The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Review: The New Marxist Criticism

Reviewed Work(s): Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism by Berel Lang
and Forrest Williams; Radical Perspectives in the Arts by Lee Baxendall, Gaylord LeRoy
and Ursula Beitz; Literature in Revolution by George Abbott White and Charles Newman;
College English by ; Marxism and Aesthetics by null Baxendall; Marxism and Form: 20th
Century Dialectical Theories of Literature by null Jameson
Review by: David Peck
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Summer, 1973), pp. 639-647
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25088354
Accessed: 22-10-2019 05:25 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Massachusetts Review, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Massachusetts Review

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review
THE NEW MARXIST CRITICISM
David Peck

The history of dialectical:

essentially 20th Century American
each critical movement literary
has started criticism
in rejec has been
tion of the current, prevailing methodologies and in simultaneous search
for usable ideas and tools in past, related movements. Thus the Marxists,
who gained prominence in the early 1930s by attacking, among others,
the New Humanists (as in Mike Gold's famous assault on Wilder),
were at the same time searching for positive critical values, not only
in contemporary Soviet criticism, but in the earlier writings of John
Reed, Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, V. L. Parrington, and
others. Likewise, the New Criticism, which began by denying the extra
literary interests of the Marxists and other socially oriented critics at
the end of the 30s, found some of its own critical framework (through
T. S. Eliot and the Agrarians in particular) in the moral, conservative
tradition of those same Humanists the Marxists had attacked.
A similar dialectical process seems to be taking place today. Critics
are discarding the worst aspects of the New Criticism (its narrow
formalism, its paralysis in the text) and, in the search for a broader,
more social and ideational criticism, are rediscovering American critics
who wrote before, or outside of, the dominance of the New Criticism.
Thus, every attack on a Northrop Frye is generally followed by the
reevaluation of an F. O. Matthiessen. (In contrast to those two earlier
movements, however, today's seems more capable of synthesis, of sal
vaging what is of value in the New Criticism for future critical use.)
The roots of the revolutionary changes in critical values and methods
are difficult to isolate, but were at least partly evident in the discovery
by teachers in the 1960s that the literary criticism inherited from the
1940s and 1950s?and ossified through professional journals and gradu
ate schools in English?was incapable of dealing with the increasingly
radical content and attitudes of American literature. How does one
confront black poetry, or feminist essays, armed only with formalist,
textual tools? The absurdity of the question prompted a search for
wider answers in critical methodology.
The very literature which teachers and critics were trying to grapple
639

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Massachusetts Review

with in the late 1960s had itself grown out of the turbulent social
political history of the decade?Watts, the anti-war movement, Chica
go, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Literature and history were interacting, and criticism learned from the
conflict. As political protest (and its suppression) brought understand
ing of the ways in which culture (and thus literature) operate in this
country, so awareness of these relations brought the commitment to
action (as in the 1968 "takeover" of the MLA).
The development of this radical criticism can be charted in its litera
ture: from the first articles in the NUC-MLC Newsletter in 1968?
1969 (Jackie DiSalvo's "This Murder . . . New Criticism and Literary
Scholarship," for example), through the March 1970 issue of College
English ("A Phalanx from the Left") and Frederick Crews' pivotal
"Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?" (PMLA, May 1970), to
such books as The Politics of Literature (1972), edited by Louis Kampf
and Paul Lauter. Through all of these the same themes are being re
hearsed: the realization of the failures of the New Criticism, the grow
ing understanding of the complex relations between literature and
society (and the crucial role of ideology in those relations), the con
sequent recognition of the need for a newer, more social and activist
literary criticism.

