In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1. The Origins of Invisibility ver the thirty or forty years which preceded the writing of Invisible Man, Arnerican criticism can be fairly-if somewhat simplistically-divided into two main camps or, to use Grant Webster's term, "charters." I The older charter I shall, for convenience, call Progressivist Criticism, a perfect example ofwhich can be found at the conclusion ofVan Wyck Brooks' America's Coming of Age. Having pointed out the merits of midnineteenth -century American writers and acknowledged their limitations, he mourns the fact that no writers have replaced them, a fact he blames directly on the domination of America by big business and industrialism. In industrial , corporate America, he concludes, "intimate feeling, intimate intellectual contact, even humor . . . privateness which holds the string of what we call publicity; these promote that right, free, disinterested publicity which the real gentleman, the real craftsman, the real civil servant has always had in his blood. Socialism Rows from this as light flows from the sun" (18o). Brooks thus presumes direct correlation between a "successful" society and its art. The argument of his book, the case for socialism, rests on the failure of capitalism as evidenced by the failure of the potentially great mid-nineteenthcentury literature to blossom, propagate, and multiply in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subsequently, among others, Lewis Mumford in The Golden Day (1926) and Herman Melville (1929), Vernon Parrington in Main Currents of American Thought (1930), and Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition (1933) echoed this argument. All of these, further, were indebted to the Beards' voluminous histories. 2 The other, newer charter, often referred to as New Criticism, Webster appropriately calls Tory Formalism. It includes the critics T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. 3 We can get a clear picture of the difference between these two charters if we compare V. W. Brooks' statement above with the following by Ransom: "The formal tradition in art has a validity more than political, and the latter I am content to waive. What I have in mind is an argument from aesthetics which will justify any formal art, even a formal literature" (The World's Body, 32). RanSOITI will "waive" political validity because he feels it works against the 2 Invisible Criticism humanity and compassion that Brooks sees it mandating. For Ransom, the political validity-or economic necessity-consists of using the most efficient means to fulfill a desire, whether that means is a simple machine, or mass production, or rape. Societies that endure and prosper, he believes, frustrate and defer these "economic" activities; this results in manners, rituals, and aesthetics. Socialism for him thus destroys society by replacing deferred gratification with economic (i.e., immediate) gratification. When Ransom considers , for example, the (alleged) equality of the sexes and deritualization of marriage in then newly soviet Russia, the question, as he frames it, is "whether the ideal of efficient animality is good enough for human beings; and whether the economic law, by taking precedence at every point over the imperative of manners, of religion and of the arts, will not lead to perfect misery" (The World's Body, 38). There were, of course, many other differences between the Tory Formalists and the Progressivist Critics, and there were, as well, many differences within these groups. But for this discussion I want to bypass those and focus on one area of strong agreement: both charters hated modern technology. For the Progressivist Critics it represented the monstrosities of capitalism, and for the Tories an assault on religion and the humanities. Both consequently posited an ideal world modeled on some moment in the American past, and both modeled it on antebellum America. For the Progressivist Critics the period was a time when small pioneering and farming communities formed the basic unit of organization, free from the encroachment of industries and monopolies . Lewis Mumford named this age of actual and prototypical communes "The Golden Day." The Tories, many of whom were southerners, also looked to antebellum America, and more specifically to the Old South, as the agrarian ideal which somehow preserved the arts and humanities through the economic self-sufficiency of the farm or plantation. In I'll Take My Stand (1930), twelve southern writers, including Ransom, Tate, and Warren, advocated a return to the agrarian tradition. But the book also defended the South-still not quite part of the Union-and indicted the North.4 In their misgivings about the outcome of the Civil War...

Share