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Ideology and Literary Studies: A Dilemma

Though Frederick Crews (PMLA, 85, 1970, 423-28; 86, 1971, 280-81) appears to solve the problem of the relation of literary studies to ideology, his animadversions imply a program that actually conceals what remains an insoluble dilemma. If he talks plausibly about "the possibilities for vital knowledge" in criticism, in the end he offers only a new version of an old approach that allows a surrender of literature and criticism to ideology. Because the issue is of continuing importance, let us uncover the program he would substitute for the one he finds almost everyone else unwittingly adhering to. What, for Crews, are the relations among literature, criticism, and history? The answer is complex. When he mentions "the waning historical vitality of the formalist paradigm" (in response to his critics) and deplores "an absence" in scholars "of feeling for historical dynamics" (in his original essay), he gives us clues to his program. "Formalist esthetics," he asserts, has done a valuable service by engaging in an "energetic critique of impressionism." But now, having done its duty, formalism must be replaced by something else, just as impressionism presumably did a service by providing a critique of whatever it replaced. By showing to be "both true and important" ... "the root assumption that literature conveys class meaning," critics like Georg Lukacs provide what is needed now. Crews, who has "feeling for historical dynamics," must see criticism as constantly in need of change as new historical circumstances arise. But if the history of criticism reveals changing assumptions about literature, it also lets us see critics in successive ages wrestling again and again with similar problems, and only a few criticsperhaps including Lukacs, perhaps not-qualifying as new in any radical sense. This view of criticism as constantly in need of change has serious consequences: criticism must answer to matters other than literature, with literature itself denied any special nature of its own. The clue here lies in Crews's statement about Lukacs' demonstration of the "truth" of an "assumption" about literature and class meaning. If Lukacs has assumed "that literature conveys class meaning" and then developed a criticism from this assumption, he has not demonstrated a truth but has only argued in a circle. But in similarly circular fashion any critic may demonstrate the truth of his assumptions.l If what Crews means is only that Lukaics has finally demonstrated the truth in what some critics have long assumed, then the same should hold as well for the parallel "truths" the formalists and even the impressionists demonstrated. Surely-and Crews seems to grant as much-the formalists must have had some claim to truth if they were able to provide their "energetic critique of impressionism." But if literature can thus accommodate Lukacs' truth and the opposed truth of the formalists, its nature becomes obscure indeed. If for Crews literature is no more than what our assumptions make of it-if it exists for whatever social or other uses we can make of it, having no unique function of its own-the word true becomes meaningless when he applies it to criticism. Probably, in Hegelian fashion, Crews would see Lukacs as having arrived at a final truth about literature and class meaning after the only partial truths of earlier critics. But instead of a synthesis of various truths about literature, this is a reduction of literature to a single truth. When he charges that the criticism to be displaced promotes "the illusion of present classlessness-an illusion whose effective function is to ensure compliance with disguised class governance," he would-disclosing his own ideology-assign criticism a role in the class struggle: the "truth" revealed in reducing literature to class meaning would help bring about an actual classless society. When he invites us to recognize the "tacit political assumptions" supporting "disguised class governance," he is at the same time urging us to adopt new assumptions, elevating them as a new "truth" that will enable us in our way to combat such governance.2 But what would ultimately become of literature and criticism after the revolution? In the classless society criticism would have no role: having elucidated class meaning in literature and helped the revolution come to pass, it would have performed its function and could be dispensed with. Literature itself would disappear, having performed its function. With no classes for literature to refer to, the class meaning that Lukacs has enabled us to discern in literature would be in fact no meaning. Whatever literature there might be after the revolution would be utterly different from what we know now. To extrapolate further from Crews's hints, after the revolution-and after literature as we know it would be of interest only to surviving antiquarians"formalist esthetics" might have a place: it could once