George Orwell

SOURCE: "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," in My Country Right or Left: 1940-43, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. II, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968, pp. 123-27.

[Orwell was an English essayist, journalist, and novelist whose works—including the novels 1984 and Animal Farm—frequently covered political issues. In the following, which was originally broadcast on the BBC Overseas Service in 1941, he argues that English literature beginning in the 1930s sacrificed aesthetics in favor of political didacticism.]

I am speaking on literary criticism, and in the world in which we are actually living that is almost as unpromising as speaking about peace. This is not a peaceful age, and it is not a critical age. In the Europe of the last ten years literary criticism of the older kind—criticism that is really judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded, treating a work of art as a thing of value in itself—has been next door to impossible.

If we look back at the English literature of the last ten years, not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude, the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic. Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic writers of the time, people like Auden and Spender and MacNeice, have been didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more interested in subjectmatter than in technique. And the most lively criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers, people like Christopher Caudwell and Philip Henderson and Edward Upward, who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than in its literary qualities in the narrow sense.

This is all the more striking because it makes a very sharp and sudden contrast with the period immediately before it. The characteristic writers of the nineteen-twenties—T. S. Eliot, for instance, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf—were writers who put the main emphasis on technique. They had their beliefs and prejudices, of course, but they were far more interested in technical innovations than in any moral or meaning or political implication that their work might contain. The best of them all, James Joyce, was a technician and very little else, about as near to being a "pure" artist as a writer can be. Even D. H. Lawrence, though he was more of a "writer with a purpose" than most of the others of his time, had not much of what we should now call social consciousness. And though I have narrowed this down to the nineteen-twenties, it had really been the same from about 1890 onwards. Throughout the whole of that period, the notion that form is more important than subject-matter, the notion of "art for art's sake", had been taken for granted. There were writers who disagreed, of course—Bernard Shaw was one—but that was the prevailing outlook. The most important critic of the period, George Saintsbury, was a very old man in the nineteen-twenties, but he had a powerful influence up to about 1930, and Saintsbury had always firmly upheld the technical attitude to art. He claimed that he himself could and did judge any book solely on its execution, its manner, and was very nearly indifferent to the author's opinions.

Now, how is one to account for this very sudden change of outlook? About the end of the nineteen-twenties you get a book like Edith Sitwell's book on Pope, with a completely frivolous emphasis on technique, treating literature as a sort of embroidery, almost as though words did not have meanings: and only a few years later you get a Marxist critic like Edward Upward asserting that books can be "good" only when they are Marxist in tendency. In a sense both Edith Sitwell and Edward Upward were representative of their period. The question is, why should their outlook be so different?

I think one has got to look for the reason in external circumstances. Both the aesthetic and the political attitude to literature were produced, or at any rate conditioned, by the social atmosphere of a certain period. And now that another period has ended—for Hitler's attack on Poland in 1939 ended one epoch as surely as the great slump of 1931 ended another—one can look back and see more clearly than was possible a few years ago the way in which literary attitudes are affected by external events.

A thing that strikes anyone who looks back over the last hundred years is that literary criticism worth bothering about, and the critical attitude towards literature, barely existed in England between roughly 1830 and 1890. It is not that good books were not produced in that period. Several of the writers of that time, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and others, will probably be remembered longer than any that have come after them. But there are no literary figures in Victorian England corresponding to Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier and a host of others. What now appears to us as aesthetic scrupulousness hardly existed. To a mid-Victorian English writer, a book was partly something that brought him money and partly a vehicle for preaching sermons. England was changing very rapidly, a new moneyed class had come up on the ruins of the old aristocracy, contact with Europe had been severed, and a long artistic tradition had been broken. The mid-nineteenth-century English writers were barbarians, even when they happened to be gifted artists, like Dickens.

But in the later part of the century contact with Europe was reestablished through Matthew Arnold, Pater, Oscar Wilde and various others, and the respect for form and technique in literature came back. It is from then that the notion of "art for art's sake"—a phrase very much out of fashion, but still, I think, the best available—really dates. And the reason why it could flourish so long, and be so much taken for granted, was that the whole period between 1890 and 1930 was one of exceptional comfort and security. It was what we might call the golden afternoon of the capitalist age. Even the Great War did not really disturb it. The Great War killed ten million men, but it did not shake the world as this war will shake it and has shaken it already. Almost every European between 1890 and 1930 lived in the tacit belief that civilisation would last for ever. You might be individually fortunate or unfortunate, but you had inside you the feeling that nothing would ever fundamentally change. And in that kind of atmosphere intellectual detachment, and also dilettantism, are possible. It is that feeling of continuity, of security, that could make it possible for a critic like Saintsbury, a real old crusted Tory and High Churchman, to be scrupulously fair to books written by men whose political and moral outlook he detested.

But since 1930 that sense of security has never existed. Hitler and the slump shattered it as the Great War and even the Russian Revolution had failed to shatter it. The writers who have come up since 1930 have been living in a world in which not only one's life but one's whole scheme of values is constantly menaced. In such circumstances detachment is not possible. You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take sides, and his feelings had to find their way not only into his writing but into his judgments on literature. Literature had to become political, because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty. One's attachments and hatreds were too near the surface of consciousness to be ignored. What books were about seemed so urgently important that the way they were written seemed almost insignificant.

And this period of ten years or so in which literature, even poetry, was mixed up with pamphleteering, did a great service to literary criticism, because it destroyed the illusion of pure aestheticism. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—and that our aesthetic judgments are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs. It debunked art for art's sake. But it also led for the time being into a blind alley, because it caused countless young writers to try to tie their minds to a political discipline which, if they had stuck to it, would have made mental honesty impossible. The only system of thought open to them at that time was official Marxism, which demanded a nationalistic loyalty towards Russia and forced the writer who called himself a Marxist to be mixed up in the dishonesties of power politics. And even if that was desirable, the assumptions that these writers built upon were suddenly shattered by the Russo-German Pact. Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed—or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer. Aesthetic scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either. The events of the last ten years have left us rather in the air, they have left England for the time being without any discoverable literary trend, but they have helped us to define, better than was possible before, the frontiers of art and propaganda.

Irving Howe

SOURCE: "The Idea of the Political Novel," in Politics and the Novel, Horizon Press, 1957, pp. 15-24.

[In the following essay, Howe finds politics to be a "violent intrusion" in literary art and seeks to examine the effect of such political ideas when writers insert them into a text.]

"Politics in a work of literature," wrote Stendhal, "is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention."

The remark is very shrewd, though one wishes that Stendhal, all of whose concerts are interrupted by bursts of gunfire, had troubled to say a little more. Once the pistol is fired, what happens to the music? Can the noise of the interruption ever become part of the performance? When is the interruption welcome and when is it resented?

To answer such questions one is tempted to turn directly to the concerts, anticipating those rude disharmonies—they will form our subject—which Stendhal hints at but does not describe. And in a moment we shall do that: we shall examine a number of major novels, each of them shaped and colored by a dominant variety of modern thought, to see what the violent intrusion of politics does to, and perhaps for, the literary imagination. But first, a few speculations.

