to examine the principles of literary evaluation in Marxist c r i t i c a l theory. This means, among other things, that mine is not a \"general\" theory of any general literary or c r i t i c a l theory or practice as a whole, Marxist or otherwise. It does depend for its self-definition and elaboration, however, on general theories (Marxist and non-Marxist) of literature, criticism, and literary value. Mine is also not a (Marxist) theory of p o l i t i c a l l y heterogeneous evaluations of actual literary texts: I have not set out to judge the empirical validity of the particular judgments on particular authors or texts made, for instance, by Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton. Though such a concern is valid and even crucial, I have instead concentrated on the p o l i t i c a l logic of these c r i t i c s ' value theories and judgments, finding that p o l i t i c a l l y more revealing (and formally more manageable) than a primarily factual verification. Of course, certain factual formulations are, in their bias or their error, p o l i t i c a l l y revealing too; but I have - 8 -allowed such . empirical. mechanisms to retain, a subordinate role _in my endeavour, which, in its conscious emphasis remains a theoretical and p o l i t i c a l one. Fi n a l l y , I have throughout stressed certain connections between axiological c r i t e r i a and p o l i t i c a l values and have recommended a conscious alignment, at an historically unprecedented l e v e l , of active Marxist politics and professional Marxist literary evaluation. The basis for my claim to originality, i f any, thus lies in my insistence on linking two simple but academically all-too-often oversimplified and ignored distinctions. The f i r s t distinction is the p o l i t i c a l difference between purely discursive protestations of l e f t i s t sympathy passing for \"commitment,\" on the one hand, and actively organised revolutionary class-struggle (and the committed orientation stemming from i t ) , on the other. The second distinction is the functional difference between \"literary\" writing (directly concerned with \" l i f e \" ) and \"critical/evaluative\" writing (directly concerned with \"literature\"). Granting the relativity of the l a t t e r , post-Romantic conventional distinction (between \"literature\" and \"criticism\"), I nevertheless believe that its terms capture, however inadequately, a real distinction within modern discursive practice. Consequently, I have argued that any counter-productive limitations that an active, organised partisanship may conceivably be felt to impose on \"literary\" activity do not . logically betoken an identical effect on \" c r i t i c a l \" analysis and evaluation. Most \"literature\" (novels, plays, poems, some kinds of essays) advances no explicit claim to be p o l i t i c a l : the social attitudes endorsed in i t are correspondingly unsystematised, relatively devoid of any unified programme for social change. But quite the - 9 -opposite conditions and tendencies obtain, I would argue, for any considered \"criticism\" of_ that \"iiterature.\" And this is doubly true of theories whose subject is \"criticism\" i t s e l f and which, moreover, overtly profess allegiance to a definite p o l i t i c a l framework of interests and methods. Such \"metacriticism\" cannot evade the imputation of self-consciousness, and any individual \"metacritic\" has the right to interrogate i t accordingly. For axiologists claiming to be Marxist, therefore, their actual attitude towards and active role ( i f any) in the organised struggle for workers' revolution acquires a decisive centrality. Their authenticity as Marxist specialists is put to the ultimate test over what they say and do about that key p o l i t i c a l question: over what they p o l i t i c a l l y avow and whether they practice what they profess. Incidentally, self-described Marxist c r i t i c s themselves invite such testing by explicitly and just i f i a b l y broaching the relevance of their p o l i t i c a l views to the operations of their c r i t i c a l analyses, evaluations, and theories. My main concern here, however, is not with the formal credibility of the \"Marxist\" axiologists' o f f i c i a l self-image. In the f i r s t place, my concern is with the internal, substantive genuineness—the p o l i t i c a l credentials of the assumptions, methods, and conclusions—of the axiology i t s e l f . But my point also is that objectively, formal participation in organised struggle is naturally constitutive of and indispensable to any genuinely Marxist credentials. It is d i f f i c u l t enough to remain, in one's theories, unvaryingly true to one's real experiences and impulses. But the task of theorising becomes practically impossible i f one has to \"guess\" what these experiences and impulses might be, from a position exterior and hostile to them. One - 10 -cannot even interpret—much less evaluate or decisively shape—literary phenomena in the declared interests of a collective p o l i t i c a l goal, i f one spurns the organised struggle central to i t s achievement. I f , therefore, particular axiologists wish to insist that they are Marxists, they must clearly seek and demonstrate p o l i t i c a l consistency, in chiefly two respects: (1) in respect of their ability to analyse and evaluate reality in light of historical lessons, through the framework of interests articulated by Marx and Engels, and (2) in respect of their willingness to act concertedly to change reality in accordance with those interests, analyses, and evaluations. And such consistency, I have argued, is inconceivable today without the shaping and irreplaceable experience of working in an organisation that functions as the collective memory and practical leader of the revolutionary working class. This emphasis on an organised Marxist orientation is what I believe constitutes my specific contribution to the current debate within Marxist literary axiology. A Brief Survey of Literary Axiology from the Past to the Present At least since the advent of Aristotle's Poetics (fourth century B.C.), Western literary and c r i t i c a l theory has always treated, explicitly or im p l i c i t l y , the issue of literary value and evaluation as an organic part of its general aesthetic discussion.^ However, over the centuries, the treatment has changed in it s form, definition, and emphasis, in general acquiring increasing self-consciousness as well as social and p o l i t i c a l consciousness. To simplify history only a l i t t l e , one might f a i r l y suggest that p o l i t i c a l literary axiology in i t s present - 11 -self-conscious form does not really emerge in conventional c r i t i c a l theory t i l l Matthew Arnold's \"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time\" (1864) and Culture and Anarchy (1869). Both Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Art of Poetry (f i r s t century B.C.) deal primarily with the internal structure and ingredients of a work of art. The authors do not equally address the problems of literary evaluation, though they do propose individual components of particular genres as bearers of literary value. Thus, Aristotle proposes the concept of a cathartic effect as one index of the genuineness of tragedy. Horace's emphasis on simplicity and unity suggests other indices, incidentally also found in Aristotle. But Horace's work addresses a technical problem in the writing (or \"production\") of poetry more than i t proposes a set of c r i t e r i a for judging i t . Longinus' treatise On the Sublime ( f i r s t century A.D.) deals more extensively than Aristotle's or Horace's with the emotional components of rhetoric and hence, by association and implication, with the emotional dynamics of literary response. However, his emphasis f a l l s on questions of style and morality, two very limited though important components of evaluation; and his pedagogical aim resembles Horace's. Moreover, his definitions of the sublime are clearly too dependent on the idealist notion of \"the soul\" to be directly appropriable by dialectical and historical materialism (Marxism). If we pass over what are mostly restatements of these \"classical\" problematics by the Renaissance c r i t i c s (such as Philip Sidney and Pierre Corneille) and variations of them by the Neoclassicists (such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, David Hume, and Joshua Reynolds), we arrive at the Romantics and, with them, at the beginnings of axiological - 12 -problematics as they predominantly define themselves in our era. This is to say simply that many of the individual axiological issues and c r i t e r i a raised by Western criticism in previous centuries become, in the Romantic period, explicitly politicised within a framework that continues to define Western society and thought to this day. The shift in axiological self-consciousness and analytical approach can be observed in some of the formulations as well as the t i t l e of an essay such as William Hazlitt's \"Why the Arts Are Not Progressive\" (1814): contrast, for instance, Joseph Addison's \"The Pleasures of the Imagination\" from a century earlier (Bate, pp. 184-87). By the time of S.T. Coleridge, we notice that the self-consciousness of \"criticism\" signalled in Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711) is beginning to consolidate i t s e l f . One of Coleridge's early essays is entitled \"On the Principles of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine Arts\" (1814). In i t he asserts the notion, common even today, that \" Qfj he Good . . . is always discursive\" and \"[tQ he Beautiful . . . is always intuitive\" (Bate, p. 375). Clearly, increasing self-consciousness does not automatically entail a materialist philosophy. Thus, on the one hand, the self-consciousness of a Hazlitt produces the materialist distinction between the \"earliest stages of the arts, when the f i r s t mechanical d i f f i c u l t i e s had been got over, and the language as i t were acquired\" and the later stages when \"they rose by clusters and in constellations, never to rise again\" (Bate, p. 293). On the other hand, the self-consciousness of a Coleridge produces a more subjective, purely idealist counterpart of Hazlitt's distinction, remaining preoccupied with disinterested intellectual contemplation and intuition (Bate, p. 373). Yet both these tendencies—an interest in the actual behaviour - 13 -of art and criticism and an urge to deny the usefulness of that material interest and experience at least to some—combine, though only selec-tiv e l y , in the c r i t i c a l theory of Matthew Arnold. Arnold is an early and not entirely misplaced testimony to the fact that, just as c r i t i c a l self-consciousness does not guarantee materialism, so \" p o l i t i c a l \" self-consciousness does not guarantee Marxism. The particular politics informing Arnold's literary axiology is liberal humanism, a politics that to one degree or another has defined most Western non-Marxist schools of criticism and c r i t i c a l theory since his time.I-* One important difference between Arnold and his ideological peers, however, is the fact that he i s , as Eagleton puts i t , \"refreshingly unhypocritical\" (LT, p. 24). In Arnold's c r i t i c a l ruminations, one may observe in their virtually unconcealed form a l l the p o l i t i c a l assumptions, interests, and values that mould a l i b e r a l humanist's pronouncements on \"literary\" value. It is this virtual transparency of motive that, as we shall see, worries that other prominent, latter-day lib e r a l humanist c r i t i c , Northrop Frye. Liberal humanism is a p o l i t i c a l characteristic of much post-nineteenth century criticism; methodologically, however, i t is neither homogeneous nor all-inclusive. One c r i t i c a l methodology i t partly straddles and partly excludes is that commonly and loosely known as \"sociological\" criticism. Among the early \"sociological\" c r i t i c s may be found names such as Mme. de Stael (1766-1817), Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), and Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828-93). The characterisation of these c r i t i c s ' works as \"sociological\" is a loose one because here again we find each individual c r i t i c emphasising different sets of social factors, in keeping with his or her general - 14 -outlook and interest in the world. However, one point at which, even i f only in a rough sense, the passive \"sociological\" method intersects an active h i s t o r i c a l , d i a l e c t i c a l , and materialist engagement with the world is the mature works of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95). The earliest source of my p o l i t i c a l argument is traceable to the mature thought and practice of these two nineteenth-century revolutionaries. It is their works that are wittingly or unwittingly invoked by the multiplicity of modern c r i t i c a l theorists claiming to be Marxist. And, as such, they wi l l be (selectively) examined in some detail l a t e r . As I suggested earlier, p o l i t i c a l literary axiology in it s present form is a relatively recent phenomenon, virtually non-existent before Matthew Arnold. Moreover, a certain spread s t i l l exists—narrower among the Marxists, wider among non-Marxist literary theorists—with regard to attitudes towards the possibility, usefulness, and correct mechanics of literary evaluation and value theory. In this Introduction, I have concentrated in general on those modern c r i t i c s who view axiology as both possible and useful; and, in particular, I have focused on those who address Marxist theory as well. An entire range of chiefly non-Marxist c r i t i c s argues, with varying mutual consistency, that a l l systematic evaluation is ultimately pointless and that theorists should simply accept, without analysis or criticism, the plurality of spontaneous evaluative responses induced in them when they read literature. This body of cr i t i c s ranges p o l i t i c a l l y from conservatives such as Harold Osborne, through liberals such as Northrop Frye, effective social democrats such as Raymond Williams, and ostensible Marxists such as Tony Bennett, to anarchists such as Roger - 15 -B. Rollin.16 while their reasons for advocating abstention from systematisation in evaluation vary, the majority of these c r i t i c s seem to share a paradoxical conception of literature and criticism as at once decisive and peripheral to society's existence.^ Their dismissal of \"extrinsic\" judgment goes hand in hand with an exclusive concentration on the \"literary\" as the vortex of cultural l i f e . This effective underestimation of material social factors reveals their distance from the Marxist conception of the limited self-generating power and social potency of literature and criticism. Perhaps the best-known non-Marxist spokesman for judgmental agnosticism today is Northrop Frye, and his chapter \"On Value-Judgment,\" in The Stubborn Structure (pp. 66-73), is a concise statement of his position.18 s t r i c t l y , Frye's views on evaluation are inseparable from his general theory of literature, which is in turn an organic part of his idealist philosophy and his aggressively anti-Marxist, l i b e r a l -humanist p o l i t i c a l stance.1^ Frye's general outlook, however, does produce certain flat self-contradictions in his statements on literary value i t s e l f which are relatively discrete and hence capable of separate analysis. In its most explicit form, Frye's treatment of the merits or demerits of evaluation is f a c i l e , both in methodology and in formulation. Thus, in The Stubborn Structure, he equates a l l value-judgements with so-called \"stock responses,\" unceremoniously dismissing both (p. 72). Apart from the questionable logic of dismissing any response merely because i t is \"stock,\" regardless of whether or not i t thereby recognises a certain relatively stable truth about reality, Frye's method leads to a series of similarly dubious - 16 -equations of value-judgment with \"the rejection of knowledge\" (p. 72) and \"anti-intellectualism\" (p. 73). Frye's dismissiveness is vividly captured in his statement that \" [t] he only value-judgment which is consistently and invariably useful to the scholarly c r i t i c is the judgment that his own writings, like the morals of a whore, are no better than they should be\" (p. 69). Frye later explicitly acknowledges the phenomenological premise of this statement when he claims that \"a writer's value-sense can never be logically a part of a c r i t i c a l discussion: i t can only be psychologically and rhetorically related to that discussion. The value-sense i s , as the phenomenological people say, pre—predicative\" (p. 70). This position in turn merely expresses axiologically Frye's functionalist conception of ideal, disinterested criticism in general: \"One of the tasks of criticism is that of the recovery of function, not of course the restoration of an original function, which is out of the question, but the recreation of function in a new context.\"20 Frye rejects Arnold's particular absolutist method of evaluation, one which judges literary works by measuring them against arbitrary \"touchstones.\" But he does so not because of Arnold's aristocratic, explicitly anti-working-class touchstones, which he merely notes, but because of Arnold's introduction, into his judgment, of any extra-\"literary,\" \"social\" and class considerations whatsoever: \"Arnold's 'high seriousness' evidently is closely connected with the view that epic and tragedy, because they deal with ruling-class figures and require the high style of decorum, are the aristocrats of literary forms. . . . We begin to suspect that the literary value-judgments are projections of social ones. . . . [A*jnd criticism, i f i t is not to - 17 -reject half the facts of literary experience, obviously has to look at art from the standpoint of an ideally classless society\" (Anatomy, pp. 21-22). The rejection of Arnold's particular (upper-class) c r i t e r i a therefore leads Frye to adopt the \"standpoint\" not of what Marxists regard as an historically more progressive class—the working class—but of a \"classless society\" admitted to be entirely ungrounded in present r e a l i t y . This purely imaginary transcendence of existng class-society can only be characterised by Marxists as an evasion of reality. It offers no concrete method of engaging with the existing, class-induced qualities of literature today. And i t is certainly not the same as the Marxists' own orientation towards a classless society through the social resolution—not evasion—of class conflict. Marxists would argue that Frye's \"standpoint\" of a \"classless society\" bespeaks not a programmatic orientation towards achieving such a society, through changing class-reality, but a mental escape from i t . Indeed, they might further argue that the charge of \"reject [ing]\" the \"facts\" of \"experience\" assumes dubious connotations when i t issues from him: Marxists, too, \"reject\" many \"facts\" of their experience, in the sense of striving to better people's existing conditions of living; but Frye here is clearly attributing to a l l principled evaluation a w i l l f u l blindness towards reality that is perhaps more properly applicable to his own method. This is the only characterisation I can make of his even-handed and contemptuous rejection of a l l class-perspectives as \"perverted culture\" and of a l l revolutionary action as anti-cultural, precisely in the declared interests of an abstract, Arnoldian liberalism: The social energy which maintains the class structure produces perverted culture in its three chief forms: mere upper-class - 18 -culture, or ostentation, mere middle-class culture, or vulgarity, and mere lower-class culture, or squalor. . . . Revolutionary action, of whatever kind, leads to the dictatorship of one class, and the record of history seems clear that there is no quicker way of destroying the benefits of culture. . . . It seems better to try to get clear of a l l such conflicts, attaching ourselves to Arnold's other axiom that 'culture seeks to do away with classes.' The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. (Anatomy, p. 347) Frye obviously believes that this exclusive focus on works of \"imagination\" inhabiting an utterly non-existent realm does not constitute a blatant rejection of \"half the facts of literary experience.\" This is the familiar, one-sided view and universalist rhetoric of bourgeois, l i b e r a l humanism, a combination historically counterposed to the open partisanship of Marxism. Of course, Frye's enjoinments to c r i t i c a l theorists to abstain from partisan evaluation and to reject more than half the facts of class-experience contradict his own practice. Not only does he repeatedly valorise or downgrade particular authors and specific values; the firm absolutism of his personal choices and their arbitrary rationalisations exactly reify in practice the logic of his Utopian, idealist theory. Thus, on the one hand, Frye argues in Anatomy that \"[tjhere are no definite positions to be taken in chemistry or philology and i f there are any to be taken in criticism, criticism is not a fi e l d of genuine learning\" (p. 19). He finds \"comparisons of greatness\" \"odious,\" recommending that they be \"left to take care of themselves\" (p.27): \"criticism has no business to react against things, but should show a steady advance toward undiscriminating catholicity\" (p. 25). He - 19 -declares \"[tfjhe goal of ethical criticism\" to be \" trans valuation, the ability to look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who is able to compare them in some degree with the infinite vision of possibilities presented by culture\" (p. 348). On the other hand, proceeding from his abstract and questionable concept of a \"pure\" literature—which, \"like pure mathematics, contains i t s own meaning\" (p. 351) and whose \"central myth . . . in i t s narrative aspect . . . [ i s j . . . the quest-myth\" (\"The Archetypes of Literature,\" in Bate, p. 607)—Frye freely counterposes \"mediocre works of art\" to \"the profound masterpiece\" (\"Archetypes,\" Bate, p. 604). He contrasts \"popular literature which appeals to the inertia of the untrained mind\" to \"a sophisticated attempt to disrupt the connection between the poet and his environment,\" such as in Joyce (\"Archetypes,\" Bate, p. 607). And he counterposes \"redeemable\" to \"irredeemable art\" (Anatomy, p. 25). He openly states that \" [t] he real concern of the evaluating c r i t i c is with positive value, with the goodness, or perhaps the genuiness of the poem . . .\" (Anatomy, p. 27), and confidently asserts that \"[Y]he c r i t i c w i l l find soon, and constantly,\" that Milton simply \"is a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than [sir RichardJ Blackmore\" (Anatomy, p. 25). In a similarly absolutist vein, Frye also asserts that \"the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better\" (\"Archetypes,\" Bate, p. 603) .21 Frye is thus caught in the contradiction between his appeals for \"undiscriminating catholicity\" and his actual practice of selecting particular authors and evaluative c r i t e r i a on a class-specific—that i s , on a consistently bourgeois-elitist—basis. Yet, Frye himself occasionally shows an awareness of his practical absolutism, for - 20 -instance acknowledging that his Anatomy \"takes certain literary values for granted, as fully established by c r i t i c a l experience\" (Anatomy, p. 20). And indeed, at one point, perceiving the frequently unfeasible outcome of his functionalist logic in practice, yet unable to spell out the methodological alternative to that dead-end, Frye l i t e r a l l y leaves his contradiction hanging, between a negation and an uncertainty: \"To bring my own view that criticism as knowledge should constantly progress and reject nothing into direct experience would mean that the latter should progress toward a general stupor of satisfaction with everything written, which is not quite what I have in mind\" (Anatomy, p. 28). Not surprisingly, we never find out what alternative he does quite have in mind. Yet the example of Frye i s , for Marxists, more productive than that of most of his co-thinkers; for, unlike them, he spells out the self-defeating circularity of his own non-Marxist logic. Marxists would neither profess or advocate \"undiscriminating catholicity\" nor wish to ignore bourgeois society's rea l , definitive class-polarities in practice. Consequently, even though this would and does ultimately entail d i f f i c u l t practical decisions about revolutionary commitment to class-struggle, Marxists would at least aspire to that crucial seriousness of conviction and consistency of logic that seems to be lacking from Frye's flippant dismissal of a l l \"revolutionary actions.\" Yet, even in self-contradiction, Frye is superior to most of his co-thinkers. For he recognises and acknowledges—however imprecisely, c l i n i c a l l y , and minimisingly—precisely that unity of idea and action that forms the backbone of Marxism (which he dismissively lumps together with Nietzscheanism and certain \"rationalisations of oligarchic values\"). Thus, there can be few more tel l i n g recommendations to abandon Frye himself than his own involuntary tribute to that same object of his contempt—Marxism: If we cut through history at any point, including our own, and study a cross-section of i t , we get a class structure. Culture may be employed by a social or intellectual class to increase its prestige; and in general, moral censors, selectors of great traditions, apologists of religious or p o l i t i c a l causes, aesthetes, radicals, codifiers of great books, and the l i k e , are expressions of such class tensions. We soon realise, in studying their pronouncements, that the only really consistent moral criticism of this type would be the kind which is harnessed to an all-round philosophy of society, such as we find not only in Marxism but in Nietzsche and in some of the rationalisations of oligarchic values in nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century America. In a l l these culture is treated as a human productive power which in the past has been, like other productive powers, exploited by other ruling classes and is now to be revalued in terms of a better society. But as this ideal society exists only in the future, the present valuation of culture is in terms of i t s interim revolutionary effectiveness. This revolutionary way of looking at culture is also as old as Plato. . . . (Anatomy, p. 346) In contrast to the non-Marxist faction discouraging value theory, typified by Frye, we find a substantial non-Marxist grouping and a smaller pool of self-declared Marxists who favour such theorising. The non-Marxist axiologists are extremely heterogeneous; they range from narrow particularists, discussing the possibility of various single c r i t e r i a of value, to mere describers of the abstract dynamics of evaluation. Some of them, however, even share much of their empirical observations and logic with the Marxists. Nevertheless, none of them manages to generalise these observations to the point of questioning their own overall, usually rationalist theoretical framework. Even the most sophisticated of these theorists thus remains on a course parallel to or—at best—converging on Marxism.22 - 22 -By far the most thorough, wide-ranging, and cogent statement from this group of non-Marxist axiologists is Barbara Herrnstein Smith's anti-Frye polemic, \"Fixed Marks and Variable Constancies: A Parable of Literary Value,\" in Poetics Today, 1, Nos. 1-2 (Autumn 1979), 7-22. In so far as class-riven society could ever yield a general, trans-class algebra of evaluation, Smith's work offers us a glimpse of i t . Indeed, Marxists could well harness, with advantage, Smith's formulations to their own method: they need merely subordinate them to a Marxist overview, crucially by inserting the class-differential as a modification. Smith provides a useful general history, sociology, and psychology of evaluative dynamics in its various forms—implicit and e x p l i c i t , personal and institutional. She vividly sketches the various situational factors contributing to a text's perceived value, the real principles as well as the external range and internal patterning of a l l evaluation, and the numerous variables shaping the specific forms of a l l the (relative) \"constancies\" of value. While she commences with an account of the complexity and slipperiness of a l l evaluation, Smith actually concludes with a positive recommendation for cautious evaluation, in explicit opposition to Frye's theoretical agnosticism and i t s obverse, empirical absolutism. Indeed, the logic of her argument seems ultimately to indicate Marxism as the only productive way forward, and she herself seems far from hostile to that option.23 Thus, Smith begins by pointing out that, in a sense, evaluation is \"always compromised, impure, contingent; . . . always Time's fool\" (p. 8). Evaluation starts with the writer's own acts of creation, alteration, rejection, and approval (p. 8); this is followed by \"an - 23 -intermediary history of valuings, also variable, also contingent\": \"publishing, printing, purchasing and preserving\" (p. 9). Acts of suppression (as with the Quarto edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets) and of selection (as with a l l anthologists) are also implicit acts of evaluation, and so are the acts of teaching, scholarly analysis,and even informal quotation (pp. 9-10, 15). Yet value remains impure; evaluation remains contingent (p. 9). And perhaps nothing illustrates this fact more vividly than the history of a l l the negative responses to Shakespeare's Sonnets evoked through the centuries, from c r i t i c s whom Smith respects as \"men of education and discrimination\": Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Byron, Hallam, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters (p. 10). This is why, to emphasise her theoretical point, Smith herself refuses to offer \"her own\" practical evaluation of the Sonnets.24 But the conclusion that Smith draws from these observations is neither subjectivist-empiricist nor abstractly absolutist. For she firmly rejects \"the well-known social parochialism of academic c r i t i c s \" (p. 15); \"experience,\" she notes, is double-edged: i t \"not only deepens and broadens us; i t also batters, scars, individualises and specialises us; experience is a provincialism of it s own, separating us from our fellow creatures\" (p. 11). On the other hand, equally out of the ques-tion for her is the possibility of absolute—what she calls \"object-ive\"—value (p. 17). Thus, \"nothing hits the spot a l l the time, because the spot is always different\" (p. 14); also, perception of value largely depends on \"the nature and potency of our own assumptions, expectations, capacities and interests\" (p. 16); literary value is thus \"radically relative and therefore 'constantly variable'\" and contingent (p. 17). - 24 -But, Smith firmly c l a r i f i e s , \"none of the terms here—contingent, relative or v a r i a b l e — i s equivalent to 'subjective' . . .\" (p.17). Rejecting both traditional \"dead-end conclusions\" of subjectivist axiology—\"either de gustibus non disputandum est . . . or the conviction that there exists . . . objective value\"—Smith argues instead that \"the variables in question are limited and 'regular'\": that i s , \"they occur within ranges\" and \"they exhibit patterns and principles\"; and \"in that sense, but only in that sense, we may speak of 'constancies' of literary value\" (p. 17). Thus, these variable constants \"should be distinguished from other kinds and conceptions of invariance that are associated with theories of literary value. . . . ^Tjhe constancies are not equivalent to what are sometimes referred to as the 'universals' of human nature\" (p. 20). As Smith moves towards her conclusion, she more and more reveals the inadequacies of her seemingly purely rationalist framework. Thus, most crucially, she adds an algebraic corollary that finds no particular, concrete illustration within her a r t i c l e , but which poses her logical problem in such a way as to clearly indicate a concrete, class-defined solution. (And today, as always, i t is not the liberal c r i t i c s of the Frye school but Marxists who stand to gain most by advancing their solution from their own, openly class-partisan point of view). Research, Smith points out, \"does not conclude with the discovery of va r i a b i l i t y : we must seek to account for the variabilities themselves. . . .\" And invoking \"basic [biologicalJ mechanisms of human perception and cognition\" is not enough, for they \" w i l l always operate differentially in different environments and interact with a broad range of other variables ( h i s t o r i c a l , cultural, situational, etc.) . . .\" - 25 -(p. 20). Similarly, \" [t]he attempt to locate invariance in the nature (or, l a t t e r l y , the structure) of the works themselves\" is \"misguided,\" for two reasons: \"different features or properties w i l l be valued dif-ferently by different audiences, etc., but, more significantly . . . £,] the very perception of those presumed properties w i l l vary\" (p. 21). Thus, Smith concludes—echoing the phenomenological argument, though never denying the reality and importance of a l l the relative, contributing factors—that, like a l l value, literary value is not the property of an object _or of a subject, but, rather, the product of the dynamics of a system. As readers and c r i t i c s of literature, we are within that system; and, because we are neither omniscient nor immortal and do have particular interests, we w i l l , at any given moment, be viewing i t from some perspective. It is from such a perspective that we experience the value of a work and also from such a perspective that we estimate its potential value for others. There is nothing illusory in the experience, however, or necessarily inaccurate in the estimate. From that r e a l — i f limited—perspective, at that r e a l — i f transient—moment, our experience of the value of the work JLS_ its value. Or, in the terms I should prefer: our experience of \"the value of the work\" is equivalent to our experience of the work in relation to the total economy of our existence. And the reason our estimates of i t s potential value for other people may be quite accurate is that the total economy of their existence may, in fact, be quite similar to that of our own. (P. 21) Smith's above formulations, essentially pointing to the \"system\" and the evaluator's \"perspective\" as decisive factors, seem to me to confirm—in their limited, indirect, and negative way—Marx and Engels' thesis that the history of a l l hitherto existing society since the advent of written records is the history of class-struggle. For, Smith's abstract rejection of subjectivism and absolutism implicitly and'futile-ly begs a concrete resolution, one that can posit a real \"variable constancy\" in present society. It is here, I believe, that - 26 -the Marxist perceptions about \"class\" can provide the missing real factor to resolve the dilemma of Smith's abstract algebra. With an article such as Robert Weimann's \"'Reception Aesthetics' and the Crisis in Literary History,\" in C l i o , 5 , No. 1 ( 1 9 7 5 ) , 3 - 3 5 , the pro-evaluation discussion begins to shade over into the Marxist sideof the spectrum. Weimann's article is a te l l i n g pro-Marxist critique of limitless relativism, especially as exemplified by the \"reception aesthetics\" of Hans Robert Jauss. Yet, I categorise Weimann's art i c l e as \"pro-Marxist\" rather than Marxist, and I do this for a reason. Undoubtedly, his expose? of Jauss's bourgeois-reformist p o l i t i c a l assumptions employs negative arguments that Marxists themselves would find indispensable; and his concise characterisation of \"tradition,\" for instance, reveals his easy grasp of the general Marxist method of dialectical-historical materialism (\"As an historical category, 'tradition' . . . applies to objective relationships in the literature of the past, but i t also applies to a necessary relationship of the literary historian to the past\" [p. 1 6 J ) . However, he never emerges witha positive methodological class-alternative to Jauss's bourgeois-reformism: and his entire polemic lacks this alternative class-axis, so that even his generally materialist discussions of \"tradition\" sometimes reveal traces of absolutism (as in his sanguine tone in referring to past \"masterpieces\" [p. 2 8 ] ) . Nevertheless, Weimann's article does provide useful ammunition for the argument that \"the dialectic between structure and function, between the history of genesis and the history of effect deserves to be at the centre of a new methodological conception of literary history\" (pp. 2 0 - 2 1 ) . While one might question the centrality of this particular dialectic as Weimann - 27 -describes i t , depending on one's overall theoretical project, Weimann's attempt to historicise the entire problematic of literary production and consumption is one wholly compatible with and in the interests of Marxism. In its current spate and form, the discussion of literary value among self-declared Marxists almost certainly dates from Terry Eagleton's chapter \"Marxism and Aesthetic Value,\" in Criticism and Ideology (pp. 162-87). We shall examine Eagleton's argument in detail i n Chapter 4. Here, we may merely note that he deplores a certain \"theoretical prudery . . . in vogue within Marxist aesthetics\" which, \"£a] t its simplest level . . . appears as an egalitarian unease about the 'elitism' of assigning certain works to second-class status\" and, \" [i]n i -t s m o r e sophisticated form . . . presents i t s e l f as a rigorous s c i e n t i f i c i t y hostile to the idealism of 'normative' judgment\"; \"evaluation,\" he observes, \"is thus evacuated from the realm of literary science, to be furtively cultivated, perhaps, as a private pleasure\" (CI, pp. 162-3). Peter Widdowson's \"'Literary Value' and the Reconstruction of Criticism,\" in Literature and History, 6, No. 2 (Autumn 1980), 138-50, offers a thoughtful and suggestive response to Eagleton (as well as to Tony Bennett), outlining certain \"pragmatic\" empirical projects compatible with Eagleton's theory and salvable from Bennett's extreme conjuncturalism (pp. 139-40). The projects constitute, within the realm of discourse, a virtual emergency programme to stop further bourgeois ravagement of culture (pp. 143-44, 147-48). At the same time,Widdowson acknowledges the overall limits of such purely discursive measures and the need for \"a radical restructuring of the education - 28 -system and of the society which sustains i t \" as the only long-term solution (p. 147). Widdowson's seven broadly-categorised exercises urge more detailed analyses of commonly-discussed literary \"traditions\" and their individual authors. They c a l l for historical demystification of the institutions of \"literature\" and \"criticism\" themselves, for renewed emphasis on the details of literary production (as opposed to Bennett's emphasis on consumption, or response), and for explanations of \"the way the 'major' authors of the past are 'produced' (and valued) in our own age\" (pp. 147-49). It is a proposition deserving careful consideration. Yet, Widdowson's obvious abil i t y to link the ideal to the real remains within the overall framework of the very academic discourse that he himself acknowledges to be self-defeating. In that sense, he ultimately writes as a c r i t i c f i r s t , and as a Marxist later, thus succumbing in reality to the same reversed priorities that handicap virtually a l l non-revolutionary intellectuals formally sympathetic to Marxism. While the present axiological debate within ostensible Marxism seems to date from Eagleton's key chapter in Criticism and Ideology, i t s immediate pre-history reaches back to the rise of Stalinist ideology, commonly associated with the \"thirties\" and, in Britain, with such cri t i c s as Christopher Caudwell, Alick West, and George Thomson. I shall discuss Caudwell in the next chapter, but a glance at a sample-piece on literary value by West would be useful for introducing that entire mode of c r i t i c a l theory. In his chapter on \"The Relativity of Literary Value,\" in Crisis and Criticism,25 Alick West makes the class-connection between values - 29 -and evaluation that non-Marxists ignore or minimise, though his positive programme is the contradictory, so-called \"socialist humanism\" of Stalin and his literary co-thinkers, the later Gorky and A.A. Zhdanov. West's formulations on the question are not always self-consistent or clear; but, in fact, they are more sharply focussed than those of his mentor and peer, Caudwell. West proceeds from the materialist premise that the priorities and experiences of l i f e — e s p e c i a l l y of p o l i t i c a l life—determine literary theory and evaluative c r i t e r i a , not vice versa: If we realise in our own lives that we have to contribute to making society, we like the literature which embodies that creation. If we are content to exploit society, we have no possibility of interest in literature. . . . But criticism does not decide whether we were stirred by emotion; our lives do that. (P. 102) As he puts i t earlier in the chapter, \"We value literature as we value our l i v e s , for i t is a part of our lives\" (p. 101). Further, West completes the logic of his albeit flawed Marxist orientation by explicitly asserting that \"the most creative movement in our society\" i s none other than \"socialism\" (as he understands that concept). And from this self-avowedly socialist perspective flows his c r i t i c a l manifesto: \"{jr]he criticism of our l i v e s , by the test of whether we are helping forward the most creative movement in our society, is the only effective foundation of the criticism of literature\" (p. 102). Thus, \" |V]he social organism to which literature has to be related, is humanity i n i t s advance to socialism. The function of criticism is to judge literature, both content and form, as a part of this movement. It can only f u l f i l l this function i f i t takes part in this movement i t s e l f on - 30 -the side of the workers of the world\" (p. 103). But West is far from employing that manifesto, in its abstraction, as a catch-all. He wants to explain reality by recognising i t , not explain i t away by reducing its complexity. Abstract theory, for West, must thus await refinement or face rejection i f i t cannot explain, in its given form, a l l the facts of one's literary experience: It should perhaps be pointed out that the analysis of value given here cannot be used as a touch-stone. The theory of value depending on the expression of the alternations i n fundamental social experience does not enable us to read a poem with a blank mind, note the alternations, and then pass judgment. The heightening of social energy [which is literature's valuable effect] has to be felt before the means by which i t was aroused can be studied. The s t i r of emotion is prior to analysis, and the condition of i t . . . . But criticism does not decide whether we were stirred; our lives do that. And i f they are such that we are stirred by what is bad, no c r i t i c a l theory is proof against being twisted into s e l f - j u s t i f i c a t i o n . (P. 102) Against any such a r t i f i c i a l s e l f - j u s t i f i c a t i o n , West counterposes as the criterion of value \"the test of whether we are helping forward the most creative movement in our society\" (p.102). \"The value of literature,\" he says, paralleling Caudwell, \"springs from the fact that i t continues and changes the organisation of social energy\" (p. 101). Debatable though this criterion might be, to West i t obviously appears to have the \"advantage\" (over many equivalent but abstract ones) of being practically verifiable. Thus, for West, the dialectics of evaluation are both concrete and complex. They preclude not only absolutism and extreme (subjective) relativism, both of which deny the real but transitory nature of literary experience; they also preclude any view of the work that might deny the ingredients of the work i t s e l f by invoking what i t presumes to - 31 -be the completely dissimilar and unrelated response of different social classes to i t . Hence, says West, \"our judgments are not only temporary class prejudices, but contain truth\" (p. 101); and \"the beauty of literature is the felt truth that we live through organised productive activity\" (p. 101). Therefore, the \"undertone of scepticism, that we cannot trust our taste, denies the experience of valuing. . . . To discuss the relativity of value from the standpoint that we have no reason whatever for believing in ourselves, is useless metaphysics; for we do believe in ourselves\" (p. 101). Nevertheless, West admits, \"we may be, and often are, wrong,\" and therefore must evaluate literature through the objective criterion of i t s impact on \"the organisation of social energy\" (p. 101). With the \"thirties'\" school of Marxists, as exemplified by West, we touch contentious claims to and interpretations of Marxism that form a major area of concern in the rest of my dissertation.^6 These conflicts are best illuminated and resolved by reexamining the theories and practical histories of the c l a s s i c a l , revolutionary Marxists themselves—Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky. Certain important similarities as well as differences mark a l l the chief figures who are the objects of this study, including the revolutionaries. Thus, Marx and Engels' specific concerns are \"different\" from Lenin's and Trotsky's, in so far as they are separated by a world-historic event: the only successful and healthy workers' revolution in history—the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Furthermore, the chiefly p o l i t i c a l concerns of these four active revolutionaries are in turn distinct from the primarily cultural preoccupations of Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton. And f i n a l l y , - 32 -Caudwell and Eagleton both openly claim to accept and even advocate Marxist theory, whereas Williams tries to maintain an e x p l i c i t , sceptical distance from i t . Yet I have compacted a l l seven of the above individuals in a single dissertation. My main basis for doing this is their common theoretical engagement with Marxism, shown in the seriousness of their attempts to examine the relevance of that theory to literary phenomena. Of course, I also note the fact that a l l three English c r i t i c s claim to be working, with varying consistency, within the framework of Marxism. The revolutionaries from Marx to Trotsky constitute, in my view, an historically-vindicated p o l i t i c a l gauge for assessing the claimed Marxism of the professional c r i t i c s . And Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton out-qualify an obviously larger galaxy of similarly oriented professionals simply by being B r i t i s h , mutually near-contemporaneous, and well-known—decisive delimiting credentials for a study this size. The common engagement of these seven c r i t i c s with Marxism has tended to reveal and clarify a central problem in Marxist axiology: the nature of revolutionary commitment, or the determining effect of building (or rejecting) the revolutionary workers' party on Marxist c r i t i c s ' c r i t e r i a for judging literature. It seems to me that a damaging hiatus has long existed between two areas of ostensible Marxist commitment—the directly p o l i t i c a l and the cultural (the latter including, of course, the literary and the c r i t i c a l ) . Marxist p o l i t i c a l commitment i s , logica l l y , incremental, concentric, and (ultimately) comprehensive; and i t presupposes consistency. Thus, a committed Marxist cannot seriously fight imperialism on the battlefield and simultaneously write sincere paeans to i t in the press. Yet, with the - 33 -general exception of the revolutionary Marxists, this is almost precisely the anomaly characterising much ostensibly Marxist c r i t i c a l theory. This is not to say that, as in my above, self-evidently absurd example, everyone from Marx to Eagleton at some point or other practises in culture the exact opposite of what he preaches in pol i t i c s ; the problem is a l i t t l e more complex, as we shall see in the section on Lenin in this Introduction. Put simply, however, i t reduces i t s e l f to the question of the changing Marxist notion and practice of what has often loosely been termed \"commitment.\"27 After Lenin, I have argued, a Marxist c r i t i c ' s commitment to revolution can only be ultimately tested and confirmed by his or her seriousness about building a revolutionary workers' party. One measure of seriousness would be the general priority that is accorded to this task; another measure would be the orientation, even within one's own sphere of specialisation, resulting from such commitment: that i s , one's seriousness as a Marxist c r i t i c would ultimately depend on whether one approached Marxism primarily from the point of view of literary and c r i t i c a l interests, or whether one approached every particular sphere of a c t i v i t y , including literary criticism, primarily from the standpoint of a revolutionary, organisation-oriented Marxist.28 T have maintained that the latter approach is a logical prerequisite—though never a guarantee—for any further, consistently Marxist advancement of literary axiology. Yet, in much so-called Marxist aesthetics, a virtual p o l i t i c a l indifferentism pervades attitudes towards evaluation. \"Culture\" is somehow deemed close enough to \" l i f e \" to benefit from radical glossing but too far from \"politics\" to be affected by the organisational - 34 -question. To a large extent, such a dichotomy between Marxist politics and \"Marxist\" aesthetics has been historically inevitable, for the socio-political revolution today logically constitutes a much more urgent, fundamental, and demanding task than its cultural consolidation. But this \"dichotomy\" between politics and culture is more a question of immediate practical priorities than of a strategic ideological orientation. This is why I see no reason why self-avowed Marxist \" c r i t i c s , \" whose specialty is literature, should have to be blind to the need for sharing with other Marxists the p o l i t i c a l direction of the revolution, in particular as streamlined through the revolutionary workers' organisation. The mere objects of one's special professional interest need not, by their sheer existential variety, impose a correspondingly inconsistent and directionless evaluative approach to them—least so among people claiming to be conscious Marxists. Instead, I have argued, Marxist c r i t i c s should begin the struggle for genuine revolutionary consistency. That i s , they should tackle, in its concrete complexity, the problem of squaring the production and appreciation of literature with the overall needs of the socio-political revolution, at a steady though cautious pace. This has been my principal theme in this dissertation. It suggests that, for Marxists, the conditions for a dialectical resolution of the anomaly between systematised politics and arbitrary literary assessments can only be provided by the interpenetration resulting from synchronised activities in a workers' revolutionary organisation. The surrealist Andr£ Breton, though speaking here chiefly about art and not criticism, put the matter well: \"From where we stand, we maintain that the activity of - 35 -interpreting the world must continue to be linked with the activity of changing the world. . . . 'Transform the world,' Marx said; 'change l i f e , ' Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.\"29 We now return to the areas of controversy mentioned earlier. I w i l l f i r s t explain my pro-Marx position on the categories of \"base\" and \"superstructure,\" \"class,\" and \"partisanship\"—categories arousing much controversy, especially among the p o l i t i c a l theoreticians of the so-called New Left. I shall then explain my pro-Lenin stance on the related question of the revolutionary workers' (\"vanguard\") party, distinguishing it from both modern social democracy and Stalinist bureaucratism and seeing its continuity in the programme of Trotsky's presently-defunct Fourth International. In a suggestive comment on a l l class societies, Marx and Engels noted in The Manifesto of the Communist Party that \"the social consciousness of past ages, despite a l l the multiplicity and variety i t displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.\"30 More than half a century later, another Marxist, Rosa Luxemburg, amplified that cryptic observation: We are often told that our movement lacks the persons of talent who might be capable of further elaborating Marx's theories. . . . It is pure illusion to suppose that the working class, i n its upward striving, can of its own accord become immeasurably creative in the theoretical domain. . . . [XJctive participation of the workers in the march of science is subject to the fulfilment of very definite social conditions. The utmost i t can do today is to safeguard bourgeois culture from the vandalism of the bourgeois reaction, and create the social conditions required for a free cultural development. . . . Not until the working class has been liberated from i t s present conditions of existence w i l l the Marxist method of - 36 -research be socialised in conjunction with other means of production, so that i t can be fu l l y utilised for the benefit of humanity-at-large, and so that i t can be developed to the f u l l measure of its functional capacity.31 The argument in this dissertation has been advanced in view of the above paradox, and yet precisely with the intent of f a c i l i t a t i n g i t s eventual methodological resolution. Marx and Engels: Base-Superstructure, Class, and Partisanship From the well-known fact that Marx left no coherent and comprehensive treatise on literary theory, ostensibly Marxist c r i t i c a l specialists have drawn one of two seemingly opposed conclusions: (1) either that \"the views of Marx on art and i t s function\" can be \"deduced\" exclusively from his \"numerous internally connected statements\" or (2) that \" [i]t is the materialist method of the Grundrisse and Capital, not hints gleaned from the 'literary criticism,' which must form the basis of anything worthy of the t i t l e of a 'Marxist criticism.'\"32 This is a false counterposition that damagingly ignores the real unity of Marx's developing theory with his changing revolutionary practice. It is crucial for Marxists to remember that Marx (like Engels) wrought his theories in close connection with his practical revolutionary a c t i v i t i e s , f i r s t as a radical-democratic disciple of the Jacobin communists (such as Babeuf and Blanqui) and then as a pioneering organiser of the modern proletariat and its early leadership, the First International.33 Now, scholars have long established that, in aesthetic matters, Marx was \"a creature of his own age\";34 t h e m a- jo r philosophical components of his aesthetic theory are usually recognised to be German (Hegelian) classicism and the broader, European Romanticism, in the tradition of Rousseau.^5 But i t would be a mistake to explain Marx's views on literary and a r t i s t i c value merely in light of his philosophico-cultural training, ignoring their proven imbrication with his economic analysis and p o l i t i c a l values and practice. After a l l , as Marx and Engels themselves pointed out as early as The German Ideology (written i n 1845-46) , \"not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and a l l other types of theory.\"36 It is this view of the objective dynamic of history that doubtless confirmed Marx in his famous thesis that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, the problem is how to change i t . The materialist premise of this programme was the analytical model of \"base\" and \"superstructure,\" f i r s t elaborated by Marx in his 1859 Preface to _A Contribut ion to the Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy (henceforth cited as Preface): In the social production of their l i f e , men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their w i l l , relations of production which correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and p o l i t i c a l superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material l i f e conditions the social, p o l i t i c a l and intellectual l i f e process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive - 38 -forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, p o l i t i c a l , religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight i t out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material l i f e , from the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before a l l productive forces for which there is room in i t have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society i t s e l f . (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow: Progress, 1973, pp. 503-504; excerpted i n Marx/Engels, pp. 41-42) Marx here is attempting to capture a complex relation between structure and process, both of which he sees as also being internally complex. The positive aim of the description is to suggest a genuinely dialectical and materialist model of social l i f e which w i l l be concrete enough to counter the idealism of Hegel but general enough to marginalise the particularities of national, cultural, and other variants. The social structure i t s e l f is regarded as internally differentiated between two main realms: the \"real foundation\" and the \"superstructure.\" The foundation consists, in its turn, of two chief components: the \"material productive forces\" and the social \"relations of production\"; the superstructure consists of \"legal, p o l i t i c a l , religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short ideological forms.\" These different components interlock, and even interpenetrate, in a changing relationship, as the social structure as a whole passes through various - 39 -\"transformations,\" from birth to death. Now, some of these components and realms are subordinate in overall power, and secondary in the chronological order of their appearance, to others. Thus, the social relations of production are \"definite,\" \"indispensable,\" and \"independent\" of people's \" w i l l \" : but they in turn merely \"correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces.\" Together, however, these mutually complementary productive forces and relations constitute \"the economic structure of society, the real foundation. . . .\" The superstructure, on the other hand, \"rises\" on these foundations, and \"definite forms of social consciousness\" \"correspond\" to i t . In this sense, the economic infrastructure, or base, \"conditions\" the ideological superstructure; existence \"determines\" consciousness and i t s products and cohabitants. But a l l this determination, correspondence, construction, domination, and subordination operates within a (changing) relationship. The f i r s t phase of any overall structural change witnesses a \"conflict\" within the base, between the economic relations and the economic forces. This is a contradiction primarily of \"material\" l i f e . However, this primarily infrastructural, material contradiction induces a corresponding superstructural change as well, though the overall appearance of the latter can only follow the overall appearance of the former, and may do so \"more or less rapidly.\" I should emphasise here that Marx suggests not only that the superstructural change is contingent on the economic, but also that the superstructure is necessarily transformed. Obversely, he does not set a time-limit on this conditional but (given the pre-condition) ultimately - 40 -inevitable superstructural change. And while he voluntarily admits the relative d i f f i c u l t y of \"determining!\" a revolutionary transformation in that sphere, he does not make such determining the test of the transformation's reality or of its dependence on the economic contradictions. (This is clearly the point behind Marx's quip that \"Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with a l l economic forms of society\" fCapital: A Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy, Vol. I, ed. Frederick Engels, t r . Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1867; t r . 1887; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1967); cited in Marx/Engels, p. 265].) Finally , we may note t h a t — f o r good reasons (as he explains at length in Capital)—Marx does not specify the exact economic relations, forces, or products that may be considered indispensable to any one society at any given point in time: for, the model of \"base-superstructure\" expresses an algebraic relationship, whose actual quantities w i l l reveal wide fluctuations internationally and periodically while confirming in each individual case the validity of that same configuration. Now, as the p o l i t i c a l revisionists t e s t i f y , this view and interpretation has its opponents. Jameson perceptively describes the general p o l i t i c a l psychology of revisionism as \"the act of making a theory comfortable and palatable by leaving out whatever calls for praxis or change, whatever is likely to be painful for the purely contemplative intellectual consumption of a middle-class public\" (Marxism and Form, p. xv). Certainly, in its incidental characterisation of the objective p o l i t i c a l effect of revisionism, Jameson's primarily psychological description seems to f i t both the - 41 -early revisionists, such as Eduard Bernstein, and the New Left revisionists, such as Herbert Marcuse, as well as their literary-c r i t i c a l co-thinkers, such as Peter Demetz and Raymond Williams. The specific terms of the debate currently centring on \"base\" and \"superstructure\" are rightly associated with Marxism. But one.component of i t — t h e debate over the relationship between \"matter\" and \"consciousness\" in general—goes at least as far back (in the West) as Plato and Democritus, known in philosophy as the proponents of idealism and materialism, respectively. In i t s philosophical aspect, Marxism is the modern continuator of Democritus' materialism: i t believes that, i n the objective scheme of existence, matter is primary and consciousness secondary. E.P. Thompson provides a simplistic but vivid i l l u s t r a t i o n of this materialistic view when he observes that \"the wood cannot determine what is made, nor whether i t is made well or badly, but i t can certainly determine what can not be made . . . \" (Poverty of Theory, p. 18). But Marxism is more than just a philosophy: i t is also a guide to social change. And the \"base-superstructure\" model is one that addresses the complex dynamics of general social change, without, relegating a l l matter to the base and a l l consciousness to the. superstructure alone. This is why the concept of modes, forces,.and relations of production together as constituents of the base becomes crucial to an understanding of Marx's model. The revisionists are unable to grasp this difference between mere \"matter\" and Marx's economic \"base,\" which latter requires for its own perpetuation a complementary—though dist i n c t , often deformed, and contingent— consciousness. While a detailed refutation of the revisionists belongs more - 42 -properly to another subject and project, certain key points can be discussed here. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), the German Social Democrat, was the major initiator of theoretical revisionism, but even he did not chiefly attack the \"base-superstructure\" model (or, for that matter, the concepts of \"class\" and \"partisanship\"). More centrally, he began to advocate, after Engels' death, the programme of gradualism, or slow, evolutionary, reformist \"growth\" into socialism.^ The so-called New Left revisionism, stemming from the nineteen-fifties, is much more thoroughgoing. A random but typical example of a New Left revision of Marx's \"base-superstructure\" model would be Ellen Meiksins Wood's \"The Separation of the Economic and the P o l i t i c a l i n Capitalism.\"38 Wood simultaneously acknowledges a \"differentiation\" between economics and politics in practical l i f e and attacks a certain conceptual \"separation\" between them which she misattributes to Marx (and Engels). In self-imagined opposition to those theorists, she argues that the (capitalist) economy is indeed affected by p o l i t i c a l decisions. But in thus stressing their obvious interaction, Wood denies the decisive centrality of economic power in relation to i t s matching p o l i t i c a l ideas and practices. She analyses the relationship between economics and politics as a s t a t i c , unhistoricised, co-equal, conjunctural intersection, thereby misrepresenting their existential simultaneity as a balance of determining power. In attacking Marx and Engels on this question, therefore, she not only brings against them charges that are factually misplaced; she commits a category-mistake, missing the exclusively interventionist perspective motivating Marx and Engels' particular analytical methods. (The divergence in aim and method between the - 43 -Marxists and Wood becomes especially clear i f we compare her definition of the state to Engels1 or Lenin's.) Nor is Wood alone in thus revising and attacking Marx. Indeed, more germanely, an entire school of literary c r i t i c s , including ostensible Marxists as well as explicit anti-Marxists, misreads Marx's Preface and indulges in similar, misdirected criticism. One of the most concise and forthrightly hostile of such criticisms issues from Rene Wellek. Wellek, a c r i t i c not particularly concerned with Marxism, dismisses Marx's view of social change as \"rigid economic determination\" that has been decisively, \"totally belied by history.\"39 Falsely charging that Marx and Engels \"deny that ideology has any history or development\" (Wellek, p. 234), Wellek quotes and then tries to parody what he misconstrues to be Marx's idea of a communist society: \"'In a communist society there w i l l not be any painters, but at the most men who, among other things, also paint' (men apparently like Churchill and Eisenhower)\" (Wellek, p.235). Wellek obviously and wrongly believes that history has ended. Similarly, Fokkema and Kunne-Ibsch (p. 87) claim that, in his 1857 draft of the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy (to be discussed below), \"Marx departs from the deterministic concept that developments in the superstructure, notably in the realm of aesthetics, must necessarily follow from changes in the economic basis.\" Their basis for this claim is merely that, i n the Introduction, he \"emphasises that there may be an unbalanced development of a r t i s t i c and material production.\" And from this distorted construction, these c r i t i c s conclude that \" i f Marx's theory of unbalanced development is applied to modern times, i t follows that a socialist society does not necessarily give rise to a superior - 44 -literature.\" Again and again, at the hands of most revisionists, Marx's model is vulgarised: his careful qualification about the \"more or less\" rapid transformation of the superstructure is ignored, as is the never-denied though contingent role of conscious activity in ensuring that the superstructure is necessarily transformed. \"Necessarily\" is symptoma-t i c a l l y misread as \"automatically\" and \"immediately,\" and the. self-centredness and passivity of much academic speculation and hindsight are falsely projected onto the distinctively interventionist and active nature of Marxism. Marx's Preface is its own best standing defence against the. distortions of revisionists and anti-Marxists. But even e a r l i e r , in their German Ideology, Marx and Engels had acknowledged that \"ft]he production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at f i r s t directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real l i f e , \" although \" [i]t is not consciousness that determines l i f e , but l i f e that determines conscious-ness\" (Marx/Engels, pp. 42-43). Moreover, effective clarifications and defences on the question have existed at least since the later Engels and appear frequently today.^ My own interpretation of Marx's Preface is obviously another such undertaking, carried out in the belief.that his model, when accurately and sympathetically understood, argues.its own continuing v a l i d i t y . For, though the logic of the revisionists and idealists of various kinds may imply otherwise, i t remains impossible to write novels while freezing to death in the open on an empty stomach. And, in one sense, Marx's Preface merely elaborates this practical bottom-line. Of the many clarification offered since Marx's publication of his - 45 -views on \"base\" and \"superstructure,\" one particular set may be singled out because of the authority behind them: Engels'. In at least three letters to different correspondents (see Appendix A), Engels sufficiently c l a r i f i e d the implications of Marx's model to obviate charges such as Wellek's. In one particular letter (to Conrad Schmidt), Engels wrote, \"The ultimate supremacy of economic development is for me an established fact in these philosophical and literary spheres too, but it operates within the terms laid down by the particular sphere i t s e l f . . . Here economy creates nothing new, but i t determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed and that too for the most part indirectly, for i t is the p o l i t i c a l , legal and moral reflexes which exert the greatest direct influence on philosophy\" (Marx/Engels, p. 60). It then seems perfectly logical to assume, as well, that \"exceptional\" intellectual forays by individuals are at least partly and i n d i r e c t l y — i f not wholly and directly—made possible by their own, specific material circumstances. For, Marx in his Preface speaks not of some mythical homogeneous material base but of the real \"contradictions\" of material l i f e , which include the \"matur [ing]\" of the \"new\" relations of production and their material conditions of existence \"in the womb\" of the older social (economic and cultural) order. \"When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society,\" observe Marx and Engels in their Manifesto, \"they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence\" (Marx/Engels, p. 73). In an abstract way, this Marxist position w i l l long remain a - 46 -subject of debate, precisely since its conclusion (like that of its critics) is generically incapable of empirical verification under controlled, laboratory conditions; i t is a conclusion operationally inseparable from particular socio-political interests. But also precisely because this is so, this not entirely abstract question w i l l be concretely resolved i f and when the working class captures state power and the means of production globally, long before the world is able to glimpse anything resembling even the shoots of socialist culture. Meanwhile, revisionists and anti-Marxists might ponder the fact that i t was not Marx but Freud who stated, \"The motive of human society is in the last resort an economic one\" (Introductory Lectures on P sychoanalysis y.f^ But, one may s t i l l ask, what is the relevance of the Marxist concepts of \"base\" and \"superstructure\" to the problems of Marxist literary axiology? The short answer is that both Marxist social analysis and Marxist literary evaluation ostensibly aim to change society in the same direction and that the latter e x p l i c i t l y professes allegiance to the former. Therefore, they can i l l - a f f o r d a self-contradictory world-view and programme that would imply mutually counterposed values, p r i o r i t i e s , and methods of analysis and evaluation. This debate is thus part of the struggle for all-round consis-tency within Marxism. And the contradiction of the New Left is that i t claims to be Marxist while revising some of Marxism's most cr u c i a l , definitive perceptions, representing hard-won historical lessons, sometimes paid for by the working class with their l i v e s . Related to his concept of a distinction-cum-interaction between the ultimately determining economic base and the ideological superstructure is Marx's awareness that a l l subject-object interaction (and, hence, a l l - 47 -evaluation) is both real and relative. Value in general, therefore (and Marx speaks of \"economic\" value only as his immediate concern, not his only one) , is value both for somebody and _in something outside the mind of the perceiver, at a particular conjuncture. Thus, in an early characterisation of the social dialectic involved in aesthetic evaluation, Marx suggests that \" [tj he object of art, as well as any other product, creates an a r t i s t i c and beauty-enjoying public. Production thus produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object\" (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of P o l i t i c a l Economy, in Marx/Engels, p. 129; this key piece is henceforth cited as Introduction). From this, i t follows that the c r i t e r i a of evaluation can only be historically and socially relative. And in Marx and Engels, the explicit term that is used as an index for these relative c r i t e r i a is the historical/temporal \"period.\" Thus Engels, in a letter to Lassalle (18 May 1859), notes his own varying responses to \"things of inferior value\" between the \" f i r s t reading\" and any subsequent ones (Marx/Engels, p. 102). More generally, Marx notes in his Introduction the temporal continuities and discontinuities of specific \"elements\" of social \"production,\" presumably with their attendant values (Solomon, p. 34); and, as we have seen, Marx and Engels note the lag in \"the social consciousness of past ages, . . . which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms\" (Marx/Engels, p. 74).^2 The general temporal and consumptional continuity and discontinuity of values are thus both real. But, as that last quotation clearly suggests, their socio-historical patterns s t i l l cannot be easily explained or predicted through a simply \"temporal\" but \"classless\" - 48 -sociology. A more precise tool of analysis is called for. This tool is the notion—not originating i n Marxism but merely finding a permanent place in i t s analytical method—of \"class.\" One non-Marxist c r i t i c working with a philosophical approach to literary evaluation has simplistically but tellingly complained that the \"search for cr i t e r i a has been going on for a long time, but without any results that a l l sides agree to be successful.\"^3 Marxists have an explanation for that. As the decreasingly Marxist historian E.P. Thompson concedes in the course of warning against any \"improperly hardened\" use of \"a category as generous as 'the working class,'\" that \"without the (elastic) category of class—an expectation justified by evidence—I could not have practised [writing history] at a l l \" (Poverty of Theory, p. 57). I believe that the same law obtains for Marxist literary axiology. If the temporal category of \"period\" explicitly dominates the evaluative terminology of Marx and Engels, the socio-economic criterion of \"class\" at least implicitly underlies their entire view of modern history and society. \"The history of a l l hitherto existing society,\" wrote Marx and Engels in 1847, \"is the history of class struggles.\" Explaining the sub-heading of this section (\"Bourgeois and Proletarians,\" referring to the two modern classes), Engels wrote, \"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of producti on of their own, are reduced to selling their labour—power in order to live\" (English ed. of Manifesto [i.888], in Tucker, p. 473, n. 5). The specific relation of dominance and subordination between - 49 -these two classes within the superstructure was early indicated by Marx and Engels in their comments on \"the ruling ideas\" in any given society. In The German Ideology, they pointed out that \" [t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time i t s ruling intellectual force . . ., so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to i t \" (Marx/Engels, p. 70). Here, the general, temporal category of the \"epoch\" clearly undergoes an internal class-differentiation; and the differentiation is a sophistication of the analytical model, not a negation. Hence i t is actually able to prefigure the writers' later comment, in the Manifesto, about the dependence of lagging \"social consciousness\" on \"class antagonisms\" and \"the old conditions of existence.\" , With the appearance of the proletariat as a self-conscious class, bourgeois society is decisively polarised; the dominant bourgeois values face an increasingly systematised challenge; and the question of the writers' and c r i t i c s ' class-allegiance is explicitly posed. Marx and Engels themselves intersected this conjuncture and allied themselves with the working class and i t s historic interests. It is from this position—a position of partisanship for the proletariat—that they addressed a l l questions of value, literary or otherwise. Thus Marx and Engels warned the bourgeoisie in their Manifesto: \"don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois , property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.\" (Solomon, p. 49). And Engels, in his 26 November 1885 letter to Minna Kautsky, noted the dilemma of trying to write a \"socialist problem novel\" for an audience composed predominantly of \"readers from - 50 -bourgeois circles,\" in the process coming up with an explicit (though negatively conceived) criterion of literary value: \"under our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois c i r c l e s , i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out i t s mission i f by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions i t dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably i n s t i l s doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists . . .\" (Marx/Engels, p. 88). Clearly, Engels here speaks from a particular class point of view—that of a proletarian (\"anti-bourgeois\") s o c i a l i s t . ^ But i t is not only that. Once the question of a writer's merely passive class \"sympathies\" is settled i n favour of the proletariat, the issue of active partisanship in literature—\"tendenzpoesie\" i n Marx and Engels and (in a different context, discussed below) \"partiinost\" in L e n i n — i s logically posed. For, the proof of one's sympathies lie s in one's willingness to fight actively and effectively for one's side. Now revisionists, non-, and anti-Marxists usually challenge this conclusion, often falsely pitting Lenin—and even Marx—against Engels.^ yet the two key letters by Engels (to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885, and to Margaret Harkness, April 1888 fMarx/Engels, pp.87-92]) that they usually quote from themselves provide t e l l i n g proof of Engels' sympathy for partisanship in literature. This is true despite the fact that these letters are primarily c r i t i c a l and cautionary notes (addressed to acknowledged fellow-socialists); for i t is those novelists' apparent technical unsubtlety, and not \"obvious p o l i t i c a l bias,\" that in this case worries E n g e l s . j j o r should this be - 51 -taken to mean that Engels values \"technique\" separately from and above content. The revisionists' case against bias per se, then, has no basis in Engels (or in any other revolutionary Marxist); and the following quotation from Engels strongly confirms that interpretation: You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done. . . . I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller's Kabale und Liebe is that i t represents the f i r s t German p o l i t i c a l problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, a l l write with a purpose. (Letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885, i n Marx/Engels, p. 88) As for Marx's admonition to Lassalle, in his letter of 18 April 1859, that \"I regard as your gravest shortcoming the fact that a l a Schiller you transform individuals into mere mouthpieces of the sp i r i t of the time\" (quoted approvingly by Wellek, p. 236; see Appendix B for fuller text of l e t t e r ) , we should note that Marx is objecting to propagandising at the expense of individualisation of character, and not to propagandising as such. Marx and Engels' general evaluative c r i t e r i a thus remain historically relative and class-partisan, for the proletariat and for socialism. This l a s t , positive and active orientation towards socialism (however indirect or negative some of i t s incidental formulations) crucially determines a number of Marx and Engels' specific authorial preferences. Most relevantly, i t explains Marx's evident preference of the perceived social orientation of a Shelley to the historically retrogressive orientation of a Carlyle. Nevertheless, a certain formal - 52 -contradiction does exist between Marx and Engels' methodological stress on proletarian progress as a positive value and their actual choice of historical example or analogy to illustrate and explain that criterion. The single most quoted and misinterpreted source of confusion on i this count is Marx's passage, in his Introduction, on the continuing (\"eternal\") \"charm\" of Greek art.^8 in a curious way, i t presents what might superficially seem merely like an odd combination of Classical tastes and Romantic cr i t e r i a ; but this would be to mistake the sheer form for the idea, which is complex and sketchy but nevertheless merits a closer look. Here is the passage in question: As regards art, i t is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure. . . . The d i f f i c u l t y we are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The d i f f i c u l t y is that they s t i l l give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal. An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does the naivete of the child not give him pleasure, and does not he himself endeavour to reproduce the child's veracity on a higher level? Does not the child in every epoch represent the character of the period in its natural veracity? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where i t attained i t s most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because i t is a stage that wi l l never recur? There are rude children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the immature stage of the society in which i t originated. On the contrary i t s charm is a consequence of this and is inseparably linked with the fact that the immature social conditions which gave r i s e , and which alone could give r i s e , to this art cannot recur. (Marx/Engels, pp. 82, 84) In this early passage, one which i t is important to know he withheld from publication, Marx introduces a concern we have not yet encountered in our discussion of him: what are the laws of aesthetic - 53 -response and of the continuity of perceived value across long stretches of time? This is his main concern in the passage as I have quoted i t . But note, even here, how he actually foreshadows the \"base-superstructure\" analytical model of his published 1859 Preface, thereby pre-confirming i t s status within his overall scheme (Greek art and poetry clearly \"are associated\" with certain forms of social development). Significantly, therefore, he characterises his question as a \" d i f f i c u l t y , \" not as an insoluble contradiction, and attempts to answer i t as a materialist. The passage i t s e l f is a combination of two main parts: the statement of the problem (\"the d i f f i c u l t y \" ) and the positing of a series of mutually related answers, half of them in the form of rhetorical questions. The \" d i f f i c u l t y , \" as Marx puts i t , is that \"some of . . . (art's]. . . peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society.\" Thus, ancient Greek art and epic poetry \" s t i l l give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal\"; they \"exert an eternal charm.\" Marx's strongly suggested explanation is that, in the case of ancient Greek art, this continuing potency results from two characteristics. One is Greek art's truthful portrayal of the external reality of the time (\"veracity\" about the objectively \"immature social conditions\"). The other is the less e x p l i c i t , more self-revealing, truthful effect of Greek art's own, child-like mode of perception, applied to and arising from that early history. The connecting thread is truthfulness—a representational \"veracity\" and a perceptual \"naivete.\" And this indicates to Marx that, as modern society's historical predecessors, \"ft]he Greeks\" were neither \"rude\" nor \"precocious\" but simply, in terms of their objectively - 54 -ordained limitations, \"normal children\" corresponding to the overall conditions of their l i f e . Now i t is true that, especially when quoted out of context in the above fashion, Marx's passage reveals certain inadequacies from the point of view of consistent dialectical-historical materialism. Thus, traces of idealist absolutism exist in formulations such as \"most beautiful form\" (\"peaks\") and \"eternal charm,\" as well as in the lack of class-differentiation within \"us\" and \"ft] he Greeks\"; and they also exist in the assumption of a unanimous aesthetic response flowing from such homogeneity (\"they s t i l l give us aesthetic pleasure\" and, in certain respects, universally and undeniably \"are regarded\" as an ideal). A l l this may well indicate the legacy of Schiller and resemble the \"Golden Age\" conceptions of Freud and Proust, as Hans Robert Jauss claims.^ Moreover, the representational \"veracity\" is le f t undifferentiated from the perceptual \"naivete,\" and, consequently, these and other words such as \"charm\" and \"normal\" seem to convey both psychological modalities and behavioural expressions and effects. Finally, Marx's attempted answer addresses—albeit m a t e r i a l i s t i c a l l y — chiefly his personal love for ancient Greek art: i t s materialism is empirical. Thus, the general, theoretical question posed at the beginning of the passage may well be regarded by some as unanswered. But such a view can be challenged, and clarifications appended, as I shall try to do below. However, even within the quoted passage i t s e l f , there are many signs that should make cr i t i c s pause before they, try, on the basis of i t , to dismiss the argument about economic base and ideological superstructure in Marx's 1859 Preface. Here, the qualifying, - 55 -speculative, and cautiously \"negative\" thrust of Marx's formulations is crucial. The reasons why ancient Greek art continues to charm people in the nineteenth century are not incomprehensible, merely d i f f i c u l t to understand. Greek art and poetry are a standard ideal, but they are so only \"in certain respects\" and are, moreover, \"regarded\" as such by possibly—but not necessarily—everyone. In fact, one presumes, the undefined subject must be culturally and p o l i t i c a l l y akin to \"us\"—a definable and almost certainly non-inclusive group, of whom Marx himself i s one. Moreover, Marx's notion of \"our\" pleasure in ancient Greek art does not claim the status of a permanent prescriptive dictate to a l l people for a l l times but rather presents i t s e l f as a mere observation of r e a l i t y , one at least personally verifiable by Marx himself. And f i n a l l y , the alleged charm results from the negative fact that the effective impression created by the ancient Greek artists \"does not conflict\" with the evaluator's knowledge of i t s social conditions of production and from the certainty that those primitive but intriguing precursors of the modern age \"cannot recur.\" In positive terms, then, for the Marx of 1857, classical Greek art seems valuable chiefly for i t s truthfulness. This truthfulness consists, in the f i r s t place, in that art's very choice of object—a real though irrecoverable society (slave-holding Athenian democracy) which, despite i t s historical limitations, affords us a glimpse of the possible future, i t s subject being \"the historical childhood of humanity.\" In the second place, this truthfulness consists i n Greek art's and a r t i s t s ' very mode of perception, resembling (for Marx) a child's naivety. Finally, i t might be interesting to speculate about whether or not Marx also sees the truthfulness manifesting i t s e l f in the - 56 -a r t i s t s ' mimetic mode of depicting the \"natural veracity\" of that historical \"child\" (\"reproduce . . . on a higher level\" [my emphasis]). If i t does, especially in an absolute way, Marx here might conceivably be accused, by some, of \"f a i l i n g \" to anticipate the problematic, twentieth-century unfolding of the fate of \"realism.\" But we shall return to this issue later. Marx's above-quoted passage from the Introduction thus attempts simultaneously to address three different aesthetic phenomena: (1) the (socio-)economic determination of art, (2) the assimilation and elevation of \"certain\" perceived aspects of art in one era to the aesthetic ideals of another, and (3) the response of some people to these perceived qualities across a span of centuries. As we know, the general problematics relevant to these concerns seem to have been roughly anticipated in the Manifesto's remark about lagging social consciousness in class-societies (Marx/Engels, p. 74). Marx's passage in the Introduction thus suggests an abiding theoretical concern on his part and constitutes a theoretical cornerstone that cannot be ignored and should not be facilely distorted. Yet, this is precisely what happens when, disregarding Marx's actual formulations, Hans Hess (for instance) pronounces that \"what he fMarx] calls 'charm' i s really prestige\" (Hess, p. 11). Interestingly, however, Marx in his Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations anticipates and obviates Hess's superficial conjecture, clarifying the relativity and partialness of the classical world's \"charm\" for him. \" [l]n one way,\" he admits, \"the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, in so far as we seek for closed shape, form and estab-lished limitation\"; but, he adds, \" [t] he ancients provide a narrow - 57 -satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, mean\" (Solomon, p. 57; also quoted in Prawer p. 288n). That i s , the ancients are not perfect, though the modern world is positively bad. Indeed, early in his career, Marx satirised the anti-historicist conservatism of Emperor Julian and \"the Alexandrine school, . . . which believed that i t could make the newly developing spirit of the times disappear by keeping i t s eyes closed so as not to see i t , \" thus striving \"to prove by force the 'eternal truth' of Greek mythology and its complete agreement 'with the results of scien t i f i c research.'\"^0 Moreover, as Lifshitz significantly observes about the \"left-Hegelians\" (of whom, of course, Marx was one), the \"new barbarism of capitalist Germany is identified [by them] with the barbarism of old [as in the Old Testament],\" while the \"defence of Greek art was at the same time an attempt to restore the [egalitarian, radical] ideals of the French Revolution\"(Lifshitz, pp. 34, 49). Any misreading of Marx on this question, therefore, must necessarily ignore the concrete p o l i t i c a l programme in whose ultimate service he was, as a Jacobin-derived communist, trying to answer i t . The result w i l l tend to become vulgar-materialist or metaphysical, not dialetical-materialist and h i s t o r i c a l . Since Marx's passage in his Introduction has, for various reasons, come to signify different things to different people, a brief c r i t i c a l reckoning with four f a i r l y symptomatic readings of i t would be useful here. Roughly, the f i r s t one represents a f l a t l y anti-Marxist approach, the second a \"history of ideas\" approach, the third a simplistic, \"vulgar materialist\" approach, and the fourth a dialectical-materialist and historical (Marxist) approach, in so far as one exists on this question. Of course, these approaches sometimes overlap; and, moreover, - 58 -a l l of them often have valid insights to offer. Hans Robert Jauss in \"The Idealist Embarrassment\" asks some useful questions about when exactly the famous \"alienation\" (described by the young Marx as the omnipresent bane of l i f e under capitalism) is supposed to enter into the actual process of production. For, from that moment on, \"beauty\" must surely become more and more d i f f i c u l t to ensure, in the face of increasingly commodity-oriented market demands (p. 198). Moreover, by selecting some straw men for his false counterpositions and illustrations of \"Marxism,\" Jauss is easily able to demonstrate that some ostensibly Marxist c r i t i c s underestimate the role of the reader, that i s , of reception dynamics (pp. 204-05).