The four works under review here are only the most recent exam
ples of the development of this criticism, a criticism which in the
broadest sense may be called Marxist. Besides helping to define the
Marxist qualities of the new movement and the possible directions of
its future growth, the most constant note sounded in the four is
possibility: the diversity and variety of the critical attitudes and methods
lumped within the Marxist rubric.
Marxism and Art1 is the easiest to begin with because it is less an
example of the new Marxist criticism than a demonstration of its roots
in the old: a textbook of aesthetics and criticism which includes both
the "sources" (in selections from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky,
Plekhanov, Bukharin, and others) and the "elements" (20th Century
critical applications). Lang and Williams give us a sense of the breadth
of Marxist methodology (from Stalin on linguistics and Mao Tse-tung
"On Literature and Art" to George Orwell's "Politics and the English

1 Berel Lang and Forrest Williams, eds., Marxism and Art: Writings in
Aesthetics and Criticism (McKay, 1972). $5.95.
640

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Marxist Criticism

Language" and Frederick Antal on art history) at the same time that
they provide us with individually important pieces (Lucien Goldmann
on "genetic-structuralism," for example, or the essays here by Walter
Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein) and introduce us to writers relatively
unknown in this country (Umberto Barbaro, for one).
The weakness of the anthology is its very range: Lang and Williams
are unable within this one volume to give us a fair and current rep
resentation of Marxist theory and approach. For one thing, there are
too few selections from Marx and Engels themselves (four fragments of
less than 35 pages out of 470). For another, there are too few selec
tions from active Marxist critics, none from an American. The bulk
of the anthology could (and should) have been put together some
years ago, stressing as it does such pre-1960 writers as Christopher
Caudwell (2 selections), Georg Lukacs (2), Arnold Hauser (2),
Bertolt Brecht (4), George Thomson (1), etc.
Marxism and Art will undoubtedly become a valuable sourcebook
for the student of Marxist aesthetics, for it provides us with a number
of important 20th Century Marxist critical documents never collected
before, at the same time that it gives us a real sense of "the critical
subtlety and philosophical importance of Marxist writing on various
aspects of art" (from Lang and Williams' excellent introduction),
but it will have to be supplemented by at least two other volumes. One
would be either the republication of International Publishers' 1947 Marx
and Engels, Literature and Art, an anthology which has been out of
print for some years, or, better, the translation and publication of
Mikhail Lifshitz, 1937/1953 (Russian/German) collection of the basic
aesthetic writings of Marx and Engels.
The other volume has already been assembled for us by Lee Baxen
dall: Radical Perspectives in the Arts? a vital collection of the major
Marxist issues and writers at work in the world today. There is a
1965 Czech symposium here on the question of decadence, a redefini
tion of socialist realism (from the "Cultural Theory Panel" of the
Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party), essays on the relations among
the arts, capitalism, socialism, and the future of culture by such various
writers as Carlos Fuentes, John Berger, Fidel Castro, Darko Suvin,
and Stefan Morawski.
The links between Baxendall's collection and that of Lang and Wil
liams?and Lukacs, Sartre, and Ernst Fischer appear in both?pro

2 Lee Baxendall, ed., Radical Persfectives in the Arts (Penguin, 1972).

$2.45.
641

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Massachusetts Review

vide us with some significant clues to the development of Marxist

literary thought in this country. The strongest influence on Marxist
theory has of course always come from eastern Europe (and Baxen
dall includes Lukacs' 1936 "Intellectual Physiognomy of Literary
Characters," one example of that influence). But there have been
developing in recent years other independent strains of Marxist thought
(represented perhaps by Fischer, Sartre, and the Americanized Mar
cuse, whose "Art in the One-Dimensional Society" appears in Baxen
dall), and some of the best essays here represent these strains: Carl
Oglesby's essay on contemporary fiction, Meredith Tax's "Culture Is
Not Neutral, Whom Does It Serve?", the essays by Berger, Jorge
Semprun ("Socialism and Literature"), and others. The eastern Euro
pean influence will continue to play on American criticism?particularly
as translations increase?but that influence can now be balanced by
reference to the largely independent traditions of Marxist criticism
which have sprung up in France, Great Britain, and in this country,
and which make Baxendall's collection so exciting to read.3
On one level it is a question of style: the traditional European
Marxist essay still has a kind of ponderous opacity that is a key to the
philosophical density in the ideas. The American critic, on the other
hand, while he may strive for the philosophical heaviness, generally
carries it in lighter baggage, in a more lively, concrete, often poetic
style. One cannot read the essays by Tax, Oglesby, and Baxendall him
self ("Spectacles and Scenarios: A Dramaturgy of Radical Activity"),
without being reminded of the "American exceptionalism" arguments
of the Marxist 1930s, that there is a certain tone or pace to American
writing which reflects the quality and limitations of American thought,
perhaps ultimately of American life.
It is this contemporary American, possibly "exceptional," tradition
of Marxist criticism which is represented most fully in the recent special
issues of College English and TriQuarterly. While together they indicate
the growing academic interest in Marxist thought, the differences be
tween them help to define the probable range of American Marxist
criticism and the particular problems to which it is prone.

