[Editor’s Note: This essay, a prescient blast at the then growing problem of Marxism in literary criticism, was released as an appendix in Henry Hazlitt’s 1933 book The Anatomy of Criticism: A Trialogue. The very same arguments, of course, use to claims utilized in criticism that particular literature is useless since it supports “the patriarchy” or other modern stand-ins for “the bourgeoisie.”]
The amazingly rapid spread, in the last 2 or three years, of the application of so-called social standards in literary criticism, and especially of so-called Marxian requirements, makes it preferable that these requirements must be sent to an important examination. In carrying out such an evaluation, one is challenged at the really starting by a formidable difficulty.
One feels that few of the authors whose theories are being analyzed will trouble to weigh on their benefits any of the particular objections provided. For the majority of the nouveau-Marxists know all the answers beforehand. They know that any critic who questions any product in the Marxian ideology is a “bourgeois” critic, and that his objections are “bourgeois” criticisms, and from that dreadful and crushing adjective there is no appeal. For the bourgeois critic, if I comprehend the nouveau-Marxists rightly, has less free choice than a parrot. He is a mere phonograph, who can only repeat the expressions and viewpoints with which he has been stuffed from his reading of bourgeois literature and his contacts with bourgeois science and bourgeois art. All these make up bourgeois culture, which is a simple class culture, i.e., a sophisticated and gigantic system of apologetics; worse, an instrument for class supremacy and class oppression.
The bourgeois critic, in brief, is a mere automaton, incapable of prevailing over or of escaping from the bourgeois ideology in which he is locked up; and the poor fool’s misconception that he can seeing any issue with relative neutrality and disinterestedness is merely another evidence that he can not pierce beyond the walls of his ideological cell. (Of course it does seem possible for a few of the chosen, by an act of grace, to get the revelation and jump all of a sudden into a complete approval of the Marxian ideology; otherwise it would be impossible to account for the bourgeois-Marxists themselves. But we may go back to such wonders later on.)
In such an environment, I hope I might be forgiven if I begin with an advertisement hominem argument, for in such an atmosphere advertisement hominem arguments are the only kind likely to make any impression. Now the first article in the Marxian credo is that there is however one Karl Marx which Lenin is his prophet. One would suppose, for that reason, that the critics who call themselves Marxists would difficulty to learn what their master and his greatest disciple believed on cultural concerns. Did Marx himself turn down the culture of his age on the ground that it was bourgeois culture? Did he leave from its contamination as from a pester? Did he repudiate it as simple apologetics?
The evidence versus any such assumption is frustrating. Wilhelm Liebknecht, in his delightful biographical memoir, informs us that Marx read Goethe, Lessing, Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes “almost daily,” and that he loved reciting scenes from Shakespeare, and long passages from the “Divina Commedia” that he knew almost completely by heart. Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, in his individual recollections (which appear in Karl Marx: Man, Thinker, and Revolutionist, a symposium edited by D. Ryazanoff), confirms this and supplements it in more detail. Marx, he informs us,
knew much of Heine and Goethe by heart, and would even price quote these poets in conversation. He read a great deal of poetry, in the majority of the languages of Europe. Year after year he would read Aeschylus once again in the original text, concerning this author and Shakespeare as the 2 biggest remarkable geniuses the world had actually ever known. For Shakespeare he had an unbounded affection.
In some cases he would lie down on the couch and read a novel, and had often 2 or three books going at the same time, reading them by turns. He had a preference for eighteenth-century novels, and was particularly keen on Fielding’s Tom Jones. Amongst contemporary novelists, his favorites were Paul de Kock, Charles Lever, the senior Dumas, and Sir Walter Scott, whose Old Death he considered a work of art.
He had a predilection for tales of experience and amusing stories. The greatest masters of romance were for him Cervantes and Balzac. His appreciation for Balzac was so extensive that he had planned to write a critique of La comédie humaine as quickly as he completed his financial studies.