^1 However, the wording of his article's t i t l e , his use of conventional anti-Marxist codewords and epithets ,^ 2 a n cj his claim that the distinction between idealism and materialism is not valid \"in the f i e l d of aesthetics\" (p. 207) a l l bespeak a qualitative dearth of p o l i t i c a l understanding and a distinct unfriendliness of intent issuing from the right. Jauss's thesis is that \"a materialist aesthetic . . . cannot get along without a central core of idealism\" (p. 192), that Marx believes that \"we scarcely know how standards arise,\" unless they do so through sheer ideas (p. 203). To prove his thesis, Jauss must largely restrict himself to the young, Hegelian Marx and then misrepresent some of Marx's key positions into the bargain. Thus, for instance, Jauss early makes the claim that \"Marx's high esteem for Greek art . . . breaches the principle of the prior economic determination of a l l a r t i s t i c production and confers on the relation of substructure and superstructure a nonsimultaneity of the necessarily simultaneous . . .\" (p. 192). But where did Jauss find in Marx the proposition that \"the relation of - 59 -substructure and superstructure\" is \"necessarily simultaneous\"? Certainly in our own scrutiny of Marx's Preface, we found \"simultaneity\" to be explicitly precluded by the \"more or less\" rapid transformation of the superstructure (following economic change); and, much earlier, even the Manifesto talks about historic lags in social consciousness and views \"the dissolution of old ideas\" as being contingent on \"the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.\" Yet, while egregious in its misrepresentations of Marx, Jauss's article remains indispensable for one pedagogical purpose: to show how the debate over \"base\" and \"superstructure\" impinges directly on literary axiology and how idealism as a philosophical trend, when allowed free rein, readily places i t s e l f at the service of unabashed anti-Marxism. Relatively subsidiary inaccuracies, self-contradictions, and questionable interpretative methods abound.-^ 3 one could dissect a sentence such as the following, for instance, to reveal the same shallowness of Jauss's critique as we have seen above: \"And i t makes i t impossible to overlook the embarrassment that in sum the art of a slave-owning society should also s t i l l rank as a 'standard and model beyond attainment' for an emancipated mankind\" (p. 102). Merely at a factual l e v e l , we might pose to Jauss certain questions: where \"in sum\" does Marx view the problem in terms of a classless \"art\" of a slave-owning \"society\" and i t s reception by an equally classless \"mankind\"? Where \"in sum\" does Marx state or imply that \"us\" represents \"emancipated\" mankind? Where \"in sum\" does Marx revise his view that ancient Greek art s t i l l constitutes an ideal model only \"in certain respects\" and not \"in sum\"? Where, even \"in sum,\" does Marx pose the - 60 -perceived residual power of aspects of ancient Greek art as a question of moralistic or psychological \"embarrassment\"? If (\"in sum\") Jauss's use of that word is not meant ethically but only methodologically, to point to the above extension in a r t i s t i c e f f e c t i v i t y , how does he rationalise his application of \"embarrassment\" to the obvious fact that i t was Marx himself who f i r s t noticed the extension (and the apparent dislocation between economic base and a r t i s t i c peaks) and attempted to address it? Further, i f his thesis is that \"base\" is irrelevant to \"superstructure,\" why does Jauss deflect the relevant and crucial comparison of the two economies (ancient Greek and modern) into the primarily p o l i t i c a l question of slavery and emancipation, thus forefeiting an opportunity to debunk Marx on his own terms? Beyond the quoted sentence i t s e l f , one could pose many equally germane questions: in their Manifesto, Marx and Engels welcomed the positive achievements of the bourgeoisie in their historically progressive phase;-^ why, then, in view of the authors' professed proletarianism, does Jauss not regard that as an \"embarrassment\" as well? Lenin repeatedly insisted that socialists must intelligently assimilate and build on the contradictory cultural heritage of the bourgeois past;^^«why, then, in view of Jauss's hazy but correct perception of Leninism's claim to Marxism, does that c r i t i c not regard Lenin's advice as another such \"embarrassment\"? \"In sum,\" provided he is held accountable for the authenticity of every paraphrase he offers of Marx or Engels or Lenin, Jauss simply cannot pretend to have an answer. The next two commentators on this issue are less overtly contrary. They are also more generalist in their approach. Michael McKeon, in \"The Origins of Aesthetic Value,\" Telos, No. 57 (Fall 1983), 63-82, - 61 -usefully lays bare in Aristotle the likely historical roots of the idea of \"aesthetic value\" and argues its differential implementation among literary consumers. The overall effect is one of destroying any absolute notions of aesthetic value or valuation. McKeon articulately insists that the issue of value is distinct from the issue of sub- and superstructural relationships (p. 64) and that, moreover, economic \"exchange\"-value in Marx is a quantitative concept, having l i t t l e to do with general \"use\"-value, which is a qualitative concept directly relating to society's physical and mental needs (pp. 69-70). Marx's \"d i f f i c u l t y \" in the Introduction, then, McKeon implies, arises not from Marx or from his model of base and superstructure but from the arbitrary and conventional notions of \"aesthetic value\" and \"aesthetic pleasure\" through which Marx uncritically views Greek art and i t s effect on him (pp. 63-64, 65). Instead of applying to these notions his usual array of demystificatory, historical analyses, observes McKeon, Marx naturalises them in the prevalent manner of his contemporaneous aestheticians (p. 66). Marx thus becomes inconsistent in terms of his own methodology, though this empirical incongruity naturally does not theoretically undermine the ignored methodology i t s e l f . The solution remains, according to McKeon, the \"dialectical\" one of uniting the continual re-production of the non-absolute text with the continual re-evaluation of its varied and changing effects on different consumers (p. 82). \"Aesthetic value\" thus stands revealed as an historically-produced, arbitrary construct—as a \"mode\" or \"counterpart\" of exchange-value (pp. 80, 91)—that can be circumvented with the aid of historical consciousness. In i t s historicising and relativising thrust, McKeon's argument can - 62 -be generally valuable for a Marxist axiology. However, in i t s specific manner of applying these methods to axiology, McKeon's article tends to disappear the problem rather than solve i t . Chiefly, a l l the problems with his argument may usefully be traced to one particular philosophical characteristic: McKeon's premises are those of idealism, and his method of analysing and solving the practical problem of evaluation is largely restricted to that of a \"history of ideas.\" Thus, for instance, McKeon typically asserts that not only were \"aesthetic value\" and \"poetry\" .each \"a mental category . . . conceived in the Greek Enlightenment\" but that \"'capitalism' i t s e l f emerged as a mental category during the European Enlightenment, coinciding with the re-emergence of poetry and aesthetic value as abstract universals, now to be embraced as widely and as enthusiastically as the ideology of capitalism would be\" (p. 79). In the beginning—as well as in the middle and at the end—was the Idea. Thus, claims McKeon, Aristotle's \"abstraction of 'poetry' as an autonomous category two thousand years before the rest of Western culture was interested in listening . . . is an . . . individual anomaly, testimony to the w i l l of a supreme intellect to pursue, i n , solitude, the logic of a radically innovative method as far as i t would go\" (p. 80). Obversely, Marx's failure to historicise the problem of \"eternal charm\" is merely \"testimony, perhaps, to the formidable power of received mental categories . . . to resist the s e l f - c r i t i c a l act of understanding by which they may be transformed from natural 'things' into historical products\" (p. 81). To axiologists seeking a purely, psychological explanation and solution, McKeon's argument may seem self-sufficient. To Marxists, however, i t is not. McKeon, as a professed Marxist scholar, is aware of this. He - 63 -therefore elaborates, as his main hypothesis, Marx's suggestive speculations (in the Introduction) about the relation of specific literary genres to specific technological forces of production.-*6 A S in Marx's Introduction, this line of enquiry yields some of McKeon's most detailed \"materialist\" results. Briefly, McKeon argues that although Marx's comments \"direct our attention to the typographical revolution of the Renaissance, the more pertinent• technological change must be the revolution which transformed the o r a l , 'archaic' culture of Homeric antiquity into the literate culture of the Greek Enlightenment. . . . [ l ] t is to this great historic transformation that we owe . . . the invention of that mental category of aesthetic value under which Marx himself occasionally, as here, may be seen to labour\" (p. 66). McKeon identifies in Aristotle's theory of \"catharsis\" (the latter's putative index of a genuinely unified plot in tragic \"poetry\") the f i r s t conceptualisation of an autonomous \"aesthetic pleasure\" (pp. 72, 74, 76). Yet, for a l l the technological history and analysis, two key questions keep nagging a Marxist: is \"technology\" a l l there is to the Marxist concept of economic base? And what are the material reasons for such apparently abstract and arbitrary concepts as \"aesthetic pleasure\" and \"aesthetic value\" taking hold in a mind as self-reflexive and c r i t i c a l as Marx's? Other, related questions soon follow. If \"aesthetic pleasure is nothing but the dissolution of pleasure through its indeterminate expansion, the temporal expression of which is perpetuity\" (p. 81), is this dissolution self-generating and uniform across classes, cultures, and ages? If i t i s , how would McKeon's model accommodate and explain dissenting evaluations such as those advanced by - 64 -the string of c r i t i c s of Shakespeare's Sonnets that Barbara Herrnstein Smith mentions? Furthermore, what is Marxist about limiting one's social categories to \"individual\" and \"trans-individual,\" as McKeon does (e.g. p. 82), i f one is at the same time discussing the \"capitalist age\" (p. 82)? F i n a l l y , does not McKeon's attempt to explain \"aesthetic value\" almost exclusively through an incremental \"analogy between economic and cultural production\" suggest a fundamental distrust in any real and active inter-relation between those two spheres? These questions, and the answers already encoded in McKeon's a r t i c l e , lead one to appropriate his contribution to Marxist axiology with caution. In many ways, Marc Shell's tack in The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978) closely resembles that of McKeon's. Both attempt to read r e a l , material connections into what are i n i t i a l l y presented as mere analogies (McKeon with \"culture\" and \"economy,\" Shell with \"language\" and \"money\"); both concentrate on a history of ( c l a s s i c a l , especially Greek) ideas; both pay substantial attention to the young Marx; and neither evinces much sense of the shaping influence of active social struggle on the consciousness embodied in art. However, Shell exemplifies, more than does McKeon, the empirical literalism (otherwise known in Marxist philosophy as vulgar materialism) that is the obverse of McKeon's type of abstract idealism. If McKeon traces the origin of the present problematic of \"aesthetic value\" back to the \"literacy\" revolution and the Greek Enlightenment, only to deny then that i t is a real problematic at a l l , Shell's particular fixation is \"numismatic semiology\" (p. 68), seeking \"to understand dialectically the relationship between thought and matter by looking from the formal similarities between linguistic and economic - 65 -symbolisation and production to the p o l i t i c a l economy as a whole\" (p. 152). \"The economics of thought, set down by Greek dialecticians at the origin of c r i t i c a l thinking,\" he claims, \"has not ceased to influence us\" (p. 62). His advice is that coins \"should be studied as semata at once artful and economic. In this sense, numismatics not only counts coins but also accounts for the significance of and the relationship between economic and aesthetic signs\" (p. 88). However, the decisive relevance of Greek ideas about money—an item that is an imperfect quantitative general index of (economic) exchange-value—to the qualitative cr i t e r i a of literary evaluation remains, even after a hundred-and-fifty-odd pages of exposition, perfectly obscure. Quite simply, Shell's methodology uncritically accepts an artifact's projection of its own \"value.\" This attitudinal impressionism is then aggravated by a conceptual blurring. Shell does not adequately distinguish between kinds of value—centrally, between (real) use-value (measured solely by cr i t e r i a of felt social needs) and (ostensible) economic value in a capitalist market (measured ultimately by the relation of the profit-oriented terms of exchange to the conditions of production, and inconsistently expressed through pricing, usually in the \"language\" of currency, or money). Thus Shell is able to endorse Nietzsche's argument in The Genealogy of Morals that \"the price-making of early man was not so different from our own\" and that \"[mjodern man returns to Greek philosophy with nostalgia, but he finds therein described only the origin or discovery of himself\" (p. 62). Differing from Melville in his attitude towards the symbolism of the doubloon i n Moby Dick, Shell asks, rhetorically, \"is one kind of exchange (economic), like the other (aesthetic), endlessly tropic and - 66 -i n f i n i t e l y hermeneutic?\" (p. 85). His implied answer, which actually challenges Melville's apparent separation of the two kinds of roles, is in the affirmative: \"Melville's numismatic semiology is a biting theory of language and economics in which the ontological status of the world i t s e l f is threatened with annihilation\" (p. 85). This is a philosophical way of saying that the difference does not matter. For dialectical historical materialists, however, i t does. For, i t is precisely arguments such as Shell's that, by collapsing discourse into \"money,\" allow impressionistic anti-Marxists to lump vulgar and dialectical materialists together, to be the better able, then, to accuse the latter (Marxists) of \"reductionism.\" That vulgar materialists such as Shell routinely swear by dialectics does not, of course, simplify matters in this regard. It is therefore unfortunate that Shell blurs the line separating him from Marxism by situating his project in the context of \"chang (\"ing] the tyranny of our world\" (p. 10) and even goes on to offer an unexceptionably \"orthodox\"—if meaningless—tautology: \"Artistic production, perhaps, is a superstructure, and material production a substructure. If so, however, they correspond to each other not mimetically but dialectically\" (p. 149). To help us see through that terminological formalism and grasp the narrowness of Shell's numismatic interest, a sentence such as the following, praising Rousseau, is more instructive: \"He does, however, exemplify how p o l i t i c a l and ideological theory must study money and discourse together, whether or not they are structurally similar The most one might say in defence of Shell's thesis, then, is that components of society\" (p. 126; emphasis and remark added). - 67 -some people may indeed be enticed by a book's price or the self-advertising blurb on its cover to buy and read i t ; indeed, their evaluation of i t may well be decisively shaped in i t s favour by these machinations of numismatic semiology. But these are hardly the kind of readers serious Marxists would hope to work with consistently as either data or forces particularly central to literary axiology or to the socialist cultural revolution. And these are certainly not the kind of readers whose evaluative psychology would help illuminate Marx's broad, considered remarks on the relative dislocation of a r t i s t i c \"peaks\" from their matching base. Superficially, Max Raphael's critique of Marx's Introduction, in The Demands of Art,57 may appear identical to Jauss's. But a closer look reveals their diametric opposition. Both c r i t i c s focus on the apparent contradiction between Marx's sociological model and his concept of \"eternal charm.\" Moreover, Raphael is indeed much more direct and relentless in his criticism than is Jauss. Yet, Raphael's purpose is exactly counterposed to that of Jauss. For, whereas Jauss seeks to use Marx's supposed \"embarrassment\" to generalise his assault on Marxism, Raphael deplores the perceived problem as an instance of Marx's failure to extend the valid logic of his a c t i v i s t , interventionist general motto to the particular sphere of aesthetics. Here is a graphic contrast between constructive, Marxist and destructive, anti-Marxist p o l i t i c a l motivation in c r i t i c a l theory: while Jauss seeks to use the occasion to drive a wedge through a commonly-perceived gap, Raphael seeks to close that gap in the face of its enemies.. Marx's answer to his own question in the Introduction, Raphael believes, \"has nothing whatever to do either with historical materialism - 68 -or with Communism as a guide for changing the world\" (p. 451). Indeed, he elaborates, i t \"sounds petty bourgeois . . .\" (p. 451). He characterises the phrase \"eternal charm\" as \"doubly untenable, both as 'eternal' and as 'charm,'\" and claims that i t \"shows how far Marx was from having solved the problem he raised so astutely\" (p. 452). \"We repeat,\" he asserts, \"the problem remains unsolved\" (p. 452). But, as Raphael goes on to explain, from a Marxist point of view, \"there are good reasons for this\" (p. 452): A transitional epoch always implies uncertainty. . . . In such a period two attitudes are possible. One is to take advantage of the emergent forces of the new order with a view to undermining i t , to affirm i t in order to drive i t beyond i t s e l f : this is the active, militant, revolutionary attitude. The other clings to the past, is retrospective and romantic, bewails or acknowledges the decline, asserts that the wi l l to live is gone—in short, i t is the passive attitude. Where economic, social, and p o l i t i c a l questions were at stake Marx took the f i r s t attitude; in questions of art he took neither. (P. 452) While Raphael's reading of that passage is clearly at variance with mine (which in turn stems partly from the historical insights provi-ded by L i f s h i t z , for instance), his theoretical solution anticipates at a stroke the general direction of my own: \"Had he been able to show that an active attitude toward art also exists, he would have brought the understanding of art up to the level of his revolutionary position(in other spheres of l i f e } \" (p. 452). Thus, i t w i l l be my argument that a knowledge of the (possibly hitherto largely unknown) history of \"aesthetic value\"—whether ideological or technological or numismatic—is a factor ultimately subordinate to one's own, specific orientation to social struggle, in determining Marxist c r i t e r i a of literary evaluation. We speculated, over the excerpt from Marx's Introduction, about - 69 -whether the criterion of truthfulness may well be seen to apply to the artifact's formal role (\"reproduce\") as much as to its perceived content. And Engels, we r e c a l l , in his 26 November 1885 letter to Minna Kautsky, advocated among other things \"a faithful portrayal of the real conditions\" of bourgeois society (Marx/Engels, p. 88). These formulations legitimately raise the question whether or not Marx and Engels ever conceptualised and consciously advocated that particular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mode of f i c t i o n a l writing known to us today (albeit within certain limits of controversy about definitions) as realism. And the answer would seem to be a guarded yes. Morawski (p. 30) notes that the \"term 'realism' does not appear in any text by Marx,\" but he believes that \"Marx agreed with the general conception formulated by Engels in his letters to Minna Kautsky and Margaret Harkness.\" Marx's comments on specific writers, as well as his choice of favourite authors (both of which we w i l l look at later) would seem to bear out Morawski's second assertion. What, then, were some of the general features of realism as Marx and Engels apparently envisaged them? Prawer (p. 19), in a useful encapsulation, observes that Marx, in his critiques of his own literary fragments, clearly valued \"'form, measure, concentration,'\" though he had no use for what Prawer calls \"pure formalism.\" Without entering at this point into a controversy about the meaning of that last phrase, which in any event is a negative criterion of value for Marx, we may look to Engels to supplement the positive c r i t e r i a spelt out by Marx and to learn his (Engels') own explicit definition of realism. \"Realism, to my mind,\" writes Engels to Harkness (April 1888), \"implies, besides truth of d e t a i l , the truthful reproduction of typical - 70 -characters under typical circumstances\" (Marx/Engels, p. 90). And his letter to Lassalle (18 May 1859), besides providing perhaps the most complete enumeration of his cr i t e r i a for realism, also connects significantly with similar specific c r i t e r i a spelt out by Marx, in his independent comments on the same text, the play Franz von Sickingen. Engels calls the play \"too abstract, not re a l i s t i c enough for me\" (Marx/Engels, p. 105); Marx complains that Sickingen is \"much too abstractly depicted\" (Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 19 April 1859, i n Marx/Engels, p. 100). Engels explains, further, that \"my view of drama consists in not forgetting the rea l i s t i c for the i d e a l i s t i c , Shakespeare for Schiller . . .\" (Marx/Engels, p. 105). His letter also establishes that, within the realis t i c mode, the most valued feature for him is dramatisation, with \"clever development of the plot\" and the \" f u l l fusion\" of profundity of thought, \"conscious historical content,\" and \"Shakespearian liveliness and fullness of treatment\" as i t s chief components (Marx/Engels, pp. 102, 103). Finally, in what is perhaps the most complete enumeration of positive realist c r i t e r i a anywhere in Marx or Engels, the l a t t e r , while warning against undramatised propaganda, commends Lassalle's class-principle of \"representative\" characterisation: Your Sickingen is on absolutely the right track; the main characters are representatives of definite classes and trends and therefore of definite ideas of their time. They find their motives not in petty individual lusts, but in the historical stream which is carrying them along. But . . . the action i t s e l f should bring these motives more vigorously, actively and, so to speak, elementally into the foreground, while the debates . . . become more and more superfluous. (Marx/Engels, p. 103) At the hands of other c r i t i c s , Marx and Engels' notion of realism - 71 -has, of course, undergone changes, as have the specific terms of their advocacy of i t . To a larger extent, the changing literary practices going by that name have themselves been instrumental in effecting t h i s , but there is also another factor. In the nineteen-thirties, the German experimental writer and c r i t i c Bertold Brecht clashed with the Hungarian academic c r i t i c Georg Lukacs, essentially over the Stalinised conception of realism (in i t s ostensibly socialist form called \"socialist realism\"). The history of this debate is f a i r l y involved and the sides are not clearly mutually exclusive.^8 The gist of the matter, however, is the following. Challenged, as ostensible Marxists, by the reality of fascism, but unable to break decisively from a purely cultural strategy for defeating i t , Brecht and Lukacs sought to resolve *the±r p o l i t i c a l -tactical differences s t r i c t l y within the realm of c r i t i c a l theory. In the ensuing confrontation, conducted within the equally discursive illusions of Stalinist cultural theory, Brecht declared for exposing reality through ceaseless practical (cultural) experimentation and subversion, the latter including subversion of the conventionally accepted differences between art and reality. Lukacs, on the other hand, pressed for an expose of reality through explicitly theoretical, polemical demystification. Thus, for Brecht, any strategy in a r t — particularly modernism—that facilitated the exposure of reality was essentially realism, or at least was the only desirable kind of a r t i s t i c strategy. For Lukacs, on the other hand, any strategy in a r t — particularly modernism as he understood i t — t h a t did not analytically expose rea l i t y , but instead pretended to merge into i t , was a strategy ultimately in the service of fascism, not against i t . To counter this allegedly pro-fascistic obfuscation perpetuated by modernism, Lukacs - 72 -upheld the \"typical\" and \"rounded\" characters of nineteenth-century European \"realism,\" along with its integrative, \"totalising\" plots and structures, which enable the reader to see the individual characters in their historical context. Thus, for Lukacs, realism always evinced identifiable, discrete, textually intrinsic properties; for Brecht, realism was a specifically unpredictable strategy that could be judged only by it s revelatory effects or otherwise. As Eagleton puts i t , \"One might say quite simply of his practice, to adapt one of his own adages: realism is as realism does\" (WB, pp. 88-89). In Eagleton's own literary theory, we eventually arrive at one possible resolution of the problem. He offers a detailed definition and assessment of realism \"in general,\" as an historical and conjunctural mode and criterion of literary value. And he argues that realism is neither technically limited to unmediated \"reflection\" of reality nor inevitably useful (or harmful) to the interests of socialism and i t s culture: It might be argued, for example, that in an earlier stage of industrial capitalist accumulation, where the dominant ideological experience was one of fragmentation and nuclearity, literary realism f u l f i l l e d a progressive role in revealing covert inter-connections—in demonstrating, in short, the power and character of something like a system. It might then be argued that, once that system was indeed fleshed within ideological experience—once industrial capitalism had passed into its monopoly forms—modernism in art arrived upon the agenda as a resistance to precisely a l l that, exploiting the fragment, the private and the unspeakable, the agonised and irreducible moment, as the lone necessary negation of the apparently \"monolithic\" society i t confronted. (WB, pp. 89-90) But such retrospective relativisation of realism's changing character and role does not, I would maintain, either invalidate Marx and Engels' (albeit unelaborated) notion of i t at the time or contradict one iota - 73 -their view of i t s ideological role up to the time of their writing about i t . On the contrary, i t actually confirms, in the particular, the unity of their general c r i t e r i a for evaluation—of truthfulness and partisanship in the service of social emancipation. Marx and Engels' judgments on specific literary traditions, authors, and texts are relevant here primarily only as empirical verification of what I have said about their general evaluative c r i t e r i a , although one could as legitimately grope one's way through to those general c r i t e r i a by starting from these specific judgments. In their limited way, the individual evaluations also afford us a glimpse of certain interesting aspects of Marx and Engels' literary world: whom they read, what common literary modes characterised their choices, what perceived particular qualities endeared particular authors and works to them, exactly how much attention they paid to technique, and so on. Besides, their engagement with nineteenth-century English prose and continental fiction links them to one dominant concern and empirical focus shared by Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton. Yet, in the last analysis—not just methodologically but factually, given what Marx and Engels actually say in them—these judgments neither contradict nor shape but at most confirm in the particular, with varying emphases, the general c r i t e r i a of literary value elsewhere argued by their authors. But even i f they did not, to Marxist axiologists, i t is the general c r i t e r i a behind these judgments that would be relevant, because theoretical, not their consistent or inconsistent applications to specific authors and works. Only this order of p r i o r i t i e s , unlike i t s reverse, could make i t meaningful to discuss, say, the pro-Balzac Marx and Engels within the same theoretical framework as Rosa Luxemburg, who - 74 -is known to have had no particular admiration for that same novelist (see Solomon's biographical note in Solomon, p. 144), or to discuss the anti-Byron Marx within the same theoretical framework as the pro-Byron Trotsky (see my section on Trotsky, below). From among the particular authors whom Marx and Engels incidentally comment on, Goethe and Carlyle emerge as the only currently well-known writers to have earned extended literary analyses, with Balzac and Shakespeare attracting the next greatest—though mainly socio-economic—attention. One other author, Eugene Sue, actually draws an extensive critique for his The Mysteries of Paris (in The Holy Family, excerpted in Marx/Engels, pp. 298-313), but most of that critique is really an ironic recounting of the novel's principal episodes, occasionally interspersed with the c r i t i c s ' early philosophical polemic against Hegelian idealism. And between Goethe and Carlyle, i t is of course the latter whose works span much of the period dealt with by Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton. I shall therefore end this section with a brief look at Marx and Engels' critique of Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets, after f i r s t noting the implications of Engels' well-known comments on Balzac. That Marx and Engels' premium on truthfulness by no means.excluded sympathy for pro-socialist partisanship, is most graphically borne out in their explicit admiration for writers such as Shelley, Cobbett, and Georg Weerth and in their effective favourable counterposition of the perceived trend represented by these writers to that represented by Byron and the later C a r l y l e . ^ Yet, as I have pointed out, many c r i t i c s , in their efforts to \"free\" literature and criticism from class-partisanship, vainly attempt to use the authority of Engels - 75 -against the Leninist refinement of that concept. Most frequently cited or alluded to in various ways i s Engels' praise of the royalist Balzac, in his letter to Margaret Harkness (April 1888): Balzac whom I consider a far greater master of realism than a l l the Zolas passes, presents et 3_ venir, in La Comedie Humaine gives us a most wonderfully re a l i s t i c history of French \"Society\". . . . Well, Balzac was p o l i t i c a l l y a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society, his sympathies are a l l with the class doomed to extinction. But for a l l that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathises most deeply—the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest p o l i t i c a l antagonists. . . . That Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies and p o l i t i c a l prejudices, . . . that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac. (Marx/Engels,pp. 91-92) F i r s t , i t is curious how cr i t i c s who really want to argue against conscious partisanship in literature almost universally light on the above passage and miss what would at least appear to be a much more conducive and explicit admonition for their purpose—Engels' comment on Goethe: \"We c r i t i c i s e him not from a moral or from a party point of view, but at the very most from the aesthetic and historical point of view; we measure Goethe neither by moral nor by p o l i t i c a l nor by 'human' standards\" (Marx/Engels, p. 356). Perhaps they do so because Engels equally explicitly points to lack of space as the reason: \"We cannot here involve ourselves in a description of Goethe's relationship to his whole age, his literary precursors and contemporaries, his process of development and his station in l i f e . We therefore restrict ourselves simply to noting the facts\" (emphasis mine; Marx/Engels, p. 356). At any rate, this brings us back to the comment on Balzac. To - 76 -begin with, any use of that passage to justify smuggling genuinely reactionary writers into Marxist respectability must necessarily ignore the fact that Engels singles out only specific features in Balzac as positive values and praises their truthfulness precisely in spite of the novelist's reactionary o f f i c i a l p o l i t i c s : \"That Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies [my emphasis] and p o l i t i c a l prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac\" (Marx/Engels, p. 92). Thus, not Balzac's general royalism but his specific, observational truthfulness in spite of i t (\"for a l l that\") is Engels' criterion for his overall assessment of the novelist.60 Furthermore, I think we may assume that Engels lends more weight to Balzac's specific truths because the latter's o f f i c i a l politics occupies a spatially marginal niche in his Human Comedy as a whole, anyway. Next, we should note that, in his formulations, Engels describes what is clearly not a simple conflict between a homogeneous, internally consistent mass of prejudices and a separate, equally homogeneous set of observations. Rather, i t is a contradictory, conflicting set of dramatised sympathies and professed loyalties most closely corresponding to the \"material\" contradictions in contemporary (\"republican\") society outside the novelist's mind: \"And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest p o l i t i c a l antagonists, the republican heroes of the Clottre Saint-Me\"ry . . .\" (Marx/Engels, p. 92). In effect, therefore, Engels in this letter i l l u s t r a t e s , rather - 7 7 -than contradicts, the base-superstructure model of social analysis posited by Marx. The contradiction between Balzac's \"old,\" general, royalist ideals and his \"new\" admiration for the republicans is manifestly the superstructural expression^* of the more basic, social contradiction between the old \"womb\" of France's aristocracy and the embryonic, \"maturing\" heroes of the bourgeois republic. Above a l l , however, we should note that Engels' comment on Balzac's contradictory works and value i s , obviously, only a description of a specifically materialised r i f t within the camp of an enemy class, not a prescriptive exhortation to a l l contemporaneous and future socialist writers to go forth and be consistently self-contradictory. Proof that Engels never thought p o l i t i c a l inconsistency to be i n t r i n s i c a l l y valuable can be amply seen in his devastating critique of Goethe's liberalism (Marx/Engels, pp. 359-67); and perhaps that is a more lik e l y reason (than Engels' note about the lack of space) why l i b e r a l c r i t i c s prefer to stick to the \"Balzac letter.\" Finally, we might wonder whether Balzac himself saw his p o l i t i c a l beliefs as something distinct from his dramatised, literary slices of l i f e and, i f he did, whether he saw them as being actually counterposed. However, i t is true that Balzac's own views in this regard need not prevent us from advancing our own, retrospective characterisations of his works, as long as such characterisations are germane to our c r i t i c a l purpose and based on reasonable evidence. Marx and Engels' review of Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets is relevant here for two main reasons: i t is their only extended evaluation of a nineteenth-century English writer, that century being a central - 78 -empirical focus for Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton; and in some ways, it combines the evaluative cr i t e r i a employed by Engels in judging both Balzac and Goethe. ( A l l quotations used here are from Marx/Engels, esp. pp. 326-39). In their review, Marx and Engels perceive in Carlyle's Latter-Day Pamphlets \"the decline of literary genius in the face of the current acute historical struggles, which i t attempts to confront with its unrecognised, direct, prophetic inspirations\" (p. 326). The reviewers acknowledge that Carlyle once wrote \"in a manner which is at times even revolutionary,\" as in his history of the French Revolution, in his \"apology for Cromwell,\" and in Past and Present, confronting the bourgeoisie \"at a time when its views, tastes and ideals held the whole of English literature in t h r a l l \" (pp. 326-27). Nevertheless, they note that, even in these radical pieces, \"the critique of the present is closely bound up with a strangely unhistorical apotheosis of the Middle Ages . . .\" (p. 327). However, the Latter-Day Pamphlets are \"a remarkable step backwards\" even compared to those contradictory writings (p. 327). In these latest pamphlets, Carlyle adopts a \"pantheistic standpoint,\" in which a l l r e a l , historically produced class-conflicts are metaphysically resolved \"into the one great, eternal conflict\"; Carlyle thereby depicts class-distinctions as \"natural,\" and \"class rule is thus sanctioned anew\" (pp. 333-34). Marx and Engels aptly characterise this idealist and reactionary feat as a \"[b] r i l l i a n t return to the 'Night of the Absolute\" in which a l l cats are grey!\" (p. 335) and expose the thoroughly bourgeois bias underlying Carlyle's ostensibly non-partisan, \"class-transcendent\" posture: - 79 -Thus after Carlyle has time and again in the f i r s t forty pages vented a l l his virtuous fury against selfishness, free competition, the abolition of feudal bonds between man and man, supply and demand, laissez-faire , cotton-spinning, cash-payment, etc., we now suddenly find that the main exponents of a l l these shams, the industrial bourgeoisie, are not merely counted among the celebrated heroes and geniuses but even constitute a v i t a l l y indispensable part of these heroes, that the trump card in a l l his attacks on bourgeois relations and ideas is the apotheosis of the bourgeois individual. It appears yet odder that Carlyle, having discovered the commanders of labour and the commanded, in other words a certain organisation of labour, nevertheless declares this organisation to be a great problem requiring solution. If the English bourgeoisie equated paupers with criminals i n order to create a deterrent to pauperism and brought into being the Poor Law of 1834, Carlyle accuses the paupers of high treason because pauperism generates pauperism. . . . This pamphlet is distinguished from the f i r s t only by a fury much greater, yet a l l the cheaper for being directed against those o f f i c i a l l y expelled from the existing society, against people behind bars; a fury which sheds even that l i t t l e shame which the ordinary bourgeoisie s t i l l displays for decency's sake. (Pp. 336, 338) Moreover, say Marx and Engels, \"Carlyle's style corresponds to his ideas\" as a \"remarkable step backwards\" (p. 327). The c r i t i c s imply a real link between the \"pompous cant\" of \"Carlyle, the Noblest\" and his \"self-important shallowness\" (p. 326). Philosophical obscurantism generates its own exaggerated bluster. Marx and Engels' obvious disapproval of Carlyle's mediaevalist conservatism (which, they note, is \"a frequent characteristic of English revolutionaries too, for instance Cobbett and some of the Chartists\" [p. 327]) throws revealing light on Carlyle's disciple William Morris as well as on Raymond Williams' dubious value-criterion of \"a whole way of l i f e , \" which we shall examine later. Moreover, the early Eagleton's thesis that the Carlylean type of contradiction qua contradiction can - 80 -always be effectively valuable because allegedly conjuncturally \"inevitable\" (as in Yeats) faces a rather uphill task as a Marxist argument, in light of a l l our discussions of Balzac, Goethe, and Carlyle. Marx, however, viewed William Cobbett quite differently from the way he viewed Carlyle, despite Cobbett's obvious Carlylean p r o c l i v i t i e s . For, Marx claims, because of his instinctual solidarising with \"the mass of the people against the encroachments of the middle-class\" (p. 323), Cobbett at least never consciously crossed over to the other side of the class-line: [Sjhortly before his death, after the establishment of the new Poor Law, . . . William Cobbett began to suspect the existence of a millocracy as hostile to the mass of the people, as landlords, banklords, public creditors, and the clergymen of the Established Church. . . . He did not see the modern bourgeoisie, but only that fraction of the aristocracy which held the hereditary monopoly of o f f i c e , and which sanctioned by law a l l the changes necessitated by the new wants and pretensions of the middle-class. He saw the machine, but not the hidden motive power. (Pp. 322-23) \"Hence the curious phenomenon,\" observes Marx, that William Cobbett, who was \"a plebeian by instinct and by sympathy\" (p. 322), \"passed in the eyes of the world and in his own conviction for the representative of the industrial middle-class against the hereditary aristocracy\" (p. 323). One can see, therefore, why Marx and Engels should value the \"curious phenomenon\" of Cobbett—a radical who thought he was bourgeois—over the pompous pretences of Carlyle—an ideological spokesman for the bourgeoisie who presented himself as a radical. As in the analogous distinction between Balzac and Goethe, Marx and Engels here had an anti-impressionist, materialist p o l i t i c a l criterion Q f v a i u e - 81 -to distinguish one kind of contradictory figure from another. This criterion was that of the class-interests objectively served by the works of the given figure at any particular point in time. Thus, real contradictions in the author or work to be judged never led Marx or Engels to pronounce \" a l l cats\" \"grey.\" For they knew that this could only represent a capitulation to the prevailing hierarchy of social and literary values, which, as the \"ruling ideas\" of capitalist society, could not but be ultimately inimical to the interests of the world's working class. Lenin's theory of party-oriented literature systematised this Marxist principle in self-conscious terms, thus also effectively ( i f less self-consciously) bringing Marxist literary axiology into contact with the central issue of modern Marxist p o l i t i c s — t h e organisational question. Lenin and the Party Question Lenin and Trotsky, in my view the two most complete Marxists of the twentieth century, devoted most of their talents to organising and defending the Bolshevik Revolution. As with Marx and Engels e a r l i e r , the demands of revolutionary politics prevented the Bolshevik leaders from constructing an elaborate and complete system of literary analysis and evaluation. Yet, for Marxist axiology, Lenin's few literary articles and comments and Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, along with his miscellaneous articles on the subject, represent this century's major continuity with the analytical methods and aims of Marx.62 In his \"Lenin as a Literary Theorist,\" Science and Society, 29, - 82 -No. 1 (Winter 1965), 3, Stefan Morawski points out that Lenin's conclusions about literature were similar to those of Marx and Engels despite Lenin's lack of a complete collection of their statements on that subject and that \"the explanation is to be found in the method of Marxism, which led in that direction.\" Further, to gain a fuller sense of Lenin's historical context, we must remember that his most frequently cited pronouncements—such as the Tolstoy articles or the major statement on party literature—were polemics aimed at clearly identified class-audiences. Thus, Lenin explicitly directed his September 1908 article \"Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution\" (later cited as \"Mirror\") against the \"crude hypocrisy of the venal [liberal bourgeois] hack,\" who facilely switches from hounding Tolstoy to praising him as a patriot, and against the monarchist writers for the Constitutional Democratic (\"Cadet\") Party's newspaper Rech (Speech).63 Similarly, in 1905, in his most widely misinterpreted statement, \"Party Organisation and Party Literature\" (later cited as \"Party Literature\"), Lenin made unmistakable the distinction between the voluntarily l o y a l , intra-party section of his audience and any hostile and disloyal claimant to party rights and privileges within the party: \"First of a l l , we are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he li k e s , without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views\" (Lenin, p. 27; emphasis mine). Freedom of association must exist at least as much as \"freedom of speech,\" and Lenin is interested in addressing mainly those who have freely chosen to be associated with the Bolshevik Party.6^ - 83 -Central to grasping the Leninist principle of literary evaluation is an understanding of precisely this unique contribution of his to revolutionary Marxism (and, by extension, to Marxist axiology): the concept and model of the \"politically-conscious vanguard of the entire working class\" (\"Party Literature,\" Lenin, pp. 25-26). If the general methodology of Marx and Engels implied that a l l literary values in a class-society ultimately correspond to partisan, class-values, and that \"tendentious\" writing and responses are inevitable and can even be desirable, Lenin emphasised that, for revolutionary purposes, mere proletarian class-tendentiousness remains socially impotent unless i t is internally p o l i t i c a l l y differentiated and defined. This internal process, according to Lenin, should explicitly demarcate and organise communists against the pervasive bourgeois values of their own p o l i t i c a l l y uneducated social base.65 Lenin's explicit insistence on organising the p o l i t i c a l l y most advanced sections of the working masses thus qualitatively develops Marx and Engels' implicit notion and model of the \"party of the whole class.\" This latter tacitly and damagingly subsumed the proletariat's most retrogressive elements and—despite Marx and Engels' occasional, class-defined and historically-limited reflexes to the contrary66—indeed shaped the Second International of Engels, Morris, and the early Lenin. But Lenin's fight against the Mensheviks in 1903 decisively marked modern Marxism's departure in practice from building p o l i t i c a l l y unsorted workers' parties (though he himself did not generalise this position in theory t i l l after the First World War). It was Lenin's Bolsheviks who made the revolution. However, revisionists, especially those writing since the f i f t i e s , almost universally deny the decisive importance of a revolutionary - 84 -workers' party. From Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), in which the name of Lenin does not occur even once, to RSgis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and P o l i t i c a l Struggle in Latin America (New York: Grove, 1968), especially pp. 104, 115-16, to Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, t r . Constance Farrington (1961; New York: Grove, 1966), especially p. 91, to Norman Geras in \"Classical Marxism and Proletarian Representation,\" New Left Review, No. 125 (Jan.-Feb. 1981), 75-89, revisionists insist that vanguardism is merely elitism: i t is allegedly \"the masses\"—if anyone—who w i l l , they imply, \"spontaneously\" make \"the revolution.\" But i t should be enough to point out that the world has not seen a single socialist revolution (that i s , a workers' revolution healthy from birth) since Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik vanguard led theirs in 1917. The Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese workers' revolutions were not only overwhelmingly peasant-oriented and peasant-led; they were, for that very reason, socially and p o l i t i c a l l y deformed revolutions, lacking in internationalist proletarian leadership as well as in proletarian democracy. In France, in 1968, the spontaneous uprising of students and workers did not produce a revolution—precisely, I would argue, because there was no revolutionary party to expose and replace the anti-Bolshevik French Sta l i n i s t s , who ordered the workers back to work. Logically, then, i f the proletariat must be internally p o l i t i c a l l y differentiated for i t to be successfully mobilised in its physical majority against capitalism, the values of Marxists at this conjuncture must surely correspond to those of the p o l i t i c a l vanguard, rather than to those of the rear. And the cri t e r i a for specifically literary - 85 -evaluation must then, equally l o g i c a l l y , flow from this (voluntary and active) correspondence. Of course, in a l l this, a party's claim to be the vanguard must reflect r e a l i t y , not wishful thinking or formal dogmatism, as was the case with Stalin's literary commissar, A.A. Zhdanov. ^ 7 The convergence of and correspondence between literary values and p o l i t i c a l values as embodied in the Marxist party should ideally represent a voluntary orientation, not an automatically accomplished state or one forced on the c r i t i c . The attractiveness and revolutionary authority of the party's values wi l l always be historically contingent. On the other hand, they can nevertheless be earned and maintained. Clara Zetkin, i n My Recollections of Lenin (Moscow: Progress [?] , 1956, quoted in Lenin, p. 275), recalls Lenin insisting that \"(V| rt belongs to the people. Its roots should be deeply implanted in the very thick of the labouring masses.\" Thus, in general, \" [ij t should be understood and loved by these masses. It must unite and elevate their feelings, thoughts and w i l l . It must s t i r to activity and develop the art instincts within them.\" Lenin's emphasis on building and activating the vanguard, even when this is to be pursued through art, is not d i f f i c u l t to see in these c r i t e r i a (\"elevate,\" \" s t i r to activity,\" \"develop\"). But precisely because art belongs, in his view, not to some abstract, classless category called \"the people\" as a universal but more specifically to \"the labouring masses,\" and precisely because these labouring masses must be won to the leadership of the socialist revolution, Lenin argues logically that the most advanced partisan cr i t e r i a for l i t e r a r y - c r i t i c a l evaluation must be those of the proletarian vanguard. - 86 -Hence, in judging the works of Tolstoy, Lenin insists on a two-track, dialectical approach. We must analyse Tolstoy in his complete historical context, Lenin urges, when we are merely explaining his contradictions; but when we are using Tolstoy's work, we must selectively appropriate only that which is of positive, current revolutionary value. Thus, on the one hand, an \"appraisal\" of Tolstoy's ideological contradictions must encompass \"the standpoint of the present-day working-class movement and present-day socialism\" a£ well as Tolstoy's own \"standpoint of protest against advancing capita-lism . . .—a protest which had to arise from the patriarchal Russian countryside\" (\"Mirror,\" Lenin, p. 32). On the other hand, because of its structurally unique position as the exploited of the last class-society and because of i t s historically unique ability—already tested to some extent—to resolve the contradictions of capitalist society without regressing into feudalism, i t is the proletarian vanguard alone that can provide a \"correct\" appraisal of Tolstoy: \"such an appraisal is possible only from the viewpoint of the Social-Democratic proletariat\" (\"L.N. Tolstoy,\" Lenin, p. 55; this article is later cited as \"Tolstoy\") Yet, this openly party-loyal standpoint for judging the present worth of any literature is not a legal decree monitoring the production of \"imaginative literature,\" especially of non-party literature. On the contrary, as is the case in p o l i t i c a l commitment in general, the usefulness of this perspective depends entirely on the conscious and enthusiastic i n i t i a t i v e of its espousers. Explicitly disavowing (in the specific) \"any kind of standardised system, or a solution by means of a few decrees,\" Lenin instead urges \"the entire politically-conscious - 87 -Social-Democratic proletariat throughout Russia\" to become \"aware of this new problem, specify i t clearly and everywhere set about solving i t \" (\"Party Literature,\" Lenin, p. 27). But Lenin's point is that the notion of non-partisan literature in a class society is nevertheless a myth, and this myth must be decisively exposed and destroyed in general: \"The freedom of the bourgeois writer . . . is simply masked . . . dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.\" Socialists expose this r e a l i t y , \"not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that w i l l be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that w i l l be openly linked to the proletariat\" (\"Party Literature,\" Lenin, pp. 28-29). We should note, however, Lenin's clear prediction that a non-class literature w i l l be possible \"in a socialist extra-class society.\" Again, clearly, the \"base\" of this new society, free from capitalist economic production, is seen by him as the condition of that classless literature's p o s s i b i l i t y . Such literature \"will be possible\" precisely because i t w i l l be voluntary and hence genuinely free, unmotivated by purely economic necessity.69 Obversely, i f Tolstoy's \"great works are really to be made the possession of a l l , . . . a socialist revolution must be accomplished . . . overthrowing the yoke of the landlords and capitalists\" (\"Tolstoy,\" Lenin, pp. 52-53). This revolutionary-activist thrust consistently marks Lenin's general approach to literary evaluation. Specifically, Lenin continued, with Tolstoy as his focus, Marx and Engels' championing of truthfulness as the single most valuable literary - 88 -criterion: \" i f we have before us a really great artist,\" he wrote in \"Mirror\" (Lenin, p. 30) , \"he must have reflected in his work at least some of the essential aspects of the [1905] revolution.\" Recognising Tolstoy's many contradictions and the incidental inaccuracy of comparing these contradictory works to a mirror (\"A mirror which does not reflect things correctly could hardly be called a mirror\" [\"Mirror,\" Lenin, p. 30]), Lenin nevertheless argued for salvaging from the novelist whatever was currently valuable to the Russian Social Democratic proletariat. Thus Lenin admitted that Tolstoy's ideological and aesthetic contradictions were \"indeed glaring,\" but pointed out that as a whole they accurately \"express the contradictory conditions of Russian l i f e in the last third of the nineteenth century\" (\"Mirror,\" Lenin, pp. 31, 32), embodying \"both the strength and the weakness . . . precisely of the peasant mass movement\" (\"Tolstoy,\" Lenin, p. 53). Hence i t was possible for Tolstoy simultaneously to draw \"incomparable pictures of Russian l i f e \" with \"the most sober realism\"—launching a \"remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy\" as evident in \"capitalist exploitation, . . . government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration\"—and to be \"the landlord obsessed with Christ, . . . the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian int e l l e c t u a l , . . . the crackpot preaching of submission\" and performing guilt-ridden penance by eating rice cutlets instead of meat (\"Mirror,\" Lenin, p. 31). Thus, Lenin felt that, in salvaging for themselves the currently valuable elements from Tolstoy's contradictory novels, the vanguard and the \"advanced classes\" must not become mired in the socio-historical explanations, lapsing into Tolstoy's own anachronistic world-view to try - 89 -to understand him better. Instead, they must s i f t the wheat from the chaff with an eye to their own present needs. Lenin therefore warned against idealising Tolstoy's doctrine of \"non-resistance\" and \"universal 'love'\" today. For, \"|a] quarter of a century ago, the c r i t i c a l elements in Tolstoy's doctrine might at times have been of practical value for some sections of the population in spite of its reactionary and Utopian features.\" But reality has evolved since then. And, \" [i]n our days,\" i t is the \"consciously reactionary\" ideas of the liberal-bourgeois mouthpiece Vekhi (Landmarks) that permeate people's minds, infecting not only the liberals themselves but \"even a section of those who were almost Marxists\" (the Mensheviks), creating \"a liquidationist trend\" among the latter (\"Leo Tolstoy and His Epoch,\" Lenin, p. 68). Thus, while evaluating a \"genius\" such as Tolstoy, who has made \"first-class contributions to world literature\" (\"Mirror,\" Lenin, p. 31), the revolutionary workers and c r i t i c s should recognise and reject his negative features, even while seeking to wrest his positive features in their own, socialist interests. Such is the p o l i t i c a l purpose of Marxist evaluation: Tolstoy is dead, and the pre-revolutionary Russia whose weakness and impotence found thier expression in the philosophy and are depicted in the works of the great a r t i s t , has become a thing of the past. But the heritage which he has le f t includes that which has not become a thing of the past, but belongs to the future. This heritage is accepted and is being worked upon by the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat w i l l explain to the masses of the toilers and the exploited the meaning of Tolstoy's criticism of the state, and the church, private property in land—not in order that the masses should confine themselves to self-perfection and yearn-ning for a godly l i f e , but in order they should rise to strike a new blow at the tsarist monarchy and landlordism, . . . i n order that they should learn to u t i l i s e at every step in their l i f e and in their struggle the technical and social achievements of capitalism, that they should learn to weld - 90 -themselves into a united army of millions of socialist fighters who w i l l overthrow capitalism and create a new society. . . . (\"Tolstoy,\" Lenin, pp. 56-57) Viewing truthfulness as the single most important literary value, Lenin was freely able to recommend to the revolutionary workers writers as p o l i t i c a l l y disparate as the anti-communist White Guard Arkady Averchenko, the mystical humanist Tolstoy, and the American communist John Reed.70 He was able to recommend the non- and anti-communist literature to communists partly because the texts' reactionary attitudes co-existed, as Lenin saw i t , with accurate observations of l i f e . But, above a l l , he was able to do this because he trusted the capacity of the politically-educated proletariat to wrench the insights free from their attendant po l i t i c s : and, indeed, he enjoined them to do so. Like Marx and Engels before him, he valued contradictory works, such as Tolstoy's, not because of but in spite of their negative features; and these features he never failed to attack and reject, however historically explicable they may have been. Again, a c r i t i c such as Eagleton, as we shall see, compares unfavourably with the Marxists on this question. Lenin's c r i t e r i a of literary evaluation, then, followed Marxist principles, and in at least one respect constituted a major development of Marxist theory and practice. This was Lenin's realisation that, to be implemented, these principles required an organisation to embody and fight for them and that the most advanced c r i t e r i a for revolutionary literary evaluation cannot logically violate the perceptions, values, and priorities of the advance guard of the socialist revolution, the (genuine) party of the revolutionary working class. After Lenin, i t was - 91 -Trotsky who spelt out and updated the detailed implications of such organisationally-shaped axiology for Marxist criticism. He did so, however, not only more extensively than Lenin but also in a different and changing historical context—namely, that of the defence of the Russian Revolution, followed by the developing fight against the Stalinist bureaucracy and its reactionary values, though that fight was s t i l l based on the unconditional military defence of the Soviet state against capitalist attack, and was, indeed, the most effective internal strategy for its defence. This is precisely the p o l i t i c a l configuration of forces that, in unprecedentedly sharpened and catastrophic form, s t i l l confronts us today. Trotsky and the Defence of the First Workers' State Our policy in art, during a transitional period, can and must be to help the various groups and schools of art which have come over to the Revolution to grasp correctly the historic meaning of the Revolution, and to allow them complete freedom of self-determination in the f i e l d of art, after putting before them the categorical standard of being for or against the Revolution. The Revolution is reflected in art, for the time being only partially so, to the extent to which the artist ceases to regard i t as an external catastrophe, and to the extent to which the guild of new and old poets and artists becomes a part of the living tissue of the Revolution and learns to see i t from within and not from without. (Leon Trotsky, Introd., Literature and Revolution, t r . Rose Strunsky 1924; t r . Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960 , p. 14; this book is later parenthetically abbreviated as LR ) Trotsky's principles of literary evaluation stemmed from his perception of two supreme complementary and conjunctural p o l i t i c a l needs. On the one hand, the fledgling Soviet workers' state had at a l l costs to be defended against capitalism, on two fronts: against the - 92 -imperialists from abroad and against the White Guards, wealthy peasantry, and other bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and feudal-communalist forces from within. On the other hand, as the twenties progressed, especially after Lenin's death in 1924, a bureaucratic caste, led by Stalin, had usurped p o l i t i c a l power from the Soviet workers. This caste, petit-bourgeois in outlook and composition, was fundamentally hostile to international workers' revolution. Thus, though i t grew and thrived on the social and economic fruits of the revolution achieved at home, i t eventually moved to formalise i t s p o l i t i c a l counter-revolution by slaughtering and banishing tens of thousands of Bolsheviks, among them Trotsky. In purely selfish and Utopian hopes of coexisting peacefully with world capitalism while building \"socialism in one country,\" i t was prepared to endanger even i t s own territory and collectivised economic base, in a common p o l i t i c a l front against the international working class. Such a posture, Trotsky saw, clearly posed a real long- or short-term internal threat to the very existence of the Soviet Union. Thus, for his entire l i f e after Lenin's death, he conducted a relentless struggle to oust the Stalinists from power and to re-i n s t a l l the revolutionary working class in i t s place, as the best—and, indeed, only—internal guarantee of the f i r s t workers' state's security, including that of i t s art and culture. Literature and Revolution, Trotsky's major statement on the subject, was published in 1924. It therefore discusses the prospects and evaluative c r i t e r i a for post-revolutionary literature mainly in light of the recently defeated threats of capitalist restoration from without and within during the C i v i l War (1918-21). The open fight of Trotsky and the Left Opposition against the Stalinist reaction is only about to - 93 -begin, though the main overall enemy of the revolution was always— later, as well as now—rightly seen by Trotsky as not Stalinism but capitalism. In that book, therefore, Trotsky describes the conjunctural character of the Russian revolution thus: Because of i t s peasant foundation, and because of its vast spaces and i t s patches of culture, the Russian Revolution is the most chaotic and formless of a l l revolutions. But in i t s leadership, in the method of its orientation, in i t s organisation, in its aims and tasks, i t is the most \"correct,\" the most planful and the most finished of a l l revolutions. In the combination of these two extremes lies the soul, the internal character of our Revolution. (LR, pp. 102-03) This'description captures in its own way the relationship between the Soviet workers' vanguard and the Soviet working masses at a particular conjuncture. And Trotsky was alluding to this real configuration of forces when he categorically declared in his Introduction that \"the problem of creating a new art proceeds entirely along the lines of the fundamental problem of constructing a Socialist culture\" (LR, p. 12). He then elaborated thus: The art of this epoch w i l l be entirely under the influence of revolution. This art needs a new self-consciousness. It i s , above a l l , incompatible with mysticism, whether i t be frank, or whether i t masquerades as romanticism, because the Revolution starts from the central idea that collective man must become sole master, and that the limits of his power are determined by his knowledge of natural forces and by his capacity to use them. This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with skepticism, and with a l l other forms of spiritual collapse. It is r e a l i s t i c , active, v i t a l l y c o l l e c t i v i s t , and f i l l e d with a limitless creative faith i n the Future. (LR, p. 15) Trotsky's positive general c r i t e r i a , as in the excerpt above, are therefore clearly a function not only of the cultural problems of his day but also of the overall problem of post-revolutionary economic, - 94 -p o l i t i c a l , as well as military consolidation faced by the f i r s t workers' state in history. In his thorough and urgent speech on \"The Tasks of the Youth Leagues\" (1921), Lenin had repeatedly hammered home the same point: \"consolidate the foundation\" (Lenin, p. 154). The proletariat needed to \"re-educate a section of the peasantry,\" to \"win over the working peasants\" in order to defeat the ric h , profiteering ones. \"The class struggle is continuing,\" Lenin had repeated; \" i t has merely changed i t s forms . . . and i t is our task to subordinate a l l interests to that struggle.\" And from this overview of the revolution, Lenin logically concluded, \"Communist morality is based on the struggle for the consolidation and completion of communism. That is also the basis of communist training, education, and teaching\" (Lenin, pp. 158, 159, 161). It is clearly this same perception, then, of the overwhelming need to defend and consolidate the besieged new Soviet state on an all-round basis that also underlay Trotsky's defiantly (and deceptively) simple statement that \"[djuring the period of the revolution, only that literature which promotes the consolidation of the workers in their struggle against the exploiters is necessary and progressive\" (LR, pp. 229-30). First things had to come f i r s t . Now such an account of Trotsky's views, though useful as a balance to an opposite kind of account that would make Trotsky out to be l i t t l e more than a democratically right-minded anti-Stalinist l i b e r a l ,71 of course ignores their internal complexity and sophistication. Yet, while the detailed ramifications of these views are varied and many, their formative principles are few and simple. On the one hand, i t is clear, Trotsky saw the \"poetry of the Revolution\" not merely in the \"elemental rise of the October tide, but in the clear consciousness and - 95 -in the tense w i l l of the leading Party\" (LR, p. 101). On the other hand, \"the leading Party\" of Lenin and Trotsky was a far cry from Stalin's bureaucratic travesty of i t . Thus, in a 1938 letter to Partisan Review, Trotsky insisted (against the populist jibes of a Chicago magazine editor) that \"[n]ot a single progressive idea had begun with a 'mass base,1 otherwise i t would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in i t s last stage that the idea finds its masses. . . .\" But then he added, immediately, \" — i f , of course, i t answers the needs of progress\" (\"Art and Politics in Our Epoch,\" Trotsky, p. 112). An entire section of his classic analysis of the Soviet state's degeneration under Stalin—The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1937; New York: Pathfinder,1972)—elaborates this distinction between a genuine vanguard and a self-appointed, arbitrary bureaucracy (reprinted as an excerpt, \"Culture and the Soviet Bureaucracy,\" in Trotsky, pp. 94-100). Comparing even the harshest dictates of the Bolshevik government to the panicking, insecure brutality of the Stalinist bureaucracy, Trotsky pointed out in his analysis that even \"in the hottest years of the c i v i l war, i t was clear to the leaders of the revolution that the government could, guided by po l i t i c a l considerations, place limitations upon creative freedom, but in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of science, literature and art\" (\"Culture,\" Trotsky, p. 96). The confident and optimistic civil-war dictatorship had \"no fear of experiments,\" while the bureaucracy \"superstitiously fears whatever does not serve i t directly, as well as whatever i t does not understand\" (\"Culture,\" Trotsky, p. 97). Ideological and aesthetic debate and competition, the \"struggle of tendencies and schools,\" have yielded to \"interpretation of - 96 -the w i l l of the leaders,\" so that \"literary estimates are transformed within a few weeks, textbooks made over, streets renamed, statues brought forward,\" a l l as a result of \"a few eulogistic remarks of Stalin about the poet Mayakovsky\" (\"Culture,\" Trotsky, p. 99). Thus this \"100 percent conformism\" merely induces cultural \" s t e r i l i t y \" (\"Culture,\" Trotsky, p. 98). Yet—and this is where Trotsky leaves no room for anti-communist populism—bureaucratism and populism are but two aspects of the same rejection of vanguard responsibility: That old [populist] Narodnik formula, rejecting the task of a r t i s t i c a l l y educating the masses, takes on a s t i l l more reactionary character when the right to decide what art the people want and what they don't want remains in the hands of the bureaucracy. . . . In the last analysis the whole affair comes down in its eyes to taking care that art assimilates i t s interests, and finds such forms for them as wil l make the bureaucracy attractive to the popular masses. (\"Culture,\" Trotsky, p. 100)72 Trotsky's c r i t e r i a of literary value thus grew out of an integrated and coherent revolutionary p o l i t i c s . In this p o l i t i c s , not only was \"the well-being of the revolution\" the \"highest law\" but this priority recognised the real limitations inherent in art as a socially discrete force: \" a r t i s t i c creativity, by i t s very nature, lags behind the other modes of expression of a man's s p i r i t , and s t i l l more of the class.\"73 Thus, while Trotsky was in a sense right to point to \"culture\" as the \"main instrument\" of past class oppression and to argue that \" i t also, and only i t can become the instrument of socialist emancipation\" (\"Culture and Socialism,\" Trotsky, p. 88), we must remember that he was talking about culture reinforcing and completing, not replacing, the process begun by the socio-political revolution. For, as he explained - 97 -in the f i r s t few lines of his Introduction to Literature and Revolution (pp. 9-10) , \"If the victorious Russian proletariat had not created i t s own army, the Workers' State would have been dead long ago, and we would not be thinking now about economic problems, and much less about intellectual and cultural ones. . . . Art needs comfort, even abundance.\" Thus, base always ultimately determined superstructure for Trotsky, though he understood quite deeply—as his example of the French Revolution's non-French a r t i s t i c chroniclers shows^—how different superstructures and superstructural factors could interact to lend a particular form to the general cultural elements produced and defined by the developments at the base.^5 The well-being of the revolution, then, and the r e a l , material limitations of art as a revolutionary social force were the twin parameters within which Trotsky theorised about specific c r i t e r i a of literary value. And Trotsky's stance towards revolutionary literature was one of broad, cautious guidance, with his stance towards non-revolutionary literature remaining, like Lenin's, selectively appropriative. Philosophically, Trotsky's specific c r i t e r i a of literary value were ful l y consistent with those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, with certain elaborations added. Thus, while \"truthfulness\"—in a l l its various connotations—had earlier figured as the common highest criterion of value from Marx to Lenin and does so again i n Trotsky, i n the latter we find some formal components of this criterion elaborated, such as psychological distance, proportion, sense of context, correct posing of social contradictions and capacity to solve them. The last criterion, of course, verges on the attitudinal; and on this matter, Trotsky advocates more earnestly than any revolutionary - 98 -Marxist before him the importance of optimism. Yet, though he maintains that the \"invisible axis\" of at least a l l post-revolutionary literature should logically be \"the Revolution i t s e l f \" (LR, p. 79), he cautions against a r t i f i c i a l didacticism (as much as against facile optimism) and recommends realism only \"in the sense of a philosophy of l i f e , \" not necessarily in the sense of \"the traditional [technical] arsenal of literary schools\" (LR, p. 236).7 6 Dialectically linking technical innovations to the needs of practical struggle, Trotsky makes the point that \"the new artist w i l l need a l l the methods and processes evolved in the past, as well as a few supplementary ones, in order to grasp the new l i f e . And this is not going to be a r t i s t i c eclecticism, because the unity of art is created by an active world-attitude and active l i f e -attitude\" (LR, p. 236). As with most of Marx's, Engels', and Lenin's comments on literature, i t is often in Trotsky's comments on particular authors that some of his evaluative criteria achieve concrete embodiment. But while his analyses of particular authors and works are far more extensive and specialised than those of his Marxist predecessors, they too serve, in the end, merely as confirmatory illustrations of the c r i t i c ' s general evaluative method. My survey of Trotsky's \"practical criticism\" w i l l therefore be proportionately brief and chiefly illu s t r a t i v e in purpose. Trotsky's probably most significant analyses involve a handful of authors—Dante, Tolstoy, Celine, and Mayakovsky—although his scattered comments on authors such as Malraux, Malaquais, Martinet, Pilnyak, Blok, and Gorky are illuminating too. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky advances his specific c r i t e r i a of literary value in the wake of what he considers the bankruptcy of most pre-1917 non-revolutionary (Russian) - 99 -literature, in view of his recognition of \"proletarian\" literature as an un-Marxist concept, and in face of the virtual unforseeability of the details of socialist and communist culture. Most relevantly, the \"fellow-travellers\" and Imagists, such as Boris Pilnyak, are described as colourful technicians but ambivalent sympathisers of the revolution; and only Alexander Blok is allowed the possibility that one of his poems, the semi-mystical \"The Twelve,\" might remain valuable beyond i t s time. The Futurists' absolute negation of the past, Trotsky notes, was always p o l i t i c a l l y ambiguous at best: they had espoused fascism in Italy, and Mayakovsky, probably the Russian Futurist to have impressed Trotsky the most, seems to him to be at his poetic worst when he is trying hardest to be a genuine communist.77 Perhaps the most serious evaluative problem from within the camp of revolution was that represented by the \"Proletkult\" group, made up of writers such as Libedinsky and patronised by figures such as Lunacharsky and Bukharin (behind whom stood Stalin himself), who argued for a hypothetically unalloyed \"proletarian\" literature. While Lenin dismissed them unceremoniously, the group received their most thorough and damaging prognosis at the hands of Trotsky. Echoing the views elaborated earlier by Luxemburg, Trotsky insisted that the historically unique cultural destitution of the revolutionary proletariat, the intensity of the p o l i t i c a l struggle during the dictatorship of the proletariat, the historically limited duration of this struggle, and this period's eventual transition into socialism—that i s , into a classless s o c i e t y — a l l logically contradicted the concept of a stable and pure \"proletarian\" culture.78 Indeed, Trotsky observed, the \"Proletkult's\" notion of a lasting and self-enclosed \"proletarian\" - 100 -culture was not Incompatible with Stalin's anti-Marxist policy of a prolonged period of \"socialism\" in isolated Russia, of \"peaceful coexistence\" with the imperialists of the world: \"Mayakovsky was not and could not become a direct progenitor of 'proletarian literature' for the same reason that i t is impossible to build socialism in one country\" (\"The Suicide of Valdimir Mayakovsky,\" Trotsky, p. 178). But of course a l l this, says Trotsky, does not mean that no literature at a l l can be produced during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. \"Of course,\" he notes, \"the p o l i t i c a l methods' and revolutionary customs of the proletariat can also be called i t s culture\"; besides, \" [ i ] t is quite possible that revolutionary poets w i l l give us martial verses . . .\" (CA, pp. 23, 27). But he believes that their value, judging by current evidence, is not encouraging and that \"the workers' verses i n Zvezda and Pravda . . . were a p o l i t i c a l event, not a literary one\" (CA, p. 6). \"There is no revolutionary art as yet,\" Trotsky declares; but \"elements of this art\" exist, so \"why should not this art, at least its f i r s t big wave, come soon . . .?\" (LR, p. 229) This transitional revolutionary a r t , Trotsky holds, wi l l be most valuable when i t manages to express the \"poetry of the Revolution,\" which lies in the party-led proletariat's struggle, growth, persistence, defeats, triumphs, calculated retreats, watchfulness, assaults—\"in the elemental flood of mass rebellion, in the exact computation of forces, and in the chess-like movements of strategy\" (LR, p. 98). In this struggle, during a period when uniquely socialist values are necessarily embryonic and incompletely differentiated from merely logical and radical ones, the proletariat w i l l have to r e j e c t — i n literature, as i n science—\"what is clearly unnecessary, false and reactionary.\" It w i l l - 101 -need to u t i l i s e available scientific methods and conclusions, \"taking them necessarily with the percentage of reactionary class-alloy\" contained in them. For, \"[p]ne has to learn regardless of the fact that learning carries within i t s e l f certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies\" (LR, pp. 199, 205). Learning from one's enemies, in Trotsky's scheme, involves at least two main components: the a r t i s t i c heritage left by capitalism and the p o l i t i c a l l y only indifferently s o c i a l i s t i c intelligentsia also bequeathed by i t . Starting from this complex and far-from-ideal r e a l i t y , Trotsky makes the following observations and suggestions. On the one hand, anyone who sincerely wishes to contribute—however ineptly—to s o c i a l i s t i c literature should be accorded a l l help and f u l l protection to experiment on that basis.^9 Dialectical materialists w i l l also be aware, Trotsky knows, of the largely unpredictable way in which new historical forces must inevitably intersect new literary movements to produce specifically unforeseeable forms, thus changing the complex course of literary history repeatedly and forever.^0 on the other hand, he i n s i s t s , revolutionaries can and should intervene actively to shape that history to their own benefit as much as possible. But the most that is logically possible (and also truly productive) in a transitional period is what Trotsky calls \"culture-bearing\" by the proletarian in t e l l i g e n t s i a , a planned preparing of the ground for the more stable future edifice of truly socialist culture to stand on.^l More than thi s , Trotsky argues, i t is neither immediately possible nor ultimately f r u i t f u l for revolutionaries to attempt in such a period of all-round f l u x . A n d i t is in this spirit of revolutionary culture-bearing, of trying to coax various bourgeois (and revolutionary) alloys to yield - 102 -their gold to the proletariat—despite the danger of contamination and poisoning—that Trotsky takes up his instruments to evaluate specific authors, broaching general questions about literary judgment in the process. In i t s close paralleling of Lenin's evaluation, Trotsky's independent assessment of Tolstoy's works is the clearest confirmatory il l u s t r a t i o n of their common, Marxist analytical method and purpose. However, a preliminary overview of some of Trotsky's comments on other writers is perhaps more in place here. As I mentioned e a r l i e r , truthfulness (in its various dimensions) was Trotsky's fundamental criterion of value, for the obvious reason that even pro-revolutionary professions of p o l i t i c a l loyalty mean l i t t l e when emanating from a dishonest work. It was the bare minimum that could be expected of any work purporting to be valuable to revolutionaries. \"The struggle for revolutionary ideas in art,\" Trotsky thus wrote in a 1938 letter to Andre Breton, after Stalin's systematic f a l s i f i c a t i o n of Soviet revo-lutionary history, \"must begin once again with the struggle for a r t i s t i c truth. . . . 'You shall not l i e ! ' — t h a t is the formula of salvation\" (\"The Independence of the Artist: A Letter to AndrS Breton,\" Trotsky, p. 124). In his comments on Celine's Journey to the End of the Night (\"Celine and Poincarg: Novelist and Politician,\" Trotsky, pp. 191-203), Trotsky explained the intricacies of this simple criterion. Celine, said Trotsky, showed pessimism and a certain modesty of ambition: he \"is no revolutionist, and does not aim to be one\"; he \"does not occupy himself with the goal of reconstructing society\" (\"Cgline,\" Trotsky, p. 201). Nevertheless, he claimed, Celine \"appears as a revolutionist,\" for he \"shows what i s \" ; \"through supreme effort he divests himself of - 103 -a l l canons, transgresses a l l conventions\" (\"CSline,\" Trotsky, p. 201). And this tenacious appetite for \"exposing the l i e \" redounds to the author's and the work's advantage. Thus, Celine's explicit pessimism, because of i t s \"very intensity, . . . bears within i t a dose of the antidote\" (\"Cgline,\" Trotsky, p. 203). For, as Trotsky observes, in real l i f e , \"active indignation is linked up with hope\" (\"Ciline,\" Trotsky, p. 191). Thus, though Trotsky can discern in Celine's novel \"almost no p o l i t i c s , \" he can discern \"something more: the livi n g substratum out of which i t takes form\" (\"Celine,\" Trotsky, p. 199). Celine's passion for truth, moreover, linked to his indignation, results in a s t y l i s t i c revolution as well. Academically and aesthetically taboo words \"become irreplaceable to give expression to l i f e in i t s crudeness and abjectness. Erotic terms serve Celine only to rip the glamour from eroticism\" (\"Celine,\" Trotsky, p. 193). As Trotsky sums up, \"He only wants to tear away the prestige from everything that frightened and oppresses him. To ease his conscience from terror in the face of l i f e , this physician to the poor had to resort to new modes of imagery. He turned out to be the revolutionist of the novel\" (\"C§line,\" Trotsky, p. 201). But the particular example of Celine also holds some general pointers for would-be revolutionary theoreticians of literary value: Decay hits not only parties in power, but schools of art as well. The creative methods become hollow and cease to react upon human s e n s i b i l i t i e s . . . . Living creativeness cannot march ahead without repulsion away from o f f i c i a l tradition, canonised ideas and feelings, images and expressions covered by the lacquer of use and wont. Each new tendency seeks for the most direct and honest contact between words and emotions. The struggle against pretence in art always grows to a lesser or greater measure into the struggle against the - 104 -injustice of human relations. The connection is self-evident; art which loses the sense of the social l i e inevitably defeats i t s e l f by affectation, turning into mannerism. (\"Ciline,\" Trotsky, p. 201) Trotsky thus dialectically links truthfulness as a moral and literary ethic to its subversive impact on the existing relationship among conventional genres, modes, images, and language, thereby revealing in the end its effectively revolutionary role in creative art as a whole. Of course, as I indicated e a r l i e r , Trotsky also recognises various components of truthfulness, as distinct from its effects. Perhaps a l l of them, however, could be seen as aspects of one major component: a sense of proportion. Thus, one aspect of this sense of proportion would be what \"the Germans c a l l the pathos of distance\" (LR, p. 155): \"for art to be able to transform as well as to ref l e c t , there must be a great distance between the artist and l i f e \" (LR, p. 139). This should not be interpreted as aloofness, or a fixed chasm between the writer and l i f e ; rather i t should be understood as an adjustable, sensitive mode of approach and retreat, an aid to achieving perspective, or a \"sense of measure\" (LR, p. 151). The intended telescopic nature of this distance is indicated by Trotsky in his comments on Jules Romains (\"Critical Jottings,\" Trotsky, pp. 209-10), where he explains that \"only a participant can be a profound spectator. . . . With a participant, his 'distance' changes depending on the nature of his participation, while with a spectator i t does not.\" Consequently, says Trotsky, a \"spectator like Romains can be a remarkable writer, but he cannot be a great . writer.\" The reverse fault is that of false familiarity, one which Trotsky finds Mayakovsky guilty of. Mayakovsky, he complains, uses - 105 -\"vulgarism so that he could be pals with Socialism and with the Revolution.\" But such gestural intimacy, when unfounded in any substantial programmatic and emotional compatability, merely amounts to disingenuousness—that i s , to a violation of truthfulness. As Trotsky notes elsewhere, \" [ffamiliarity is not at a l l an expression of an inner intimacy, for frequently i t is merely an evidence of p o l i t i c a l or moral slovenliness. An internally developed bond with the Revolution would exclude a familiar tone\" (LR, p. 155). This false familiarity is of course quite different from the dramatic irony based on trust that any Soviet comedy, so longed for by Trotsky (LR, pp. 238, 240), would normally employ. Thus, both lack of capacity to adjust one's \"distance\" and spurious intimacy damage the sense of proportion. This in turn disorients the reader, so that, to use Trotsky's example of Boris Pilnyak, \"you do not feel the satisfaction which comes from solving contradictions, which is the greatest sign of a work of art\" (LR, p. 81). For, contradictions, as well as people's need and capacity to solve them, are for Marxists the stuff of l i f e . And to ignore or distort them is to ignore or distort the truth. The other major aspect of a sense of proportion is internal to a work's formal (rather than perceptual) mechanics and relates to structural measure, intensity, and pace. Here, too, Trotsky finds Mayakovsky wanting, complaining that the poet's \"[e]ach phrase, each expression, each image . . . tries to be the climax. That is why the whole 'piece' has no climax\" (LR, p. 52). And in this formal f a i l u r e , Trotsky sees a reflection of the \"chaotic and formless\" nature of the Russian revolution, just as Lenin saw the contradictions of nineteenth-century peasant Russia in the mystical, confused indignation of Tolstoy. - 106 -But Mayakovsky ignores the existence of a compensating factor—the revolutionary workers' organisation—that Tolstoy could only dimly have apprehended. This neglect, I would argue, permits his one-sided depiction of the revolution, and hence his partial untruthfulness. Trotsky himself comes close to making this point. \"It is not true,\" he protests, \"that Mayakovsky was f i r s t of a l l a revolutionary and after that a poet, although he sincerely wished i t were so. In fact Mayakovsky was f i r s t of a l l a poet, an a r t i s t , who rejected the old world without breaking with i t . Only after the revolution did he seek to find support for himself in.the revolution, and to a significant degree he succeeded in doing so; but he did not merge with i t totally, for he did not come to i t during his years of inner formation, in his youth\" (\"Mayakovsky,\" Trotsky, pp. 174-75). Yet Mayakovsky was a victim of p o l i t i c a l naivety, not a malicious and deliberate distorter of truth, and Trotsky's characterisation of his plight clinches the p o l i t i c a l -poetic connection: \"the general contradictions of revolution [are] always d i f f i c u l t for a r t , which seeks perfected forms. . . . rMayakovsky was] defeated by the logic of the situation\" (\"Mayakovsky,\" Trotsky, p. 177). He thus could not meet Trotsky's clearly spelled out crit e r i a of value in this respect: \"A work of art must show the gradual growth of an image, of a mood, of a plot, or of an intrigue to i t s climax and must not throw the reader about from one end to another end, no matter i f i t is done by the most s k i l f u l boxing blows of Imagery\" (LR, p. 152). In light of Trotsky's admiration for Celine's anti-conventional boldness of imagery, we can only read the above cri t e r i a as ones subject to the presence or absence,in a given work, of general, perceptual truthfulness. - 107 -Trotsky's most extensive engagement with the issue encountered by Marx in his continuing attraction to ancient Greek art can be found i n the former's discussion of Dante's Divine Comedy (in Class and Art, pp. 9-12). This discussion separately tackles the concrete problems involved in selectively appropriating non- and pre-revolutionary \"classics\" in the interests of the on-going socialist revolution. From the outset, Trotsky distinguishes between an approach based on historical-research interests and one based on aesthetic and emotional empathy, while insisting—contrary to some interpretations^—on the respective legitimacy and even interdependence of both. The context of the discussion leaves no doubt that Trotsky's emphasis f a l l s on the aesthetic empathy only because he finds himself combating the vulgar materialist arguments of Fedor Raskolnikov. This is borne out by Trotsky's repeated assurances that the documentary researcher's and the layman reader's approaches, though at \"two different levels,\" are \"connected\" (CA, p. 9): \"I am not against history—that's pointless. Of course the historical approach to Dante is legitimate and necessary and affects our aesthetic attitude to him . . .