Discussion of Papers by the Members of the Seminar on Dialectical Criticism

118 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW DISCUSSION OF PAPERS BY THE MEMBERS OF THE SEMINAR ON DIALECTICAL CRITICISM transcribed and edited by Erica Harth I. Gaylord Leroy's paper NR: I liked the boldness with which Gaylord proposes a model which has the laudable aim of saving Marxist criticism from rapid normative judgments of art on the basis of immediate political considerations. I also think that the effort to use the literary and critical heritage through Matthew Arnold's contribution to art theory is a good example because it points to the necessity for Marxists to reappropriate the literary past in a new way. The concentric circle idea is attractive, although it raises difficult questions and perhaps some justifiable objections. It defines interestingly a demarcation between the critical and the political intelligence. It enables us to appreciate the great achievement of authors like Dostoyevsky, Yeats and Faulkner despite some objectionable aspects of their ideological stances. However, in the paper the relationship between the two stages is not immediately clear. I would also question in the paper concepts like the archaic self and a largely unexplained conviction that writers like Jung can contribute to a scientific view of the individual. I would suspect that there is something wrong with an interpretation of myth which underplays its social content. After all, if we are to take the notion of myth seriously, we have to recognize that its great figurai creations (in the Auerbachian sense of that term) were imaginative projections of social types, of culture heroes, rather than examples of individual psychology. The value of the paper, then, is that it points the way to new exploration which may reveal great discoveries when more elaborately developed, exemplified, and deepened. LR: My comments on the paper are directed to two points, one of which was brought up by Norman. This has to do with the reliance on a literary tradition, which is where Arnold comes in. The other has to do wtih the introduction of Jung and his psychoanalytic theories. While I am in basic agreement with Gaylord's premise, I would say that if Marxism aims at a scientific examination of literature (i.e. as rigorous as possible), it needs to rely on all the advances made since Arnold's time in related fields, such as linguistics. I should think that a reliance on the Freudian as opposed to the Jungian tradition might be more pertinent. I would bemore interested in bringing in Lacan's rethinking of Freud, since Lacan relies also on linguistics and has been close to the relevant philosophical and political currents. Especially with regard to matters of personal psychology, the Freudian unconscious would not exist as it does without the presence of dominant ideology. Dominant ideology is what causes a large percentage of the repression and therefore determines the nature of the unconscious. These things are quite pertinent to the framework within which we are working. CR: The importance ofGaylord's paper lies first ofall in its attempt to grapple with a longstanding problem he and other Marxists have had in "grading" literary works according to the degree with which they conform to Marxist precepts; second, to offer a way out of this unsatisfactory way of criticizing, but not at the expense of the revolutionary project. I feel, however, that he has not succeeded for the following reasons. The designation of powerlessness and fatality as primary themes in Absalom, Absalom! on which he rests his extended discussion of the science of the individual misses the mark. Although the characters do live out distorted, twisted, deprived lives and die in the end as the slave South also dies and its victimizers are routed by the inexorable force of history which they do not understand, to call this complexity powerlessness and fatality is simply to misstate the theme. Absalom, Absalom! is an indictment of the immorality and injustice of slavery, and its power lies in its vivid, unforgettable depiction of the moral and 119 psychological horror inflicted on the characters. It is a work that offers a larger canvas than any other to date on the ante-bellum South, even with its distortions, ambiguities, obsessions, and misguided ideology. Even if these were...