Literature and the Marxist Aesthetic

LITERATURE AND THE· MARXIST AESTHETIC CHARLES I. GLICKSBERG I N his preoccupation with the ultimate goal of social integration, the Communist critic emphasizes one pole of the personality to the exclusion of other aspects and potentialities, for he assumes that when social integration, according to his formula, is achieved the health and happiness of the individual and the flowering of culture will be automatically assured. For him the individual is but a function of economic society, a cell in the corporate blood stream. But if the individual has many roots of his complex being in society, there is also a part of him, an important part, that has no connection with the immediate pressures of his culture. He is lonely and apart, feeling within him the stirrings of energy and striving that he cannot account for, the emergence of mysteries he cannot hope to solve, the perception of cosmic enigmas which baffle the mobilized intelligence of science. He is both mystic and metaphysician, a dweller in the unconscious, a dreamer as well as a worker, a seeker after an unknown, perhaps ultimately unknowable God. And his life in the dark labyrinths of the unconscious fascinates him, for it challenges the alleged supremacy of the rational and mechanical. The writer, as writer, enjoys nothing more than posing contradiction against contradiction and attempting to resolve them in a "higher" synthesis, which in turn will generate further contradictions. Cradled in the inscrutable, suckled on mysteries which cannot be put into words, however subtle and evocative, he is no confident dogmatist, no crusading propagandist. There is more between heaven and earth and in the unfathomable soul than the authors of the Communist Manifesto were aware of. The artist is himself a bundle of contradictions. He studies Freud and in part follows his counsel to look within, for like Coleridge he knows that he cannot hope from outward forms to gain the vision and the faith that must come from within. And he knows this first, because he is tremendously interested in the life of dreams, the ambivalence of the unconscious, the conflicting desires that torment him, the symbols that arise out of the murky, turbulent depths; and second, because he is determined that no aspect of life shall escape his relentless scrutiny. Hence the persistence with which Communist critics attack what they call the middle-class ideology of Freudianism. But Freudianism cannot be thrust out of the way by simply invoking class co-ordinates-unless the Marxists are to argue that since everything is social the contents of the unconscious are also social in character, or unless they are to argue that these contents are the product of theosophy, not science. This will never do, how76 LITERATURE AND THE MARXIST AESTHETIC 77 ever, for while the instinctual energy whose tortuous course Freud tracked down to its source may be modified by social influences, its fundamental desire for gratification remains unaltered. There is the world of sex, the lunar cycle, the rhythm of the menstrual period, dream and myth, neuroses and creative hunger, symbol and memory, consciousness and the oceanic tides of the unconscious. And there is, too, at all times, the mysterious cosmos without and the problem of man's relation to it. Man who dwells on this earth for but an ephemeral span-what does he make of it all? What God shall he acknowledge and how shall he worship Him? What shall he make of death that daily threatens his extinction and that has undone billions upon billions before him? Hence his feeling of loneliness and his star-crossed metaphysical pilgrimage, his sorrowful journey to the end of night: a journey, a pilgrimage , which leads him not only to the flaming abysses of the inferno but also to Pisgah-heights of vision. Joyce was profoundly influenced by Freud and Jung; Franz Kafka had read both Freud and Kierkegaard. Are they to be condemned as decadents simply because they do not conform to the Marxist Weltanschauung? On the contrary, such writers, precisely because they are free from ideological bias, the distorting simplifications introduced by dialectial materialism, see more deeply and more truly into the tragic heart of things. Neither decadents nor propagandists, they...