\" (CA, p. 11). His emphasis that \"one can't substitute one for the other\" (CA p. 11) and that they \"do not overlap\" (CA, p. 9) is therefore one necessitated by the given relationship of polemical forces in this particular discussion. Beyond the different specific elements identified by Marx in ancient Greek art and by Trotsky in Dante, respectively, as the bases of their aesthetic empathy, the explanatory principles of the two revolutionaries remain strikingly similar. Thus, we recall Marx and Engels' observation in the Manifesto that the old, class-based \"social - 108 -consciousness,\" despite i t s frequent variations, nevertheless \"moves within certain common forms, or general ideas,\" that have existed for as long as class society i t s e l f and w i l l continue to exist t i l l \"the total disappearance of class antagonisms\" (Marx/Engels, p. 74); and we recall Marx's specific identification of certain socially pre-figurative elements in ancient Greek art as the source of its charm for him (Introduction, Marx/Engels, p. 84). Similarly, Trotsky explains the phenomenon of his continuing empathy for the mediaeval Dante by indicating the \"common features\" of \"class-society.\" He singles out one \"elementary psychological feeling\"—the \"fear of death\"—as a shared concern through the ages (and, indeed, across human-animal barriers) and points out that such a shared concern \"can\" move \"us\" even today, though this is no guarantee that the same concern w i l l either be shared or be appreciated in quite the same way in a different age or social context: How is i t thinkable that there should be not an [merely] historical but a directly aesthetic relationship between us and a mediaeval Italian book? This is explained by the fact that in class society, in spite of a l l i t s changeability, there are certain common features. . . . Let us take, for instance, such an elementary psychological feeling as fear of death. This feeling is characteristic not only of man but also of animals. In man i t f i r s t found simple articulate expression, and later also a r t i s t i c expression. In different ages, in different social milieux, this expression has changed, that is to say, men have feared death in different ways. And nevertheless what was said on this score not only by Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, but also by the Psalmist, can move us. (CA, pp. 9-10) When Libedinsky utters an incredulous exclamation at this point, Trotsky explains that i t is possible—even inevitable—that Shakespeare and Byron themselves w i l l at some point \"stop speaking\" to their souls: \"undoubtedly a time w i l l come when people w i l l approach the works of - 109 -Shakespeare and Byron . . . exclusively from the standpoint of scie n t i f i c - h i s t o r i c a l analysis\" (CA, p. 10). Indeed, he adds, this is the way \"we approach most poets of the Middle Ages\" (CA, p. 10). But Trotsky nevertheless challenges Libedinsky to deny, on the basis of their own acknowledged, real responses, that Shakespeare and Byron at this juncture \"somehow speak to your soul and mine\" (CA, p. 10). Moreover, he continues, works of art need not always be valuable as a whole: i t is therefore possible for an historically non-specialised reader to receive enjoyment, \" i f not from the whole of the Divine Comedy then at least from some parts of i t \" (CA, p. 11). Exactly what literary values are appropriable is a question whose answer depends on the given, concrete conjuncture of l i t e r a r y , psychological, and historical components. And, f i n a l l y , such appropriation is a pos s i b i l i t y , not an i n e v i t a b i l i t y . Hence, though Trotsky's actual peroration of Dante's current revolutionary value suffers from certain tautological and apparently non-materialistic formulations ,85 ^is argument proper about the general principles, historical factors, and real evaluative c r i t e r i a involved in the process of revolutionary appropriation remain entirely materialist and d i a l e c t i c a l . Trotsky's evaluation of Tolstoy is of interest primarily as a common focus for closely comparing Lenin's evaluative c r i t e r i a and methodology to his (Trotsky's). B r i e f l y , Lenin and Trotsky both agree that Tolstoy's works are contradictory but that the socialist proletariat can usefully separate Tolstoy's reactionary doctrine from his truthful and often unwittingly accurate depiction of the Russian pre-revolutionary society, and value the latter quality, along with i t s technical results, to i t s own advantage. Thus Trotsky, in is 1908 essay - no -\"Tolstoy: Poet and Rebel\" (Trotsky, pp. 127-42), calls Tolstoy a \"fmjoralist and mystic, foe of politics and revolution,\" who \"nourishes with his criticism the confused revolutionary consciousness of many populist sects\"; at worst, Tolstoy is characterised as a \"conservative anarchist\" (\"Poet and Rebel,\" Trotsky, pp. 140, 139). Yet, Trotsky notes, two years later (\"On Tolstoy's Death,\" Trotsky, pp. 143-47), \"there is a deep moral affinity between the beliefs of Tolstoy and the teachings of socialism\" (Trotsky, p. 145). As in the case of Celine, Malraux, and other modern writers admired and recommended to socialists by Trotsky, the key to this paradox of Tolstoy's value for socialist culture, he maintains, li e s in his indignant truthfulness, \"in the honesty and fearlessness of their [Tolstoy's teachings'] denunciation of oppression and slavery and in their indomitable striving for the brotherhood of man\" (\"On Tolstoy's Death,\" Trotsky, p. 145). War and Peace, which Trotsky calls Tolstoy's \"best and unsurpassed work\" among an epic repertory that shares a \"kinship with the Pentateuch and the Iliad\" (\"Poet and Rebel,\" pp. 131-32), illustrates for Trotsky a l l of Tolstoy's strengths: his breadth of vision, his generosity, his capacity to see (and depict) l i f e as \"a limitless panorama whose parts are inseparably bound together by an internal bond,\" as well as his capacity to maintain a steady detachment from a l l his objects of concern. Lenin had maintained that even though Tolstoy had completely missed the significance of the proletariat as the nemesis of the class that he so hated (\"L.N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement,\" pp. 55-63), \"that certainly does not mean that the doctrine was not s o c i a l i s t i c or that i t did not contain c r i t i c a l elements capable of providing valuable - I l l -material for the enlightenment of the advanced classes\" (\"Leo Tolstoy and His Epoch,\" Lenin, p. 67). For, as a powerful, self-confident, and sincere a r t i s t , Tolstoy had \"raised a number of questions\" concerning bourgeois society (\"Tolstoy and Labour,\" Lenin, p.58)—questions that could be solved only by the revolutionary working class. Trotsky's assessment in this respect is identical to Lenin's: \"Tolstoy did not know or show the way out of the hell of bourgeois culture. But with i r r e s i s t i b l e force he posed the question that only scien t i f i c socialism can answer. And in this vein one might say that everything in Tolstoy's teaching that is lasting and permanent flows into socialism as naturally as a river into the ocean\" (\"On Tolstoy's Death,\" Trotsky, p. 146).^6 In the generally barren or non-existent f i e l d of post-revolutionary \"proletarian\" literature, Trotsky did seem to recognise one exception, whom he significantly called \"a Bolshevik whose weapon is poetry\" (LR, p. 212). Considering Trotsky's earlier trenchant criticism of Mayakovsky's false intimacy with the revolution as well as of the a r t i f i c i a l i t y of his ostensibly communist poetry (LR, pp. 155, 146), we may safely assume that neither \"Bolshevik\" nor \"poetry\" is here light l y associated with this exception. In him, one may well argue, Trotsky sees a model genuinely worthy of emulation by the revolutionary proletariat. This poet's work represents, to Trotsky, the greatest historically available consummation of the two supreme crit e r i a of literary value under the on-going dictatorship of the p r o l e t a r i a t — unswerving f i r s t loyalty to the defence and consolidation of the revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party, and authenticity of content, attitude, and literary technique. The name of the poet is Demyan Biedny: - 112 -It is curious that those who make abstract formulas of proletarian poetry usually pass the poet by who, more than anyone else, has the right to be called the poet of revolutionary Russia. He is a Bolshevik whose weapon is poetry. . . . The Revolution i s , for him, no [mere] material for creation, but the highest authority, which has placed him at his post. His work is a social service not only in the fi n a l analysis, as a l l art i s , but subjectively, in the consciousness of the poet himself. . . . He grew up in the Party, he lived through the various phases of its development, he learned to think and to feel with his class from day to day and to reproduce this world of thoughts and feelings in concentrated form in the language of verses which have the shrewdness of fables, the sadness of songs, the boldness of couplets, as well as indignation and appeal. There is nothing of the dilettante in his anger and in his hatred. He hates with the well-placed hatred of the most revolutionary Party i n the world. Demyan Biedny did not and w i l l not create a school; he himself was created by the school, called the Russian Communist Party, for the needs of a great epoch which w i l l not come again. If one could free oneself from a metaphysical concept of proletarian culture and could regard the question from the point of view of what the proletariat reads, what i t needs, what absorbs i t , what impels i t to action, what elevates i t s cultural level and so prepares the ground for a new art, then the work of Demyan Biedny would appear as proletarian and popular literature. . . . If this is not \"true\" poetry, i t is something more than that. (LR, pp. 212-14) Trotsky's admiring description of Biedny encapsulates the former's entire evaluative orientation towards contemporaneous literature. It draws together a l l his positive c r i t e r i a of literary value, incidentally contrasting some of them to their common counterparts (such as Biedny's professional, \"well-placed revolutionary hatred\" to its dilettantish version). Given the revolutionary conjuncture, the poet's party-loyalty figures prominently as a virtue. As well, Trotsky emphasises the importance of paying close attention to the proletariat's real needs, responses, preoccupations, and incentives. Indeed, he demonstrates, through his own method of appraising Biedny, the p o l i t i c a l -- 113 -interventionist stance that a Marxist c r i t i c should logically learn to adopt as a general rule. Above a l l , Trotsky's evaluative description of Biedny d i s t i l l s and makes available the most advanced analytical methods and evaluative c r i t e r i a in the century-old tradition of the revolutionary Marxists. However, as we shall see, for mutually related though distinct historical and socio-political reasons, neither Caudwell nor Eagleton continues that particular tradition, while Williams remains fundamentally inimical to i t . It thus remains for someone else to pick up where Trotsky l e f t off and restore the revolutionary tradition's evaluative principles to the forefront of Marxist literary criticism. Notes * Rene Wellek, \"Criticism as Evaluation,\" The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel H i l l , North Carolina: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 62-63. 2 Useful accounts of the history of Marxist literary theories, though not always sympathetic, comprehensive, or concise, can be found in Henri Arvon, Marxist Aesthetics, t r . Helen R. Lane, intro. Fredric Jameson (1970; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism, rev. and enl. by Peter Demetz, t r . Jeffrey L. Sammons (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959), esp. Chs. 7-9 (on post-Marx/Engels developments), pp. 178-236; Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1976); Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 81-100; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1975; rpt. London: Verso, 1978), pp. 21-43 (on English Marxist literary theory); D.W. Fokkema and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, Theories of Literature in the Twentieth Century: Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics of Reception, Semiotics (London: C. Hurst, 1977), Ch. 4, pp. 81-193; Berel Lang and Forrest Williams, Introd., Marxism and Art: Writings i n Aesthetics and Criticism (New York: David McKay, 1972), pp. 1-17; C l i f f Slaughter, Marxism, Ideology and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1980); George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athenum, 1967), pp. 305-24; Raymond Williams, \"Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis,\" New Left Review, No. 129 (Sept.-Oct. 1981), pp. 51-66; and Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 197-212. Particularly useful treatments of Marx and Engels' l i t e r a r y - c r i t i c a l pronouncements, in addition to Arvon, Demetz, Eagleton, and Slaughter, can be found in Ian B i r c h a l l , \"The Total Marx and the Marxist Theory of Literature,\" in Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures, ed. Paul Walton and Stuart Hall (London: Human Context Books, 1972), pp. 118-45; Mikhail L i f s h i t z , The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, t r . Ralph B. Winn, Preface by Terry Eagleton (unsigned) (1933; t r . 1938; London: Pluto Press, 1973); Stefan Morawski, Introd., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (St. Louis, Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1973), pp. 3-47; Maynard Solomon, \"General Introduction: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,\" in Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 3-21; and S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). David Craig, in \"Towards Laws of Literary Development,\" Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, ed. David Craig (Harmondsworth, Mdx.: Penguin, 1975), pp. 134-60, attempts a survey of various non-Marxist literary theories throughout history in order to begin to forge a uniquely Marxist theory of literature. - 114 -- 115 -\"Prefatory: Marxism and Cultural Continuity\" and \"Under Which King, Bezonian?\" in For Continuity (1933; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 5, 168, and generally, pp. 1-12 and 160-75. 4 \"Under Which King, Bezonian?\" in For Continuity, pp. 171-72. 5 The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 25. 6 \"Sociology and Literature,\" The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 200; generally, see pp. 195-203 and also \"Literature and Society,\" i b i d . , pp. 182-94. 7 \"Prefatory: Marxism and Cultural Continuity,\" For Continuity, p. 9. 8 Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, t r . Mark E. Suino (1936; Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1970), p. 65. ^ Criticism and Ideology, p. 17; see also the entire section covered by pp. 11-43. This t i t l e is henceforth abbreviated in parenthetical references as CI. 10 Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 209; see also the entire \"Conclusion: P o l i t i c a l Criticism,\" pp. 194-217, as well as the \"Introduction: What is Literature?\" pp. 1-15. This book's t i t l e is henceforth abbreviated as LT i n a l l parenthetical references. 11 Walter Benjamin, p. 93; see the entire chapter on \"'Marxist Criticism,'\" pp. 81-100, as well as \"A Small History of Rhetoric,\" pp. 101-13, where he shows that \"a p o l i t i c a l literary criticism is not the invention of Marxists\" but rather \"one of the oldest, most venerable forms of literary criticism we know\" (p. 101), and \"The Angel of History,\" pp. 173-79, where he measures the historical significance of Benjamin against that of Leon Trotsky, the organiser of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 in Russia. Henceforth, in a l l parenthetical references, this book's t i t l e w i l l be abbreviated as WB. Also see Eagleton's \"The End of Criticism,\" Southern Review, 14, No. 2 (July 1981), pp. 99-106. 12 Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. x. 13 \"Literature and Politics Now,\" C r i t i c a l Quarterly, 20, No. 3 (August 1978), p. 68. Also cf. the following: \"Breaking with the literary institution does not just mean offering different accounts of Beckett; i t means breaking with the very ways literature, literary criticism and i t s supporting social values are defined\" (LT, p. 90). 14 To run through a f a i r l y comprehensive anthology of criticism is instructive in this regard. For most of my references in this - 116 -discussion of past c r i t i c s , I have relied on Walter Jackson Bate's anthology, Criticism: The Major Texts, enl. ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1970). 15 See Eagleton's Literary Theory for a Marxist account and analysis of this history. 16 Harold Osborne, \"Aesthetics and Value,\" Revue Internationale de Philosphie, 28 (1974), 280-92; Northrop Frye, \"On Value Judgments,\" The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 69; Roger B. R o l l i n , \"Against Evaluation: The Role of the C r i t i c of Popular Culture,\" Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (1975), 355-65; Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), esp. chs. 7-9, pp. 127-75. E.R. Harty in \"Value Judgments in Criticism,\" Unisa English Studies, 11, No. 3 (Sept. 1973), 30-37, working within the liberal framework defined by c r i t i c s from Arnold to Frye, argues simply that \"evaluation cannot be accorded equal status with analytic and interpretative procedures\" and that this is \"at least consistent with the essentially unverifiable character of value judgments\" (p. 37). 17 An extremely pure form of such thinking is evident in Michael Fischer's approving account of Thompson in \"The Literary Importance of E.P. Thompson's Marxism,\" English Literary History, 50, No. 4, (Winter 1983), pp. 818-19. 1^ K.K. Ruthven, in C r i t i c a l Assumptions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), claims that Frye \"has been more successful than any other literary theorist in persuading us that the supreme c r i t i c a l act is not evaluation but recognition\" (p. 202). Fischer observes (p. 811) that \"Northrop Frye's critique of Marxism expresses the uneasiness of many contemporary literary c r i t i c s . \" 19 \"The present book assumes that the theory of literature is as primary a humanistic and libe r a l pursuit as i t s practice\" (Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays CPrinceton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 19571, p. 20). \"The dialectic axis of criticism, then, lias as one pole the total acceptance of the data of literature, and as the other the total acceptance of the potential values of those data. This is the real level of culture and of liberal education . . . \" (Anatomy, p. 25). 20 Anatomy, p. 345. 21 \"When we examine the touchstone technique in Arnold, however, certain doubts arise about his motivation. The line from The Tempest, 'In the dark backward and Abysm of time,' would do very well as a touchstone l i n e . One feels that the line 'Yet a t a i l o r might scratch her where'er she did it c h ' somehow would not do, though i t is equally Shakespearean and equally essential to the same play\" (Anatomy, p. 21). Frye does not provide the reader with either the immediate context or the overall aim of either quotation; yet he expects the reader to identify with his persona (\"one\"): therein lies his abstract absolutism, or challengeable generalisation. - 117 -Thus, on the completely narrow end of the scale, we find Pat Lamorte lamenting the absence in modern poetry of \"the concept of the line and the stanza,\" of \"musicality\" and \"syntactical expression\"; she counterposes Pope's dicta as a touchstone (\"The 'Ancient Rules—A Vanishing Species?\" i n Georgia Review, 27 [1973], 489-502). Marcia Cavell's \"Taste and the Moral Sense,\" JAAC, 34 (1975), 29-33, on the other hand, completely subjectivises the c r i t e r i a : \"At its worst, art blunts se n s i b i l i t y , inhibits self-recognition, rewards mindlessness and rigi d i t y ; at its best, i t expands vision and feeling\" (p. 33). Norman N. Holland, in his chapter \"Evaluation\" in The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), Ch. 7, pp. 193-224, tries to balance objectivist practice and psychoanalytic explanation—and vice versa—in a socio-historical vacuum. In a tautological vein, Bernard Richards argues in \"Memorability as a C r i t i c a l Criterion,\" Essays in Criticism, 26 (1976), 42-49, that despite i t s dangers as an absolute criterion of value, \"[m] emorability in poetry should continue to be valued . . .\" (p. 47); and John Hoaglund i n \"Originality and Aesthetic Value,\" BJA, 16 (1976), 46-55, sounds similar when he concludes that \"a tiny . . . difference can greatly affect aesthetic value . . . i f that tiny difference is what distinguishes copy from original [esp. in the visual arts] with the attendant great difference in aesthetic value\" (p. 54). From an opposite tack, Gerald Robei in \"The Concept of Unity and Its Normative Tendency,\" Recovering Literature, 1, No. 1 (1972), 42-53 and Kenneth M. Stampp, J r . in \"Unity as a Virtue,\" JAAC, 34 (1975), 191-97, both concentrate on debunking the claims of any one criterion of value (\"unity\") as absolute. Elias Schwartz, driven to distraction by his own similar rejection of various particular c r i t e r i a in the abstract, nevertheless finds that evaluation \"must acquire a tradition, as Eliot defines i t , \" and concludes, helplessly: \" i t would be gratifying to know that in the not-too-distant future our grandchildren wi l l be taught to love Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson rather than E.A. Poe and Richard Brautigan\" (\"On Literary Evaluation,\" College English, 39 Cl978], p. 332). For other interesting discussions of literary value by non-Marxists, see the following: (a) Extreme particularists: E.L. Epstein, \"The Self-Reflexive Artifact: The Function of Mimesis in an Approach to a Theory of Value for Literature,\" Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New S t y l i s t i c s , ed. Roger Fowler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 40-78 (\"Sub-lexical mimesis as an indicator of value . . . applies mainly to varieties of Renaissance and post-Renaissance poetry from the technologically advanced countries of Western Europe and America. Other sorts of poetry would be measured by other standards\" [p. 75]); Heide Gottner, \"Analysis of the Problem of Relevance in the Study of Literature,\" Poetics, 5 (1976), 35-56 (discusses relevance as a mathematically quantifiable criterion of value); Hilde Hein, \"Aesthetic Consciousness: The Ground of P o l i t i c a l Experience,\" JAAC, 35 (1976), 143-52 (talks about \"the Greater Glory of God\" and defends \"aesthetics as the core of philosophical thinking and the foundation upon which a l l cognitive as well as affective judgment rests\" (pp. 147, 144); Anthony Savile, \"On Passing the Test of Time,\" BJA, 17 (1978), 195-209 (\"reveres\" Churchill and Eisenhower and discusses how works of art can legitimately \"pass the test of time\"); Susan Stewart, \"Some Riddles and Proverbs of Textuality: An Essay in Literary Value and Evaluation,\" - 118 -Criticism, 21, No. 2 (Spring 1979), 93-105 (discusses evaluation as an act or process at least leading to \"performance,\" or \"composition,\" through comparison); (b) (General Mechanics of Evaluation: Vida Carver, \"The Measurement and Comparison of Value Systems,\" Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Aesthetics, ed. Rudolf Z e i t l e r , Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Figura Nova Ser. X (Uppsala: n.p., 1972), pp. 457-61 (attempts a structural class-analysis, based on George Kelley's 1955 \"personal construct theory\"); John J . Fisher, \"Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Evaluation,\" Ibid., pp. 531-32 (\"positive value can coexist with the positive aesthetic experience\" rp. 532]); Manfred Naumann, \"Literary Production and Reception,\" NLH, 8 (Autumn 1976), 107-26 (on\"the general dialectic of appropriation\" of specific values by specific readerships in specific contexts); Elder Olson, \"On Value Judgment in the Arts,\" C r i t i c a l Inquiry, 1 (1974), 71-90 (completely r e l a t i v i s i t c except for one criterion: \"The standard or criterion must represent an actual value,\" \"an actual good\" [p. 83]); Burce Vermazen, \"Comparing Evaluations of Works of Art,\" JAAC, 34 (1975), 7-14 (on \"int r i n s i c \" [ i . e . , uniquely generic] versus \"independent\" [from generic considerations] value); (c) Axiological Philosophy: Peter Kivy, \"What Makes 'Aesthetic' Terms Aesthetic?\" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 36 (1975), 197-211 (\"art-for-art's sake\" articulately reattributed to criticism as contemplation, description, or evaluation for its own, \"terminal\" sake); Matthew Lipman, \"Can Non-Aesthetic Consequences Justify Aesthetic Values?\" JAAC, 34 (1975), 117-23 (\"aesthetic values must be justified solely by aesthetic consequences and must be explained solely by aesthetic antecedents\" Cp. 123]); for a more balanced point of view, see Eugene Goodheart, \"Art Criticism and the Anatomy of Aesthetic Values,\" Salmagundi, 35 (1976), 56-64 (\"Perhaps what is needed is an Enlightenment criticism from the outside,which at the same time is sensitive to the virtues and constraints of the medium, for the ultimate logic of medium purification which is immune to criticism from the outside is t r i v i a l i t y \" fjp. 64]): (d) Non-Marxists on Marx: Melvin Rader, \"Marx's Interpretation of Art and Aesthetic Value,\" BJA, 7 ( J u l . 1967), 237-49 (pro-social democratic Sweden anti-communist, who labours the obvious point that \"aesthetic values, . . . v i v i d , unique and diverse, . . . are never reducible to a homogeneous monetary measure\" [p. 241]); Heinrich von Staden, \"Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art and Literature: Case Studies in Reception,\" Daedalus, 105 (Winter 1976), 79-96 (points out Marx's \"Neoclassical and Romantic Hellenism\" [p. 82]). 23 \" i might add that a number of unusually interesting inquiries into aesthetic value have been pursued in Eastern Europe (either as developments of or 'in dialogue with' classical Marxist thought), among the most original and penetrating of which is Jan Mukafovsky's (1970) (orig. pub. Prague, 1936)\" (pp. 18-19, n. 2). Smith herself is clearly influenced by Mukafovsky. 24 in a parallel situation, E.P. Thompson refuses \"to counter Althusser's paradigm of knowledge-production with an alternative, universal, paradigm of my own\" (Poverty of Theory, p. 13). 25 Crisis and Criticism and Selected Literary Essays, foreword - 119 -Arnold Kettle, introd. Elisabeth West (1937; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), esp. pp. 100-03. 26 Kenneth Burke's \"Literature as Equipment for Living,\" The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967), Ch. I l l , a., pp. 293-304, which is a product of the same period, only superficially resembles even the most mechanical versions of that strain of criticism, arguing for so-called \"active categories\" that \"would consider works of art . . . as strategies for selecting enemies and a l l i e s , for socialising losses,\" and so on (pp. 303, 304). However, its propositions deserve pause, as a research article such as Elizabeth E. Irvine's \"The Clayhangers: Father and Son: The Value of Creative Literature in Giving Body to Abstractions of Psychology,\" British Journal of Social Work, 12 (Feb. 1982), 77-89, should show. Irvine's article demonstrates the l i t e r a l l y \"practical\" value of Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger in social therapy for father-hating sons. Perhaps the closest modern approximation of Burke's 1930's argument can be found in Jeremy Hawthorn's Identity and Relationship: A Contribution to Marxist Theory of Criticism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973). In that book Hawthorn maintains that \"in the last resort, the process of living distinguishes good works from bad, and f r u i t f u l responses to them from unfruitful ones. Questions of 'legitimacy' only confuse the issue. Using a Chippendale chair to batter down a door in a fire is not an 'illegitimate' use of i t , but it is not a use which develops and utilises a l l the rich potentialities which the chair has, in the long term, for humanity\" (p. 152). 2 7 The term and concept \"commitment,\" in the sense of individually-decided allocation of personal energies to non-party p o l i t i c a l work, was made fashionable by Jean-Paul Sartre. The many preconditions to and loopholes in such \"commitment\" are cogently revealed in Max Adereth's Commitment in Modern French Literature (1967), from which a section entitled \"What is 'Littgrature Engagge'?\" i s reprinted in Craig's Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, pp. 445-85. 28 prom his diametricaly opposite, anti-Marxist standpoint, F.R. Leavis recognises this distinction and its importance when he remarks, \"I . . . am avowedly in the f i r s t place a literary c r i t i c . . .\" (The Common Pursuit, p. 183). 29 \"Speech to the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture,\" Solomon, pp. 512-13. 30 Marx/Engels on Literature and Art (1976; Moscow: Progress, 1978), p. 74. This definitive anthology is the source of a l l my quotations from Marx and Engels unless otherwise stated, and its t i t l e is henceforth cited as Marx/Engels. 3^ \"Stagnation and Progress of Marxism,\" from Karl Marx: A Symposium, ed. D. Ryazanoff (London: n.p., 1929), pp. 105-14; anthologised in Solomon, pp. 155-59. Note that Luxemburg's proposal, directed to a committed communist proletariat, is qualitatively different from that of, say, Sheila Delany in the following quotation which \"spl i t s \" the tasks of the addressee on the academic assumption - 120 -that he or she is already internally \" s p l i t , \" or uncommitted, on the p o l i t i c a l question of revolution: \"I don't propose that we as teachers give double answers. But for the radical teacher who is not himself a communist, that sort of logical/doctrinal sp l i t consciousness w i l l be • necessary until a revolutionary (that i s , a communist) literary tradition exists. . . . As long as our greatest aesthetic achievements convey nonprogressive moral and p o l i t i c a l values, i t w i l l be impossible to gratify aesthetic and p o l i t i c a l convictions at once. We lack contemporary mythic models for radical convictions, and such models cannot convincingly be developed in the arts until history again provides the prototypes, as i t always has done\" (\"Up against the Great Tradition,\" The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English, ed. Louis Kampf C1970; New York: Pantheon, 19 72] , p. 321). 32 xhe f i r s t view is that of Hans Hess in \"Is There a Theory of Art in Marx?\" Marxism Today (1973), 307; the second is that of Terry Eagleton in \"Marxist Literary Criticism,\" from The Sociology of Literature: Theoretical Approaches, ed. Jane Routh and Janet Wolff, Sociological Review Monograph 25 (Keele: Univ. of Keele, 1977), p. 86. 33 A series of articles in Young Spartacus by Joseph Seymour, entitled \"Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition,\" elaborates the close inter-weaving of theory and revolutionary practice in the evolution of Marx's (and Engels') thought. The bibliographical details are as follows: No. 40 (Feb. 1976), pp. 6-7, 10; No. 41 (Mar. 1976), pp. 6-8; No. 42 ( A p r i l , 1976), pp. 6-7; No. 45 (July.-Aug. 1976), pp.6-7;No. 46 (Sep. 1976), pp. 8-10; No. 48 (Nov. 1976), pp. 6-7; No. 49 (Dec. 1976), pp. 6-8; No. 50 (Jan. 1977), pp. 6-8; No. 57 (Sep. 1977), pp. 6-8; No. 59 (Nov. 1977), pp. 6-7, 11; No. 61 (Feb. 1978), pp. 6-8; No. 64 (May 1978), pp. 6-8, 11; No. 65 (Summer 1978), pp. 8-10, 15; No. 68 (Nov. 1978), pp. 6-8; No. 69 (Dec. 1978/Jan. 1979), pp. 6-7, 10; No. 70 (Feb. 1979), pp. 6-7, 11. 3 4 Prawer, p. 284. 35 Morawski, pp. 42-44. Prawer points out that Marx was \"a voracious reader . . . unusually sensitive to ideas that were in the air\" (Prawer, p. 33). See also Demetz, Chs. 1-4, pp. 1-115. 36 Solomon, p. 42. It is true that Marx and Engels here are using \"criticism\" in the general sense of \"social protest through words,\" but the point applies a l l the more forcefully to literary criticism for that. 37 see his Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, t r . Edith C. Harvey (1899; New York: Schocken, 1961). 3 8 New Left Review, No. 127 (May-June 1981), 66-95. J y \"Marx and Engels,\" A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, III (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 236, 235. - 121 -40 See esp. Lenin's classic pamphlets and articles collected i n Against Revisionism (Moscow: Progress, 1966); Daniel de Sousa, A C r i t i c a l Evaluation of Contemporary \"New Left\" Sociology (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1979), pp. 245-49; Maurice Godelier, \"Infrastructures, Societies and History,\" New Left Review, No. 112 (Nov.-Dec. 1978), 84-96; Maynard Solomon's \"General Introduction,\" Solomon, pp. 7-8, esp. n. 13; and Goran Therborn, \"The Frankfurt School,\" New Left Review, No. 63 (Sep.-Oct. 1970), 65-96. Incidentally, Wood's article frontally attacks and destroys the different revisionist arguments of G.A. Cohen, a believer in technological determinism (pp.74-75), and of Raymond Williams (pp. 74-75). 41 Quoted by Eagleton in Literary Theory, p. 151. Even F.R. Leavis, however, concedes at one point that \"there is a sense in which economic problems are prior\" (For Continuity, p. 6); unfortunately, he does not elaborate. 42 xo the category of historical period, we must add that of place. Thus Engels, after remarking in a letter to Minna Kautsky that the plot in a certain part of her novel The Old Ones and the New \"develops sometimes too rapidly,\" adds: \"Many things that may give us this impression perhaps look quite natural in Vienna, considering the city's peculiar international character and its intermixture with Southern and East European elements\" (26 November 1885, in Marx/Engels, p. 87). 43 John M. E l l i s , \"Evaluation,\" The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (Berkeley, Ca.: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 75. 44 Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 473. Engels explained in a footnote to the English edition of the Manifesto (1888) that he and Marx were referring to \" a l l written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, was a l l but unknown\" (Tucker, p. 473, n. 6). 45 xhe ultimate goal of a l l socialists is communism; in usage that was standardised by Lenin, socialism—preceded by the dictatorship of the p r o l e t a r i a t — i s a stage in post-revolutionary society's development towards communism. Marx, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, called \"communism . . . the positive transcendence of private property\" (Solomon, p. 55); i t corresponds to what he calls in Capital \"the realm of freedom.\" This realm \"actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases: thus . . . i t lies beyond the sphere of actual production. . . . Freedom in this f i e l d can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing i t under their common control, instead of being ruled by the blind forces of Nature. . . . Beyond i t begins that development of human energy which is an end in i t s e l f , the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as i t s basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite\" - 122 -(Marx/Engels, p. 183). The above \"realm of necessity\" is designated socialism, and the \"true realm of freedom,\" communism, in Marxist usage. Crucial to the consolidation of the workers' revolution and to i t s evolution towards the socialist stage is the dictatorship of the proletariat, a policy that is fully explained i n Lenin's State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917; 2nd rev. ed. Moscow: Progress, 1965). It was f i r s t consciously implemented during the Bolshevik Revolution i n Russia. 46 See, for instance, Demetz's counterposition of Marx and Engels in his section on \"Balzac,\" in the Chapter \"Three Interpretations: Shakespeare, Goethe,Balzac,\" pp. 169-77. George Steiner (p. 308) concludes: \"Clearly, there is between Engels' pronouncements and the Leninist conception of partiinost a profound divergence in bias and d r i f t of argument—if not a formal contradiction.\" We shall see what Lenin himself says, later. 47 Fokkema and Kunne-Ibsch (p. 88) claim that Engels was \" c r i t i c a l . . . towards obvious p o l i t i c a l bias in literature,\" without ever pointing to his qualifying statement defending—and even praising—biassed literature in general. 48 Among the misinterpreters of this passage are Demetz (p. 229), Fokkema and Kunne-Ibsch,' Wellek (pp. 235-36, where the passage is a r t i f i c i a l l y distinguished from the Preface's \" r i g i d economic determinism\"), and O.K. Werckmeister, in \"Marx on Ideology and Art,\" NLH, A (1973), 502-504. Werckmeister attacks Zhdanovism's Stalinist distortions of Marx as \"communist,\" finding two \"apparently contradictory notions of art\" in Marx—\"one idealistic-Utopian [introduction], and the other historical-deterministic [Preface].\" In turn, Hans Robert Jauss attacks Werckmeister in \" The Idealist Embarrassment: Observations on Marxist Aesthetics,\" NLH, 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1975), 191-208. See Appendix C for f u l l text of the relevant sections of Marx's Introduction. Also see Slaughter, pp. 21-85. 4 9 \"The Idealist Embarrassment,\" p. 192. 5 0 \"The Leading Article i n KBlnische Zeitung, No. 179,\" Marx/Engels, p. 206. 51 The straw men include Manfred Naumann, a reception theory specialist, in addition to Marcuse and Werckmeister. The false counter-positions include the young Hegelian Marx versus Lenin, and Werckmeister versus Marcuse. 5^ \"Embarrassment,\" \"Observations on,\" \"reflection dogma\" (p. 191), \"Marxist-Leninist epistemology\" (p. 203). 53 Especially questionable are his attributed counterpositions of \"labour\" to \"consciousness\" (p. 196), of the \"laws of beauty\" to \"Nature\" and the \"material\" for objects (p. 198), of \"alienation\" to \"the cultivation of the senses\" throughout history (he is prepared to - 123 -between: p. 199), and of the art product to the felt need for i t (p. 202). Also, he wrongly adduces to the entire Marxist method a Hegelian idealism, based on the one ostensible parallel between the two in Marx's Introduction (\"the idealist embarrassment\": p. 197). On the other hand, i t is Jauss himself who suggests that the dialectical resolution of the false counterposition of \"alienation\" to \"the cultivation of the senses\" lies in \"Art\" rather than in \"material production\" (p. 206). Meanwhile, using linear, particularist, empiricist thinking, Jauss remarks, \"The trouble is that the art object could hardly e l i c i t a need that was i n i t i a l l y quite absent in a public which the art object f i r s t had to create i f beauty is to be given only the function of copying in a materialistic way\" (p. 202). Jauss wants to have i t both ways: he wants to be more \"materialistic\" than Marx where the latter seems to him insufficiently so, and more receptive towards Hegelian idealism where Marx seems to him too crassly \"materialistic.\" However, my reading of Marx does not reveal any such substantive philosophical dislocation in his statements, as I have tried to show. If my reading holds, then Jauss's alternating \"leftism\" and \"rightism\" with regard to Marx would appear to be merely the effect of his consistent p o l i t i c a l hostility to Marxism rather than the effect of any consistent f i d e l i t y to perceived re a l i t y . And this w i l l not do.' 54 See, for instance, their Manifesto's section on \"Bourgeois and Proletarians,\" Tucker, pp. 475-78. 55 See, for instance, the following articles in the anthology Lenin on Literature and Art (1967; rpt. Moscow: Progress, 1978), henceforth abbreviated as Lenin: \"A L i t t l e Picture in Illustration of Big Prob-lems,\" pp. 127-31; \"The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Gov-ernment,\" pp. 132-38; \"The Tasks of the Youth League: Speech Delivered at the Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, October 2, 1920,\" pp. 148-66; \"On Proletarian Culture,\" pp. 167-69; and \"On the Significance of Militant Materialism,\"pp. 174-77. 56 See Appendix C or Marx/Engels, p. 83. 57 \"Art, Opiate, Transcendence,\" Solomon, pp. 450-53. 58 The best concise account and analysis of this debate can be found in Terry Eagleton's.Walter Benjamin, pp. 8 3-91. Also see his Marxism and Literary Criticism, pp. 28-31, 70-72; henceforth, this t i t l e w i l l be parenthetically abbreviated as MLC. The definitive documentation of this debate i s Aesthetics and P o l i t i c s , afterward Fredric Jameson (London: New Left Books, 1978). 59 For Marx on Byron and Shelley, see Marx/Engels, pp. 32-21 (Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, \"Shelley as Socialist\"): \"The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this that those who understand and love them consider i t fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley's death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and .through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.\" As I stated earlier, my interest here is not in the empirical accuracy of Marx's (or Engels') particular assessment of any individual author or - 124 -work but in the rationale provided for that assessment; i t is in this light that I also view the above evaluation of Shelley. For comments by Marx and Engels on other authors, see especially the following: for Marx on Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fielding, and Balzac, Marx/Engels, pp. 436 , 438-40 (Paul Lafargue, \"Reminiscences of Marx\"), pp. 440-42 (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, \"Karl Marx\"), pp.442-43 (Franzisca Kugelmann, \"Small Traits of Marx's Great Character\"), and p. 444 (Anselmo Lorenzo, \"Reminiscences of the First International\"); for Marx on Cobbett, \"Layard's Inquiry: Fight over the Ten-Hour Working Day,\" Marx/Engels, pp. 3 2 1 - 2 3 ; for Marx on Homer, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, \"Karl Marx,\" Marx/Engels, p. 4 4 1 ; for Marx on Dante, \"Affairs in Prussia,\" New York Daily Tribune (15 October 1860) , Marx/Engels, p. 248 and Paul Lafargue, \"Reminiscences of Marx,\" Marx/Engels, p. 4 3 8 ; for Marx on Goethe, \"Karl Marx Confessions,\" Marx /Engels, p. 4 3 6 , Lafargue, \"Reminiscences,\" Marx/Engels, p. 438 and Kugelmann, \"Small Traits,\" Marx/Engels, p. 442 ; for Engels on Byron and Shelley, The Condition of the Working Class in England, excerpted in Marx/Engels, pp. 164-65 ; for > Engels on Shaw, letter to Karl Kautsky (4 September 1892) , Marx/Engels, p. 340; for Engels on Scott, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, excerpted in Marx/Engels, p. 321 ; for Engels on William Morris and his c i r c l e , letter to Laura Lafargue (23 November 1 8 8 4 ) , Marx/Engels, p. 342 ; for Engels on Homer, \"'Song of the Apprentices' by Georg Weerth,\" Marx/Engels, p. 405 ; for Engels on Dante, \"'Preface' to Marx's Capital,\" Vol. I l l , Marx/Engels, pp. 2 4 7 - 4 8 , \"To the Italian Reader (Preface to the Italian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party),\" Marx/Engels, pp. 2 4 8 - 4 9 , and German Socialism in Verse and Prose, excerpted i n Marx/Engels, esp. pp. 3 7 0 - 7 1 ; for Engels on Goethe, i b i d . , pp. 3 4 9 - 7 4 ; for Engels on Heine, Ludwig Fuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, excerpted i n Marx/Engels, pp. 374-75 and \"Communism in Germany,\" New Moral World (13 December 1844) , excerpted in Marx/Engels, pp. 375 -76 ; and for Georg Weerth, \"'Song of the Apprentices' by Georg Weerth,\" Marx/Engels, pp. 4 0 2 - 0 5 . Finally, Marx's well-known comment referring to Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Mrs. Gaskell as \"the splendid brotherhood\" occurs in \"The English Middle Class,\" Marx/Engels, pp. 3 3 9 - 4 0 . 60 And h e r e , I d i s a g r e e w i t h F r e d r i c Jameson's (misformulated) contention that \" L X J u c h a separation Csi<0 is possible only for a w o r l d -v i e w — l i b e r a l i s m — i n which the p o l i t i c a l and the ideological are merely secondary or 'public' adjuncts to the content of a real 'private' l i f e , which alone is authentic and genuine. It is not possible for any world-view—whether conservative or radical and revolutionary—that takes politics seriously\" (The Polical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [ l 9 8 1 ; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983J , p. 2 8 9 ) . 6* Here again I disagree with Jameson's effective rejection (in P o l i t i c a l Unconscious, pp. 282-84) of what he terms the \"instrumental\" or \"functional\" view of superstructural phenomena on grounds that this suggests a non-conflicted realm; the original Marxist model clearly allows for heterogeneity and c o n f l i c t , both at the base and at the top. 62 Anatoly Lunacharsky's frequently b r i l l i a n t \"Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism\" (1928) shares the intellectual capacity - 125 -of the Bolshevik tradition; nevertheless, i t displays an organic prescriptiveness more representative of Zhdanovism: see Anatoly Lunacharsky on Literature and Art (1965; rpt. Moscow: Progress, 1973), pp. 9-21. 63 see \"Mirror,\" Lenin, pp. 30-31. 64 \"['Party Literature'] must be readJ therefore, in the context of Lenin's debates with the Menshevik parliamentarians on one side and the anarchists and Narodniks on the other\" (Solomon, p. 168). Morawski in his \"Lenin as a Literary Theorist\" (p. 21) confirms that Lenin's \"fundamental thesis was aimed in a definite direction, at Minsky and his supporters.\" This clearly includes, though i t does not focus on, \"imaginative literature\": see Lenin's reference to \"thought and fantasy\" (p. 26). 65 The following quotation should sufficiently illustrate Lenin's point: \"the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology-. . . , for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism . . . and trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task . . . is _to_ combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring i t under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy\" (What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement [1902; rpt. Moscow: Progress, 1978], p. 41). i ,. ' •' 66 see esp. their \"Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, and Others,\" Tucker, pp. 549-55. > < 67 See A.A. Zhdanov, sel. from \"Report on the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad, 1947 ,\" in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, pp. 514-526. Lenin was generally extremely cautious about unnecessarily and prematurely aligning his party or his faction with one or another school of philosophy; moreover, he considered philosophy to be more po l i t i c a l l y embattled and less \"neutral\" than the literary criticism of his day: see Lenin's various letters to Maxim Gorky on this subject (Lenin, pp. 184-203). But, for active revolutionaries, i t is crucial to remember the balance provided by Lenin in \"Party Literature,\" where he explicitly urges the early and organic alignment of revolutionary politics and literature sympathetic to i t , despite the d i f f i c u l t i e s involved: \"There is no question that literature is least of a l l subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling, to the rule of the majority over the minority. There is no question, either, that in this f i e l d greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal i n i t i a t i v e , individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content. A l l this is undeniable; but a l l this simply shows that the literary side of the proletarian party cause cannot be mechanically identified with i t s other sides. This, however, does not in the least refute the proposition, alien and strange to the bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, that literature must by a l l means and necessarily become an element of Social-Democratic Party work, inseparably bound up with the other elements\" (Lenin, p. 26). - 126 -68 As in a l l previous though less ambiguous instances, the \"Social-Democratic\" descriptive label here refers to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), parent body to Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevik (Majority) faction as well as to Plekhanov's Menshevik (Minority) faction; i t i s , of course, Lenin's Bolsheviks who carried through the October Revolution and went on to become the (original, non-Stalinised) Communist Party of the Soviet Union—RCP(B). 69 \" i t w i l l be a free literature, because the ideal of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or careerism, w i l l bring ever new forces to its ranks. . . . [Blecause i t w i l l serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored 'upper ten thousand' suffering from fatty degeneration, but the millions and the tens of millions of working people . . . enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and livi n g work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about permanent interaction between the experience of the past . . . and the experience of the present\" (\"Party Literature,\" p. 29). 70 Lenin praised Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World for i t s \"truthful and most vivid exposition\" of the October events (Introd. to Reed's book, in Lenin, p. 147); and he recommended that some of Averchenko's stories be reprinted because they were \"amazingly vivid\" and showed the writer's \"knowledge of the subject £of upper-class, pre-revolutionary l i f e ] and his sincerity,\" both of which Lenin called \"most extraordinary.\" The last line in that review reads—only partly with tongue in cheek—\"Talent should be encouraged\" (\"A Capably Written L i t t l e Book,\" Lenin, pp. 170-71). 71 Edmund Wilson's frankly \" l i b e r a l \" assessment of Trotsky takes to its logical extreme such \"democratic\" anti-\"Stalinism\": \"we can go even further than Trotsky . . . and declare that Marxism by i t s e l f can t e l l us nothing whatever about the goodness or badness of a work of art\" (\"Marxism and Literature,\" The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948], p. 204). Paul Siegel, writing for the publishing arm (Pathfinder Press) of the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (U.S.), less brazenly concludes that Trotsky's \"literary criticism . . . has i t s origin in the vision of social humanism that animated his whole l i f e \" (Introduction, Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art ed. Paul N. Siegel, 2nd ed. 1972; New York: Pathfinder, 1977 , p. 26); this t i t l e is later abbreviated as Trotsky. And Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's most comprehensive biographer, reveals his \"democratic\" principle of selection when he quotes Literature and Revolution one-sidedly on the limitat ions of the methods of Marxism\" as applied to art (The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky: 1921-29 [New York: Random House, 1959], p. 190). Wilson quotes a similarly misleading passage from Literature and Revolution (p. 178) two pages before arriving at his above conclusion. Useful surveys of Trotsky's aesthetics can be found in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921, Vol. I (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 46-56; in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 164-200; in Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, pp. 169-85; Marxism and Literary Criticism, pp. 42-43, and Walter Benjamin, pp. 173-79. - 127 -72 in his polemic against the Formalists, Trotsky explained his position from another angle, closely resembling Lenin's in \"Party Literature\": \"It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and i t is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! Of course, the new art cannot but place the struggle of the proletariat in the centre of its attention. But . . . no one is going to prescribe themes to a poet or intends to prescribe them. Please write about anything you can think of! But allow the new class which considers i t s e l f , and with reason, called upon to build a new world, to say to you in any given case: It does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of l i f e of the Seventeenth Century into the language of the Acmeists. . . . The proletariat has to have in art the expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just beginning to be formulated within him, and to which art must help him give form. This is not a state order, but an historic demand\" (LR, pp. 170-71). This historic demand—as opposed to a state order—is what inspired the early Gorky's \" s p i r i t of daring, the romantic bravery of people who had nothing to lose,\" and the \"splendid spontaneity\" that Trotsky admired (\"Maxim Gorky,\" Trotsky, pp. 217, 218). 73 in Trotsky's 9 May 1924 speech to the Press Dept. of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), published as Class and Art: Problems of Culture under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1925; Eng. t r . Brian Pearce, 1967; rpt. London: New Park, 1968), pp. 4 and 7; this t i t l e is henceforth parenthetically abbreviated as _CA. Trotsky adds that \"CiJt is one thing to understand something and express i t logically, and quite another thing to assimilate i t organically, reconstructing the whole system of one's feelings, and to find a new kind of a r t i s t i c expression for this new entity. The latter process is more organic, slower, more d i f f i c u l t to subject to conscious influence—and in the end i t w i l l always lag behind\" (CA, p. 7). 74 \" it £s untrue that revolutionary art can be created only by workers. Just because the Revolution is a working-class revolution, i t releases . . . very l i t t l e working-class energy for art. During the French Revolution, the greatest works which, directly or indirectly, reflected i t , were created not by French a r t i s t s , but by German, English, and others. The French bourgeoisie which was directly concerned with making the Revolution, could not give up a sufficient quantity of its strength to recreate'and to perpetuate its imprint. This is s t i l l more true of the proletariat, which, though i t has culture in p o l i t i c s , has l i t t l e culture in art\" (LR, p. 217). 75 \"New a r t i s t i c needs or demands for new literary and a r t i s t i c points of view are stimulated by economics, through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli which originate outside of art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on i t s e l f , but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his l i f e and environment\" (LR, p. 179). \"At various periods, and by various methods, realism gave expression to the feelings and needs of different social groups. Each - 128 -one of these r e a l i s t i c schools is subject to a separate and social literary definition, and a separate formal and literary estimation. What have they in common? A definite and important feeling for the world . . . , a feeling for l i f e as i t i s , . . .an a r t i s t i c acceptance of r e a l i t y , . . . an active interest in the concrete st a b i l i t y and mobility of l i f e . It is a striving either to picture l i f e as i t is or to idealise i t , either to justify or to condemn i t , either to photograph i t generalise and symbolise i t . But i t is always a preoccupation with our l i f e of three dimensions as a sufficient and invaluable theme for art\" (LR, p. 235). With regard to drama and the theatre Trotsky commented, \"One good Soviet comedy wil l awaken the theatre for a few years to come, and then perhaps we w i l l have tragedy, which is truly considered the highest form of literature\" (LR, p. 240). 77 Literature and Revolution, pp. 19-161. See The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 180-88 for a more detailed summary. 78 see Literature and Revolution, pp. 184-214; Class and Art, pp. 22-23, 25; The Prophet Unarmed, pp. 169-181, 188-90. 79 \"The domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help i t , but i t can only lead it indirectly. It can and must give the additional credit of i t s confidence to various art groups, which are striving sincerely to approach the Revolution. And at any rate, the Party cannot and w i l l not take the position of a literary circle which is struggling and merely competing with other literary c i r c l e s . The Party stands guard over the historic interests of the working class in i t s entirety. . . . [l]t regards the literary fellow-travellers not as the competitors of the writers of the working class, but as the real or potential helpers of the working class in the big work of reconstruction. . . . If i t is not possible to determine the place of any given group today, then the Party as a Party w i l l wait patiently and gracefully. Individual c r i t i c s or readers may sympathise with one group or another in advance. The Party, as a whole, protects the historic interests of the working class and must be more objective and wise\" (LR, pp. 218-19). \"The proletariat also needs a continuity of creative tradition. At the present time the proletariat realises this continuity not directly, but indirectly, through the creative bourgeois intelligentsia which gravitates towards the proletariat and which wants to keep warm under i t s wing. The proletariat tolerates a part of t h i s i i n t e l l i g e n t s i a , supports another part, half-adopts a third, and entirely assimilates a fourth. The policy of the Communist Party towards art is determined by the complexity of this process, by its internal many-sidedness\" (LR, p. 227). 80 \"By projecting our present-day problems into the distant future, one can think himself through a long series of years into proletarian culture. But no matter how important . . . our culture-building may be, i t is entirely dominated by the approach of European and world revo-lution. . . . We are, as before, merely soldiers in a campaign . . . bivouacking for a day. . . . This becomes especially clear when one considers the problem as one should in its international character\" - 129 -(LR.pp. 190-91). \"[T]he a r t i s t i c creativity of a given epoch . . . comes into being through complex inter-relations, in the f i r s t place with the different fellow-travelling groups\"; \"[a] fter the present breathing-space, when a literature strongly coloured by the 'fellow-travellers' is being created . . . , there wi l l come a period of new, terrible spasms of c i v i l war. We shall inevitably be drawn into i t . . . . [x]he result of this new, much mightier period of c i v i l war, i f we are victorious, w i l l be the complete securing and consolidation ofthe socialist basis of our economy. . . . And . . . only then w i l l begin a real building of culture, and, consequently, also the creation of a new literature . . . built entirely on constant intercourse between the artist and the masses who w i l l have come of age culturally. . . . No tree can be grown from a kidney-bean\" (CA, pp. 13 and 27). See also Literature and Revolution, p. 227. 81 \"True, historic foresight cannot have mathematical precision. Now i t exaggerates, now i t underrates. But the conscious w i l l of the vanguard becomes a greater and greater factor in the events which prepare the future\" (LR, pp. 101-102). \"But in its essence, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an organisation for the production of the culture of a new society, but a revolutionary and military system struggling for i t \" (LR, p. 190). \"The main task of the proletarian intelligentsia in the immediate future is not the abstract formation of a new culture regardless of the absence of a basis for i t , but definite culture-bearing, that i s , a systematic, planful and, of course, c r i t i c a l imparting to the backward masses of the essential elements of the culture which already exists. It is impossible to create a class culture behind the backs of a class\" (LR, pp 193-94). \"The proletariat rejects what is clearly unnecessary, false and reactionary, and . . . makes use of . . . present day science. . . . The practical result w i l l justify i t s e l f generally and on the whole, because such a use when controlled by a Socialist goal w i l l gradually manage and select the methods and conclusions of the theory. And by that time there w i l l have grown up scientists who are educated under the new conditions\" (LR, p. 199). \"But does not the work of culture-bearing, that i s , the work of acquiring the A B C of pre-proletarian culture, presuppose criticism, selection and a class standard? Of course, i t does. But the standard is a p o l i t i c a l one and not an abstract cultural one. The p o l i t i c a l standard coincides with the cultural one only in the broad sense that the Revolution creates conditions for a new culture\" (LR, p. 220). 82 Trotsky does, however, adumbrate the expectable general values under socialism and communism. \"Under Socialism, solidarity w i l l be the basis of society. . . . A l l the emotions which we revolutionists, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming—so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians—such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbour, sympathy, wil l be the ringing chords of Socialist poetry\" (LR, pp. 229-30). As a general phenomenon, \"the farther we go,\" the \"wall between art and industry w i l l come down\" (LR, p. 249). Communism, moreover, w i l l oversee the f a l l of the wall—\"not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between art and nature also\" (LR, p. 250). Beyond that, the \"average human type w i l l rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And - 130 -above this ridge new peaks w i l l rise\" (LR, p. 256). 83 we may note that Trotsky prefers Tikhonov's \"passionate\" poetry \"about a l i t t l e grocery store\" to Alexei Tolstoy's conservative story \"about\" the revolution (called \"The Road to Calvary\" LR, p. 228 ), and that his c r i t e r i a for evaluating C§line's work are virtually duplicated in his c r i t e r i a for judging Malaquais's Les Javanais and Malraux's The Conquerors: \"Although social in i t s implication, . . . Les Java- nais . . . is in no way tendentious in character. He does not try to prove anything, he does not propagandise. . . . It is 'only' a work of art. At the same time, we sense at every step the convulsionsof our epoch\" (\"Les Javanai s,\" Trotsky, p. 230); \"The Conquerors offers a source of p o l i t i c a l lessons of the highest value. Do they come from Malraux? No, they flow from the recital i t s e l f , unknown to the author, and they go against him. This does honour to the author as an observer and an a r t i s t , but not as a revolutionist. However, we have the right to evaluate Malraux too from this point of view; . . . the author does not hesitate with his judgments on the revolution\" (\"The Strangled Revolution: Andri Malraux's The Conquerors,\" Trotsky, p. 180). Of course, the resemblance of that last evaluation to Engels' evaluation of Balzac, and Lenin's of Tolstoy, is too obvious to miss. 84 Francis Barker, in \"Some Problems in Trotsky's Literary Criticism,\" Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Essex, 1976, ed. Francis Barker et al ( Colchester: Univ. of Essex, 1977), p. 178, charges that \"the historical is entirely bracketted out.\" Terry Eagleton: \"It is not a question of 'suspending' the work's historical conditions of p o s s i b i l i t y , placing them in brackets (as Trotsky suggests) to attend to i t s 'aesthetic' . . .\" (CI, p. 177). 85 \"Works of art developed in a medieval Italian city can, we find, affect us too. What does this require? A small thing: i t requires that these feelings and moods shall have received such broad, intense, powerful expression as to have raised them above the limitations of the l i f e of those days. Dante was, of course, the product of a certain social milieu. But Dante was a genius. He raised the experience of his epoch to a tremendous a r t i s t i c height\" (CA, p. 9). 86 xn passing, we might note some of Trotsky's judgments on Tolstoy's style. Trotsky values the \"simple,\" \"calm, unhurried, frugal, . . . muscular, on occasion awkward and rough\" style of Tolstoy, which i s , he f e e l s , \"without being miserly or ascetic always incomparable in i t s results\" (\"Tolstoy: Poet and Rebel,\" Trotsky, pp. 133-34). These cri t e r i a reappear in Caudwell's, Williams', and Eagleton's differences (and agreements) over Hardy's literary style. Christopher Caudwell Caudwell's Politi c s and His General Theory of Literature \"It i s axiomatic,\" perceptively observes a recent commentator on Caudwell, \"that no Marxist literary theory can be more adequate than the conception of his t o r i c a l materialism which underlies it.\"\"'\" And, given that \" [u] ndoubtedly Caudwell supposed himself to be a 2 3 Marxist,\" has been viewed as such by others, and that he formally joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Marxist axiology would be remiss i f i t were to ignore the p o l i t i c a l assumptions and practice to which Caudwell's thinking on literary evaluation was indeed decisively linked. A precise, i f b r i e f , p o l i t i c a l assessment of Caudwell's \"Marxism\"—especially on the key issues of base and superstructure, class, revolution versus reform, and the vanguard p a r t y — i s crucial to any Marxist evaluation of his axiology. For i f , as E. P. Thompson claims in his major essay on the c r i t i c , Caudwell really exercised \"considerable influence upon the Marxism of the Forties,\"^ one may legitimately ask what kind of influence i t was. To this, Thompson's own answer in fact seems to be that \" [t]he entire body of Caudwell's work may be read as a polemic against mechanical materialism of this [Stalinist] kind, masquerading as Marxism\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 248). But i f this is indeed the case, one might then question how Thompson can simultaneously have us believe that \" [i] t is no longer possible to suppose a Marxist orthodoxy against which Caudwell can be judged, confirmed or found wanting. We can no longer ask whether Caudwell was or was not 'correct'\" - 131 -- 132 -(\"Caudwell,\" p. 229). In his argument, Thompson tends to equate his own conception of \"orthodoxy\" with empirical blindness, a p r i o r i attributing both features to Marxism as an hypothetical system. He seems unaware that \"Marxist orthodoxy\" could be systematic in i t s codification of principles, because of hi s t o r i c a l l y observed and tested patterns i n objective l i f e , and s t i l l remain open to modification or dissolution i f confronted with a reality that demands such change. Indeed, the Marxist revolutionaries always predicted the demise of Marxism in a classless society. But Thompson clearly scorns a l l orthodoxy, because of i t s supposedly monolithic i n f l e x i b i l i t y . Consequently, he dismisses any notion of a systematised Marxism; for that, too, would be \"orthodoxy.\" Yet, interestingly, we rec a l l that he argues differently when he rightly defends the specific notion of \"classes,\" in his Poverty of Theory (p. 57). Now, I hope to show that Thompson's characterisation of Caudwell's work as an undifferentiated, anti-Stalinist whole i s only partly true. I have no reason to regard that c r i t i c ' s work as \" a \" — that i s , as a consistent—polemic against the kind of mechanical materialism exemplified by Stalinism. Sometimes Caudwell argues against i t ; but, as we shall see, he often does not. Hence arises the question: what exactly does Thompson think Caudwell argues for? In fact, i f Caudwell does occasionally c r i t i c i s e particular aspects and instances of Stalinist counterpositions to Marxism-, (without, however, identifying them as S t a l i n i s t ) , he also sanctions the overall p o l i t i c a l programme and stance of Stalinism itself.\"' One might expect that this would have been only too obvious to any informed reviewer, particularly one such as Thompson, encountering Caudwell's p o l i t i c a l code with some knowledge of his p o l i t i c a l training.^ - 133 -Thus, in Illusion and Reality, Trotsky and his supporters are labelled as \"counter-revolutionaries\" (p. 104), and their programme i s accused of being \"destructive,\" \"anarchic\" (p. 313), and \"complete treachery\" (p. 319). At the same time, Stalin—already widely known as the organiser of massive international proletarian defeats, from the German revolution of 1923 to the German disaster of 1933—earns an admiring and respectful mention as a proletarian leader, alongside Marx and Lenin (p. 32 7). But, of course, Caudwell's Stalinism goes deeper than the r i t u a l slander and glorification of Trotsky and Stalin respectively^ In fact, the r i t u a l i t s e l f stems from a more fundamental, programmatic agreement, centring on essentially two interdependent hallmarks of Stalinism. One is the policy of domestic class-collaboration in capitalist countries, most widely recognised as the Popular Front policy. The other i s the advocacy of international class-appeasement, of indefinitely extended efforts by the Soviet state to conclude a class-peace with i t s imperialist enemies. The latter policy, today known as \"dgtente,\" or \"peaceful coexistence,\" originated with Stalin as the theory of \"Socialism in One Country.\" Br i e f l y , Caudwell's most explicit condonement of the Popular Front policy occurs in Romance and Realism. In one particular passage, he pointedly groups heterogeneous classes together, including \" a l l bourgeois revolutionaries,\" i n a Utopian vision of a \"fight against capitalism\" that significantly leaves the specific basis for such p o l i t i c a l unity unmentioned: In i t s fight against capitalism, the proletariat needs a l l helpers; to i t s standard r a l l y a l l those bourgeois disgusted or crippled by the world they have made. . . . A l l bourgeois scientists, a r t i s t s , and intellectuals revolt. . . . Nationalists as well as creators of a classless world fight against the finance capital that - 134 -enslaves and destroys a l l national cultures. . . . All bourgeois revolutionaries, valuable and important auxiliaries. . . march with them [the proletariat] in demonstrations. . . . (RR, pp. 137-38) That the specific programme for this unique lash-up \"against\" capitalism remains unmentioned here is probably no accident. For, as Caudwell himself elsewhere lets sl i p , in fact in the course of admiring the Popular Front, this policy is merely the \"final movement of the bourgeois illusion\" (or, more accurately, bourgeois deception). Through i t , \"a l l the liberal elements\" ostensibly put themselves \"under\" the \"leadership\" of the proletariat—\"in a formal written alliance limiting the scope of that leadership\" (IR, p. 132; a l l emphases mine). No more eloquent condemnation of his own political programme can be found in Caudwell. Yet, the fact remains that he explicitly defends the Popular Front policy. Similarly, Caudwell's most explicit attempt at justifying the policy of \"Socialism in One Country\" produces a revealing array of self-contradictions and illogicalities (\"Pacifism and Violence,\" S_, pp. 108-10). But he defends that purely Stalinist invention nevertheless. Inveighing against \"the Trotsky nightmare, from which i t followed that Socialism could not be established anywhere without a world revolution,\" a l l he is concretely able to claim is \"the fact that Soviet Russia is not an [[internally, capitalistically] exploited State\" (p. 108). But Trotskyists have always affirmed the same, pointing out, however, that the mere absence of capitalist economic exploitation, though crucial, does not constitute socialism. (And, incidentally, this fact also does not preclude or account for the existence of a parasitic bureaucracy.) But Caudwell simply claims that the Trotskyist theory \"overlooked\" this absence - 135 -of capitalist exploitation in the Soviet Union. Needless to say, not even a pretence i s made at offering evidence for this charge. After a l l , we have no reason to believe that Caudwell ever bothered to read Trotsky for himself. Moreover, i t i s mildly amusing that Caudwell should describe the Marxist position as \"the Trotsky nightmare.\" For, not just Marx, Engels, and Lenin but Stalin himself, on one occasion, had pointedly dismissed the notion of building socialism i n one country as absurd.'' Indeed, one page la t e r , Caudwell himself i s forced to retreat, conceding, \"That i s not to say Russia i s not in danger\" (p. 109). He even admits that \" [i] t i s therefore necessary for her to arm herself as heavily as her bourgeois neighbours . . .\" (p. 110). But theriyhe adds, in the next clause, that she must \"try to strengthen herself by pacts, the inter-national equivalent of cartels and trade agreements\" (p. 110): such as the Hitler-Stalin pact of i939?, one-might ask, recalling the twenty million Soviet lives lost i n the aftermath. Already, the twin policies of the Popular Front and \"Socialism in One Country\" can be recognised as parts of the common programme of class collaboration. This identity becomes graphic when Caudwell claims that capitalist Britain i s in \"as much danger\" from Nazi Germany as i s the Soviet Union (p. 110). It i s merely an implicit version of what the Stalin i s t public press was claiming much more e x p l i c i t l y : that the bourgeois Churchill could lead the fight against fascism (see Black, pp. 179-91). The practical implication of Caudwell's view that \"the Fascist States constitute the main danger to Russia today\" (p. 110) was, for Stalinists in B r i t a i n , to line up behind their own bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the Soviet Stalinists tried to appease Hitler and assure a l l imperialists that capitalism would be spared in the West. - 136 -On two key programmatic Issues for Marxists i n this century, therefore, Caudwell was d e f i a n t l y — i f not too competently—a S t a l i n i s t . In f a i t h f u l l y reproducing, including with the inevitable self-contradictions, the arguments for a Popular Front and for \"Socialism i n One Country,\" Caudwell remained deeply class-collaborationist in his p o l i t i c a l programme. But to say this i s to state merely that Caudwell was an average St a l i n i s t , a f a i r l y representative member of the CPGB. Thompson's attempt to portray Caudwell as an intransigent anti-Stalinist Marxist therefore contradicts the facts. But no more successful, even at a purely logical l e v e l , i s Thompson's scornful attempt to dismiss any possibility of a \"Marxist orthodoxy,\" or \"cprrect[ness].\" For, i f his argument were v a l i d , why would he feel compelled to ask, as he does,\"was Caudwell a Marxist at al l ? And, i f so, of what kind?\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 232). And even less explicable, then, becomes Thompson's subsequent urge to offer a verdict: \"nothing that he wrote i s of a maturity or consistency to merit election as a Marxist or any other kind of 'classic'\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 262). The fact i s that Thompson i s undecided about a clear choice; either abandon any attempt at analysing Caudwell in terms of a clearly definable and established method known as Marxism or acknowledge the existence and relevance of that system and proceed accordingly. One canno.t have i t both ways. Precisely because Thompson refuses to recognise and acknowledge any established Marxist tradition or method, he cannot p o l i t i c a l l y characterise or resolve those contradictions in Caudwell that, empirically, he so accurately describes. Thus, on the one hand, Thompson i s concerned to deny Marxism any discrete and verifiable identity. On the other hand, he feels compelled to note that - 137 -the particular point within the Thirties\" at which Caudwell wrote his works was indeed a \"crisis\" that was \"not imaginary . . . [but]. . . imposed itself 'like a pressure from without' upon his acrid style and within the antinomies of his thought\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 271). \"Caudwell's failure to elaborate any concept of value or of value-system,\" he goes on to admit, is indeed due to \"the inadequacy in his conceptual terms which has the most serious practical consequences .7 . . obliterating] where a l l the significant questions l i e \" (\"Caudwell, pp. 255-56). But i f this is true, then surely the logical next step would be to diagnose that crisis politically/historically and define the \"adequate\" norm against which Caudwell's terms are found wanting. Thompson does not do this. In the event, therefore, historians such as he should carefully ponder Francis Mulhern's observation: \"The popular after-images of 'The Thirties' (in the main, the handiwork of the contrite and the scornful) can be displaced only by scrupulous research and argument. . . . ' Jjf]he intellectual fellow-traveller' was not, as has sometimes been supposed, a globally undifferentiated phenomenon. It is necessary to delineate, however provisionally, the specific character of the Marxist milieu in which Caudwell was formed\" (p. 39). Central to any specific characterisation of Caudwell's Marxist political milieu would seem to be the one confrontation—with international repercussions—that Thompson completely ignores: the historic and continuing battle between Stalinism and Trotskyism. While manifestly sensitive to the deforming effects of what he explicitly identifies as \"Stalinist doctrine\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 233), Thompson remains curiously silent about the existence of the tendency within the post-Lenin Communist International that gave Stalinism its name - 138 -and which, since 1923, has constituted the Bolshevik challenge to i t : 8 Trotskyism, once internationally organized as the Fourth International. One immediate result of this slight oversight i s Thompson's utterly vague description of Caudwell's faults, as distinct from his clear articulation of that critics!s perceived virtues. While Caudwell's ostensible virtues are presented as exemplary, no corresponding negative lessons are drawn from his many theoretical catastrophes. Thus, on the one hand, Thompson welcomes Caudwell's allegedly \" f r u i t f u l ambiguity as to being/consciousness,\" his \"liberating and 'heretical' influence\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 256). He assures us that \" [i] n refusing the orthodox closures offered by reflection theory, by the basis-superstructure model, and by the allocation of 'economics' to the base and norms, or affective culture, to the superstructure, he was holding open a door to a more creative tradition\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 270). Yet, on the other hand, Thompson vaguely complains that \" [tjhe terms of Caudwell's attempted revision are often unsatisfactory: the conceptual vocabulary which he inherited or which he invented from diverse disciplines sometimes broke apart i n his hands: but the Marxism of his time offered him no other. And I am less confident than some others that 'Western,' or any other, Marxism has subsequently resolved these problems (\"Caudwell,\" p. 256). Now I submit that the phrase \"the Marxism of his time\" exactly reveals Thompson's contradictory c r i t e r i a for evaluating Caudwell—a matter whose comprehension i s key to our following or abandoning Thompson in his p o l i t i c a l conclusions about that c r i t i c . From the generally recognised (and indisputable) deformity and paucity of the dominant Marxism in Britain, Thompson deigns to generalise - 139 -about Caudwell's \"time\" (emphasis mine) — a formulation that, willy-n i l l y , implicates genuine Marxism internationally and virtually writes i t out of existence: \"There was a time, a very recent time, when to ask such questions and to receive an irresolute answer would have been to have courted dismissal. Marxism—or the people who spoke most loudly and authoritatively i n Marxism's name—already knew the answers. I am glad that this intellectual iron age i s now passing; one has waited for a long time for i t to go by\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 270). It i s that barely acknowledged distinction between \"Marxism\" and i t s self-proclaimed (mis)representatives that i s decisively revealing. When such p o l i t i c a l l y indifferent anti-\"orthodoxy\" halls Caudwell's \"'heretical' influence\" (note the mocking single quotation marks), one may rest assured that i t i s not exactly being done out of concern for the advancement of Marxism. For Marxists, then, the task becomes one of surpassing Thompson and of forging a broader, p o l i t i c a l l y counterposed analysis, in defence of Marxism. Such an analysis should include not only the fact that the Left Opposition had begun i t s struggle against Stalinism as early as 1923 in the Soviet Union and expanded into continental Europe since the early t h i r t i e s ; i t should also include the fact that the Opposition had, by the \"time\" of Caudwell's p o l i t i c i s a t i o n , already made a known impact on Caudwell's party i t s e l f . The CPGB had, as early as 1932—three years before Caudwell joined—expelled the Trotskyist sympathisers of the so-called \"Balham Group,\" thus formalising the birth of British . q ostensible Trotskyism. The fact of Stalinism's overall continuing dominance, therefore; though irrefutable, can hardly be regarded as one that went unchallenged during Caudwell's own p o l i t i c a l l i f e , even - 140 -in his own country. Consequently, the limitations of his terminology— while historically explicable in terms of Stalinist hegemony and Caudwell's own induction into it—can by no means be politically legitimised by invoking some mythically homogeneous \"conceptual vocabulary\" allegedly monopolising an equally mythically-undifferentiated \"Marxism of his time.\" That is simply an anti-Marxist ploy for evading the intervening history and the continuing revolutionary credentials of Trotskyism. Its::familiar effect is simultaneously-to amnesty past Stalinist atrocities as inevitable \"errors\" and portray the present-day continuation of basically the same policy as the legitimate—if occasionally fallible—heir to Leninism. Such accounts are only superficially amusing; their political implications reverberate more perniciously and at levels other than the merely theoretical. The time is more than ripe for establishing correctives wherever possible; and a Trotskyist assessment of Caudwell could be a small but useful step in that project. In 1951, The Modern Quarterly conducted a debate subsequently known as the \"Caudwell Controversy.\" Maurice Cornforth initiated the debate with his \"Caudwell and Marxism.\"10 Now Cornforth's attack on Caudwell has been shown to be vitiated by misquotations and misinter-pretations.11 Despite these methodological problems, however, Cornforth does manage to grasp the thrust of Caudwell's argument and to reveal with devastating effect the confused quality of Caudwell's philosophical and political \"Marxism.\" Certainly, I myself am yet to see or feel moved to provide an answer to Cornforth's observation that Caudwell himself \"typically\" adopts idealist positions before trying to escape from them by asserting their Marxist counterparts; and yet, Cornforth notes, \"Re allows his original:idealist inversion to stand . . .\" (p. 18; the charge - 141 -here refers, i n the f i r s t place, to a specific example). Whatever Caudwell's posthumous excuse may be (and lack of time for revisions was certainly a real problem), the p o l i t i c a l consequences of such unresolved contradictions remain. Now Thompson, referring to Cornforth's attack, seeks to avoid dealing with the justice (or otherwise) of i t s substance simply by claiming that \"the assault on Caudwell was perhaps seen, by the directors of the Party's press, as a small purgative exercise i n the Zhdanov mode \"(\"Caudwell,\" p. 232). Yet, i f Thompson wants us to infer from this that the targets of Zhdanovists could not possibly have been Zhdanovists/Stalinists themselves, he should try to explain his own (accurate) observation that, 11 [d] espite the efforts of Caudwell's defenders, the argument never succeeded in escaping from the terms in which i t had at f i r s t been set\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 233). For Marxists, of course, the crucial question would be: what exactly are these mystifyingly alluded-to \"terms\"? One answer may have been inadvertently revealed by George Thomson himself, whom E. P. Thompson calls Caudwell's \"leading defender\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 273, n. 16). In his reply to Cornforth,/Thomson e x p l i c i t l y reminds him that he could have \"learnt . . . from Caudwell many years before\" the class-nature of science under capitalism that he \"only learnt . . . from Zhdanov and Lysenko\" some 12 years later/ So much for Caudwell's spotless anti-Stalinism according to E. P. Thompson. Admittedly, Caudwell's p o l i t i c a l statements and analyses occasionally do evince elements of Marxist methodology and i t s formal programme, thereby even sometimes paralleling certain general observations by Trotsky. Among these, the importance of action as 13 the aim and the testing ground of theory earns the most emphasis. - 142 -The leading agents of the revolution are usually specifically identified as the industrial proletariat (IR, p. 303), and their hi s t o r i c a l l y -designated immediate goal i s recognised to be the dictatorship of the proletariat.1^ Indeed, Caudwell often comes close to grasping, | empirically, Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and i t s complementary critique of the Stalin i s t Popular Front.^ As we:nave seen, he i s thus able to expose, from this ostensibly Marxist standpoint, the implications of class-collaboration—sometimes even in the course of praising the Popular Front: \"The same f i n a l movement of the bourgeois i l l u s i o n i s reflected i n the growth of the People's Front, where a l l the l i b e r a l elements, representing the craft content of modern society, put themselves under the leadership of the proletariat in a formal written alliance limiting the scope of that leadership\" (IR, p. 132; my emphasis). Similarly, he i s able to expose the tacit condonation* of bourgeois violence underneath the p a c i f i s t s ' o f f i c i a l \"principle\" of \"non-violence,\"^ revealing the \"voluntary cartel\" League of Nations for the \"bourgeois i l l u s i o n \" i t i s .1 7 And he i s able to c r i t i c i s e the anti-revolutionary role of a l l reformism, though sometimes (as with his critique of Christ) on the basis of historically unjustified expectations.^ Aesthetically, in defining the p o l i t i c s behind surrealism, Caudwell arrives at a conclusion virtually identical to Trotsky's— namely, that, \"as a revolutionary situation develops, the surrealistic poets either retreat to reaction and Fascism (as many in Italy) or are thrown into the ranks of the proletariat, lik e Aragon in France\" (IR, p. 129). Similarly, Caudwell admits that proletarian art \" i s really an art i n transition,\" although i t \" i s sometimes regarded as being essentially - 143 -proletarian art\" (IR, p. 302). Moreover, he believes, no Marxists— unlike H. G. W e l l s — w i l l try to predict what the full-fledged communism of the distant future w i l l look like in i t s details, including i n i t s a r t . For, \"(tjhought visualising the future and divorced from action, can do no more than project the disheartening poverty of the 19 present into the richness of the future.\" This unpredictability of future details does not, however, logically negate for him the fact 20 that the future i s nevertheless fu l l y determined by material history. Now, since Caudwell was an organised, o f f i c i a l Communist, we should not be surprised to find him nominally familiar with the elementary concepts of classical Marxism. In fact, that he was not more consistent than he was in his understanding, i s the point of my cri t i c i s m . Thus, the issues around which the Marxism of a Communist Party member such as Caudwell i s tested w i l l naturally tend to centre on the finer and more specific points of Marxist theory and practice: no self-respecting CPGB member, for instance, should have to be argued with about socialism's hi s t o r i c a l superiority to capitalism. Rather, the specific arguments and actions by such a member that effectively confirm or contradict his or her stated general agreement on that question should, more lo g i c a l l y , constitute the test of that member's claimed Marxism. And, since the issues of economic determination, ideology, reformism, and the necessity of proletarian revolution have, on the whole, long been formally settled inside the- so-called Marxist movement, the most frequent ultimate test of a Marxist in the twentieth century logically tends to be his or her understanding of the organisational question. Considering a l l t h i s , i t i s important to remember Caudwell's - 144 -own formal arguments for-building a revolutionary party. For, my criticism w i l l be that he nevertheless does not understand the party question as Lenin and Trotsky understood i t . That i s , he does not sufficiently see the party as a democratic-centralist weapon of proletarian revolution. Rather, Caudwell tends to see the party's role as a question of trans-class \"democracy\" (popular frontism) programmatically and as a question of usually arbitrary dictates and pure centralism operationally/organisationally. Consequently, he tends to demand ostensibly revolutionary and proletarian axiological c r i t e r i a through exhortation and f i a t . This i s counterposed to the Leninist-Trotskyist argument for an always voluntary but organised revolutionary orientation in a l l cultural matters. One effect of this confusion about the party's precise role reveals i t s e l f in Caudwell's numerous pleas to overtly anti-Marxist \"fellow travellers\" 21 to join the Communists in making the revolution. As I w i l l try to show, this disorientation produces axiological effects that closely correspond to the po l i t i c s of Stalinism, whose un-Marxist assumptions Caudwell shared to a large degree. However, i f we are to c r i t i c i s e Caudwell for insufficiently assimilating his Marxism, i t i s illuminating—before we substantiate our criticism with evidence—to see exactly how close Caiidwell occasionally did manage to come to Marxism on the question of the need for a vanguard party. Towards the end of Illusion and Reality, Caudwell asserts that \"no one who has patiently followed the argument thus far can f a i l to see i t s relevance to contemporary art, and the importance of understanding the revolutionary transformation of the basis of society which i s everywhere affecting art and the a r t i s t \" (IR, p. 308). Further down, - 145 -Caudwell becomes more speci f i c , actually defining revolutionary commitment, as he sees i t , in terms of membership in the Communist Party (IR, p. 314). \"A revolutionary must be a member of the revolutionary party,\" he asserts in Romance and Realism. \"As long as he remains outside.this.revolutionary party, i t is a sign that although he believes in the need for a revolution he remains bourgeois\"; one must, therefore, \"be a revolutionary not only in blank verse but in every activity\" (RR, pp. 134-35). He tellingly complains that \"fellow travellers \" such as Spender and Day Lewis '\"announce themselves as prepared to merge with the proletariat, to accept i t s theory and i t s organisation, in every f i e l d of concrete l i v i n g except that of art\"; everyone i s \"prepared to accept proletarian leadership in every f i e l d except the one which i s valuable to them, and where they demand the retention of bourgeois categories. . . . [Tjhe a r t i s t i s , for example, quite content to see the scientist proletarianised\" (IR, pp. 315 Caudwell explains how this \"reservation . . . is absolutely disastrous for an a r t i s t . It leads to a gradual separation between his l i v i n g and his a r t . . . . A l l his proletarian aspirations gather at one pole, a l l his bourgeois art at the other,\" although they cannot help influencing each other in a distorting way (IR, p. 315). Thus, says Caudwell, such people's chief interest in the revolution turns out to be \"to secure guarantees of freedom in the f i e l d of art after the revolution\"; they go to Russia \"not so much to see i f the people are free, but i f the artists are 'interfered with' by the authorities\" (IR, p. 316). Moreover, obversely, Caudwell i s formally opposed to spurious, forced \"commitment\" in a r t . \"Our demand—that your art should be - 146 -proletarian—\" he explains to the literary fellow-travellers, \" i s not a demand that you apply dogmatic categories and Marxist phrases to a r t . To do so would be bourgeois. We ask that you should really l i v e i n the new world and not leave your soul behind in the past. . . . It is a demand that you, an a r t i s t , become a proletarian leader i n the f i e l d of art; that you do not take either of these easy roads which are in essence the same—mechanically shuffling the outworn categories of bourgeois art or mechanically importing the categories of other proletarian spheres. You must take the d i f f i c u l t creative road— that of refashioning'!:the categories and technique of art so that i t expresses the new world coming into being and i s part of i t s realisation\" (IR, pp. 318-19). He t e l l s them that their kind of \"agitational poetry cannot be great poetry, because i t springs from a divided world-view . . .