Labels, categories, definitions—particularly with regard to so loose and baggy a monster as the novel—do not here concern me very much. Whether a novel may be called a political or a psychological novel—and it is seldom anything more than a matter of convenience—seems rather trivial beside the question, why does a particular critic, bringing to bear his own accumulation of experience, propose to use one or the other of these labels? What is it that his approach is to make us see more clearly? What mode of analysis does the critic employ, or what body of insights does he command, to persuade us to "grant" him his classification, in the sense perhaps that one "grants" a builder his scaffold?

When I speak in the following pages of the political novel, I have no ambition of setting up still another rigid category. I am concerned with perspectives of observation, not categories of classification. To be sure, distinctions of genre can be very useful in literary analysis: they train us to avoid false or irrelevant expectations and prepare us, within fluid limits, to entertain proper expectations; they teach us, if I may cite a familiar but still useful example, not to expect a lengthy narrative about the deeds of a hero when we read a lyric poem. But we are hardly speaking of genres at all when we employ such loose terms as the political or the psychological novel, since these do not mark any fundamental distinctions of literary form. At most, they point to a dominant emphasis, a significant stress in the writer's subject or in his attitude toward it. They may, that is, be convenient ways of talking about certain rather small groups of novels.

I stress this empirical approach—this commitment to practical criticism—because it has been my experience that a certain kind of mind, called, perhaps a little too easily, the academic mind, insists upon exhaustive rites of classification. I remember being asked once, after a lecture, whether A Tale of Two Cities could be considered a political novel. For a moment I was bewildered, since it had never occurred to me that this was a genuine problem: it was, I am now sure, the kind of problem one has to look for. I finally replied that one could think of it that way if one cared to, but that little benefit was likely to follow: the story of Sidney Carton was not a fruitful subject for the kind of inquiry I was suggesting. Pressed a little harder, I then said—and this must have struck some of my listeners as outrageous—that I meant by a political novel any novel I wished to treat as if it were a political novel, though clearly one would not wish to treat most novels in that way. There was no reason to.

Perhaps it would be more useful to say that my subject is the relation between politics and literature, and that the term "political novel" is used here as a convenient shorthand to suggest the kind of novel in which this relation is interesting enough to warrant investigation. The relation between politics and literature is not, of course, always the same, and that too is part of my subject: to show the way in which politics increasingly controls a certain kind of novel, and to speculate on the reasons for this change. The chapters on Stendhal and Dostoevsky contain a far heavier stress upon the literary side of things than do the chapters on Koestler and Orwell. And, I think, with good reason. In a book like 1984 politics has achieved an almost total dominion, while such works as The Possessed and The Charterhouse of Parma cannot be understood without using traditional literary categories.

Having cast more than enough skepticism on the impulse to assign literary labels, I want now, in the hope that it will not seem a merely frivolous sequel, to suggest the way in which I shall here use the term "political novel." By a political novel I mean a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting—though again a qualification is necessary, since the word "dominant" is more than a little questionable. Perhaps it would be better to say: a novel in which we take to be dominant political ideas or the political milieu, a novel which permits this assumption without thereby suffering any radical distortion and, it follows, with the possibility of some analytical profit.

Let us for the moment assume a vastly oversimplified schema for the genesis and growth of the novel. Several kinds of prose writing converge to form the novel as we know it, among them the picaresque tale, the pastoral idyll, the romance, the historical chronicle and the early newspaper report. The most important of these is probably the picaresque tale, which flourished during the era in which the bourgeoisie was proving itself to be a vital class but was not yet able to take full political power. Largely good-natured in its moral tone, and often a lively sign of social health and energy, the picaresque novel, through the figure of the rogue-hero, obliquely suggested the new possibilities for social mobility. In acts of sly outrage the rogue-hero broke through the conventional class barriers while refraining from an explicit challenge to their moral propriety; his bravado thus came to seem a mocking anticipation of the regroupment of social strata which would soon take place in the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the picaresque novel reflected the capacity of society to absorb the shocks of the bourgeois revolution. The atmosphere in which the rogue-hero moved was expansive and tolerant; society had room for his escapades and felt little reason to fear his assaults upon its decorum; in a curious, "underground" way he expressed the new appetite for experiment as a mode of life.

From the picaresque to the social novel of the nineteenth century there is a major shift in emphasis. Where the picaresque tale had reflected a gradual opening of society to individual action, the social novel marked the consolidation of that action into the political triumph of the merchant class; and where the rogue-hero had explored the various levels of society with a whimsical curiosity (for he was not yet committed to the idea of life within society), the typical hero of the nineteenth century novel was profoundly involved in testing himself, and thereby his values, against both the remnants of aristocratic resistance and the gross symbols of the new commercial world that offended his sensibility.

Once, however, bourgeois society began to lose some of its élan and cohesion, the social novel either declined into a sediment of conventional mediocrity (as, frequently, in Trollope) or it fractured in several directions. The most extreme and valuable of these directions were the novel of private sensibility, raised in our time to a glory of achievement and a peak of esteem that is without precedent, and the novel of public affairs and politics, which might be warranted in feeling a certain sibling rivalry. . . .

The social novel has always presupposed a substantial amount of social stability. For the novelist to portray nuances of manners or realistically to "cut a slice of life," society must not be too restive under the knife; and only in England was this stability still significantly present during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The ideal social novel had been written by Jane Austen, a great artist who enjoyed the luxury of being able to take society for granted; it was there, and it seemed steady beneath her glass, Napoleon or no Napoleon. But soon it would not be steady beneath anyone's glass, and the novelist's attention had necessarily to shift from the gradations within society to the fate of society itself. It is at this point, roughly speaking, that the kind of book I have called the political novel comes to be written—the kind in which the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society, has penetrated the consciousness of the characters in all of its profoundly problematic aspects, so that there is to be observed in their behavior, and they are themselves often aware of, some coherent political loyalty or ideological identification. They now think in terms of supporting or opposing society as such; they rally to one or another embattled segment of society; and they do so in the name of, and under prompting from, an ideology. [Howe writes in a footnote: I am quite aware that in practice it would often be impossible or not very useful to draw a sharp line of distinction between the political and social novels as I have here described them. Many novels—for example, George Eliot's Middlemarch—would seem to straddle the two categories. But I think it is worthwhile making the distinction analytically even if one recognizes that there are few examples of the "pure" type.]

To see this most clearly we must turn to France where Stendhal, though he wrote only a few decades after Miss Austen, was already marking the death of an era. In France, which had known a bourgeois revolution both abrupt and violent, all social contradictions were sharper and the consciousness of them more acute than in England. Through his novels Stendhal repeatedly declared that the hero, having been deprived of an arena for his talents and energies, must break his way into—and then through—society by sheer force of will. Decades before the world realized it, Stendhal's novels announced that the age of individual heroism was dying, the age of mass ideology beginning to appear.

The political novel—I have in mind its "ideal" form—is peculiarly a work of internal tensions. To be a novel at all, it must contain the usual representation of human behavior and feeling; yet it must also absorb into its stream of movement the hard and perhaps insoluble pellets of modern ideology. The novel deals with moral sentiments, with passions and emotions; it tries, above all, to capture the quality of concrete experience. Ideology, however, is abstract, as it must be, and therefore likely to be recalcitrant whenever an attempt is made to incorporate it into the novel's stream of sensuous impression. The conflict is inescapable: the novel tries to confront experience in its immediacy and closeness, while ideology is by its nature general and inclusive. Yet it is precisely from this conflict that the political novel gains its interest and takes on the aura of high drama. For merely to say that ideology is, in some sense, a burden or an impediment in a novel is not yet to specify its uses—is not yet to tell us whether the impediment may be valuable in forcing upon the novelist a concentration of those resources that are needed to overcome it.