3 Among other translations scheduled, Humanities Press will shortly issue

an anthology of post-War Russian and East German criticism edited by
Gaylord LeRoy and Ursula Beitz. According to a note in Radical Perspec
tives in the Arts, Baxendall and Stefan Morawski are themselves "completing
a work on the origins and development of Marxist aesthetic thought." The
renaissance in Marxist criticism and scholarship is apparently just beginning.

642

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Marxist Criticism

The best essays in TriQuarterlyh "Literature in Revolution" issue4

comprise a very mixed bag: Noam Chomsky's opening article on "Lan
guage and Freedom," pieces on contemporary culture by Paul Buhle
and Todd Gitlin, George Abbott White's "Literature and Ideology:
American Renaissance and F. O. Matthiessen," Marge Piercy and Dick
Lourie on "The Political Economy of Poetry," Sol Yurick on "The
Politics of Imagination," and Raymond Williams "On Solzhenitsyn."
These, however, represent just a third of the contents of the issue.
There are other essays here that are "revolutionary" only by virtue of
the use of the word in the tide (e.g., Harry Levin's "Shakespeare and
'The Revolution of the Times' "), but that are really very straight,
scholarly pieces. There is a third group that is apparently "new con
sciousness" in orientation but indecipherable in meaning, and, finally,
a set of essays that is clearly anti-Left (notably Frederick Crews'
"Offing Culture: Literary Study and the Movement," which details
Crews' dismay over the consequences of the discovery of the role of
ideology in literary studies as elsewhere).
The weakness of this issue of TriQuarterly, in short?and it is the
problem of much of the academic literary criticism that TriQuarterly
publishes as a scholarly journal?is that it has no center. The Oglesby
essay in Baxendall is a brilliant reading of the parallels between Camus
and Heller (exile/desertion), but he has contributed to TriQuarterly
an almost unreadable interpretation of Moby-Dick. (Carlos Fuentes'
essay in Baxendall, in contrast, is a fascinating Marxist analysis of
Ahab, Ishmael, and the crew of the Pequod; his piece in TriQuarterly
?"The Enemy: Words"?is not nearly as effective.) "Literature in
Revolution" is thus a loose collection of new, non-, and anti-Marxist
criticism (not all of it, granted, by American academics), with litde
focus, but with plenty of contradictions. The best essays demonstrate the
diversity of Marxist approach to literary history, language, and culture.
The rest of this special issue only proves that the phrase "Literature in
Revolution" is highly ambiguous. While Baxendall's contributors as
sume the essential interdependence of the two terms, in TriQuarterly
literature and revolution can be, and often are, separated. Perhaps what
TriQuarterly ultimately reveals is the flip side of the American buffalo
of "exceptionalism": the refusal or inability to be serious about litera
ture and revolution at the same time.

4 George Abbott White and Charles Newman, eds., "Literature in Revo

lution" (Winter/Spring, 1972 issue of TriQuarterly). $3.50.

