Novelties
Denis Donoghue
The :Cove/ and Revolution Alan Swingewood (Macmillan £7.95) Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, arid Critical Method Frederick Crews (Oxford n iversity Press £5.50) Mr Swingewood aspires to a dialectical theory of the novel and society, "one in which the complex mediations of writer, group, class, text, culture, society are retained", but he outruns the official terminology and finds himself back where presumably he started, in the sweet palaver of "the tragic vision" and "human community". At this point, in the long commentary on Solzhenitsyn, he has got a lot out of his system. The system is Marxist
dialectic, but its value to Mr Swingewood .is that it offers him a force to surmount. His main
arguments are "that the author as creator lives within his work through values and praxis" and that the novel "is not reducible entirely to economic, political, and social structure". Solzhenitsyn's work is deemed crucial because it "recaptures the dialectical tension between freedom and determinism". The system must be forced to receive as primary elements in the fiction the writer's presence, his imagination, his creative freedom.
Mr Swingewood starts with the common theory of the novel as bourgeois consolation prize. Lukacs and Goldmann are severely rebuked for their reductive and deterministic bias. Gramsci's concept of hegomony is introduced to effect a transition toward a more feasible account of the novel, since hegemony is not power but the rhetoric of power. Hegemony, Realism, and then at last Revolution, the main thing: how writers have dealt with revolution and its themes. There is a heavy-fisted account of Conrad's alleged insincerity, his rigging The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes to make every socialist revolutionary an ass. Other images of revolution, partial and therefore unsatisfactory, are studied in Wells, Jack London, Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, Koestler and Victor Serge. These chapters are pretty thin and they reveal the old vice of sociology, that it is written by sociologists: when the works studied are works of. imagination, the imagination is lost in the grid, the poetry is never allowed to matter. Mr Swingewood draws mainly from the plots of these novels the implications available to sociology: what he produces as literary criticism is primitive.
Even in the full-scale chapters on Solzhenitsyn it is not allowed to make a difference that the novels are written in Russian and that their indispensable character is linguistic and formal: what matters is the plot_ I am sorry to say these things, because Mr Swingewood's instinct is sound and his critique of hard-line Marxist theory is extremely acute. He is also to be praised for preferring people to systems, imaginations to mechanisms. I only wish he would give more thought and feeling to such things as literature, language, fiction, form and how the imagination works. His generalisations are often illuminating. Quoting Gold mann's observation that "refusal, in the radical and absolute form which it assumes in tragic thought, has only one dimension in time: the present", he argues that "it is precisely within the novel form that the tragic vision expressed itself historically, for the genuine novelist has no duty to grasp the future, only the present as history". This reaches far, but Mr Swingewood does not disclose its bearing upon the form and meaning of any particular novel, where it counts. What the generalisation needs is a sufficient phalanx of particulars in which it is tested and enacted.
Frederick Crews is well known as the author of a study of Hawthorn's psychological themes, Sins of the Fathers, so his new book will gratify those readers who enjoy the spectacle of a son confessing his own sins in public. Mostly the sins are venial, errors of judgment and emphasis rather than anything heinous. It is nice to have an evening with the photograph album, smiling upon the excesses of one's recent past. Mr Crews is embarrassed to admit that for several years he accepted the suppositions of Freudian psychoanalysis without sufficiently questioning them, especially when they were based upon a theory of inevitable conflict. He now thinks the application of psychoanalytical theory to literary criticism a dangerously misleading business, and then it would be wiser to look for "general criteria of rationality" rather than a pre-fabricated set of questions and answers. I am sure many of Mr Crews's colleagues will say 'I told you so' and will welcome evidence that he is at last acknowledging the force of general intelligence rather than the bias of applied intelligence acting under Freud's auspices. But Mr Crews has not given up the faith, he is merely engaged in a sceptical work of revision. Freud's tales from the Vienna woods are not false; only true so far as they go.
The essays collected in Out of My System were written in the heady years 1967-1974, the head having subsided a good deal recently. Do you remember the student protests, the New Left, Louis Kampf s coup at the Modern Language Association, Norman 0. Brown, McLuhan, Reich? Mr Crews exercised himself upon these topics at the time, stood up to be counted on Vietnam, had rap sessions with students, worried himself sick about the aims and values of teaching in the universities. It was all pretty hectic at the time. Mr Crews was knocked sideways by these events, but he has picked himself Up and decided that his essays, qualified by a few paragraphs of revisionist comment, can still present themselves as lively if not charming. And he is right. He has always been a witty man, and now he is witty at his own expense: a fair trade. Much of his revisionary work could safely v have been handed over to that extremely far-reaching critic who writes under the pseudonym of Time, but I do not quarrel with Mr Crews for anticipating that verdict. There is no point in waiting to be accused when you are ready to look in the mirror and shout 'J'accuse'. I assume that Mr Crews's current mood of apology and explanation is only partly a personal matter and in other respects just as much a matter of the zeitgeist as the new mood of modesty exhibited by American scholars tripping over one another to disavow all claims to manifest and exceptional destiny. But it makes an interesting occasion.
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