New Masses editor Joseph Freeman, who with Mike Gold was the leading voice of 1930s ‘proletarian literature’ speaks to the foundations of Marxist literary criticism in the essay tracing criticism from Kant to Plekhanov and contrasting French theorists Hippolyte Taine to Marc Ickowicz.

‘Literary Theories’ by Joseph Freeman from New Masses. Vol. 4. No. 12. May, 1929.

The national, racial and class conflicts of the past fifteen years have compelled writers and critics to revise their notions about literature. Everyone has been struck by the quantity of books about books which the printing presses are pouring out; and more than one observer has noted that critical literature is at this moment on a higher level than creative literature. This state of affairs is a result of a transition period in which values are transvalued, and confident feelings give way to questioning thoughts, conflicts and battle-cries. We have had manifestoes urging young writers back to “humanism,” to the tenets of the Catholic church, to “intellectualism,” to the method and outlook of the Elizabethan period; to “go Left,” to Marxism.

These contradictory slogans reflect a society divided into social castes and torn by class war. As the population of the United States becomes more rigidly stratified along caste lines, ideas assume a more open class character. It is no accident that “humanist” critics like Professor Babbitt of Harvard worship Mussolini or that Marxist critics lean politically toward Lenin. However, not all literary critics stress the social basis of art. Humanists and idealists, if they are not openly fascist, tend to ignore or deny the living roots of literature and seek to transport it to some metaphysical realm remote from contemporary conflicts. They tend to mislead the reader into believing that in fiction and poetry he enters a world which is “above the battle.” This, of course, is an illusion; art and theories about art have specific social roots; and the critic who wishes to do more than wallow in comfortable dreams must trace literary tendencies to their source.

Marc Ickowicz’s Literature in the Light of Historic Materialism is an attempt in this direction. The author analyzes four leading aesthetic theories, current in Western Europe and the United States in many diluted and eclectic forms. One is the idealist theory elaborately formulated in different ways by Kant and Hegel. Kant did not believe in the objective existence of beauty; aesthetic value, he said, is based on the capacity to please as an object of pure contemplation. This aesthetic satisfaction must be disinterested and free; it must be completely detached from all concern about the real existence of the object and our dependence on it. Though Kant believed that beauty has no objective validity and is valid only for the spectator, he claimed for beauty a universal subjective validity, saying that the object we consider beautiful is fitted to please all men. This universal validity, Kant said, is due to the disinterestedness of our pleasure, to its independence of personal inclination. Kant’s view of the subjectivity of beauty was not shared by Hegel, who gave it an “objective” basis, but only in the sense that he considered the “Idea” to be objective reality. In Hegel’s system, art is considered as the first stage of the Absolute; and the beautiful is defined as the ideal revealing itself to sense or through a sensuous medium. Hegel found in art the highest revelation of the beautiful; he maintained that art makes up for the deficiencies of natural beauty by clarifying the idea and showing the life of the “external” world. It will be seen at once that the idealist concept of art is still current in one form or another, one of its versions being the “art for art’s sake” theory.

The idealist viewpoint had its roots in the metaphysical way of thinking prevalent before science established its hegemony in the intellectual world. The nineteenth century which saw the rapid development of the natural sciences also witnessed the elaboration of the sociological theory of art. This theory abandoning idealist metaphysics, insisted that art is the expression of society. The sociologic viewpoint has been perhaps best formulated by the French critic Taine, and at present seems to be the approach most frequently made by west European and American critics and historians of art. According to Taine, “a work of art is determined by an ensemble which is the general state of the spirit and customs of the environment.” In all the periods which he examined, Taine saw a general situation which was the “state of society”—its religion, customs, poverty of wealth, the degree of freedom or slavery prevalent in it and so on. This general situation, according to Taine, develops corresponding needs, distinct attitudes, and specific sentiments; and since these attitudes and sentiments manifest themselves in the same mind they constitute a prevailing personality, a sort of model man to whom his contemporaries give their sympathy and admiration. Thus, in Greece the “prevailing personality” was the nude and beautiful man; in the middle ages the ecstatic monk and amorous cavalier; in the seventeenth century the sentimental man; and in the nineteenth Faust or Werther. Taine finally formulated his viewpoint thus: a work of art is the product of three factors operating simultaneously: (1) Race; including a man’s innate and inherited characteristics with which he is born and which manifest themselves in temperamental differences as well as physical and intellectual differences; (2) environment, including climate, social conditions, and political circumstances and (3) the given moment. This concept Taine explained as follows: “When the national character and the circumstances of the environment operate they do not operate on a blank tablet, but on a tablet on which imprints have already been made. So that when one takes the tablet at one moment or another, the imprint is different; and that is enough to make the effect of the whole different.” We may assume that Taine considered the third element in the production of a work of art to be time.