It would be easy to slip into a mistake here, precisely the mistake that many American novelists make: the notion that abstract ideas invariably contaminate a work of art and should be kept at a safe distance from it. No doubt, when the armored columns of ideology troop in en masse, they do imperil a novel's life and liveliness, but ideas, be they in free isolation or hooped into formal systems, are indispensable to the serious novel. For in modern society ideas raise enormous charges of emotion, they involve us in our most feverish commitments and lead us to our most fearful betrayals. The political novelist may therefore have to take greater risks than most others, as must any artist who uses large quantities of "impure" matter; but his potential reward is accordingly all the greater. The novel, to be sure, is inconceivable without an effort to present and to penetrate human emotion in its most private, irreducible aspects; but the direction in which the emotion moves, the weight it exerts, the objects to which it attaches itself, are all conditioned, if not indeed controlled, by the pressures of abstract thought.

Like a nimble dialectician, the political novelist must be able to handle several ideas at once, to see them in their hostile yet interdependent relations and to grasp the way in which ideas in the novel are transformed into something other than the ideas of a political program. The ideas of actual life, which may have prompted the writer to compose his novel, must be left inviolate; the novelist has no business tampering with them in their own domain, nor does he generally have the qualifications for doing so. But once these ideas are set to work within the novel they cannot long remain mere lumps of abstraction.

At its best, the political novel generates such intense heat that the ideas it appropriates are melted into its movement and fused with the emotions of its characters. George Eliot, in one of her letters, speaks of "the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh." This is one of the great problems, but also one of the supreme challenges, for the political novelist: to make ideas or ideologies come to life, to endow them with the capacity for stirring characters into passionate gestures and sacrifices, and even more, to create the illusion that they have a kind of independent motion, so that they themselves—those abstract weights of idea or ideology—seem to become active characters in the political novel.

No matter how much the writer intends to celebrate or discredit a political ideology, no matter how didactic or polemical his purpose may be, his novel cannot finally rest on the idea "in itself." To the degree that he is really a novelist, a man seized by the passion to represent and to give order to experience, he must drive the politics of or behind his novel into a complex relation with the kinds of experience that resist reduction to formula—and this once done, supreme difficulty though it is, transforms his ideas astonishingly. His task is always to show the relation between theory and experience, between the ideology that has been preconceived and the tangle of feelings and relationships he is trying to present. This he does in a number of ways: diseased and intimate emotion twisting ideology into obsessional chimeras, as in Dostoevsky's The Possessed; ideology fortifying emotion for an heroic martyrdom, as in Malraux's Man's Fate; ideology pure and possessed strangling emotion pure and disinterested, as in Koestler's Darkness at Noon; and emotion fatally sapping the powers of ideological commitment, as in James' The Princess Casamassima.

The greatest of all political novels, The Possessed, was written with the explicit purpose of excommunicating all beliefs that find salvation anywhere but in the Christian God. "I mean to utter certain thoughts," wrote Dostoevsky, "whether all the artistic side of it goes to the dogs or not . . . even if it turns into a mere pamphlet, I shall say all that I have in my heart." Fortunately Dostoevsky could not suppress his "artistic side" and by the time his book reaches its end it has journeyed through places of the head and heart undreamed of in his original plan. But whatever else it does, The Possessed proves nothing of the kind that might be accessible to proof in "a mere pamphlet." For while a political novel can enrich our sense of human experience, while it can complicate and humanize our commitments, it is only very rarely that it will alter those commitments themselves. And when it does so, the political novel is engaged in a task of persuasion which is not really its central or distinctive purpose. I find it hard to imagine, say, a serious socialist being dissuaded from his belief by a reading of The Possessed, though I should like equally to think that the quality and nuance of that belief can never be quite as they were before he read The Possessed.

Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something other than itself. The political novelist—the degree to which he is aware of this is another problem—establishes a complex system of intellectual movements, in which his own opinion is one of the most active yet not entirely dominating movers. Are we not close here to one of the "secrets" of the novel in general?—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies. He knows that his own momentum, his own intentions, can be set loose easily enough; but he senses, as well, that what matters most of all is to allow for those rocks against which his intentions may smash but, if he is lucky, they may merely bruise. Even as the great writer proudly affirms the autonomy of his imagination, even as he makes the most severe claims for his power of imposing his will upon the unformed materials his imagination has brought up to him, he yet acknowledges that he must pit himself against the imperious presence of the necessary. And in the political novel it is politics above all, politics as both temptation and impediment, that represents the necessary.

Abstraction, then, is confronted with the flux of experience, the monolith of program with the richness and diversity of motive, the purity of ideal with the contaminations of action. The political novel turns characteristically to an apolitical temptation: in The Possessed to the notion that redemption is possible only to sinners who have greatly suffered; in Conrad's Nostromo and Under Western Eyes to the resources of private affection and gentleness; in Man's Fate to the metaphysical allurements of heroism as they reveal themselves in a martyr's death; in Silone's Bread and Wine to the discovery of peasant simplicity as a foil to urban corruption; and in Darkness at Noon to the abandoned uses of the personal will, the I so long relegated to the category of a "grammatical fiction." This, so to say, is the "pastoral" element that is indispensable to the political novel, indispensable for providing it with polarity and tension; but it matters only if there is already present the public element, a sense of the rigors, necessities and attractions of political life.

The criteria for evaluating a political novel must finally be the same as those for any other novel: how much of our life does it illuminate? how ample a moral vision does it suggest?—but these questions occur to us in a special context, in that atmosphere of political struggle which dominates modern life. For both the writer and the reader, the political novel provides a particularly severe test: politics rakes our passions as nothing else, and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react with an almost demonic rapidity to a detested political opinion. For the writer the great test is, how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions? For the reader the great test is, how much of that truth can he accept though it jostle Aw opinions?

In the political novel, then, writer and reader enter an uneasy compact: to expose their opinions to a furious action, and as these melt into the movement of the novel, to find some common recognition, some supervening human bond above and beyond ideas. It is not surprising that the political novelist, even as he remains fascinated by politics, urges his claim for a moral order beyond ideology; nor that the receptive reader, even as he perseveres in his own commitment, assents to the novelist's ultimate order.

Philip Hanson

SOURCE: "Antibourgeois Anger: Notes on Fiction as a Guide to a Political Sentiment," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 235-45.

[In the following essay, Hanson attempts to locate the difference between genuine "social conscience" and "political sentiment" as they are expressed in twentieth-century novels.]

FICTION AND POLITICAL SENTIMENT

The political objectivity of fiction compared with that of social science is remarkable. The political economist or social philosopher speaks almost always in a single voice and continues to feign a detached and judicial tone even as he moves from evidence to (contentious) interpretation. He may do the decent thing and signpost his transitions from "is" to "ought." He will probably present, in the course of his argument, points of view opposed to his own. Nonetheless, his own preferences almost invariably become apparent—and usually sooner rather than later. Most social philosophizing is therefore a monologue without drama or conflict; the reader knows that he is being addressed by an advocate who is out to win a case. The novelist, on the other hand, can give persuasive expression to conflicting views. It may not even become clear to the reader which view the writer favors. Sometimes the writer himself does not know; politically, many novelists have been turncoats, floating voters, and "Don't Knows."