643

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Massachusetts Review

The contents of the special Marxist issue of College English? are

skimpier and narrower than TriQuorterly\ yet College English is
clearly the better introduction to the pedagogical and intellectual as
sumptions and focus of the new Marxist criticism.
The most valuable pieces here are the three by the editors, Richard
Wasson ("New Marxist Criticism: Introduction") and Ira Shor (both
"Notes on Marxism and Method" and "Questions Marxists Ask About
Literature"), which open the issue, and the annotated bibliography by
M. L. Raina which closes it, for these form the framework of explana
tion of the essential Marxist attitudes toward literature today and the
basic sources for these ideas.6 If these pieces tend to be overly schematic
and categorical, the student of Marxist aesthetics will not complain.
Within this framework are articles on allegory (Ellen Cantarow)
and on "The Dialectical Materialist Form of a Literature Course"
(Brent Harold), and critical analyses of Joyce (Paul Delaney), Woolf
(Margaret Blanchard), Wright (James G. Kennedy), and Mailer/
Dickey (Fredric Jameson). Each essay is followed by a "comment"
from another critic (usually helpful suggestions for further questions or
arguments, but in several cases sharp insights into problems and per
spectives) . The issue thus has a kind of double didactic tension, between
the articles and comments, and between these clusters and the larger
introductory framework of Marxist questions, and this tension produces
a sense of vitality rare in traditional journals of American criticism.
What we observe in the entire issue of College English is, first, a real
sense of being in the midst of a new movement, a consciousness of a
"resurgence" of Marxist thought in this country. But this consciousness
has two edges: while most of the critics here are aware of the limita
tions of earlier methods of dealing with literature (especially the New
Criticism), they are also hyper-sensitive to the reported dangers of a
"vulgar" Marxism, one which is dull, rigid, monolithic (Wasson's
terms). They are thus striving for a subtle, sophisticated, complex
Marxist methodology, at the same time that they are suspicious of those
qualities' becoming ends in themselves.
The criticism here belies their fears. The best essays show that what

5 College English, Vol. 34, No. 2 (November, 1972) ["Marxist Inter

pretations of Mailer, Woolf, Wright, and Others"].
6 It is worth noting that fully three-quarters of the writers listed in
Raina's "select" bibliography appear in either the Lang and Williams or
the Baxendall collection. As Raina notes, the comprehensive bibliography in
the field is still Baxendall's Marxism and Aesthetics (1968) which perhaps
marks the beginning of this whole critical renaissance.

644

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Marxist Criticism

has been salvaged from the New Criticism is a complex, primary recog
nition of the literary work, and a sophisticated concern for such literary
qualities as symbol, form, allegory. What is more, these essays show a
real capacity for incorporating within the Marxist framework the ques
tions and interests of other critical disciplines without losing the funda
mental Marxist focus (see in particular Jameson's myth-psychological
reading of Mailer and Dickey, and the two feminist comments on the
essays on Woolf and allegory).7
Still, most of the essays here are on the novel (four of the six critical
essays deal with 20th Century British or American fiction), and their
most telling analyses are made on the contents or ideological points of
view of those novels, and these analyses contain both historical sense
and political consciousness. In other words, while the Marxist criticism
here demonstrates its innate capacity to deal with questions of form,
sensibility, psychology, it just as naturally shows a preference for dealing
with certain kinds of literature and for reading that literature with one
eye on its connections to culture, to society, or to history. It may be
easier and preferable to deal with Mailer than with, say, Wallace
Stevens (which has nothing to do with the quality of either as writer),
and it is only years of conditioning and the dominance of the New
Criticism which have given the Marxist the nagging conscience that
somehow he should be analyzing Stevens, whether or not he enjoys his
poetry or has anything at all to say about it.
What these critical essays in College English show?and this applies
as well to Baxendall's collection and to the Marxist contributions in
TriQuarterly?is that this new Marxist criticism is capable of handling
a Stevens, or a Proust, or any other bugaboo that bourgeois literary
history or personal taste tosses up. But what distinguishes the Marxist
from all other critics is his particular point of view, which means he
will probably not read Stevens, or Proust, or Mailer, without checking
out some other referents, without going beyond the individual poem
or novel. It is the Marxist perspective on these referents that defines
the criticism. Yet, there is a built-in danger that any definition neces
sarily narrows the range and scope of the movement we see today.

7 Jameson's Marxism and Form: 20th Century Dialectical Theories of

Literature (Princeton, 1971) is one (difficult) example of the contemporary
Marxist concern with form (in particular with the theories of Bloch, Mar
cuse, Sartre, Lukacs, and others). Jameson, it might be added, read the most
interesting paper?"History and the Techniques of Literary Criticism"?
of several presented to the newly formulated Marxist Forum at the Decem
ber, 1972 convention of the MLA.
645