Ickowicz rejects both the idealist and the sociologic conceptions of art. He points out how Schopenhauer, carrying the idealist viewpoint to its logical conclusion, declared that “music is completely independent of the phenomenal world, ignores it absolutely and could after a fashion continue to exist even if the universe did not exist”; while Oscar Wilde, restating the idealist aesthetic in his paradoxical way, declared seriously enough that Balzac’s novels created the nineteenth century and Turner created English sunsets. This notion that “life imitates art,” explains nothing; and Ickowicz justly objects that it shuts its eyes to social reality, to the “tumultuous life of the collective which is the primary cause of the efflorescence of art.”

Similarly, the author finds that Taine’s theories will not stand scientific analysis. The theory which seeks to explain literary creations by the “spirit of the race” collapses when “germanic” geniuses like Shakespeare and Dickens are compared with “latin” geniuses like Racine and Balzac. The “genius of the race” turns out to be another metaphysical bogey like the Absolute. The role of climate also turns out to be negligible when we compare the artistic production of the modern Greeks with those of the ancient Greeks living under the same sky. As for the “given moment,” Ickowicz is inclined to interpret it as imitation, and to deny it any leading role in artistic creation. However, it is in the concept of the prevailing personality, that Ickowicz finds Taine weakest. According to Taine, the so-called prevailing personality is supposed to represent the whole of a given society; but the fact is that society is divided into classes. Taine finds that the prevailing personality of Louis XIV’s reign was the “perfect courtier,” polished, elegant, touchy about his honor, and speaking in high-flown and noble language. And indeed, this personality does “prevail” in the tragedies of Racine. What Taine forgets is that side by side with Racine there is Moliere; and if the former depicts the nobleman the latter paints the bourgeois, a quite different type of personality, with a different code of morals and a different manner of speech.

Ickowicz accepts Taine’s general formula that “a work of art is determined by an ensemble which is the general state of the spirit and customs of the environment,” but emphasizes that by failing to recognize the class nature of society Taine got lost in the mazes of idealism.

To the idealist and sociologic theories of art the twentieth century added the psychoanalytic theory. As formulated by Freud, art arises out of the psychic conflicts of the artist. Tormented by forbidden desires which he is unable to realize in the actual world, the artist seeks other means for their realization and finally sublimates them in art. In painting a picture or writing a poem, the artist finds a symbolic satisfaction for those unconscious desires (usually sexual) which he would have satisfied directly but for the demands of society and his own “censor.” Freud sees an analogy between the fantasies of the day-dreamer and the creations of the artist, with this difference, that when we discover the egotistic fantasies of the day-dreamer we get no pleasure from them; they leave us cold and may even repel us; the artist, on the other hand, can convey his day-dreams to us in a form so disguised that they give us profound pleasure. How the artist manages to do this is his own secret. “In the technique of overcoming that repulsion, which undoubtedly has some connection with those barriers which arise between one ego and another, lies the essential art of poetry.” Nevertheless, Freud maintains, the mechanism of art is closely related to the mechanism of day-dreams, involving in the same way the libido, the censor, suppressed desire, emotional conflict, symbols, and sublimation. Stekel carries the psychoanalytic theory of art to the point where he says that “between the neurotic and the poet there is no essential difference; not every neurotic is a poet but every poet is a neurotic.” Freud’s theory of art, however, has certain moral and social aspects. In treating neurotics, psychoanalysis seeks to lead the patient from the “pleasure principle” to the “reality principles”; the former characterizes the child, the latter the adult. Art is one of the means by which one overcomes one’s “lower” instincts. In speaking of Michaelangelo’s statue of Moses, Freud says that the “tremendous physical mass and powerful muscles of the figure become physical expressions of the highest psychic achievements possible for man, for the conquest of one’s own passion in the interest of a goal which one has set for oneself.”