So far as politics is concerned, novels that do best are those that depict political sentiments. For political ideas the best sources are the partisan social philosophers. But for the emotions and sensibilities with which individuals embrace some ideas and reject others, fiction—it seems to me—imparts a stronger feeling of understanding than the unnatural sciences¹ of psychohistory or political sociology. Yet in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least, novels written in this century seem seldom to be discussed as political documents. To treat nineteenth-century novels in this way is quite usual, but it is as though novels had to pass through a century or so of processing by literary critics before they were fit for consumption by social critics.

Novelists of any vintage, however, can perform two useful tricks in depicting political sentiment. Both are impressive, though one is more remarkable than the other. The first is to give convincing life to political sentiments that the author himself does not approve of. Even in Russian fiction, with its tradition of strong social commitment, there are striking examples of this in the present century: Maxim Gorky's pitying account of a Tsarist police informer (The Life of a Useless Man); Sholokhov's Cossack nationalist, Grigor Melekhov (in the Don trilogy), and the recalcitrant villagers in his collectivization novel, Virgin Soil Upturned;² Solzhenitsyn's labor-camp Leninist, Rubin, in The First Circle, not to mention his attempt at (on?) the original Leninist in Lenin in Zurich.

The second and more remarkable trick—which must be less consciously performed, as a rule—is that of displaying the seamy side of the author's own political sentiments. Dostoevsky quite often does this, so that a perceptive neo-Marxist commentator can argue that the novels undermine Dostoevsky's own conservative philosophy.³ And Waugh's famous account of Gilbert Pinfold's misanthropy resembles an ad hominem attack on many of his own attitudes: "His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity that came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . . Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked (sic) furiously forward to confront the offending object closeup with glaring lens. . . . "

ANTIBOURGEOIS ANGER

Mr. Pinfold's is a Tory style of anger. It is isolationist and defensive. The note is one of slapping down and keeping out. Left, or progressive, or antibourgeois anger is different—and more characteristic of the culture of Western intelligentsias. Indeed, a romantic distaste for the bourgeois world is now so mass-produced, diluted, and tenth-hand that in prosperous societies a large number of otherwise bourgeois people can safely affect it, as a pastime or a manner of speaking.⁴ Politically, such parttime alienation may be expressed merely in a propensity to suspicious and indignant hostility toward many of the more conspicuous persons, institutions, and ideas in sight in one's own society: a notion that the establishment or the power structure is generally in the wrong, combined with no great inclination to do anything about it. The same sentiment more passionately entertained shades into anger with and hatred of "the bourgeoisie" and "the system." It is a political sentiment of some importance, and what novelists have told us about it is sometimes unexpected.

Some of them are obviously hostile witnesses. Several Russian writers with direct experience of revolution, for example, concluded that the zeal of revolutionaries was pathological. Pasternak's Yuri Zhivago observes that "those who inspired the revolution aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil: that's their native element; they aren't happy with anything that's less than on a world scale. For them, transitional periods, worlds in the making, are an end in themselves. They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know about anything except that".⁵ A similar skepticism about the motives of revolutionaries and builders of new worlds was expressed much earlier by Zamyatin in his novel We (1921) and in several of his short stories. This aversion to the whole idea of revolution seems to be shared to this day by all the heterogeneous groupings of Soviet dissidents.

This aversion finds an elaborate—and, to western eyes, exotic—expression in social philosophy in the writings of the Soviet mathematician, Igor Shafarevich. For Shafarevich, socialism is simply an authoritarian, regimented form of social organization such as existed in several past civilizations: his examples include the Third Dynasty of Ur, the Incas, and the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Those who struggle to achieve such a society in modern times are driven, according to Shafarevich, by a pathological propensity to anger, hatred, and destruction—ultimately, a propensity to self-destruction. Dedicated revolutionaries, whatever they may say about their aims for a better world, are actually clear about only what they want to destroy: hierarchy, private property, religion, and the family. That, says Shafarevich, springs from a rage to destroy human individuality. To Shafarevich, socialist revolutionaries really are as Dostoevsky lampooned them in The Devils, and socialism is an embodiment of the death-wish.⁶

LESSING AND SARTRE AS WITNESSES

The opinions of Pasternak, Zamyatin, and Shafarevich are formed by a political experience that is almost the opposite of that of western intellectuals. What is more surprising is that some western novelists of radical or revolutionary sympathies have shown, by implication, a measure of agreement with those opinions. Performing the second kind of novelist's trick in the depiction of political sentiment, they have drawn leading characters whose antibourgeois anger appears pathological.

The best examples I know are two novel-sequences that express attachment (in different degrees) to the revolutionary left. They are Sartre's "Roads to Freedom" trilogy and Doris Lessing's sequence of five "Martha Quest" novels grouped under the title "Children of Violence." Each of these cycles was published in a period when left-wing sentiment was strong among the intelligentsias of western Europe: 1945-49 and 1964-69, respectively.

Mathieu Delarue and Martha Quest share one conspicuous trait: a habitual mental state of disgust, irritation, and fretfulness. It is true that there are also large differences between the Delarue and Quest temperaments. There are differences, too, between the two characters' political biographies and between the roles that the two political biographies play in the two novel-sequences. (Quest enters the Communist party near the start of World War II and leaves it after Hungary; she does not find another political home or become enamoured of the bourgeois world she inhabits. Delarue is attracted to the party but resists joining it. He dies fighting the invading German army and is replaced as a central character—in the last segment of Iron in the Soul—by the Communist, Brunet. Brunet's road to freedom is open, while Delarue's is closed.) So far as the depiction of political sentiment is concerned, however, both the similarities and the differences are intriguing.

The habitual state of irritation of both characters is emphasized by their creators. On the first page of the "Children of Violence" novel-sequence Martha Quest is pictured, at the age of fifteen, sitting on the veranda steps of her parents' farm in Rhodesia reading while her mother talks with a neighbor nearby:

She frowned, and from time to time glanced up irritably at the women, indicating that their gossip made it difficult to concentrate. But then, there was nothing to prevent her moving somewhere else; and her spasms of resentment when she was asked a question, or her name was used in the family chronicling, were therefore unreasonable.

Two pages later:

She looked down at her book. She did not want to read it; it was a book on popular science, and even the title stiffened her into a faint but unmistakable resentment. . . . Perhaps she was so resentful of her surroundings and her parents that the resentment overflowed into everything near her.

These first few pages of Martha Quest describe adolescent anger in a remarkable way. Martha's rages are passionately conveyed, and the reader has to see that they are about real and important things. They are also shown to be a little absurd, but only a little. In the five novels of the "Children of Violence" sequence Martha's anger is traced from adolescence to middle age. It takes many forms and is directed at many targets. The objects of Martha's wrath include her mother (for her narrow views and capacity for self-delusion); the bourgeois white establishment of Rhodesia; her first and second husbands; and her own capacity to play a part she despises (the character she calls "Matty," who charms others by a whimsical exaggeration, and therefore trivialization, of her own nonconformity). The anger becomes more specifically directed and more immediately political during her early period of party membership; later it seems to become a less important part of her temperament and of her responses to what she encounters.