\" (RR, p. 135). \"Is the proletariat made conscious of i t s goal by rhymed economics?\" he asks (RR, p. 136). And in his essay on Shaw, Caudwell c r i t i c i s e s that dramatist for f i l l i n g his plays with, among other things, \"deliberately forced conversions\" and \"unconvincing *** 22 denouements.\" Yet, as I hope to show, the net effect of Caudwell's contradictory arguments shows at most an unsustained approximation of Marxism. And in this regard, Caudwell's o f f i c i a l subscription to Stalinism, with i t s concomitant ignorance of and h o s t i l i t y towards the Bolshevik tradition of Lenin and Trotsky, seems decisive. Despite Caudwell's considerable assimilation of Marxism, then, and even taking into account the brevity of his acquaintance with i t , he remains unacceptably inconsistent on many of the fundamentals of i t s philosophy and p o l i t i c a l strategy. Thus, he often advances formulations in which he overestimates the motivating and determining - 147 -power of consciousness and art and ignores their necessary economic and social pre-conditions. His generalisations sometimes suggest that \"a complete refashioning of consciousness\" alone would suffice to bring about the desired \"change of values, the devulgarisation of l i f e , the growth of collective freedom and the release of individual consciousness which takes place in communism\" (IR, pp. 320, 326). Apart from mentioning a vague \"increase in freedom\" with the advent of communism, Caudwell at one point completely ignores the material changes underlying the new \"social solidarity,\" and speaks only of \"individuation and consciousness\" (IR, p.323). Similarly, ignoring the economic basis of so-called proletarian art, Caudwell at another point seems to imply that this art can simply evolve superstrueturally into communist art, in detached tandem with, not as an integral part of, the s o c i a l i s t revolution (IR, p. 311). One particularly concise example of Caudwell's unsureness on this question occurs in his essay on \"Men and Nature,\" where he categorically and patently contradicts himself: \" (Ajs a result of economic production a man finds himself born not into nature, but into a society already organised by interpenetration with nature, and into a nature already changed and X-rayed by this. He does not ever at any stage consciously form a_society; society forms him. He in turn, as a result, is_ an active centre for a fresh transformation; 23 he in turn forms society\" (emphasis mine). How can one \"actively\" form society without being at a l l conscious of the act, however unwillingly performed? It does not alter the fact of the contradiction one iota that Caudwell himself i s bothered by i t and returns to i t later (FS, p. 136); as Cornforth might have put i t , Caudwell allows his original mechanical-materialist inversion to stand—a fact, incidentally, that hardly bolsters - 148 -E.P. Thompson's promotion of \"the entire body of Caudwell's work . . . as a polemic against mechanical materialism of this kind, masquerading as Marxism\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 248). A more accurate description of Caudwell's formulations on this question, as of those on most others, would be \"vacillation between an anti-Marxist idealism and an un-Marxist materialism.\" And that problem, as E.P. Thompson half-recognises, i s an integral part of the his t o r i c a l l y larger, p o l i t i c a l problem of Stalinism. It should not be d i f f i c u l t for Marxists to see, from Caudwell's occasional confusion on the question of base and superstructure, how this vacillation could logically blur his notion of classes. That i s , since consciousness and culture can advance independently of the economy, this logic might run, people no longer find specific opposed interests around which to group themselves, in accordance with the dictates of economic necessity. One can also see, then, how even such an incipient notion of classes as a myth could sow doubts about the necessity of a workers' revolution and lead straight to reformist and popular frontist appetites. Such a \"logical\" thread does, in fact, exist and run through Caudwell's work, though sometimes less overtly than at others. E.P. Thompson has shown that Caudwell, \"in his essentialist paradigm of society, . . . often loses a l l sight of the real h i s t o r i c a l contradictions, in social being, of social class\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 256). \"Caudwell's move from primitive to modern society i s so swift,\" he notes, \"that (despite passing references to class) i t allows for the interposition of only one new important concept: that of the market, and of commodity-fetishism . . .\" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 258): \"what happened (one wonders) i n the interval between 'primitive' and 'later - 149 -bourgeois c i v i l i s a t i o n ' ? \" (\"Caudwell,\" p. 258). Indeed, I would argue, a conception of even this \"later bourgeois c i v i l i s a t i o n \" as merely \"association,\" rather than as a power-structure comprising forces with fundamentally opposed socio-economic interests, pervades Caudwell's 24 analysis of i t . It i s such conceptual imprecision about an elementary sociological truth—discovered, in fact, by bourgeois ideologues a century before Marx—that renders Caudwell vulnerable to Stalinism's programme of class-collaboration. From insufficiently grasping the significance of Marxist class-analyses, Caudwell needs to make no special effort to accept the programme of the Popular Front: he willingly presents the rarely and always only marginally radicalised bourgeois intelligentsia (along with anarchists, p a c i f i s t s , and Christians) as being, without exception or gradation, revolutionary 25 peers of the communist workers. Disregarding his own assertion that 26 \"[t]here i s no abstract man,\" Caudwell can advance the concept of a seamless and classless \"average genotype\" who partakes of an equally 27 classless \"collective emotion of ... . the era\" (IR, p. 83) . Finally, Caudwell can pronounce dialectical materialism \"the product 28 of a classless society\" and even advance the concept of a \"classless 29 state,\" notions that would have intrigued Marx, Engels, and Lenin. If a state can be classless, one can see why Caudwell assumes 30 that workers can achieve \"freedom\" while s t i l l under capitalism. This then dovetails neatly into the Stalinis t policies of \"peaceful co-existence\" and \"Socialism in One Country.\" For, as every worker . (in the eyes of Caudwell and the Stalinists) ought to know, whether circumstances are favourable or not, so c i a l i s t revolution i s achievable 31 ( i f at a l l ) only through inevitable stages of pain and suffering. The programmatic Stalinism of Caudwell, then, i s substantial, - 150 -and this can hardly be expected to leave his general system of values-literary or otherwise—unaffected. But i t i s the specific correspondence between this programme and Caudwell's o f f i c i a l member-ship in the CPGB that decisively marks his p o l i t i c s , as well as his axiology, as more Stalinist than Marxist. General and abstract discussions about his sense of \"commitment\" w i l l not suffice. The party question with Caudwell i s either a matter of formally argued, specific, and o f f i c i a l loyalties, or i t i s nothing; and his own remarks on that subject, as we saw e a r l i e r , testify to this fact. Everyl.biographical account echoes in one form or another Mulhern's claim that Caudwell \"worked hard to carry out his day-to-day party duties . . .\" (p. 38). And i t i s in the specific p o l i t i c a l question \"What party duties?\" that the possibility of precisely defining Caudwell's axiology l i e s . Aware of the need for organised activity i f one indeed wants to become \"a thorough Marxist\" (RR, p. 136), Caudwell i s trapped between his often more-than-rudimentary understanding of Marxism and the non-Marxist programme of his own, o f f i c i a l party. Unable to grasp the meaning and unacquainted with any practice of genuine democratic centralism within a Bolshevik party, Caudwell shuttles confusedly between liberal-democratic, popular frontist premises and authoritarian, spurious dictates. On the one hand, reflecting the class-capitulatory p o l i t i c a l appetites of Stalinism, Caudwell 32 stresses the adaptive and conciliatory properties of a r t . On the other hand, expressing Stalinism's internally dictatorial and mechanistic organisational norms, Caudwell issues the Zhdanovist decree that \"whatever methods are necessary for a social transformation must - 151 -be necessary in art\" (RR, p. 132; my emphasis). For Marxists, i t i s within this p o l i t i c a l compass that Caudwell's axiology i s most revealingly diagnosed. E.P. Thompson has noted that \"Caudwell commonly ascribed to 'art' functions and properties which might more properly be ascribed to language, and thence to culture. . . . We slide around too much between language, culture, art and poetry\" (\"Caudwell,\" pp. 260-61). Nevertheless, to be able to extract any sense of Caudwell's \"general theory of literature\" ait a l l , one i s provisionally compelled to regard 33 his use of those categories as co-equal and interchangeable. B r i e f l y , then, in his ostensibly more Marxist stretches, Caudwell regards a l l art and literature in bourgeois society as expressions of the dominant bourgeois myth of complete freedom, a myth that nevertheless assumes a 34 certain reality through the beliefs of the rest of society. The ultimate determinant of this art i s the capitalist mode of commodity-production, which,by oyer-fragmenting the social division of labour, 35 generates a sequence of splits i n social phenomena. These sp l i t s range from the invention of writing and the birth of the reading public to the birth of the l y r i c , the movement for \"art for art's sake,\" and i t s ultimate, i l l o g i c a l extreme—the development of self-enclosed, \"in t r i n s i c \" meanings of words, corresponding to the pathological alienation of the individual and the over-privatisation of emotion. Towards the end of and alongside this sequence, a compensatory movement for synthesising and reintegrating the scattered ideological realm appears. This i s witnessed in the shifting emphasis, in literature, towards social theory, novels of ideas, propaganda, and other such - 152 -36 g e n e r a l i s i n g s t r a t e g i e s and mechanisms. While d i f f e r e n t l i t e r a r y genres e x h i b i t d i f f e r e n t and of ten opposing f u n c t i o n a l tendencies (poetry tending to be i n d i v i d u a l i s t i c and r e b e l l i o u s , f o r i n s t a n c e , whi le the n o v e l and 37 the short s tory tend to be more s o c i a l and i n c r e a s i n g l y submiss ive ) , l i t e r a t u r e i n general performs two—eventually d i a l e c t i c a l l y counter -p o s e d — f u n c t i o n s . As long as the bourgeois myth dominates, l i t e r a t u r e mostly helps human beings tame t h e i r animal i n s t i n c t s i n t o emotions, thereby f a c i l i t a t i n g the task of s o c i a l adjustment, or \" a d a p t a t i o n \" to \" e x t e r n a l r e a l i t y \" (IR, p . 289). But because of i t s c o n t r a d i c t o r y nature as both adaptive and r e b e l l i o u s , a n d because of the maturing economic, p o l i t i c a l , and general s o c i a l c o n t r a d i c t i o n s of bourgeois s o c i e t y at l a r g e , bourgeois l i t e r a t u r e ( l i k e a l l c l a s s art ) a l s o proves to be the nemesis of the bourgeois myth of absolute freedom. I t e v e n t u a l l y r e v e a l s , through i t s most s k i l l e d p r a c t i t i o n e r s , the many s t r i n g s t y i n g that myth down to bourgeois n e c e s s i t y . And ( f o r Caudwell) i n t h i s r e v e l a t i o n , t h i s f a c i l i t a t i o n of the r e a d e r ' s \" r e c o g n i t i o n of n e c e s s i t y , \" l i e s even bourgeois a r t ' s capac i ty to b r i n g about \" f r e e d o m , \" which i s i t s 38 c h i e f general v a l u e . Caudwell ' s c l a s s i f i c a t i o n of nine c o n v e n t i o n a l l y recognized-per iods i n the h i s t o r y of bourgeois E n g l i s h l i t e r a t u r e i n terms of t h e i r economic framework attempts to apply broadly the above theory, centred on h i s p a r t i c u l a r understanding of Marxis.J 'base-super-s t r u e t u r e \" a n a l y t i c a l model . I t i s w i t h i n the framework of the above theory that he c a r r i e s out h i s own evaluat ions of p a r t i c u l a r authors , when he i s being c o n s i s t e n t . But one of the sources of Caudwell 's i n c o n s i s t e n t Marxism, i s p r e c i s e l y the frequent c l a s h between h i s \" m a t e r i a l i s t i c \" analyses .and h i s o f t e n unexamined, i d e a l i s t i c v a l u e -judgments between r e l a t i v i s m . a n d absolut i sm, o b j e c t i v i s m and s u b j e c t i v i s m , - 153 -rebelliousness and capitulation. These philosophical contradictions, in their specific axiological relation to his Stalini s t p o l i t i c s , we shall now examine below. Caudwell's Principles of Literary Evaluation Doyle (p. 247) claims that Caudwell's work definitively shifts the axiological problematic from the conventional concern with explaining the assumed greatness of particular authors, works, traditions, and oeuvres to \"a more diale c t i c a l understanding of the determinate modes by which f i c t i o n , self and society inter-penetrate in different /ways, within specific documentary, monumental, and institutional formations.\" That i s , according to Doyle, Caudwell replaces the old practice of exclusively intra-literary assessments \"with questions of a rather more functional nature.\" But the fact i s that although literature's contextual function does interest Caudwell more than the relative i n t r i n s i c values of i t s individual products, he does not so much replace the earlier evaluative practice with dialectics as attempt to \"dialecticise\" that practice i t s e l f . Thus we find Caudwell stating categorically (IR, p. 150) that i t i s \"the essential task of aesthetics to rank Herrick below Milton, and Shakespeare above either, and explain in rich and complex detail why and how they d i f f e r . . . . Such an act implies a standard.\" This i s no declaration of abandonment of the older problematic. Rather, i t i s an attempt— in the event albeit contradictory and problem-ridden—to revolutionise the \"standard\" i t s e l f , in light of his understanding of literature's general function in l i f e . This explains why, although he seems at one point to favour Aristotle's concern with \"function\" over Plato's - 154 -concern with \"enjoyment\" (IR, p . 51)—at l e a s t p r o v i s i o n a l l y assuming t h e i r counterposi t ion—he f e e l s impel led to conclude Romance and Realism (pp. 139-40) with a c a l l f o r an a l l - r o u n d t r a n s v a l u a t i o n of l i f e and a r t : [TJhe study of a e s t h e t i c s i n c l u d e s the a p p r e c i a t i o n of p r i m a r i l y a e s t h e t i c values detected i n the t a s t i n g and c r e a t i o n , i n values of beauty, emotion, co lour and l i f e . . . . We cannot neglec t such a study i f we are to e n r i c h and expand our v a l u e s , and escape from the barren categories of the p r e s e n t . . . . jjwjhen a c u l t u r e d i s i n t e g r a t e s , when we lose a world-view, then a e s t h e t i c s , too , d i s i n t e g r a t e s ; our v a l u e s , which seemed so c l e a r , so much p a r t of the artwork, abrupt ly fade . To res tore them, to advance beyond, to create a new a r t or new world-view, a new set of a e s t h e t i c v a l u e s , a new l i f e , i s the purpose now of any a n a l y s i s of the s o c i a l generation of a r t . I t then becomes an e s s e n t i a l pr e l i mi nar y task f o r the r e c r e a t i o n of a r t and a e s t h e t i c s . The passage i s t a n g e n t i a l l y reminiscent of T r o t s k y ' s observat ion that s o c i a l decay h i t s \"not only p a r t i e s i n power, but schools of a r t as w e l l \" ( \" C e l i n e , \" T r o t s k y , p . 201)—but only t a n g e n t i a l l y . F o r , whereas Trotsky i s d i s c u s s i n g the determining i n f l u e n c e of m a t e r i a l and p o l i t i c a l changes on a r t , Caudwell i s , i n a sense, d i s c u s s i n g some-thing p r e c i s e l y o p p o s i t e : the determining i n f l u e n c e , w i t h i n the super-s t r u c t u r e , of \" c u l t u r e \" on \" a e s t h e t i c s . \" This l i m i t e d n e s s of the semi-p a r a l l e l i s s i g n i f i c a n t . F o r , as Caudwell ' s perhaps most s u b s t a n t i a l statement ron* a e s t h e t i c value w i l l t y p i c a l l y show (below), h i s emphasis on the superstructure sometimes verges on a reversal of its overall r e l a t i o n -ship to the base, as that r e l a t i o n s h i p i s def ined i n Marxism: [ A ] r t adapts the psyche to the environment, and i s therefore one of the condi t ions of the development of s o c i e t y . . . . JEt . . . remoulds e x t e r n a l r e a l i t y nearer to the h e a r t ' s d e s i r e . A r t becomes more s o c i a l l y and b i o l o g i c a l l y v a l u a b l e and greater a r t the more that remoulding i s comprehensive and true to the nature of r e a l i t y . . . . A r t gives us so many - 155 -glimpses of the Inner heart of l i f e ; and that Is Its significance, different from and yet arising out of i t s purpose. It i s like a magic lantern which projects our real selves on the Universe and promises us that we, as we desire, can alter the Universe, alter i t to the measure of our needs. (IR, pp. 289-90;' emphasis mine.) From the above passage, we can separate Caudwell's two chief c r i t e r i a of aesthetic (including literary) value: truthfulness to life-and a quality that increases the art-appreciator's capacity to cope with l i f e , eventually leading to \"liberty.\" I w i l l discuss the f i r s t criterion later. The second cr i t e r i o n , ln Caudwell's code, actually conceals a tension between submissive values and rebellious values that clearly reflects his own more fundamental, p o l i t i c a l vacillation between reformism and revolution—between Stalinism and Marxism. The net implication i s a valorisation of \"the consoling, healing and invigorating power of a r t \" — a l l \"adaptive\" attributes that usually lead at most to \"the vigour and serenity of an organism sure of i t s e l f i n the face of external reality\" (IR, pp. 294-295). That i s , within the framework of class society, one criterion of valuable literature i s seen by (Caudwell as i t s a b i l i t y to conciliate the reader to the dominant, conservative status quo. Literature, to become valuable, iimist perform \"a wide and deep feat of integration\" (IR, p. 225), leading, like most poetry, to \"an adaptation to external reality\" (IR, pp. 237-240). This hi s t o r i c a l l y unspecific, seemingly classless criterion of literary value—mediated by the equally classless \"social\" conventions of art (RR, p. 36)—of course finds i t s logical extension i n Caudwell's indiscriMnate labelling of a l l forms of society as \"association.\" Thus, Caudwell's humanist statement that \"one can only find salvation - 156 -for oneself by finding i t for a l l others at the same time\" (emphasis mine) naturally leads to an evaluation of D. H. Lawrence in which he c r i t i c i s e s the novelist's \"essential bourgeois selfishness\" but f a i l s to indicate i t s specifically proletarian alternative (\"D.H. Lawrence,\" S_, p. 69). For, after a l l , \" i t i s the process of association which makes men noble and heroic, which gives their character more beauty and worth. Hence, the 'I' of dream, stripped of so much of i t s social adaptation, i s stripped of i t s largeness and human value\" (IR, p. 203). An imaginary, contradiction-free \"association\" i s posited as an existing fact. Herein l i e s one crucial element of Caudwell's philosophical idealism. In his passage on the c r i t e r i a of aesthetic value quoted above (IR, pp. 289-90), Caudwell speaks of art remoulding \"external reality nearer to the heart's desire,\" promising us \"that we, as we desire, can alter the Universe. . . . \" \"The heart's desire\": that i s the other, weaker pole of the tension in Caudwell's second main set of c r i t e r i a . His tendency to \"adapt\", which i s stronger, i s indeed to a degree balanced by an impulse to actively implement \"change.\" Thus, for instance, in discussing'the dual character of the \"adaptive value\" of poetry, Caudwell notes that \"great poetry w i l l not disguise the nakedness of outer necessity, only cause i t to shine with the glow of interest. Poetry soaks external reality—nature and society—with emotional significance . . . [which] gives the organism an appetitive interest in external r e a l i t y , enables the organism to deal with i t more resolutely, whether in the world of reality or of phantasy\" (IR, p. 241). In one particularly revealing metaphor (for the thalamus, a part of the human brain), Caudwell links the (presumably non-fascistic) \"instincts\" to the proletariat and to rebellion: \" A l l violent - 157 -effective outbursts . . . are assumed to be thalamic. The thalamus is the rebel, the seat of the unconscious, the instinctive proletariat, which that well-educated and refined bureaucracy, the cortex, with i t s unemotional logical consciousness, keeps (not without difficulty) in Elsewhere, Caudwell e x p l i c i t l y links rebelliousness with li v e l i n e s s , freshness, \"naturalism,\" and the Renaissance, on the one hand; on the other hand, he associates the classical tradition with mechanical lifelessness, smug, conservative academicism, \"formalism,\" and Hellenism. \"We value the revolutionary, dissatisfied art works of the Renaissance,\" he says in \"Beauty\" (FS, p. 78), \"and see nothing in those of the Hellenising classicists or tired formalists who mechanically repeat the beautiful things of times gone by.\" Relating the character of those insurgent, innovative, discontented traits to their common socio-economic basis and h i s t o r i c a l class-heritage, Caudwell f i r s t equates pre-Gothic art with stiffness and feudalism, and Gothic art with the \"vigour\" of the nascent bourgeoisie, and then draws a parallel between \"the art of revolutionary Greece\" and that of the Renaissance bourgeoisie: [A] class developed beneath the quiet, s t i f f art of feudalism, whose vigour i s f i r s t announced by the Gothic cathedrals. This class in turn became a ruling classjbut one whose condition of existence i s a constant revolution of the means of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Its art is therefore in i t s essence an insurgent, non-formal, naturalistic a r t . Only the art of revolutionary Greece in any way forecasts the naturalism of bourgeois art. It i s an art which constantly revolutionises i t s own conventions, just as bourgeois - 158 -economy constantly revolutionises i t s own means of production. This constant revolution, this constant sweeping-away of \"ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,\" this \"everlasting uncertainty and agitation,\" distinguishes bourgeois art from a l l previous a r t . Any bourgeois a r t i s t who even for a generation rests upon the conventions of his time becomes \"academic\" and his art l i f e l e s s . This same movement i s characteristic of English poetry. (IR, p. 67) For Caudwell, these revolutionary values in their bourgeois form derive their power from \"heroism\" . Heroism combines—as in Shakespeare— the \"instinctive,\" \"unconscious\" \"self-hood\" of the long-oppressed petit-bourgeois \"individual\" with the socially progressive significance of 40 his arts. As literature evolves, the \"affective heat\" of other socially-generated emotions such as love and comedy also lends \"vividness,\" \"vigour,\" \"colour,\" and \" l i f e \" to literature, these values themselves being positive 41 ones, as in Dickens. Yet, as even Caudwell sometimes recognises, in the last analysis, the emotional \"desire\" that gives rise to these values and c r i t e r i a of evaluation i s i t s e l f determined by the supervening laws of nature 42 and class society. And the most perspicuous bourgeois artists 1 recognition of this necessity, without their recourse to any real strategy for freedom, constitutes both their relative ideological freedom and their situational pathos. Caudwell sees this dilemma expressed most intensely i n the tragic genre and mode, especially as exemplified by Shakespeare (IR, pp. 28, 80, 86-88, 91, 271). However, he does not imply that tragedy is \"in i t s e l f tragic\"; \" i t i s beautiful, tender and s a t i s f y i n g — i n the Aristotelian sense cathartic,\" he says. \"But there i s also the spectacle of culture tragically perishing because i t s matrix, society, has become dispersed and s t e r i l e \" (IR, p. 328). The relevance of tragedy as a criterion of literary value, to Caudwell's - 159 -mind, therefore derives from a tragic dilemma extrinsic to literature i t s e l f . It points to an undesirable but apparently intractable contradiction i n bourgeois society at large, and incidentally registers the bourgeois artist's partially liberating recognition of that dilemma: This i s the pathos of a r t , which cannot be tragic because i t cannot resolve i t s problems in a tragic way, but i s torn by insoluble conflicts and perplexed by a l l kinds of unreal phantasies [from The Tempest (IR, p. 91) to Ulysses (IR, p. 328)]. This i s the tragedy . . . of w i l l that does not understand i t s e l f ; of the unconscious individual who i s slave to he knows not what. Art i s the privilege of the free. (IR, p. 328) This dual c r i s i s of situation and perception, and hence ,ofs existing (bourgeois) values, obviously calls for an alternative set of c r i t e r i a by which to judge art as well as social intercourse i n general. Yet, Caudwell believes, the purely cerebral Shaw, the abstract dreamer Wells, the regressive Meredith, the eventually colourless romantic Conrad, the anarchic Yeats, or the reactionary skeptic E l i o t , for instance, though a l l c r i t i c s of bourgeois values in their own 43 way, decidedly cannot provide that alterant!ve. But before we discuss Caudwell's own proposed solution to this c r i s i s , l e t us examine his other chief evaluative criterion—truthfulness to l i f e . In Illusion and Reality, Caudwell defines truth in general as \"the special complex formed by the partial reflections of reality in a l l l i v i n g men's heads—. . .as the views are organized i n a given society, by i t s level of experimental technique, s c i e n t i f i c literature, means of communication and discussion and laboratory f a c i l i t i e s . \" And precisely because the truth at any given time i s - 160 -formed by \"partial reflections\" of specific conditions and objects, \"[t]here i s no absolute truth,\" though there i s an objectively determined \"limit to which the truth of society at any moment continually aims\" (IR, 155).. The connection between such philosophical truth, bourgeois necessity, and rebellious instincts, on the one hand, and art, on the other, is formulated by Caudwell as follows: \"In so far as art exposes the real necessity of the instincts by exposing a l l the various possible changes following from the various possible means of influencing them, art becomes conscious of the necessity of the world of feeling, and therefore free\" (IR, p. 158). Consciousness (and, s p e c i f i c a l l y , the consciousness of necessity) thus becomes for Caudwell a major criterion of value in a work of a r t . But, he claims, such consciousness i s precisely what Is seriously lacking in the works of writers such as James (RR, p. 103), Joyce (RR, pp. 110-11), Woolf (RR, p. 114), and Hemingway (RR, p. 118). To Caudwell, a l l of them, like Conrad, conceal \"a complete poverty of internal philosophy and a limitation therefore of possible reactions to reality\" (RR, p. 103). The consciousness that people's conception of beauty is \"always a beauty rooted in their cultures\" (\"Beauty,\" FS_, p. I l l ) and that, ultimately, the bourgeois' \"conceptions of justice and right were also determined by society\" (\"Consciousness,\" FS, p. 169), i s to him an indispensable component of (relative) ideological freedom. And this consciousness, he would seem to believe, is absent in the above novelists. Yet, even in the following \"socialist r e a l i s t \" critique of the bourgeois \"observer's\" deluded absolutism, nowhere does Caudwell posit any alternative more Marxist than a merely general, - 161 -sociological relativism: The bourgeois i s unconscious of the determining character of social relations. He therefore believes i t possible to construct a closed, absolute world of art from which the observer i s excluded, a world of absolute values existing in themselves, not a world of values for the observer. The more this objectivity i s consciously sought, the more subjective the novel becomes. The solution i s Marxist. The closed world of art i s not possible. The observer i s himself and i n his values determined by his social relations. None-theless, the observer can be freed. This freedom is also the aim of the bourgeois closed world of art , an aim which failed only because of bourgeois ignorance concerning the nature of freedom. Freedom i s obtained, not by the elimination of the observer or by suppressing his role, but only by recognising i t , by understanding of the determining power of social relations. . . . This fact does not lead to r i g i d i t y and stagnation, for this world-view recognises the r e l a t i v i t y of a l l values and the change of a l l being. (RR, pp. 118-19) Nevertheless, a key to unlocking this trans-class fusion of values could be found in Caudwell's observation that while there i s \"not much l e f t of importance in bourgeois ethics\" (^Pacifism and Violence,\" S_, p. 96), i t i s bourgeois values that rule i n a bourgeois society, to the point of their not even recognising the existence and relative legitimacy of other class-values. For the bourgeois, and eventually for \"society\" as a whole, \"beauty i s a state of the bourgeois\" (\"Beauty,\" FS_, p. 80). Bourgeois philosophy defines the environment as ' a l l that i s not the bourgeois,' while the Bourgeois stands outside i t free and separate. The world thus becomes divested of a l l values arising from the relation of bourgeois to environment, for a l l such values, since they contain the bourgeois, are abstracted from the environment, for otherwise they would tie him to i t . Such a non-valued environment ultimately contains nothing knowable and contains therefore nothing at a l l , but by the time this - 162 -is discovered bourgeois culture i s in such an advanced stage of disintegration that i t seems immaterial whether the world i s a r e a l , coloured, qualified world or a ghostly ballet of equations. (\"Beauty,\" FS? p. 80). In passages such as the above, Caudwell shows his creative application of a key Marxist concept—that of ideological hegemony—to aesthetics. Despite the frequent lapses into confusion and idealism, and notwithstanding the real incursions of bourgeois ideology, Caudwell does manage in his work to sketch an outline of (chiefly English) hist o r i c a l moments that suggestively relates socio-economic base to ideological values. Thus he argues persuasively that chastity, for instance, becomes a social virtue, and Benedictine monasteries spring up, precisely when the model feudal agricultural unit emerging from the disintegrating Roman imperialist monolith dem«uids a \"reduction In population\" (\"Breath of Discontent,\" FS_, p. 64),. Similarly, he maintains that Puritan t h r i f t and sobriety as values reflect the new-found a b i l i t y of the English petty bourgeoisie to replace i t s previous primitive accumulation of capital through robbery with economic independence through \"saving\" (IR, p. 92; ; also see RR, p. 62); the manufacturing bourgeoisie's sudden (post-revolutionary) clamour for \"order,\" \"measure,\" I ' ! l a w ^ \" \" g°o d taste,\" \"tradition,\" and \"conventions\" stems from i t s new need to organise and streamline the chaotic growth of capitalist manufacture, now that the victory of capitalism as a system i s assured (IR, p. 98); and the resulting capitalist market-economy—with i t s relentless transformation of a l l objects and values into self-contained commodities, and of a l l consumers into one unpredictable, faceless \"public\"—gives rise to commodity-fetishism, which, as we have seen, makes art-works seem \"worthy ends-in-themselves\" (IR, Sjp. 101; also see pp. 116-17, 124, 162, 323). - 163 -Thus, for instance, Caudwell more, than once emphasises the , socio -economic dissimilarities underlying apparent literary similarities between, on the one hand, Shakespeare and Marvell and, on the other, writers from Moore to the Dadaists: \"the increasing individualism which, seen at i t s best in Shakespeare, was a positive value, . . . pushed to i t s limit f i n a l l y spelt the complete breakdown of art i n surrealism, Dadaism and Steinism\" (\"D. H. Lawrence,\" S_, p. 54): \"[t]he gulf between Marvell's America (the remote Bermudas) or Shakespeare's (the still-vex'd Bermoothes), and Moore's (a journalist i n New York)/ i s the gulf which has opened between early vigorous bourgeois culture and old tired bourgeois culture\" (RR, p. 107). The wide generic range and some of the characteristics of the decaying \"old tired\" bourgeois culture, or \"bad art,\" can be 'glimpsed in Caudwell's indictment of what he curiously (though with partial justice, in terms of some of i t s consumers) calls \"the real proletarian literature of today\": Films, the novel and painting a l l share i n the degradation. Immense technical resources and steady debasement and stereotyping of the human psyche are characteristics. . . . The modern t h r i l l e r , love story, cowboy romance, cheap fil m , jazz music or yellow Sunday paper form the real proletarian literature of today—that i s , literature which is the characteristic accompaniment of the misery and instinctual poverty produced in the majority of the people by modern capitalist production. . . . This art, universal, constant, fabulous, f u l l of the easy gratifications of instincts starved by modern capitalism, peopled by passionate lovers and heroic cowboys and amazing detectives, i s the religion of today, as characteristic an expression of proletarian exploitation as Catholicism i s of feudal exploitation. . . . \"Low-brow\" proletarian art grows on the proletariat's unfreedom and helps, by i t s massage of the starved revolting instincts, to maintain that unfreedom in being. (IB£ p. 123) Meanwhile, argues Caudwell, \"modern poetry grows barer and barer - 164 -of l i f e , of real social content, and the only word-values useable by poetry become increasingly personal u n t i l poetry i s altogether esoteric and private\" (IR, p. 325) . Such art often tends to presage \"liberty's opposite,\" fascism (\"Shaw,\" S, p. 9). Fascistic \"art,\" for Caudwell, is marked above a l l by an instinctive, introverted primitivism—the ultimate form of enslaving \"regression\" (IR, p. 312). 44 The fascist g l o r i f i e s barbaric social relations; fascism i s hostile to contemporary c u l t u r e , ^ to Marxism /socialism/communism,^ as well 47 as to racial (usually non-Aryan) minorities. It fosters hero-worship (\"D.H. Lawrence,\" j>, p. 56) and purports to exalt so-called reason over emotion (IR, p. 131), while simultaneously fetishising \"unconscious\" instincts (\"D. H. Lawrence,\" j>, pp. 63, 67). Fascist ideology, claims Caudwell, stems from and results In \"a lowering of consciousness and an impoverishing of values\" (\"D. H. Lawrence,\" J 3 , p. 67). Complicity in the \"old,\" bourgeois values i s therefore fat a l ; and to regard them as absolute i s no less so. Sharing in the bourgeois' conception of \"his desires and notions of justice, morality and so forth, as not in any way determined, but as primary and therefore eternal\" (\"Consciousness,\" FS_, p. 169), then, is also counterposed to any movement towards independence and freedom. This is what happens with Wells, who \"is intellectually one with those he wishes to convert\" (\"Wells,\" S_, p. 85) . Thus, on the one hand, the value of a detached ideological stance on the part of the a r t i s t is for Caudwell graphically demonstrated in the case of Shakespeare: - 165 -Shakespeare could not have achieved the stature he did i f he had not exposed, at the dawn of bourgeois development, the whole movement of the capitalist contradiction, from i t s tremendous achievement to i t s mean decline. His position, his feudal \"perspective,\" enabled him to comprehend i n one era a l l the trends which i n later eras were to separate out and so be beyond the compass of one treatment. ^Footnote:] In the same way, More., from his feudal perspective, anticipates the development of capitalism into communism in his Utopia. (IR, p. 90) Perspective entails a comprehensiveness and realism of vision. \"Art becomes more . . . valuable and greater art the more that remoulding of external reality nearer to the heart's desire is comprehensive and true to the nature of r e a l i t y , using as i t s material the sadness, the catastrophes, the blind necessities, as well as the delights and pleasures of l i f e \" (IR, p. 289). On the other hand, this particular kind of truthful remoulding in turn leads not only to a wide canvas and a r e a l i s t i c technique for the a r t i s t but also to a sense of historical context for the c r i t i c 48 judging works belonging to other cultures and ages. It i s this sense of contextual \"appropriateness\" that enables Caudwell not only to compare but also to contrast Marlowe, Shelley, Lawrence, and Dali: \"each expresses this revolt of 'feeling' against 'reason' \" but does so \" i n a manner appropriate to the period\" (IR, p. 103). Similarly, both Hardy and Euripides are pessimists, but each exhibits \"a pessimism appropriate to that era and that situation\" (RR, p. 92). And Milton's blank verse— \" l a t i n i s t , sonorous, f u l l of studied inversions\"—may not seem to us revolutionary \"but then we forget against what he was revolting—against the easy fluent (.glitter of the Court, the sweetness and corrupt simplicity - 166 -of a Suckling or a Lovelace who were courtiers s t i l l l i v i n g i n the world of Elizabethan absolutism from which the courtly l y r i c sprang. Graveness, austerity, dignity, and Latinity are now revolutionary, and to be Roman and classical i s to be republican and a contemner of new-fangled luxury. To be noble in style i s then to be [revolutionary] petty bourgeois\" (RR, pp. 47-48). Note that Caudwell's criterion of revolutionary value comprises what is_—at least in his view—objectively, hi s t o r i c a l l y progressive, not whatever might appear to the individual a r t i s t (or c r i t i c ) to be so simply because i t i s \"different.\" This distinction explains Caudwell's negative assessment of Lawrence's primitivism: \"Survivals of barbaric social relations between men . . . stand out as valuable in a culture where these relations have become relations between man and a thing, man and d i r t \" ; but that does not make those relations less barbarous for seeming \"valuable\" (\"D. H. Lawrence,\" S_, pp. 58-59). On this particular principle, therefore, Caudwell i s closer to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky than he i s to Williams or Eagleton. \"Appropriateness\" in general, for Caudwell, i s therefore an historically relative though real positive cr i t e r i o n , and so is realism as a specific instance of i t . Generically and modally, realism i s viewed as having played a revolutionary role when i t f i r s t emerged from, and went into partial conflict with Romanticism, synthesising \"the very wildness of romanticism, as i n Flaubert's exotic Salammbo, Zola's extravagant b e s t i a l i t y , or Tolstoy's surging war canvas,\" with the \"cold objectivity\" of eighteenth-century classicism (RR, pp. 31-32). But this, same realism \"more and: more seems, to rob the picture of romantic - 167 -vigour, u n t i l f i n a l l y i t becomes unemotional, dead, and without virtue. Realism in turn explodes, and we have anti-realism\" (RR, p. 32). Caudwell's valuing of philosophical and his t o r i c a l truthfulness, therefore, cannot be viewed as identical with his valuing of \"realism\" as a formal mode. Rather, i t is the literary work's \"cre d i b i l i t y \" within the context \"appropriate\" to i t that should serve as the evaluative principle. Caudwell explains his point by analysing what he considers the ('failure of de l a Mare and Yeats. He c r i t i c i s e s their attempts to (re-) construct once potentially valuable myths that can neither possess any literary credibility in this s c i e n t i f i c age nor hold any particular, resonant significance for a bourgeois readership who seem to be bereft of a l l positive values: De l a Mare attempts to construct a world-view of the fairy supernatural, but the impossibility of belief in such a world robs It of value. It is not suggested that one must believe in fa i r i e s or ghosts to make poetry of them. But one must believe i n a world in which they have a definite place, either as things really existing, or as projections of the unconscious, or as myths, or as examples of the absurdity of mankind, or as emanations of the d e v i l . The decaying b ourgeois has no definite belief about f a i r i e s , no positive attitude, only a suspension or mixture of beliefs and a negative attitude. Poetry i s not built from negative attitudes. Hence, de l a Mare has ceased to write poetry. Exactly the same attempt to patch up a world-view occurs with Y e a t s . . . . Yeats may by an heroic act of w i l l build up a world-view of definite belief in magic, f a i r i e s , the gods, and symbols of occult truths, but he cannot ensure that his belief w i l l be present in his contemporaries. . . . Consequently, his poetry i s f u l l of evocative references and allusions which are simply missed by his readers who do not share this world-view, and even the notes he gives do not help. (RR, pp. 126-27) Again, as we shall see, the contrast with Eagleton, for instance, i s illuminating. - 168 -Counterposed to.de la Mare and Yeats and, in this case, to T. S. E l i o t , for instance, is Dante: [ l ] n i t s attitude to beliefs of an older generation—for example to Dantesque scholasticism— our culture sees clearly both Dante's truth and Dante's error . . . i n terms of our higher faith and larger world-view. . . . It i s not a case, therefore, of pretending to believe what Dante believed; i t i s a question of understanding what his belief was. Then, although we no longer believe in his God: \"In l a sua volontade e nostra pace\" i s s t i l l poetry. . . . It is h i s t o r i c . (IR, pp. 129-30) Note, once again, Caudwell's close approximation here to Trotsky's method, in fact to Trotsky's very comments on Dante himself. On the other hand, Caudwell i s hardly opposed to a certain \"simplicity\" as one criterion of value. Indeed, perhaps no other criterion of value in Caudwell's scheme i s more evocative of the values of Marx himself. \"Simplicity,\" for Caudwell, actually possesses several characteristics. In a negative way, i t suggests a certain absence of social complications and worries: the uncomplex collective l i f e of primitive society, before the modern division of labour. In doing so, i t links the present to the past—and both to the desired future (advanced communism)«j—thereby lending \"immediacy\" to the work. And i t also emanates a certain innocence, comparable (in spite of Caudwell) to that of the Rousseaudian, \"Natural\" child: \"in general, the timelessr-ness of poetry matches his own childish simplicity which thinks, like Traheme, that the wheat was golden and immortal, corn that had never been sowed or reaped\" (IR, p. 207).5 0 However, unlike Marx, Caudwell makes certain that he - 169 -emphasises his awareness of the r e l a t i v i t y of sueh freedom (IR, p. 51), of the partial extent of such \"timeless\" continuity,5 1 and of the generally more advanced consciousness of c i v i l i s e d people over that of primitive people (\"Beauty y\" FS, pp. 111-112). But the relationship between Caudwell's usually absolutist generalisations and his occasionally r e l a t i v i s t empirical qualifications i s inconsistent and i s well captured in his comments on Greek art's relevance to modern bourgeois aesthetics. While Caudwell claims that \"[o]nly the art of revolutionary [ f i f t h century] Greece in any way forecasts the naturalism of bourgeois art\" (IR, p. 67), he expects us to \"value the revolutionary, dissatisfied art works of the Renaissance, and see nothing in those of the hellenising classicists or tired formalists who mechanically repeat the beautiful things of times gone by\" (\"Beauty,\" FS, p. 78). And yet, even here, one might well detect the evaluative criterion of contextual (in-)\"appropriateness\" operating through this \"paradox\"; what looks at f i r s t l i k e arbitrary taste and absolutist stereotyping may nevertheless reveal consistently hi s t o r i c a l underlying c r i t e r i a after a l l . Contextual!ty i s thus what defines, for Caudwell, the beauty or the ugliness of a given literary text, genre, or mode, and furnishes his explanation for the paradoxical beauty, as he sees i t , of bourgeois tragedy in the midst of ugly bourgeois social r e a l i t y . For, bourgeois tragedy often t e l l s the truth about the repression of the working class. Further, the particular:context of proletarian defeats at the hands of the capitalist state, from which modern:tragedy often derives i t s characteristic moods, poses squarely the question of the Marxist reader's own desire to ^intervene actively in the struggle to reverse i t s course. The issue of partisanship, as well as the nature of the actual partisan - 170 -programme for victory, therefore arises immediately. Evaluative c r i t e r i a for \"beauty\" and \"ugliness\" thus become linked to the specific character of one's own, socialist intervention to change their enabling conditions. And i t i s here that Caudwell's limitations and contra-dictions as an ostensible Marxist surface and exert a distorting pressure once more—as soon as aesthetic values reveal p o l i t i c a l ones. As with Yeats' and de l a Mare's myths, Caudwell finds a l l potential vehicles of beauty to be subject to enabling or disabling social and his t o r i c a l conditions. Thus, while he clearly states i n \"Beauty\" that \"[bjeauty i s the end of art\" (FS, p. 102) and that \"the experience [of f e l t beauty] i s real\" (FS, p. 88), he also points out that beauty i s not \"universal\" but \"social\" (FS_, pp. 87-88) , and hence subject to variation from one \"society\" to another (FS, p. 104). \"Standards\" in society, after a l l , as he notes, \"are made, not found\" (\"Pacifism and Violence,\" S_, p. 125); and that is one reason, incidentally, why Aristotle's bio-emotional theory of cathartic literary value i s apparently not adequate for us (IR, p. 63). Further, Caudwell observes, beauty i s relative even within a single culture. hi s t o r i c a l context; for, in the last analysis, i t must be defined in terms of i t s opposite—ugliness. Yet, the concept of ugliness i s i t s e l f contextually intricate and relative, too: Beauty, then, i s defined by a l l that i s not-beauty. . . . Ugliness i t s e l f i s an aesthetic value: the v i l l a i n , the gargoyle, the grotesque, the Caliban, the snake-headed Furies, the triumph of Time's decaying hand, a l l these qualities inter-penetrate with beauty, and help to generate and feed i t . A l l live i n the same world. Nowhere can we draw a distinct line and say, on this side lives the beautiful, and on that the ugly. (\"Beauty,\" FS, p. 77) . - 171 -From this arises, for Caudwell, the contradictory value of tragedy. As a discursive analysis of bourgeois necessity unable in reality to transcend that necessity i t s e l f , tragedy remains bourgeois and \"ugly\"; yet, as a truthful expression of the bourgeois artist's struggle against necessity, i t i s \"beautiful.\" Hence, Caudwell describes the paradox of (especially late) bourgeois art thus: \"The true i s no longer beautiful, because to be true in bourgeois c i v i l i s a t i o n i s to be non-human. The beautiful i s no longer r e a l , because to be beautiful i n bourgeois c i v i l i s a t i o n i s to be imaginary\" (\"Beauty,\" FS, p. 106). That i s , an honest a r t i s t in bourgeois society w i l l logically write the truth, which i n i t s attitudinal aspect might earn him or her some bourgeois plaudits—and therefore an acknowledgment of beauty. But in i t s descriptive details, such truthfulness w i l l naturally reveal the \"ugliness\" of that society, as Marxists would characterise i t . Moreover, Caudwell imagines, this w i l l tend to generate a mood of tragic gloom, something that the smug and socially secure bourgeois audience w i l l logically f a i l to understand and w i l l hence c a l l \"ugly,\" from i t s own point of view. Hence, the \"depth with which Shakespeare moved in the bourgeois i l l u s i o n , the greatness of his grasp of human society, i s shown by the fact that he i s ultimately a tragedian. . . . Before he died Shakespeare had cloudily and phantastically attempted an untragic solution, a solution without death. Away from the rottenness of bourgeois c i v i l i s a t i o n , in the island of The Tempest, man attempts to liv e quietly and nobly. . . . Such an existence s t i l l retains an Elizabethan reality; there i s an exploited class—Caliban, the bestial serf—and a 'free' s p i r i t who serves only for a t i m e — A r i e l , apotheosis of the free wage-labourer. - 172 -This heaven cannot endure. The actors return to the real world. The magic wand i s broken\" (IR, pp. 87, 91). And for much the same reason, with the advent of the Romantic Revival, \"an a i r of tragedy . ; . looms over a l l bourgeois poetry that is worth the adjective 'great'\" (IR, 52 p. 110). * However, defeat need not produce defeatism. Caudwell thus admires the revolutionary defiance of Milton's Samson, who, even in defeat, \"pulls down the p i l l a r s on the insolent Court that mocks him\" (RR, p. 50). Yet, this defiance does not reverse the impending counter-revolution, does not solve the conflict in reality: i t represents \"'only a wish fulfillment\"1 (RR, p. 50). The social solution thus remains to be found. But Caudwell also sees that in class-art, as in class-society at large, such \"defeats\" are c l a s s - i n f l i c t e d , partisan; the struggle to reverse them must therefore also be class-partisan. In a l l struggles—successful or unsuccessful—against the bourgeoisie, the communist takes the side of the proletariat; now the p o l i t i c a l l y mobile bourgeois a r t i s t must choose his or her side: In the sphere of art this appears as the fugitive or confused alliances of bourgeois artists with the proletariat, and the emergence (at f i r s t within the limits of bourgeois technique) of proletarian a r t i s t s . \"There i s no neutral world of a r t . . . . Ours i s . . . a demand that you, an [bourgeois] a r t i s t , become a proletarian leader i n the f i e l d oi a r t . . . . \" (IR, pp. 311, 318-19)53 Yet—and this i s what Caudwell overwhelmingly seems to miss— as long as today's pro-proletarian c r i t i c restricts his or her supposed - 173 -class-struggle to the sphere of discourse, the reality of society remains bourgeois, the proletariat's subordination unreversed. In such a recalcitrantly bourgeois society, even granted that the partisan c r i t i c i s intellectually as well as emotionally completely honest (besides being technically competent), such \"sympathetic\" criticism can be said to have at best a very limited and ambiguous value, almost entirely restricted to the sphere of \"culture T ' That i s to say, the reality of the social problem the c r i t i c set out to tackle :\\ s t i l l remains unchanged: the revolution remains on the agenda. Towards the end of Illusion and Reality, Caudwell remarks that \"easy solutions or shallow grasps of reality are poor art\" (IR, p. 278); and in Romance and Realism (p. 136) he calls upon the poet to attain \"a world view that w i l l become general,\" as a \"prerequisite\" for great a r t . Furthermore, Caudwell—in a faint echo of Engels' advice to Minna Kautsky, though his t o r i c a l l y far removed from that pre-Lenin conjuncture—maintains that the poet can attain such a view \"only by destructively analysing a l l bourgeois culture, separating the best elements, synthesising them, and advancing to a new world-view—in a word by becoming a thorough Marxist and not merely acquiring a Marxist facade. . . . \" The poet can then, \"when he has a new experience, . . . project i t into the new world struggling to be born and become a poet of the future. But this requires the destructive analysis and synthesis of bourgeois culture, i t s e l f a revolutionary task.\" Howeyer'v • the problem with the above set of theses, from a consistently Marxist point of view, i s of course that one does not become a \"thorough Marxist\" by operating s t r i c t l y within the confines of discourse and thought— attaining a \"world view,\" \"analysing,\" \"separating,\" \"synthesising,\" \"advancing,\" or \"projecting.\" A l l this i s necessary and even indispensr - 174 -able—but i t is insufficient. Given Caudwell's established p o l i t i c a l vacillation between reform and revolution (among other things), therefore, i t i s not only not surprising but positively indicative of his latent axiology that the above statements by him contain a certain important ambiguity in precisely that regard: they do not make i t clear whether or not the recommended \"synthesis of bourgeois culture\" can proceed and succeed without the prior destruction of capitalism's material (and p o l i t i c a l ) components and the inauguration of a so c i a l i s t economy. In other words, Caudwell i s unclear about whether the cultural \"revolutionary task\" described i s an adjunct of or a substitute for the socio-political workers' revolution. And crucially following from Caudwell's actual formulations i s my own conclusion that here, as i n most instances, he does effectively view the cultural revolution as at least independent from and possibly even prior to the socio-political revolution. Hence follows the absence, from his entire theoretical system, of that mechanism for unlocking precisely such un-Marxist dilemmas as his own: the kind of consistent orientation provided by a proletarian organisation that tackles every problem fundamentally from the standpoint of revolutionary class struggle. And, lacking the p o l i t i c a l consistency, Caudwell cannot possess the unitary evaluative standpoint deriving from i t . Many characteristics of Caudwell's axiology can be found condensed in his theory of the function and value of particular genres, especially of poetry and the novel. This can also serve as a bridge to his specific evaluation of Thomas Hardy's works, with which I shall end - 175 -this chapter. Caudwell's theory of the generic function and value of poetry shows the familiar overlap between his relativism and his absolutism. Analytically, when explaining the history of poetry, Caudwell i s a r e l a t i v i s t , situating each phase of that genre's development in a particular social context. But programmatically, when spelling out poetry's current obligations as he perceives them, Caudwell seems to become more absolute. Nevertheless, a consistent Marxist may well glean from that methodological alloy a couple of useful, though simple and not entirely o r i g i n a l , pointers. One i s the importance of being honest about one's own real responses to literature. The other i s the importance of maintaining the search for a method that w i l l explain the responses through dia l e c t i c a l -h i s t o r i c a l materialism rather than through exp l i c i t idealism. Caudwell possesses both these qualities. Caudwell regards ; -poetry as a synthesising, universalising, emotive and imaginative genre, compared to the novel, which he regards as much more mundane, pragmatic, l o g i c a l , and finely discriminating. Thus poetry, for him, \"expresses the freedom which inheres in man's general timeless unity in society\"; i t \" i s interested i n society as the sum and guardian of common instinctive tendencies\" and \"speaks of death, love, hope, sorrow and despair as a l l men experience them\" (IR, p. 229). Moreover, poetry apparently \"requires the highest degree of technical s k i l l of any a r t i s t \" (IR, p. 123). The novel, on the other hand, \" i s the expression of that freedom which men seek, not in their unity in society but in their differences\" (IR, p. 229), and is \"much more r e a l i s t i c and factual than the shimmering, dreamlike mock-world of poetry\" (IR, p. 209). Y e t — and here Caudwell himself seems to miss the paradox, though his own formula-- 176 -tion of the supposed difference points to one—while the internally accommodating and integrative genre of poetry frequently expresses people's social rebelliousness because i t expresses their \"instinctive tendencies,\"5 4 the internally differentiating and analytical genre of the novel tends to be socially and p o l i t i c a l l y \"conservative and 55 satisfied\" (RR, p. 69). However, the more fundamental paradox that C'audwell misses, for at least does not emphasise enough, is that a l l mere discourse i s in effect \"conservative and satisfied.\" Nevertheless, from Caudwell's theory/of generic function and value flows, then, quite directly, his explanation of Hardy's f a t a l i s t i c philosophy (RR, p. 9 4 ) Y e t , as I mentioned e a r l i e r , when Caudwell spells out his c r i t e r i a for evaluating poetry, the generic (\"intrinsic\") characterisations discussed above are implicitly discarded and replaced by a temporal-contextual cr i t e r i o n . And the only consistent link between his two (intrinsic and historicist) approaches to the same genre (poetry) i s his determination to provide a Marxist explanation for a l l his f e l t responses, many of which themselves implicitly violate the logic of a consistently Marxist orientation. Thus, Caudwell applies no generic prejudgment or explanation when suggesting c r i t e r i a for evaluating \"new\" poets, as opposed to the \"old.\" In that instance, he adopts a contextual approach to the poetic genre as a whole, which might be expected, but then arbit r a r i l y places different form/content specifications for different poetic periods. That i s , sp e c i f i c a l l y , he suggests that old poets should be judged \"almost entirely by their affective tone.\" But new poets, according to him, must provide \"new manifest contents and new affective colouring.\" F i n a l l y , i f someone (including, presumably, \"old\" poets) does manage to combine novelty and range in both content and form, he or she w i l l be deemed \"good\" - 177 -or even \"great\": It i s plain that poetry may be judged i n different ways; either by the importance of the manifest content or by the vividness of the affective colouring. To a poet who brings a new portion of external reality into the ambit of poetry, we feel more gratitude than to one who brings the old stale manifest contents. . . . Old poets we shall judge almost entirely by their affective tone; their manifest contents have long belonged to our world of thought. Hence the apparent triteness of old poetry which yet i s a great triteness. From new poets we demand new manifest contents and new affective colouring, for i t is their function to give us new emotional attitudes to a new social environment. A poet who provides both to a high degree w i l l be a good poet. A poet who brings into his net a vast amount of new reality to which he attaches a wide-ranging affective colouring we shall c a l l a great poet, giving Shakespeare as an instance. . . . But the manifest content, whatever i t i s , i s not the purpose of the poem. The purpose i s the specific emotional organisation directed towards the manifest content and provided by the released affects. (IR, pp. 240-41) One might note, incidentally, the symptomatic fact that even though Caudwell,/ manages to free himself from the particular text enough to be able to locate i t s \"purpose\" outside i t s \"manifest contents,.\" he stops short of locating i t outside the mere mental operations of the poet, in any p o l i t i c a l dynamic. Fin a l l y , such apparent minimising of the importance of content in poetry (as in the above passage) might surprise us coming from Caudwell, primarily a c r i t i c of ideas. But i t i s actually consistent with the activist component of his contradictory (idealist-materialist) method. This component, which i s real but p o l i t i c a l l y askew, shows i t s e l f most prominently in Caudwell's many insights into the social significance of the language and \"style\" of individual poets and novelists. But even from these comments, we can extract the same - 178 -chief c r i t e r i a of formal value that we noted earlier with re;spect to content: truthfulness, simplicity, l i v e l i n e s s , realism.5 7 In two particularly suggestive passages, Caudwell links the characteristic texture of a writer's language to not only the ideology informing i t , but, ultimately, to the his t o r i c a l context shaping the ideology i t s e l f : and, thereby, he also underscores his own c r i t e r i a for evaluating that s t y l e . One passage in Romance and Realism (pp. 65-66) demonstrates how \"Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth represent three main currents of the petty bourgeois revolution, and how their styles reflect the same flow.\" And in Illusion and Reality (p. 89), Caudwell provides the following glimpse of the Elizabethan \"world\" in the grain of i t s \"language,\" Notice how he vividly compacts his understanding of the material relationship between, on the one hand, revolutionary activity and, on the other, commitment to truth, with i t s attendant spareness of expression: [M]en like Bacon and Galileo and da Vinci did not specialise, and their language reflects this lack of differentiation. Elizabethan tragedy speaks a language of great range and compass, from the colloquial to the sublime, from the technical to the narrative, because language i t s e l f i s as yet undifferentiated. Like a l l great language, this has been bought and paid f o r . Tyndale paid for i t with his l i f e ; the English prose style as a simple and clear r e a l i t y , f i t for poetry, was written in the fear of death, by heretics for whom i t was a religious but also a revolutionary activity demanding a bareness and simplicity which scorned a l l t r i f l i n g ornament and convention. Nothing was asked of i t but the truth. Caudwell's c r i t e r i a of literary value thus present a mixed and even anti-rclimaetic range of ideologies^-from Plato to Marx to Zhdanov/Stalin. From a Marxist standpoint, their common, defining - 179 -absence i s . the lack of any notion of an organised evaluative orientation. Of course, to possess that notion, Caudwell would need, to understand the concept of the vanguard party in a Leninist way. He would need to view the party as the class-instrument capable of continually assessing the revolution's changing overall needs and of synchronising this assessment with i t s own projection,of what might constitute literary value at any given time within that general revolutionary context. Caudwell's insufficiently Leninist p o l i t i c s , however, foster a pronounced hesitancy between an almost exclusively negative, non-interventionist response to capitalist values (restricting i t s e l f to demythifying criticism) and an occasional advance into an actual description and advocacy of socialist values. Yet, i f Caudwell's theoretical discussion of literary value clearly lacks a consistent Marxist component on the question of an organized revolutionary orientation, and i f , furthermore, his c r i t e r i a regularly vacillate between idealism and materialism, between absolutism and h i s t o r i c a l relativism, i t i s also true that in passages such as the above, he leaves an indication of the h i s t o r i c a l and materialistic connections he was capable of perceiving. But, perhaps more importantly, his work exemplifies the obligation of a l l professed Marxists at least to strive for Marxist consistency, in discourse as well as in practical l i f e . And this example, no subsequent axiologist claiming to be Marxist can afford to ignore. Caudwell's Evaluation of Hardy In i t s empirical aspects, Caudwell's evaluation of Hardy - 180 -seems barely useful to.Marxist axiology today, and certainly not for the accuracy of his h i s t o r i c a l assumptions-about Hardy and his society, from which his specific judgments flow. But Caudwell never pretended to produce fool-proof characterisations of particular authors or their works. His c r i t i c a l project was rather to forge a technique for extending the logic of Marxism, as he understood i t , to c r i t i c a l theory; and he used familiar names in literature as and when he f e l t that those might il l u s t r a t e his theoretical point. As Mulhern observes (with a different emphasis from mine), \" [w] i t h Caudwell, as with Marx, the theory is implicit in the concrete studies\" (p. 52). And i t i s on Caudwell's theory (or theoretical logic) that I wish to focus once more. Caudwell's evaluation of Hardy occurs in the course of the larger project of Romance and Realism, which he describes in that book's sub-title as \"A Study in English Bourgeois Literature.\" In this study, Caudwell attempts—often thought-provokingly—to capture certain broad movements in English (and some American and European) literary history under capitalism, from a point of view and with methodological aims deemed valuable to fellow-Marxists. The many fleeting but sweeping generalisations that characterise this study are thus at least partly an attempt to capture certain larger patterns of p o l i t i c a l logic in literary history. Caudwell's framework for evaluating individual writers under capitalism i s that socio-economic system's own overall h i s t o r i c a l movement, from i t s emergence through feudalism .to i t s climax and demise as imperialism. Within this movement, the revolutionary period of Milton i s broadly distinguished (by Caudwell) from the counterrevolutionary - 181 -centuries thereafter, from Dryden to Kipling. Distinctions are made along the way between subjective, conscious fighters against r e a c t i o n — such as Blake—and objective capitulators to i t — s u c h as Dryden. Distinctions are made as well between the various classes opposing the industrial capitalists; from out-of-power aristocrats, such as Disraeli and Galsworthy, through begrudging careerists, such as Donne, to successful but c r i t i c a l careerists, such as Dickens, and complete rebels, such as Lawrence. Another set of oppositionists perceived to be complicit with bourgeois values i s that of the women novelists from 58 Charlotte Bronte to Virginia Woolf. Hardy i s seen, in this context, partly as a confluence of a number of social and literary traditions. Socio-economically, Caudwell places Hardy simultaneously at the interface of an ostensible residual feudalism and an encroaching capitalism (RR}pp. 88-91), as well as at the interface of industrial capitalism and emergent imperialism (RR, p. 79). Now this overlap of feudalism and industrial capitalism, on the one hand, and of the nascent and the advanced stages of capitalism, on the other, i s i t s e l f symptomatic of Caudwell's imprecise analysis. Moreover, this primary imprecision i s exacerbated by an arbitrary and near-absolute overlap of capitalism with the \"town\" and of feudalism with the \"country.\" Finally, Hardy is in some ways (wrongly) viewed as a spokesman for an unruptured, homogeneous feudal way of l i f e as supposedly obtained in the West country at the turn of the nineteenth century. But a positive unifying project does link a l l these empirical inaccuracies: namely, Caudwell's attempt to find and evaluate, from a Marxist point of view, an eloquent, v i v i d , and largely supportable non-Marxist critique of capitalism in English f i c t i o n . Such a project can be of considerable methodological interest to c r i t i c s . Second, in terms - 182 -of a literary context, Hardy i s seen, on the one hand, as the culmination of the bourgeois-realistic tradition in the novel, i n -augurated by Defoe and perpetuated by Austen (RR, pp. 84, 97). On the other hand, he is seen as the predecessor of the Jamesian novel, with i t s self-doubting narrator reflecting the new epistemological preoccupation of philosophy (RR, pp. 79, 100-01). Further, objectively, Hardy i s paired with Kipling in a shared framework of imperialism, though with opposing attitudes. And, in Caudwell's view, this shared framework imposes, among other things, many of the limitations of i t s dominant (Victorian-bourgeois) ideology on most of i t s intellectuals, including on Hardy. This i s especially so considering that this i s the audience which the novelist continues to have to address, however much he may resent the contradiction:. These, then, are the chief factors that overtly enter into Caudwell's explanation of Hardy's views and affect his evaluation of the novelist's 59 works. Caudwell's assessment of Hardy's works rests on the fundamental perception that the novelist's social existence and thought were subject to two decisive factors—a chaotic economic system called capitalism and a general absence, in Hardy's bourgeois intellectual milieu, of Marx's revolutionary analysis of andr.proposed solution to that system. Thus Caudwell speaks of \"the unplanned bourgeois economy\" logically generating Hardy's emphasis on \"accident and chance\" (RR, p. 93) and of the \"lack at that time of any positive culture to replace i t [the bourgeois one] except Marxism, which was beyond the vision of a [then culturally dominant] Victorian bourgeois\" (RR, p. 92). Con-sequently, Caudwell concludes, \"Hardy's philosophy Is neither profound - 183 -rior complex, but i t i s a satisfying symbol, to the bourgeois, of bourgeois l i f e \" (RR, p. 93). Now this simple analytical model i s complicated by Caudwell's understandable uncertainty about the exact c l a s s - a f f i l i a t i o n of Hardy, as well as about the degree to which geography corresponds in Hardy to economics and the degree to which Hardy expresses one geographically-conditioned point of view as opposed to another. Thus Caudwell mistakenly believes that \"the rustic economy [itself an ambiguous category, neither feudal nor c a p i t a l i s t — K . D . G Q i n which he developed was backward . . . and i t was a homogeneous, self-contained countryside\" (RR, p. 91). But while the statement does capture the relative insularity of Hardy's country people as well as their geographical isolation, i t also f l a t l y contradicts what Caudwell states elsewhere about that \"homogeneous\" \"rustic economy\": Even in Hardy's l i f e the most profound changes were affecting the l i f e of this countryside. . . . The changes i n the countryside were in fact more far-reaching and important during Hardy's time than those in the town. Just because town economy was in Hardy's time changing with unprecedented rapidity, so was the country. Hardy came in for his f u l l share of these exports. (RR, pp.- 89-91) Now, I think we may correctly assume that by describing the rural changes as \"more far-reaching and important during Hardy's time than those in the town,\" Caudwell i s actually trying to convey the impact of any such change at a l l on Hardy's particular consciousness: \"Blind unconscious bourgeois society is.the antagonist of Jude the Obscure and also the real enemy, of the Dynasts. . . . Hardy, as a - 184 -rural novelist, would feel most vividly this aspect of i t , for i t i s the country which above a l l has things done to It and i s the passive party in the accidents and mishaps of bourgeois culture\" (RR, p. 93). But Caudwell manifests another apparent problem. On the One hand, he describes Hardy as \"the spokesman\" of the \"economy\" of the \"countryside\" (RR, p. 89), insisting that the novelist \"feels himself rooted i n the country,\" \" i s absolutely of the country,\" and \"has a clear picture of what agricultural society i s \" (RR, p. 90). On the other hand, he maintains that Hardy's pessimism stems from his complicity in the bourgeois (Arnoldian, Tennysonian) \"Victorian doubt,\" which i t s e l f — Caudwell claims — i s a product of the industrial \"town,\" an \"export\" to the countryside (RR, p. 91). Yet, this \"problem\" becomes irresolvable only i f we ourselves imagine that a novelist's descriptive focus on and general sympathy with the late-nineteenth-century West-country people must inherently preclude any acquaintance with and sharing of the nationally disseminated despair of the \"urban\" bourgeois i n t e l l i g e n t s i a . And this i s quite apart from the question of how exclusively \"urban\" either the bourgeoisie or i t s ideology may have been at that or any other point. In other words, granted Caudwell's frequently dubious specific understanding and use of the words \"capitalism\" and \"feudalism\" with respect to Hardy and the Victorian \"town\" and \"countryside,\" his general description of the confrontation between two value-systems—for Marxists, one evidently based on those two distinct economies—retains a certain heuristic value for a Marxist analysis and evaluation of Hardy. For, of this confrontation, I think there can be no doubt. Given a l l the empirical inaccuracies of Caudwell's version - 185 -of English history, then, his evaluation of Hardy nevertheless confirms the operative principle behind a l l his positive c r i t e r i a of literary value: intransigent opposition (as he understands i t ) to capitalism and i t s mores (as he understands these), coupled with truthful depiction of (bourgeois) society i t s e l f , i n the interests of l i b e r t y . A \"functionalist\" component, of course, also attaches to this principle, given Caudwell's general emphasis on socially functional rather than in t r i n s i c value. This i s borne-put by the number of features in Hardy that he finds satisfying because they are contextually \"appropriate.\" But overwhelmingly, within the framework of an analysis that i s not very extensivev or detailed or even consistently illustrated to begin with, Caudwell's main criterion of positive value in Hardy remains the latter's resolute anti-bourgeois truthfulness, as Caudwell understands that. Thus, among Hardy's virtues, Caudwell l i s t s what he perceives to be the simplicity and humanity of the novelist's characters, r the simplicity clearly f a c i l i t a t i n g the depiction of the truth and the humanity obviously underpinning that truthful depiction with an indication of Hardy's preferred values. Caudwell finds Hardy's depiction of \"his rural background and i t s inter-relations\" particularly authentic: \"His characters really act on each other in a human way (by contrast with Meredith's or Kipling's) . They really love (Jude) or hate (Mayor of Casterbridge). This i s then the strength of Hardy, his soundness and richness\" (RR, p. 91). Significantly, moreover, Caudwell sees a connection between what he considers Hardy's unflinching realism and the \"genuine\" and courageous personal qualities of Hardy as a c r i t i c of bourgeois values: - 186 -\"he did not escape from reality to a closed world of art, and shut the door after him, like Swinburne\" (RR, p. 92). By this Caudwell obviously means not that Hardy abandoned art as a profession but that he always tried to let l i f e (as he saw i t ) dictate what he wrote, rather than let a relatively arbitrarily-defined view of \"art for the sake of art\" dictate what he saw. And in this endeavour, Caudwell feels Hardy was aided by his own rural background and partisan-ship: \"Hardy feels himself rooted in the country. . . . He i s absolutely of the country; this fact i s the reason for Hardy's strength. Not only does the country in Hardy's youth s t i l l retain enough of older norms to give the writer a stable world, with no need for 'escape,' but also . . . Hardy has a clear picture of what agricultural society i s . . .\" (RR, p. 90). Now, while such an evaluation misses the tension that exists in Hardy between both attraction to and repulsion from different aspects of both country and c i t y , i t does capture an important aspect of the impression that Hardy's rural settings and descriptions can leave on one's mind, long after the plots have been forgotten (for example, Egdon Heath). But, once again, Marxists w i l l gain less from scrutinising Caudwell's accuracy in assessing Hardy's factual accuracy than they w i l l by pondering the principle of anti-bourgeois partisan-ship that motivates Caudwell's (mis)reading in the f i r s t place. Caudwell identifies the most prominent (potentially) negative feature in Hardy's works as his pessimism. This he views as a function of Hardy's complicity in the (generally quite different kind of) \"y-tctorian doubt\" seen, in Arnold or. Tennyson, which i t s e l f Caudwell characterises as a product of the industrial \"town,\" an - 187 -\"export\" to the country (RR, p. 91). Yet, Caudwell feels, this \"doubt\" is prevented from turning into conventional, religious fatalism because what he sees as Hardy's own religious doubts lead him instead to scrutinise Nature for possible f i n a l causes. And the conclusion about the mechanistic cruelty of Nature that Hardy arrives at in turn expresses i t s e l f in Hardy's pessimistic \"Irony.\" Unacquainted with the Marxist analysis of his own society, Hardy—Caudwell argues— remains partially trapped within the terms of bourgeois mystification, despite his opposition to i t s f e l t manifestations: \"Hardy cannot believe in God or any of the simple formulations of earlier bourgeois culture now dissolved by i t s own development; yet quite plainly human lives and human hopes are forcibly thwarted 'from outside' by forces whose nature and behaviour are quite unknown\" (RR, p. 92). Hence, Hardy espouses a bit t e r pessimism, one that Caudwell sees as a function of i t s hi s t o r i c a l conjuncture, \"a pessimism appropriate to that era and that situation\" (RR, p. 92).- It i s , for Caudwell, at once a measure of Hardy's superiority to prevalent bourgeois cultural values and of his ideological subjection to the limits of the existing terms of social analysis and (non)programmes for change. Moreover, Caudwell sees the tension in Hardy between the old and the new, the capitalist and the anti-capitalist, the conservative and the progressive, as shaping some of the formal idiosyncracies of his work. Applying to this particular instance his classification of the novel (especially the English novel in Defoe's tradition) as a conservative genre, Caudwell observes in Hardy's works a tension between the rebelliousness of his ideas and feelings and the allegedly submissive (and repressive) nature of his chosen vehicle of expression, - 188 -the novel: It i s not surprising that Hardy i s drawn to poetry, and that the novel is to him an alien form. The novel is the great medium of acceptance of social relations; this acceptance i s imposed by i t s form, inherited from Defoeism. . . . Hardy inherited the accepting English tradition and he was not sufficiently conscious a r t i s t i c a l l y to shatter and remould i t . Thus he always wears i t a l i t t l e awkwardly. His self-expression is primarily a doubting sceptical attitude and he i s forced to include long tracts of non-narrative in which the author directly expresses his attitude. These unassimllated chunks give his novels a starched, old-fashioned a i r . (RR, p. 94) In that f i n a l section on \"long tracts of non-narrative in which the author directly expresses his attitude,\" tracts which Caudwell disapproves of as \"unassimllated chunks [that] give his novels a starched, old-fashioned a i r , \" we may perceive a parallel with Engels' comments on tendenzpoesie• But they also hint at a possible indecision in Caudwell's mind about \"good\" novels versus \"bad\" that implicitly undermines his characterisation of novels as an i n t r i n s i c a l l y conservative genre. This then raises the further possibility that he might well be thinking of the more dramatised novels of Woolf or Joyce or Hemingway—novelists that he discusses but otherwise condemns— as better alternatives on this score. A l l of this in turn suggests that Caudwell may well have shared Engels' predilection for partisanship through effective dramatisation as a criterion of positive value. (Of course, the other aspect—that he dislikes the modernists, principally for their ideas and moral values—is obvious•) F i n a l l y , Caudwell sees Hardy's alleged awkwardness extending beyond narrative structure into the very texture of his language—in his - 189 -poetry as much as in his prose: \"the superior importance of diction in poetry makes us note the rugged, uneasy choice of words, springing from the complete unconsciousness of Hardy's attitude to l i f e . . . . It i s only such a complete unconsciousness which makes acceptable Hardy's violently awkward way with words, as of one insensible to their affective values and concerned only with their cognitive meanings\" (RR, pp. 93-94). Caudwell furnishes no examples; further, we may well question, even from a purely theoretical point of view, his claim about Hardy's \"unconscious\" attitude to l i f e . Yet i t i s significant that precisely this issue, as formulated by Caudwell, w i l l resurface ex p l i c i t l y in Williams and in Eagleton, when they attempt to evaluate i t s significance in reply to widespread identical charges by non-Marxist c r i t i c s such as F. R. Leavis. But the special twist that Caudwell lends to this ostensible charge i s what distinguishes him from the non-Marxists, places him partly in the same camp as Williams and Eagleton, and, most importantly, indirectly reaffirms his consistency in regarding truthfulness as the highest positive criterion of literary value, in form as well as in content. For, he adds, \"that i s not the whole story\": Such unconsciousness would result in diffuseness and f a l s i t y i f i t were a l l i e d to an optimistic or Golden-Age reaction to bourgeois culture, but springing as i t does from a quite unflinching acceptance, a l l i e d with a rural passivity and stolid endurance, i t causes the verbal gawkishness to be an asset, and gives the distinctive Hardy flavour. GRR, p. 94) Truthfulness (as opposed to \"falsity\") thus emerges as the decisive criterion of positive value, in this instance crucially bolstered - 190 -by an \"unflinching\" and \"stolid endurance\" that constitutes the index of Hardy's apparently intransigent opposition to bourgeois values. In one of his characteristic images, Caudwell vividly conveys his assessment of Hardy's value by connecting the perceived quality of rural Victorian England to Hardy's persona and his language: \"Hardy seems at f i r s t to stand apart . . . like a gnarled self-determined British oak. In this he seems a reflection of that English countryside which, like i t s unchanging grass and daily l i f e , appears to go on and on . . .; the rustic economy in which he developed was . . . a homogeneous, self-contained countryside. This fact gives Hardy his rural foundation—his gnarled epithets . . .\" (RR, pp. 89y 91). Whatever the obvious hi s t o r i c a l faults of that characterisation, i t s imagistic appropriateness to Hardy's predominant \"gnarled\" qualities as seen by Caudwell cannot be easily denied. Nor can the continuity between these particular qualities in Hardy and the general c r i t e r i a of literary value in Caudwell, fundamentally centred on partisan truthfulness in the service of freedom. Caudwell's theoretical project was a pioneering one, in the combination of i t s subject, method, and scope; also, i t was executed in considerable haste, by a f a i r l y young and variously occupied writer o f f i c i a l l y recruited to Stalinism. - Taking these factors into account when assessing his theory of literary value might help high-light the points that Marxists today could well benefit from. One reason Caudwell could not refine his theory beyond i t s present state i s that he died young, fighting for his (albeit confused) values in practice, covering a bourgeois Republican military retreat from - 191 -Franco's fascists in Spain. The active struggle for liberty from capitalism, as he understood those words and ideas, constituted in a profoundly real way his highest criterion of value—literary or otherwise. In the process of forging a comprehensive literary theory that might capture his.felt response to literature through analytical terms devised by Marx, he came up with some specific criteria of value that any Marxist critic would have to confront before advancing farther. Of course he also came up with other specific criteria that are indeed less compelling. In his occasional reiteration, however, that the highest social value is freedom and that it arises out of a recognition of the inescapable laws of nature and class-society (including laws of class-emotions and instincts), he at least connected—however inconsistently and however overwhelmingly within the parameters of mere discourse—two hitherto almost entirely mutually exclusive domains: bourgeois literary theory and (the semblance of) a materialist and historical methodology. In a number of interconnected aspects, Caudwell's axiology shows extensive signs of philosophical idealism, political passivity, and reformism, in forms that—from all indications—bespeak Stalinism as their most likely specific conveyor. Egregious among these signs are Caudwell's rather uniform tendency to overestimate, in one way or another, the real social power of culture, as opposed to that of the economy. Paradoxically, however, in articulating his own maximum expectations of \"great\" literature in bourgeois society, Caudwell remains studiedly negative; he fails to stress any positive outlook beyond the primarily destructive analysis, perceived in the works of a Shakespeare or a Hardy. Meanwhile, his self-restricted concern with - 192 -the \"adaptive\" social role of poetry and the \"accepting\" generic nature of the novel effectively confirms his substantial i n e r t i a . Indeed, at least i m p l i c i t l y , these paramaters bespeak and even reiterate his more purely p o l i t i c a l reformism and popular frontism. His is frequently the Stalinist logic of \"Socialism in One Country,\" of class-collaboration, and \"live and let l i v e , \" extended to literary theory. It i s therefore logical that Caudwell should be inconsistent in his class-analyses and unfamiliar with the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party and Its axiological implications. Nevertheless, despite considerable theoretical inconsistency, Caudwell does highlight two important confirmations of the Marxist argument. One is that as long as the bourgeoisie rules society, the dominant definition of beauty and the prevailing choice of specific artefacts considered beautiful w i l l continue to accord with the bourgeoisie's own views and interests. The second, a corollary of the f i r s t , i s that i f literary evaluation is to be freed of purely economic motivations, one must necessarily f i r s t remove the \"disruptive factor\" called the capitalist profit motive. For, as Luxemburg long ago pointed out, the virtual cultural destitution of the proletariat, under the vir t u a l cultural and economic monopoly of the bourgeoisie, necessarily pre-cludes any finished and \"perfect\" Marxist culture. But, of course, the further question remains: how is a Marxist c r i t i c to evaluate a literary text prior to and during the socialist transition, in the interests of the working class? And of course, as I have argued, the answer depends on the specific conjuncture of text, c r i t i c , readership, and p o l i t i c a l situation. Nevertheless, one can say in general that, without the unique orientation of a professional - 193 -c r i t i c belonging to the organised vanguard of that class, this question becomes logically impossible to answer. And that lack of consistent orientation, i n the f i n a l analysis, was Caudwell's crucial handicap, doubtless consolidated by his a f f i l i a t i o n to a brand of po l i t i c s fundamentally hostile to Marxism. Decay can hit not only parties but schools of criticism as well: Stalinism deformed not only Caudwell's understanding of Marxist p o l i t i c s , but also his understanding of the principles of Marxist literary evaluation. Notes Francis Mulhern, \"The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell,\" New Left Review, No. 85 (May-June 1974), 52; see pp. 37-58 for entire a r t i c l e . 2 E. P. Thompson, \"Caudwell,\" The Socialist Register: 1977, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin, 1977), p. 233; see pp. 228-76 for this key evaluation of the c r i t i c in i t s entirety. 3 See, e.g., Charles Le Roy Elkins, \"The Development of British Marxist Literary Theory: Toward a Genetic-Functional Approach to Literary Criticism,\" DAI, 33 (1973) 5119A (So. 111.), 616 pp.; Stanely Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study i n the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Knopf, 1952), pp. 173-207; Samuel Hynes, Introd. to Caudwell's Romance and Realism: A Study i n English Bourgeois Literature, ed. Samuel Hynes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 14, 27; Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: The Bodley Head, 1976), p. 256; David N. Margolies, The Function of Literature: A Study of Christopher Caudwell's Aesthetics (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 7; Mulhern, p. 40; Solomon, p. 305; Gjeorgej TJhomsonj , in Biographical Note, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1977), p. 11 (this book i s later parenthetically abbreviated as IR); George Thomson, \"In Defence of P o e t r y , T h e Modern Quarterly, NS, 6, No. 2 (Spring 1951), p. 123; and, perhaps most dramatic of them a l l , the poet W. H. Auden, when Illusion and Reality f i r s t appeared: \"We have waited a long time for a Marxist book on the aesthetics of poetry. Now at last Mr. Caudwell has given us such a book\" (quoted in Hynes, The Auden Generation, p. 258). 4 Thompson, \"Caudwell,\" p. 244. \"Studies i n a Dying Culture played a significant part In the intellectual biography of my own generation\" ( i b i d . , p. 229); \"Caudwell's insights and Caudwell's confusions were imprinted upon many of my generation\" ( i b i d . , p. 270). 5 See, esp., Illusion and Reality (pp. 132 and 138) and Romance and Realism (pp. 137-38); the latter t i t l e w i l l be parenthetically abbreviated as RR. I elaborate on Caudwell's Stalinism i n the body, below. Here, I merely summarise the key p o l i t i c a l events inaugurating that programme internationally. Between 1928 and 1933, Stalin's \"Comintern\" (Communist International) pursued a policy of extreme practical sectarianism, baselessly declaring that a new period of rising class-struggle was at hand. One consequence of such sectarianism was the Communist parties' denunciation of the Social Democratic workers as \"social fascists,\" even though the latter were themselves targetted by the fascists. Thus, the German Communist Party even blocked with the Nazis i n the so-called \"Red Referendum\" i n Prussia, in an - 194 -- 195 -unsuccessful attempt to bring down the Social Democratic government there; and German and French Stalinists refused to act together with the Social Democrats in a united workers' front against the fascists. In 1933, capitalising on the Stalinist-induced paralysis of the working class, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Stalin then pushed the Comintern to the other, right-wing extreme, seeking to placate the international bourgeoisie i t s e l f , in an ostensible attempt to defeat the alleged main enemy, fascism. This concretely meant postponing and supressing actual workers' revolutions internationally, which, as Trotsky repeatedly pointed out, would have constituted the real nemesis of fascism on home ground. In the year that Caudwell started reading the Marxists (1934), Stalin took the USSR into the League of Nations, an organisation that Caudwell himself rightly called one form of \"bourgeois hope\" and which Lenin had once labelled a \"den of thieves.