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Massachusetts Review

It is easier to state what Marxist criticism is not: it is not just the

study of radical or revolutionary literature. (Other critics can write
such studies, as TriQuarterly shows.) And it is not just literary sociol
ogy (or "literature and society" or "literature and history," although
handbooks of literary study are constantly confusing them and faulting
Marxist criticism for not being one of the other interdisciplinary meth
ods). The Marxist critic is certainly close, on one edge at least, to
sociology, and will use the concepts and methods of that discipline when
necessary, in the same way he may borrow from psychology, anthro
pology, etc. But the use of the tools or ideas from other disciplines (the
whole concept of social class, for example) does not define the Marxist
position, any more than the opposite use of a Marxist concept like
alienation turns a sociological critic into a Marxist.
What defines the Marxist is his particular understanding of the
relations among literature, society, and history. The Marxist sees a
dialectical movement to history, understands the role that class and
class conflict have played in that movement, and views recent history
in part as a movement from capitalism to socialism. More importantly,
the Marxist sees literature as a vital part of the superstructure built
upon this socioeconomic base in history, and the relationship between
literature and society as itself dialectical: while literature may tell us
about material or spiritual forces in the society, it may also become a
force and influence that society. (That is, the individual novel may?
through character, point of view?indicate class, racial, sexual attitudes
in a society; it may also affect or change those very attitudes.) The
Marxist thus has a sense of the complex web of lines running between
literary properties?form, genre, language?and the larger elements
and movements of social-political history.
The difficulties of the Marxist position stem from its essentially moral
view of literature as a unique form of cognition and its partisan view
of history reaching toward socialism. The Marxist critic is not only
the detached observer of literary phenomena; he is himself a partici
pant in a living historical period where ideology and consciousness play
vital parts and where his job as literary critic is consequently of crucial
significance. As a descriptive critic (which he is most of the time), he
may analyze the individual literary work or perhaps the larger literary
movement (as in an analysis of the relations between the New Criticism
and the "end of ideology" arguments during the Cold War). But,
like other critics, he also has a prescriptive function, and he may tend
to read into progressive literary movements the social future he thinks
he sees, or moralize about the failures of past writers to see the same

646

This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Marxist Criticism

future. In other words, the Marxist critic runs the risk of making litera
ture more utilitarian or prophetic, the artist more or less responsible,
than either really is.
Most treatments of Marxist criticism during the last three decades
have stressed this prescriptive tendency as a weakness, to the exclusion
of all other qualities, which explains the ignorance among a number
of critics?including Marxists?of the valuable and influential Marxist
criticism written in this country during the 1930s.
Much that is significant to Marxist criticism, however, is prescriptive:
the arguments that poems should mean as well as be, the demands that
artists and writers today confront their world, the warnings of how
preemptive the counterculture is, or how ideology and consciousness are
manipulated in our culture. The Marxist critic must be wary in his
prescriptive role that his judgements are not unjustifiably anticipatory
or retroactive, but he cannot give up that role. In his dominant descrip
tive function, he must show at least as much intelligence and sensitivity
as any other critic.
These sketchy definitions do not begin to suggest the range of ideas
and approaches represented in the four new volumes of criticism. (For
fuller definitions, see especially the introductions by Wasson and Shor
to College English, and Meredith Tax's introductory essay in Baxen
dall.) And as these are only the first works in what promises to be a
renaissance of a living Marxist tradition, we can look for the definitions
to shift and expand. What these four new works reveal is how broad
and flexible the categories and approaches of Marxist criticism have al
ready become. The modern Marxist critic is neither transfixed on history
nor blinded by class (both have become far too complex today for the
myopic vision). He merely has his eyes open wider than other critics:
he is looking at literature and at the same time (if only through his
mind's eye) he is watching the larger movements within history and
society. If his partisan views interfere with his literary sensibilities,
then he will surely fail as a critic. But if his literary sensibilities are
divorced from his social and historical senses, he will no longer be
Marxist. What ultimately defines the new Marxist critic is this double
perspective: literature as literature, and at the very same time as some
thing else, as a document which is crucial in understanding the condition
of man. The one without the other is clearly formalism; the reverse
is Marxian sociology. The Marxist critic is the one who holds them
in this delicate balance.

647
This content downloaded from 172.58.99.107 on Tue, 22 Oct 2019 05:25:41 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms