Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition (review)

REVIEWS 153 ous than ever, as Enzensberger (The Consciousness Industry) and others have pointed out. As consumer society embraces romantic anti-intellectualism and narcissism, existential Marxists disclaim the anti-intellectualism and narcissism of the romantic Left does not explain away the presence of these tendencies in its own logic. Gerald Graff Norman Rudich, ed. Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition . Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1976. 389 pp. $4.50. (Also available in hardcover ; distributed by Monthly Review Press.) Weapons of Criticism has been several years in the making-four of its key essays were originally prepared as papers for the 1972 Marxist Forum at MLA-yet editor Norman Rudich's claim that it "is the first collection of Marxist literary criticism made up exclusively of essays by North American scholars and critics" is still true. Other recent anthologies continue to emphasize European sources and practice: Berel Lang and Forrest Williams' Marxism and Art (1972) contains no Americans; Maynard Solomon 's collection of the same title (1974) has selections from Sidney Finkelstein, Harry Slochower, and W. E. B. Du Bois-out of 35 contributors; David Craig's Marxists on Literature (1975) concentrates on English and European critics, Gaylor LeRoy and Ursula Beitz's Preserve and Create (1973) on East European critics. Only Lee Baxandall 's Radical Perspectives in the Arts (1972) has given adequate representation to critics in this hemisphere: a good third of his essays are by Americans, both north and south. The importance of Rudich's collection is double: it is the first collection of Marxist criticism devoted to theory and practice in this country, and thus shows us in great relief both the strengths and the limitations of this criticism as it has developed here over the past decade. The absence of American criticism in other anthologies is not something we can easily complain about, of course; certainly the most important Marxist theory has, until very recently, been written in Europe. Any anthology worth its escalating priceand Solomon's Marxism and Art is the most comprehensive, if not the most expensive of those listed above-must include something of the statements on literature of Marx and Engels, plus representative selections (and here I am reading from Solomon's table of contents) from Lenin, Trotsky, Plechanov, Mao, Sartre, Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fischer-and how many others? Little wonder that Solomon has room for only three Americans in his 600-plus pages. And yet there has been a good deal of Marxist criticism written in this country over the last century. Much ofthat produced before World War 1 has not been recovered from its journalistic sources. The criticism that came after the War suffered first from the bohemia-left conflicts of the 1920s (represented in the work of Floyd Dell, Max Eastman) and then from the destructive schismatic splits of the 1930s (as we see in the careers of V. F. Calverton, Mike Gold). Still, there is much criticism from both the 20s and the 30s that has not been salvaged, including important work by Joseph Freeman and Edmund Wilson, among others. The same thing holds for the 40s and 50s, when a number of critics (including Finkelstein, Louis Harap, Edwin Berry Burgum) continued to practice in spite of the growing political pressures from a society dedicated to obliterating the memories of its 'red decade.' One of the benefits of the current Marxist renaissance, hopefully, will be the recovery of those Marxist critics who operated in this country before the 1960s and the equitable evaluation both of their critical work and of its socio-political contexts. 154 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW But the absence of American Marxist criticism from recent anthologies is not only the consequence of its political basis or of our failure to recover it: few American critics have developed the kind of comprehensive, systematic theories we associate with a Lukacs or a Lucien Goldmann. Most American criticism has been both practical and periodical-that is, until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now we are being inundated by theory: the journals of the academic left (like Telos and New German Critique) are often freighted with heavy and abstract theoretical discussions, derived from the...