\" In the year that Caudwell wrote most of Illusion and Reality and joined the Communist Party (1935), Stalin formalised his f i r s t Popular Front pact, with the French premier Pierre Laval, who paved the way for the fascist Vichy regime five years l a t e r . The same year, the Bulgarian Stalinist G. Dimitrov defended this class-collaboration and generalised i t into a Comintern policy, and the British Communists, led by Harry P o l l i t t , decided to support \"their own\" imperialists i n the war against the Italian fascists. In 1936, the year before his death, Caudwell travelled to France to experience the Popular Front at f i r s t hand for the f i r s t time in his l i f e ; later that year, he went to Spain to fight Franco, and there he experienced a second Popular Front--the bourgeois Azana and Companys coalition government, into which Stalin was forcing the revolutionary Spanish working class and which paved the way for Franco by defeating key workers' insurrections, most crucially i n Barcelona (Catalonia). Meanwhile, the French Socialist premier Leon Blum broke a general strike in France; and the f i r s t of Stalin's notorious fake-trials of Bolsheviks took place in Moscow. Betrayals of revolutions abroad went hand i n hand with the physical obliteration of communists at home. The logical climax to this search for a mythical bourgeois support at the physical cost of so c i a l i s t revolutions came in 1939, about a year after Caudwell's death; that year, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with H i t l e r , thus paving the way for the Nazi invasion of his own disarmed country i n 1941. The threat of Hitler's attack was systematically underplayed and specific forewarnings dismissed as fascist and \"Trotskyite\" misinformation. Twenty million Soviet workers paid with their l i v e s , over the next four; years, in their now famous counter-offensive, to retrieve their state from the consequences of another of Stalin's cynical \"errors.\" Caudwell's reference to the League of Nations as one form of \"bourgeois hope\" occurs i n \"Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics,\" i n Studies i n a Dying Culture, in Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, introd. Sol Yurick (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 106. Studies i n a Dying Culture, introd. John Strachey, and the second part, Further Studies i n a Dying Culture, ed., and pref. Edgell Rickword, are henceforth parenthetically abbreviated as S_ and FS, respectively. A useful, concise history of the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism can be found in Reply to the Guardian: The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited (New York: Spartacist Publishing Co., 1976), p. 10, henceforth abbreviated as SSFR. - 196 -Solomon (p. 310) pinpoints the non-Bolshevik Plekhanov and the inconsistently Bolshevik Bukharin as the specific intermediaries through whom Caudwell understood his Marxism: \"Caudwell absorbed Marxism through the framework that Plekhanov and Bukharin had erected.\" He maintains that, in addition to Marx's Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the Manifesto, Capital, and Engels' Anti- Duhring,., \"Caudwell was familiar with only a few brief passages from Marx's The German Ideology.\" And, f i n a l l y , the bibliography appended to Illusion and Reality l i s t s Stalin, but not Trotsky. 7 _ _ As early as 1850, Marx and Engels had warned that \"(wjhile the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible, and with the achievement, at most, of the above[bourgeois-democratic] demands, i t i s our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, un t i l the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only i n one country but in a l l the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased. . .\" (\"Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,\" Tucker, pp. 504-05). This argument was subsequently elaborated by Trotsky i n his Results and Prospects (St. Petersburg, 1906; rpt. in The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, 3rd ed., t r . Brian Pearce, Introd. Peter Camejo [New York: Pathfinder, 1969J, pp. 29-122). Lenin reached the same conclusion l a t e r , in his 1917 Letters from Afar (Moscow: Progress, 1971) and Apr i l Theses (3rd rev. ed. [_Moscow: Progress, 1970]). His numerous warnings against parochialism are well documented by Robert Black i n Stalinism i n Britain (London: New Park, 1970), pp. 35-50. And, f i n a l l y , even as late'» as 1924, this i s what Stalin himself was saying In his subsequently \"disappeared\" f i r s t edition of Foundations of Leninism: \"For the f i n a l victory of socialism. . . the efforts of one country . . . are insufficient: for that the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required\" (quoted in SSFR, p. 11). g The Soviet Left Opposition expanded into the International Communist League in 1933; in 1938, the Fourth International was born. It remained undivided and undegenerated t i l l about 1952. The American section of the now defunct Fourth International, the Socialist Workers Party, has now formally denounced Trotskyism and excised i t s own founders, Trotsky and James Patrick Cannon, from i t s o f f i c i a l history. 9 See Peter Shipley, Revolutionaries in Modern Britain (London: Bodley Head, 1976), p. 61. 1 0 The Modern Quarterly. NS, 6, No. 1 (Winter 1950-51), 16-33. 1 1 See esp. George Thomson's \"In Defence of Poetry,\" pp. 107-34. \"In Defence of Poetry,\" p. 117. - 197 -See Illusion and Reality, pp. 164, 219, 261-65 and \"Beauty: A Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics\" (FS, p. 95). Hynes, in his introduction to Romance and Realism, suggests that \"ffjrom Marx, Caudwell took two key ideas\": the theory of the economic determination of consciousness and the implications^ of Marx's remark that \"[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, i s to change i t ' \" (p. 16). 1 4 See Illusion and Reality, pp. 74, 304,; \"Pacifism and Violence\" (£, p. 172), and \"Liberty: A Study in Bourgeois Illusion\" (S_, p. 201). 1 5 See, e.g., his comment on how, in Barcelona (during the Spanish C i v i l War,) \"the anarchists have had to support a strong Central Government and in every way negate their own creed\" (IR, pp. 128-29) ; the Stalinists were part of that counter-revolutionary Popular Front government: see Felix Morrow, \"The May Days: Barricades i n Barcelona,\" Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (1938; r p t . New York: Pathfinder, 1974), pp. 140-64. Also see Caudwell's comment on the massacre of the Chinese Communists at the hands of \"their own\" bourgeois \"anti-imperialists,\" the Kuomintang, in \"T. E. Lawrence: A Study in Heroism\" (S, p. 43); and see his remark, apropos of Swinburne's \"shallowness,\" that this \"reflects the essential shallowness of a l l such [bourgeois-democratic] movements in this late era when, owing to the development of the proletariat, they almost Instantly negate themselves\" (IR, p. 116). 1 6 \"Pacifism and Violence\" (S, p. 128). 1 7 \"Pacifism and Violence\" (S, pp. 106-08) . 1 8 \" [TJ O try to change the world by operation entirely within the tiny group formed by the dissolution of bourgeois culture—the poetic p u b l i c — i s l i k e trying to pull a house down by dragging at the smoke from the chimney\" (RR, p. 136). \"[Tjhings have gone so far that no tinkering with social relations . . . w i l l cure t h i s . Social relations themselves must be rebuilt. The a r t i s t i s bound for the sake of his integrity to become thinker and revolutionary\" (\"D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Bourgeois A r t i s t , \" S, pp. 64H55) . The \"reformist instead of revolutionary approach was just what secured the defeat of Christianity. . . . [ijhe entry-. into Jerusalem showed the wide measure of popular support he [Christ) had obtained, but with no programme of action directed to the seizure of power, this basis of popular support was useless. . . . This reformist step appears to have been taken by Christ at the very moment when he forbade Peter to use violence. He was prepared to whip the moneychangers out of the Temple but not out of the State\" (\"The Breath of Discontent: A Study in Bourgeois Religion,\" FS, pp. 56-57). \"H.G. Wells: A Study in Utopianism\" (S_, p. 88). Marx's \"detailed picture\" of communist society (in The German Ideology)—\"hunt - 198 -in the morning, fish i n the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, c r i t i c i s e after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or c r i t i c \" (Tucker, p. 1 6 0 ) — w i l l , of course, be taken l i t e r a l l y and r i g i d l y as a \"rebuttal\" of Caudwell's point only by simple-minded people. Caudwell believes that for the communist proletariat, science and art, as \"guides to action,\" \"can have only one goal, that of freedom\" (IR, p. 173); for, \"[vflnlike a class of nomads, smallholders or burghers, a class of slaves has no art\" (IR, p. 52). The \"goal\" of communism i s \"a blend of what i s possible and what i s desirable . . . . Of a l l possibles and a l l desirables, the laws of reality enforce only one wedding, and the child i s a new generation\" (\"Beauty,\" FS_, pp. 101-102). When this \"new generation\" arrives, \"psychology, biology and physics w i l l not be ab.sorbed by history, any more than factory organisation-or school organisation or theatre organisation w i l l be absorbed by social organisation. By the removal of the disruptive factor, private p r o f i t , these organisations w i l l generate the social organisation and, as a result of this organisation, themselves differentiate and become enriched. The renaissance of history w i l l not therefore be the amalgamation of the sciences, but the removal of the hidden force that was distorting and isolating them to an increasing degree\" (\"Men and Nature: A Study in Bourgeois History,\" FS, p. 125). 20 \"Reality: A Study in Bourgeois Philosophy\" (FS, p. 230). 21 \"Cannot you see,\" he pleads with Spender and Day Lewis, \"that in this one matter £of a r t j you line up with our enemies—you, our ally—which i s why on this point we fight your theory so bitterly?\" (IR, p. 318). 22 \"George Bernard Shaw: A Study of the Bourgeois Superman\" (S_, pp. 14-15). See also Illusion and Reality, pp. 318-19 and Romance and Realism, ,'pp. 134-35\", on voluntary commitment in a r t . 2 3 \"Men and Nature\" (FS, p. 134). 24 See, e.g. Illusion and Reality, pp. 156 f f . , 162> f f . , 183, 189, 191, 203, 206, 216, 218, 308. ^ See Romance and Realism, pp. 137-38. In typical Stalinist fashion, Caudwell never mentions any concrete p o l i t i c a l programme around which the revolutionary working class can achieve what he c a l l s an \"assimilation of i t s bourgeois a l l i e s \" (IR, p. 139). He also does not explain whether, in the absence of a socialist programme and a revolutionary party, \"pulling down the old world\" automatically pushes the \"new world\" in a socialist direction. He does not explain how bourgeois dissenters can be called both \"bourgeois\" and \"revolutionary\" (in a proletarian-socialist sense) at the same time (see IR, p. 138); and he does not explain why openly communist workers should disregard the Leninist, early Comintern's directive to \"March separately, strike together\" (\"Comintern Theses on the United Front,\" 1922, cited i n SSFR, p. 22) and heed Stalin's policy of marching together and perishing alone instead. - 199 -2 6 \"Pacifism and Violence\" (!5, p. 121); see also Illusion and Reality, p. 153. 2 7 For Caudwell's \"average genotype,\" see esp. Illusion and Reality, pp. 153, 229, and \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S_, p. 52). 28 \"The Breath of Discontent\" (FS, p. 21). 2 9 \"Shaw\" (S^ , p. 10) and \"Pacifism and Violence\" (S, p. 127). For Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the state i s a special body of armed people organised to guard the material interests of one class against one or more other classes. The very existence of a state therefore^ implies, to Marxists, the existence of i t s b a s i s — i . e . , of classes. Consequently, a \"classless state\" Is a contradiction i n terms, a pure, un-Marxist hypothesis. See, esp., Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, Sec. IV (Tucker, pp. 537-39) and the concluding paragraph in the section on \"History\" i n The German Ideology, Part I (Tucker, p. 163); Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific- (.1880; Moscow: Progress,\"1970.) • and Lenin, State and Revolution. 30 \"The condition of the freedom of the worker i n a capitalist society i s the non-existence of capitalist rule. This i s also the condition of freedom for a completely free society—that Is, a classless society\" (IR, p. 77; emphasis mine). \"The value of art to the a r t i s t then i s t h i s , that i t makes him free\" (\"D.H. Lawrence,\" j>, p. 53). \"The neurotic i s deluded because the complex i s in his unconscious; he i s unfree. The a r t i s t i s only illuded because the complex i s in his conscious: he i s free\" (IR, p. 294). 31 Thus, in an apology for the deliberate Stalinist betrayals i n Germany (1933) and Spain (1936), and i t s p o l i t i c a l counter-revolution within the Soviet Union (1923-28 onwards), Caudwell philosophises: \"It costs the keenest of human pangs to produce a man: and events in Russia, Germany and Spain have only proved the correctness of the communist warning that a new society would be born only i n suffering. . . . This rebellion of the suffering people . . . i s for the majority no clear-headed passage to a common goal\" (IR, p. 303). 3 2 See Illusion and Reality, pp. 225, 237, 240, 294, 295. 33 The general concerns of his theory have already been variously summarised by previous scholars. See especially Mulhern, pp. 40-51; Hynes, pp. 16-20; Margolies, pp. 10-12, 23-27, 42-75, and 85-125; Solomon, pp. 305-308; Hyman, pp. 173-79; Brian Doyle, \"The Necessity of Illusion: The Writings of Christopher Caudwell,\" Literature and History, 6, No. 2 (Autumn 1980), 240-47; Michael Draper, \"Christopher Caudwell's Illusions,\" i n The 1930's: A Challenge to Orthodoxy, ed. John Lucas (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), pp. 86-90; and Thompson, \"Caudwell:'!,pp. 228-76. For an account of Caudwell's f i c t i o n and verse and their links to some of his - 200 -theoretical cornerstones, see Draper, pp. 81-85; Doyle (pp. 238-40) makes some sharp characterisations of the intent and scope of Caudwell's theoretical project. 3 4 \"The perceived world i s real\" (\"Reality,\" FS, p. 210); \"I l i v e , therefore I think I am\" (ibid; p. 239) . See also Illusion and Reality, pp. 22, 24, 25, 82-83, 155, 158, 171, 173, 217, 220, 226, 246-47, 251, 295, 96, 264-65, 291; \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S, p. 66), \"Love: A Study i n Changing Values\" (S, p. 151), and \"Men and Nature\" (FS, p. 116). Poetry embodies an accurate \"feeling of society\" despite a \"confused perception of i t \" (IR, p. 44). 35 p- . \"[Tjhe a r t i s t i c process i s an economic process. . . . If this seems to vulgarise and cheapen the a r t i s t i c process, this i s because [craft-work such as] the building, and the hafemaking process has been vulgarised and cheapened, and i s now in turn vulgarising and cheapening art\" (RR, p. 38). In Illusion and Reality (p. 110), Caudwell notes one significant effect of commodity-production on literature i n Keats's statement \"that he could write forever, burning his poems afterwards.\" 36 With the spread of commodity-production, the soli t a r y , Romantic bourgeois figure logically (though not always sequentially) develops from a tragic hero (Faust, Hamlet) to a p i t i f u l figure (Lear?) to a Vicious and despicable one (Timon) (IR, pp. 70, 80). The word, in social discourse, begins to acquire apparently i n t r i n s i c \"meaning\" in a manner analogous to that of the pound's\"value\" in the market economy (IR, p. 162) . Commodity-fetishism in economic l i f e finds i t s cultural echo in the fetishising of \"art for art's sake\" (IR, p. 116)—which soon becomes \"art for the artist's sake\" (IR, p. 124) and, for the a r t i s t , \"art for the s k i l l y ' s s a k e \" and \"art for my sake\" (IR, pp. 124-25). This simultaneous de-socialisation and over-personalisation of art takes place in the context of the bourgeois market assuming the mask of a faceless and inconsistently predictable \"public\" (IR, p. 117); and art can be re-socialised and re-infused with comprehensible significance only with the advent of a radically new society, whose aesthetic tastes and demands are as d i f f i c u l t to predict, from an historical position anterior to that new society, as are i t s administrative details (IR, p. 229). \"It i s for this reason that sincere a r t i s t s , such as Lawrence, Gide, Romain Rolland, Romains, and so on, cannot be content with the beautiful art work, but seem to desert the practice of art for social theory and become novelists of ideas, literary prophets and propaganda novelists. . . . Cl]t i s inevitably the prerequisite for art becoming art again\" (\"D.H. Lawrence,\" p. 48). 37 Illusion and Reality, pp. 229-30. See Note 55. 38 See Romance and Realism, pp. 118-19 and Illusion and Reality, pp. 75-83. \"Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology\" (FS_, p. 187) . It i s important to note two points here. One i s that whatever Caudwell's - 201 -attitude towards the proposed physiological distinction between the thalamus and the cortex, the analogical apposition of \"proletariat\" to the thalamus i s manifestly accepted, i f not invented, by him. Second, even Caudwell's attitude towards the said physiological d i s t i n c t i o n — i n i t i a l l y proposed by \"bourgeois psychology\"—seems to be favourable: he mentions that \"the general trend of research has i f anything confirmed Head's distinction between cortex and thalamus . . . \" (ib i d . , p. 187). ^ Illusion and Reality, p. 285; Romance and Realism, p. 41; \"Shaw\" (S, pp. 4-5); \"T. E. Lawrence\" (S_, p. 24); \"Consciousness\" (FS, p. 197). 41 Illusion and Reality, pp. 231-32; Romance and Realism, pp. 70-71, 103; \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S_, p. 68). 42 Romance and Realism, p. 35; \"Reality\" (FS, p. 248). 4 3 \"Shaw\" (£, p. 7); \"Wells\" (£, p. 81); Romance and Realism, pp. 82, 102, 127, 128. 44 \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S, p. 58). Also see \"Shaw\" (£, p. 53). 45 Illusion and Reality,p. 57; \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S^, p. 59). 46 Illusion and Reality, p. 314; \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S^ , p. 56). 47 Illusion and Reality, p. 314; \"D. H. Lawrence\" (£, p. 56), and \"Willis\" (S_, pp. 88-89). 48 Some analogous points made by Caudwell would i l l u s t r a t e from an interesting angle his sense of structural \"context,\" or framework. \"It i s well known,\" he says, \"that we do not regard the visual f i e l d as an undifferentiated whole, but that different parts of i t have different values. . . . We see interesting objects\" (\"Consciousness,\" FS_, p. 189). Again, \"before we can become conscious of a thing, we must f i r s t become unconscious of i t . We must have awareness over a wide general f i e l d . . . . Our visual f i e l d i s . . . limited to phenomena which, as we evolved, have proved of interest to us, such as the common light octave (in colour)\" ( i b i d , p. 195). And f i n a l l y , \"faff pianola r o l l i s pierced with holes. These holes are real concrete e n t i t i e s . But they are not the music. The music i s what happens when i t i s played. The poem i s what happens when It i s read\" (IR, p. 40). 49 Among his l i s t of unrealistic writers i n this sense, Caudwell includes Browning.y (RR, p. 75), Galsworthy (RR, p. 96), James and Conrad (RR, p. 103), Bennett (RR, p. 105), Joyce (RR, pp. 110-11), and the Sitwells (RR, p. 126) . - 202 -5 0 See also Illusion and Reality, pp. 227, 339. 5 1 Illusion and Reality, p. 229; \"Beauty\" (FS, pp. 84, 112); \"Men and Nature\" (FS, p. 138). 52 See also Romance and Realism, pp. 40-41, on Shakespeare. Caudwell c r i t i c i s e s Shaw's works for lacking, among other things, \"tragic f i n a l i t y \" (\"Shaw,\" S, p. 7) . 53 See also \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S_, p. 56) and Romance and Realism, pp. 133-38. 5 4 In Romance and Realism (pp. 68-69), Caudwell e x p l i c i t l y associated \" p o l i t i c a l \" with \"revolutionary\" periods, while reiterating that the novel \"tends to be conservative and satisfied.\" 55 In Illusion and Reality (pp. 229-30) , Caudwell i s less categorical: see Note 37 to this chapter. 56 Hynes (p. 26) observes this fact, too. However, we must also note that Caudwell warns us against viewing this as an \" i n t r i n s i c \" quality and attributes i t more to the English novel's \"tradition\" (RR, p. 94). 5 7 See, for instance, Caudwell's comparison between the \"sensuous language\" of Keats and the \"decorative tapestry\" of Tennyson and Browning (RR, pp. 72-73) or his comments on Kipling's \"visual g l i t t e r \" (RR, p. 85) or on Meredith's \"quite unreal pretty phrases\" (RR, p. 81). 58 On Milton, see Romance and Realism (RR), pp. 47-50 (cf. Caudwell's comments on Shakespeare i n RR, pp. 40-41); in Illusion and Reality (IR), he is called \"England's f i r s t openly revolutionary poet\" (p. 93). On Dryden, see RR, p. 51; on Kipling, RR, pp. 79, 83, 86; on Blake, RR, p. 66 (\"the most genuine revolutionary\"); on D i s r a e l i , RR, p. 70, and on Galsworthy, RR, pp. 94-96; on Donne, RR, p. 43 and IR, p. 93 on Dickens, RR, pp. 69-71; on Lawrence, RR, p. 118, IR, pp. 103, 310, and \"D. H. Lawrence\" (S, pp. 44-72; a substantive assessment); and on the women novelists, see RR, pp. 67-68 (Austen), p. 71 (George E l i o t ) , p. 72 (the Bronte's and Woolf), and pp. 114-16 (Woolf and Dorothy Richardson) . 59 For an important analysis of some key sociological and ideological factors that have shaped readers' varying perceptions and evaluations of Hardy through the century, see Peter Widdowson, \"Hardy in History: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature,\" Literature and History, 9, No. 1 (Spring 1983), 3-16. Raymond Williams Williams' P o l i t i c s and His General Theory of Literature P o l i t i c a l l y , Caudwell's axiology was shaped by a f a i r l y simple objective contradiction. On the one hand, he proceeded from an exp l i c i t and complete affirmation of what he understood to be genuine Marxism; on the other hand, what he understood to be genuine Marxism turns out to have been Stalinism, both programmatically and organisationally. Williams' axiology i s shaped by a more complex set of contradictions than Caudwell's and characterised, moreover, by a qualitatively greater sel f -consciousness about their existence and significance. Indeed, Williams' work i s i n large part a sustained polemic against Caudwell, from the social-democratic right. Some sense of the complexity of Williams' p o l i t i c s may be gained from the confusion that i t engenders in even such an apparently informed c r i t i c as Patrick Parrinder. In a review of P o l i t i c s and Letters,1 Parrinder finds himself simultaneously implying that Williams i s and is not a Marxist. Thus, on the affirmative side, Parrinder speaks unqualifyingly of \"the Marxist standpoint of his recent work,\" in which-Williams supposedly \"put forward a consistent theory of literature and culture, based on acknowledged. Marxist tenets—an orientation which had.not been declared openly in his work since his brief membership,of the Communist Party i n 1939-41\" (p. 124). He speaks of \"Williams' re-affiliation:to Marxism\" (p..124) and simply \"assumes that the contempt with which he treated some of i t s central concerns, even as lately as . . . 1971 ('If you're not i n a church you're - 203 -- 204 -not worried about heresies') must be deeply embarrassing to him now\" (p. 126). That assumption, as we shall see, i s wrong. Yet, Parrinder i s only one among many who have, in one 2 way or another, entertained that assumption. The ultimate responsibility for this phenomenon must rest with Williams himself, who has formally asserted that his \"cultural materialism\" actually marks a practice \"within h i s t o r i c a l materialism\" and that i t i s i n fact \"a Marxist theory,\" \"part of . . . the central thinking of 3 Marxism.\" Even in his studiedly agnostic P o l i t i c s and Letters, he claims that \" [s] tarting now,\" with his present knowledge of Marxism, the Marxist tradition \"would look different\" to him from the negative picture he painted of i t in his earlier book, The Country and the City (PL, p. 318). The belief i s widespread, then, that Williams i s indeed some kind of Marxist; and Williams himself can hardly be accused of straining to combat that image. Therefore, Parrinder can have l i t t l e reason to object (as he does) to the fact that \"the goal of these interviews [in P o l i t i c s and Letters], even i n the case of Williams' l i t e r a r y - c r i t i c a l work, i s to define an agreed orthodoxy\" and that \"the goal of an agreed orthodoxy i s also present in certain formulations of the methodology of literary criticism\" (p. 125). If the unduly 4 diplomatic hints of the New Left Review editors (Perry Anderson et al) seem to Parrinder like, \"inquisitorial techniques\" (p. 125), he should ponder the p o l i t i c a l reasons for his and Williams.', manifest, i n a b i l i t y to deny.their truth. This-should prove far more.productive, than complaining about.the perfectly harmless*-and, indeed, often even inept—investigative strategies deployed by \"our interrogators\" (p. 124). In fact, one - 205 -might re c a l l here Williams' own disenchantment with \"a certain kind of a n t i - p o l i t i c a l cynicism\" as a result of which c r i t i c s \"are so attuned to faults that when there i s an industrial dispute, they would rather be analysing the militants' language, which w i l l always include some errors or cliche's, than giving a damn what the dispute i s about\" (PL, p. 241). And the relevance of \"an industrial dispute\" here i s more than analogical. For, i f E. F. Timms i s right, Williams himself \" f a i l s to bridge the gap which Marx so memorably defined in the 'Theses on Feuerbach': between interpreting the world differently, and changing i t \" (p. 830) . Now, as one can see from most commentaries on Williams' work, one does not need to be a Marxist to be led to expect Marxist argumentation in i t , and then to be also- .able to perceive Williams' express rejection of the definitive components of Marxism. George Woodcock, for instance, in a violently anti-Marxist review of Marxism and Literature.5 calls that book \"a confessional document . . . of a true believer\" (p. 593) but then goes on to observe that \"in the realms of neo-Marxist aesthetics he appears as bewildered as he i s bewildering\" (p. 594). John Sutherland, another non-Marxist, remarks, \"He has, in fact, surrendered less [to Marxism] than might be supposed since Culture and Society.\" ^ And, in an appropriately dubious compliment, the pro-anarchist Arthur Efron includes Marxism and Literature among \"the best revisions of the [Marxist] theory\" (p. 5). Even Timms' favourable review of the book:, cla s s i f i e s . Williams' method as \"scarcely a Marxist approach\"—though i t is supposedly.Williams' \"most ex p l i c i t contribution to Marxism\" (pp. 826, 829). - 206 -A general and not unfounded impression therefore prevails that Williams i s at once a Marxist and not a Marxist. To any consistent Marxist, that i s a p o l i t i c a l l y absurd paradox. Nor i s the issue here one of a legally or morally binding choice, but of a concrete and logical impossibility. If one consciously produces arguments and uses methods that are recognisable as conventionally non- or anti-Marxist, one's claim to being a Marxist cannot be simultaneously sustained. That i s the problem with Williams. The axiom advanced above has nothing to do with the demands of abstract logic; i t has everything to do with how Marxists and non-Marxists in the particular define and relate to each other in reality. And, in view of this, Parrinder's mystifying p o l i t i c a l defence of Williams serves merely to hinder any understanding of the latter's axiology. Blake Morrison, another non-Marxist reviewer of Williams, pierces one useful hole through such ideological fog. 7 \"Williams,\" Morrison shrewdly notes, \" i s only too eager £in P o l i t i c s and LettersJ to seize this opportunity to set the record straight, either by total recantation, or, very occasionally, by counter-attack, or, more subtly, by showing how apparent heresies in his early work actually contain submerged socialist theory. . , . Time and again what are obviously non- or anti-Marxist writings are presented as having hidden strategies, latent intentions, submerged histories, or particular contexts, and are thus rendered more orthodox than they appear\" (p. 537). If now, therefore, Williams i s finally brought under Marxist scrutiny, defenders of his theory w i l l have to do rather better than raise the bogey of \"Inquisition.\" They w i l l have to produce arguments. As Parriilder's own reference to Williams' long-standing - 207 -\"contempt\" for some of Marxism's \"central concerns\" indicates, Parrinder himself,is f u l l y aware that, as he puts i t , \"Williams^ r e - a f f i l i a t i o n to Marxism was very much on his own terms\" and that \"the polite but firm rejection of a number of commonly-held Marxist positions i s a crucial feature of Marxism and Literature\" (p. 124). So, what were Williams' \"own terms\"? Efron correctly locates the chief terrain of Williams' revisionism and, with i t , some of those specific \"terms\": \"Williams goes so far; he is courageous in rejecting some of the oldest, most respected categories, such as that of 'ideology,' and the distinction between the productive 'base' of society and i t s cultural 'superstructure'\" (p. 5). That is certainly the definitive burden of Williams' literary theory and the shaping philosophical influence on i t s attendant axiology: i f Caudwell was inconsistent in his use of Marxist categories, Williams overtly rejects them. On this issue, therefore, a gulf separates Caudwell's inadvertent departures from Marxism and Williams' defiant resistance to i t . This can be seen even from some of Williams' ostensibly pro-Marxist statements, whose negative formulations and tone are too obvious to miss: indeed, they are in reality no more than reluctant concessions made by a cornered opponent of Marxism. Williams' most complete exp l i c i t concession to Marxism on the key issues mentioned by Efron occurs i n P o l i t i c s and Letters. It i s , typically, preceded by evasions, misses, qualifications, and hesitation (PL, pp. 182, 184,-212); i t i s phrased i n the language of denial and innocence-; .and i t i s succeeded by what i s .effectively a retraction (PL, p. 356). Yet, for a l l that, i t i s a unique, and te l l i n g acknowledgment: - 208 -[ l ] t i s true that there are forms of material production which always and everywhere precede a l l other forms. I am very glad to make that c l a r i f i c a t i o n — i t doesn't seem to me l i k e a concession. What one then has to say i s that these forms of production are really very basic indeed; they are the production of food, the production of shelter, and the production of the means of producing food and shelter—an extended range which i s s t i l l related to the absolutely necessary conditions of sustaining l i f e . The enormous theoretical s h i f t introduced by classical Marxism—in saying these are the primary productive activities—was of the most fundamental importance. (PL, p. 353)8 Since this doesn't seem to Williams like a concession, we should recapitulate some of his previous pronouncements on the issue. Declaring that the economic determination of culture \" i s , ultimately, an unanswerable question,\" the early Williams c r i t i c i s e d \"a general 9 inadequacy, among Marxists, in the use of 'culture' as a term.\" Then, incidentally', not entirely in keeping with his claimed agnosticism on the question, Williams went on to counterpose to Marxism his own methodological alternative. Marxists \"should logically use 'culture' in the sense of a whole way of l i f e , a general social process,\" he advised, elaborating that \"the whole received basis of social thinking [clearly not excepting Marxism— K.D.G.], i t s conception of what man in society i s , must be deeply revised.\"1 0 He charged that \"[sjtructure and superstructure, as terms of an analogy, express at once an absolute and a fixed relationship\" and falsely implied that, for Marx, the \"superstructure i s a matter of human consciousness\": alone (CS, pp. 260, 259). Obversely, this latter charge of course further implied that the economy does not involve conscious regulation. Williams claimed that - 209 -the Marxist analytical model \"excluded\" two realms: \"the system of learning and communication\" and \"the complex of natural relationships based on the generation and nurture of l i f e ^ . . .\" (Long R, p. 114). \"The d i f f i c u l t y l i e s , \" he explained in Culture and Society (p. 273), \". . . i n the terms of Marx's original formulation: i f one accepts 'structure' and 'superstructure,' not as the terms of a suggestive analogy, but as descriptions of r e a l i t y , the errors naturally follow. Even i f the terms are seen as those of an analogy, they need . . . amendment.\" And in his recent Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), pp. 263-64, he asserted the following: The concept of a 'mode of production' . . . has selected a particular h i s t o r i c a l and material orientation as essential and permanent. It can illuminate variations of this orientation [ i . e . , of capitalist society], but i t can never really look beyond i t . This fact has emerged in the most practical way, in that the great explanatory power of Marxism, where this concept has been most active, has not been accompanied by any successful projective capacity. . . . [l]n basing his thought on an inherited concept of production . . . Marx was unable to outline /any f u l l y alternative society. . . . The problem and the obstacle are in the concept i t s e l f . I shall merely refer the reader back to my Introduction to confirm Williams' factual imprecision and (the theoretical i l l o g i c a l i t y of his revealed expectation. And I shall focus, instead on an incidental but tellingly symptomatic feature of the above-quoted passage; nowhere in i t does Williams Indicate any awareness of the social power-relations that dictate.the choices for thought and discourse. Recreating the autism of his Long Revolution, Williams revolves tightly around \"concepts,\" \"thoughts,\" \"explanatory powers,\" and \"projective capacities,\" - 210 -as i f they issued from some implanted crystal b a l l In the brain. But a Marxist feels inclined to point out that Marx was \"unable\" to \"outline any f u l l y alternative society\" because he \"saw,\" from experience and past history, the utterly fantastic—and, ultimately, reformist— consequences of such a detailed prophetic enterprise under capitalism. It is precisely because of this that, while he was \"unable\" to paint detailed Utopias, Marx also did not find himself shunted, like Williams, from one ideological extreme to another. Thus, i t was Williams himself who, some decades e a r l i e r , had equally confidently denounced the very sin that he now regards as a virtue—\"the persistent attempts to define the culture of the so c i a l i s t future\": As a matter of fact, most of the speculation about the \"socialist culture\" of the future has been no more than a Utopian habit; one cannot take i t very seriously. . . . My own view i s that i f , i n a socialist society, the basic cultural s k i l l s are made widely available, and the channels of communication widened and cleared, as much as possible has been done in the way of preparation, and what then emerges w i l l be an actual response to the whole r e a l i t y , and so valuable. (CS, pp. 273-74) In fact, though Williams wrongly counterposed this position to some hypothetical, \"other\" way of Lenin, decrying Lenin's stress on cultural planning without noting i t s post-revolutionary context (CS, p. 274), i t s substance i s clearly much closer to Marxism than is the impatient propheticism of Towards 2000. Again, i t i s precisely because of.Marx's, unique lack of \"projective capacity\" of the Williamsian kind that he did. not find himself trapped, as does Williams, in contradictions of a methodologically - 211 -elementary nature. Thus, i t i s not Marx but Williams whom we find complaining with surprise about the blanket use of \"culture\" (a l a Leavis) to denote \"a whole way of l i f e , a general social process\": \"we are continually forced to extend i t , u n t i l i t becomes almost identical with our whole common l i f e \" (CS_, p. 249) . \"The basic intellectual fault of such formulations as that In Culture and Environment i s , curiously, the taking of aspects for wholes\" (CS, p. 253). Yet, for a l l his misgivings, Williams' own use of \"culture\" i n this respect does not differ qualitatively from that of Leavis. So the concession i n P o l i t i c s and Letters about the importance of Marx's \"base-superstructure\" analogy i s hardly the matter of routine \" c l a r i f i c a t i o n \" Williams presents i t as. Rather, from this c r i t i c who has consistently stressed the alleged \"primacy of cultural production\" (PL, p. 133) and maintained that, \"contrary to a development In Marxism, i t i s not 'the base' and 'the super-structure' that need to be studied, but specific and indissoluble real processes . . .\" (ML, p. 82), i t i s a rare and dramatic acknowledgment of theoretical defeat. As Williams himself once so movingly announced, with revealing delay and disbelief, \"I am certain, as I review the evidence, that i t i s capitalism . . . which i s in fact confusing us\" (Long R, P. 300). As with the analogy of base and superstructure, so with the notion of classes based on particular (andopposed) economic interests, Williams differs from Caudwell in this: that he w i l l approximate the Marxist position only when compelled to, in the face of otherwise rather egregious self-contradictions. His approximations, accordingly, once again assume the form of reluctant and tortuously inductive - 212 -concessions. Thus, we have already heard Williams regret the inadequacy of that s t i l l attractive, Leavisian use of \"culture.\" Similarly, i n The Long Revolution (p. 353), we hear him ask, in exasperation, \"If . . . we are to be co-operative, responsible, non-violent, where exactly, in our actual world, are we expected to live? Is the economy co-operative, i s the culture responsible, are the p o l i t i c s non-violent?\" The s p i r i t , i t would seem, is willing to encourage a l l those'ostensible virtues. Yet Williams i s on record as once having e x p l i c i t l y c r i t i c i s e d 12 \"the illusions of humanism\" and, on another occasion, ridiculed the Wellsian \" l i t t l e human peninsula, trying to forget what the high 13 bourgeois mainland i s l i k e . \" The deceptive \"convention of the plain observer with no axes to grind, who simply t e l l s the truth,\" Williams has more recently noted, \". . . cancels the social situation of the writer and cancels his stance towards the social situation he i s observing\" (PL, p. 388). The result of such a convention, as he puts i t in the case of Jane Austen, i s that \"where only one class i s seen, no classes are seen.\"1 4 Thus, speaking of his unique, hitherto classless notion of \"structures of feeling\" (discussed below), Williams says that he would \"now want to use the concept much more differen t i a l l y between classes\" (PL, p. 158). And discussing the evaluator's stance, he warns that although \"everyone i s i n i t i a l l y in a different situation, . . . we should not forget the true common modes, beyond that, of class a f f i l i a t i o n \" (PL, p. 342). Marxists can assure Williams that they w i l l not forget. Indeed, they might go on to express a l i t t l e amusement at the apparent change of mind wrought in their admonisher since the days when he used - 213 -to dismiss \"myths of a 'proletariat' and ^ p r o l e t a r i a n i s a t i o n , \" ' confidently declaring that the Marxists' \"traditional definitions have broken down\" (Long R, pp. 327, 325). The \"division of votes,\" the electoralist Williams used to i n s i s t , \"cuts right across the usual analysis by class, introducing questions which cannot be negotiated within our ordinary p o l i t i c a l categories\" (Long R, p. 330). Deploring an unnamed \"main current in Marxism,\" he called i t \"profoundly mechanical in i t s determinism, in i t s social materialism, and in i t s characteristic abstraction of social classes from human beings\" (MT, p. 78). In the most explicit of his dismissals of class-analysis, Williams asserted that \"most of us\" are \"truly sick and tired\" of the \"irrelevant\" discussion of class, and called for \"the more interesting discussion of human differences, between real people and real communities livin g in their valuably various ways\" (Long R, p. 169). A l l t h i s , too, Marxists w i l l not forget. Indeed, even i f they wished to, they could not: Williams has just pointedly reinstated his decades-old analysis of \"Britain in the Sixties\" (Long R) in his latest book, Towards 2000.15 The \"change of mind\" In P o l i t i c s and Letters therefore stands revealed as precisely the kind of reluctant admission of defeat I have talked about. At the f i r s t opportunity, Williams promptly resumes his anti-Marxist positions again. If Caudwell neglected to resolve his objectively contradictory formulations, Williams makes i t a point to register his express defiance.of Marxism, inserting concessions and claiming ulterior Marxist intentions only when.left:with no immediate prospect for escape, under conditions of scrutiny (or when presented with the cheap opportunity to c r i t i c i s e liberalism from i t s \" l e f t \" ) . - 214 -Williams' insistent-denial of fundamentally divisive economic forces in capitalist society and culture, however, merely exhibits microcosmically what in fact i s with him a much broader, openly reformist p o l i t i c a l programme, for which the organised expression is the virulently anti-communist British Labour Party. It i s this overall p o l i t i c a l programme, rather than separate and remote manifestations of i t , that i s in the f i r s t place key to understanding Williams' system of values. In some ways, Williams' formal p o l i t i c a l sympathies undercut much more drastically than volumes of thematic analyses any claims he might advance to being a Marxist. For, there can be l i t t l e doubt—least of a l l in Williams' own mind—that his entire system of cultural values i s linked to his particular conception of necessary and possible social change, a conception practically indistinguish-able from the consummate reformism of the Labour Party. Thus, in P o l i t i c s and Letters, Williams on the one hand implicitly indicates the absurdity of expecting the Labour government to fund \"institutions of popular education and popular culture that could have withstood the p o l i t i c a l campaigns in the bourgeois press\" (PL, p. 73). On the other hand, he goes on to remark that the \"correct perspective\" would have been \"to try to help build a very strong popular cultural mobilisation to take part in a battle inside the Labour movement\" (PL, p. 75; my emphasis). He correctly concedes that \"we s t i l l shared one i l l u s i o n with precisely the position we were attacking,\" although he misses.the fundamental point when, he identifies this i l l u s i o n merely:as the attempt to implement change \"simply by literary argument, by cultural discourse\" (PL, p. 75). Of course, that i l l u s i o n i s s t i l l undeniably part of Williams' p o l i t i c s ; but i t is secondary to the i l l u s i o n that the century-old bourgeois policies - 215 -of the Labour Party can be reversed by a \"popular cultural\" mobilisation \"inside\" the Labour movement, rather than by spl i t t i n g i t s social base p o l i t i c a l l y from the top and electing a new leadership on a programme of revolutionary class-struggle. In this regard, Williams' allusive talk of \"economics\" as the wrongly-neglected \"main battl e f i e l d \" (PL, p. 75) seems a l l the more deliberately vague, and hence significant. Does \"economics\" here refer s t r i c t l y to economic theory? Does i t refer to s t r i c t l y economistic—i.e., studiedly anti-political—struggle? Does i t refer to economic reform, i n the sense of i t s acting as_ a_ deterrent to revolution? A l l of these connotations, as the passage below w i l l indicate, are conceivable—since a l l of them are reformist to the core: I should say that in general the very energies which make up the militancy of an authentic revolutionary l e f t tend to make i t much worse at working with others, to i t s own detriment, than reformists who have adopted the perspective of getting as much as you can within the system, developing s k i l l s of co-operation and compromise thait any socialism n e e d s . . . . So far as the shift from a reformist to a revolutionary perspective i s concerned, I think that s t i l l i f I saw an area i n which the f i r s t kind of course seemed possible, I would always follow i t until I was f i n a l l y convinced that i t was not just d i f f i c u l t , or interminable, or intractable, but that i t was actually delaying the prospect of a solution. (PL, p. 410) In view of the above declaration of principles, i t should hardly come as a surprise to Marxists that Williams' conception of even the \"short\" revolution i s one in which the-ruling system simply implodes; spontaneously, without any need for organisation or leader-ship, the revolution emerges through a presumably self-induced floss by the state of i t s capacity for predominant reproduction of the existing social - 216 -relations\" (PL,,p. 421). His tired prediction of continuing racism and his bizarre advice to the unemployed that \"even socialists w i l l have to stop thinking in the capitalist category of f u l l employment\" (PL, p. 382), are the expected corollaries to Williams' proposed •-. wait for a spontaneous reform of capitalism. After a l l , he had long ago defined the \"choice\" as one between \"qualified acceptance in a subordinate capacity\" and \"the renewal of an apparently hopeless challenge\" (Long, R, p. 303). This i s the c r i t i c who a l i t t l e more than twenty years ago had openly scoffed at \"such general nostrums as the fight for socialism\" (Long R, p. 294) and spurned revolution as \"evidently a time of violence, dislocation and extended suffering,\" as \"tragedy, in the everyday sense,\" as \"ordinarily a time of l i e s and of suppression of truths,\" and as \"a time of c h a o s I t i s thus perfectly consistent for Williams today to find \"the carriers of the new and positive issues and interests\" i n the single-issue peace, ecology, women's, third world, human rights, anti-poverty, housing, and cultural \"movements\" and \"campaigns\"17 and to announce his sympathy 18 for continental Europe's anti-communist social democracy as well. Moreover, even sociologically, Williams' p o l i t i c a l trajectory should come as no surprise to Marxists. As Williams himself, pointing to his overwhelmingly petty bourgeois upbringing and academic experience has explained, his \"situation was not typical\" of the urban proletariat, and i t took him \"a long time to realise\" this fact (PL, p. 22). On his return from Europe after the Second World.War, he \"took up academic work . quite fanatically\"; allowing his two-year membership of the CPGB to lapse, he consciously made \"a certain notion of cultural p o l i t i c s \" his - 217 -\"more general priority\" (PL, p. 52). As he himself tel l i n g l y admits, his \"fatigue with the complexities of po l i t i c s at the time, expressing i t s e l f as superiority,\" was merely \"the self-defence of an intellectual who has retired from immediate p o l i t i c s \" (PL^pp. 103, 106). The \"complexities\" alluded to were, of course, the murderous travesty of Marxism then being perpetrated by Stalin and his Communist parties internationally. But, while these \"complexities\" were only too r e a l , Williams' \"fatigue\" had nothing in common with either the critique of or the practical p o l i t i c a l struggle against Stalinism conducted by Trotsky's Left Opposition since 1923. Indeed Williams himself, when confronted with the fact 20 of Trotskyism, admits his relative ignorance on that question. However, the problem of Ignorance can be solved or minimised i f there i s a w i l l . But, by his own account, i t was ultimately the w i l l , and not merely the knowledge, that was lacking: \"I would agree that this i s a block. . . . It is . . . a certain reluctance to go back into intricacies which were not present for the succeeding generation\" (PL, p. 401). The problem, therefore, is not merely circumstantial but p o l i t i c a l . Yet, neither Williams nor his interviewers draw any programmatic conclusions from the former's t e l l i n g acknowledgment: both parties are, clearly, agreed that the said \"intricacies\" are \"not present for the succeeding generation.\" In the-minds of many, therefore, 21 Stalinism continues to equal Marxism and communism. But this i s precisely what propels Williams: deeper into reformist values today. Those \"intricacies\" constitute the artifically-maintained \"blind\"-spot that - 218 -both.social democracy and Stalinism.alike must necessarily continue to nurture, in order to hold their common line against revolution. It i s therefore precisely at this point that Trotskyism must force an entry, subjecting Williams* \"cultural p o l i t i c s \" and i t s axiology to some elementary Marxist scrutiny. When Williams joined the Cambridge CPGB Writers* Group, he \"did not come across Caudwell\"; but he did encounter Ralph Fox's The Novel and the People, Alick West, and Left Review—all known Stalinist-Zhdanovist literary forces (PL, pp. 42, 44). Thus when, on returning to Cambridge after the Second World War, Williams engaged with Leavis' anti-Marxist empiricism, he was completely overwhelmed, finding \"English studies\" to have matured as a discipline \"to which Marxists could oppose only a precarious handful of works whose contribution to literary study was easily dismissed as reductionism\" (PL, p. 45). Williams strove, within the Writers' Group, to attack the Zhdanovists; but, in the absence of a Trotskyist perspective, he clearly did so not from the terrain of Marxism but from that of social democracy. Typically conflating one or another version of Stalinism with Marxism, Williams c r i t i c i s e d so-called \"Marxist writing in England\" from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-fifties as \"very mixed in both quality and occasion\" and warned that \" i t i s as well for Marxists to remember that very many mistakes were made, and that these are less easy to forgive because of the tone of dogmatic i n f a l l i b i l i t y which characterised some of the most popular writings\" (CS, p. 262). \"In fact,\" he concluded, \"as we look at the English attempt at a Marxist theory of culture, what we see i s an interaction between Romanticism; and Marx. . . . - 219 -We have to conclude that the interaction i s as yet far from complete\" (CS, p. 271). He has attacked Caudwell's use of the phrase 22 \"capitalist poetry\" and c r i t i c i s e d \"the conventional descriptions oh the l e f t of the major thought and writing i n England from the sixteenth 23 to the twentieth centuries as bourgeois culture\" (PL_, p. 155). Yet he himself understandably uses phrases such as \"bourgeois novelists\" and \"socialist novel\" (e.g., PL, p. 268). Williams' specifically literary-theoretical project may be seen as an attempt to systematise and concretise the analysis of the material and h i s t o r i c a l factors determining the actual processes of literary production (as distinct from response): and behind that l i e s the attempt to discover ways of harnessing new cultural practices in general to the cause of Labourite reformism. Williams himself has variously described i t as an attempt to \"rejoin\" \"literary studies\" with \"experimental science\" (PL, p. 341), a \"theorisation of composition\" (PL, p. 192), an attempt \"to show simultaneously the literary conventions and the h i s t o r i c a l relations to which they were a response—to see together the means of the production and the conditions of the means of production\" (PL, p. 304), and, most simply, as \"cultural materialism: a theory of the specificities of materialism\" (ML, p. 5). In any event, i t grows out of his dissatisfaction with a l l previous systems of criticism—non-Marxist as.well as ostensibly Marxist—coupled with an attraction to structural linguistics. (PL, p. 324). And i t takes as i t s . ideological premise \"the primacy of cultural production\" (PL, p. 133), concentrating, for i t s part, on the \"very deep material bond,between language and the body,\" categories deemed only inconsistently and unevenly determined by - 220 -.economics and class. Williams' main criticism of \"traditional\" systems—from the Aristotelian to the Richardsian/Leavlsian and the s t r u c t u r a l i s t — has been that \"theorisation when i t appears i s always a theorisation of reading [or 'response']—it i s not a theorisation of composition 2S [or 'process']\" (PL, pp. 191-92). Moreover, he argues, \"Criticism\" as a specialised activity i s a bourgeois phenomenon, too, dating back, in England, to the seventeenth century and passing through several 26 hi s t o r i c a l shifts in meaning (ML,pp. 48-51). Thus he categorically states, i n the Conclusion to his Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, that \"[w]e cannot usefully apply, to any modern a r t , the c r i t i c a l terms and procedures which were discovered for the understanding of earlier work.\"27 Typically, however, Williams' polemics against \"traditional\" methods are directed not so much at Aristotle or Leavis as at \"Marxist literary criticism\"; his alternative system of cri t i c i s m , therefore, properly begins with the rejection of Marx: English society and French society are both, today, in certain stages of capitalism, but their cultures are observably different, for sound hi s t o r i c a l reasons. That they are both capitalist may be f i n a l l y determining, and this may be a guide to social and p o l i t i c a l action, but clearly, i f we are to understand the cultures, we are committed to what i s manifest; the way of l i f e as a whole. What many of us have f e l t about Marxist cultural interpretation i s that i t seems committed, by Marx's formula, to a r i g i d methodology so that i f one wishes to study, say, a national literature, one must begin with the.economic history with which the literature co-exists, and then put the literature to i t , to be interpreted in i t s l i g h t . I t i s true that on occasion one learns something from th i s , but, in general, the procedure seems to involve both forcing and. s u p e r f i c i a l i t y . - 221 -For, even i f the economic element i s determining, i t determines a whole way of l i f e , and i t i s to t h i s , rather than to the economic system alone, that the literature has to be related. (CS, p. 272) The impressionism of the analytical method advocated in that passage i s key: \"We are committed to what i s manifest.\" (More-over, Williams is of course patently wrong to insinuate that Marx encouraged relating literature to \"the economic system alone.\") In subsequent statements, however, Williams will-with characteristic even-handedness—also point out the epistemological ^shortcomings of 28 impressionism. But that nevertheless remains his definitive c r i t i c a l mode, with i t s emphasis on a classless \"whole way of l i f e \" (or \"lived experience,\" or \"the knowable community,\" as he variously terms i t 29 in his works). Yet, of course, the sheer theoretical dissolution of the \"base\" and the \"superstructure\" into what is merely \"manifest\" does not in the least dissolve Williams' actual need to identify some \"pattern\" of \"relations\" in that \"whole culture.\"3 0 And i t also does not cancel the need to discover, even in most modern literature, \"the movements of an integrated world economy\" which \"a naive observation . . . can never gain knowledge of . . .\" (PL, p. 171). Thus Williams i s compelled to invent a substitute for the Marxist analytical model (one which could well have co-existed with i t , within the larger realm of the superstructure); \"structure of feeling.\" In Marxism and Literature (p. 100), for instance, Williams rejects the notion of \"mediation\" or \"intermediary\" because he rejects the notion of a \"separate\" base and superstructure (a notion falsely attributed to Marxism). But he early recognises, i n his own way, the distinction between basic existence and expressed consciousness. This - 222 -dilemma—between the rejection of the Marxist distinction and the inescapability of his own, similar one—he then seeks to negotiate with the aid of his new category, \"structure of feeling.\" In The Long Revolution (p. 48), he vaguely describes this category as \"a particular sense of l i f e , a particular community of experience hardly needing expression, through which the characteristics of our way of l i f e that an external analyst could describe are in some way passed, giving them a particular and characteristic colour.\" As he later elaborates in Marxism and Literature (p. 133), structures of feeling are \"social experiences in solution\" that recognise both the \"specificity\" of '\"the aesthetic,' 'the arts,' and 'imaginative 31 literature'\" and \"their specific kinds of sociality.\" But the link between these structures' purely \"cultural\" functions and their (more subtly) p o l i t i c a l one becomes clear in The English Novel (p. 192), where he directly l i n k s , through that concept, his empiricism and English exceptionalism to an e x p l i c i t l y anti-Marxist polemic on the origins of \" a l l art\": Much ordinary social experience i s of course directly reflected, represented, in what is indeed an ideology, what can be called a superstructure. But in any society at a l l like our own, and especially i n this one this last hundred and f i f t y years, there's a very v i t a l area of social experience—social- experience—that doesn't get incorporated: that's neglected, ignored, certainly at times repressed: that even when i t ' s taken up, to be processed or< to function as an o f f i c i a l consciousness, i s resistant,-lively, s t i l l goes i t s own way, and eventually steps on.its shadow . . . ,ih such a way that we can see which i s shadow and which is substance. It i s from this v i t a l area, from this structure of feeling that i s lived and experienced but .not yet quite arranged as institutions and ideas, from this common and inalienable l i f e that I think a l l art is made. - 223 -The urge to focus on societies \"like our own\"—\"especially . . . this one this last hundred and f i f t y years\"—as the defining norm for \"social experience\" of course captures the parochial and historically self-centred quality of Williams' \"common and inalienable l i f e . \" And yet, already in this passage, Williams feels obliged to begin with a concession to the Marxist analytical model, shifting slightly from his earli e r insistence that analysis can begin only from \"experience,\" which, moreover, for him \"moves within an actual situation, in directions which the forces within that situation w i l l alone determine\" (CS, p. 195). Such (albeit partial and provisional) breaks from empiricism directly enable Williams to compare his t o r i c a l l y and socially disparate works and authors. And, only slightly less dire c t l y , not only does this incipient broadening of perspective influence Williams' c r i t e r i a of general literary value and his selection of those particular works and authors in the f i r s t place; the selection and the c r i t e r i a themselves in turn force a broadening of the perspective. In this way, Williams i s logically led to rejoin the problematic of \"response\" with his preferred problematic of \"production.\" He acknowledges theoretically the possibility of both \"permanent\" and hi s t o r i c a l l y \"conjunctural configurations\" of aesthetic response (PL, pp. 325, 341); and this partial advance in perceiving di f f e r e n t i a l response refines his earlier notion of the reader-c r i t i c s * \"selection\"—or \"assimilation\" (MT, pp. 27-29)—of specific authors, texts, and \"traditions,\" inducing him to attempt a materialist 32 explanation for particular claims to literary value. In this respect, Williams' own definition of and p a r t i a l i t y towards the so-called \"organicist\" - 224 -tradition (\"knowable community\") i n English literature provides a close measure of both his limited break from empiricism and his resistance to Marxism (especially to the importance i t attaches to \"class,\" which he p l u r a l i s t i c a l l y tolerates as merely one of \"many kinds of special interest\"): [w]e discover our epoch . . . by those points, those l i v e s , those experiences, in which the structure of our own most significant d i f f i c u l t i e s seems to begin to take shape. . . . And in my own case I go . . . to the problem of knowable community . . . under \\ery specific and active and continuing pressures. (EN, pp. 186-87) Within a given society, selection w i l l be governed by many kinds of special interest, including class interests. The traditional cultures of a society w i l l always tend to correspond to i t s contemporary system of interests and values, for i t i s not an absolute body of work but a continual selection and interpretation. . . . In the analysis of contemporary culture, the existing state of the selective tradition i s of v i t a l importance, for i t i s often true that some change in this tradition . . . is a radical kind of contemporary change. . . . Often i t i s simply that in the good novel the ordinary situations and feelings are worked through to their maximum intensity. In other cases, though the framework i s retained one element of the experience floods through the work, in such a way as to make i t relevant in i t s own right, outside the conventional terms. . . . These are the creative elements, though the connection with the ordinary structure of feeling i s s t i l l clear. (Long R.? pp. 51-52, 53, 68) Here are a l l the rudiments of Williams' contradictory analytical as well as evaluative theory. . The\"We\" carries no definite class-denotation, hence nor does \"the structure of our own most significant d i f f i c u l t i e s . \" The liberalism of \"many kinds of special interest\" i s decidedly curtailed by the weight of the c r i t i c ' s \"own - 225 -case,\" in which he goes.to \"the:problem of knowable community\" and not to \"class.\" It i s , for Williams, not social change that triggers cultural ones but rather a change in the \"selective tradition\" of a \"culture\" that i t s e l f simply \" i s \" the \"contemporary change.\" We \"discover our epoch\" and select traditions in keeping with \"those points . . . in which the structure of our most significant d i f f i c u l t i e s seems to begin to take shape,\" with our \"contemporary system of interests and values\"; yet, \"one element\" of a f i c t i o n a l \"experience\" can become \"relevant in i t s own right, outside the conventional terms.\" Absolutism clashes with classless relativism; liberalism translates into i t s obverse, individualism; consciousness determines everything; and \"relevance\" always needs to be classlessly \"contemporary\" in relation to the reader, though i t may sometimes also be i n t r i n s i c . It i s between these substantially i d e a l i s t , absolutist, classless, p l u r a l i s t i c modes, on the one hand, and formal invocations of di a l e c t i c a l h i s t o r i c a l materialism, on the other, that Williams' general theory of literature, within the p o l i t i c a l framework of reformism, resides. Williams' Principles of Literary Evaluation Whether one approaches. Williams' c r i t e r i a of literary value inductively or deductively, the same logical questions about his general scheme of values must arise. And, given his claim to working within Marxist assumptions,. that ultimate modern.test of Marxist, consistency— the claimant's understanding of revolutionary party-commitment—must sooner or later be posed. Here, once more, Williams' real p o l i t i c s - 226 -of reformism virtually preempt that question p o l i t i c a l l y and, simultaneously, define the limits of his \"Marxism.\" Williams' specific literary c r i t e r i a for evaluation remain well within his p o l i t i c a l values and goals. Therefore, while Williams' evaluative methods show considerable sophistication i n their d e t a i l , we must not forget the overall limit'- of the reformist project—\"cultural materialism\"—that circumscribe them a l l , defining the very terms of the problematics they raise. Among these individual problematics, the crucial one must surely be Williams' ambivalence about the validity and usefulness of the very act of evaluation i t s e l f . This ambivalence i s the axiological manifestation precisely of the two key p o l i t i c a l features of his work: one, a pronounced activist appetite simply to proceed with the actual literary production, presumably leading to a \"cultural revolution\" independently of a socio-political one—that i s , an appetite for reformism; and two (resulting directly from the f i r s t feature), a passive resistance to accepting any commitment to a revolutionary party and Its general p o l i t i c a l orientation that might logically entail both Marxist c r i t i c a l consistency and reversed practical p r i o r i t i e s , ultimately requiring revolutionary intervention. It i s on this (essentially social democratic) p o l i t i c a l dilemma that our examination of Williams' evaluative c r i t e r i a w i l l centre. Undoubtedly, there are occasions when Williams deplores \"the typical emphasis of a consumer s o c i e t y — . . . the descent towards a trivialism of preference, or towards a technicism that ends in no judgment of any kind—a simple technical recomposition of the text\" (PL, p. 344). But he i s also on record calling for a \"significant - 227 -rejection of the habit (or right or duty) of judgments\"; \"what always needs to be understood,\" he explains, \" i s the specificity of the 33 response, which i s not a judgment but a practice. . . .\" Indications are that he tends to extend to a l l evaluation his revulsion against the Victorian substitution of literary value for disappearing \"religious and ethical values\" (PL, p. 130); certainly his New Left Review commentators have noted his frequent studied abstentions from \"any actual evaluation,\" as with the country-house poems analysed i n The Country and the City (PL, p. 342). Nevertheless, Williams does formally approve of evaluation and suggests a few positive strategies for practising i t . The overall quality of his suggestions i s contradictory, vacillating between the familiar polarities of absolutism and relativism, idealism and materialism. The mode in which they are advanced i s mostly cautionary and negative, rather than exploratory and positive. And they are often abstract. Yet, because of Williams' emphasis on the hist o r i c a l context of a text's production and on the evaluator's mechanism for conjunctural selection (\"structure of feeling\"), he manages, usefully, to show the entire evaluative process to be relative, reminding us that, in their origin, \"'taste' and 'sensibility' are characteristically bourgeois categories.\" Within this contradictory framework that i s heavily conserva-tive to start with, then, Williams nevertheless does provide some evaluative tools and strategies worthy of consideration by Marxists. We may aptly begin with his exp l i c i t warning that \"[tjhere i s a good deal of apparently theoretical discourse about the process of making judgments which as an isolated activity repeats the limitations of the - 228 -isolated c r i t i c a l practice i t s e l f \" and that \"in general the isolation of the pure act of judgment between c r i t i c a l reader and text tends i n the end to prevent even judgment\" (PL, pp. 238, 338). But i n general, given these qualifications, Williams declares himself \"wholly in sympathy with reasonable uses of damn this/praise this\" (PL, p. 311). And perhaps his most complete recent statement of general evaluative principles occurs around the following c a l l for \"a very complex typology of occasions and cues\": It i s a major human gain to attend with complete precision, often without any other consideration, to the way someone has shaped a stone or uttered a musical note. To deny that would be to cancel so much of human culture that i t would be comical. But I think we need a much more specific analysis of the situations, the occasions, the signals which release that response, that kind of attention. I am absolutely unwilling to concede to any predetermined class of objects an unworked priority or to take a l l the signals as equally v a l i d . We need a very complex typology of occasions and cues, which I think i s quite practicable, although i t w i l l inevitably be p a r t i a l . One would then have to look at the situations and occasions i n which those signals and cues conflict with other systems which i t i s really very important not to cede. It i s crucial that we resist the categorical predetermination of them as a reserved area, and the extreme training against taking these experiences back out and putting them in relation to other value systems. No doubt in various judgments one w i l l be caught out saying—I really do find this working on me, although I hate the fact that i t does so. By really exploring that contradiction, I may find out something about myself and others. (PL, pp. 348-49) This manifesto i s f a i r l y typical of Williams, in i t s theoretical contradictions. Thus, on the one hand, Williams attempts to highlight the importance of relativism by calling for \"a much more specific analysis of the situations,\" for \"a very complex typology,\" - 229 -and for an exploration of contradictory responses that w i l l \"resist the categorical predetermination\" of signals and cues, denying them \"an unworked priority\" (or even equal mutual v a l i d i t y ) , and instead placing them \"in relation to other value systems.\" On the other hand, his absolutist tendencies surface despite himself: he clearly allows the possibility and the desirability of finding i n t r i n s i c (formal) value, \"often without any other consideration\"; he talks about an undifferentiated \"human\" gain and culture; and he prevalues the contemplative act, declaring that attention to formal detail i s self-evidently a \"major\" human gain. Even his (negative) insistence on methodological balance i s i t s e l f , objectively, a testimony to his contradictory impulses: he i s anxious \"[not] to deny\" the alleged importance of purely formal evaluations; he i s \"unwilling to concede\" pre-ordained and equal value to different objects; he i s concerned \"not to cede\" the task of comparative evaluation, and i s determined to \"resist\" the \"extreme training\" against such methods. This i s not to say that Williams' own, explicit observation about the heuristic value of contradictory responses i s unimportant. Rather, i t i s precisely in his non-class-specific description of them that their significance for Marxist axiology l i e s . The \"community\"-oriented psycho-culturalist exercise suggested by Williams 1 invitation to \"find out something about myself and others\" directly corresponds to his frequently anti-Marxist usage of \"human,\" and i s reminiscent, of nothing so- much, as the petit-bourgeois \"Me\"-generation talk of the New Left. Such mystification actually serves to prevent the class-perception: and practical resolution of bourgeois cultural (and socio-economic) contradictions—thereby ultimately doing - 230 -i t s b i t to defend capitalism against.socialist.revolution—while simultaneously projecting the image of an ideology anxious to imbue people with ''social\" awareness. This i s also the role of classical social democracy and i t s p o l i t i c a l rhetoric (taken up, as and when convenient, by Stalinism). The self-restriction to culture, then, i s p o l i t i c a l l y c r u c i a l . We have already seen Williams' dramatic s h i f t on the question of a planned socialist culture. Underlying both His early dismissal of i t (in Culture and Society) and his subsequent obsession with i t s every detail (in Towards 2000) i s the same absence of a class-based projection, which then naturally circumvents the question of proletarian revolution and leads, rather directly, to undiluted reformism. Thus i t transpires, for instance, that although he reveals the bourgeois origins of current aesthetic categories to suggest their tenuousness, Williams does not extend that class-principle of analysis to the scenario of the future. This explains his silence about the values conceivably relevant to the p o l i t i c a l rise to power of the last ruling class, the revolutionary proletariat. For, without any oppressors and oppressed p o l i t i c a l l y intruding into the cultural scene, who needs a proletarian revolution? Certainly, the old, bourgeois values are useless now; but (so runs his l o g i c ) , since the proletariat i s probably no longer a revolutionary class anyway, and since that removes international socialist revolution, along with i t s specific values, from the agenda, socialists, w i l l simply be compelled to re-cycle those old bourgeois values--sometimes in slightly updated form—and re-consume them within the perennial structure of bourgeois society. The - 231 -\"cultural revolution\" w i l l thus have to precede—and possibly preclude— the proletarian capture of state power. This p o l i t i c a l logic certainly corresponds to a l l of Williams' specific axiological vacillations, contradictions, negativisms, and idealist compromises. In keeping with his declared emphasis on (literary) production rather than on consumption, Williams has more to say about the literary product's ingredients and process of generation than about reader-response and evaluation. Nevertheless, he does occasionally generalise about the latter aspects of literary transaction, usually with a negative, classless relativism. \"The argument of values,\" he explains in Marxism and Literature (p. 157), for instance, \" i s in the variable encounters of intention and response in specific situations.\" In P o l i t i c s and Letters (p. 347), he c l a r i f i e s that his \"general position\" is \"to seek the maximum disclosure of the circumstances of judgment, which would allow someone to dissociate himself from i t ; but then openly and not by a presumptive category.\" If Williams' apparent stress on \"circumstances\" and \"dissociate\" seems then to imply a policy of indifferentism, this i s not accidental. But of course, even in i t s negative form, this stance—though i t s e l f not Marxist—can be useful to Marxist evaluation. Thus, as we shall see, Marxists can gain an insight into at least Williams' own specific c r i t e r i a for valuing (and his methods of \"appropriating\") one of his favourite writers, Thomas Hardy, by following the particular.materialist logic of his personal variables. In the abstract, too, these idiosyncratic variables, which I shall.discuss l a t e r , do find some generalised theoretical formulation, especially regarding the interaction among text, reader, writer, and the rest of society, the objective effects of this interaction on the reader, and the reader's more or less conscious - 232 -efforts to regulate those effects i n his or her own interests (\"appropriation\"). And through them a l l , indeed, emerge Williams' fundamentally social-democratic p o l i t i c a l values and viewpoint. Thus, i n an early description of his ideal of a \"good community\" and \"living culture,\" typically phrased as an admonition aimed at \"the working class movement\" (rather than as an indictment of bourgeois society), Williams effectively urges a relaxing of proletarian vigilance and independence, in the direction of classless pluralism, within the explicit p o l i t i c a l framework of bourgeois \"industry and democracy,\" or the \"long revolution\": A good community, a livin g culture, w i l l . . . not only make room for but actively encourage a l l and any who can contribute to the advance in consciousness which i s the common need. Wherever we have started from, we need to liste n to others who started from a different position. We need to consider every attachment, every value, with our whole attention; for we do not know the future, we can never be certain of what may enrich I t . . . . Thus, in the working-class movement, while the clenched f i s t i s a necessary symbol, the clenching ought never to be such that the hand cannot open, and the fingers extend. . The forces which have changed and are s t i l l changing our world are indeed industry and democracy. Understanding of this change, this long revolution, . . . i s not easy to reach. . . . We are learning, slowly, to attend to our environment as a whole, and to draw our values from that whole, and not from i t s fragmented parts, where a quick success can bring long waste. . . . The struggle for democracy i s the pattern of this revaluation. . . . (CS, pp. 320-22; see also Long R, p. 340) Here, \"the struggle for democracy,\" or the \"long revolution,\" i s conceived expressly within the confines of bourgeois \"industry and democracy\"; the stick i s openly bent against \"the working-class movement\" and i t s r e a l , non-symbolic \"clenched f i s t , \" In favour of - 233 -\" a l l and any\" who have \"started from a different position.\" The class-orientation of the l a t t e r , typically, i s never forthrightly revealed as bourgeois; that has to be deduced from the class-nature of i t s opposite, the \"working-class movement.\" Moreover, again typically, the crucial issue Is i d e a l i s t i c a l l y and classlessly (\"common need\") posed as one of \"advance in consciousness\" rather than one of social revolution through organised proletarian activity and consciousness. But, of course, the passage also contains precisely those li b e r a l enjoinments that are at once sensible because self-evident and abstract because non-commital regarding class. Of course one would be a foolish Marxist indeed i f one did not \"listen to others who started from a different position,\" did not \"consider every attachment, every value,\" with one's \"whole attention,\" and claimed to \"be certain\" of everything about the \"future\" and \"what may enrich i t . \" But, a Marxist may also legitimately ask, does Williams' recommended alternative of eclecticism here refer simply to a Marxist's range of parameters, the merely numerical scope of his or her objects of enquiry? Or does i t rather refer to a clearly-charted orientation towards liquidating Marxist methodology and proletarian independence (in a l l spheres) into the amorphous \"struggle\" for bourgeois \"democracy\"? My answer would be the l a t t e r . The studied agnosticism of \"l i s t e n , \" \"consider,\" \"do. not know,\" \"open,,\", \"extend,\" \"understanding,\" \"learning,!' and \"attend\" i s decisively exposed in i t s bourgeois bias by Williams' open, campaigning for \"democracy,\" in effective practical opposition to the real \"clenched f i s t . \" Williams' real demand, therefore, - 234 -i s n e i t h e r f o r \" n e u t r a l \" n o n - i n t e r v e n t i o n i n the c l a s s - s t r u g g l e , nor even f o r an e n t i r e l y necessary democracy w i t h i n the workers ' r e v o l u t i o n a r y movement, but f o r an abandonment of p r o l e t a r i a n c l a s s -independence i n favour of the e x i s t i n g bourgeois \"environment as a whole\" and f o r an abandonment of the \"short r e v o l u t i o n \" i n favour of h i s \" l o n g \" one. Thus, W i l l i a m s ' urging of workers to \" c o n s i d e r \" \"every\" attachment and value wi th t h e i r whole \" a t t e n t i o n \" i s r e a l l y h i s coded advice to accept bourgeois attachments and v a l u e s , i n o p p o s i t i o n to r e v o l u t i o n a r y p r o l e t a r i a n ones. Wil l iams. ' \" u n c e r t a i n t y \" about \" f u t u r e \" values merely amounts to a determined p r e d i s p o s i t i o n to r e j e c t only those c e r t a i n t i e s f lowing from the r e a l , non-symbolic \"c lenched f i s t . \" A l l u n c e r t a i n t i e s are reserved f o r that p a r t i c u l a r \" f u t u r e , \" n o t — i r o n i c a l l y — f o r the one that he h i m s e l f terms the \" l o n g \" r e v o l u t i o n . In other words, W i l l i a m s ' apparent approval of the symbolic clenched f i s t a c t u a l l y hinges on h i s e f f e c t i v e r e j e c t i o n of i t s p r a c t i c a l i m p l i c a t i o n s . Y e t , r e f o r m i s t and u l t i m a t e l y c o n c i l i a t o r y though W i l l i a m s ' stance towards c a p i t a l i s m may b e , he does perce ive t h i s reformism as a r e a l s t ra tegy f o r \"human,\" \" c u l t u r a l \" l i b e r a t i o n . To that end, h i s general c r i t e r i o n of l i t e r a r y value i s one that o f t e n favours e f f e c t s that a t l e a s t lead to ( c u l t u r a l - r e f o r m i s t , humanist) a c t i o n . In t h i s , even i f i n an attenuated f a s h i o n and a t a q u a l i t a t i v e l y l e s s r a d i c a l l e v e l , W i l l i a m s ' c r i t e r i o n p a r a l l e l s that of Caudwell . And i t i s t h i s r e f o r m i s t - u t i l i t a r i a n c r i t e r i o n , that serves as h i s . g e n e r a l p o l i t i c a l p r i n c i p l e f o r s e l e c t i n g h i s f a v o u r i t e \" t r a d i t i o n \" i n l i t e r a t u r e , f o r h i s \" a p p r o p r i a t i o n \" of a v a i l a b l e l i t e r a r y v a l u e s . - 235 -Thus, in Po l i t i c s and Letters (p. 343) Williams e x p l i c i t l y rejects the purely personal criterion i n favour of an objective one, but s t i l l avoids lending the latter a class-definition. Instead, his definition harks back to the community-oriented c r i t e r i a of Culture and Society i t s e l f : \"Serious acts of valuation. . . are those which have a wider t-than-personal] continuity of effect as an active process. They are modes of standing towards a particular form, which show i t in a different light that affects not just some way in which we react to i t , but some way i n which we l i v e . \" But exactly what 'wider\"-than-personal evaluative criterion to employ, which particular \"modes of standing\" to recognize as v a l i d , and exactly how to define, assess, and act on the \"way i n which we l i v e , \" are a l l questions typically l e f t unbroached and unanswered: .that i s , from a consistently Marxist standpoint, the issues of class, (proletarian) partisanship, and (proletarian) revolution are a l l ignored. The values of \"community,\" \"complexity,\" and \"democratic socialism\"—in a word, of reformism— replace them instead. In this l i g h t , even Williams' early talk about \"[gfjreat literature\" as being \"indeed. . . liberating\" and about the near-absurdity—but also near-possibility—of literature functioning as a \"substitute\" for \" l i v i n g \" (CS, p. 245) retrospectively shows i t s e l f to be quite compatible with his lifelong mode of active \"culturalist\" reformism. Both versions reject proletarian social revolution. Thus, even when Williams condemns Lawrence's passivity, defeatism, and inconsistency (MT, p. 138), he himself s t i l l remains firmly within this framework: - 236 -. . . Lawrence w i l l not even oppose what he opposes, w i l l not enter that dimension at a l l , in any active way, though he has known It as torment and written i t as general and inescapable. It i s possible to say this, i f one believes i n meaningful social action, and of course to await that summary dismissal as p o l i t i c i a n or sociologist, a simple pedlar of the old social dream. . ./•;. At this [the] farthest point of his c r i s i s , Lawrence not only refuses to oppose what he opposes, but also refuses to affirm what he affirms. Under these tensions, only death i s possible. After a l l , Williams elsewhere explains, \"[t]o succeed in art i s to convey an experience to others i n such a form that the experience is actively re-created—not 'contemplated,' not 'examined,' not passively received, but by response to the means, actually lived through, by those to whom i t i s offered\" (Long R, p. 34). But, of course, in precisely how consistent a manner—from a Marxist point of view—Williams himself wants to see the \"experience\" \"actively re-created\" and \"actually lived through,\" remains the question. The link between Williams' occasional discussion of evaluative response and his more frequent discussions of ostensibly intr i n s i c literary value i s his concept of the \"selective tradition,\" in relation to the c r i t i c ' s mechanism for i t s appropriation (\"assimilation\"). Taking his cue from Marx's observation that the French neo-classical dramatists' \"misunderstanding\" of Greek drama \"corresponded to the needs of their own art\" (Marx/Engels, p. 269), Williams offers the generalisation, that \" [t] he traditional culture of a society w i l l always tend to correspond to i t s contemporary system of interests and values. . .\"(Long R, p. 51). The particular c r i t e r i a for the correspondence, Williams notes, may vary: sometimes a work may continue - 237 -to be valued because i t constitutes \"a.genuine contribution to cultural growth\"; at other times, he observes, \" (w]e shall find . that we are using the work in a particular way for our own reasons . . . \" (Long R, pp. 52-53). And in any case, he concludes, \" i t i s better to know this general, material law of valuation than to surrender to the mysticism of the 'great valuer,^ Time\"1 (Long R, pp. 52-53). Now, in these statements, there seems to be nothing that e x p l i c i t l y contradicts the premises and methodology of Marxism. However, the entire argument i s actually advanced within a purely evolutionary conception of \"complex\" and \"continuous\" social \"growth,\" so that practical (and organised) class-struggle as a decisive and often drastic, revolutionary selective factor i s replaced by \"many kinds of special interest,\" of which \"class interests\" are but one, non-definitive set. Yet, Williams' rejection of class as definitive merely indicates his more general disagreement with the consistent historical materialism of the Marxist method. Consequently, while denying the notion of absolute \"human perfection (a movement towards determined values),\" he simultaneously advances the possibility of equally absolute \"true\" values and \"permanent\" contributions (Long R, p. 53). This dual rejection of consistent class-centredness and h i s t o r i c a l relativism i n his analytical method -icx&cially matches his non-interventionist prognosis regarding \"the relevance of past work, in any future situation,\" which—proceeding from a non-revolutionary point of view—he can only describe as unmitigatedly \"unforeseeable\" (Long R, p. 51). The Marxist revolutionaries, as well as Caudwell, could a l l recognise and adumbrate (in their h i s t o r i c a l l y distinct ways) the class-defined, qualitative h i s t o r i c a l break in social - 238 -configuration and values that bourgeois society would face at some point; but Williams* reformist programme, coupled with his denial of classes as a definitive social category, forces a complete evasion on his part, over this question. Thus, in an early extrapolation of his oft-repeated platitude that \"the break towards socialism can only be towards an unimaginable greater complexity\" and that the \"notion of social simplicity . . . i s untenable\" (PL, pp. 128-29), Williams envisions a society in which the working class has somehow already managed to \"become dominant.\" It then \"would, of course,\" he concludes, \"produce new valuations and new contributions. But the process would be extremely complex, because of the complexity of the inheritance, and nothing i s now to be gained by diminishing this complexity to a crude diagram\" (CS, p. 309). Of course, a Marxist would want to know the specific diagram that Williams dismisses as \"crude.\" Judging by other internal evidence, Williams i s almost certainly referring to Zhdanovism. But Zhdanovism (literary Stalinism) i s not Marxism, as Trotskyism has repeatedly pointed out. To liberals and social democrats, however, the two are identical. Herein l i e s Williams' objective p o l i t i c a l bloc with bourgeois anti-communism. A connection exists, moreover, between Williams' undialectlcal leap into \"complex\" \"socialism\" and his reformist-nationalist frustration at not already having found the all-inclusive \"proletarian\" British novel, irrespective of even his own brand,of \"socialist society.\" \"It is extremely sad,\" he laments, \"to read proletarian novels which are totally authentic and have something of the breadth of interest of 19th-century bourgeois realism, yet to feel at the end that they are - 239 -profoundly regional in the sense that the very forces which operate from outside on the formation and the destiny of the class i t s e l f . . . cannot be represented within them. The most that can be introduced is the occasional class v i s i t o r or class enemy\" (PL, p. 267). It i s as though literary production has—and should have—nothing to do with i t s class-conditions of p o s s i b i l i t y . One result of such a method i s the extreme personalisation of virtually a l l the selective c r i t e r i a , qualified by a perfunctorily self-admonitory confession of that fact. Thus, Williams—as the representative of an admittedly limited social sector—can easily be taken to imply that novelists such as George E l i o t and Lawrence a r e generally \"important because they connect directly with our own kind of upbringing and education\"; they touch upon a period \"in which some of us have gone to Oxford or Cambridge\" and, of course, upon Williams himself \"who went to Cambridge and now teach [es]there.\" Thus, for Williams, the criterion ensuring the claimed literary value of certain writers i s the arbitrary and seemingly classless \"question of the relation between education ... . and the actual lives of a continuing majority of our people . . . who are s p e c i f i c a l l y , l i t e r a l l y , our own 35 families\" (CC, p. 209), Conjunctural literary value thus becomes indexed to the experiences, views, and values of \"us\"—a narrow section of a particular social stratum, namely, those of the \"Oxbridge\" academic establishment typified by Williams. This nonrMarxist, petit-bourgeois perspective decisively conditions both.the.relative p o l i t i c a l s e l f -consistency and.the logical contradictions of Williams' method of judging particular authors or works and of selecting.his favourite literary \"traditions.