The character of Martha Quest contains a large and changing collection of reactions and perceptions. Many of her antipathies are mingled with other feelings: the element of reluctant (and limited) admiration, for example, in her view of Mr. Maynard, a moderate in the Rhodesian establishment. In other words, her character is so fully represented and so convincingly complicated that it would be absurd to summarize her as some sort of personification of anger. To the reader of "Children of Violence" she becomes like a close personal friend, impossible to describe briefly in any way at all. But the fretfulness is profound and salient, all the same. Martha Quest spends a very large proportion of her recorded existence in states of annoyance, anger, and disgust—very often with herself. On few pages is she amused, tranquil, enthusiastic, or ecstatic; and she hardly ever falls about, laughing.

Sartrean anger and nausea are, I suppose, more famous. In Mathieu Delarue they are more extreme than in Martha Quest and, as a personal trait, less interesting. Delarue is a small and rather clockwork assembly of attitudes and does not change much over time. (Admittedly, the action in the "Roads to Freedom" trilogy gives him little time in which to change.)

There are only two flashbacks to Delarue's childhood, and they are both exotic in their treatment of frustration and anger. In the first, he is described as savoring the memory of a day when, as a seven-year-old, he (a) tore the wings off a fly; (b) rubbed the fly's head with a kitchen scraper ("the feeble, lackadaisical sport of a bored little boy" in Eric Sutton's translation); (c) picked up and smashed a 3,000-year-old Chinese vase belonging to his uncle (a dentist who, curiously, kept the vase in his waiting room—surely a more imaginative acte gratuit than anything Delarue achieves?); and then (d) "felt quite proud" (of (c)), "freed from the world, without ties or kin or origins, a stubborn little excrescence that had burst the terrestrial crust."

The next flashback (immediately following) is to another moment when he felt free or capable of becoming so. He was sixteen "and had just thrashed a lad from Bordeaux, who had thrown stones at him, and he had forced him to eat sand."

The adult Delarue is obsessed with a desire to achieve freedom. When Sartre selects moments in Delarue's experience which have seemed to bring a sense of freedom, these flashbacks are the only two moments he chooses—until the last few minutes of Delarue's life, when he is killing German soldiers. Except for these latter episodes, Mathieu Delarue is shown as constantly angered and revolted by himself and others and, especially, by any behavior characteristic of the bourgeois world he inhabits.

The bourgeois reader can understand this, for Delarue's peacetime world is a nightmare. It is not, however, a world of classes, races, labor, and exploitation—or even a world of political debate. In The Age of Reason (the first volume of the trilogy), Delarue's world is composed of a set of venomous pairings, in each of which at least one partner loathes, despises, or at the very least bitterly resents the other: Daniel-Marcelle, Marcel-Mathieu, Mathieu-Ivich, Boris (Ivich's brother-Lola. On the periphery are a number of other characters who turn out, in the later volumes, to be resented, despised, etc. by their partners (Mathieu's brother Jacques, for example, and Sarah). Then, outside the nightmare of personal relations, there is the dedicated communist, Brunei, who could slip unnoticed into the better class of Soviet socialist realist novels, and he is unattached.

Mathieu Delarue is attracted to the Communist party and to the idea of fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His obsession with personal freedom, however, prevents him from signing up for either. And the chief attraction of the commitment he is resisting is the scope it would give him for smashing things. He pictures Brunet in Paris " . . . walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, light-hearted because he can look ahead, he walks through a city of threaded glass that he will soon destroy, he is walking with rather a mincing, cautious gait because the hour has not yet come to smash it all; he waits, he hopes."

Sartre presents Delarue as a tragic character and a failure. The person he recommends, evidently, is Brunet. But there is no sign that Sartre condemns Delarue's vindictiveness or praises Brunet for acting on some nobler sentiment. The difference between the two men, so far as their political behavior is concerned, is simply that Brunet has decided what to do and gets on with it, whereas Delarue can't make up his mind. (The difference between them as fictional characters is that Delarue has some semblance of life and Brunet none at all.)

Mathieu Delarue is finally presented with a pressing invitation to do something violent. In June 1940 his unit is overtaken by the advancing German army and he has to choose between surrender and a final, doomed resistance. He chooses to shoot—and therefore to be shot—and kills several German soldiers before he dies:

Mathieu looked at the dead soldier and laughed. For years he had tried, in vain, to act. One after the other his intended actions had been stolen from him: he had been no firmer than a pat of butter. But no one had stolen this. He had pressed a trigger and, for once, something had happened, something definite. The thought made him laugh louder than ever. . . . He looked with satisfaction at his dead man. . . . His dead man, his handiwork, something to mark his passage on the earth. A longing came to him to do some more killing: it was fun and it was easy.⁷

And later: "Each one of his shots revenged some ancient scruple . . . this for everybody in general whom I wanted to hate and tried to understand."

In "Roads to Freedom" Sartre's intellectual stance seems to be that hating is, in the bourgeois world, a truer and more appropriate emotion than the urge to understand. In Part Two of Iron in the Soul Brunet, the communist activist, carries the action for the first time in the trilogy. He is a prisoner of war trying to organize a communist cell among his fellow-prisoners. He is shown as brave and determined. If he also exhibits understanding of other people, however, it is a contemptuous and remorseless sort of understanding.

For the great majority of the French prisoners around him he feels the standard Sartrean disgust: " . . . undersized, nimble, mean . . . with ferrety muzzles." He resents their aptitude for "squalid, poverty-stricken contentment." Communists, he reflects, look different: "tough-looking, with hard eyes." The others are "just animals" or "lilylivered swine." "What they needed was suffering, fear and hatred: what they needed was the spirit of revolt, massacre and an iron discipline."⁸

What are the moods and attitudes of the other prisoners of war which so enrage Brunet? They are familiar from other writings about war: writings by Hasek, Heller, and ex-bombardier Milligan. The men Brunet despises are those who think war is crazy, and shrug, and consider their own comfort. So much for the Good Soldier Schweik.

THE POLITICAL SENTIMENT OF THE STEPPENWOLF

What is striking about Delarue and Quest is that their antibourgeois anger is presented as a revulsion from their own comfortable lives and not as a revulsion from the squalid and uncomfortable lives of people less fortunate than themselves. The more conventional view, among western intelligentsia, is that all such sentiment against the existing order has an important element of generosity which should command respect. Sartre and Lessing, however, imply something overwhelmingly self-regarding.

There certainly does exist a tradition of radical political sentiment that has something to do with more generous impulses. Describing how socialist ideas began to take hold among the British intelligentsia in the 1880's, Beatrice Webb refers to the growth of a "collective or class consciousness of sin . . . among men of property and men of intellect." This she ascribes to "a growing uneasiness" about an industrial system that kept propertied persons in comfort but "failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain."⁹

In Mrs. Webb's account, the controversies among socialists, philanthropists, and laissez-faire radicals about the problem of poverty influenced her choice of her life's work. Unable to decide who was right, she set out with Victorian energy and seriousness to discover the extent and nature of poverty in the society around her. The aim was to discover what should best be done about it, and she began her work while still disinclined to reach socialist conclusions.

By comparison, the antibourgeois anger described by Sartre and Lessing—considered as a motive for political action—seems childish and petty. It entails, apparently, no concern to investigate what might be going on outside one's own head. The impulse that they depict is an impulse to lash out in order to relieve one's feelings, with little concern for other consequences.