Ickowicz’s repudiation of this analysis is a little lame; his final conclusion, however, is that while psychoanalysis can dissect the soul of the creator, penetrate into his unconscious and dig up his desires, aspirations and ideals, it merely deals with the voice of the individual; but “there is a voice which is stronger, more powerful, more decisive—the voice of society.”

This leads him to the fourth aesthetic theory, which he accepts completely under the term “historic materialism.” The theory was first formulated by Karl Marx who in the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, summed up his views on the origin of ideas as follows: “In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms and social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” With this idea as a basis, Marx made some observations about art which more than fifty years later seemed “revolutionary” when stated by futurists and now is a commonplace: “It is a well known fact that Greek mythology was not only the arsenal of Greek art, but also the very ground from which it had sprung. Is the view of nature and of social relations which shaped Greek imagination and Greek art possible in the age of automatic machinery, and railways and locomotives and electric telegraphs? Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts & Co.; Jupiter as against the lightning rod; and Hermes as against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature. What becomes of the Goddess of Fame side by side with Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes the existence of Greek mythology, i.e., that nature and even the form of society are wrought up in popular fancy in an unconsciously artistic fashion. That is its material. Not, however, any mythology taken at random, nor any accidental unconsciously artistic elaboration of nature (including under the latter all objects, hence also society). Egyptian mythology could never be the soil or womb which would give birth to Greek art. But in any event there had to be a mythology. In no event could Greek art originate in a society which excludes any mythological explanation of nature, any mythological attitude towards it and which requires from the artist an imagination free from mythology.”

These two passages indicate not only what the Marxist attitude toward art is but also what it is not. Ickowicz quite correctly repudiates the legend that Marxists believe that the economic factor is the only factor important in the development of art. Quite the contrary, Marx, Engels, Lenin and other historic materialists have always pointed out that the political forms taken by the class struggle, legal codes, religion, philosophies, morals, etc. have influenced social life. Furthermore, in the case of art the economic factor is the determining factor in the last instance, but intermediate factors, such as “mythology” play a more direct role. The Marxist theory on art was developed at a later date by the Russian Marxist, George Plekhanoff, who evolved the following formula for analysing a work of art: (1) the level of productive forces; (2) economic relations, conditioned by these forces; (3) the social-political regime, erected on the given economic basis; (4) psychology of the social man, determined in part directly by the economic factor, and partly by the entire social political regime erected on it; (5) the various ideologies reflecting this psychology.

Plekhanoff attached great importance to the psychology of the epoch and to the class struggle. In studying the French Romantics he pointed out that the same psychology permeates the poems of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and the music of Hector Berlioz. He went further, and pointed out that while Romanticism was essentially bourgeois and was the expression of the class which came into power after the Revolution, Romanticism never attracted general sympathy. “Similar discord between ideologies and the class whose tendencies and tastes they express is not a rare thing in history,” Plekhanoff wrote.

Since Plekhanoff little has been added to the general Marxist theory of art, but important specific applications have been made. The bulk of these have appeared in the Soviet Union in the past few years; but the most elaborate Marxist study of art has been made by the German scholar Wilhelm Hausenstein whose Art and Society appeared in 1916, followed by The Cultural Foundations of the Nude, the Spirit of Barok and Rococo: German and French Illustrators of the 18th century. In these studies Hausenstein follows the development of sculpture and painting parallel with the evolution of society.

To these Marxist studies must now be added Ickowicz’s Literature in the Light of Historic Materialism, for more than half of the book is devoted to an application of the Marxist theory to the novel (including Robinson Crusoe, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola); the theatre (including Shakespeare, Dumas and Ibsen) and some studies of poetry. The book also contains an interesting study on “Literary Genius and Economic Conditions.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1929/v04n12-may-1929-New-Masses.pdf