\" - 240 -Williams' contradictory methodology and c r i t e r i a for judging readers' response are duplicated i n his approach both to the general internal components and processes shaping the text and to the specific values seen to be contained i t i t . Essentially, once more they operate within anti-Marxist assumptions; hence they swing between reformist logic and radical phrases, empiricist practice and theoretical disclaimers of empiricism, classless generalisations and absolutist choices of specific texts, authors, and \"traditions\" linked to entrenched sectoral values—some of which, of course, are broadly compatible (though not identical) with the revolutionary Marxists' c r i t e r i a . Methodologically, as we have seen, Williams' alternative to pursuing evaluation \"as an isolated activity\" consists not In placing i t within the framework of revolutionary proletarian interests and tasks but i n actually counterposing his \"culture\"-centred reformism to that Marxist strategy. Thus, significantly, he reproduces and attacks, from an anti-Marxist position, a familiar distortion of Marx's comment that, \"as regards art, i t i s well known that some of i t s peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society\": putting i t i n a . . . familiar way, the a r t i s t i c achievements of a class belong to i t s r i s e . This i s a classical Marxist proposition and there are many examples to confirm i t . . . . - 241 -But I have often been tempted to think that It Is a regular pattern that a particular kind of formally perfect work emerges at the end of a period i n the history of a class, although not necessarily that of i t s defeat— clearly not i n the case of Jane Austen's time. I think we have probably paid too l i t t l e attention to this recurrent phenomenon, because the other proposition— that major art i s connected with the confidence and vigour of the ruling class-takes us a good way. In fact there can be an especially perfect kind of art at a time when i t s social positions have become impossible. (PL, p. 250) This statement i s an elusive polemic against Marxism. It i s elusive most obviously because i t attacks but does not e x p l i c i t l y use or paraphrase Marx's actual words i n his Introduction; i t i s elusive also because much of what Williams correctly attacks i s a false target, a straw man simultaneously evocative of and untrue to Marx's Introduction. But i t i s worse than falsely evocative of Marx: i t i s distortive. For nowhere in my Marx can I find that \"other proposition—that major art i s connected with the confidence and vigour of the ruling class,\" or that \"the a r t i s t i c achievements of a class belong to i t s ri s e , \" though both propositions may be perfectly legitimate in themselves. And of course, beyond that, the very question of which specific works qualify as \"major \"art needs to be settled before one can test the merits of the proposition as a whole. Yet this near-severance of \"major art,\" of \"formally perfect work,\" from \" i t s social positions,\" \"the history of a class,\" ultimately - 242 -stems from Williams' familiar reformist perspective of carrying out a \"cultural revolution\" irrespective of social revolution. Once one has emphasised the looseness of the superstructure from i t s base and defined one's goal in l i f e as \"cultural p o l i t i c s , \" - half the battle over values i s already \"won\": the project for full-scale reform of \"values\" may now be begun within the confines of capitalism, free from the Leninist insistence on fundamental socio-economic change as the historic prerequisite for decisively solving a l l cultural problems. At bottom one may recognise, in Williams' above inaccurate paraphrase, the familiar, revisionist rejection of \"Base-Superstructure\" and \"Class.\" The consequences, as I have noted, are contradictory. Mainly, on the one hand, Williams lapses into an indiscriminate theoretical relativism, verging on indifference, towards-particular (especially socio-political) values; his subjective impressionism fuels his resistance to class-analysis. On the other hand, his specific evaluative c r i t e r i a and literary preferences turn out to be both sectoralist and absolute (flowing from a particular academic world-view), though their application is often accompanied by his attempts at c r i t i c i s i n g their limitedness. Williams' absolutist premises usually do not receive ex p l i c i t theoretical generalisation. But when they do, they seem quite categorical. Thus, the early Williams f l a t l y asserted that \" [i] f you don't like i t in one century, you can't reasonably like i t i n another\" (Long R, p. 265). In his more recent Po l i t i c s and Letters interviews, he echoed this early axiomatic statement, albeit in order to expose the real gap between Leavis' ostensibly principled valorisation of \"colloquialism\" - 243 -and \"everydayness\" and his actual discrimination towards these qualities in relation to their varying contexts: \"You can't extol these virtues in the past and then lament them.in the present without the extraordinary cultural map which Leavis had to draw: once a l l these things had been part of real l i f e , now they were a simple vulgarity\" (PL, p. 247). For Williams himself, however, \"Leavis' stated position of colloquiality and lived experience'V\"Is. s t i l l , on evidence, an absolute c r i t e r i a of positive value, and should have remained so for Leavis (PL, pp. 247-48). That is why Williams i s able to reveal to us, in an equally metaphysical vein, that he himself \"very consciously reserved the possibility that there may be permanent configurations that would account for the responses to which, for example, the concept of beauty points\" (PL, p. 341; emphasis mine). And although he goes on to say that \"such a finding . . . cannot be adumbrated speculatively beforehand\" (PL, p. 341), his record shows precisely several such attempts to capture some absolute general criterion of value. The net characteristic of this value may be defined as \"the detailed and substantial performance of a known model\" of people or a r t i s t i c forms, the latter including syntactical, rhythmic, and thematic patterns, conceivably rooted in \"certain shared 'physical' and 'mental'—active— l i f e processes of evolved human organisation,\" though \"of course made and remade within specific cultural traditions\"; as Williams puts i t , \"the materialising of recognition i s an evident formal element of much of the great art of the world\" (ML, pp. 209, 188, 191). Between.Williams' categorical absolutism and his equally extreme classless relativism, hovers his. premium on \"constant experiment.\" - 244 -Among his absolute general c r i t e r i a of int r i n s i c value, this one i s least in t r i n s i c to any one text per se. Early on, Williams had asserted that \" i t i s the e f f o r t , the learning [by nineteenth-century writers] in experience which i t is important for us to know\" (CS, p. 38). And later, he went so far as to value Under Milk Wood on this basis alone: \"It remains true, in the drama and the theatre, that we do not know what we can do until we have tried; . . . constant experiment is essential. Under Milk Wood ju s t i f i e s i t s e l f , i f only as this\" (DIB, p. 245). Yet, In calling for a \"new realism,\" to strike a \"balance\" between experimental struggles for new a r t i s t i c modes and the fetishising of those struggles themselves, Williams clearly warned against the latter ploy of mere experiment-for-experiment's sake: Reality i s continually established, by common effort , and art i s one of the highest forms of this process. Yet the tension can be great, in the necessarily d i f f i c u l t struggle to establish r e a l i t y , and many kinds of failure and breakdown are possible. . . . The recording of creative eff o r t , to explore such breakdowns, is not always easy to distinguish from the simple, often rawly exciting exploitation of break-down. . . . It i s certain that any effort to achieve a contemporary balance w i l l be complex and d i f f i c u l t , but the effort is necessary, a new realism i s necessary, i f we are to remain creative. (Long R., pp. 288-89) Naturally, the test of any realism must be \"experience.\" For Williams, however, \"experience\" as a criterion and a method also becomes the rationale, for, on the one hand, positing a l l kinds of ar b i t r a r i l y chosen values as absolute, and, on the other, for resisting a class-orientation in evaluative method and denying a class-axis within individual textual ingredients - 245 -\"Experience\" thus doubles as an adhesive for two mutually complementary \"opposites\": absolutism and classless relativism. It i s , in one sense, his axiological charm for warding off the e v i l s p i r i t of a l l \"received doctrines,\" a charm whose accompanying code-words usually are \"intensity,\" \" v i t a l i t y , \" \"immediacy,\" \"instinct,\" \"emotion,\" \"connection,\" \"strength\" and \" l i f e \" . This v i t a l i s t anti-\"doctrinanrism\" i s precisely the perspective from which he praises Godwin's use of experience in Caleb Williams,' i n contrasting his work to Burke's: \"Things as They Are seeks at the outset to i l l u s t r a t e the original argument and then throughout the rest of the book i s driven to challenge and to deny i t . That kind of straining at the limits of a position without giving up the intention behind i t i s pre-eminently the kind of p o l i t i c a l thought I was evoking as other than the application of received doctrines—the reworking of a formula through experience, both in the personal sense and in the most immediate social sense of what was actually happening inside England\" (PL, p. 124). Here, not only are we back to our earlier discussion of constant experimentation as one of Williams' absolute c r i t e r i a of positive value: we are also back to the issue of such fetishism's p o l i t i c a l significance. (\"Reworking\" for reworking's sake, \"straining\" for straining's sake, i s , after a l l , nothing but a programmatic fetish for \"experiment.\") This fetish i s merely a symptom. The more systemic disorder i s Williams' abstract and automatic extension of the f e l t need to challenge specific flawed arguments (such as Burke's or,even Godwin's) to the sphere of argumentation in general (\"a position,\" \"a formula\" [emphasis minej) { i t i s a significant inter-- 246 -pretation of an occasional necessity as a principled virtue. This interpretation and emphasis i s not an accident but an accurate polemical expression of deep c r i t i c a l impulses and, beyond that, of a p o l i t i c a l programme. For a settled social democrat such as Williams, to advocate resistance to Burkean conservatism alone ( i f at a l l ) would be unforgivably to allow free rein to Marxism. But i t i s Marxism or nothing that has historically always been the ultimate target and victim of social democracy; and Williams' generalised codewords \"received doctrines\" accurately suggest that his own \"intention behind i t \" i s no exception to that history. Corroboration of this view can be found in Williams' numerous, more explicit commentaries on radical literature of the post-Marx era. In general, i t i s safe to say that Williams invokes the authority of \"experience\" only when confronted with the abstract platitudes and s t i l t e d illustrations of Zhdanovite \"Socialist Realism\"—which, as we know, he then almost never distinguishes from genuine Marxism (see, for instance, his Cold War laudatory peroration on Pasternak, in Modern Tragedy, p. 173). \"Experience\" (with one or more of i t s specific attributes stressed) i s deployed in Williams principally to combat the Marxist notion—what he terms the \"stock notion\"—of class and correspondingly,to elevate the worth of \"community.\" Thus, in Culture and Society (p. 126), Williams is using quotation marks quite unironically when he complains that \"[t]he worst harm done by the 'stock notion' of class . . . was that i t offered category feelings about human behaviour, based-on a massing and simplifying of actual individuals, as an easy substitute for the d i f f i c u l t i e s of personal and immediate judgment.\" And in The Country and the City (p. 315), Williams significantly characterises Fred Kitchen's - 247 -novel Brother to the Ox (1939) as \"the true voice of the surviving countryman . . . with the real connections of labour and community. . . . It i s the real sense of context,\" he goes on* \"experiencing directly what i s ordinarily abstracted . . .; shrewdly observed, without class preconceptions.\" This i s the classic anti-Marxist double-standard, applied to axiology: \"class\" entails \"category\" feelings, but \"countryman,\" \"labour,\" and \"community\" do not; \"class\" Is based on a \"massing and simplifying of actual individuals,\" but \"community\" and \"labour\" are not; to see classes in society i s to harbour \"preconceptions,\" but not to see classes i s to be \"shrewd,\" \"without class preconceptions.\" These are precisely the preconceptions, as we have seen, of the Arnoldian l i b e r a l . In this case, they are picked up and perpetuated by a social democrat. Yet, as I noted, Williams i s contradictory in his evaluative methods, just as he i s in his p o l i t i c s . And part of that contradiction l i e s in his occasional recognition of the obvious epistemological absurdity and counterproductivity of empiricism. Thus, in c r i t i c i s i n g Camus' defeatist f i c t i o n a l philosophy, Williams openly declares that \"while history i s an abstraction i t i s s t i l l an abstraction from the actual lives of ourselves and others. There i s a point at which the refusal of history, the limitation of significance to the personally known and affirmed, becomes i n effect the refusal of others, and this also can be evasion and even complicity\" (MT, p. 184) In fact, in Po l i t i c s and Letters (p. 342), he even goes so far as to warn that although, in the act of evaluation (\"a declaration of interest\"), \"everyone i s i n i t i a l l y in a different situation, . . . - 248 -we should not forget the true common modes, beyond that, of class a f f i l i a t i o n . \" And indeed, one can sometimes find in Williams' work 38 the odd class-analysis of specific values. But generally, Williams' rejection of subjective, empiricist impressionism produces not class-dialectics but a classless algebra straddling extreme \"relativism\" and \"more general acts of valuation,\" a position of which the following i s the clearest statement: [TJhe movement towards declaration of situation is . . . cr u c i a l , given the successive mystifications of the trained reader or the informed c r i t i c or the cultivated gentleman. It does not have to lead to relativism, because the active valuations to emerge from the whole process would not be connected with those elements of one's own situation which are really just biographical idiosyncracies that issue into personal preferences. . . .; they would instead be related to those which associated one with others in certain more general acts of valuation . . . . What I am rejecting i s the notion of valuation without the development of either of the two situating processes—that which has come to be encapsulated as c r i t i c i s m . Today i t has become divorced even from the hist o r i c a l models to which i t used to be attached. . . . But i f you erect 'my first-hand response' into a criterion of judgment, i t i s very d i f f i c u l t to exclude such responses on grounds of p r i n c i p l e — a l l that can be said i s you've got a very clumsy f i r s t hand. . . . (PL, pp. 342-43) Williams' application of the above \"situating\" principle to specific values (and valued categories) i s frequent, and, admittedly illuminating, though there, too, the effect remains primarily abstract and negative, or de-mythifying. - 249 -But such a procedure is not far removed from a random sociologism, in which the most obvious and direct determinants of particular values and evaluations are seized upon by way of \"contextual explanation,\" without much concern for their broader logic or patterns of incidence and contradiction. In other words, i t i s methodologically of a piece with empiricism and impressionism; only the immediate ambit of those impressions becomes slightly more accommodating, more e l a s t i c . Williams1 work furnishes several instances of precisely such analyses, vivid but theoretically limited. Perhaps the most elaborate and rounded of these i s his commentary, in Marxism and Literature (pp. 11-54), on Neo-classical and Romantic values in general, what he calls the \"central Romantic assertions\" (ML, p. 50). Especially sharp i s his analysis of \"the denial of materiality by these necessary workers with material,\" as a protest against \"the capitalist system of material production for a market\" (ML, p. 162). Other similar conjunctural analyses— examining the writer's values, the text's contained values, the audience's values, as well as various c r i t i c s ' values—occur in his comments on Richardson's \"specialisation of virginity\" to a \"personal and (in i t s context) fashionable issue\" (CC, pp. 83-84), on the reasons why Wells, \"moving around a more comfortable London [than Gissing's] came as a positive r e l i e f , a recovery of energy\" (EN, p. 162), why sentimental tragedy \" i s now valueless\" (MT, p. 93), and why sentimental comedy failed and \"continues to f a i l \" (Long R, p. 260). Yet, the stamp of absolutism clearly marks the assumptions underlying at least the last three of those characterisations/evaluations: - 250 -Williams seems to have no doubt that Wells simply was and w i l l be universally viewed as \"a positive r e l i e f \" from Gissing, that sentimental tragedy nowadays simply is \"valueless,\" and that sentimental comedy undeniably failed and \"continues to f a i l . \" He thus routinely proceeds to \"explain\" those phenomena (as he sees them), in each case. But herein l i e s the tenacity of his idealist premises and method: they w i l l simply not be dispelled by formulaic, superficial \"conjuncturalism.\" For, unless one provides a relatively stable frame of reference, such specific evaluations either seem to lack a l l principle or seem to be each a law unto i t s e l f — a n d neither outcome reflects reality or helps the axiologist. A typical practical result of this method (more representative, incidentally, of Williams' general method than his analysis of Romantic values) can be seen in his evaluation of the theme of \"rebellion\" in drama. Thus, in discussing the sh i f t in the central figure in modern drama from \"the l i b e r a l hero\" to \"the hero as liberator,\" Williams points out that \" fi] n fact this work has rested on a particular kind of social support, with audiences drawn from groups committed to reform, or at least prepared to give i t a hearing\" (Long R, p. 267). Obversely, drama based on national legends \"has been less successful in finding a social basis\" in England than in countries such as Ireland and France. \"It has depended, in fact, on two kinds of audience: f i r s t , one associated with the church, which in some cases has sponsored such work, and which was.the effective basis for the introduction of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral; second, particularly with classical material, a limited.public with some classical education, usually served-by minority broadcasting.rather than by theatres\" (Long R, p. 268). - 251 -In such a s i t u a t i o n — i n a society divided into privileged, exploiting classes and deprived, exploited ones-—Marxists would hardly expect from a writer such as E l i o t anything more promising than what Williams calls \"a decadence in manner,\" \"the inertia of a convention he had begun by attacking,\" \"a tragedy\" i n which E l i o t \"finds and then loses, in experiment and accommodation, a new and serious dramatic form\" (DIB, pp. 217-219, 220-22). At least they would not be astonished to find aristocratic reaction from the American South \"accommodating\" to i t s class-image, ancient English obscurantism. Yet Williams finds this \"decadence\" \"startling.\" In The Elder Statesman, in 1958, he complains, \" [i] t i s Eliot's familiar conclusion: The release, through consciousness, from an unreal ordinary l i f e , 'only human beings'; the acceptance, in death, of another real i t y \" (DIB, p. 222). To Marxists, i t i s — i f anything— not Eliot's \"decadence\" (dating, according to Williams, from The Confidential Clerk [l953]) but Williams' astonishment at i t that may seem really \"startling.\" One noticeable distinction between the previous group of c r i t i c s — f r o m Marx to Caudwell—and Williams is that the latter addresses the problem of evaluative method in greater detail than the former. But, as we have seen, many of Williams' general axiological principles themselves emerge from his actual valuation (or devaluation) of particular textual ingredients: and a common ideological thread runs through his evaluative methods-and his specific c r i t e r i a of value. Hence, the p o l i t i c a l premises.from which Williams, judges literary c r i t i c s are the same as those from which.he judges \"creative\" writers and their literature, though the latter premises do show one or two nuances appropriate - 252 -to their special spheres of operation. Williams' counterposition of community, complexity, and reform to class-analysis and revolutionary evaluation thus also makes i t s e l f generally f e l t in his detailed judgments. In one sense, Williams' chief specific c r i t e r i a of literary value may be regarded as the same as everyone else's before him: truthfulness. In another sense, such a characterisation might seem an oversimplification, for the particular components that add up to truthfulness, for him, are certainly complex. It might be useful, therefore, to emphasise his formal c r i t e r i a of value over his ideological ones, while trying to convey a sense of them both through the term \"realism.\" Certainly, that term i t s e l f in Williams is not simple. The early Williams argued that the \"simple technical use of 'realism,' to describe the precision and vividness of a rendering in art of some observed detail . . . Q] . . . involves a l l the later complexities\" (Long R, p. 274). Later, in P o l i t i c s and Letters, he defined realism as \"a certain perception of reality and a certain awareness of inter-relationships,\" not a convention that \"carries a certain mode of composition with i t \" or one that bears \"a second-order relation to pre-existing r e a l i t y \" (PL, p. 350). Thus, he now concludes, \"a convention could resemble no actual history at a l l , yet be positively productive by i t s representation of possible situations. The soundest conventions are not.always.realist, although this i s more often the case than not.\" Generalising about such axiological issues-. (PL, pp. 306-07), Williams suggests that \"the crucial evaluative function is the judgment of conventions themselves, from a deliberate and declared - 253 -position of interest. . . . Each convention must be assessed by what i t is rooted i n and what i t does. . . . \" He distinguishes \"two kinds of judgment\": one i s the kind that enables us to classify a convention as \"historically productive and therefore hi s t o r i c a l l y valuable—in that sense . . . a major contribution to human culture\"; the other kind stems from one's own presumed \" a f f i l i a t i o n to the working class\" and enables one to classify \"bourgeois society and i t s contradictory products\" as \"a disastrously powerful contribution.\" By way of i l l u s t r a t i n g the second kind of judgment, he asks, rhetorically, \" [ l ] f I cannot be seriously offended that in [\"To Penshurst\" Ben Jonson] . . . wrote out the labourer, what a f f i l i a t i o n can I now make to labourers? . . . [and] . . . what i s the meaning of solidarity?\" A Leninist would answer that \"the meaning of solidarity\" within discourse today i s to seize every opportunity to extend i t beyond discourse: i t i s to demonstrate the general need for a workers' revolutionary organisation that w i l l remove the p o l i t i c a l obstacles exemplified by the l i b e r a l , moralistic gestures and abstract mental deliberations of someone like Williams himself. Williams would object to that. That is why his conception of working-class solidarity programmatically limits i t s e l f to discursive gestures signalling that he i s \"morally offended\" (PL, p. 307). As he once self-revealingly indicated,.\" [t] he nature of . . . £ the moral choices in l i b e r a l tragedy]... . i s in the end essentially a matter of attitudes towards revolution.. I t - i s . i n this process, that we are s t i l l engaged\" (MT, p 68). Judging by even his latest pronouncements, for Williams, the day of decision in favour of revolution.will never come. But his observations about the.historically dual character of literary conventions, especially of those generally assumed to typify - 254 -\"realism,*' are useful. Thus, in a discussion of Orwell, Williams remarks that \" [i] n Orwell's Lancashire i t i s always raining, not because i t often does or doesn't, but because i t has to do so as a condition of convincing local detail of the North\" (PL p. 391). C r i t i c i s i n g the later Orwell's \"extreme distaste for humanity of every kind,\" which he traces back \"after a l l to the early E l i o t , \" Williams suggests that \"certain literary conventions really dictate modes of observation, not just of writing, although i t ' s in the writing that the effective dictation comes and that what is taken as vivid and convincing and truthful i s actually prescribed\" (PL, pp. 390-91). Of course, specific literary conventions in themselves can hardly \"dictate\" a l l of a writer's modes of observation unless he or she is predisposed to the general outlook embodied in them. In the last analysis, i t would seem, no consistent description and explanation of the variable character of \"realism\" can avoid class-analysis. But that i s anathema to Williams. Thus, i t i s entirely in keeping with his non-class methodology that Williams should strongly hint at but s t i l l not spell out the petit-bourgeois class-basis of Orwell's urge to l e t Eliotesque \"conventions\" \"dictate\" his own observations. Generally, Williams i s not at a l l hostile to what he calls modernism, .especially when he i s comparing i t to Zhdanovite \"Socialist Realism,\" Thus, he recalls that in the Cambridge CPGB's Writers' Group, they \"were pretty c r i t i c a l of socialist realism—our interests were very much more in.modernism. . . . Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake . . . were the texts we most admired, and we counterposed to so c i a l i s t realism\" (PL, p. 45). He goes on to praise and i l l u s t r a t e the distinction \"between - 255 -indicative and subjunctive modes within the [modernist-realist] dramatic form i t s e l f \" (PL, p. 218). The indicative mode, he explains, \"states that this i s what reality i s l i k e , \" whereas the subjunctive mode \"precisely captures the most Brechtian intention.\" Williams then cites \"a striking example\"from Brecht's Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich, where a scene is f i r s t played showing the defeat of a revolution, \"and then i t is replayed with the introduction of some other element and the result is a different outcome.\" Contrasting this kind of \"transformation within a rea l i s t framework\" to the undialectical progressions usually depicted within Socialist Realism, Williams explains: \"A Utopian or futurist drama . . . would make a completely false jump to a socialist docks run by the workers in which there was no more co n f l i c t . In that kind of mode, there is no way of getting from the present to the future, which was always what was wrong with the Stalinist definition of socialist realism\" (PL, p. 219). As he argues in Marxism and Literature (p. 201), \" [i] ndeed the critique [by Marx and Engels] of 'tendency literature' i s not a case against 'commitment' but a case for serious commitment: the commitment to social reality.\" Yet, like most of Williams' interpretations of Marxist concepts, this one too may be seen to have been bent to his particular social-democratic and culturalist inclinations, presenting \"serious commitment\" as a chiefly literary intervention into a p o l i t i c a l l y amorphous \"social reality.\" The interpretation i s double-edged. However, one of i t s edges does cut against the blatant disregard for and distortion of class-reality spawned by bourgeois ideology and nurtured by Stalinism. And in this, Williams' argument does constitute a defense of some form of partisan realism. - 256 -Williams' manifest regret at the demise of nineteenth-century realism should be viewed in light of the above complicating factors. Nevertheless, his regret i s clear, especially in his tracing of i t s \"breakdown\" from \"expressionism\" in drama to the \"stream of consciousness\" i n the novel and, beyond, to \"the f i c t i o n of special pleading,\" or the propaganda novel (MT, pp. 139-40). \"In the best literature of the nineteenth-century,\" he recalls nostal-g i c a l l y , \"the whole way of l i f e and the individual human beings were not only simultaneous and contemporary, but were both real.\" But \"in the middle of the twentieth century,\" he decides, significantly echo-ing Caudwell's complaint, \"[a] general consciousness of i l l u s i o n has taken over from the reality of both . . . . Illusion i s not a means to r e a l i t y , but an expression of i l l u s i o n i t s e l f \" (MT, p. 141). Moreover, the Caudwellian parallel extends beyond general formulations, to several individual examples from literature i t s e l f . Thus, for instance, Williams' preference of reality to i l l u s i o n can take the form of valuing \"history\" over \"spectacle,\" as in Scott versus James, respectively (PL, pp. 256-57). He favours \"historical imagination\" (as in Shirley, Middlemarch, and Felix Holt) over the kind of \"fanciful exercises\" to be found in Romola or a Tale of Two Cities (EN, p. 14). He prefers \"authentic observation\" to Georgian \"sub-intellectual fantasy\" (CC, p. 308). He values dramatic \"realism . . . at every level of creation—action, persons, and speech,\" as in Hauptmann's The Weavers, over \"situation, plot, 'spokesman.' characters,\" as in Widowers' Houses 1 (DIB, pp. 273, 275). And he prefers \"dramatic conventions . . . which the audience do not recognise as-conventions\"— such as, apparently, the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral—to \"unfamiliar barrierjsj\" (DIB, pp. 199-200). - 257 -Real individuals must be shown integrated into a \"whole way of l i f e \" ; a writer must evoke the complexity of \"lived experience\" within a community. These pro-realism demands encapsulate Williams' overall conception of positive literary value. They do so, moreover, despite his receptiveness—in the face of a st u l t i f y i n g Socialist Realism—to formally non-representational \"modernism.\" They carry with them connotations of comprehensiveness of vision, internal consistency of expression (ideological, structural, and s t y l i s t i c ) , and courage and optimism of perspective (the l a s t , of course, expressly dissociated by Williams from organised communist partisanship). These aspects are sometimes also overtly expected by him as requisites. Williams' emphasis on \"lived experience,\" i n particular, often verges on the absolute, though this criterion must be seen in light of his other premiums on experiment and general truthfulness. Yet, i t is important to connect this specific criterion of \"literary\" value to Williams' philosophical subjectivism,\" -in \"which --experience\" becomes his coded \"answer\" to Marxist class-analysis. On the one hand, such a criterion can accommodate an entire gamut of arguably disparate writers, from Austen to Brecht, on the basis of either their compre-hensive vision or their observational precision. Thus, Austen's engagement with \"lived experience\" can be praised for being \"prying and analytic\"; George Eliot's engagement with i t in Adam Bede can be praised for bringing an essentially Austenite analysis \"to bear without the class limitation,\" counterposing the depicted \"social and economic relationships\" to class (CC, p. 205; also see Culture and Society, p. 118); and Brecht's \"complex seeing\" despite i t s \"alienating\" strategies,.can be praised.precisely for evincing the opposite of- \"the intensity of special pleading on behalf of an - 258 -isolated figure\": \"The positive reference, the source of values and explanation, is at the.other pole: the t o t a l i t y , the h i s t o r i c a l process\" (DIB, p. 321). Again, as we can see, the amorphous \"historical process\" simultaneously embodies concrete \"experience\" and eliminates the class-axis from any false individual/society counterposition. \"The strength of his [Brecht's] form,\" Williams continues, \" i s that i t permits this kind of c l a r i f i c a t i o n : at once clipped, b i t t e r , distant, and yet, in i t s assumption of a common complicity, a common weakness, connecting and humane in very general ways: a human need and satisfaction ironically 39 known and recalled\" (DIB> p. 321). Indeed, in Po l i t i c s and Letters (p. 216), Williams expressly dissociates Brecht's \"complex seeing\" from the idea (let alone the act) of \"revolutionary entry into a new world, because that repeatedly in the plays does not happen.\" Thus, i f Williams finds Gaskell's Mary Barton \"really impressive,\" he clearly does so not because of her social focus or sympathies—which seem, at most, of incidental, journalistic significance to him—but because of \"the intensity of the effort to record, in i t s own terms, the feel of everyday l i f e in the working class homes,\" for a \"convincing . . . creation of the characteristic feelings and responses of families of this kind (matters more determining than the material details on which the reporter is apt to concentrate) . . . \" (CS, p. 99: emphasis mine). As a polemic against Stalinism's mechanistic demands in i t s theory of Socialist Realism, Williams' emphasis on subjectivity i s understandable. But of even larger significance to a Marxist would be the revealing paradox that, as Williams' allegedly \"Marxist\" career - 259 -progresses, anti-Stalinism—rather than anti-capitalism—indeed becomes his abiding criterial preoccupation. This raises legitimate questions about whom he really sees as the main enemy of Gaskell's, Brecht's and his own, contemporary \"working class.\" Of a piece with the above paradox, moreover, is Williams' methodically inconsistent literalism with regard to Brecht and Gaskell, respectively. That i s , in Brecht's case, Williams refuses to recognise any message beyond what explicitly does or does not \"happen\" in the plays; in Gaskell's case, however, he is concerned to shift any possible focus away from the \"material details.\" The common principle, then, seems to be to obviate, at a l l costs, any discussion of real class-struggle. And the only evident reason for that is his demonstrated distaste for a l l the \"doctrinaire\" questions about revolutionary and organisational commitment that such a discussion might logically raise in the minds of consistent Marxists. Williams' evaluation of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is probably paradigmatic in this respect. He explicitly calls that novel \"very great\": \"I emphasise the achievement as indeed that; not a preliminary, an achievement\" (EN, p. 175). And he details the various aspects of \"lived experience\" depicted by Lawrence: \"A physical primary relationship\" between a mother and her sons that \"is lived through . . . as a whole and continuing experience, in which what can easily be separated as personal and social are, in fact, known as a single complicated process. And Lawrence writes of this with a closeness and a continuity that are still.unsurpassed; writing with the experience; with the mother as well as the son; with the l i f e they belong to that is more, much more than.a portrait of an environment or a - 260 -background\" (EN, p. 175). It i s as i f the only conceivable alternative to the false polarities of \"portrait\" and \"environment or back-ground\" wg£e ; mer-e 1 y l i f e \" and \"experience.\" One does not have to be a Marxist to see the theoretical banality as well as the practical passivity underlying the choices envisaged by Williams. On the same basis—that i s , of the claimed superiority of \"experience\" as, ideally, both a broadening and an intensifying non-class factor—Williams prefers Anna Karenina's concern with \"a whole experience\" to the \"isolated moral action\" of Lady Chatter ley's Lover\" and Lawrence's variety and internationalism over the parochialism 41 of the \"Wells-Bennett-Galsworthy type.\" And, i n like vein, he sees Camus' \"tragic humanism\" as a stepping-stone \"from a l i b e r a l to a so c i a l i s t humanism\" (MT, pp. 174-76). Williams' search for literary \" t o t a l i t i e s \" and \"connections\" to complement his perceived social \"communities\" also ranges over a wide spectrum of categories, including authorial ideology, characterisation, and idiom. His conception of a \"common credible world\" (CC, p. 303)— of \"connection\" (MTTp. 13), of a \"knowable community\" (EN, pp. 186-87)— illustrates this range. It extends from a writer's own participation in a \"believing community\" (as with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia f c s , p. 281] ) to the author's overall \"vision\" (as in Dickens [EN, pp. 54, 57] and in Ulysses [CC, p. 29l]) to \"whole actions which spring from the substance of . . . [the characters']] . . . lives\" (as does not happen in E l i o t [CC, p. 21l]) to \"complex feeling\" (as in Mother Courage and Her Children [MT, p. 202]), as far as \"community of speech,\" \"the most deeply known community\" (as i i i Ulysses [CC, p. 294], in \"[the early] Lawrence's miracle of language\" [EN, pp. 172-73], and in \"the anonymous, collective, popular idiom\" of Robert Tressell's Ragged-Trousered - 261 -Philanthropists [EN, p. 155]). On grounds of complexity and integration, Williams calls for a British emulation of Solzhenitsyn's F i r s t Circle (PL, p. 290) and upholds the Soviet cinema of Eisenstein over the cinema of Italian neo-realism (PL, p. 232). Obversely, Williams may reject a work for i t s lack of \"coheren[ce] in i t s own terms\" (PL, p. 259) or for i t s demonstrated \"gap\" between \"disparate structures\" within i t s invoked r e a l i t y . Thus he notes in sentimental tragedy \"an evident gap between private sympathy and the public order' (MT, p. 93): the bourgeois tragedians, he explains, \"moved by pity and sympathy, and struggling for realism, were in fact betrayed by this gap, where no realism was possible.\" Sometimes, moreover, Williams may partially reject a work because of an a r t i f i c i a l resolution imposed by the author on i t s real conflicts, as with Austen's attempt to reconcile \"property and virtue like a supernatural lawyer\" (PL, p. 248). \"We read the last chapters of Victorian novels,\" he comments, \"which bring the characters together and settle their future directions, with . . . indifference or even impatience. This kind of reparation i s not particularly interesting to us, because not really credible. Indeed i t looks much too like a solution, which twentieth-century c r i t i c s agree i s a vulgar and intrusive element in any art.\" \"Yet of course,\" he adds, \" [t]o conclude that there is no solution i s also an answer\" (MT, p. 55). The key term there is \"credible,\" for that i s Williams' basic criterion of realism. It i s on the basis of credibility (or lack thereof) that he c r i t i c i s e s Mary Barton Is \"devastating conclusion\" as a \"cancelling of the actual d i f f i c u l t i e s \" (CS, p. 103); and i t i s also on this basis that he c r i t i c i s e s the \" a r t i f i c i a l solutions\" - 262 -of sentimental comedy (Long R, p. 260). In a more complex discussion, Williams favourably.compares Emily Bronte's \"human solution\" (through \"human intensity and connection\") to George Eliot's \"more c r i t i c a l l y r e a l i s t world\"^ i n which she \"conceives and yet cannot sustain acceptable social solutions; i t i s . . . a sad resignation on which she f i n a l l y comes to rest\" (CC, p. 215). On the other hand, quite obviously, Williams i s not unaware of the dubious credibility of closed forms in art, precisely because of their rarity in l i f e . Thus, at one point, he accedes to a diagnosis of \"exactly what I f e l t was wrong with Hard Times\" as \"overtotalisation\" (PL, p. 253) and grants that, while the \"realist novel needs, obviously, a genuine community,\" i t i s also \"obviously d i f f i c u l t , in the twentieth century, to find a community of this sort\" in real l i f e (Long R, p. 286). In fact, apparently somewhat to his surprise, he finds the characters of George E l i o t , too, disappointingly unintegrated in this respect. Discussing Eliot's incomplete empathy with her characters, Williams complains that she \"gives her own consciousness, often disguised as a personal dialect, to the characters with whom she really does feel: but the strain of the impersonation is usually evident—in Adam, Daniel, Maggie, or Felix Holt. For the rest she gives out a kind of generalising affection which can be extended to a generalising sharpness (compare the Ppysers with the Gleggs and Dodsons), but which cannot extend to a recognition of lives individually made from a common source . . . \" (CC, pp. 207-08) . Thus Williams detects \"an evident failure of continuity between the necessary language of the novelist and the recorded language of many of the characters,\" resulting in \"a deeply inauthentic\" combination of \"idioms\" which is \"not particularly convincing\": such is allegedly the - 263 -case, for instance, with the speech of \"Adam or Dinah or Hetty . . . when they are acting as individuals.\" Now, for the sake of simplicity, let us concede Williams' ab i l i t y to distinguish between personae in general, regardless of his a b i l i t y to spot Eliot's particular persona among them. Even so, the discrepancy between his literary expectations and actual literature remains a problematic fact: and i t needs to be explained. In a sense, Williams' critique i t s e l f goes a long way towards furnishing the explanation. Significantly, however, in doing so, he regrets the alleged break in unity resulting from Eliot's (alleged) recognition of class-conflict: he does not welcome i t . To that extent, therefore, he seems to prefer structural and tonal unity, for instance, to the accurate depiction of social r e a l i t y , i f the two become counterposed. Thus, in P o l i t i c s and Letters (pp. 248-49), he praises \"the confidence of Jane Austen's remarkable unity of tone\" as \"an apparently successful unification of an ideology and a practice within a dominant class,\" even though he characterises her project as \"a very strenuous attempt to unify what was not unifiable—that is to say, the necessary processes and structures of a class to which she was committed, and the universalist values of a moral tradition which were overtly defined as honesty, kindness, responsibility.\" In contrast, he argues, \"[w]hen the early George E l i o t applies the same values to a wider admission of actual social relations, for example between landlord and tenant,\" the Austenite \"unity of tone breaks up.\" In E l i o t , he claims, \"the very recognition of c o n f l i c t , of the existence of classes, of divisions and contrasts of feeling and 43 speaking, makes a unity of idiom impossible.\" In light of the above, perhaps Williams' own claim that - 264 -\" [tjhe deepest c r i s i s in modern literature i s the division of experience into social and personal categories\" (MT, p. 121) captures, i n the percipient's own terms, something of his general perceptual problem (as Marxists would regard i t ) . That i s to say, the deepest characteristic of capitalism i s the division of society into two main opposing classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and one of the consequences of that division i s the disorientation of most petit-bourgeois Intellectuals trapped between these two classes, their inab i l i t y to recognise or accept that r e a l i t y . Such a framework at least begins to account for not only George Eliot's described problems but also for Williams' own perplexed disappointment at their undialectical oppositions (e.g., \"individual\" versus \"society\"). To grasp that fact, however, Williams would have to begin by accepting the validity of certain fundamentals of Marxism—for instance, that class-being determines class-consciousness (and also c l a s s - i l l u s i o n ) . Yet, as we know, he is averse to doing so, at least in any decisive and consistent manner. The defining general contradiction of Williams' axiology, then, seems identical to Caudwell's: an un-Marxist p o l i t i c s (in Williams' case, social democracy) being brought to bear on literary evaluation and value theory allegedly within the framework of Marxism. The above are some key literary aspects and p o l i t i c a l ramifications of Williams' criterion of truthfulness. His particular stress on t o t a l i t i e s and lived experience bespeaks an empiricist Idealism—which, from a Marxist point of view, is not at a l l a contradiction in terms. Williams' methodology, in i t s various ways, repeatedly reveals the contradictions stemming from the r i v a l claims of i t s components: the empiricist side tends to foster extreme observational subjectivism, - 265 -impressionism, and parochialism, while the idealist side pushes him to reach for an abstract theoretical wholeness that he can (understandably) never grasp. Missing from Williams'methodology, of course, is any consistent use of the dia l e c t i c a l and materialist criterion of \"class,\" along with the related programme for an organised, revolutionary intervention into the debate over value. This consigns his value-judgments to perpetual oscillation between passively direction-less relativism and insistently categorical absolutism—however much he might claimsto deplore both. Underlying the vi r t u a l absence of the class-criterion from Williams' axiology i s , once more, his opposition to the Marxist categories of base and superstructure; and underlying this broad ideological opposition to Marxism i s his p o l i t i c a l fatigue, expressed in his reformism and his corresponding h o s t i l i t y to organised communist partisanship. While a l l these positions reveal a mutual consistency, they also externally negate, as a whole, Williams' claim to be a contributor to Marxism. Herein l i e s the single most influential contradiction of his p o l i t i c s . One of the starkest implications of Williams' general and specific p r i o r i t i e s can be clearly observed in his handling of p o l i t i c a l l y reactionary writers. While he correctly perceives in each of these writers certain contradictions, and while each such \"paradoxical writer,\" as he usually calls them, formally resembles the phenomenon perceived in Balzac by Marx and Engels (or i n Tolstoy by Lenin and Trotsky), Williams' actual resolution of those contradictions merely parodies the revolutionaries' method and c r i t e r i a . Indeed, one might quite simply characterise the difference as that between Marxism and social democracy. For, in a symptomatic reversal of p r i o r i t i e s - 266 -later acknowledged to be a p o l i t i c a l skew but never actually corrected, Williams seldom stresses anything positive about the (albeit problematic) pro-socialist literature of the workers' states (for, are they not a l l homogeneously \"Stalinist\"?) and equally firmly refuses to stress anything negative about such classic English reactionaries as Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle. The relevant primary material on this issue i s the section in P o l i t i c s and Letters (pp. 97-132, esp. pp. 103-06, 109, and 120-24) devoted to a discussion of Culture and Society. In that section, Williams simultaneously admits this p o l i t i c a l disorientation and continues—implicitly, through a myriad \"explanations\" about the \"complexity\" of the problem, his \"original strategy,\" and the drawbacks of his \"literary training\"—to defend i t . The gist of his contradiction i s cogently presented to him by his interviewers. B r i e f l y , they begin by stating that \"certain omissions\" from Williams' \"Culture and Society\" tradition seem \"very strange\" (PL, p. 98); these omissions include Marx (PL, pp. 115-16); and William Morris, the early English Marxist, is routinely incorporated into the predominantly conservative tradition of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Mallock (PL, pp. 128-29). The interviewers maintain a studied diplomacy, speaking, for instance, of \"an inadvertently conservative bias\" (PL, p. 103), of \" a striking inequity in . . . treatment\" (PL, p. 104),of \"particular and significant imbalances in i t \" (PL, p. 106), and of \"overgenerous assessments of people on the conservative side of this tradition, or too restrictive judgments of people who were on the other side\" (PL p. 107). But they nevertheless feel compelled to remark that \"[s]uch absences would appear to risk certain real distortions in your - 267 -account . . . \" (PL, p. 99) . C r i t e r i a l l y , Culture and Society i s demonstrated by the interviewers to reveal \"a clear contrast . . . between truth which is necessarily s o c i a l , and p o l i t i c s which i s a b r i t t l e and ephemeral adjunct separable from i t \" (PL, p. 101). \"At a number of points in the book,\" they continue, \"you seem to be contrasting or counterposing ideas and arguments with what you c a l l 'response' or 'experience'\" (PL, p. 120). Quoting Williams on Burke, they note \"an opposition between the truth of ideas as usually understood . . . and a deeper or more durable experience that does not necessarily correspond to any kind of ordinary discursive truth\" (PL, p. 120). They round off the evidence with further quotations from Williams, on Coleridge and Carlyle, and conclude: \"These passages can appear to be devaluing the ordinary c r i t e r i a of rational judgment—the sense in which we determine whether certain ideas are true or whether they are false\" (PL p. 120). By way of specific i l l u s t r a t i o n , the interviewers re c a l l the following evaluations, which are worth citing at length: Your discussion-of Burke contains virtually no limiting phrases at a l l . It ends by saying that we should be grateful to Burke for what you c a l l his \"magnificent affirmation\" (CS, p. 39). In the case of Carlyle, you do c r i t i c i s e his later writings b r i e f l y , but you s t i l l conclude that his \"purposes\" were \"positive and ennobling\" and that overall \"reverence\" was \"his essential quality\" (CS, pp. 90 - 272 -The.key to the \"paradox,\" of course (Marxists would argue), i s the anti-capitalist sentiments and rhetoric of parts of the aristocratic Byron and the monarchist Southey, on the one hand, and the general lack of class-consciousness and class self-interest among the early English proletariat, on the other. Lenin, as we know, expressly addressed the latter phenomenon in his own profession and fought for an independent organisation to lead the proletariat out of their limited consciousness. But for Williams, who resists Marxist theory (not to mention Leninist practice) in i t s most elementary form, such a \"paradox\" must indeed remain a mystery. This link between his anti-Marxist method and what he c a l l s a \"problem\" about a plausible explanation for certain readerships i s made clear by Williams himself: \"anybody could reel these writers off as the representative figures of a certain social class. Not that the description was necessarily wrong, but I knew that i f you started from that kind of abstract delineation you didn't even have to read them—you read from i t \" (PL, p. 111). But Williams' un-dialectical alternative, the \"concrete\" shunning of any class-analysis whatsoever, then produced his demonstrated, politically-defined preference for the likes of Burke and Carlyle over Shelliey, Cobbett, and Morris. And his dismissive rationale for praising Carlyle i s a telling i l l u s t r a t i o n of where.this anti-Marxist logic would lead him: \"I had had so much of this marshalling of who were the progressive thinkers and who were the reactionary thinkers i n the nineteenth century when I was a student: I too wrote my essay on Carlyle as a fascist when I was an undergraduate. Part of the submerged history of the book i s that there were a l l sorts of positions which came almost too easily to the pen, - 273 -which were .then .precisely .what I.was drawing back from. I had discovered themes profoundly related to my sense of the social c r i s i s of my time and the socialist way out of i t , not in the approved l i s t of progressive thinkers, but in these paradoxical figures. I then overemphasised the place of these values in writers whose eventual development led them i n a quite different direction\" (PL, pp. 105-106). Even without going into details about the individual authors, surely no Marxist would characterise the maturing of Burkean reaction or of Carlylean pro-imperialism as developments in directions \"quite different\" from their early tendencies; the seeds of their terminal fanaticism were already embedded in their founding p o l i t i c a l assumptions. Marx and Engels, as we know, were not fooled by Carlyle. But Williams i s not a Marxist; he i s , therefore, in the p o l i t i c a l sense, taken by surprise. Paradigmatic of Williams' politico-axiological contradictions Is the positive value he places on courage, strength, and optimism, on the one hand, and on imagination and incertitude, on the other. These c r i t e r i a , in their frequent conjunctural opposition and ambiguity, graphically convey the abstractness and contradictoriness of Williams' reformist p o l i t i c a l programme and i t s attendant values. Thus, i t i s not only the Bronte sisters who are praised for breaking \"a whole structure of repression i n their time . . . with a strength and a courage that puts us a l l i n their debt\" (EN, p. 63), or Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song for depicting \"the strength of the l i v i n g people\" (CC, p. 323). Burke, too, i s praised, .for retaining, \"at.the height of his .prejudices, . . . an always admirable^strength\" (CS, p. 126). On the one hand, Williams admires:in Ibsen's plays the sense that \"the experience of defeat does not diminish, the value of the fight\" (PL, p. 63) and finds Lawrence's - 274 -\"recovery of energy\" in Lady Chatterley's Lover \"very moving\" and \"profoundly encouraging\" (EN, p. 184). Obversely, he despises Gissing's \"despair born of social and p o l i t i c a l d i s i l l u s i o n \" (CS, p. 177) and Orwell's \"profoundly offensive\" assertion in 1984 \"that people w i l l always betray each other,\" as well as the 45 \"defeatist\" lament in Animal Farm (PL, pp. 390-91). On the other hand, he states in P o l i t i c s and Letters (p. 127) that \" [t]he only Lawrence I now read i s the very late Lawrence, the versions of Lady Chatterley and the autobiographical texts he wrote just before he died. It i s the powerful uncertainties there that are impressive.\" Something of Williams' categoricalness as well as something of his perpetual hesitancy i s caught in the above two assessments of value i n Lawrence. And, as always, the miner's son Lawrence brings out in him the deepest p o l i t i c a l contradictions shaping his c r i t e r i a for literary evaluation, not merely in specific instances but also in general. Thus i t i s no accident that courage and \"creative disturbance,\" two valued qualities perceived i n Lawrence, are also features that Williams praises in our next object of focus, Thomas Hardy. Williams' Evaluation of Hardy In a sense, Williams' c r i t e r i a for evaluating a l l literature, - 275 -including the works of Hardy, share the anti-Caudwellian thrust of his general literary theory. Through his negation of the S t a l i n i s t , mechanistic c r i t e r i a readily observable in Caudwell, Williams advances his own, narrowly academic, petit-bourgeois alternatives. However, his specific evaluation of Hardy does offer a concrete and detailed axiological model, from which Marxist evaluation can then choose i t s own points of concurrence and departure. The periodisation of English literary history that accompanies Williams' general theory of literature i s , more than in the case of Caudwell's, a function of the c r i t i c ' s personal definitions of \"relevance\" and \"tradition.\" In Culture and Society (pp. 320-22), Williams had defined his conception of a \"good community, a l i v i n g culture,\" in terms of the \"struggle for democracy.\" His periodisation of English literary history follows that declared c r i t e r i o n , focusing on the post-Shakespearean period, which i s then divided into five main stages: The C i v i l War and Re8toEHtion, the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism and Victorianism, an \"Interregnum,\" and the contemporary phase— a l l tending towards accomplishing the \"long revolution\" of \"democracy\" and industrial \"culture.\"4*' The progress of the novel as a genre i s traced in parallel form: i t is regarded as \"the major form in English literature\" between the eighteen-forties and the nineteen-twenties,4^ with .the \" s p l i t \" between i t s \"social\" and \"personal\" forms marking a crucial conjuncture \"between the 1890's, and the,first war\" (EN, pp. 9, 132). Intersecting this generic s p l i t and straddling a socially \" s p l i t \" situation/himself (between town.and country, bourgeoisie and labour) i s Thomas-Hardy. Williams, as we shall see, focuses on and values Hardy mainly because the social .meaning of \"Jude\" and - 276 -\"Christminster\" carries , \"a special importance to a particular generation [i.e., Williams'], who have gone to the university from ordinary families . . .\"; but i t also expresses, for Williams, the recent historical trend \"in Britain generally!' (CC, p. 241). Here, personally experienced polltics.can be clearly observed shaping Williams' perception of the general importance and \"relevance\" of a particular author. Historical categories parallel the l i t e r a r y , which i n turn reflect the p o l i t i c a l ; a l l of which come together i n his discussions of the c r i t e r i a for literary evaluation. Looking at Hardy principally as a prose-writer and novelist, Williams places him i n a line running through Cobbett, E l i o t , and Lawrence, among others, particularly in terms of the author's social situation, dominant subject-matter, and social and philosophical perception. On the other hand, looking at Hardy principally as a \"rural\" writer, Williams also places him in the tradition of one Joseph Arch, one Joseph Ashby, and one Richard Jeffries (as well as Cobbett), particularly in terms of the author's social attitude and use of literary imagery (CC, p. 238). In other words, Williams views and evaluates Hardy principally as a \"rural\" novelist registering, analysing, and c r i t i c i s i n g \"industrial capitalism.\" Much of Williams' incentive for not only evaluating but valorising Hardy i s negative; i t stems from his opposition to a certain kind of condescension towards the novelist shown by Leavis (see, e.g., 48 CC, pp. 208, 242). Williams seeks to dispel the sociological simplifications accompanying.such.patronising attitudes,.which reduce Hardy to a.mere \"regional novelist\" and his unsimple situation and vision to \"a neo-pastoral convention of - the. countryman as an age-old figure, or - 277 -a vision of a prospering.countryside being disintegrated by Corn Law repeal or the railways or agricultural machinery. ' In reply to a question from New Left Review about exactly how deliberate The English Novel's obvious \"inversion\" of Leavis' \"great tradition\" was, Williams replies at length (PL, pp. 245-46), clarifying the polemical context sketched above. \"At certain points [the inversion was] very deliberate,\" Williams confirms, reminding us that \"by this time, . . . i f you talked to anyone about the English riovel, including people who were hostile to Leavis, they were in fact reproducing his sense of the shape of i t s history.\" Addressing Leavis' treatment of Hardy in particular, Williams i n s i s t s , simply, \"he should not have done that to Hardy.\" Even the \"faults\" i n Leavis' formulations, Williams claims singling out \"his emphasis on Englishness or on particular kinds of rural community--\"should at least have directed his attention towards Hardy, rather than to excluding him from the very tradition i n which they were being urged.\" By the time of The Great Tradition, Williams complains, Leavis \"treats him patronisingly, almost as a country yokel.\" Nevertheless, of course, much of Williams' basis for valuing Hardy is positive. Williams relates very closely and personally to the social context of an upwardly-mobile petit bourgeoisie, signified (to him) by \"Jude\" and \"Christminster.\" He also sees i n those two names \"a much more general importance; for i n Britain generally this i s what has been happening; a moving out from old ways and places and ideas and feelings; a discovery in the new of certain unlooked-for problems, unexpected and very sharp crises, conflicts of desire and possibility\" - 278 -(CC, p. 241). Williams—following Hardy—would seem to be describing here nothing moreivor less than the apparently arbitrary c r i t e r i a governing bourgeois and petit-bourgeois values. Thus, Williams revealingly argues that Clym's rhetorical poser to his mother, '\"Mother, what i s doing well?'\" i s a \"familiar\" question and that \" s t i l l after a l l these years no question i s more relevant or more radical\" (CC, pp. 245-46). But not many British coal-miners today, for instance, could be found counting such relatively luxurious subjects among their consuming preoccupations. In other words, proletarian struggle i s apparently neither \"familiar\" nor \"relevant\" nor \"radical\" in Williams' scheme of Marxism. However, the ambivalence informing Williams' above emphasis i s also important to Marxists: in noting the familiarity and relevance of Clym's question, Williams shows his suspicion of the bourgeoisie; but in claiming that \"no question i s more relevant or more radical,\" he merely betrays his own easy access to the limited bourgeois opportunities for \"doing well,\" his corresponding blindness to the more extensive deprivation historically beleaguering the world proletariat, and his consequent over-generalisation of the relevance and the \"radical\" power of Clym's rhetorical question. This contradiction also reveals i t s e l f in the fact that Hardy i s not even mentioned.in Culture and Society (Williams' tribute to the right-wing, Burkean tradition) and i s then hailed as a \"landmark\" in the would-be \"radical\" The Country and the City: \"He writes more consistently and more deeply than any of our novelists about something that i s s t i l l very close to us wherever we may be l i v i n g : . . . the problem of the relation between customary and educated l i f e ; between customary and educated feeling and thought\" (CC, p. 240). A Marxist wonders how many - 279 -proletarians Williams thinks might enjoy the privilege of even knowing the difference, let alone understanding the said \"relation.\" But, as Williams himself c l a r i f i e s , to appreciate Hardy's capacity to do both, \"we have to get beyond the stereotypes of the autodidact and the countryman and see Hardy in his real identity: both the educated observer and the passionate participant, in a period of general and radical change\" (CC, p. 247). And Williams' own standpoint i s , of course, precisely that of \"the educated observer\"—in the service of social democracy. The \"real Hardy country,\" Williams therefore generalises, with his familiar absolutism,\">. . . i s that border country so many of us have been li v i n g i n : between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change\" (CC, p. 239). Tending to associate, quite a r b i t r a r i l y , whatever is \"last\" and \"most contemporary\" with the value-terms \"major\" and \"deepest,\" he furnishes as proof and i l l u s t r a t i o n of his value-assumption the novels Tess and Jude: \"(r]he last and deepest novels, Tess and Jude the Obscure, are significantly the most contemporary. . . . Within the major novels, . . . the experiences of change and of the d i f f i c u l t y of choice are central and even decisive\" (CC, p. 239). But, as Williams typically neglects to add, the \" d i f f i c u l t y of choice\" depends on the avail a b i l i t y and necessity of choice. And that, in turn, depends on whether or not one i s privileged enough to l i v e in Hardy/Williams' \"border country\" of the petit-bourgeois int e l l i g e n t s i a . Like Williams' own \"border country\" i n his criticism and f i c t i o n , Hardy's f i c t i o n a l \"border country\" corresponds to—Williams would deny that i t could actually be based on—that writer's petit-- 280 -bourgeois position in the real world (CC, pp. 242-43). Thus Williams characterises Hardy as \"one of the many professional men\" who worked within the rural-capitalist structure, \"often with uncertainty about where they\"— the \"actual country people\": \"landowners, tenant farmers, dealers, craftsmen and labourers\"—\"really belonged in i t . \" While his father was a small employer himself, Hardy, in becoming \"an architect and a friend of the family of a vicar . . . moved to a different point in the social structure, with connections to the educated . . . and . . . to that shifting body of small employers, dealers, craftsmen and cottagers who were themselves never wholly d i s t i n c t , in family, from the labourers.\"5 0 Hardy's changed, intermediate class-position also resulted i n his subjects and his putative audience corresponding to two different social strata. As Williams remarks of Hardy's rural peti t -bourgeois subjects and characters, \"he was not writing for them, but about them, to a mainly metropolitan and unconnected literary public.\" A l l these contradictions, argues Williams, then found expression within Hardy's f i c t i o n a l world as well: \"He i s neither owner nor tenant, dealer nor labourer, but an observer and chronicler, often again with uncertainty about his actual relation.\" Hardy, says Williams, thus attempted \"to describe and value a way of l i f e with which he was closely yet uncertainly connected,\" and \"the literary methods . . . follow from the nature of this attempt.\" However, we might add, two methodological/perceptual consequences accompany Williams' above, classification of Hardy and his writings. One i s Williams' tendency to reproduce in his.own c r i t i c a l theory the described class-disorientation of Hardy, by subordinating a l l . perceived class-factors to the \"personal choice\" of the novelist's characters. The - 281 -other i s Williams' inclination towards an axiological functionalism, whereby whatever transpired at the end of Hardy's.writing process may be seen as inevitable and therefore valuable. (Of course, this functionalist approval i s selectively bestowed: as we have seen, William Morris' style somehow does not qualify for even an equally functionalist acquittal, not to mention praise.) From the standpoint of Marxism, then, the ideologically skewed analytical and evaluative tools of Williams prove to be of somewhat tangential and contradictory use with respect to Hardy's similarly contradictory works. Williams' own perception of social dynamics i s indistinguishable from his reading of Hardy's perception; and Hardy, Williams says, sees a contradiction \"between intelligence and fellow-feeling,\" for \"the process which allows him to observe is . . . one which includes in i t s attachment to class feelings and class separations, a decisive alienation\" (CC_, p. 250) . The most typical Hardyesque co n f l i c t , Williams describes as the \"historical process i n which education i s tied to social advancement within a class society, so that i t i s d i f f i c u l t , except by bizarre personal demonstration, to hold both to education and to social solidarity ('he [Clym] wished to raise the class')\" (CC, p. 245). Williams' dominant emphasis, however, i s not on the class-framework fleetingly acknowledged above. In fact, that supposed framework becomes subordinated to \"personal choice\" in Williams' analytical scheme when he e x p l i c i t l y asserts the following: \"One of the most: immediate.effects of mobility,, within a structure i t s e l f changing, i s the d i f f i c u l t nature of the marriage choice. . . . The specific class element; and the effects upon this of an insecure economy, are parts of the personal choice.which i s after a l l a choice - 282 -primarily of a way to l i v e , of an identity In the identification with this or that other person\" (CC, p. 255). Thus Williams may, on the one hand, correctly Inveigh against a Leavisite simplification of Hardy's depicted society, even going so far as to introduce class-characterisations of i t : \"We cannot suppress . . . [Hardy's actual society], . . in favour of a seamless abstracted 'country way of l i f e . ' . . . There i s no simple case of an internal ruralism and an external urbanism. It i s not urbanism but the hazard of small-capital farming that changes Gabriel Oak from an independent farmer to a hired labourer and then a b a i l i f f . . . . The social process created in this interaction i s one of class and separation, as well as of chronic insecurity, as this capitalist farming and dealing takes i t s course\" (CC, pp. 253-54). Similarly, Tess i s \"not a peasant g i r l seduced by the squire\" but \"the daughter of a lifeholder and a small dealer\" seduced by \"the son of a retired manufacturer\"; Henchard is destroyed not by \"a new and alien kind of dealing but by a development of his own trade\"; Grace Melbury \"is not a country g i r l 'lured' by the fashionable world but the daughter of a successful timber merchant whose own social expectations, at this point of his success, include a fashionable education for his daughter\" (CC, p. 254). Yet, on the other hand, Williams tends to view objective class-interests as \"confusions\" (CC, p. 258); he effectively views \"custom and education,\" \"work and Ideas,\" \"love of place and an experience of change,\" \"intelligence,\" \"fellow-feeling,\" and 'personal choice\" as a l l subsuming \"the specific class element.\"51 He seldom:ventures beyond generalities about \"social\" \"mobility\" i n one 52 or another \"century,\" and he abstractly sees their \"common pattern\" - 283 -(in Hardy) as the \"relation between the changing nature of country livin g . . . and one or more characters who have become in some degree separated from i t yet who remain by some t i e of family inescapably involved\" (CC, p. 243). That i s , somewhat metaphysically, Williams perceive^ in Hardy's work a conjunctural, sectorally valid \"modernity,\" characterised by a \"paradoxical separation,\" a \"double movement, of loss and liberation, of exposure and of advantage\" (CC, p. 251). Usually, this paradox i s embodied in a heroic, torn figure (or two) caught in the socially contradictory attractions of upper-class security and success and radical petit-bourgeois social sympathies. \"It i s the c r i t i c a l problem of so much of English f i c t i o n , \" claims Williams, \"since the actual yet incomplete and ambiguous social mobility of the nineteenth century. . . . It i s here that the social values are dramatised in a very complex way and i t i s here that most of the problems of Hardy's actual writing seem to arise\" (CC, p. 243) . Tess i s cited as one example of such a paradoxical figure, though \"Grace i n The Woodlanders, Clymn in The-Return of the Native, represent this experience more completely,\" and \"we need not be tempted . . . to detach Jude the Obscure as a quite separate kind of novel\" (CC_, pp. 243-44) . At the centre of Hardy's positive value, Williams suggests, i s that novelist's (ostensibly) r e a l i s t i c , comprehensive, and humane depiction of the complex (and \"organic\") \"border\"rt'/conflict between two social systems—pre-Industrial (merchant) capitalism:.and industrial capitalism—overlapping:two geographical units—the country and the c i t y . Certain of Williams' familiar general c r i t e r i a of value recur in this - 284 -characterisation and assessment of Hardy's f i c t i o n . Prominent among them are, in some form or other, the c r i t e r i a of complexity, \"organic\" community, and faithfulness to \"lived experience.\" Of course, i n one particular instance, a l l these features seem to Williams to be typically captured in the \"organic relation\" that \"the limitations of the educated and the affluent\" bear to those of \"the ignorant and the poor (as in parts of Return of the Native and in Tess and Jude).\" I have in mind the following definitive passage from The Country and the City (pp. 246-47): The complexity of Hardy's f i c t i o n shows i n nothing more than this: that he runs the whole gamut from an external observation of customs and quaintness, modulated by a distinctly patronising affection (as i n Under the Greenwood Tree), through a very positive identificationsbf intuitions of nature and the values of shared work with human depth and f i d e l i t y (as In The Woodlanders), to the much more impressive but also much more d i f f i c u l t humane perception of limitations, which cannot be resolved by nostalgia or charm or the simple mysticism of nature, but which are lived through by a l l the characters, in the real l i f e to which a l l belong, the limitations of the educated and the affluent bearing an organic relation to the limitations of the ignorant and the poor (as i n parts of Return of the Native and in Tess and Jude). In keeping with Williams' declared premium on incertitude (recall his comment on the later Lawrence, for instance), that c r i t i c , as we note, effectively identifies his own \"perception\" of the \"limitations\" depicted by Hardy with that novelist's personal ideological \"complexity,\" lack of resolution, and;self-restriction to \"lived\" experience. That i s , while correctly-dismissing \"nostalgia or charm or the simple mysticism of nature\" as real solutions to the Hardyesque dilemma, Williams - 285 -nevertheless abdicates a certain:critical responsibility:to distinguish his own proposed solution to the situation from Hardy's. And he does so partly because there indeed i s very l i t t l e to distinguish their non-Marxist \"solutions,\" ideologically. But beyond this de facto similarity, Marxists might also perceive the crucial difference that while the f a t a l i s t i c Hardy had no p o l i t i c a l pretensions to arguing \"within historical materialism,\" the Williams of this period does project such an image—explicitly i n Marxism and Literature (p. 5) and implicitly in The Country and the City, through his choice of terminology (see the extensive discussion on the latter book, on this very question, in P o l i t i c s and Letters, pp. 303-23, esp. 310-20). Yet, i t i s precisely the bankruptcy of Williams' p o l i t i c s that disables him at the crucial moment of evaluation. The Hardyesque combination (\"limitations\") of petit-bourgeois experience, aspirations, and disillusionment—on the one hand—and programmatic paralysis, on the other, can neither be \"solved\" nor transcended nor fought with their social-democratic, Williamsian complements. One cannot constructively c r i t i c i s e bourgeois and petit-bourgeois defeatism from a position of p o l i t i c a l fatigue and academic despair of workers' revolution. But, of course, one must also f i r s t feel the need and the urge to c r i t i c i s e ; and we have no evidence that Williams feels such a need and urge in the case of Hardy. This again suggests the close compatability of their distinct yet similar bitterness1—which, in Williams' case, constitutes a f a i r l y , blunt cynicism and does nothing, to bolster his projected image as a Marxist. Judging Hardy from the point of view of his: own, similar experience and outlook, Williams values i n that novelist mainly his - 286 -(perceived) truthfulness to l i f e . This, for Williams, means recognising the continuities and variations i n rural \"tradition,\" registering i t s communal as well as i t s alienating aspects, and expressing i t s grimness as well as i t s humaneness and invigorating s p i r i t . S t y l i s t i c a l l y — t o use that term in a broad, technical sense—it means, for Williams, the adequate matching of the text's form, mood, idioms, and so on, to the needs of i t s subject and purpose. In a l l t h i s , needless to say, we may rightly detect Williams' academically sectoralist viewpoint rein-forcing his declared preference for a certain existing tradition of nineteenth-century realism, albeit in light of the Brechtian redefinition of that concept. Williams greatly prizes Hardy's rendering of the quotidian rural panorama. And Hardy's perceived a b i l i t y to portray the \"complex\" nature of \"country l i v i n g \" at an historically crucial juncture enjoys Williams' special respect. The novelist's \"insights of consciously learned history and of the educated understanding of nature and behaviour,\" says Williams, enable the former to \"see tradition i n both ways\": \"the native place and experience but also the education, the conscious enquiry\"; t h i s , he claims, i s \"indeed Hardy's special g i f t \" (CC, p. 249). This h i s t o r i c i s t double-vision, Williams argues, i s matched by Hardy's capacity to situate the individual, at any given time, in a structurally wider social context, as part of \"a whole way of l i f e . \" And i t i s apparently this qualification that motivates Williams, to elect Hardy e x p l i c i t l y to his own \"great tradition\": \"As in a l l major re a l i s t f i c t i o n the quality and destiny of persons and the quality and destiny of a whole way of l i f e are seen in the same dimension and not as separable issues\" (CC, p. 244). In the - 287- -course of discussing Hardy's incipient \"fatalism,\" or negativism, Williams remarks at one point that \"the most significant thing about Hardy, in and through these d i f f i c u l t i e s , i s that more than any other major novelist since this d i f f i c u l t [social] mobility began he succeeded, against every pressure, in centering his novels in the ordinary processes of l i f e and work\" (CC, p. 255). The unargued equation here of \"major novels\" to \"the ordinary processes of l i f e and work\" i s , incidentally, a small indication of the absolutism pervading Williams' axiology. However, more relevantly, i t i s also a usefully clear indication of one of his dominant general c r i t e r i a of literary value. And underlying both i s his demonstrated programmatic refusal to adopt a class-based critique of any literature, even when he i s overtly rejecting c r i t i c a l tendencies that view \"persons\" as \"separable\" from their \"whole way of l i f e . \" For, the word \"ordinary\" can hardly be said to occur in Williams either accidentally or innocently. He shows merely some discomfort with the limitless range of connotations that Leavis attaches to that word, but he openly rejects the Marxist, class-specific alternative\" to Leavis. Thus, the phrase \"ordinary process of l i f e and work\" cannot, for Williams, be simply an uncomplicated way of describing an objectively uncomplicated r e a l i t y . \"Ordinary\" i s Williams' encoded polemical rebuff %o Marxism at the same time that i t i s another of his familiar expressions of empathy with the social interaction in Hardy's rural England. P o l i t i c a l l y , i t i s ambiguous at best. Williams elaborates his c r i t e r i a by analysing a description of Tess among-the ri c k s , i n which he finds a valuable \"fulness,\" \"a single dimension\" that balances \"the long c r i s i s of separation,\" i n - 288 -which \"individuation . . .yet does not exclude the common condition,^ and the \"tragically isolated catastrophes\" are offset by \"the strength and the warmth of people livin g together\" (CC, p. 257). \"Hardy thus achieves a fulness which i s quite new, at this depth, in a l l country writing,\" Williams claims: \"the love and the work, the aches of labour and of choice, are in a single dimension.\" In the communal \"strength\" perceived i n Hardy's novels by Williams, we find the latter's crowning criterion of v a l u e — a courage and endurance verging on an ironically grim but tenacious and real defiance, what he calls \"pure affirmation\": The general structure of feeling i n Hardy would be much less convincing i f there were only the alienation, the frustration, the separation,, and isolation, the f i n a l catastrophes. What i s defeated but not destroyed at the end of The Woodlanders of the end of Tess or the end of Jude i s a warmth, a seriousness, an endurance in love and work that are the necessary definition of what Hardy knows and mourns as loss. V i t a l l y — a n d i t i s his difference from Lawrence . . . — Hardy does not celebrate isolation and separation. He mourns them, and yet always with the courage to look them steadily in the face. . . . It i s important enough that Hardy keeps to an ordinary world, as the basis of his major f i c t i o n . . . . And i t i s even more important, as an act of pure affirmation, that he stays centrally, with his central figures [as George E l i o t cannot: see CC, p. 21l]; indeed moves closer to them in his actual development, so that the affirmation of Tess and of Jude—an affirmation in and through the defeats he traces and mourns—is the strongest in a l l his work. . . . [Hardy i s ] enduring i n the community of this impulse, which pushes through and beyond particular separations and defeats. It i s the continuity not only of a country but of a history and a people. (CC, p. 258) With sweeping.centripetality, Williams draws the key elements of his ideology into a system of moral p r i o r i t i e s , simultaneously generating - 289 -cr i t e r i a of literary value. Alienation, separation, and isolation are fi n a l catastrophes that cause frustration; they are defeats. However, Hardy is allegedly able to find cause for \"courage\" and \"affirmation\" \"in and through the defeats he traces and mourns.\" And he i s able to do so because this \"impulse\" for endurance and affirmation \"pushes through and beyond particular separations and defeats.\" Yet, i t represents \"the continuity\" not of the urban and rural proletariat but of \"a country\" and of a classless and \"ordinary\" \"history and a people,\" embodied in the central characters of Hardy's \"major f i c t i o n . \" As Williams remarks i n Po l i t i c s and Letters (p. 222) , \"Hardy is remarkably contemporary with Ibsen in his presentation of a wholly valid and never questionable desire, which i s quite tragically defeated without cancelling the validity of that impulse, and which reaches the point of questioning the social order that has defeated i t . \" But while such mere \"questioning\" may have constituted an honourable his t o r i c a l maximum for most writers contemporary with Hardy, Williams' undistanced account of i t conceals the fact that for c r i t i c s of his own, post-Marx/Engels/Lenin/Trotsky generation, such Ibsenlte \"questioning\"—even at i t s harshest—fails to surpass the ideology of bourgeois dissent. In that l i g h t , i t merely reflects unfavourably on the po l i t i c s of Stalinism that, in a period of general fear among intellectuals of associating with the word \"communist,\" i t had to be the bourgeois l i b e r a l Ibsen who \"protected\" Williams \"from the rapid retreat from the thirties, which so many former comrades from the [Communist] party were conducting.. . . . In his plays, the experience of defeat does not diminish the value of the fight\" (PL, p. 63). That Ibsen, and not Marx (let alone Lenin or Trotsky), i s the figure - 290 -Williams resorted to i n the face of Stalinism, also does l i t t l e to enhance his own, projected image as a Marxist. If Williams sees in Hardy's depiction ofpooular rural \"strength\" and \"affirmation\" that novelist's decisive counterbalance 1 to the tragedy of loss and defeat, i t is nevertheless apparent that such an attitudinal counterbalance would in i t s e l f count for nothing unless i t were \"convincing\" to start with. C r e d i b i l i t y — a l b e i t judged by Williams from the standpoint of his own, narrowly academic experience and values—commands from him a decisive respect. In The English Novel (p. 118), Williams commented that \"gaining a growing certainty which was a strengthening as well as a darkening of vision,\" Hardy \"ran his course to an exceptional f i d e l i t y . \" Significantly confirming their v i r t u a l identity of outlook, Williams repeatedly mounts a spirited defence of \"what i s sometimes called Hardy's bitterness,\" claiming that i t \"in fact i s only sober and just observation.\" The issue therefore clearly becomes posed as one of realism and truthful-ness as positive literary values: What Hardy sees and feels about the educated world of his day . . . i s so clearly true that the only surprise i s that c r i t i c s now should s t i l l feel sufficiently identified with that world . . . to be willing to perform the literary equivalent of that stalest of p o l i t i c a l tactics: the transfer of bitterness, of a merely class way of thinking,from those who exclude [The Judes of societyj to those who protest. (CC, p. 250) In other words, Hardy's i s a real world, a \"characteristic world,\" observed, recorded, and explained in \"fine detail . . . as a whole'' as well as i n terms of \"the internal processes and their complicated effects - 291 -on the rural social structure\"; \"intensity and precision of the observation . . . is. Hardy's essential position and attribute\"; he writes with \"fine Insight\" and \"characteristic accuracy\"; he \"sees\" not only \"the r e a l i t i e s of labouring work\" but also \"the harshness of economic processes, in inheritance, capital, rent and trade, within the continuity of the natural processes and persistently cutting across them\"; and the \"losses are real and heartbreaking because the desires were r e a l , the shared work was r e a l , the unsatisfied impulses were real\" (CC, pp. 241, 251, 249, 257, 252, 254, 258). However, the relatively smooth continuity of Hardy's fi c t i o n a l content—seen from Williams' consistently unitary point of view—is apparently ruptured by formal \"disturbances,\" especially by the idioms employed and registered in the novels. A disjunction i s alleged to arise, precluding any \"organic\" technical complement to their thematic and psychological realism. Yet, here, Williams invokes his functionalist sociologism, both to explain and to j u s t i f y — indeed, to laud—this (apparent) disjunction. The overall effect, then, i s to declare Hardy, both ideologically and technically, an almost perfect novelist for his time. Williams approaches the \"problem\" of disjunction from three distinct though related angles: the class-differential between Hardy's fi c t i o n a l sub jectsi.and.his..putative.audience, the incompatability of old literary conventions (including_idiomatic patterns) with the changing social.reality .of the,time, and-\"Internal, disturbances\" within those conventions- themselves, (presumably as a.result.of the social pressures ,*>=fe£rom,without).... \"Hardy.'s.writing, or- . . . style,\" Williams o b s e r v e s \" i s obviously affected-by.. . . [h]is complex.position as an - 292 -author, writing about country livin g to people who almost inevitably saw the country as empty nature or- as the working-place of their inferiors\" (CC,. p. 247) . In P o l i t i c s and Letters (p. 264) , Williams lends Hardy's style blanket approval, justifying i t s various perceived \"levels\" by their objective functions in a particular h i s t o r i c a l conjuncture witnessing major social change, Including a widened readership. \"When people say that Hardy wrote badly,\" he argues, \"the problem i s not one of form but of received literary judgment. Why does he write on two or three different levels of discourse, and how does he try to unify them? The diversity,\" Williams answers, \"exactly corresponds to the range of his social address.\" Then, Williams has also reminded us of the novelist's task of \"communicating\" the \" l i f e \" and \"experience\" from \"a real social history\" and has argued, for instance, the inappropriateness of \"sentimental\" neo-pastoralism for this post-industrial-revolution project. Thus he urges us \"to see the source of these differences [between narrative 'ease' and 'disturbance'3 in a real social history. . . when we are asked by several kinds of c r i t i c to abstract 'construction,' 'organisation,'^;'thematic unity,' 'unity of tone' and even 'good writing' and judge novels by those canons.\" He points out that on \"these abstract cr i t e r i a — a n d especially those of unity—we should have to find Trollope a better novelist than George E l i o t . \" Wrongly assuming that such a conclusion is self-evidently absurd, however, he arbi t r a r i l y suggests that \" [w]hat we have, to emphasise, on the contrary, i s the creative disturbance which is.exactly. George .Eliot's importance; the disturbance.we shall see also in Hardy. That i s where the l i f e i s , in that disturbed and unprecedented time.\" Justifying a disturbed - 293 -style for disturbed times, he asserts that \"those who saw most deeply, who saw most, had no unified forms, no unity of tone and language, no controlling conventions, that really answered their purposes. Their novels are the records of struggle.and d i f f i c u l t y , as was the l i f e they wrote about\" (EN, p. 85). This evaluation i s of a piece with Williams' general theoretical \"functionalism\" noted before. In discussing the relevance of \"the ballad form of narrative\" and \"the sentimental terms of neo-pastoral\" to Hardy's literary purposes, Williams maintains that other forms, other terms are needed to convey the sense of social disturbance. Thus he argues in a general way that the \"profound disturbances that Hardy records cannot be seen in the sentimental terms of neo-pastoral; the contrast between country and town.\" But his elaboration of the alternative avoids any class-characterisation and restricts i t s e l f to the familiar generalities of \"psychological\" terms and the \"social\" character of the change (CC, p. 254). \"What have been seen as his strengths— the ballad form of narrative, the prolonged literary imitation of traditional forms of speech—seem to me mainly weaknesses,\" says Williams, characterising that form as \"a 'tradition' rather than human beings.\" It is \"precisely disturbance rather than continuity which had to be communicated,\" he maintains, adding, \"to communicate Hardy's experience,\" neither Tess's \"consciously educated\" language nor her \"unconsciously customary\" language \"would.serve\": \"the educated dumb in intensity and limited in humanity; the customary thwarted by ignorance and complacent in habit.\" Yet, he concedes, the \"marks of a surrender to each mode are certainly present i n Hardy,\" though \"the main body of his mature writing i s a more d i f f i c u l t and complicated - 294 -experiment\" (CC, pp. 247-48). We might note i n passing how Williams' s t y l i s t i c c r i t e r i a actually reproduce his broader l i t e r a r y , cultural, and moral values, for instance i n his overt insistence on \"intensity\" and \"humanity\" as virtues: his aversion to \"ignorance\" and \"complacency\" can also be read, i m p l i c i t l y , as the advocacy of education and rebelliousness. The,: key criterion for Williams, however, seems to be an intense, insightful, humane, and credible content, matched by a consistently corresponding f i c t i o n a l idiom. The third disjunction, which i s internal to the conventions and linguistic structures deployed by Hardy, Williams views as the consequence of a relatively uneven break from organic self-unity. \"The more fu l l y Hardy uses the resources of the whole language, as a precise observer, the more adequate the writing i s , \" he says (CC, p. 248). Precision (truthfulness) and resourcefulness therefore already prepare the ground for s t y l i s t i c adequacy. But they alone do not suffice. \"Hardy's mature style,\" for instance, according to Williams, i s threatened in one direction by a willed 'Latinism' of diction and construction\"; but in another direction, i t i s threatened \"by this much less noticed element of a r t i f i c e which i s too easily accepted, within the patronage we have discussed, as the countryman speaking (sometimes indeed i t i s l i t e r a l l y the countryman speaking, in a contrived picturesqueness which i s now the novelist's patronage of his rural characters)\" (CC, p. 249). A parallel exists here between Williams' warning against artifice—which in Hardy's case he characterises as an. expression of patronage—and Trotsky's warning against certain uses of \"revolutionary\" \"vulgarisms\" which in Mayakovsky's case: he characterises as an expression of real estrangement from the revolution, as false f a m i l i a r i t y . But - 295 -the very comparison also.serves to emphasise the p o l i t i c a l gulf separating the Marxist revolutionary's c r i t i c a l methods, principles, c r i t e r i a , and usual subjects from those of the academic social democrat's. Williams can be easily imagined speaking as Hardy's academic alter ego when he approvingly notes that the novelist's \"mature style i s unambiguously an educated style, in which the extension of vocabulary and the complication of construction are necessary to the intensity and precision of the observation which i s Hardy's essential position and attribute\" (CC, p. 249). As he put i t i n The English Novel (p. 124), \" [t]here's a c r i s i s [during the 'interregnum* of the 1870's-1914] . . .: a c r i s i s of language and form, which now comes to a new phase. In effect I'd say, what had been a tension became now a s p l i t . Internal disturbances of the sort we saw in George E l i o t and in Hardy became too strong, too restless, to be contained any longer within any single writer. . . . \" As a self-described descendant of that same \"border-country\" tradition, Williams clearly considers himself to be not only in a position to know but also in a position to empathise. Once more, his own c r i t e r i a of value become almost indistinguishable from the values that he attributes to the object of his study (in this case, Hardy). And once more, they are something other than revolutionary, or Marxist. Williams does not, as we know, speculate to any substantial extent about the c r i t e r i a of literary value under socialism. However, he does have some ideas for projects in the immediate, p o l i t i c a l l y undefined future, including ideas for so-called \"s o c i a l i s t \" literature. One thread that runs through them a l l i s \"not only the possibility but the necessity of the resumption of the rea l i s t project today.