Possibilities Of A Political Aesthetic: The Case Of Hugh MacDiarmid

freedman 41 Carl Freedman Possibilities Of A Political Aesthetic: The Case Of Hugh MacDiarmid In many traditions— for instance, the French, the Russian, or the Latin American— the notion of a close relationship between the political and the aesthetic is widely accepted, and the political artist is a familiar figure. Zola and Sartre, Gorky and Solzhenitsyn, Neruda and Dalton, are all, within their own cultures, immediately recognizable as paradigmatic men of letters. The situation is radically different in English-speaking cultures. Perhaps our most acceptably political artist is Joseph Conrad, and Conrad is "political" in a sense quite different from that which applies to the writers cited above. In Nostromo, for example, the fascination with political struggle is detailed and powerful, but the text deliberately resolves itself into a tissue of ironies and indeterminacies that preclude clear position-taking or what Sartre would call engagement : one might say that the novel is "about" politics but consciously tries to avoid being itself a political text.1 It is significant, however, that even Conrad was of course not a native English-speaker. Yet his attraction toward English culture was not accidental, for the kind ofinterest he took in politics is wholly acceptable to a critical tradition that, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to posit a fundamental incommensurability between the strictly goal-oriented character of political commitment and the allegedly disinterested, autotelic nature of the work of art. When decisively committed political literature has emerged, it usually has been explained away as the product of the author's personal quirkiness (as with the fascist art of Ezra Pound), or has been relegated to a relatively minor position within the accepted canon (as with Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy or the more partisan nationalist poems of Yeats), or has been denied admission to the canon altogether (as with much Afro-American and feminist writing). When such particular strategies of repression have proved unfeasible (as with much of Blake or Dickens), it has always been possible to fall back upon a more general argument and to maintain, for instance, that the enduring interest of "London" or Little Dorrit derives from supposedly "universal" human concerns that are quite independent of merely local and secondary political questions. The work of Hugh MacDiarmid has been subjected to all these strategies. His personality has been celebrated (especially in Scotland) as that of a great eccentric in a way that leaves little room for serious consideration of his political ideas.2 When readers have paid attention to his 42 the minnesota review poetry, they have tended to prefer the post-Romantic lyricism of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep or the counter-Eliotic modernism of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle to the more overt communism of the Hymns to Lenin or 7"Ae Battle Continues.3 His nationally and linguistically marginal position, as the first Scots poet of consequence since Burns, has always made his membership in the approved canon of modern poetry somewhat shaky, despite the fact that he has been praised a major artist by such respectable and influential critics as T. S. Eliot, David Daiches, and M. L. Rosenthal.4 Finally, when MacDiarmid has been honored— and he has been: he is commonly listed as one of the three greatest Scots poets (with Burns and Dunbar), often considered the greatest of these three, and sometimes ranked on a level with such other modern poets as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens— it has generally been in such a way as to elide or minimize the aesthetic importance of his political views. Critics have sometimes forgiven him his strong opinions and Communist afiliations, but it is not widely accepted that his politics are structurally crucial to any of his poetic achievements. It would be perfectly possible to make a contrary argument along traditional lines. The notion that there is a determinate relation between poetry and belief, and that a work of art must be seen in the context of a value system in order to be properly understood, is after all fairly conventional . This principle could easily be applied to MacDiarmid's Marxism , and the result might well be preferable to a merely formalist approach . In what follows, however...