All the same, in these novels by Sartre and Lessing it is constantly indicated that the central character's anger is not a matter simply of personal pathology (allowing, for the moment, that there might be such a thing as "purely personal" pathology). It is something to do with the bourgeois (ordered, prosperous) world in which the character lives, but the exact connection is neither expounded nor implied. The connection is, however, almost formally discussed in an earlier—and more recently fashionable—novel: Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf.

Hesse did not depict antibourgeois anger as variously as Doris Lessing or as insistently as Sartre, but he seems to have thought more about its origins and about what it encompassed. Harry Haller (the Steppenwolf) describes his own feelings as follows:

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages. . . . For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

Later a more analytical account of his discontent is transmitted to him, by magic, in the "Treatise on the Steppenwolf."

Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. [The bourgeois] will never be a martyr nor agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. . . . His aim is to make a house for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms or tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of his own intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. . . . The bourgeois is therefore by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and therefore easy to rule.

This is the spectacle of everyday, prosperous life that nauseates Mathieu Delarue, puts Martha Quest in a state of constant fretfulness, and alienates Harry Haller. In literature, sense can no longer compete with sensibility. Where Jane Austen deplored the cultivation of sensibility ("intensity of life") as a highbrow form of dissipation, harmful to others, Hesse deplored its avoidance. It is characteristic of twentieth-century literary culture that his account is aesthetic rather than utilitarian. The result of "living intensely" may be destruction of the self; its consequences for others scarcely enter the picture. In general, the consideration of outcomes—particularly social outcomes—is something to be relegated to the alien, and probably fraudulent, calculus of the politician or businessman.

By the late 1930's even a political economist had noticed this "cultural contradiction." One of Schumpeter's reasons for doubting that capitalism would survive was that the bourgeoisie lacked any sort of romantic allure to help maintain its power; and it zealously built up an intellectual class which was repelled by this lack. One of capitalism's weaknesses in this respect is, paradoxically, its "progressive" replacement of tradition by supposedly rational calculations of costs and benefits. This sort of calculation spreads, in Schumpeter's view, from business into most other human activities, and the element of unseemly, inappropriate calculation is repellent to many. At the same time, one of the distinguishing characteristics of intellectuals, for Schumpeter, was precisely "the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs"; that is to say, they are defined by him as "people who wield the power of the spoken and written word" without being professionally obliged (unlike, say, diplomats) to concern themselves with the consequences of what they say.¹⁰ As part of an account of the downfall of capitalism, this is a frivolous tale, on the face of it, to follow Marx's surplus value and organic composition of capital, but it is one that is easier to recognize.

Later on, in Steppenwolf, Harry Haller passes into one of the shows at the Magic Theatre. It is a war. One side summons the nation "to side with the men against the machines, to make an end at last of the fat and welldressed and perfumed plutocrats who used machines to squeeze the fat from other men's bodies. . . . " This call for an assault on plutocrats moves immediately into something more general and more frenzied: "Set factories afire at last! Make a little room on the crippled earth! Depopulate it so that the grass may grow again. . . . " The other side proclaims "in a truly impressive way the blessings of order and work and property and education and justice . . ."

To the Steppenwolf both sides appear right: "I stood as deeply convinced in front of one as in front of the other. . . . " But the crucial consideration to any Steppenwolf was that there was a good war going: "a war in which everyone who lacked air to breathe and no longer found life exactly pleasing gave emphatic expression to his displeasure and strove to prepare the way for a general destruction of this iron-cast civilization of ours. In every eye I saw the unconcealed spark of destruction and murder, and in mine too these wild red roses bloomed as rank and high, and sparkled as brightly. I joined the battle joyfully."

POLITICAL SENTIMENT AND POLITICS

For reasons both good and bad (or so it seems to me) "this iron-cast civilization of ours" does not please all who inhabit it—though for a great many it does quite well. In particular, it generates among its intellectuals a discontent or irritation or even a settled hostility that is no longer politically insignificant. Shafarevich (disapprovingly), Sartre (approvingly), and Hesse (equivocally) identify this sentiment as destructive. Lessing (in the Martha Quest novels) does not depict the sentiment as destructive in its social implications; in common with Sartre, Hesse, and many other twentieth-century novelists, however, she does convey to the reader a picture of antibourgeois anger as a sentiment stemming above all from a sense that one's own life is being stifled and limited. It is characteristic of Mathieu, Quest, Haller, and whole battalions of like-minded characters in modern fiction that their resentment is to do with an injury which they sense has been done to themselves; it is not to do with the fate of others. By the same token, if the sentiment of antibourgeois anger moves these characters to any strong form of public action, the consequences of that action for others appear only as a secondary consideration.

Antibourgeois anger is often dismissed, smugly, as a childish and irresponsible sentiment. It is not my intention to add to the catalogue of such dismissals. The sentiment, in various forms and degrees, has been too widely shared for too long to be treated merely as an unworthy contrivance of intellectual fashion. What is more to the point is that the sentiment should not be misconstrued. It should not be confused with the workings of social conscience.

As an influence on behavior, therefore, this sentiment occupies a kind of no-man's-land between the world of letters and the world of affairs. All political sentiments, by definition, are forms of feeling rather than calculation and therefore do not include within themselves a consideration of causes and effects. Some political sentiments, however—Beatrice Webb's "collective or class consciousness of sin", for example—would seem to prompt those who entertain them toward a consideration of specific aims and of means to achieve those aims. Antibourgeois anger, on the other hand, is one of the more purely sentimental of political sentiments. The careful weighing of consequences is itself one of the bourgeois habits of mind which arouse this anger in the first place. This sentiment is therefore an impulse toward the politics of upheaval; in more or less normal times it finds strong expression only at the outer fringes of conventional politics, and weak expression only in a general inclination toward the radical Left.

The anomaly is that any set of attitudes should have such a star role in our literature and yet be capable of contributing (I suspect) only harm to our lives as social beings. For all the political activism of (some) literary intellectuals and the literary culture of (some) politicians and "practical men," the gap between literature and politics in the Western world is pathologically large.

NOTES

¹ Alexander Zinoviev's phrase (neestestvennye nauki), in The Yawning Heights, for the social sciences.

² Whether the extant Sholokhov, the Grand Old Man of official Soviet literature and the bête noire of the literary dissidents, really wrote most of the first novel in the Don sequence is contested. Computer analysis has been inconclusive. Even if he didn't, Virgin Soil . . . , at least, still serves as a striking example.

³ Leonid Plyushch, History's Carnival (London, 1979), p. 118.

⁴ An anomaly described, in different styles, by Johannes Gross ("On a German Paradox of "Golden Gloom,'" Encounter, April 1981) and by Tom Wolfe ("The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," in his Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine [New York, 1976]). In his study of the "pilgrimages" of western intellectuals to communist countries, Paul Hollander has explored the consequences of this revulsion from western society for attitudes to the USSR, China, and Cuba (Political Pilgrims [London, 1981]).

⁵Dr. Zhivago (London, 1958), p. 269. As the Soviet literary establishment correctly observed, Zhivago is a profoundly, pervasively, and explicitly antirevolutionary book. It seems strange, now, that Pasternak ever thought it might be published in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the animus is so strong and Pasternak's ability to imagine minds other than his own is so slight that he simply does not depict revolutionary political sentiment "from inside." His revolutionaries are credible only as objects viewed from a distance. Podstrelnikov is a kind of nonfigurative construct apparently intended as a portrait of (it might be better to call it "a meditation upon") the poet Mayakovsky. See Olga Ivinskaya. A Captive of Time (London, 1978).