\" Of - 296 -course, he presumes, with the his t o r i c a l demystificationi of a l l \"organic\" forms, this new realism \"will involve the sharpest distinction from naturalism i n the conventional sense in which i t has settled down.\" And, moreover, with the proliferation of various extra-\"literary\" media, the \"future of a new realism\" w i l l l i e \"in the combination of three directions, the more mobile dramatic forms of the camera, direct relation-ship with more popular audiences, and development of subjunctive actions\" (PL, pp. 223-24). It i s a credible projection, both \"culturally\" as well as \"logically.\" Yet, by leaving i t s exact p o l i t i c a l context unstated—and therefore, at best, ambiguous—Williams leaves the whole question of the possibility of i t s ever being realised (and stabilised and developed) open. And a l l t h i s , besides, is quite apart from the problem of how one might judge such new r e a l i s t work. Thus Williams' fundamental p o l i t i c a l reformism unavoidably ethereallses his future \"cultural\" project, consigning i t to the murky region between revolution and reform. This i s a logical outcome of the contradiction between his aggressive revision of Marx and his formal claim that his work constitutes \"a Marxist theory,\" \"part of . . . the central thinking of Marxism\" (ML, p. 5). On the one hand, this p o l i t i c a l contradiction derives i t s particular characteristics from Williams' somewhat unique social origin and history; on the other hand, i t i t s e l f spawns an idiosyncratic axiology, showing a strong anti-Marxist motive. The p o l i t i c a l paradox (from a Marxist standpoint) encapsulated i n \"cultural materialism\" finds recognisable expression i n that other, axiological;set of contradictions: between Williams' philosophical idealism, empiricist impressionism, and - 297 -c a t e g o r i c a l a b s o l u t i s m , on the one h a n d , a n d , on t h e o t h e r , h i s t e n u o u s , n o m i n a l , and d e f e n s i v e a t t e m p t s a t r e l a t i v i s m , accompan ied by h i s r a d i c a l - s o c i o l o g i c a l , t e r m i n o l o g y and c o n c e p t s . I n t h i s r e g a r d , t h e c o n t r a d i c t o r y e f f e c t o f W i l l i a m s ' t h e o r y o f l i t e r a r y v a l u e i s p a r t i a l l y c a p t u r e d by T e r r y E a g l e t o n , i n h i s c h a r a c t e r i s a t i o n o f t he f o r m e r ' s work as a w h o l e : \"We b e g i n t o t h i n k where we l i v e \" : t h e l i m i t s o f W i l l i a m s ' t h i n k i n g have i n d e e d been t h e l i m i t s o f h i s w o r l d . F o r t h e p o p u l i s m and r e f o r m i s m wh i ch mar red h i s work were c l e a r l y enough t h e p r o d u c t o f a p o l i t i c a l moment. The i n t e l l e c t u a l s y n t h e s i s w h i c h W i l l i a m s u n d e r t o o k was one f o r c e d upon h im by t h e n o n -a v a i l a b i l i t y o f a r e v o l u t i o n a r y t r a d i t i o n and t h e p a u c i t y o f w o r k i n g - c l a s s i d e o l o g y . Marooned between S t a l i n i s m and r e f o r m i s m , p e r s o n a l l y and t h e o r e t i c a l l y d i v o r c e d f rom a p o l i t i c a l l y beca lmed w o r k i n g c l a s s , t h e e a r l y New L e f t movement to w h i c h W i l l i a m s b e l o n g e d was c o n s t r a i n e d t o p i e c e t o g e t h e r i t s own e c l e c t i c t h e o r y and s t r a t e g y i n r e s p o n s e to an o b j e c t i v e p o l i t i c a l \" b r e a k \" (Hungary , Suez) . I n t h a t p r o c e s s , W i l l i a m s ' r e d i s c o v e r y o f t he \" C u l t u r e and S o c i e t y \" l i n e a g e p l a y e d a c e n t r a l r o l e — a s p i r i t u a l r e c u p e r a t i o n o f the v a l u e s o f t he l a b o u r movement wh i ch saw i t s e l f as a c h a l l e n g e to t h a t movement ' s p o l i t i c a l i n e r t i a . Y e t . . . t h a t c h a l l e n g e i n f a c t r e p r o d u c e d t h e v e r y i d e o l o g i c a l c a u s e s o f t h e i n e r t i a . . . . The ab sence o f mass w o r k i n g - c l a s s s t r u g g l e a t t h a t t ime (an a b s e n c e v i c a r i o u s l y f i l l e d by t h e p e t i t - b o u r g e o i s p o p u l i s m o f the n u c l e a r d i sarmament movement) , and the upsurge o f a l i t e r a r y L e f t - r e f o r m i s m t o r e p l a c e r e v o l u t i o n a r y t h e o r y , were s t r u c t u r a l l y r e l a t e d moments. I n W i l l i a m s ' work , p a r a d i g m a t i c a l l y , the one ab sence n u r t u r e d and c o n f i r m e d the o t h e r . (CI_, p . 34) E a g l e t o n h e r e b l u n t l y r e l a t e s W i l l i a m s ' l i t e r a r y - t h e o r e t i c a l p e c u l a r i t i e s t o t h e \" p o l i t i c a l moment\" i n f o r m i n g and s h a p i n g them. T h i s i s t h e most i m m e d i a t e : q u a l i t y o f v a l u e to M a r x i s t s , i n t h a t p a s s a g e . S t a l i n i s m , p o p u l i s m , r e f o r m i s m a r e a l l e x p l i c i t l y named as d e t e r m i n a n t s o r c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s , o r b o t h , o f W i l l i a m s ' t h i n k i n g . However, a s we s h a l l - 298 -see, Eagleton himself i s not too distant from the kind of \"Left-reformism\" for which he implicitly c r i t i c i s e s Williams. The passage quoted therefore also has another value. When Eagleton talks about \"the non-availability of a revolutionary tradition and the paucity of working-class ideology,\" one can hardly be blamed for recalling the arguments used by E. P. Thompson, under similar circumstances, to justify Caudwell's l i t e r a r y - p o l i t i c a l ideas. In my chapter on Caudwell, I have countered those arguments on a number of grounds. That Eagleton should echo Thompson on related p o l i t i c a l and literary issues i s , therefore, I believe, not without significance for Marxist axiology. Indeed, Eagleton's Thompsonlan assumptions here are a f a i r l y accurate—if not exhaustive—index of his own inconsistent relationship to Marxism. This relationship, along with i t s attendant axiology, we shall now examine,below. Notes 1 T o l i t i c s arid Letters; Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), reviewed by Patrick Parrinder i n Literature and History, 7, No. 1 (Spring 1981), 124-26. Williams' book i s later parenthetically abbreviated as PL. 2 Cornelia Cook, in her review of Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), in Notes and Queries, NS, 25, No. 4 (August 1978), speaks of \"Williams' personal brand of l i b e r a l Marxism\" (362). Arthur Efron, in \"Why Radicals Should Not Be Marxists,\" The Sphinx, 3(4), No. 12, ca l l s the same book \"the best in Marxist thought today\" (p. 6) and \"the finest of Marxist thinking\" (p. 9) before predictably attacking i t from the right. And E. F . Timms, in a favourable review of both P o l i t i c s and Letters and Marxism and Literature i n Modern Language Review, 75, Part 4 (Ocrober 1980), speaks of \"Professor Williams' most expl i c i t contribution to Marxism\" (p. 829) . These examples are just a sampling of the general image of himself that Williams has succeeded in projecting. Marxism and Literature i s later parenthetically abbreviated as ML. 3 Marxism and Literature, pp. 5-6. 4 See esp. their questions about Williams' apotheosising of Burke and Carlyle, as opposed to his denigration of Morris (PL, pp. 97-132) . 5 \"Two Faces of Modern Marxism,\" Sewanee Rev., 86, No. 4 ( F a l l 1978), 588-94. \"Problematical,\" rev. of Marxism and Literature, i n New Statesman, 94, No. 2421 (12 Aug. 1977), 248. ^ \"Jim, Raymond, Jim,\" rev. of P o l i t i c s and Letters, i n New Statesman, 98, No. 2536 (26 Oct. 1979), 637. 8 • ^Indications of an (occasionally dubious) understanding of this central Marxist axiom appear in several places. Thus, Williams notes that \"in the continuous pressure of l i v i n g , the free play of the Romantic genius found i t increasingly d i f f i c u l t , to consort with the free play of the market, and the d i f f i c u l t y .was. not:solved, but cushioned, by an Idealization\" (Culture and:Society: 1780-1950 [ 1958; Harmondsworth, Mdx.: Penguin, 1963], p. 63; henceforth, this t i t l e i s abbreviated as CS). \"Capitalism's version of society can only be the market, for i t s purpose Is profit in particular a c t i v i t i e s rather than any general conception of social use, and i t s concentration of ownership in sections.of the community makes most common decisions, beyond those of the market, limited or impossible\" fThe Long Revolution [London: Chatto and Windus, 1961], p. 300; henceforth, this t i t l e i s abbreviated as Long.RJy ' f a f we-are - 299 -- 300 -serious about ending the class system we must clear away the survivals, the irrelevancies, and the confusion of other kinds of distinction, u n t i l we see the hard economic centre which f i n a l l y sustains them\" (Long R, p. 335). Between \"culture and affluence . . .as alternative aims, . . . the latter w i l l always be the f i r s t choice, i n any_real history\" (The Country and the City CFrogmore, St. Albans, Herts.: Paladin.^ 1975], p. 245; henceforth, this t i t l e i s abbreviated as CC?). \"[t]he economics of commercial publishing now impose extraordinary restrictions on writers. The f i r s t reaction of a publisher to a novelist these days i s : 'Fine, but not more than 80,000 words'\" (PL, p. 274); \"[tjhe publishers are now in a different world, they have standard formats for novels. The price of £ 4 . 9 5 i s now a fixed ceiling for a lot of f i c t i o n \" (PL, p. 300). 9 /Culture and Society, pp. 271-72, 273. ^ C u l t u r e and Society, p. 273. See also The Long Revolution, p. 115. 1 1T n the last analysis, for Williams, everything depends on one's way of \"seeing.\" Pages 293 to 355 of The Long Revolution contain the most saturated application of this particular \"way of seeing.\" But while the omnicausality attributed to \"interpretation\" (p. 345), \"discussion\" (p. 335), \"definitions\" (pp. 352, 354), \"feeling\" (pp. 308, 312, 326, 335), \"concepts\" (p. 305), \"consciousness\" (p. 325), and \"meanings\" (p. 305) i s anti-materialist enough philosophically, the suicidal p o l i t i c a l implications of this quirk become especially clear when he soberly counsels \"new creative definitions\" as the answer to \"destructive expressions\" such as \"the delinquent gang\"—and fascism (Long R, p. 354). 12 Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), p. 59. This t i t l e i s parenthetically cited as MT. 13* The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 129; this t i t l e i s parenthetically abbreviated as EN. 14 The Country and the City, p. 146. 15 On the specific question of \"class,\" Williams remains evasive at best. Thus, in Towards 2000,he mentions \"the old Marxist definition of 'productive workers' (those from whom surplus, value i s extracted within capitalist relations of production)\"—then proceeds to. conclude: \"The point is not so much to choose: the 'correct.' definition but at f i r s t just to be aware of the radical differences according to the category chosen\" :(p. 158). But only some ten pages or so later, he i s already systematically reducing \"class\" to an anthropologico-sociological question of \"bonding\" and \"rich/poor\" contrasts (pp. 162, 166-71). ^Modern Tragedy, pp. 64-65. On page 73, Williams correctly notes that \"our attitude to the revolutionary societies of our time i s central and probably decisive in a l l our thinking.\" A l l the more - 3 0 1 -damning, then, i s his continuing - tendency to view,\"the Bolshevik experience\" i t s e l f as essentially, and at best, \"tragic\" (PL, p. 399). See also Towards 2000, p. 12. 1 7 Towards 2000, pp. 251,- 172. m Williams describes \"the German and Scandinavian comrades\" as \"my kind of people,\" identifying his own position as \"to the l e f t and on the l e f t of the French and Italian communist parties,\" with \"the communist dissidents from the East like Bahro\" (PL, p. 296). But the Green Party's Bahro is to the right of even the right-wing French and Italian Communist parties. This barely qualifies Williams as much more than a \" l e f t \" social democrat. This assessment i s , of course, confirmed by his programme as well as his loyal \"criticisms\" of the \"labour Left\" (PL, pp. 367-68). Williams' reformist programme clearly coincides with the Labour Party's role In Brit a i n , despite the fact that he l e f t i t in 1966 and decided to write \"some sort of a manifesto, stating very clearly that the Labour Party was no longer just an inadequate agency for socialism, i t was now an active collaborator in the process of reproducing capitalist society\" (PL, p. 373). This belated \"discovery\"—about three-quarters of a century after Lenin's exposes— does not alter Williams' consummate \"culturalist\"(^meliorism one i o t a . 19 r T \"He aptly calls this phenomenon \"[tjhe 'New Le f t ' cultural intervention,\" which, he concedes (though rather mildly, i t would seem to a Marxist), was \"incomplete\" and a \"weakness which was heavily paid for later\" (PL, p. 362). 20' w \"It was a deficiency of my own generation that the amount of classical Marxism i t actually knew was relatively small; . . . there were areas of formed argument which I hadn't previously encountered, which meant that . . . there were certain positions which I ought to have been directly meeting, but had not met\" (PL, pp. 316-17). The inter-viewers ask, \"Were you aware of Trotsky's writings at a l l ? \" Williams replies, \"No. That was a crucial lack. It wasn't t i l l much later that I really learnt of the existence of a socialist opposition i n Russia\" (PL, pp. 48-49). After the war, he \"seized upon Deutscher—the Stalin and-the Trotsky books. . . . His interpretation of the Russian Revolution and i t s development made entire sense to me. . . . I took i t as the necessary realignment. But I did not know where i t l e f t one on the p o l i t i c a l spectrum in the. present\" (PL, p. 90). 21 ' \" F i r s t , I think there's no doubt that the rationalising and controlling elements in the received socialist idea have become, in their received terms, residual\" (PL, p. 431). \"Orthodox communism and orthodox social-democracy . . . indeed showed many features of this [[capitalist and.imperialist ] system in their most powerful forms . . . \" (CC, p. 366). \"The real tragedy occurs . . . when the revolutionary impetus is so nearly l o s t , or so heavily threatened, that the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on i t s e l f - 302 -and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated. That kind of hardness, although i t shifted around in the complicated p o l i t i c s of the USSR in the twenties, was in different ways taken up by everybody in the Soviet Party. Those who withdrew from the notion of a hard line—hard yet f l e x i b l e — d i d stop believing in the revolution\" (PL, p. 395). Ergo: Stalinism was a revolutionary Marxist necessity, and Trotskyism, l o g i c a l l y , could not then have been revolutionary and Marxist. But Stalinism i s bad; therefore, Marxism is bad. 22 Po l i t i c s and Letters, p. 144; Culture and Society, p. 272. 23 The early Williams' attack on Caudwell (CS, pp. 267-71) focuses most of the former's abiding differences with Marxism. He asserts that Caudwell \"has l i t t l e to say, of actual literature, that i s even interesting\" and that \"for the most part his discussion i s not even specific enough to be wrong\" (CS, pp. 268-69). Commenting on J.D. Bernal's observation \"that the formulations i n Caudwell's books 'are those of contemporary bourgeois s c i e n t i f i c philosophy . . . and not those of Marxism,\"' Williams decides simply that \" [ i t ]his i s a quarrel which one who is not a Marxist w i l l not attempt to resolve\" (CS, p. 269). Two decades after thus dismissing the importance of resolving this \"quarrel,\" however, Williams himself offers his own \"solution\": \"I could at last get free of the model which had been such an obstacle, whether in certainty or in doubt; the model of a fixed and known Marxist position, which in general only had to be applied, and the corresponding^; dismissal of a l l other kinds of thinking as non-Marxist, revisionist, neo-Hegelian, or bourgeois\" (ML, p. 3). In Polit i c s and Letters, Williams withdraws what he calls his earlier \"peremptory\" treatment of Illusion and Reality while making no theoretical concessions to Caudwell's argument. 24 Pol i t i c s and Letters, p. 340. Also see Marxism and Literature, p. 188. 25 Williams remarks that this emphasis, in England dating from the seventeenth century, actually expresses the his t o r i c a l generation of an originally bourgeois, purely consumptive attitude to art (ML, pp. 137, 149-60). The main shifts noted by Williams are the following (listed in chronological order): \"fault-finding,\" \"learned\" \"commentaries,\" and \"conscious exercise of 'taste,' 'sensibility,' and 'discrimination'\" (ML, p. 49). He adds that \"criticism, taken as a new conscious discipline into the universities, to be practised by what became a new para-national profession, retained these founding class concepts, alongside attempts to establish new abstractly objective c r i t e r i a . More seriously, criticism was taken to be a natural definition of literary studies, themselves defined by the specialising category (printed works of a certain quality) of literature. Thus these forms of the concepts of literature and criticism are, in the perspective of his t o r i c a l social development, forms of a - 303 -class specialisation and control of a general social practice, and of a class limitation of the questions which i t might raise\" (ML, p. 49) . 27 Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Harmondsworth, Mdx: Penguin, 1964), p. 381. This t i t l e i s parenthetically abbreviated as DIB. 28 \"It is very striking that the classic technique devised in response to the impossibility of understanding contemporary society from experience, the s t a t i s t i c a l mode of analysis, had i t s precise origins within the period of . . . [the 1840sJ. For without the combination of s t a t i s t i c a l theory. . . and arrangements for collection of s t a t i s t i c a l data, symbolised by the foundation of the Manchester St a t i s t i c a l Society, the society that was emerging out of the Industrial Revolution was l i t e r a l l y unknowable. . . . After the Industrial Revolution the possibility of understanding an experience in terms of the available articulation of concepts and language was qualitatively altered. . . . New forms had to be devised to penetrate what was rightly perceived to be to a large extent obscure. Dickens i s a wonderful example of th i s , because he i s continually trying to find fi c t i o n a l forms for seeing what is not seeable—as in the passages in Dombey and Son where he envisages the roofs of houses being taken o f f , or a black cloud that i s the shape of a l l the lives that are lived yet otherwise cannot be repre-sented at a l l . . . . [w]e have become increasingly conscious of the positive power of techniques of analysis, which at their maximum are capable of interpreting, let us say, the movements of an integrated world economy, and of the negative qualities of a naive observation which can never gain knowledge of re a l i t i e s like these. But at the same time,-.. . . I see a kind of appalling parody of i t beyond me— the claim that a l l experience is ideology, that the subject is wholly an ideological i l l u s i o n , which is the last stage of formalism—and I even start to pull back a b i t . But I think the correction i s right and in a way I should always have known i t . . . \" (PL, pp. 170-72). 29 The following quotes may well be regarded as Williams1 theoretical manifesto on this criterion: \"What we have again to say i s that social experience i s a whole experience. Its descriptive or analytic features have no priority over i t s direct realisation i n quite physical and specific personal feelings and actions\" (EN, pp. 65-66); \"while we may, in the study of a past period, separate out particular aspects of l i f e , and treat them as i f they were self-contained, i t i s obvious that this i s only how they may be studied, not how they were experienced. We examine each element as a precipitate, tfut\". in the livin g experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex , whole. And i t seems to be true from the nature of a r t , that i t i s from such a totality that the a r t i s t draws; i t i s in a r t , primarily, that the effect of a whole lived experience i s expressed and embodied. To relate a work of art to any part of that whole may, in varying degrees, be useful; but i t is a common experience, in analysis, to realise that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some elements for which there is no external counterpart\" (DIB pp. 9-10). \"Yes, 'experience' was a term I took over from Scrutiny\" (PL, p. 163). - 304 -3 0 The Long Revolution, p. 67; P o l i t i c s and Letters, pp. 159, 164. 31 .- • - -\"See The Long Revolution, pp. 48-71, for an extended discussion of this concept. In P o l i t i c s and Letters, Williams elaborates his meaning: \"The point of the deliberately contradictory phrase, with which I have never been happy, is that i t was a structure in the sense that you could perceive i t operating in one work after another which weren't otherwise connected—people weren't learning i t from each other; yet i t was one of feeling much more than of thought—a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones, for which the best evidence was often the actual conventions of literary or dramatic writing. . . . The notion of a structure of feeling was designed to focus a mode of h i s t o r i c a l and social relations which was yet quite internal to the work, rather than deducible from i t or supplied by some external placing or c l a s s i f i c a t i o n . . . . There are cases where the structure of feeling which i s tangible in a particular set of works i s undoubtedly an articulation of an area of experience which l i e s beyond them. . . . On the other hand, a dominant set of forms or conventions—and in that sense structures of feeling—can represent a profound blockage for subordinated groups in a society, above a l l an oppressed class. In these cases, i t i s very dangerous to presume that an articulate structure of feeling i s necessarily equivalent to inarticulate experience\" (PL, pp. 159, 164). \"Some elements of a structure of feeling are, of course, only traceable through a rather close analysis of language, which w i l l always be a national one\" (PL, p. 166) . One might well ask i f British English and North American English, for example, are both English and i f they are, whether they belong to the same nation; of course this particular set does not even include the English dialects of most Commonwealth countries. The \"connection between the popular structure of feeling and that used in the literature of the time i s of major importance in the analysis of culture. It i s here, at a level even more important than that of institutions, that the real relations within the whole culture are made clear. . . . \" (Long R, p. 67). In Culture and Society (pp. 99-119), Williams Illustrates this concept of structures of feeling with reference to \"an unsettled [ Victorian ] industrial society\" and a series of mid-nineteenth century \"industrial novels\" written by Gaskell, Dickens, D i s r a e l i , Kingsley, and George E l i o t . 32; \"We do not now read Shakespeare, we read editions of Shakespeare . . . in [the] . . . substantial sense of the reproduction of the text in a quite different culture. . . . Another example would be Horace's famous ode, Beatus I l l e , which was reproduced in different forms in various successive phases of the revival of classical culture, characteristically often omitting the last line and therefore the social situation in which i t was written, and therefore the whole meaning of. the ode. Translations, of course, pose this problem especially acutely. . . . A l l the forces which keep the text current are among i t s conditions of production\" (PL, pp. 344-45). 33v Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 76, more fu l l y quoted in PL, p. 334ly;; On balance, the doubts and reluctance prevail, despite the occasional'acknowledge ment that \"in the end . . . judgment is inevitable\" (PL, p. 338). Thus, Williams echoes in Marxism and Literature (p. 146) the same sentiments - 305 -he earlier voiced i n Keywords: \"It i s s t i l l d i f f i c u l t . . . to prevent any attempt at literary theory from being turned, almost a p r i o r i , into c r i t i c a l theory, as i f the only major questions about literary production were variations on the question 'how do we judge?'\" In Politics and Letters (p. 306), he begins one statement on his evaluative c r i t e r i a with the clause \"If there i s s t i l l place for evaluation in literature.\" And in the same set of interviews, he carefully distinguishes his own descriptive-analytical project in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht from those of orthodox \"practical criticism\"; \"Why do people close-ananlyse within the main p r a c t i c a l - c r i t i c a l tradition? In order to cl a r i f y their response as evaluation. The verbal analysis of the Ibsen and Strindberg plays I undertook i s scarcely concerned with response at a l l \" (PL f p. 193). No doubt Williams' early confrontation with T i l l y a r d , as a young S t a l i n i s t , contributed to this evasive \"solution.\" \"We maintained,\" he r e c a l l s , \"that . . . the problem was not how to judge literature or respond to a poem, i t was how to write a different kind of novel or p;dgm;. . . . In i t s positive emphasis, the position was not entirely wrong. . . . But when the productive mood which was our way of replying by not replying faded away after the war, and we had to engage in literary criticism or history proper, we found we were l e f t with nothing. . . . Tillyard told me this was not a tenable procedure; i t was a fantasy. How could you judge something that had been written from the perspective of something that hadn't?\" (PL, pp. 45-51) \"As subjective definitions of apparently objective c r i t e r i a (which acquire their apparent objectivity from an actively consensual class sense), and at the same time apparently objective definitions of subjective qualities, 'taste' and 'sensibility' are characteristically bourgeois categories\" (ML, pp. 48-49). Other related categories that Williams historicises and problematises i n a similar way include \"art\"/ \"aesthetic\" (ML, p. 50), \"culture\" (ML, pp. 14-20), and \"literature\" (ML, pp. 45-54; PL, pp. 326, 328, 329). 35 ' \"George E l i o t i s the f i r s t major novelist i n whom this question i s active. That i s why we speak of her now with a connecting respect, and with a hardness—a sort of family plainness—that we have learned from our own and common experience\" (CC, p. 209). -** Presumably, Lawrence, with his usually controlled \"intensity only rarely breaking into hysteria\" (MT, p. 138), i s as close as any of Williams' favourite mainstream writers to his ideal: \"The outstanding value of Lawrence's development i s that he was i n a position to know the living process as a matter of common rather than of special experience\" (CS, p. 203).. Lawrence thus represents the golden mean between \"the emotional inadequacy\" of Shaw (DIB, p. 291) and the \"very real hysterical element\" i n the German dramatist Ernst Toller (DIB, p. 302);. Shaw \"withered the tangible l i f e of experience i n the pursuit of a fantasy of pure intelligence and pure force\" (DIB, p. 291), while Toller un-successfully attempted \"to repress a part of the pattern of his experience, - 306 -which had too much v i t a l i t y to be simply and easily neglected\" (DIB, p. 302). Other relevant evaluations include an effectively hierarchical preference of Pasternak's \"remarkable intensity and seriousness\" to \"Eliot's cocktail party, where the sound of human beings was heard as the rubbing of insects''leg? (MT, p. 167), and of Eliot's nevertheless \"more intense and more precise\" dramatic \"emotions,\" as well as \"finer\" \"language,\" to Ibsen's prose plays, for instance (DIB, pp. 209-10). Cobbett's \"sureness of instinct\" i s deemed a \" v i t a l and impregnable, a genuine embodiment of value,\" comparable to \"Burke's depth of mind\" (CS,pp. 31-32), and Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children i s f e l t to create ''a substance comparable in intensity with the moral inquiry. To c a l l this action Shakespearean i s not to put the praise too high\" (MT, p. 198). Wuthering Heights is valued because \"Cw]hat i s created and held to i s a kind of human intensity and connection which i s the ground of continuing l i f e \" (CC, p. 215), and Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song is praised for embodying \"the strength of the l i v i n g people\" (CC, p. 323). 3 7 In a similar vein, he avers that \"Freud's writings should be read . . . as . . . novels. . . . One reads them as one would read the . . . writing of Strindberg or Proust, granting no necessary prior validity because they were based on c l i n i c a l experience, simply because between the c l i n i c a l experience and the text there i s the process of composition. After a l l , whatsis the validity of Strindberg or Proust? Their work articulates another kind of experience, an observation of experience, which preceded and continued into the process of composition. In the same way the work of Lacan today should not be taken as a confirmatory authority . . . but rather as i t s e l f a composition which we a l l believe to be important\" (PL, p. 332). Of course, Williams' logic stumbles in that f i n a l clause, for the question precisely i s whether or not and why \"we a l l \" should believe Lacan's composition to be even \"important.\" 38 Perhaps Williams' closest approximations to a theoretical class-analysis of s t i l l current individual values are his comments on \" e v i l \" (MT, pp. 59-60), \"sacrifice\" (MT, p. 197), and \"lost innocence\" (CC, pp. 48-60). Further, although Williams never resorts to a consistent class-analysis of values at an e x p l i c i t l y theoretical l e v e l , the very terms of some of his deceptively \"arbitrary\" case-illustrations suggest a more general class-logic, trapped in the self-defining laconicism of the specific \"fact\" i t s e l f : \"Thus the most interesting Marxist position, because of i t s emphasis on practice, i s that which defines the pressing and limiting conditions within which, at any time, specific kinds of writing can be done. . . . [fjhe writer within a revolution i s necessarily in a;different position from the writer under fascism or inside capitalism, or i n exile\" (ML, p. 204). For classless analyses of certain cultural, thematic, and modal values, see his comments on unprincipled iconoclasm (MT, p. 141), \"art-for-art's sake\" (CS, p. 171), the absoluteness of death (MT, pp. 56-57, 137), and the i l l u s i o n of timelessness (CC pp. 249-253). - 307 -3 9 See also Modern Tragedy, p. 196 (on Brecht), and The Country and the City, pp. 196-201 (on Dickens). 4 0 \"Modern Tragedy, pp. 126, 313. Also see P o l i t i c s arid Letters, p. 259. 4 1 Culture and Society, pp. 248-49; The English Novel, p. 127, 169. 4 2 The English Novel,p. 77; The Country and the City, pp. 207-08. The Country and the City, p. 207, See also his comments on Gaskell, in Culture and Society, pp. 99-104. 4 4 This point has been convincingly argued by Eagleton, with regard to Williams' literary theory i n general: see Criticism and Ideology, pp. 21-42. 4 5 See also Williams' praise of the following: Synge's \"genius of delight\" and \"brave affirmation\" (DIB, p. 152); Dickens' \"act of f a i t h \" in the existence of \"a human s p i r i t . . . ultimately more powerful than even this [inhuman] system\" (EN, p. 53); George Eliot's \"giving her last strength, her deep warmth, to a hope, a possibility beyond what she had to record in a hardening clearly seen world\" (EN, p. 94); and Wells's \"sense of possibility: that history could go either way . . . \" (CC, p. 279). See also Williams'\"^disapproval of Auden's (and Isherwood's) \"real doubt about the truth of . . . [the] objective Cor Brechtian-revolutionary] viewpoint\" or i t s negative identification \"with a s t i l l subjective and anguished consciousness\" (DIB, p. 394). The periodisation shows the following pattern: \"the transition marked by the C i v i l War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration and the constitutional settlement of 1688 [, which]] fundamentally altered the social character of England,\" also altering literature \"in ideology, in mediation and in new creative work\" (CC, p. 72); \"the lifetime of Blake, 1757 to 1827,\" which i s , \"in general, the decisive period\" for the Industrial Revolution and i t s attendant \"hunger, suffering, c o n f l i c t , dislocation; hope, energy, vision, dedication\" (CS, p. 49); 1880-1914, which i s \"a kind of interregnum\" between \"the period of the Romantic and Victorian masters\" and \"the period of our contemporaries, of writers who address themselves, in our kind of language, to the common problems that we recognise\" (CS, p. 165); and the period of \"our contemporaries\" themselves, who \"appear in effect after the war of 1914-18. D. H. Lawrence is a contemporary, in mood, in a way that Butler and Shaw are clearly not\" (CS, p. 165). 47 \" [ l ] t remains true, looking at i t from experience, that there are certain feelings, certain relationships, certain fusions and as relevantly certain dislocations, which can only be conceived in the novel, which indeed demand the novel and in just this d i f f i c u l t border country [between 'Imaginative' work and those other accountsJ where from - 308 -Dickens to Lawrence, making i t s own very varied demands, i t has lived and lived with meaning\" (EN, p. 190). 4 8 Williams' evaluation of Hardy in The Country arid the City i s an updated version of his almost identical chapter iri The English Novel. I have followed his latest (CCl version, except where a pertinent ' remark can be found only in The English Novel, such as the following: \"The more I read Hardy the surer I am that he i s a major novelist, but also that the problem of describing his work i s central to the problem of understanding the whole development of the English novel\" (EN, p. 97); \" f i r s t I am interested in emphasising a more central English tradition [than George E l i o t to Henry James]: from George E l i o t to Hardy and then on to Lawrence, which i s a very clear and in my view decisive sequence\" (EN, p. 95); \" i t ' s significant that Lawrence, in effect deciding the future direction of his l i f e , should try to get his thoughts and feelings clear in relation and in response to the writer [ Hardy] who i s obviously ( i f we can look without prejudice) his direct and most important English predecessor\" (EN ,p. 170). y The Country and the City, p. 234.,jPolitics and Letters?p. 247; The Country and the City, p. 252. 50 Williams takes great pains to emphasise that \"Hardy was born into a changing and struggling rural society, rather than the timeless backwater to which he is so often deported,\" even though he typically attributes and subordinates the \"specific class element\" to \"personal choice\" (CC, pp. 239, 253,^55, 258). See Note 51 for f u l l e r quotations. x See Note 50. The emphasis, in Williams' analysis of the acknowledged class-factor in Hardy, i s on blurring i t s operations rather than on defining them sharply: \"He wrote in a period i n which, while there were s t i l l local communities, there was also a v i s i b l e and powerful network of the society as a whole: the law and the economy; the railways, newspapers and the penny post; . . . the real Hardy country, we soon come to see, is that border country so many of us have been li v i n g in : between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change\" (CC, p. 239). \"The social process created i n this interaction i s one of class and separation, as well as of chronic insecurity, as this capitalist farming and dealing takes i t s course. . . . One of the most immediate effects of mobility, within a structure i t s e l f changing, i s the d i f f i c u l t nature of the marriage choice. . . . The specific class element, and the effects upon this of an insecure economy, are parts of the personal choice which i s after a l l a choice primarily of a way to l i v e , of an identity in the identification with this or that other person\" (CC, pp. 254-55; emphasis mine). \"People choose wrongly but under terrible pressures; under the confusions of class, under i t s misunderstandings, under the calculated rejections of a divided separating world\" (CC, p. 258). 5 2 The Country and the City,p. 243; \" [Hardy] attempted to describe and value a way of l i f e with which he was closely yet uncertainly connected . . . . As so often^whenthe current social stereotypes are removed the - 309 -c r i t i c a l problem becomes.clear i n a new way. It i s the c r i t i c a l problem of so much of. English, f i c t i o n , since the actual yet incomplete and ambiguous social mobility of the nineteenth century. . . . It Is here that the social values are dramatised i n a very complex way and i t i s here that most of the .problems of Hardy's actual writing seem to arise (CC, p. 243). Terry Eagleton Eagleton's Po l i t i c s and His General Theory of Literature \"Let us review some of the names of the major Marxist aestheticians of the century to date: Lukacs, Goldmann, Sartre, Caudwell, Adorno, Marcuse, Delia Volpe, Macherey, Jameson, Eagleton\": thus begins a paragraph in one of Eagleton's own books, Walter Benjamin (p. 96). He thereby locates his own polir . t i c a l credentials emphatically within a framework judged to represent mainstream Marxism.1 This explicit self-definition, coupled with Eagleton's manifest knowledge of the works and history of Marxism as well as his known passage through certain ostensibly Trotskyist parties in Britain (most recently the centrist Workers Socialist League) , should justify a more specifically Trotskyism-centred examination of his views than would have been logical in the case of Caudwell or Williams. Particularly relevant to our axiological concerns here should be the question of the degree of Eagleton's actual agreement with the programme of the Marxist tradition. For, he has exp l i c i t l y named Marxism as being virtually 2 ignorant of \"a category . . . called 'enjoyment,'\" complained of a certain \"theoretical prudery . . . in vogue within Marxist aesthetics\" that remains \"silent on the qualitative distinction between, say, Pushkin and Coventry Patmore\" (CI, p. 162), and openly charged that \"Marxism, in its day, has operated . . . a philistine reduction on just about everything from 3 race and sex to religion and culture. . . .\" The question of Eagleton's degree of agreement with Marxism contains two aspects. One is a perceptible disjunction between his often radical-sounding programme advanced around particular (usually s i n g l e c u l t u r a l ) issues and his reluctance consistently to generalise i t into an argument for proletarian - 310 -- 311 -revolution. The other, flowing from this f i r s t aspect, is his chronic self-distancing (both in his theory and in the specific emphases of his practice) from organised revolutionary politics--an attitude that is increasingly consolidating its scattered manifestations into a theoretical rationale. In an interview with Geoff Dyer on Britain's Channel 5 television (printed in Marxism Today [February 1985] , 30-32), Eagleton describes this trajectory quite clearly: Over those [last ten] years I've followed a now familiar track on the L e f t , from a Trotskyist organisation to the Labour Party. One of the reasons for this move could be summarised by saying that the Trotskyist organisation hadn't really taken account of Gramsci. . . . There was no way in which an analysis which locates counter-revolutionary forces primarily at the p o l i t i c a l level, in the reformist trade union bureaucracy, can displace an understanding of other and perhaps more central forms of hegemony. That is why I think the whole area of cultural discourse is so important. Indeed, until we know more about the way p o l i t i c a l issues are figured, lived, experienced, in complex and contradictory ways by individual people, I think we can say with some certainty that we won't actually be able to resolve some of the most pressing p o l i t i c a l problems we're facing. In that sense radical cultural analysis seems to me of -paramount importance. (P. 32) That quotation helps us focus on the two key issues in Eagleton's politics and axiology: (a) the question of reformism versus revolution and (b) the more specific and contingent question of the need for a revolutionary workers' party. Now Eagleton himself has repeatedly reminded liberals'that \"the narrative Marxism has to deliver is the story of the struggles of men and women to free themselves from certain forms of exploitation and oppression. There is nothing academic about those struggles, and we forget this at our cost\" (MLC, p. v i i i ) . \"The Marxist tradition is not--and i t is lamentable that i t needs even to be said at this point--is not a tradition of 'theoreticians,'\" he reminds another interviewer. \"By the Marxist tradition we mean a tradition that has for one - 312 -and a half centuries involved l i t e r a l l y millions of men and women in l i f e and death struggles. And whatever we mean by Marxist theory, unless from the 4 beginning we put i t in that context, then we are no more than idealists.\" \"Marxist criticism is not just an alternative technique for interpreting Paradise Lost or Middlemarch,\" he maintains; \" \\i~\\t is part of our liberation from oppression\" (MLC, p. 76). Doubtless with this point in mind, Eagleton tellingly ridicules the social democrat Hilferding's implication that \" i t is possible to be a Marxist without being a revolutionary socialist\" (CI, p. 163). For, as he counters against the liberal humanists, \"'being human' in the West in 1981 means overthrowing the bourgeois state so as to socialise the means of production.\"\"' He is thus even (ostensibly) c r i t i c a l of \"the residual academicism of Criticism and Ideology. . . . I would say that the task of a Marxist c r i t i c was not primarily in the academy, . . . where we are doing a kind of holding operation , . . .\" (\"Interview,\" p. 54). \"Men and women do not,\" he lucidly remarks, \"live by culture alone, the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by i t at a l l , and those few who are fortunate enough to live by i t now are able to do so because of the labour of those who do. not. Any cultural or c r i t i c a l theory which does not begin from this single most im-portant fact, and hold i t steadily in mind in it s a c t i v i t i e s , is in my view unlikely to be worth very much\" (LT, p. 214). Thus, Eagleton's formal grasp of Marxism far exceeds the elementary positions that cause someone like Williams so much trouble. Indeed, i t is specific enough to enable him to identify the weaknesses of other theorists on the party question. Over the years, he has variously and acutely criticised Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, students of English literature, radical book reviewers, and Raymond Williams for 'failing to understand the \"theory of p o l i t i c a l leadership and role of the revolutionary party.\"^ As he exemplarily i n s i s t s , .addressing - 313 -anti-vanguardists such as Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess, \"only one response is possible; their theories should be opposed and destroyed.\"7 In fact, Eagleton can often be even more specific, addressing the sp l i t between Stalinism and Trotskyism. Thus he actually declares at one point that \"the hypothesis of Trotsky's Results and Prospects . . ., generalised as the theory of permanent revolution, remains of the utmost importance for socialist strategy today\" (WB, p. 178). He maintains that the Bolshevik Revolution is \"the most important historical moment in the whole of Marxism, and, indeed, in a g sense, in the whole of history to date,\" and openly states that \"Trotskyist p o l i -9 tics seem to me the one living continuity with Bolshevism. . . .\" He repeatedly combats the anti-Marxist conflation of Stalinism and communism, as in his polemic against the social democrat Andreas Huyssen; he cites \"the steady degen-eration of the Bolshevik revolution under Stalinism\" and hails Trotsky as \"one of the two greatest Marxist -revolutionaries of the twentieth century,\" ex p l i c i t l y crediting him as \"the architect of the Red Army and the Fourth International\" (WB, pp. 173-74). And a l l this is not surprising when we recall that Eagleton does have a history of belonging to or supporting, at various times, certain ostensibly Trotskyist parties, although I have only known him to name the specific organisations verbally, and not in print. (However, one can also draw one's own conclusions from the various organs of the British Left in which he has published.) Now this entire profile clearly provides imaginable grounds for some commentators to label Eagleton a Trotskyist. But such a label--as I w i l l show--would be misplaced. And,not least because anti-Marxists might well opportunisti-cally invoke the un-Trotskyist elements in Eagleton's po l i t i c s precisely to misrepresent and slander Trotskyism, and also because Eagleton himself makes a p o l i t i c a l issue out of his c r i t i c a l theory, his positions must be rigorously examined and characterised. - 314 -\" [ w ] i t h the leftwards movement i n the Labour party,\" writes an English reviewer of a book on c r i t i c i s m , i n 1 9 8 3 , \"there i s the poss i b i l i t y of a Labour government which might take seriously the programmatic proposals which Williams set out [for the Atlee government] twenty years ago in Communications for the social ownership and control of the culture and consciousness industries. These are not the only or necessarilv the best proposals, but they would represent a f i r s t move towards the 'proletarian public sphere.'\" \"Socialists,\" we read i n a book on li t e r a r y theory the same year, \"are those who simply wish to draw the f u l l , concrete, practical applications of the abstract notions of freedom and democracy to which l i b e r a l humanism subscribes, taking them at their word when they draw attention to the 'vividly particular.\"1 To such unapologetically reformist p o l i t i c s , which do not even pretend to be Marxist, Eagleton's critique of Williams' p o l i t i c s long ago furnished the apt answer: \"When Williams wrote in the May-Day Manifesto of a social democratic government having 'taken our values and changed them,' the tone of affronted moral indignation was a precise function of the unperceived structural complicity between those values and social democracy i t s e l f . It i s worth adding, too, that the collapse of the 'Manifesto* movement, as the last-ditch strategic 'intervention' . . . of the early New Left, was almost mathematically predictable\" (CI, p. 3 5 ) . C r i t i c i s i n g \"Williams' p o l i t i c a l gradualism which rested on a deep-seated trust i n the capacity of individuals to create 'new meanings and values' now—meanings and values which w i l l extend (at some i n f i n i t e point i n the future?) to socialism\" (CI, p. 27), Eagleton relentlessly exposed the \"essentially l i b e r a l conception of so c i a l i s t organisation\" v. -' 315 -implicit i n that programme and declared i t \" p o l i t i c a l l y s t e r i l e from the outset\" (CI, p. 35). \"Socialism\" in the early Williams, Eagleton shrewdly and disapprovingly pointed out, \" i s merely an extension of bourgeois democracy\" (CI, p. 32). Now, as may not have been immediately apparent, I have just finished quoting the \"orthodox Marxist\" Eagleton from 1976 against the social-democratised Eagleton himself from 1983.^ I hope that the contrast has been t e l l i n g . Of course, even in his 1976 epigraph to his father's memory, he had stated, \"What we do best i s breed/ speech . . . \" (CI, p. 9). But what started out as a matter of p o l i t i c a l dissatisfaction and sense of limitation (however minimal) with discursive radicalism has assumed, over the years, a certain defiant theoretical generalisation and s e l f - j u s t i f i c a t i o n . \"If you l i k e , \" Eagleton quips to his interviewers, \"the slogan w i l l be 'from Marxist aesthetics to revolutionary cultural theory and practice\" (\"Interview,\" p. 63): and he emphatically does not mean \"revolutionary\" in the sense of \"party-oriented.\" The stress f a l l s on \"cultural.\" This stance i s no more than one small step to the ostensible l e f t of what Eagleton himself c r i t i c i s e d as Williams' \"Left-Leavisism.\" One might then, quite j u s t i f i a b l y , c a l l i t \"Left-Williamsism,\" thereby recognising that Eagleton's comparatively greater verbal militancy actually resides within the same framework of p o l i t i c a l - c u l t u r a l a c t i v i t i e s and concerns as Williams'. Indeed, the limits of Eagleton's thinking are turning out to be the \" l e f t \" limits of Williams' world. This holds true even where Eagleton details his \"revolutionary cultural\" projects, as we shall see. And a certain opportunistic complacency informs this developing and consolidating programme. \"We - 316 -never said the theatre would stop tanks,\" announces a reconciled Brecht i n Eagleton's play Brecht and Company.11 \"We're actors. What else can we use but what we've got—props, words, bits of costume? . . . We haven't won yet. . . . But we did what we could, making a l l things serviceable, using such scraps as history permitted us.\" Read in the lig h t of Eagleton's maturing left-apologism for Williams, \"Brecht's\" established limitations actually represent Eagleton's highest reformist aspirations. Thus, one may well doubt that Eagleton's irony i s an entirely disapproving one when he observes of Joyce that, \"[ujnable to overcome the contradictions of Ireland in p o l i t i c a l action, . . . [he] . . . proceeded to lay bare those contradictions in his art\": \"With love and hate for Ireland at war within his heart/He learned what can't be done in 12 l i f e can s t i l l be on in art.\" Only some nouns need to be changed in that jingle to show how i t s picture matches that of Eagleton's own p o l i t i c a l programme today. But we need not merely through indirection find Eagleton's p o l i t i c a l direction out. For, on two concrete and fundamentally divisive issues of Marxist p o l i t i c s today, he has either openly denounced Marxism (and, with i t , the notion of a vanguard) or openly distanced himself from i t , i n the process sometimes attributing to i t a history that even a reasonably scrupulous non-Marxist analyst would recognise as f a l s e . These issues are (1) the nature of the Soviet Union and i t s East European a l l i e s today and (2) the Bolshevik programme for women's liberation. It Is on these questions that Eagleton's anti-Marxist p o l i t i c s become most immediately obvious. Even i f we consider only the most recent of Eagleton's various - 317 -statements and hinted positions on the f i r s t question, we find a consistent solicitousness towards social-democratic, anti-Soviet \"public opinion.\" This i s evinced chiefly by his readiness to denounce the (albeit real) evils i n the Soviet bloc \"even-handedly\" with those in the ca p i t a l i s t West, without once defending—or even mentioning—the equally real 13 gains s t i l l remaining there, despite the p o l i t i c a l degeneration. And, for a l l i t s correct points, Eagleton's polemic against Andreas Huyssen i m p l i c i t l y accepts the latter's social-democratic telescoping of the S t a l i n i s t Soviet bureaucracy with the entirety of \"the Soviet Union\" i t s e l f .1 4 A l l this i s decidedly and sp e c i f i c a l l y anti-Trotskyist. However, on this question, Eagleton has not yet equated Marxism with Stalinism i n order openly to denounce the former; for that, we have to read him on feminism. \"Marxism i s now reaping the whirlwind of i t s own frequently callous insensitivity to the oppression of women,\" he maintains i n Walter Benjamin (p. 100), \"and i t i s to be hoped that the lesson i s deep and enduring. By virtue of i t s own pa r t i a l l y sexist history, Marxism has lowered i t s moral and p o l i t i c a l c r e d i b i l i t y in the eyes of one of the most potentially v i t a l of a l l mass movements. . . . It i s clear at any rate that any attempt now on the part of Marxism cynically to cash in on the sufferings of women w i l l be fiercely and rightly repulsed.\" Now, a Marxist could say many things about this passage (and about other similar ones in Eagleton); one obvious point would be that Eagleton offers no evidence to support his charge. Let us merely examine, however, the substance of his claims. F i r s t , his remarks - 318 -reveal an utter ignorance of Bolshevik history on this question.1 5 As early as 1899, Lenin insisted that Caluse 9 of the f i r s t draft programme of his party (RSDLP) contain the words \"establishment of complete equality of rights between men and women\"; and Bolshevik Russia became the f i r s t country i n the world in which women won that equality. By the time of the October Revolution, women constituted about ten per cent of the membership of the Bolshevik Party and were represented at every level of the organisation. The Bolsheviks created a special commission of the Central Committee for Work among Women, led by Inessa Armand. It was replaced i n 1919 by the governmental Department of Working Women and Peasant Women (Zhenotdel), which went on to organise—among other things—25,000 literacy schools i n which the women themselves were often the majority of the students. Women volunteered for the Red Guard units to defeat the counterrevolution, with sixty-three women winning the Order of the Red Banner for military heroism. The Bolshevik Revolution legally and practically abolished so-called illegitimacy, making fathers co-responsible with the mothers for their offspring; i t declared marriage to be a free contract between free and equal individuals, established hundreds of care-institutions for mothers and children, legalised abortions, assured equal pay for equal work, and unlocked vast opportunities for women in industry, the professions, the party, and the government. Culturally, too, one can trace a risi n g struggle, beginning with the Bolshevik Women's clubs of St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1907, passing through the journalism of Pravda's special column for working women - 319 -and the founding of the journal Rabotnitsa (1914-18), and culminating i n the re-appearance of a revolutionary women's journal after the C i v i l War (Kommunistka), edited by Alexandra Kollontai and Armand. It was not Marxism but the S t a l i n i s t counterrevolution—with i t s \"Mother Heroine\" medals and i t s abolition of Zhenotdel—that reversed many of the gains of that f i r s t Marxist revolution. I detail this history for a reason. As one anti-Marxist reviewer of Eagleton's Literary Theory, Janet Montefiore, approvingly notes—while berating him, from his ultra-feminist r i g h t , for his \"incipient vanguardism\"—\"Eagleton's prime model of . . . a p o l i t i c s of personal experience—or, rather, of analysing experience—Is feminism\"; and she wryly lauds \"the positively chivalrous respect he evinces for i t . \"1* ' Indeed, most noticeably since his Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and the Class Struggle l n Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), the p o l i t i c a l l y petit-bourgeois feminist movement has increasingly become for Eagleton both a social focus for his l i b e r a l guilt and awe17 and a p o l i t i c a l rallying point for his reformist impulses. Consequently, feminism—a separatist antithesis to proletarian Interests—has increasingly become Eagleton's particular vehicle, for launching his more open attacks on Marxism. This vehicle, moreover, carries him across a large cross-section of phenomena, including l i t e r a r y axiology. For, as he remarks (somewhat pointlessly, i t might seem at f i r s t ) , \"feminism recognises no . . . [false] . . . distinctions between questions of the human subject and questions of p o l i t i c a l struggle\" (LT, p. 215). Apparently, that i s , Marxism does. - 320 -For, of course, only a.p o l i t i c a l innocent .would take that remark to be merely the rebuff to apo l i t i c a l empiricism that Eagleton e x p l i c i t l y presents i t as; behind i t , surely, l i e s his usual warning to \"philistine\" Marxism to learn a few things from the latest \"mass\" \"movement.\" For, wblle he extols the \"potential\" v i t a l i t y or importance of feminism (though the ungrateful Janet Monteflores of the world be but mildly amused), i t i s after a l l Marxism that he chooses to characterise as cynically opportunist. The fact i s that, even though his (all-too-modestly) \"incipient vanguardism\" makes him distasteful to feminism, Eagleton's own revulsion from the implications of consistent Marxism nevertheless keeps him pushed in a bloc with i t s petit-bourgeois antithesis. The sectarian p o l i t i c a l ideology that he thereby feels compelled to capitulate to has nothing i n common with the ideology of even some of the merely cl-a'ss-rfconscious proletarian women of today—such as the militant Women's Auxiliary supporting the 1984 Arizona copper-miners' strike or the wives of the Kent coal^-miners who marched i n London the same year, under slogans 18 such as \"Kent Miners Wives Say Stand by Your Man.\" The net critical-theoretical result of Eagleton's current p o l i t i c a l trajectory has therefore been his rapid f a l l i n g - i n behind that other petit-bourgeois c r i t i c , the social-democratic Williams, in their common adoption of \"culturalism.\" That i s , both c r i t i c s have carefully restricted their, p o l i t i c a l efforts to culture, thereby pointedly .rejecting any. orientation to, organised revolutionary commitment in practice. Before formally announcing this programme (which has always been the observable r e a l i t y ) , the Eagleton: of Literary Theory - 321 -brief l y tries to pre-empt criticism by assuring us that \" [t]hose who work in the f i e l d of cultural practices are unlikely to mistake their activity as utterly central\" (LT, p. 214); then he takes the plunge, vaguely alluding to \"times and places when i t suddenly becomes newly relevant, charged with a significance beyond i t s e l f \" (LT, p. 215). Perhaps Eagleton believes i n a different definition of cynical opportunism than do those philistine Marxists he berates. Be that as i t may, the specific form of Eagleton's culturalism . * i s simply a \"proletarianised\" version of the \"community\" reformism he himself so acutely c r i t i c i s e d in Williams. It names four main areas of special interest: anti-imperialist culture emanating from colonial countries \"struggling for their independence from imperialism,\" the feminist \"women's movement,\" the so-called \"culture industry,\" and the so-called \"worker writers' movement\" (LT, pp. 215-16). Of these, i t i s of course the last-named area that i s of direct relevance to our discussion here. Eagleton hails the \"worker writers' movement\" as \"one sign of a significant break from the dominant relations of literary production\": f o r , he asserts, \"[cQommunity and cooperative publishing enterprises . . . interrogate the ruling definitions of literature ,. . .\" (LT, p. 216). Clearly, Eagleton must believe these days that \"interrogating\" the ruling \"definitions\" of \"literature\"—irrespective of organised proletarian revolution—will significantly contribute to \"overthrowing-the bourgeois state so as to socialise the means of production.\" Either Eagleton.truly, does, believe.this, or he no longer thinks that the bourgeois state needs to be (in his phrase) \"overthrown.\" In any case, his p o l i t i c a l perspective stands revealed - 322 -as that of mainline Williamsian \"culturalist\" reformism. For, as Eagleton himself has, noted, \"Materialism must i n s i s t on the ir r e d u c i b i l i t y of the real to discourse\" (WB, p. 51). For a l l those familiar with the Trotskyist position of unconditional defense of the USSR against imperialism, the bathetic logic of Eagleton's reformist trajectory i s captured i n his parallel rallying cry to \"those who have doubts about the ideological implications of . . . departmental organisations such as those of literature . . . to defend them unconditionally against government assaults\" (LT, p. 213). Eagleton seems to understand the meaning and importance of principled unconditional defence quite properly when i t i s the livelihood of academics in capitalist Britain that looks uncertain; but he somehow forgets i t when the very existence of entire workers' states are jeopardised by imperialism. Such i s the logic of a p o l i t i c s rapidly retreating from a formal Imitation of Trotskyism. The nature of this contradiction i s exactly encapsulated in the fact that, after having repeatedly and regretfully noted Walter Benjamin's \"negative theology,\" with i t s \"absence of the revolutionary party\" (WB, pp. 148, 177), and after having e x p l i c i t l y argued that \"Trotsky was incomparably more significant than Benjamin for the course of socialism\" (WB, p. 174), Eagleton squarely opts for . . . Benjamin: \"In the imperialist homelands, the conditions against which Benjamin warned are once again in sway. . . . In such a situation, i t i s more than ever necessary to blast Benjamin's work out of i t s historical continuum, so that i t may f e r t i l i s e the. present!' (WB, p.. 179; emphasis .mine) ... Eagleton's effectively exclusive choice i s no accident; and.the political-contradiction i s not resolved by pointing to the obvious fact that the book, after a l l - 323 -i s \"about\" Benjamin, not,Trotskyv Eagleton's motivating p o l i t i c a l programme stands revealed not in his token acknowledgement but i n his actual recommendations. Besides, the very fact of Eagleton's culturalist emphasis codifies, in any case, his p o l i t i c a l choice; one therefore needs to remain conscious of the overall rightward d r i f t of his p o l i t i c s in order to see through the apparent methodological and verbal \"leftism\" of much of his c u l t u r a l - c r i t i c a l theory i t s e l f . His categories are deployed to subvert virtually every conventional assumption about culture except one—namely, that even \"Marxist\" cultural activists need not base their operations on the logic and the demands of organised revolutionary proletarian p o l i t i c s . In formulations that at f i r s t seem to constitute a dramatic p o l i t i c a l broadening of p r i o r i t i e s , but which then (less ostentatiously) dispel that impression, Eagleton offers a number of possible projects that he calls \"useful\" (or \"revolutionary\") c r i t i c i s m . Two passages from Walter Benjamin contain some detailed explanation of his conception: It would dismantle the ruling concepts of \"literature,\" reinserting \"lite r a r y \" texts into the whole f i e l d of cultural practices. It would strive to relate such \"cultural\" practices to other forms of social a c t i v i t y , and to transform the cultural apparatuses themselves. It would articulate i t s \"cultural\" analyses with a consistent p o l i t i c a l intervention. It would deconstruct the received hierarchies of \"literature\" and transvaluate. received judgments and assumptions; engage with the language and \"unconscious\" of literary texts, to reveal their role- in the ideological construction of the subject; and mobilise such texts, i f necessary by hermeneutic \"violence\",; i n a struggle to transform those subjects within a wider p o l i t i c a l , context. (WB, p. 98).*.* The task of the \"revolutionary cultural workers,\" Eagleton later - 324 -summarises, are three: F i r s t , to participate i n the production of works and events which, within transformed \"cultural\" media, so fictionalise the \"real\" as to intend those effects conducive to the victory of socialism. Second, as \" c r i t i c , \" to expose the rhetorical structures by which non-socialist works produce p o l i t i c a l l y un-desirable effects, as a way of combatting what i t i s now unfashionable to c a l l false consciousness. Third, to interpret such works where possible \"against the grain,\" so as to appropriate from them whatever may be valuable for socialism. The practice of the soc i a l i s t cultural workers, in b r i e f , i s projective, polemical and appropriative. (WB, p. 113) Obviously, Eagleton's combination of violently deconstructionist and appropriative rhetoric—structurated by images of diversification and broadening, and concretised by references to \"social activity,\".-;, \" p o l i t i c a l intervention,\" and \"victory of socialism\"—seems, by academic standards, startlingly radical. But i t also tends to obscure the fact that Eagleton has l e f t remarkably open the specific question of exactly \"whatever\" he thinks may be \"valuable for socialism.\" This i s not a demand on my part for a complete l i s t of specifically unforseeable \"effects\" deemed \"conducive to the victory of socialism.\" Rather, i t i s merely a recognition of the absence, from Eagleton '8 theory, of any conception of a guiding p o l i t i c a l vehicle to orient those \"effects\" and the means of achieving themu And this holds true for his latest book on the subject as well: The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984) . Ian Birchall i s one c r i t i c who has come close to identifying the 19 limitations of an argument such as Eagleton's. While partly sharing - 325 -Eagleton'8 academic horizon and orientation (expressed i n the ambiguous statement, \"Our p o l i t i c a l tasks clearly begin there [in the academy]\" [p. 116]), Birchall also asserts the obvious social truth that \"there are other tasks outside of academic institutions. The whole experience of Stalinism and Zhdanovism has distorted the argument about the relationship between cultural practice and p o l i t i c a l organisation. There are a whole number of questions to be reopened here\" (p. 117). Of course, he then goes on to imply that Trotsky's critique of Froletkult was wrong, that Rock Against Racism represents \"bringing together p o l i t i c a l organisation and cultural practice,\" and that he i s probably thinking more about \"the relations of party and writer\" (my emphasis) than about the relations of party and c r i t i c — a distinction I have stressed in my Introduction. Birchall's idea of \" p o l i t i c a l organisation,\" then, i s not exactly a Leninist one; but he at least names the problem. From a relatively more philosophical standpoint, C l i f f Slaughter, too, stresses the crucial importance of what he calls \"Marx's revolution in philosophy\": Does not creative literature (like music and the visual a r t s ) , besides reflecting the contemporary ideology i n particular ways, provide compelling and life-giving images for the inner struggle men must undertake in order to re-engage continually in the struggle to unite with nature, a unity and conflict of opposites? When Trotsky wrote Literature and Revolution, i t was from this standpoint, which allowed him to start from the most specific problems facing the writers, readers and c r i t i c s of the day, problems which together constituted the question of the whole hist o r i c a l meaning of the Russian Revolution as the beginning of the world socialist revolution, and the new way i n which the thoughts and feelings aroused by this ti t a n t i c struggle opened up to mankind the treasure-house of - 326 -past literature., None of this i s considered by Eagleton f i n Criticism arid Ideology ], restricted as he is to the ideological function of literature and cri t i c i s m . (P. 207) I find Slaughter's primary focus (\"creative li t e r a t u r e \" ) , his theoretical sureness about the nature of creative literature, and his unmediated broadening of perspective into a vi r t u a l l y pointless (and debatable) generalisation about people's struggle to \"unite\" with nature different from my focus and approach. But his analytical i l l u s t r a t i o n from Trotsky does, nevertheless, valuably remind Marxists of the logical and indispensable connection between literary criticism and theory, on the one hand, and actual participation in p o l i t i c a l struggle, on the other. On this point, Slaughter has certainly managed to spot a major—and, arguably, the decisive—absence in Eagleton's p o l i t i c a l makeup, as manifested i n the latter's theoretical system. I therefore thoroughly disagree with those social-democratically inclined c r i t i c s , such as Neil Bolton, who complain of Eagleton's allegedly \"serious over-estimation of the achievements of 20 Marxist p o l i t i c s . \" I also disagree with those S t a l i n i s t , popular-frontist c r i t i c s , such as Arnold Kettle, whose infatuation with \"democratic\" pragmatism leads them to prefer \" l i b e r a l errors and petty bourgeois inroads\" to Marxism, and for whom even the all-too-accommodating 21 Eagleton becomes a \"purist\" and a \"sectarian Marxist.\" In this respect, Eagleton himself merely confirms Slaughter's observation when, in Literary Theory, he emphatically, restricts his own conception of the \"radical critics'\";tasks to \"discursive practices\": \"[the;/task i s ] to see 'literature' as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole f i e l d of what Michel Foucault has called - 327 -'discursive practices,' and . . . i f anything i s to be an object of study i t i s this whole f i e l d of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled 'literature'\" (LT, p. 205). For Eagleton, \"discusive practices\" really do mark the limits of his horizon: organised revolutionary class-struggle seems almost embarrassingly out of place here. Yet, he has named himself on a short l i s t of the \"major Marxist aestheticians of the century to date.\" That, in Marxism, i s known as a contradiction—and one should expect to be held accountable for embodying i t . Since Eagleton's main overture to social democracy occurs over a relatively larger question—the very choice of a c t i v i t y — r a t h e r than over det a i l s — t h a t i s , for example, over the methodological superiority (or otherwise) of psychoanalysis to deconstruction—any detailed analysis of his actual internal literary-theoretical system would be somewhat beside the political/axiological point. Of course, as we shall see, this i s not to say that the details of his system do not internally share the overall direction and character exhibited by his p o l i t i c s externally;, quite the contrary. But, to adopt a Benjaminesque phrase through Eagleton, i f reading \"against the grain\" i s the best way of uncovering a writer's suppressed positions, then lending much p o l i t i c a l c r e dibility or import to Eagleton's left-sou;ndiag \"litera r y \" theory w i l l not particularly help us i n analysing the pol i t i c s of his axiology. However, alongside this caveat, I-will of course concede that some acquaintance with.his literary .theory per se i s necessary to an understanding of his axiology as well. B r i e f l y , Eagleton argues - 328 -that \"[t]he guarantor of a scientific criticism is the science of ideological formations,\" and maintains that \"{t\\o argue for differential relations between text and ideology . . . is to claim that those relations are historically mutable—as mutable as 'general' and 'aesthetic' ideologies themselves—and therefore demand specific historical definition\" .(CI, pp. 96, 94). The particular analytical value of literature, Eagleton holds, is that i t \"is the most revealing mode of experiential access to ideology that we possess. It Is in literature, above a l l , that we observe in a peculiarly complex, coherent, intensive and immediate fashion the workings of ideology in the textures of lived experience of class-societies.\" Consequently, he argues, clearly deploying the deconstructionist strategy of reading \"against the grain,\" \"[tjhe function of criticism is to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work—to deny that 'naturalness' in order to make its real determinants appear\" (Cl, p. 101). From a l l this, and particularly from Eagleton's reference to \"general\" and \"aesthetic\" ideologies, one can already gather that \"ideology,\" as he conceives i t , is both a recognisably distinct and an internally differentiated entity. In fact, ideology in Eagleton's scheme is the body of materially and conceptually signified beliefs and values of particular individuals, groups, and masses of people that 22 define their position and role in the social relations of power. These beliefs, he points out, usually contain some truth about objective reality, as well as some elements of misperception; and in the literary realm, as in a l l others, these beliefs and values are Intricately linked to their individual possessor's economic and cultural role in society. - 328a -Leaf 329. inLs.sed la number - 330 -The literary sector i t s e l f includes what Eagleton calls \"a number of 'levels': theories of literature, c r i t i c a l practices, literary traditions, genres, conventions, devices and discourses\" (CI, p. 60); and the specifically \"aesthetic\" aspect of i t includes \"an 'ideology of the aesthetic'—a signification of the function, meaning and value of the aesthetic i t s e l f within a particular social formation, which i s in turn part of an 'ideology of culture' included within . . . [the general Ideology]\" (CI, p. 60). As for the text i t s e l f , i t i s \"not the 'expression' of ideology\" but \"a certain production of ideology\" (CI, p. 64); Its \"relation to ideology so constitutes that ideology as to reveal something of i t s relations to history\" (CI, pp. 68-69). This can happen both negatively as well as positively: \"in deformatively 'producing' the r e a l , i t nevertheless carries elements of reality within i t s e l f \" (CI_, p. 69). Now, though some texts \"seem to approach the real more closely than others,\" i t i s the literary text's \"lack of a real direct referent [that] constitutes the most salient fact about i t \" : \"fictiveness . . . i s the most general constituent of the literary text, and this refers not at a l l to the l i t e r a l fictiveness of the text's events and responses (for they may happen to be historically true), but to certain modes of producing those materials\" (CI, pp. 77-78). According to Eagleton, then—given the nature of bourgeois ideological dominance, the ideological make-up of literary texts, and the analytical power of counter-ideological c r i t i c i s m — t h e c r i t i c ' s task should be to reveal, analyse, and.judge \"the relation between textual signification (which is both 'form' and 'content') and those more pervasive significants we name ideology\" (CI, p. 79). To i l l u s t r a t e his conception of the ideologically contradictory - 331 -properties of literature, Eagleton cites the work of Balzac: Balzac was indeed able to achieve partial insight into the movement of real history, but i t i s mistaken to image such insight as a transcendence of ideology into history. No such displacement of realms occurs: i t i s rather that Balzac's Insights are the effect of a specific conjuncture of his mode of authorial insertion into ideology, the relations of the ideological region he inhabited to real history, the character of that stage of capitalist development, and the \"truth-effect\" of the particular aesthetic form (realism) he worked. It i s by force of this conjuncture that he was able to be at once exceedingly deluded and extraordinarily percipient. There is no more question of Balzac's text having \"by-passed\" the ideological and established a direct relation to history than there i s of Shakespeare's drama having launched i t s critique of bourgeois individualism from outside a highly particular ideological standpoint. (CI, pp. 69-70) This f a i r l y balanced explanation of both the perceptiveness and the deludedness of Balzac, however, is rather unique in the general scheme of Eagleton's c r i t i c a l theory. As more than one commentator has observed, the overall emphasis in Eagleton's theory usually tends to f a l l on the omissions or delusions, understressing the elements 23 of direct, positive truth in a text. And this general imbalance, as weLshall see, bears direct implications for his axiology, while at the same time bespeaking a more fundamental problem with his p o l i t i c a l relationship to Marxism. Eagleton's.Principles of L i terary Evaluation To a greater extent than either Caudwell or Williams, Eagleton views specific empirical c r i t e r i a of li t e r a r y value as algebraic - 332 -functions of their larger; methodological principles. He abstracts—and, therefore, i n one sense radically \"simplifies\"—the entire axiological problematic as i t has historically been defined by most theorists before him. On the other hand, viewed from a specifically Trotskyist standpoint, this simplification produces certain un-Marxist contra-dictions, some of whose practical results violate the requirements of even simple lo g i c . And the contradictions, I w i l l argue, are chiefly defined by two inadequacies: one i s Eagleton's inconsistent class-definition and class-differentiation of his discussed authors, readers/critics, and (his own and their) motivating p o l i t i c a l programme(s); the other, related to this occasional practical class-blindness, i s an insufficiently consistent integration of his evaluative principles with a revolutionary standpoint that recognises the centrality of the party question in Marxist axiology today. Eagleton maintains that i t would seem absurd for Marxist criticism \"to be silent on the qualitative distinction between, say, Pushkin and Coventry Patmore. Yet such a theoretical prudery i s in vogue within Marxist aesthetics . . .: how patrician to prefer Blake .-to-- Betjeman\" (CI, p. 162). Arguing that \"Marxist criticism should indeed decisively intervene in the 'value-problem,'\" he correctly points out that \"nothing i s to be gained by that form of literary jiltra-leftism which dismisses received evaluations merely because they are the product of bourgeois criticism\" (CI, p. 162). In this negative stance towards \"literary ultra-leftism,\" I find myself at one with Eagleton. The difference arises when he formulates.the positive tasks of Marxist criticism as he sees them: - 333 -The task of Marxist criticism i s to provide a materialist explanation of the bases of literary value—a task which Raymond Williams, i n his discussion of the English novel, seems to me to have l e f t largely unachieved. It should not, then, be a matter of embarrassment that the literary texts selected for examination by Marxist criticism w i l l inevitably overlap with those works which literary idealism has consecrated as 'great'; i t is a question of challenging the ina b i l i t y of such idealism to render more than subjective accounts of the c r i t i a of value. (CI, p. 162) Since this statement, in Eagleton's chapter on \"Marxism and Aesthetic Value\" (CI, pp. 162-87), constitutes part of the f i r s t specialised axiological discussion within ostensible Marxism i n recent years, i t rewards diagnostic scrutiny. Of course, I should mention at once that elements of the argument are subsequently revised or refined by him in books such as Literary Theory. In light of our preceding observations about Eagleton's p o l i t i c s and his general theory of literature, several theoretical questions might immediately be raised regarding the above-quoted sections: why the gratuitous self-restriction to \"received evaluations\" merely because, manifestly, not a l l products of bourgeois criticism are unmitigatedly reactionary? Are Marxists expected to conclude that a l l bourgeois evaluations are therefore p o l i t i c a l l y the opposite, only ineptly \"explained\" by the class-enemy? What i s meant by \"the\" \"bases\" of \"literary value\"? Are we supposed to think that \"received\" bourgeois evaluations rest on Marxist motivational \"bases\"? Is there only a fixed number of. \"bases\"? Are they classless? Whose \"literary value\" i s being.proposed, i n whose interests., and in what specific h i s t o r i c a l and class context? Or does Eagleton indeed believe—contrary to subsequent indications—that times change, but - 334 -values don't (\"as though we s t i l l believed i n k i l l i n g off infirm infants or putting the mentally i l l on public show\" \\lfE. p. 11])? Are Marxist axiologists the kept literary lawyers of bourgeois ideologues that they should not so much question the very terms of the selection and the consecration of those ideologues' \"great tradition\" as content themselves with merely \"explaining\" why the \"tradition\" must stand undisturbed and why the assumption about i t s \"greatness\" must remain universally conceded, i f not unchallenged? Of course, I am exaggerating here the contradictions i n Eagleton's early axiological arguments. But I am doing that for a reason—precisely because, i n his later work, they tend to become misleadingly subdued or blurred or part i a l l y \"corrected\" without really getting resolved. The assumptions of universal consensus, intri n s i c value, and non-revolutionary, non-party contexts linger on, highlighting Eagleton's chief philosophico-political poles of contra-diction: absolutism and relativism, idealism^ and materialism, discursive culturalism and a formal notion of organised p o l i t i c a l commitment, reformism and revolutionism, centrism and Trotskyism. \"The value of a text, then,\" Eagleton decides in the above-cited chapter from Criticism and Ideology, \" i s determined by i t s double mode of insertion into an ideological formation and into the available lineages of literary discourse. It i s in this way that the text enters into relation with an always partial range of the hi s t o r i c a l l y determined values,.interests, needs, powers and capacities which surround i t . . . \" (CI, p. 186). Here, typically, Eagleton speaks more radically than many ostensible Marxists about \"interests, needs, powers and capacities,\" calling for the \"double-refusal\" of historicism and - 335 -r formalism, i n favour of .re-enacting \"the founding.gesture of Marxist p o l i t i c a l economy and re-consider [ing] the question of value on the si t e of literary production\" (CI, p. 166). Yet, his parameters do not decisively surpass \"Ideological practices\" as such. And he accordingly (falsely) transfers the notion of economic production as a whole to 24 one restricted \" s ite\"—the \"literary\"— within i t . In Literary Theory, Eagleton attempts to overcome this discursive parochialism at a stroke. \"'Value,'\" he remarks correctly, \" i s a transitive term: i t means whatever i s valued by certain people infspecific situations, according to particular c r i t e r i a and i n the light of given purposes\" (LT, p. 11). Thus, \"what distinguishes one kind of discourse from another . . . i s neither ontological [rijor methodological but strategic,\" he points out. \"This means asking f i r s t not what the object i s or how we should approach i t , but why we should want to engage with i t in the f i r s t place. . . . It i s not a matter of starting from certain theoretical or methodological problems: i t is a matter of what we want to do, and then seeing which methods and theories w i l l best help us achieve these ends\" (LT, pp. 209-10). In an abstract way, this orientational \"corrective\" certainly throws some useful light on the general logic of evaluation. It healthily insists on emphasising the practical motives of value judgment. At the same time, this argument logically reminds one of Eagleton's own, declared pr a c t i c a l - p o l i t i c a l motive—a left-Williamsian culturalism. Moreover, i t leads one to ask why he himself should have wanted to \"engage\" with \"received\" bourgeois, evaluations principally in the role of a mere expIleator, stubbornly unquestioning of their evaluations - 336 -themselves: \"The Brontes , Dickens , E l i o t , Hardy: i t i s wi th them, ra ther than w i t h Thackeray, T r o l l o p e , D i s r a e l i , Bulwer L y t t o n , that the f i n e s t achievements of nineteenth-century r e a l i s m are to be found\" (CI , p . 125). The r e l e v a n t questions here are i n the f i r s t place methodologica l : \" f i n e s t \" f o r whom? i n what h i s t o r i c a l context? f o r what l i t e r a r y , c u l t u r a l and p o l i t i c a l purposes? The answers to these questions are not i n s c r i b e d i n the judgment i t s e l f ; and t h i s has remained the o v e r a l l symptomatic problem with E a g l e t o n ' s e m p i r i c a l assessments of authors and t h e i r works. One i s therefore i n c l i n e d to suspect t h a t , i n such a s o p h i s t i c a t e d o s t e n s i b l e T r o t s k y i s t as E a g l e t o n , t h i s a b i d i n g neglec t of the a x i o l o g i c a l importance of h i s imagined audience 's c l a s s - c h a r a c t e r must be a d i r e c t f u n c t i o n of h i s p o l i t i c a l centr ism i n g e n e r a l . I t i s not an a c c i d e n t . I f one can agree, a t ^ l e a s t p r o v i s i o n a l l y , to d i s t i n g u i s h between two aspects of E a g l e t o n ' s a x i o l o g y — i t s formal statements of p r i n c i p l e s and i t s revealed p o s i t i o n s centred on p a r t i c u l a r e v a l u a t i o n s — one might recognise a rough correspondence between those statements and E a g l e t o n ' s r e l a t i v i s t i c consciousness , on the one hand, and between those revealed p o s i t i o n s and h i s a b s o l u t i s t assumptions, on the o t h e r . This can enable us , f u r t h e r , to see how the r e l a t i v i s t and the a b s o l u t i s t i n Eagleton combine i n a s p e c i f i c way in_ p r a c t i c e , s a n c t i o n i n g the v a l o r i s a t i o n of p o l i t i c a l l y reac t ionary w r i t e r s i n the name of both c o n t e x t u a l l y h i s t o r i c a l ' , r e l a t i v e s i t u a t i o n s and i n t r i n s i c a l l y absolute p a r t i c u l a r v a l u e s . And t h i s can v i v i d l y demonstrate f o r us one i m p l i c a t i o n of the.marriage b e t w e e n . p o l i t i c a l centr ism and l i t e r a r y a x i o l o g y . - 337 -Thus, on the one hand, Eagleton i s clearly enamoured of his \"shock\"-technique of using the allegedly \"agreed\" value of, say, Homer or Shakespeare to argue their conceivable future worthlessness: \"Given a profound enough hist o r i c a l s h i f t , there i s no reason in principle 25 why Shakespeare should not f a l l into the ranks of the unemployed.\" Criteria for literary evaluation, he reminds us, are inevitably pre-constituted at a number of levels in any given society and culture, and they are applied in conscious or subconscious accordance with the ultimately practical p o l i t i c a l interests of the judge, and of his or her class: Another reason why literary criticism cannot justify i t s self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their \"value\" i s that criticism i s part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the f i r s t place. . . . Literary criticism selects, processes, corrects and rewrites texts in accordance with certain institutionalised norms of the \"literary\" —norms which are at any given time arguable and always historically variable. . . . [Tjhere are certainly a great many ways of talking about literature that i t excludes and a great many discursive moves and strategies which i t disqualifies as invalid, i l l i c i t , non-critical nonsense. . . . Regional dialects of the discourse, so to speak, are acknowledged and sometimes tolerated, but you must not sound as though you are speaking another language altogether. . . . It i s the power of \"policing\" language—. . . of policing writing i t s e l f . . . . F i n a l l y , i t i s a question of the power-relations between the literary-academic institution, where a l l of this occurs, and the ruling power-interests of society at large, whose ideological needs w i l l be served and whose personnel w i l l be reproduced by the preservation and controlled extension of the discourse in question. (LT pp. 202-03) \"Literary value,\" Eagleton warns, even in Criticism and Ideology, \" . . . i s always relational value: 'exchange-value.1 The histories of 'value' are a sub-sector of the histories of literary-- 338 -ideological receptive practices\" (CI, pp. 166-67). In this sense, the text can generate only a f i n i t e number of possible readings \"within the conjuncture of the reader's ideological matrix and i t s own\" (CI, p. 167). Thus, since value i s the determinate product of a particular interaction under particular circumstances, Eagleton believes that we must \"refuse a 'moralism' of l i t e r a r y value\" and \"rewrite the question of a work's quality with the question of i t s conditions of possibility\" (CI, p. 187). Hence, taking a cue from the Marxist (especially the Trotskyist) prognosis of culture in the distant future, Eagleton speculates at one point that \" i f Marxism has maintained a certain silence about aesthetic value, i t may well be because the material conditions which would make such discourse f u l l y possible do not as yet exist\" (CI, p. 187). This element of relativism and sense of h i s t o r i c a l context enables Eagleton to expose the ideological bias of such fundamental categories as \"Literature\" and \"Criticism,\" to link their significance at crucial points to the history of \"Realism\" as a convention, and to reveal certain axiological implications of such \"conjuncturalisation.