A lot more direct proof of Marx’s literary tastes is furnished by a “confession” which he signed at the insistence of two of his children. It was a game, popular in the early sixties, and still often restored, of answering a set of leading concerns; and from what we know of Marx there can be no doubt that his responses, while in a couple of instances lively, were fundamentally major.
Asked who his “preferred poet” was, he addressed: “Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe.” He provided his favorite author as Diderot, his favorite occupation as “book worming,” and– what should interest those critics who seem to have chosen that nothing outside of the class battle is now worth talking about– he set down his preferred maxim as “Nihil humanum a me alienum tuto“–“I concern nothing human as alien to me.”
Lenin was as little disposed to reject bourgeois culture as Marx himself. In her biographical memoir, Lenin’s widow, N.K. Krupskaya, informs us that “Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] not only read, but lot of times go over, Turgenev, L. Tolstoy, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and in general had a great knowledge of, and affection for, the classics.”
We find out also that at one time he was quite taken up with Latin and the Latin authors; that he excitedly scanned Goethe’s “Faust” in German, Heine’s poems, and Victor Hugo’s poems; that he liked Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya; which he “put the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Nekrasov by the side of his bed, together with Hegel”.
Madame Lenin tells an amusing story of his encounter with some young communists. “Do you read Pushkin?” he inquired. “Oh, no, he was a bourgeois. Mayakovsky for us.” Lenin smiled: “I like Pushkin much better.” But he admired Mayakovsky, and even applauded him once for some verses deriding Soviet bureaucracy.
If additional proof is required on this point, we have it in the list published by Joshua Kunitz in the New Masses of January, 1932, of the volumes which Lenin purchased for his library in 1919–“a year,” Mr. Kunitz reminds us, “of financial disorganization, political counter-revolution, and impending civil war.” Amongst the poets whose collected works were ordered were Pushkin, Lermontov, Tuitshev, and Fet, and amongst the prose writers Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Alsakov, and Chekhov.
Even when we pass from this record of the individual tastes of Marx and Lenin to concerns of theory, we find that the author of the teaching of Economic Determinism was far from applying it with the crude, rigid and dogmatic directness of a lot of those who now proclaim to be his fans. Regrettably, Marx’s views on the relation of literature to class are less completely set forth than we must like, but in a paper published as an appendix to The Review of Political Economy he makes this significant statement:
It is well known that certain periods of greatest advancement of art stand in no direct connection with the basic development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its company. See the example of the Greeks as compared with the modern countries or even Shakespeare.
Here is a clear acknowledgment that a work of literature is not necessarily to be dismissed as inferior since it outgrows a society in which social injustice prevails, even if it is the product of an oppressing class or of a slave-holding class. To call a work of literature “bourgeois,” to put it simply, would not have suggested for Marx that it was necessarily not a great work. And as a corollary, to call an artwork “proletarian” would not have actually implied for him that it was necessarily admirable.
Now that Leon Trotsky is a political exile, his concepts on any subject are probably not as commonly popular among communists, and certainly not among the celebration hacks, as they once were; but his impressive volume Literature and Transformation, published in America in 1925, was written when he still held office, and seems to me at bottom an advancement of the mindset already implicit in Marx.
Like Marx himself, Trotsky is not devoid of disparities. Definitely he typically errors political for visual criticism. He has an oddly ambivalent mindset toward the “fellow-travelers,” at times applauding, sometimes deriding them, and sometimes taking part in an unattractive heresy hunt. He firmly insists, specifically in the early part of his volume, on the important class character of art. Social landslides, he says, reveal this as plainly as geologic landslides expose the deposits of earth layers. But he has a real sensation for literature and brilliant analytical powers, and the sound judgment and nerve to contradict the dogmas of the extremists in his own celebration. The italics in the following quotes are mine:
It is not real that we relate to only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets need to describe undoubtedly a factory chimney, or the uprising versus capital! … Personal lyrics of the very tiniest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art … It is very real that a person can not constantly go by the concepts of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a masterpiece. An artwork should, in the very first location, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art.
Every ruling class produces its own culture, and subsequently its own art … Bourgeois culture … has existed five centuries, but it did not reach its biggest flowering up until the nineteenth century, or, more correctly, the second half of it. History shows that the development of a new culture which focuses around a gentility needs considerable time and reaches completion just at the period preceding the political decadence of that class … The period of the social transformation, on a world scale, will last … decades, however not centuries. … Can the proletariat in this time develop a brand-new culture? It is legitimate to question this, due to the fact that the years of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which damage will inhabit more space than new construction. At any rate, the energy of the proletariat itself will be invested primarily in dominating power … The cultural reconstruction which will start when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unrivaled in history will have disappeared, will not have a class character. This appears to cause the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any, and in reality there is no factor to regret this. The proletariat gets power for the purpose of doing away permanently with class culture and to make way for human culture. We frequently seem to forget this.
The main task of the proletarian intelligentsia in the immediate future is not the abstract development of a brand-new culture despite the lack of a basis for it, but definite culture-bearing, that is, a methodical, planful, and, obviously, crucial imparting to the backward masses of the important aspects of the culture which already exists… It would be monstrous to conclude … that the method of bourgeois art is not essential to the employees … It is childish to think that bourgeois belles-lettres can make a breach in class solidarity. What the worker will draw from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky, will be a more intricate concept of human character, of its passions and sensations, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and of the function of the subconscious, …
The proletariat likewise requires a connection of imaginative tradition. At today time the proletariat realizes this continuity not directly, however indirectly, through the creative bourgeois intelligentsia … I
excuse these long quotations, but as I said at the beginning, most of our own so-called Marxists are so impervious to arguments from liberal and bourgeois sources that it is needed to direct their attention at least to the tastes and viewpoints of the leaders they profess to follow. These leaders, obviously, dispose of a good deal of the rubbish about “proletarian literature.” Those who look for to dismiss almost all existing culture by the simple procedure of labeling it “bourgeois” are not necessarily Marxists. They are simply new barbarians, celebrants of crudity and ignorance.
There remains in most of the brand-new American “Marxist” critics a deplorable mental confusion, and this mental confusion, as I have actually hinted, is not always gotten in touch with Marxism. Marx himself would most likely be distressed by the way in which they abuse Marxian terms. A proletarian, for instance, in Marx’s use of the term, is a made use of handbook worker, a factory “hand,” and he stays a proletarian no matter his political or financial views.
A communist, on the other hand, is an individual who, regardless of his financial position, holds a specific guaranteed set of viewpoints. Most of the brand-new “Marxian” critics use these terms interchangeably, as if they were synonyms, and as an outcome some extremely weird things occur. A Harvard graduate like Dos Passos, for example, is hailed as a terrific “proletarian” novelist. Still more violent, in a double sense, is making use of “bourgeois” to imply either a person of a particular economic status or a non-communist.
Now it must not seem particularly disgraceful not to be a sweated factory worker. In this basic, detailed, and Marxian sense of the word, Marx himself was a bourgeois economist. (As Trotsky remarks in Literature and Transformation, “Marx and Engels came out of the ranks of the petty bourgeois democracy and, of course, were raised on its culture and not on the culture of the proletariat.”) If this economic-status significance were abided by, the adjective “bourgeois” would not seem especially damning. But it is, as I have said, utilized also as an emotive word, a blackjack to describe non-communists. Full advantage is taken of its historical, non-Marxian connotations– an uncultured shopkeeper, a provincial, a timidly traditional person, a non-Bohemian, a philistine.
This emotive use of words is bound to cause mental confusion. It is impossible to construct, for example, exactly what the brand-new Marxists mean by a “proletarian literature.” The majority of them, most of the time, appear to imply a literature about proletarians. Some of them, a few of the time, seem to suggest a literature by proletarians. A few of them, part of the time, suggest a communist or innovative literature; and a few of them demand nothing less than a mix of all 3 of these. This hardly seems to leave much space for the majority of what used to be called literature.
It may be well at this moment to ask simply how much a culture is revoked or suspect since it is a “class” culture. We are led to expect, under extreme analyses of the doctrine of financial determinism, that our financial status inevitably determines our opinions, that those viewpoints are simple justifications of our class status. Let us confess the element of reality in this; let us confess that our financial status influences the viewpoints of each of us, in different unconscious and subtle– and often not so subtle– methods.
Is it impossible for the specific to prevail over these restrictions? Is it difficult for him, once he has acknowledged this bias, to guard against it as he guards against other bias? Is the restriction of class necessarily any more engaging than the restriction of nation, of race, of age, of sex? Because Proust was a Frenchman, his writing is naturally colored by his French environment; it is different from what it would have been had he lived all his life in England. However does Proust’s Frenchness decrease, to any level worth broaching, his worth to American readers?
Shakespeare, as a seventeenth-century author, was naturally limited by the lack of understanding and a lot of the bias of his age; his age colors his work. Does that mean that he is of little worth to the twentieth-century reader? Since Dreiser is a male, does he lose his value for ladies readers? Does Willa Cather lose hers for males readers? The answers to these concerns are so obvious that it appears practically childish to inquire. The excellent author with great imaginative presents might universalize himself. If not in a literal sense, then definitely in a practical sense, he can transcend the barriers of nationality, age, and sex. And certainly he can, in the exact same functional sense and to the same degree, transcend the barrier of class.
Undoubtedly, the barrier of class is maybe in some respects less hard to surmount than the barriers of citizenship, historical period, individual age, and sex. This is no place to analyze the entire basis of communism, however it can be stated that it is merely not real that the modern world, particularly the American world, includes just two greatly defined classes. Our class borders are infamously unclear, loose, and shifting. No doubt the contrast between those on top and those at the bottom is just as fantastic as the communists say it is, but the division into just 2 contrasted classes is a kid of the Hegelian dialectic rather than of unbiased reality.
There is the more concern, never satisfactorily handled and perhaps not even clearly recognized by a lot of communist critics, of the distinction in between genesis and worth. Every opinion, stated or implied, has a right to be handled simply on its own benefits, and need to be so dealt with if there is to be any intellectual clearness. The reality or worth of a concept or an attitude should ultimately be judged entirely apart from the prejudices, the interests, or the income of the male who reveals it.
All this is not to state that the question of class bias is trivial in literature, science, or art; it is simply to subordinate it to its correct location. It is ridiculous and virtually worthless, for instance, to say that we have a bourgeois astronomy, a bourgeois physics, a bourgeois mathematics. Here the class predisposition enters to so infinitesimal an extent that it is not worth talking about. But the elements of class predisposition may be larger in biology– as, for example, in its responses to issues of environment and heredity.
When we concern the social sciences, particularly economics, the elements of class predisposition might be huge. In the arts they will exist less directly: they will be smaller in poetry than in fiction, smaller sized in painting than in poetry, smaller in music than in painting. This difference is clearly confessed by Trotsky. What must be chosen in each case is the concern of the degree of class predisposition and the real relevance of it. It may be sometimes pertinent for the critic to explain the class predisposition or the class compassion in any author and just how it affects his work.
It might be sometimes even more pertinent, for that matter, to indicate his religious predisposition, his nationalistic predisposition, his sexual predisposition, or the influence upon him of the particular historic period in which he composes. There is no reason that any one of these should receive exclusive or constant emphasis. The greatest threat, simply put, of so-called Marxian criticism in literature is that the critics who make a fetish or a cult of it will in time become definitely dull. When we are informed that Emerson was bourgeois, Poe bourgeois, Mark Twain bourgeois, Proust bourgeois, Thomas Mann bourgeois, we can just respond that this might all be really real, however that we knew it in advance and that it tells us nothing. It is like telling us that Rousseau was an eighteenth-century author, that Goethe was a German, and that atheists are not Catholics. What we have an interest in is what distinguishes the fantastic writer from other persons of his class, what provides him his individuality– in quick, what makes him still worth talking about at all.