⁶ "Socialism in Our Past and Future," in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ed., From Under the Rubble (London, 1975), pp. 26-27. This is an abbreviated version of an extended historical and philosophical work which existed in samizdat in the early 1970's.

⁷Iron in the Soul, pp. 217-18 of the Penguin edition The original title, La Mort dans lame, fits Shafarevich's diagnosis precisely.

⁸ These quotations are taken from Brunet's reflections at several different points, scattered over ninety pages of text.

⁹ Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Penguin ed., 1938), pp. 204-06.

¹⁰ Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, second ed. (London, 1947), p. 147.

George Bornstein

SOURCE: "The State of Letters: Can Literary Study be Politically Correct?," in the Sewanee Review, Vol. C, No. 2, April-June, 1992, pp. 283-89.

[In the following essay, Bornstein criticizes the narrowness of political correctness, particularly when applied to literary study, which he argues should not be a limiting exercise. ]

At the height of the terror that established Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, Lenin reportedly sent a famous telegram exclaiming indignantly "We're not shooting enough professors." That was political correctness with a vengeance. The incident reminds us that political correctness is nothing new, that it tends toward the authoritarian, and that it is not likely to contribute much to the welfare, or even the survival, of the professoriate. Although in the last two years one hears the term political correctness most loudly from conservative opponents of recent academic trends, the phrase itself has a more complicated history. For example communist intellectuals used it during the 1930s under Stalin. It fit well with a diction that spoke of "the party line," and often appeared in negative usage as "politically incorrect"—for example, it was correct that the world's leading Marxist country had signed a treaty with the world's leading fascist one, but politically incorrect to say so. A half century later, feminists of the 1980s sometimes used the phrase politically correct, often with a commendably ironic overtone. So the term appears to span the political spectrum rather than to belong exclusively to any special part of it.

Political correctness, or PC, seems likely to emerge at times of social change, whether of the murderous class displacements of the October revolution in Russia or the more intellectual combat in American universities today. Such changes in constitutive groups, as in canons, seem to me the normal state for universities. To profit from such changes, we need to be fully open in discussing their causes, nature, effects, and even their desirability. Whatever narrows that conversation in advance is limiting. "Damn braces, bless relaxes," wrote William Blake. Particularly in their virulent condemnatory form, doctrines of prior political correctness work against the very openness that they claim to champion.

I welcome as well as defend that increasing openness, being myself the product of it. One of the many instances of the historical amnesia of current political correctness is its erasure of the long discrimination against Jews practiced by elite American universities. In May 1918, for example, Dean Frederick Jones of Yale University spoke for many, when, in a meeting of the Association of New England Deans held at Princeton University, he said that "I think we shall have to change our views in regard to the Jewish element. . . . If we do not educate them, they will overrun us. We have got to change our policies and get them into shape. A few years ago every single scholarship of any value was won by a Jew. I took it up with the Committee and said that we could not allow that to go on. We must put a ban on the Jews. We decided not to give them any scholarships." I don't know if Princeton succeeded in getting me "into shape," but here I am anyway. It took a long time for the vestiges of such discrimination to disappear. Indeed one of my uncles—who with the ethnically indeterminate name of Price became the first member of the family to attend college—had been awarded a scholarship to Columbia, but then it was rescinded when the authorities following the Dean Jones plan discovered that he was Jewish. I myself came East to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1959, two years after its president, Nathan Pusey, forbade the use of the university chapel to a Jewish faculty member wishing to get married in it, and the year after New York Times coverage made the anti-Semitism of the Princeton eating clubs known to the nation (those clubs had been praised by an earlier secretary of the university, Varnum Lansing Collins, as "our strongest barrier" to Jewish admissions). In those days, so far as we students knew, Harvard had but one Jewish professor of English (Harry Levin, who seemed more in comparative literature), and Princeton—as I discovered upon arriving there for graduate school—had one. Things were shortly to change so drastically that in a literature class I taught at the University of Michigan this spring, only one of the fifty students knew that Jews had ever suffered discrimination in American academia. As a black friend of mine likes to point out, the predicament of Jewish men of my generation is that we went directly from being discriminated against for being Jewish to being discriminated against for being white males, without ever passing through a period of popularity. Thus to me Harold Shapiro's recent assumption of the presidency of Princeton remains a deeply enigmatic event.

Political correctness is notoriously hard to define, yet I suspect that each of us here has a relatively clear idea of what it means on campus nowadays, and I want to enumerate three components of that idea present in literary study. The first is that PC privileges race, class, and gender in its social and literary analyses. To the extent that those categories recuperate voices previously marginalized or ignored, they seem a clear gain. Who would deny the rightful place of, to pick a few of many writers earlier in our century, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, or H.D.? And yet race, class, and gender can generate their own blindness when they become not three of many categories but the dominant—and sometimes the only—ones. Categories that other times and places have thought and still do think fundamental can fall from sight—among them religion, nationalism, or education. To return to Jewish matters for a moment, I like most of my colleagues can rattle off lists of rediscovered female and Afro-American writers prior to 1900, but how many of us can name a single Jewish literary writer in English before 1900? The once marginal have become central, but the still marginal are invisible to the lenses of race, class, and gender. Of course the categories I have suggested loom large in the world today beyond literature: for example, religion in Northern Ireland or in the Middle East, nationalism in central Europe, or education practically everywhere.

We ought not to think that emphasis on race, class, and gender is anything new or that it is automatically progressive. After all, both fascist and Stalinist approaches to aesthetics highlighted such features, as the art exhibition "'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany" reminds us. A representative book is Paul Schultze-Naumberg's Kunst und Rasse [Art and Race], published in 1928, which extended Max Nordau's Entartung (Degeneration), published in 1892, into a full-scale racial analysis of modernism. Race-based approaches to all the arts underlay the Nazis' German Cultural League, which sponsored "art programs" to demonstrate, for example, "why negro culture is contrary to German customs" and to defend "pure German culture." Such positions extended even into the natural sciences. The Nobel prize-winner Philipp Leonard, for instance, argued for pure "German physics" against the pernicious "Jewish science" of Albert Einstein and others. The Nazi press attacked the discoverer of the Uncertainty Principle, Werner Heisenberg, for spreading "Jewish physics" because he used Einstein's relativity theory in his own work. And all such "foreign" influences were seen as threatening aryan womanhood. Meanwhile, in Stalinist Russia, doctrines of "socialist realism" insisted that literature reflect a class-based revolutionary struggle that particularly valorized workers and peasants into cartoon caricatures of virtue. The moral of this, of course, is not that we should abandon race, class, and gender as categories of literary analysis, but only that we should recognize their long and generally shameful history in that enterprise, and should not take their invocation as automatically progressive.

A second characteristic of current PC is its implicit and sometimes explicit casting of the United States as source of the evils identified by analysis according to race, class, and gender—namely racism, classism, and sexism. During its war of national liberation against England earlier in this century, the Irish Republican Army developed a mock catechism around the question "What is the origin of evil?" and its answer, "England." PC often implies a similar catechism, with the answer being America. That is useful insofar as it helps us to struggle against race, class, and gender discrimination. But for all its talk against ethnocentrism, PC seldom includes a comparative perspective on other societies—and for a very good reason. Most other societies, particularly outside the much vilified Europe and Israel, are even less politically correct than the United States. Here some harsh realities need citing: there are not twenty million women walking around America with forced clitorectomies as there are in Africa; slavery was outlawed here nearly a century before it disappeared from the Arab world (and it still hasn't disappeared from some remote corners of that world); and not capitalist America but rather Marxist Russia and China starved to death peasants by the tens of millions as a matter of deliberate state policy. Nations of the so-called Second and Third Worlds are even less politically correct than those of the First World. Indeed it is hardly original to point out that a hallmark of Western tradition is its self-critical attitude on just the points that political correctness holds so dear, including the characteristic one of ethnocentrism.

PC sees the United States not so much as needing reform in order to live up to its own ideals but as so radically flawed as to need to begin all over on a different plan. That plan is usually anticapitalist, and its implicit or explicit socialism constitutes the third characteristic of political correctness. After the spectacular collapse of the Marxist empire in central Europe and the massacres in Tiananmen Square, few PCers willingly identify themselves as Marxists, but instead choose from a range of pathetic evasions: that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is not really a Marxist or socialist country, that no Marxist country is really a Marxist country, that they themselves are only cultural but not economic Marxists (whatever that means), or that they have simply renamed themselves materialists. It has become a cliché that the last Marxists in the world are in Western humanities departments, and that virtually none of them have ever studied economics. The general bias leads to a double standard in judging modernist authors of, say, the 1930s: writers who flirted with fascism however long (like Pound) or briefly (like Yeats before he repudiated it) are regularly damned, while those who served Stalinism long after its horrors were known (like Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Neruda) suffer no opprobrium at all, but often are admired instead. During my own years in academia, the academic left has regularly glorified one shabby dictatorship after another, and upon its unmasking not questioned the politics that produced the debacle but rather rushed on to a new paradigm—first Cuba, then North Vietnam, then the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, then China, and so on. When I lived in Italy in 1972-73 a favored regime of Italian "democratic leftists" was Albania!

Against such sophistry I would adopt the position of W. B. Yeats when he expressed in 1936 his "horror at the cruelty of governments" and declared that "Communist, Fascist... are all responsible according to the number of their victims." By that standard governments we might call Marxist or socialist or communist have a great deal to answer for in our century, where their toll of victims far out does even that of the fascist regimes and, of course, dwarfs the very real sins of the liberal democracies. Current estimates now taught in Russian schools estimate the deaths caused by the Stalinist regime within the Soviet Union to number between 20 and 40 million people, to say nothing of the further millions exterminated outside the nation by Soviet imperialism. And in communist China the internal death toll during the Great Leap Forward (that disaster of the late 50s and early 60s that I and other opponents of the Vietnam war once were taught to admire) is now estimated at between 16 and 27 million people, with 10 million dying in the year 1960 alone. As with genocide, so with ecology. We heard in the 1970s about socialism's respect for the environment and capitalism's cynical exploitation of it, until we learned in the 1980s that the most environmentally polluted regions on earth are in central Europe and Eastern Russia. I do not know whether to be more appalled at the commission of such crimes, or at the silence about them by the academic left today; one has the clear sense that had such atrocities been committed by liberal democracies, they would be regularly cited by proponents of political correctness. What both Marxist totalitarianism and political correctness have in common on this issue is the idea of group as opposed to individual identity and rights, and the fact that such strategies of identity have been central to the most appalling oppressions of the twentieth century ought at the very least to give us pause about invoking them as somehow automatically on the side of liberation.

In carrying over many of the categories mentioned above (emphasis on race-class-gender; America as the Great Satan; and a loosely leftist orientation) the adherents of PC have already decided what is politically correct and what functions as a moral monitor of past literature. That is, it interrogates the literature of the past according to the standards of the present, rather than using that literature to interrogate the standards of the present. PC thus lacks both humility and the potential for correction: it represents an imperialism of time as obnoxious as an imperialism of space, imposing its own standards on the great world of time with relentless ethnocentrism. Like all imperialisms PC is relentlessly moralistic, in the manner argued against by Shelley in the Defense of Poetry. There Shelley defines poetry as the expression of the imagination and maintained against the devotees of Political Correctness in his own time that poetry improved society most by strengthening individual imagination rather than by preaching; hence, he wrote, "a poet would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations." The Defense of Poetry reminds us that political correctness has recurred throughout history, and that, however admirable some of its goals may be, its means are narrow.

A good example is the controversy over John Synge's Playboy of the Western World at the beginning of our century. Synge's rollicking comedy portrayed a mock parricide among the Irish peasantry and the tumultuous love affair between the "hero" Christy Mahon and heroine Pegeen Mike in a language modelled on peasant speech in the West of Ireland. Yet, at its first Irish performances in 1907 and first American tour in 1911, the play provoked riots and denunciations by the then politically correct—the Irish Nationalists in both Ireland and America. Their critique focused on race, class, and gender in political contexts. At that time Ireland was still ruled by England, and Synge was a Protestant Anglo-Irishman writing about Gaelic-speaking Catholic peasants. Politically correct critics like the alderman Michael McInerney, who led the successful fight to ban the Playboy in Chicago, labeled it "a studied sarcasm on the Irish race." In Dublin opponents branded it a slander on the peasant class, and argued that it defamed Irish women in particular. In a depressing anticipation of issues that sound familiar today, the Boston police even told Lady Gregory that "they had had the same trouble about a negro play said to misrepresent people of colour." And George Bernard Shaw still sounds highly topical when he defends the Playboy by denouncing those whose "notion of patriotism is to listen jealously for the slightest hint that Ireland is not the home of every virtue and the martyr of every oppression, and thereupon to brawl and bully or to whine and protest, according to their popularity with the bystanders." African-American writers were quicker to see the point. "Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin had for the New Ireland," declared Alain Locke in the introduction to his landmark anthology, The New Negro (1925), while James Weldon Johnson wrote in his important anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), that "what the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without." Today, of course, Synge's play is viewed as one of the glories of Irish—and indeed world—literature, even in Ireland. The highly original works that comprise today's canon seldom won the approval of the politically correct of their own day.

The problem with political correctness, then, is not whether it is political or whether it is correct, but that it is narrow. It limits rather than enlarges. To that extent, literary study certainly can be politically correct but ought not to be. In "Esthetique du Mal" Wallace Stevens quotes Victor Serge's description of a Stalinist prosecutor—"I followed his argument/With the blank uneasiness which one might feel / In the presence of a logical lunatic"—and identifies what we would call a politically correct person as "the lunatic of one idea / In a world of ideas." Political correctness often gives me the same uneasy feeling that it gave Serge and Stevens, and not just because of its narrowness ("one idea") but because it lacks the capacity for self-scrutiny, self-control, and self-criticism. Ezra Pound displayed those qualities when he movingly asked in his last completed canto, "As to where they go wrong, thinking of Tightness?" and admitted that "Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow through." Similarly T. S. Eliot in the last of his Four Quartets lamented "things ill done and done to others' harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue." Much as I deplore the politics of Pound and Eliot, I admire their capacity for self-criticism, a capacity at odds with all political correctnesses and thus to me central to literary study. For that enterprise I would urge the vision articulated by the great African-American poet Robert Hayden when he wrote:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook, nigger, honkey, wop, nor kike
but man
permitted to be man.