\" On the other hand, as we shall see, this lit e r a r y - h i s t o r i c a l relativism can easily translate, in Eagleton, into an acceptance of p o l i t i c a l pluralism—which can then be used to accommodate downright reaction and to \"ju s t i f y \" the p o l i t i c a l passivity and defeatism implicit i n his \"culturalism\". Moreover, Eagleton remains attached to the term and the concept of \"the value\" of a text; i t i s an. attachment which groundlessly posits an. i n t r i n s i c , permanent, and universally recognisable element. He makes no decisive, and more logical, s h i f t to the term and the concept - 339 -o f \" e v a l u a t i o n , \" w h i c h wou ld n e c e s s a r i l y s u g g e s t f l u x , i n t e r a c t i o n , and i n t e r d e p e n d e n c e . T h i s t h e n b e s p e a k s h i s i n c o n s i s t e n c y i n e x t e n d i n g h i s own l i t e r a r y - h i s t o r i c a l r e l a t i v i s m t o t h e r e a l m o f a x i o l o g y . And t h e c o n t r a d i c t o r y e f f e c t s o f h i s l i m i t e d m e t h o d o l o g i c a l r e l a t i v i s m and h i s r e s i d u a l m e t h o d o l o g i c a l and e m p i r i c a l a b s o l u t i s m show i n many o f h i s s p e c i f i c l i t e r a r y j udgment s , a s does t h e i r c o n c o m i t a n t p o l i t i c a l c e n t r i s m . I t i s i m p o r t a n t t o n o t e the f o r c e o f E a g l e t o n ' s arguments f o r r e l a t i v i s m , n o t o n l y b e c a u s e t h e y o f f e r a p o s i t i v e a n a l y t i c a l g u i d e b u t a l s o b e c a u s e t h e y p r o v i d e a gauge a g a i n s t wh i ch t o measure h i s own c o n t r a s t i n g , a b s o l u t i s t s t a t e m e n t s . T h u s , f o r i n s t a n c e , d e s t r o y i n g t h e myth o f t he i s o l a b l e and permanent \" v a l u e \" o f someth ing c a l l e d \" L i t e r a t u r e , \" i f : Eag le ton e x p o s e s t h e i m p l i c i t m u t u a l v a l o r i s a t i o n s o f r e a d e r and t e x t as t h e y o p e r a t e i n e s t a b l i s h e d \" C r i t i c i s m \" t o d a y : C r i t i c i s m becomes a m u t u a l l y s u p p o r t i v e d i a l o g u e between two h i g h l y v a l o r i s e d s u b j e c t s : t he v a l u a b l e t e x t and the v a l u a b l e r e a d e r . . . . The v a l u a b l e r e a d e r i s c o n s t i t u t e d as v a l u a b l e by t h e t e x t s w h i c h he c o n s t i t u t e s as s u c h ; i d e o l o g i c a l v a l u e i s p r o j e c t e d i n t o the T r a d i t i o n t o r e - e n t e r t h e p r e s e n t a s m e t a p h y s i c a l c o n f i r m a t i o n o r c r i t i q u e . The name o f t h i s t a u t o l o g y i s L i t e r a t u r e . . . . ( C I , p . 164) As E a g l e t o n goes on to e l a b o r a t e i n L i t e r a r y T h e o r y ( u s i n g s m a l l \" 1 \" i n s t e a d o f c a p i t a l \" L \" f o r \" L i t e r a t u r e \" ) , \" by and l a r g e p e o p l e te rm ' l i t e r a t u r e ' w r i t i n g w h i c h they t h i n k i s g o o d \" : V a l u e judgments wou ld c e r t a i n l y seem to have a l o t t o do w i t h what i s j u d g e d l i t e r a t u r e and what i s n ' t — n o t n e c e s s a r i l y i n t h e sen se t h a t w r i t i n g has to be \" f i n e \" t o b e l i t e r a r y , b u t t h a t i t has t o be o f t he k i n d t h a t i s j u d g e d f i n e : i t may - 340 -be an inferior example of a.generally valued mode. . . . Anything can be literature, and-anything which i s regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature. . . . Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. . . . [People] may even change their minds about the grounds they use for judging what i s valuable and what i s not. . . . There i s no such thing as a literary work or tradition which i s valuable in i t s e l f , regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about i t . (LT, pp. 10-11) It i s on these grounds that Eagleton specifically c r i t i c i s e s , for instance, Lukacs' pro-\"realism\" aesthetics, for \"they play upon some quite unexamined shi f t from 'fact' to 'value'. . . . It just i s the case that art which gives us the 'real' i s superior art\" (WB, pp. 84-85) . And yet, Eagleton routinely and uncritically upholds the \"received\" ranking by \"conventional estimation as 'major'\" of authors such as Yeats, E l i o t , Pound, and Lawrence, and of works such as 26 Tristram Shandy. Of l a t e , Eagleton has modified the absolutism of his specific evaluative formulations; nevertheless, he has not expressly come to terms with and rejected the methodology that led him into absolutism in the f i r s t place. Thus, he actually often reproduces his absolutism at other levels, within the framework of the new formulations. For instance, he suggests that psychoanalytical theory can t e l l us \"more about why most people prefer John Keats to Leigh Hunt\" (LT, p. 193). The homely.simplicity and-mischievously self-conscious bias of that statement leaves unquestioned certain assumptions:that nevertheless bear serious-examination: where did Eagle-ton find his stat i s t i c s on the said preference? What bias did that - 341 -survey i t s e l f start out with? Has Eagleton checked to see i f the relative productions and professional prescriptions of works by Keats and Hunt affect their respective popularity? Of course, Eagleton i s entirely aware of a l l these axiological factors in a general way: but i f that general awareness does not show any impact on his specific formulations, then we are entitled to question at least his consistency, and perhaps even to suspect the rigour of his general understanding. In a discussion with Peter Fuller in New Left Review, Eagleton himself makes clear some of the implications of my questions: \"Nobody I know is prepared to argue that Lem i s unquestionably inferior to Thomas Love Beddoes, but because Lem happens to write in what i s currently ranked as a subordinate genre, he doesn't make i t into the 27 canon and Beddoes, who writes in a currently consecrated genre, does.\" Dramatically demonstrating the existence and the nature of differences in evaluation (and in evaluative motivation), Eagleton attacks Fuller's contention that the \"relative constancy of biological activity\" universally constitutes the dominant measure of perceived value: \"there i s a danger of concluding,\" he wryly points out, \"that the greatness of King Lear, for example, l i e s in the fact that i t i s about suffering and death and the break-up of the family. That certainly wasn't true for Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson himself suffered and died, sharing definite biological structures with Shakespeare and those characters in Lear, this didn't figure at a l l i n his response. For him the end of the play was morally disgusting—a response; which arose purely from his own ideological situation\" (\"Discussion,\",; p. 82). Simultaneously, Eagleton warns against ego-centric impressionism: \"often the principal uses of the argument Lof the kind advanced by Fuller] lead to the \"You like i t and I don't—on to the next a r t i f a c t ' type of position\" (\"Discussion,\" p. 82). But \"the problem of aesthetic judgment l i e s somewhere at the juncture of three dimensions: li n g u i s t i c s , psychoanalysis and the study of ideology\" (\"Discussion,\" pp. 82-83), and not merely in the individual c r i t i c ' s mind. For, Eagleton correctly perceives a direct link \"between certain forms of psychic intuition and authoritarianism. . . . You are saying that i t ' s a matter of pulses. If you are reduced to silence when you try to identify or define that force in the classic which i s taken to be indescribable, then you simply i n s i s t , take an authoritarian stand\" (\"Discussion,\" p. 89). Yet note, even here, phrases that indicate a tendency to accept conventional value-judgments without question: \"the greatness\" of King Lear, that force in \"the classic.\" Nor are these phrases merely coincidental concessions in rhetoric; they are part of a pattern, one of whose most extreme examples i s Eagleton's unqualified and provocative assertion that \" i t is surely true that Shakespeare i s more 28 enjoyable than Martin Webster.\" Again, the issue here in the f i r s t place i s not one of empirical truth or untruth—for Eagleton i s arguing theory—but one of methodological consistency or inconsistency. If Eagleton could rightly c r i t i c i s e Lukacs for simply assuming that \" [i] t just i s the case that art which gives us the 'real' i s superior art\" (WB, p. 85), we can c r i t i c i s e Eagleton himself for presenting his own perception of the alleged superiority of Shakespeare to Webster as self-evident throughout society, irrespective of—among other factors—classes and the class-interests of the posited readership(s) . The last-named considera-tions, incidentally, also distinguish the contextless pronouncement of Eagleton from the challenge of Trotsky to Libedinsky on the specific impacts - 343 -of Shakespeare and Byron on a specific group of revolutionary readers 29 in a specific revolutionary context. Thus, while Eagleton has become formally less absolute-sounding over the years, the absolutist methodological inclinations persist. And, from this point of view, Criticism and Ideology seems retrospectively to furnish the greatest number of \"pure\" and \"typical\" examples of Eagleton's axiological vacillation between relativism and absolutism. Thus, after repeatedly spurning evaluative categories such as \"authentic,\" \"valid,\" and \"great\" on principle (CI, pp. 82-83, 174), Eagleton himself proceeds to employ terms qualitatively no different from the ones he rejects, such as \"major\" (CI, pp. 104, 125, 162, ff.) and \"powerful\" (CI, p. 104). And after repeatedly insisting that a l l value i s hist o r i c a l l y relative (e.g., CI^, p. 186), Eagleton declares with f i n a l i t y that the \"work of a Landor or a Lamb . . . relegates i t s e l f to irretrievably minor status\" (CI, p. 187). One of the predictable consequences of his incomplete and contradictory relativism i s the absolute valorisation of certain alternative, marginally unconventional c r i t e r i a as the measures of literary \"value.\" Two of the less frequently mentioned c r i t e r i a are a text's capacity to be aggressively provocative and i t s a b i l i t y to stimulate thought. \"What i s fascinating about Paradise Lost,\" asserts Eagleton, as though there could be no doubt about that poem's fascinating character or no second feature of fascination to someone else, \" i s precisely i t s necessary lack of s e l f - i d e n t i t y — . . . that provocative offensiveness which Benjamin discerns i n the baroque. . .\" (WB, p. 12). And with equal self-confidence, Eagleton seconds Brecht's opinion on aesthetic value as well: - 343a -Leaf 344 missed in numbering. - 345 -On the question of aesthetic value, one must surely agree with Brecht. . . . When Shakespeare's texts cease to make us think, when we get nothing out of them, they w i l l cease to have value. But why they \"make us think,\" why we \"get something out of them\" ( i f only for the present) i s a question which must be referred at once to the ideological matrix of our reading and the ideological matrix of their pro-duction. It is in the articulation of these distinct moments that the question of value resides. (CI, p. 169) Not for a moment here does Eagleton doubt that \"we\" are a class- / homogeneous body who invariably \"get something out of\" Shakespeare's works, even \" i f only for the present.\" The thoroughly un-Marxist methodology behind those absolute assumptions should not have to be laboured at this late stage in my argument. But there is one absolute criterion of value in Eagleton's axiology that dominates his approach to evaluation, and whose p o l i t i c a l implications regress far beyond mere \"un-Marxist\" neutrality, 30 embracing actual p o l i t i c a l reaction i t s e l f . This i s the negative criterion of \"fissured\" form, already intimated in formulations such as \"necessary lack of self-identity\" above (WB, p. 12). \"That the fissuring of organic form i s a progressive act has not been a received position within a Marxist tradition heavily dominated by the work of George Lukacs,\" he complains (CI, p . 161). \"The destruction of corporate and organicist ideologies in the p o l i t i c a l sphere has always been a central task for revolutionaries; the destruction of such ideologies in the aesthetic region i s essential not only for a s c i e n t i f i c knowledge of the literary past, but for laying the foundation on which the materialist aesthetic and a r t i s t i c practices of the future can be b u i l t . \" On this point, i t i s worth quoting J . R. Harvey's - 346 -observations: \"On some occasions, Eagleton allows for unity with no depreciatory suggestion, while on others 'disunity,' along with 'fissuring' and 'splitting,' are acclaimed as though they were direct indices of value. He allows that there i s a degree of disunity, fissuring and spli t t i n g which i s collapse and a r t i s t i c failure, but has no means from within his logic of determining where that point comes— . . . no means of verifying fine valuations, and has large areas where, even for crucial modernist works (such as Finnegan's Wake, [.CI,] p. 157), i t is incapable of decision\" 31 (emphasis mine). Eagleton's process of arriving at this criterion as an absolute may even—superficially—appear to be Marxist. For instance, in Criticism and Ideology i t s e l f , he presents a rationale ostensibly based on dial e c t i c a l materialism: To argue [supposedly like Trotsky] that The Divine Comedy survives i t s h i s t o r i c a l moment because of i t s \"aesthetic\" effect i s fin a l l y tautological: i t i s to claim, in effect, that a work of art survives because i t i s a work of a r t . . . . \"Survivability,\" as Brecht saw, i s in any case a profoundly suspect criterion of literary value. . . . But even so, the question of why we s t i l l respond to Beowulf or Vi l l o n seems i n principle no more perplexing than the question of why we s t i l l respond to the Lollards or the Luddites. Literary works \"transcend\" their contemporary history, not by rising to the \"universal,\" but by virtue of the character of their concrete relations to i t . . . . And even an hi s t o r i c a l l y alien work may \"speak\" to us in the present, for human animals . . . share a biological structure even where they do not share a direct cultural heritage. Birth,;;nourishment, labour, kinship, sexuality, death are common to a l l social formations and to a l l literature; and i t i s no rebuttal of this to insert the correct but commonplace caveat that this biological \"Infrastructure\" i s always hi s t o r i c a l l y mediated. . . . (CI, pp. 178-79) - 347 -Yet, once again, we observe the typically absolute and unquestioning assumption that \"we\" s t i l l \"respond\" (positively, one presumes) to Beowulf or Villon. As Bennett has accurately observed, \"Eagleton's comments on the problem of literary value . . . are curious in themselves. On the one hand, Eagleton argues that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. . . . Yet, on the other hand—and he will brook no argument—the works of the 'great tradition'. are indisputably of aesthetic value. . . . Quixotic in the extreme, Eagleton avoids fetishising literary value as an immanent quality of 32 the text only to present i t as an effect of the work's origins.\" In other words, Eagleton sometimes forgets the implications of his own insight that, \"jjfjiven a profound enough historical shift, there is no reason in principle why Shakespeare should not f a l l into the ranks of the unemployed.\" This absolutism regarding specific texts or authors finds generalised expression in Eagleton's explicit assertion that \"valuable art comes into being not despite its historical limitations . . . but by virtue of them\" (CI, p. 179) . This curious identification of the negative \"limitations\" of a text as the basis of positive \"value\" might at first seem too paradoxical to be credible. In fact, it is partially contradicted by Eagleton himself later when, in Walter Benjamin, he admits that the fact \"that a text may embarrass a dominant ideology is by no means the criterion of its aesthetic effectivity, though i t may be a component of i t \" (p. 129). And i t certainly possesses nothing in common with the criterion that Eagleton falsely invokes from Marx to lend an air of authority to his own logic: \"It is precisely this negative attitude which Marx adopts in his discussion of ancient Greek - 348 -art in.the Grundrisse\" (CI, p. 179). But there i s i n fact a logic to Eagleton's perversion of Marx's logic (the contrast being most vivid i f one recalls the latter's remarks on Goethe): he requires a p o l i t i c a l rationale for his unaltered, left-Williamsite acceptance of the alleged \"greatness\" of the \"tradition\" of Austen, James, Yeats, E l i o t , Pound, Joyce, Lawrence. As Eagleton himself seeks to explain, \"It i s not d i f f i c u l t to see in English literature how the value of, say, Jane Austen's f i c t i o n i s indissociable from the dominative, drastically constricted class-practices and class-ethics which provide i t s problematic. The literary achievement of an Austen or a James i s based on i t s reactionary conditions of class-formation, not a miracle which 33 escapes them\" (CI, p. 179; emphasis mine). Even i f we ignore for a moment the familiar recrudescence of \"the value\" and \"the\" literary \"achievement,\" we need not declare Eagleton's above statement to be entirely l o g i c a l . For, in fact, he has executed a subtle shift from \"indissociable from\" (which i s logically unexceptionable) to \"based on\" (which i s passed off as carrying the same, valid logical meaning). But a phenomenon that i s \"indissociable from\" i t s h i s t o r i c a l conditions in their contradictory totality (including their negative aspects) (a) does not thereby have to become universally valued and (b) cannot logically have the \"basis\" of i t s perceived positive value rooted precisely in those features classified by the evaluator himself as negative (\"Dominative, drastically constricted class-practices and class-ethics\"and \"reactionary conditions of class-formation\") . The most plausible Marxist explanation.for this strange paradox, therefore, would seem, to be that Eagleton's residually lef t-Williamsite \"taste\" in literature overwhelms his already unsure and - 349 -nominal sense of the demands of Marxist methodological.consistency. As in the majority of such cases, appetite defeats logic and generates a new theoretical rationale. The methods of Eagleton's p o l i t i c a l centrism penetrate the methods and conclusions of his literary axiology, definitively compromising his claim to Marxism. Thus i t transpires that Eagleton can launch on his project of \"embarrassing\" other \"'materialist' criticism\" and merely \"explain\" how Yeats may rightly be judged \"'great.'\" (Note the double inverted commas: Eagleton is always carefully self-ironic—and therefore d i f f i c u l t to pin.) \"[wjhat i s meant by the claim that Yeats i s a 'great' poet?\" he asks, implicitly merging his own opinion with that of the other admirers, through the significant use of the passive form \" i s meant.\" Whether or not a l l readers agree with Eagleton's perceived consensus i s a question that clearly does not bother him; he is too anxious to explain why they (supposedly) do. \"Bourgeois criticism,\" he confidently continues, \"has, characteristically, no convincing answer to this question beyond intuit i o n i s t rhetoric. Nor does a certain style of 'materialist' criticism feel wholly unembarrassed by the celebration of an extreme right-wing, sporadically fascist writer.\" Not so the \"Marxist\" Eagleton, however; for, he argues, \" i t i s precisely Yeat's ideological limitations which lay the basis for the value of his aesthetic achievement\" (CI, p. 179). \"In twentieth-century English literature,\" he declares, v\"given the absence of a revolutionary tradition, i t was only from the 'radical right' that such a critique could be launched . . . \" (CI, p. 180). This, then, i s the s u i c i d a l — and e x p l i c i t l y p o l i t i c a l — l o g i c motivating Eagleton's axiological considerations. \"The value\" of Yeats' \"aesthetic achievement\" i s - 350 -just as much in dispute, with Eagleton, as i s \"the absence of a revolutionary tradition\" and the inevitability of such a \"critique\" from the \"'radical right'\": that i s , there i s no dispute; a classless consensus i s simply assumed. And this \"aesthetic\" value i s actually supposed to owe i t s allegedly indisputable positive nature precisely to the p o l i t i c a l l y reactionary conditions of i t s emergence. But since when did Marxism teach that only li t e r a r y (discursive) \"tradition\" determines the p o l i t i c a l character of a subsequent literature? And since when have Marxists become obligated to offer p o l i t i c a l amnesty to.vv reactionary values merely because they are perceived (rightly or wrongly) to have contributed to \"aesthetic value\" and to have been historically inevitable anyway? Marx and Engels, when they praised Balzac, praised him only \"aesthetically,\" especially for his social insights, but never for his Loyalist p o l i t i c a l programme. They selected only certain s p e c i f i c , observational and tonal, features in his works for praise; and Engels was e x p l i c i t l y and intransigently c r i t i c a l of the novelist's reactionary p o l i t i c a l values. Moreover, one would expect that a Balzac—limited in his alternatives by the absence of any sizeable proletarian force at the time—should be regarded by his t o r i c a l materialists in quite a different light from a Yeats writing in the context of rising class struggle. Again, contrast Eagleton's telescopic \"logic\" to Trotsky's clear-sighted distinction between the author's role as \"observer\" and \" a r t i s t \" and his or her role as a p o l i t i c a l being (\"revolutionist\"). Viewing Andre. Malraux's reactionary.politics i n The Conquerors through the lens of genuine and simple dialectics, Trotsky says that the novel \"does honour to the author as an observer and an a r t i s t , but - 351 -not as a revolutionist.\" Nor does Trotsky leave the matter there, so that liberals may rush to i n s i s t that Malraux should therefore be judged only as an \"observer and an a r t i s t . \" For, as a conscious and responsible Marxist, Trotsky categorically adds: \"However, we have the right to evaluate Malraux too from this [political] point of view; . . . the author does not hesitate with his judgments on the revolution\" (\"The Strangled Revolution,\" Trotsky, p. 180). Whereas Trotsky always mobilized against reaction—be i t literary or p o l i t i c a l , residual or nascent, ideological or practical—Eagleton seeks to do the opposite. He aggressively tries to provide an alibi;for.even \"extreme right-wing, sporadically fascist\" poets p o l i t i c a l l y . In one sense, i t is the difference between Marxism and one kind of centrism. C l i f f Slaughter indeed understates the case when he remarks that \" [t] he measure of truth in this argument [for attributing positive authorial insights to the author's reactionary p o l i t i c s ] i s extremely limited, and i f 35 pushed beyond i t s narrow limits becomes an untruth.\" The obverse of the earlier Eagleton's defiant p o l i t i c a l amnesty and even admiration for reactionary writers i s what we might c a l l the evasive \"ultimatism\" of the more recent Eagleton. Both aspects revolve around an axis of pseudo-Marxist methodology, characterised by a complete blindness to any need or opportunity for organised revolutionary intervention into the present class struggle, which i s what could lend concrete substance, form, and direction to the Marxist evaluative c r i t e r i a for the given conjuncture. Thus, echoing the apocalyptic Benjamin iii an ultimatistic way, Eagleton postpones any definite speculation about the \"poetry of the future\" to \"Judgment Day\"; - 352 -in one classic instance of absolutism, he speaks of a \"true evaluation\" and locates i t firmly beyond the \"f i n a l confrontation\" of socialist revolution. But this i s an attitude of passive waiting, not of aggressive intervention: \"Much of the greatness of [Proust's] work,\" writes Benjamin, \"will remain inaccessible or undiscovered until the [bourgeois] class has revealed i t s most pronounced features in the f i n a l struggle.\" For Benjamin, we are not yet capable of reading Proust; only the f i n a l p o l i t i c a l combat w i l l produce the conditions for his significant reception. It i s the proletariat who w i l l render Proust readable, even i f they may later find no use for him. . . . It i s neither the case that Sophocles w i l l inevitably be valuable for socialism, nor that he w i l l inevitably not be. . . . Sophocles must be collected, because he may always come in handy when you least expect i t . But he always may not . . . . Only on Judgment Day w i l l Sophocles and Sholokov be narratable within a single text; until then, which i s to say forever, a proletarian criticism w i l l reject, rewrite, forget and retrieve. And the Proust whose texts socialism shall recompose w i l l not be the Proust consumed in the salons: no value i s extended to the masses without being thereby transformed. (WB, p. 130) And again: \"Walter Benjamin once wrote that we would only be able to read Proust properly when the class he represented had disclosed something of i t s true substance in the f i n a l confrontation. We w i l l only be able to read Proust retrospectively; for a true evaluation of him we must wait upon history\" (\"Discussion,\" p. 77). F i r s t , the talk in the former passage about how \"a proletarian criticism\" w i l l \"forever\" \"reject, rewrite, forget and retrieve,\" typically leaves unexplained the. exact (or even approximate) c r i t e r i a for that rejection and rewriting. Eagleton's earlier description of some of the tasks of a revolutionary criticism might at f i r s t seem - 353 -to provide the answer: deconstruct and p o l i t i c i s e the concepts and histories of \"Literature\" and \"Criticism\"; \"transvaluate received judgments and assumptions\"; explore the sub-surface of the text; create cultural effects \"conducive to the victory of socialism\"; combat non-socialist ideology and rhetoric; project, polemicise, and appropriate (WB, pp. 98, 113). But the old problem with those formulations does not disappear; they remain p o l i t i c a l l y bound to the culturalist (centrist) road to \"socialism.\" Thus, from correctly arguing at one point in Criticism and Ideology for a generally dialectical appropriation of the \"aesthetic,\" Eagleton goes on in Literary Theory to articulate an ex p l i c i t l y and primarily cultural-academic-discursive vision of the \"liberation of Shakespeare and Proust.\" \"The 'aesthetic,'\" he points out in the former book, \" i s too valuable to be surrendered without a struggle to the bourgeois aestheticians, and too contaminated by that ideology to be appropriated as i t i s \" (CI, p. 187). But Literary Theory reveals the specific p o l i t i c s of the struggle envisaged by Eagleton: If the study of such writers [as Shakespeare and Proust] could become as charged with energy, urgency and enthusiasm as the activities I have just reviewed [feminism, colonial and proletarian writing, and the \"culture industry\"!], the literary institution ought to rejoice. . . . But i t i s doubtful that this w i l l happen when such texts are \"hermetically sealed from history, subjected to a s t e r i l e c r i t i c a l formalism, piously swaddled with eternal verities and used to confirm prejudices which any moderately enlightened student can perceive-to be objectionable. The liberation of Shakespeare, and Proust from such controls may well entail the death of literature, but i t may also be their redemption. I shall end with an allegory. We know that the lion i s stronger than the lion-tamer, and.so does the - 354 -lion-tamer. The problem i s that the l i o n does not know i t . It i s not out of the question that the death of literature may help the li o n to awaken. (LT, pp. 216-17) Note, incidentally, how Eagleton views the (proletarian) \"l i o n \" as being decisively separate from the contemplative (revolutionary-c r i t i c a l ) observer \"we.\" With a l l allegorical proportions guarded, this s t i l l indicates the socio-political distance from which the centrist Eagleton tends to calculate the fortunes of \"s o c i a l i s t \" literary evaluation. It therefore provides l i t t l e Marxist cl a r i t y about his general guidelines for a \"revolutionary\" criticism discussed above. Furthermore, Eagleton's reluctance everi to sketch a certain broad but concrete spectrum of evaluative c r i t e r i a i s entirely inimical to the method of Trotsky—or, for that matter, to that of even the non-Marxist Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Though Trotsky insisted that most post-revolutionary values are specifically unforeseeable and most currently-held values provisional, he never adduced these material truths to claim that any valid judgments prior to the socialist phase are theoretically absolutely impossible. Likewise, Smith deliberately desisted from offering her own evaluation of Shakespeare's Sonnets not because she believed that such evaluation was theoretically absurd and practically impossible; rather, she desisted because she wished to stress her point about the-inevitability of differential assessments between different kinds of c r i t i c s . That i s , neither Trotsky nor Smith denied the possibility of (and. the need for) actual value judgments, however provisional and conjunctural they might turn out to be. But Eagleton's un-Marxist ultimatism (a form of absolutism) leads - 355 -him to do precisely that. He thus misses the very character, s i g n i f i -cance, and purpose of revolutions, which demand real choices even as the selectional c r i t e r i a themselves are undergoing change. And at bottom i t i s an attitude that defines i t s e l f in terms of distance rather than in terms of any desire to crystallise an orientation through organised class-struggle involvement and leadership. As Slaughter has observed, Eagleton \"proceeds with a r e l a t i v i s t view of the nature of truth which leaves a gap to be 36 f i l l e d by some inevitably religious notion of ultimate r e a l i t y . \" We have, of course, already noted Eagleton's unwitting confirmation of Slaughter's shrewd calculation: he postpones a l l \"true evaluation\" to the time following Benjamin's apocalyptically envisioned \"Judgment Day.\" Thus philosophical absolutism—in the absence of a consistent dialectical materialism—ultimately claims Eagleton and limits his a b i l i t y to extend and generalise the implications of his many real r e l a t i v i s t insights. And the overall trajectory of his \"philosophy\" clearly answers to the larger needs of his p o l i t i c a l centrism—a \"radical\" l i f e and programme individualistically divorced from any centralised struggle for socialist revolution. Eagleton's Evaluation of Hardy If the effect of Eagleton's p o l i t i c a l centrism on his literary axiology cannot be accurately gauged chiefly on the basis of his specific theoretical.criteria of value, even less can i t be gauged primarily on the basis of his empirical assessment of one particular author and his work. That p o l i t i c a l effect shows i t s e l f - 356 -f i r s t and foremost in the place he accords to literary discourse as a whole, within his overall scheme of values; and from that derives the p o l i t i c a l significance of the value he attaches to individual authors, texts, and textual properties. In i t s historical development, the pattern of Eagleton's evaluation of Hardy shows four different polemical targets, what he cal l s \"four distinct stages\" of Hardy c r i t i c i s m . Without arguing about the empirical merits of such a distinction, we may simply observe that these targets usefully demarcate certain negative positions against which at least Eagleton himself defines his own assessment of Hardy. He names these \"stages,\" or trends, as (a) the contemporaneous, Victorian view of Hardy as \"anthropologist of Wessex,\" (b) G. K. Chesterton's view of that novelist as \"'the n i h i l i s t i c village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village i d i o t , ' \" (c) the post-1940s' \"'sociological' reading of Hardy,\" and (d) the \"stealthy recuperation of his texts by formalist criticism\" in the sixties and 37 seventies (WB, pp. 127-28). However, neither these \"stages\" nor the actual evaluations of Hardy w i l l yield much p o l i t i c a l significance i f we forget the overall p o l i t i c a l framework in which they materialise. As might be expected, Eagleton approaches, analyses, and judges Hardy primarily as the embodiment of certain historically crucial contra-dictions. He traces and evaluates these contradictions from Hardy's social origins, through his social vision and adopted generic and narrative modes, to his narrational and dramatised language. Through them a l l , he identifies a dilemma his t o r i c a l l y corresponding to that of advanced petit-bourgeois ideologues trapped between rejection of liberalism - 357 -and unawareness of Marxism. In an early a r t i c l e on Hardy's f i c t i o n , Eagleton explains the link between Hardy's allegedly contradictory vision and his petit-bourgeois social location: [T]here i s no individual a r t i s t i c biography which i s not determined by a wider history. The fact i s that Thomas Hardy's situation as a literary producer was ridden with contradictions. As a provincial petit bourgeois (son of a Dorsetshire stone-mason) who wrote for a middle-class metropolitan audience, he was simultaneously on the \"inside\" and \"outside\" of both his own local community and English society at large. He belonged sufficiently to \"Wessex\" to explore i t s l i v i n g , inward totality with the penetrating, a l l -commanding eye of the great realists; yet he was alienated enough from i t by social class and education to view i t through the uneasily distancing, immobilising perspective of myth. His sharp sense of Wessex as a region of socio-economic devastation and decline could release the generally imaginative sympathies of the major r e a l i s t novel; i t could also throw him at times, provisionally and uncertainly, into the arms of those fin-de-siecle naturalistic ideologies which registered their own helpless estrangement from social experience in the \" s c i e n t i f i c \" impassivity of their authorial viewpoint.3** In most respects, this description i s identical in substance to Williams' characterisation of Hardy in The Country and the City (pp. 239-58). But even here, the beginnings of Eagleton's limited \" l e f t \" differentiation from Williams are recognisable. Thus, for instance, whereas Williams stops at calling Hardy \"one of the many professional men\" (CC, p. 242), Eagleton e x p l i c i t l y terms him \"a provincial petit bourgeois.\" Yet, his points-of unqualified consensus with Williams, with a l l their methodological, and p o l i t i c a l implications, are also apparent here: hence, for instance, the continuing use of \"community,\" \"society,\" and \"social experience\" i n a style suspiciously similar to Williams', as well as the latent absolutism of \"the great - 358 -re a l i s t s \" and \"the major real i s t novel.\" But this i s merely incidental to our main concern in this passage. Also incidental to our concern i s whether Eagleton's claim about Hardy's \"sharp sense of Wessex as a region of socio-economic devastation and decline\" i s empirically well-founded or not. More important i s the manner In which Eagleton draws the links between perceived textual, authorial, and h i s t o r i c a l \"contradictions\": for, this actually sets the stage for his eventual absolute valorisation of Hardy's contradictory language i t s e l f , thereby deploying a particular mode of his t o r i c a l functionalism to reverse the negative verdict of most preceding c r i t i c s on that question. Eagleton offers an analysis of the precise manner in which Hardy's contradictory social situation (including his fraught relation-ship to his audience) determines the latter's mixed choice of framing devices, characterisation, and language (in the sense of diction, idiom, and so on): His use of myth and pastoral r e f l e c t s , very occasionally, an anxious pact with their [ i . e . , his audience's] own f l a t patronage of the \"bucolic\": but he also deploys the universalising frames of myth, melodrama, fable and tragedy to combat such patronage—to confer status on f i c t i o n liable to be dismissed as of merely provincial import. The problem of how to reconcile these conflictual forms—is Alec D'Urberville bourgeois a r r i v i s t e , pantomine de v i l , melodramatic v i l l a i n , symbol of Satanic e v i l ? — enacts a set of ideological and his t o r i c a l contradictions. With Hardy, indeed, . . . i t i s quite l i t e r a l l y a problem of how to write—how to stay verbally fai t h f u l to his own marvellously immediate experience while projecting i t into the sorts of \"literary\" language consumed in the metropolis.39 Eagleton discerns i n this tension—and i n Hardy's flouting of bourgeois-re a l i s t conventions in Jude—an objective irony of history: i> •\".* - 359 -By the time of Jude the Obscure, Hardy has turned on [the technical expectations of—K.D.G.] his own audience; that novel i s less an offering to them than a calculated assault. I&s refusal to confine i t s e l f to commonly received categories of 'realism' is also a par t i a l refusal to become a commodity. . . . It i s one of the most exciting and moving ironies of literary history that, having struggled his painful way through to his major achievement, . . . there was nowhere else to go. Having arrived, Hardy had to disembark.40 Eagleton's revised version of the above a r t i c l e , in his Criticism and Ideology,- makes i t clear that he i s speaking here primarily about the implicit conjunctural po l i t i c s of Hardy's literary techniques, not about the overt po l i t i c s of Hardy's literary content. This has implications for our analysis of Eagleton's evaluative c r i t e r i a (as at least transitionally exemplified in Criticism and Ideology). Thus, Eagleton mentions but does not dwell on Hardy's \" f i r s t , abrasively radical work\" (CI, p. 131); rather, in keeping with his pronouncement in that book that \"the fissuring of organic form i s a progressive act,\" Eagleton focuses on the formal features in Hardy's works in general, and on the dissonances within those features in particular. He believes that \"though Hardy inherits an ideology of social evolution . . . [i n the manner of George E l i o t J . . ., his f i c t i o n i s essentially pre-occupied with those structural conflicts and tragic contradictions in rural society which Eliot's novels evade\" (CI_, p. 131). But It is not in the main the depicted social contradictions that occupy Eagleton at this point: \" i t is the peculiar impurity of his literary forms . . . which i s most striking\" (CI_, p. 131; second emphasis mine). Citing criticism of Jude's inconsistent realism, Eagleton frontally defends, and actually j u s t i f i e s and lauds, Hardy's approach: \"What have been - 360 -read as i t s 'crudities' are less the consequences of some a r t i s t i c incapacity than of an astonishing raw boldness on- Hardy's part, a defiant flouting of 'verisimilitude' which mounts theatrical gesture 41 upon gesture in a driving back of the bounds of realism\" (CI, p. 131). Indeed, Eagleton typically seems to view these technical disjunctions as the product f i r s t and foremost of certain resultant \"forces\" 6f discursive \"production\": \"crammed with lengthy quotations from other texts, thematically obsessed with the violence of literary culture, laced with typological devices, Jude contrasts the murderous inertia of the letter with that alternative image of a r t i s t i c production which i s material craftsmanship. The models, forms, moulds and productive practices over\"' which the text broods are themselves images of i t s own construction . . . \" (CI, pp. 131-32). But the apparent object and stance of Hardy's formalist \"brooding\" i s shared by Eagleton himself. Hence, even when he does recognise (one of) the social tensions animating Hardy's novel, Eagleton s t i l l remains fixated on their \"form\"; and, in an objectively appropriate conclusion to this formalist and discursive bent in analysis, he actually completes his logic by gainsaying Hardy himself and attributing that novelist's abandonment of novel-writing to a formal c r i s i s alone: Within the radical provisional!ty of Hardy's productive practice i s inscribed a second, more fundamental provisionality—the desired un-closure of social forms themselves (epitomised in sexuality), forms which in their received shape, the novel \"explodes\" i n the act of \"exploding\" the letter of i t s own text. Throughout the novel, hallowed manuscripts—the Nicean creed, the Book of Job—are violently transformed by Jude into angry oral assaults on an unresponsive audience—assaults through which the novel mimes Its own displaced position -361 -within the literary social relations of i t s time. Hardy claimed that the bigoted public response to Jude cured him of novel-writing forever; but whether a producer of Hardy's status stops writing merely on account of bad reviews i s surely questionable. The truth i s that after Jude, there was nowhere for Hardy to go; having \"exploded\" the organic forms of f i c t i o n , he was forced to disembark. (CI, p. 132) Nor, as I said, does Eagleton rest with a mere description of Hardy's alleged formal c r i s i s ; he traces the c r i s i s through Hardy's imagery as well as his language and valorises their contradictory properties as a whole. Thus, in an early a r t i c l e on Hardy's language, Eagleton notes \"a mode of imagery in some of Thomas Hardy's novels . . . which depicts a peculiar tension, and occasionally an outright contradiction, between 'subjective' and 'objective' forms of existence-A2 or perception.\" He claims that this tension \"has a clear significance; i t acts, even i f only in local ways, as a paradigm of creative and possible relations between the s p i r i t and the flesh . . . \" (\"Nature as Language,\" p. 162; the perceived p o l a r i t i e s — \" t h e s p i r i t \" and \"the f l e s h \" — r e f l e c t the vestiges of Eagleton's religious training, in his phenomenological phase)., And as late as Walter Benjamin, he reiterates that \"the significance of Hardy's writing l i e s precisely in the contradictory constitution of his linguistic practice\";\"that a text may embarrass a dominant ideology i s by no means the criterion of i t s aesthetic e f f e c t i v i t y , though i t may be a component of i t . But in Hardy's case, these two issues were Imbricated with a peculiar closeness\" (pp. 128-29). I have addressed Eagleton's inserted caveat (about the criterion of \"aesthetic effectivity\") earlier; here, i t should be sufficient to remark that Eagleton nevertheless reiterates his general premium on formal disjunction, albeit this time by sel f -- 362 -consciously conceding the theoretical possibility of exceptions. Eagleton's ill-concealed absolutism of method affects not only his assumptions about \"the value\" of formal textual fissures but, obversely, also his assumptions about Hardy's (and his own) readers and their responses to the novelist's mode of characterisation. This i s obvious in i t s purest form in Eagleton's full-scale analysis of Jude, in his Introduction to the 1974 Macmillan edition of that 43 novel. In that Introduction, Eagleton reveals a plethora of assumptions about a p o l i t i c a l l y undefined but monolithic readerhsip, positing a universal \"We\" whose reception of the novel i s simply presumed to match his own, detail for d e t a i l . Thus, Sue simply is_ asserted to be \"Hardy's most masterly exploration of the limits of liberation in Victorian society—more masterly by far than Angel Clare, who i s an earlier experiment in the same mode\" (Furbank, p. 14); \"Hardy retains some of our sympathy for Sue against a l l odds\"; \"We come to feel that Sue is_ [Eagleton's emphasis] more than just a perverse hussy, f u l l of petty stratagems and provocative pouts\"; \"we feel that she i s more than t h i s . . . because she i s so deeply loved by Jude\" (Furbank, p. 16; emphases mine). Similarly, \"(w]hat we remember about Arabella isn't her sensuality but her calculating acquisitiveness, her sharp, devious opportunism\" (Furbank, p. 17; emphasis mine); yet \"authentic\" desire simply is_ \"rather better\" than \"empty convention,\" and to that extent, so i s the \"candid authenticity\" of Arabella \"better\" than Sue's \"evasions\" (Furbank, p. 18). F i n a l l y , Father Time's pessimism simply \" i s not, in fact, Hardy's way\" (Furbank, p. 20). One important distinction must be reiterated here. My personal, inconsistently examined impression of Jude happens, empirically, - 363 -to correspond to Eagleton's assessment. But this coincidence (not necessarily an accident, and therefore at least partly related to the text's properties) by no means validates Eagleton's method of assuming the scope of the consensus; his method remains unscientific. Nevertheless, In a c r i t i c less concerned with theory and methodology than i s Eagleton, this would have mattered less than his apparently valid empirical judgment and assumptions. But even i n his \"practical criticism\" (including in his Introduction to Jude), Eagleton remains 44 primarily a theoretician, a metacritic; and his motivation in the Introduction remains primarily political/theoretical. Thus, in this context, i t i s crucial that his evaluation of Hardy's characterisation i n Jude ,» f a i l s methodologically (in violating the laws of social relativism) at the same time that i t appears to some to succeed empirically. It i s bad Marxist methodology implicitly to assume a homogeneous, pre-converted readership, even i f the empirical results produced despite i t appear reasonably accurate to some; this i s different from e x p l i c i t l y selecting and then addressing a homogeneous, pre-converted readership, which might well exist (or at least thereby come into being). Eagleton's approach simply constitutes one more instance of his methodological absolutism. Lastly, Eagleton's postponement of a f i n a l , \"true evaluation\" of today's literature to a stage after the socialist revolution affects his attempt to foresee \"the\" future \"value\" of Hardy in a predictably absolutist and ultima'tistic way.. \"Whether Thomas Hardy can be wrested from history and inserted into tradition—whether i t i s worth doing so--fis not a question that can be h i s t o r i c a l l y preempted. It remains to be seen\" (WB, p. 130). Eagleton's use of the term - 364 -\"tradition\" as something capable of being \"wrested from history\" reveals his complicity in the same anti-historicism evident in his predecessors' ostensibly classless, static models. Furthermore, the apparent provisionality of \"It remains to be seen,\" coming from the centrist Eagleton, is not a concession to theoretical relativism but merely the logical extension of his p o l i t i c a l defeatism and passivity. Since \"we\" Brechtian/Eagletonian culturalists and his t o r i c a l bystanders can only wait upon history, upon the death of literature, and upon an eventually awakened though estranged proletarian \" l i o n , \" to oust the bourgeoisie—so the logic runs—the most we can do actively in the meantime i s invoke our alleged helpless-ness and \"breed speech.\" This negative abstentionism in Eagleton clearly represents not so much axiological common sense as p o l i t i c a l opportunism, as at least one reviewer seems (in his own way) to have 45 come close to recognising. It i s from Eagleton's lack of an organised, interventionist p o l i t i c a l perspective, in the f i r s t place, that his ostensible \"openness\" about the future flows. Such \"openness\" has nothing to do with the kind of axiological algebra of the future that Trotsky, for Instance, was led to recognise as a result of his p a r t i c i -pation in the Bolshevik's organised revolutionary struggle. One's sense of limits varies according to who or what sets them—that i s , according to whether they are set by oneself or by the objective contingency of struggle.. Eagleton sets his own p o l i t i c a l limits; and in so doing, he weakens his claim to being a Marxist. His p o l i t i c s reveal themselves.in his axiological generalisations and methodology, his specific evaluative c r i t e r i a , as well as i n his practical assessments of particular authors and texts: they a l l bespeak what I have called centrism. - 365 -Thus does one p a r t i c u l a r k i n d of p o l i t i c s — r v a c i l l a t i o n between r e v o l u t i o n and reformism, with an a t t r a c t i o n towards the la t ter -—adversely a f f e c t the ax iology of one of \"the major Marxis t a e s t h e t i c i a n s of the century to d a t e . \" Notes Notice that Raymond Williams i s omitted from the l i s t . The reasons for this can be gathered from the critique in Criticism and Ideology, p. 34 (quoted towards the end of my previous chapter). The omission marks a decisive shift in Eagleton's vacillating assessment of Williams over the previous decade or so. However, even as late as 1977, Eagleton defined the \"most dominant European tradition of Marxist criticism\" as \"the neo-Hegelian lineage of George Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Williams,\" going on to explain in a note that \"I include Williams because his work clearly belongs with this tradition, although he i s not a Marxist\" (\"Marxist Literary Criticism,\" i n Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, ed. Hilda Schiff [London: Heinemann, 1977], pp. 95-96). In another ar t i c l e the same year he remarked, \"One might formulate the problem paradoxically by saying that our best Marxist critic—Raymond Williams i s not in fact a Marxist\" (Routh and Wolff, p. 90). 2 \"The End of Criticism,\" p. 1Q5I. 3 \"Marxism, Nationalism and Poetry,\" Poetry Wales, 15, No. 3 (Winter 1979), p. 34. 4 James H. Kavanagh and Thomas E. Lewis, \"Interview: Terry Eagleton,\" D i a c r i t i c s , 12 (Spring 1982), 57. 5 \"The End of Criticism,\" p. 105. See Walter Benjamin, pp. 148, 177; Makers of Modern Marxism, pp. 1-2; \"Four C r i t i c s , \" The English Magazine, No. 4 (Summer 1980), 10; \"Radical Orthodoxies,\" rev. of Language and Materialism by Rosalind Coward and John E l l i s , in The Oxford Literary Review, 3, No. 3 (Spring 1979), 101; and, for the criticism of Williams, Criticism and Ideology, p. 39. 7 Makers of Modern Marxism, p. 17. g Routh and Wolff, p. 86. 9 \"Terry Eagleton Replies,\" reply to Andreas Huyssen's rev. of Marxism and Literary Criticism i n C l i o , 7, No. 2 (1978), 326. - 367 -See, for the f i r s t quote, \"The Institution of Criticism,\" rev. of Peter Uwe Hohendahl's The Institution of Criticism i n Literature and History, 9, No. 1 (Spring 1983), 101; for the second quote, see Literary Theory, p. 208. 1 1 J£S« (1979), pp. 34-38. 1 2 \"Joyce: 'The Finest Irish Genius That No One Can Read,'\" Socialist Challenge (11 Feb. 1982), n.p. and \"The Ballad of James Joyce,\" i b i d . , n.p. 13 One of the most egregious instances of this occurs i n Literary Theory (p. 208), where he effectively accuses the already anti-Soviet Western \"liberal humanists\" of not being hard enough on \"the tyrannies\" of Eastern Europe: \"Many Western socialists are restless with the l i b e r a l humanist opinion of the tyrannies in Eastern Europe, feeling that these opinions simply do not go far enough: what would be necessary to bring down such tyrannies would not be just more free speech, but a workers' revolution against the state.\" Since Eagleton leaves unspecified any programme for that \"revolution\" other than \"to draw the f u l l , concrete, practical applications of the abstract notions of freedom and democracy to which l i b e r a l humanism subscribes\" (LT, p. 208; emphasis mine), his argument— which presumably coincides with that of those \"Western soc i a l i s t s \" he so uncritically cites—simply amounts to a c a l l for capitalist counterrevolution i n the workers' states. See also pp. 18, 36, 40, 110, and 208, on Poland. 14 \"Terry Eagleton Replies,\" p. 327: \"the national and international p r i o r i t i e s of the Soviet Union have contributed to the repression of Western liberation from capitalism\"; \"nothing suits the Stalinist Soviet Union better than that Western Marxists should be good reformists. . . . \" 1 5 A l l my following information comes from five anonymous articles in Women and Revolution (abbreviated as WR): \"How the Bolsheviks Organised Working Women: History of the Journal Rabotnltsa,\" WR, No. 4 ( F a l l , 1973), 4-5, 14-16; \"Feminism versus Marxism: Origins of the Conflict,\" WR, No. 5 (Spring 1974), 7-14; \"Early Communist Work among Women: The Bolsheviks,\" Part 1, WR, No. 10 (Winter 1975-76), 7-14; Part 2, WR, No. 11 (Spring 1976), 18-22; and \"Early Bolshevik Work among Women of the Soviet East,\" WR, No. 12 (Summer 1976), 14-19.. 16 Janet Montefiore, \"The Rhetoric of Experience,\" New Left Review, No. 145 (May-June 198.4), 127. ^ Along with Samuel Richardson and the modern, petit bourgeois feminists, Eagleton asserts that \"the so-called 'woman question' i s nothing of the kind—that the root of the sexual problem i s men\" (The Rape of Clarissa, p. 96). I must, however, qualify this by noting - 368 -that the above quote in i t s f u l l context actually purports to describe only what Richardson had (apparently) \"grasped\": yet, in the very use of such a word to describe, unironically, Richardson's ostensible feat, Eagleton registers his own ideological agreement. 18 See \"Labour Must Smash Phelps Dodge Union-Busting.' Class War in Arizona Copper Mines,\" Workers Vanguard, No. 357, 22 June 1984, p. 7 and \"Women Organise for Strike Victory,\" Spartacist Bri t a i n , No. 56, Apr i l 1984, p. 4. 19 Ian H. B i r c h a l l , \"In Defence of Reductionism,\" The P o l i t i c s of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. Francis Barker;et a l (Colchester: Univ. of Essex, 1983), pp. 107-20. 20 Neil Bolton, \"Towards a Marxist Literary Culture,\" rev. of Criticism and Ideology in; International, 3, No. 3 (Spring 1977), 61; for f u l l a r t i c l e , see pp\"T 61-63. 21 Arnold Kettle, \"Literature and Ideology,\" rev. of Eagleton's \"Ideology and Literary Form\" and Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes in Red Letter, No. 1 (n.d.), 4; see pp. 3-5 for complete review. These accusations seem especially absurd in view of Eagleton's manifest urge to make li b e r a l humanists (along with Western \"socialists\") better anti-Soviets (see his Literary Theory, p. 208, quoted in Note 12). See esp. Literary Theory, p. 14. 23 See esp. Slaughter (p. 201): \"Undoubtedly the s c i e n t i f i c historical analysis of literary schools and literary works w i l l contribute to a Marxist understanding of the formation of ideology. But i f criticism i s directed as Eagleton does, following Macherey, at the omissions from the text (as part of the specific means by which the work creates . . . 'self-oblivion'), w i l l i t not ignore the possibility that the dramatist or novelist or poet might penetrate, in some way and in some measure, to the source of this ideological structure and thus be able to expose i t s contradictions (not merely be expressing these contradictions as their victim, something which can only be discovered afterwards, by what Eagleton ca l l s a 'science of criticism')?\" 24 Slaughter has lucidly pin-pointed and c r i t i c i s e d this un-Marxist revision in Eagleton, in Marxism, Ideology and Literature, pp. 202-05. 25 \"Literature and P o l i t i c s Now,\" p. 65; see, also, Literary Theory, pp. 10-12, Marxism, and Literary Criticism, pp. 10-13, and Walter Benjamin, pp. 123-24, 130. - 369 -2 6 See Exiles and Emigres: Studies l n Modern Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) pp. 9 , 14-15, 17. Also see Criticism and Ideology, pp. 162-180; Marxism arid Literary Criticism, p. 8; Schiff, p. 103, and Walter Benjamin, p. 16. 27 \"The Question of Value: A Discussion,\" New Left Review, No. 142 (Nov.-Dec. 1983), 76; see pp. 76-90 for f u l l interview. 28 \"The End of Criticism,\" p. 100. I have been unable to find any information on \"Martin Webster.\" It i s just possible that that i s precisely the point Eagleton wants to make. . . . 29 Class and Art, p. 10. 30 Huyssen (p. 3) overtly praises Eagleton for \"his attempt to take reactionary writers seriously.\" Coming from that social democrat and anti-communist, this praise hardly amounts to even a .neutral plea for dispassionate and impartial scholarship—the ideal of l i b e r a l -humanist academia; i t is positively s i n i s t e r . 31 J . R. Harvey, \"Criticism, Ideology, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton,\" rev. of Marxism and Literature^,. Keywords ^ C r i t i c i s m and Ideology, and Marxism and Literary Criticism i n The Cambridge Quarterly, No. 8 (1978), 60-61. 32 Bennett, p. 153. 33 For other similar valorisations of negative c r i t e r i a , see Criticism and Ideology, p. 180, n. and p. 181; Literary Theory, p. 12; Schiff, p. 103. For Eagleton's own devastating critique of this very aspect of Derrida's deconstructionist theory, see, for example, Literary Theory, pp. 127-50; Walter Benjamin, pp. 129, 131-42; and the articles \"Derrida—From Plato to NATO,\" Literary Review, 2, No. 41, (Oct. 1981), 35 and \"Text, Ideology, Realism,\".Literature, Language and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward Said, NS, 3 (London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 149-73. 34 \"The Strangled Revolution,\" Trotsky, p. 180. 35 Marxism, Ideology and Literature, p. 207. 36 Marxism, Ideology and Literature, p. 204. 37 See also his \"Liberality and Order: The Criticism of John Bayley,\" New Left Review, No. 110 (July-Aug. 1978), 34-38 and Walter Benjamin, p. 129. 38 \"The Form of His Fiction,\" New Blackfriars, 55, No. 653 (Oct. 1974), 480; see pp. 477-81 for f u l l a r t i c l e . - 370 -3 9 ''The Form of His Fiction,\" pp. 480-81. 4 0 \"The Form of His Fiction,\" p. 481. 4 1 For a sense of the array of c r i t i c s and criticisms against which Eagleton defends and praises the alleged s t y l i s t i c \"crudities,\" see again, Walter Benjamin, p. 128. 4 2 \"Thomas Hardy: Nature as Language,\" C r i t . Q., 13, No. 2 (Summer 1971), p. 155. 43 Ed. P. N. Furbank, Jude the Obscure (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 9-20; this edition i s henceforth cited as Furbank. 44 Harvey (p. 63) comes close to remarking upon the same point: \"For Eagleton value i s , militantly, value in theory: to be determined at a f i t s c i e n t i f i c remove from the text, i n accordance with his extraordinary inaugural axiom, 'the function of criticism i s to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work'\" (emphasis mine). 45 Again, Harvey (p. 65) seems to sense the same connection, from a different angle: \" i n the current ideological situation, reductive (but talismanic) categorisation cooperates with the necessary epidemic anti-realism in legalising the mind's escape from experience.\" Conclusion The problem of a Marxist axiology, to extend one positive element in Eagleton's logic, i s above a l l the problem of a Marxist p o l i t i c s . Specifically, in the cases of Caudwell, Williams, and Eagleton, this means that their principles of literary evaluation are decisively shaped by their attitudes towards proletarian revolution. The central questions involved here are (1) their acceptance or rejection o f — o r deflection from—revolution and (2) their corresponding view of the revolutionary party's role i n literary evaluation. Of course, running as a thread through a l l axiological issues i s the question of their attitude towards and use ( i f any) of Marxist analytical methodology—namely, of consistent dialectical-historical materialism. As I have tried to show, the three main c r i t i c s under discussion vary i n a l l the key respects described above. Caudwell formally and openly desires proletarian revolution. Moreover, he i s the only one of the three who not only recognises but actually insists on the centrality of an organised revolutionary practice to a l l cultural evaluation. Yet, certain details i n his actual p o l i t i c a l programme correspond to the class-collaborationist programme of Stalinism rather than to the class-struggle programme of Marxism; and the fact that his particular, o f f i c i a l models for a revolutionary party turn out to be the Stialinist Communist parties of the Soviet Union and Great Britain i s , therefore, hardly a coincidence. Caudwell's resultant misunderstanding of the class-axis of the socialist revolution and of the degree of democracy permissible and - 371 -- 372 -ess*»tjtal\"within a revolutionary workers' party consequently places a question-mark over his axiology. And this question-mark i s confirmed by his inconsistently dialectical and materialist theory of literary value, specifically illustrated in his evaluation of Hardy. Here, he shows frequent lapses into idealist and absolutist assumptions, which p o l i t i c a l l y translate into bourgeois and reformist values. Neither his formal programme nor his o f f i c i a l choice of party continues the po l i t i c s of Lenin and Trotsky, and his methodology in general remains only unevenly Marxist at best. Williams' p o l i t i c s , however, are marked by an explicit and defiant rejection ; of some of the elementary analytical categories of Marxism, such as \"base-superstructure\" and \"class.\" Consequently, his formal claim to being a contributor to the \"central thinking of Marxism\" seems false from the outset. This suspicion i s vindicated by his acknowledged organisational sympathies, which l i e with the social democracies of Europe—the British Labour Party and the Eurocommunists. And, indeed, he inserts their overtly reformist values quite directly into his literary-evaluative method. The normally concomitant question of his attitude to the concept of a revolutionary vanguard i s therefore rendered somewhat moot. Nevertheless, i f one harbours any doubts about Williams' h o s t i l i t y to that concept—let alone to the notion of such a party \" t e l l i n g \" anyone what to do—one can always refer to his autobiographical account of his student days in the CPGB before World War I I . Like most social democrats and l i b e r a l s , Williams chronically equates Stalinism (embodied in the CPGB, for instance) with Marxism, and, therefore, in rejecting the former, \"logically\" rejects the - 373 -latter as well. The objective;effect of Williams' negative relationship to Marxism i s his positive identification with elements of pure reaction. One instance of this phenomenon—which i s recognised as a law by Marxists—can be seen in his defiant rationale for consecrating Burke and Carlyle, as well as i n his ideological rationale for valuing the \"Culture and Society\" tradition as a whole. His evaluation of Hardy also reveals the social class with which he identifies most clearly—one self-admittedly narrow section of the British petty bourgeoisie, ensconced within the Oxford and Cambridge academic milieu as i t s \" l e f t \" face. Terry Eagleton has rightly described this whole posture as mere \"left-Leavisism.\" Eagleton himself, on the other hand, displays substantial his t o r i c a l knowledge and theoretical grasp of Marxism—up to and including Trotskyism. But, for a l l that, his own actual p o l i t i c a l trajectory has increasingly converged on Williams' left-Leavisite culturalism, from i t s centrist l e f t . Thus, while Eagleton volunteers a l l the formal Marxist arguments, advocating organised international proletarian revolution in short order, these arguments remain inconsistent and superficial, frequently leaving his actual methods, assumptions, and values untouched. One logical effect of his inconsistency and p o l i t i c a l super-f i c i a l i t y shows in his evaluation of a writer such as Yeats. Determined to combat what he calls a certain \"theoretical prudery\" and \"moralism\" within Marxist aesthetics, Eagleton actually attributes the perceived virtues of the eventually fascistic Yeats directly to that writer's apparently inevitable reactionary p o l i t i c s . The discourse-restricted, - 374 -non-interventionist, and ultimately reformist po l i t i c s of Eagleton draws him into a passively contemplative sanctioning of \"what i s \" (or \"was\"); no consistent w i l l to oppose acknowledged p o l i t i c a l reaction (in literature or elsewhere) through organised revolution is evident. This i s not Marx's historical materialism and dialectics but liberalism's anti-historical objectivism, or functionalism. If our present inability to alter the past is obvious, our obligation therefore to justify that past politically/axiologically i s not. Eagleton's impulse i s to extrapolate the latter programme from the former fact, which then must necessarily affect not just evaluations of past writers but those of present and future ones. Herein l i e s the anti-Marxist extreme of Eagleton's centrist p o l i t i c a l l o g i c . Another result of Eagleton's insufficient assimilation of Marxism i s his abiding presupposition of a socio-politically homogeneous readership as well as of i n n a t e — i f changeable—literary \"value.\" These presuppositions indicate a fundamental absolutism. Unlike Trotsky or Lenin, who repeatedly made i t quite clear that they were addressing organised revolutionaries sharing the same p o l i t i c a l programme and social orientation, Eagleton uses \"We\" and \"Us\" without either arguing for such a clearly-defined audience or ex p l i c i t l y taking the real heterogeneity of his readership into account. Moreover, as Bennett has remarked, the Eagleton of Criticism and Ideology w i l l brook no argument against his assertion that a given text or author simply i s valuable. The later Eagleton's attempt (as in Walter Benjamin) to introduce a semblance of relativism into his evaluative method merely consolidates his absolutism from a different angle: instead of insisting on the positive innate value of a given text, he now - 375 -abdicates a l l responsibility for any evaluation whatsoever, postponing an ultimatistic \"true evaluation\" to the socialist \"Judgment Day.\" Once more, the absolutism of his axiological conception reveals i t s e l f as one more form of'his abiding p o l i t i c a l absentionism: he simply does not evince any perspective for organised revolutionary inter-vention into the current class-struggle; his attitude to such intervention remains negative and passive; and the real possibility of Marxists' actively shaping their present and future values therefore remains a notion largely foreign to his axiology. While the debate between proponents and overt opponents of proletarian revolution, in my view, can no longer be considered directly relevant to the internal concerns of ostensible Marxist axiology, the question of the role of the vanguard s t i l l can. Therefore, particularly for those who have followed the development of Marxism into i t s Trotskyist phase, i t is useful to rec a l l Trotsky's urgent warning that, \"{wjithout a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. It is now the turn of the proletariat, i.e., chiefly of i t s revolutionary vanguard. The historical c r i s i s of mankind i s reduced to the c r i s i s of the revolutionary leadership.\"1 The \"whole culture of mankind,\" i t goes without saying, includes one's a b i l i t y to evaluate literature meaningfully. That specific a b i l i t y cannot somehow transcend one's general a b i l i t y to survive; and that latter a b i l i t y , as Trotsky forcefully reminded revolutionaries in 1923—after a series of crushing defeats in Bulgaria and Germany—cannot be separated from one's understanding of the central importance of the revolutionary party today: - 376 -[^EJvents have proved that without a party capable of directing the proletarian revolution, the revolution i t s e l f i s rendered impossible. The proletariat cannot seize power by a spontaneous uprising. Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with the substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.2 Of course, this does not mean—and should not be taken to mean—that mere membership in a revolutionary party guarantees one's survival and, concomitantly, one's a b i l i t y to produce Marxist evaluations of literature. Of course, restricting one's activity to non-axiological party-work w i l l not miraculously transform one into a Marxist axiologist. But my contention is that no ostensible Marxist who does not understand the central, orientational importance of working in a revolutionary organisation (and who does not act in accordance with that understanding) can logically be expected to produce much more than a pseudo-Marxist axiology at best. For, the irreplaceable experiential core that makes Marxism something more than just another philosophy w i l l be missing. And that experience, i f i t i s to stay on par with the demands of modern class-struggle, cannot afford to remain stubbornly whimsical, dilettantish, and individualistic: i t must be streamlined, organised, and centralised. In other words, i t cannot be gained anywhere except through the mechanism of the vanguard party, the systematically organised repository of the proletariat's history and p o l i t i c a l programme. Obviously, however, for a full-fledged, professional Marxist axiology to appear, the organised p o l i t i c a l orientation must in t e r s e c t — among actual c r i t i c s — a range of literary knowledge and motivation. - 377 -corresponding to the demands of the revolutionary moment. This intersection i s something that can neither be a r t i f i c i a l l y manufactured nor mathematically predicted. Yet, aspiring Marxist axiologists can surely increase the chances of i t s occurrence by consciously and actively cultivating that aspect of their capacity which they deem the weaker—the p o l i t i c a l or the l i t e r a r y . The problem l i e s with c r i t i c s who reject the very conception of a Marxist axiologist outlined above, not with the nature of i t s requirements, which—I would maintain—are merely necessitated by the struggle for socialist revolution today. Whether or not a given axiologist i s indeed Marxist may take us some time to judge; but p o l i t i c a l l y , non-Marxists are not d i f f i c u l t to spot, and meanwhile, c r i t i c s wishing to correct others' errors can certainly begin their work any time they wish. Only history can \"judge\" whether one is or was producing Marxist axiology; but, in the interim, subjective Marxists can act. A l l they need to remember is that there are two main components of Marxist literary evaluationr—a knowledge of literature (and of i t s accompanying history) and an intimate personal understanding of the practical vicissitudes of organising proletarian revolution. To l i s t specific c r i t e r i a for literary evaluation now would be, then, to miss the entire point of my argument about the prerequisites. The validity of that argument, I believe, i s independent of whether or not such a l i s t i s provided here i t s e l f . The central lesson that I have sought to draw and establish as a consistent guideline i s a politico-methodological, not a literary-empirical, one. It Is aimed at a social stratum already steeped in literature but not correspondingly conscious of or rigorous about the p o l i t i c a l issues from a Marxist - 378 -standpoint. As such, I consider i t appropriate to stress the importance of p o l i t i c a l systematisation over the already-granted importance of literary knowledge. The late historic American Trotskyist James P. Cannon provided some useful insights in this regard: The question at issue i s the attitude of proletarian revolutionists to educated members of the petty-bourgeois class who come over to the proletarian movement. . . . Our movement . . . judges things and people from a class point of view. Our aim i s the organisation of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian struggle for power, and the reconstitution of society on socialist foundations. . . . We judge a l l people coming; to us-from another class by the extent of their real identification with our class, and the contributions they can make which aid the proletariat in i t s struggle against the capitalist class. That i s the framework within which we objectively consider the problem of intellectuals in the movement. If at least 99 out of every 100 intellectuals . . . who approach the revolutionary movement turn out to be more of a problem than an asset i t i s not at a l l because of our prejudices against them, or because we do not treat them with proper consideration, but because they do not comply with the requirements which alone can make them useful to us in our struggle. Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, Luxemburg—none of them were proletarians in their social origin, but they came over to the proletariat and became the greatest of proletarian leaders. In order to do that, however, they had to desert their own class and join \"the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in i t s hands.\" They made this transfer of class allegiance unconditionally and without any reservations. . . . There was and could be no \"problem\" in their case. The conflict between the proletarian revolutionists and the petty-bourgeois intellectuals . . . arises from the fact that they neither \"cut themselves adrift\" from the alien classes, . . . nor do they \"join the revolutionary class,\" in the f u l l sense of the word. . . . The function of the Marxist intellectual i s to aid the workers in their struggle. He can do i t constructively only by turning his back on the bourgeois world and joining the proletarian revolutionary camp, that i s , by ceasing to be a petty bourgeois. On that basis the worker Bolsheviks and the Marxist intellectuals w i l l get along very well together.3 - 379 -L i t t l e needs to be added to that lucid statement. Marxist p o l i t i c s demand seriousness and consistency no less than professional literary criticism does. Hence axiologists claiming to be Marxists should, logic a l l y , be able to meet this requirement^. For, although such an orientation towards organised revolutionary practice may well produce the actual communisation of world society before the f i r s t piece of genuinely Marxist axiology has been written, or, alternatively, although the whole project may well be rendered moot by thermonuclear holocaust, one negative implication of my argument remains v a l i d . And that i s , without such an orientation on the axiologist's part, no piece of literary evaluation or value theory can logically be considered s t r i c t l y Marxist. This i s not a legal or moral imperative but merely an acknowledgment of the induplicable nature of first-hand experience—in this case, of the experience of being a complete Marxist. 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Excerpted in Marxists on Literature: An Anthology. Ed. David Craig. Harmondsworth, Mdx.: Penguin, 1975, pp. 514-26. Appendix A 1. According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor i n history i s the production and reproduction of real l i f e . Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than t h i s . Hence i f somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase. The economic situation i s the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—political forms of the class struggle and i t s results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., j u r i d i c a l forms, and especially the reflection of a l l these real struggles in the brains of the participants, p o l i t i c a l , legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas— also exercise their influence upon the course of the hi s t o r i c a l struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular. There i s an interaction of a l l these elements in which, amid a l l the endless host of accidents (that i s , of things and events whose inner interconnection i s so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard i t as non-existent and neglect i t ) , the economic movement is f i n a l l y bound to assert i t s e l f . Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the f i r s t degree. (Letter to Joseph Bloch [21-22 Sep. 1890], Marx/Engels, p. 57) 2. P o l i t i c a l , j u r i d i c a l , philosophical, religious, l i t e r a r y , a r t i s t i c , etc. development i s based on economic development. But a l l these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else i s only passive effect. There i s , rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts i t s e l f . The state, for instance, exercises an influence by protective t a r i f f s , free trade, good or bad f i s c a l system; and even the deadly inanition and impotence of the German Ph i l i s t i n e , arising from the miserable economic condition of Germany from 1648 to 1830 and expressing themselves at f i r s t in pietism, then in sentimentality and cringing s e r v i l i t y to princes and nobles, were not without economic effect. That was one of the greatest hindrances to recovery and was not shaken un t i l the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the chronic misery an acute one. So i t i s not, as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, that the economic situation produces an automatic effect. No. Men make their history themselves, only they do so in a given environment, which conditions them, and on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however, much they may be influenced by the other—the p o l i t i c a l and ideological relations—are s t i l l ultimately the decisive ones, forming the keynote which runs through everything and alone leads to understanding. (Letter to W. Borgius [25 Jan. 1894], Marx/Engels, p. 58) 3 As to the realms of ideology which soar s t i l l higher in the a i r — r e l i g i o n , philosophy, etc.—these have a prehistoric - 401 -- 402 -stock, found already in existence and taken over by the h i s t o r i c a l period, of what we should today c a l l nonsense. These various false conceptions of nature, of man's own being, of s p i r i t s , magic forces, etc.; have for the most part only a negative economic factor as their basis; the low economic development of the prehistoric period i s supplemented and also partially conditioned and even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic necessity was the main driving force of the increasing knowledge of nature and has become ever more so, yet i t would be pedantic to try and find economic causes for a l l this primitive nonsense. The history of science i s the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or rather of i t s replacement by fresh but less absurd nonsense. The people who attend to this belong i n their turn to special spheres i n the division of labour and they think that they form an independent group within the social division of labour; their output, including their errors, exerts in i t s turn an effect upon the whole development of society, and even on i t s economic development. But a l l the same they themselves are i n turn under the predominant influence of economic development. In philosophy, for instance, this can be most readily proved true for the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the f i r s t modern materialist (in the sense of the eighteenth century) but he was an absolutist at a time when absolute monarchy was i n i t s heyday throughout Europe and began the battle against the people in England. Locke was in religion and in p o l i t i c s the child of the class compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more consistent followers, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie, the French even the philosophers of the bourgeois revolution. The German philistinism runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, sometimes in a positive and sometimes a negative way. But the precondition of the philosophy of each epoch regarded as a distinct sphere in the division of labour, i s a definite thought material which i s handed down to i t by i t s predecessors, and which i s also i t s starting point. And that i s why economically backward countries can s t i l l play f i r s t fiddle in philosophy: France in the eighteenth century as compared with England, on whose philosophy the French based themselves, and later Germany as compared with both. But both i n France and in Germany philosophy and the general blossoming of literature at that time were also the result of an economic revival. The ultimate supremacy of economic development i s for me an established fact in these spheres too, but i t operates within the terms l a i d down by the particular sphere i t s e l f : in philosophy, for instance, by the action of economic influences (which in their turn generally operate only in their p o l i t i c a l , etc., make-up) upon the existing philosophic material which has been handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing anew, but i t determines the way in which the thought material found in existence i s altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for i t is the p o l i t i c a l , legal and moral reflexes which exert the greatest direct influence on philosophy. (Letter to Conrad Schmidt £j27 Oct. 1890], Marx/Engels. pp. 58-60) Appendix B I am now coming to Franz vbri Sickingen. F i r s t of a l l , I must praise the composition and action, and that i s more than can be said of any other modern German drama. In the second instance, leaving aside the purely c r i t i c a l attitude to this work, i t greatly excited me on f i r s t reading and i t w i l l therefore produce this effect in a s t i l l higher degree on readers who are governed more by their feelings. And this i s a second and very important aspect. Now the other side of the medal: F i r s t — t h i s i s a purely formal matter—since you have written i t i n verse, you might have polished up your iambs with a b i t more a r t i s t r y . But however much professional poets may be shocked by such carelessness I consider i t on the whole as an advantage, since our brood of epigonous poets have nothing l e f t but formal polish. Second: The intended conflict i s not simply tragic but i s really the tragic conflict that spelled the doom, and with reason, of the revolutionary party of 1848-49. I can therefore only most heartily welcome the idea of making i t the pivotal point of a modern tragedy. But then I ask myself whether the theme you took i s suitable for a presentation of this c o n f l i c t . Balthasar may really imagine that i f Sickingen had set up the banner of opposition to imperial power and open war against the princes instead of concealing his revolt behind a knightly feud, he would have been victorious. But can we subscribe to this illusion? Sickingen (and with him Hutten, more or less) did not go under because of his cunning. He went under because i t was as a knight and a representative of a moribund class that he revolted against the existing order of things or rather against the new form of i t . Strip Sickingen of his individual traits and his particular culture, natural a b i l i t y , etc., and what i s l e f t i s — G otz von Berllchingen. Gotz, that miserable fellow, embodies In adequate form the tragic opposition of the knights to the Emperor and princes; and that i s why Goethe has rightly made him the hero. In so far as Sickingen— and even Hutten to a certain extent, although with regard to him and a l l ideologists of a class, statements of this kind ought to be considerably modified—fights against the princes (for the conflict with the Emperor arises only because the Emperor of the knights turns into an Emperor of the princes), he i s indeed only a Don Quixote, although one historically j u s t i f i e d . The fact that he began the revolt in the guise of a knightly feud means simply that he began i t i n a knightly fashion. Had he begun i t otherwise he would have had to appeal directly and from the outset to the c i t i e s and peasants, i.e., precisely to the classes whose development was tantamount to the negation of the knights. Hence, i f you did not want to reduce the c o l l i s i o n to that presented in Gotz -yon Berllchingen—and that was not your plan—then Sickingen and Hutten had to succumb because they imagined they were revolutionaries (the latter cannot be said of Gotz) and, just like the educated Polish nobility of 1830, on the one hand, - 403 -- 404 -made themselves exponents of modern ideas,1 while, on the other, they actually represented the interests of a reactionary class. The aristocratic representatives of the revolution—behind whose watchwords of unity and liberty there s t i l l lurked the dream of the old empire and of club-law—should, in that case, not have absorbed a l l interest, as they do i n your play, but the representatives of the peasants (particularly these) and of the revolutionary elements in the c i t i e s ought to have formed a quite significant active background. In that case you could to a much greater extent have allowed them to voice the most modern ideas in their most naive form, whereas now, besides religious freedom, c i v i l unity actually remains the main idea. You would then have been automatically compelled to write more in Shakespeare's manner whereas I regard as your gravest shortcoming the fact that a l a Schiller you transform individuals Into mere mouthpieces of the s p i r i t of the time. Did you not yourself to a certain extent f a l l into the diplomatic error, l i k e your Franz von Sickingen, of placing the Lutheran-knightly opposition above the plebeian Miinzer opposition? Further, the characters are lacking in character. I exclude Charles V, Balthasar and Richard of T r i e r . Was there ever a time of more impressive characters than the 16th century? Hutten, I think, is too much just a representative of \"inspiration\" and this i s boring. Was he not at the same time an ingenious person of devilish wit, and have you not therefore done him a great injustice? The extent to which even your Sickingen, who incidentally i s also much too abstractly depicted, i s a victim of a c o l l i s i o n independent of a l l his personal calculations i s seen, on the one hand, in the way he must preach to his knights friendship with the c i t i e s , etc., and, on the other, in the pleasure with which he metes out fist-law justice to the c i t i e s . As far as details are concerned, I must here and there censure the exaggerated introspections of the individuals—something which stems from your partiality for S c h i l l e r , e.g. p. 121. As Hutten t e l l s Marie his l i f e story, i t would be absolutely natural to let Marie say: \"The whole gamut of feelings\" etc. up to \"Andiit i s heavier than the weight of years.\" The preceding verses from \"It i s said\" up to \"grown old,\" could then follow, but the reflection \"The maid becomes a woman in one night\" (although i t shows that Marie knows more than the mere abstraction of love), was quite unnecessary; but least of a l l should Marie begin with the reflection on her own \"age.\" After she had said a l l that she related in the \"one\" hour, she could give her feeling general expression in the sentence on her age. Further, in the following lines I was shocked by: \"I considered i t my right\" (namely happiness) . Why give the l i e to the naive view of the world which Marie maintains to have had hitherto by converting i t - 405 -into a doctrine of right? Perhaps I shall set forth my view in greater detail for you another time. I regard the scene between Sickingen and Charles V as particularly successful, although the dialogue becomes a l i t t l e too defensive on both sides; further also the scenes i n T r i e r . Hutten's sentences on the sword are very fine. Enough for this time. You have won a particular adherent for your drama in my wife. Marie is the only character with whom she is not s a t i s f i e d . Salut. Yours, K.M. (Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle [l9 April 1859], Marx/Engels, pp. 98-101) Appendix C 6. The unequal development of material production and, e.g. that of a r t . The concept of progress i s on the whole not to be understood in the usual abstract form. Modern ar t , etc. This disproportion i s not as important and d i f f i c u l t to grasp as within concrete social relations, e.g. in education. Relations of the United States to Europe. However, the really d i f f i c u l t point to be discussed here i s how the relations of production as legal relations take part in this uneven development. For example the relation of Roman c i v i l law (this applies in smaller measure to criminal and constitutional law) to modern production. 7. This conception appears to be an inevitable development. But vindication of chance. How? (Freedom, etc., as well.) (Influence of the means, of communications World history did not always exist; history as world history i s a result.) 8. The starting point i s of course the naturally determined factors; both subjective and objective. Tribes, races, etc. As regards a r t , i t is well known that some of i t s peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore to the material substructure, the skeleton as i t were of i t s organisation. For example the Greeks compared with modern nations, or else Shakespeare. It i s even acknowledged that certain branches of art, e.g., the epos can no longer be produced in their epoch-making classic form after a r t i s t i c production as such has begun; in other words, that certain important creations within the compass of art are only possible at an early stage in the development of ar t . If this i s the case with regard to different branches of art within the sphere of art i t s e l f , i t is not so remarkable that this should also be the case with regard to the entire sphere of art and i t s relation to the general development of society. The d i f f i c u l t y l i e s only i n the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they are reduced to specific questions they are already explained. Let us take, for example, the relation of Greek a r t , and that of Shakespeare, to the present time. We know that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also i t s basis. Is the conception of nature and of social relations which underlies Greek imagination and therefore Greek art possible when there are self-acting mules, railways, locomotives and electric telegraphs? What i s a Vulcan compared with Roberts and Co., Jupiter compared with the lightning conductor, and Hermes compared with the Credit mobiller? A l l mythology subdues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; i t disappears therefore when real control over these forces i s established. What becomes of Fama side by side with Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, in other words that - 406 -- 407 -natural and social phenomena are already assimilated i n an unintentionally a r t i s t i c manner by the imagination of the people. This Is the material of Greek a r t , not just any mythology, i.e. not every unconsciously a r t i s t i c assimilation of nature (here the term comprises a l l physical phenomena, including society); Egyptian mythology could never become the basis of or give rise to Greek a r t . But at any rate i t presupposes a mythology; on no account however a social development which precludes a mythological attitude towards nature, I.e. any attitude to nature which might give rise to myth; a society therefore demanding from the a r t i s t an imagination independent of mythology. Regarded from another aspect: i s Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And i s the I l i a d , possible at a l l when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is i t not inevitable that with the emergence of the press bar the singing and the te l l i n g and the muse cease, that i s the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear? The d i f f i c u l t y we are confronted with Is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The d i f f i c u l t y i s that they s t i l l give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable id e a l . An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does the naivete' of the child not give him pleasure, and does not he himself endeavour to reproduce the child's veracity on a higher level? Does not the child i n every epoch represent the character of the period in i t s natural veracity? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where i t attained i t s most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because i t i s a stage that w i l l never recur? There are rude children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the immature stage of the society in which i t originated. On the contrary i t s charm i s a consequence of this and i s inseparably linked with the fact that the immature social conditions which gave r i s e , and which alone could give r i s e , to this art cannot recur. (Introduction to Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, rpt. i n Marx/Engels, pp. 81-84. A l l parenthetical insertions are original to the above edition.) "@en ; edm:hasType "Thesis/Dissertation"@en ; edm:isShownAt "10.14288/1.0096547"@en ; dcterms:language "eng"@en ; ns0:degreeDiscipline "English"@en ; edm:provider "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en ; dcterms:publisher "University of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:rights "For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en ; ns0:scholarLevel "Graduate"@en ; dcterms:title "Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton"@en ; dcterms:type "Text"@en ; ns0:identifierURI "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25578"@en .