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CLASSICS REVISITED (8)
William Blake, Poems
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Marx, The Communist Manifesto
One of the most extraordinary ideas in the history of literary criticism is the notion,
popular a generation or more ago, that William Blake was a naïve, uneducated man, a kind
of literary and artistic Douanier Rousseau, unable to grasp the refinements and
complexities of any orthodox world view or any “tradition,” and so forced to
make up a cranky system out of his own head. Since then the literature on Blake has grown
to enormous proportions and threatens to overtake and surpass that on the more difficult
books of the Bible. The old point of view, shared by critics and editors as widely
disparate as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and T.S. Eliot, by almost everyone except William
Butler Yeats, is completely discredited, and is held now by no serious person.
Blake was for his day an exceptionally learned man, and he was the most impressive and
most durable eighteenth-century representative of a tradition older than any orthodoxy
— the main line of the orthodoxy of heterodoxy. Blake survives and is read all over
the world; the great French Illuminist, Saint-Martin, is forgotten by all but specialists
and learned occultists. It is apposite to compare the ever-growing exegesis of Blake with
that of Second Isaiah or the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, to apocalypse
and mystical cosmology. This is where Blake belongs. He speaks the same language, uses the
same kind of symbols, deals with the same realities. It is his grasp of this tradition
which gives him his power and which makes him ever more meaningful as time passes.
Blake belongs to the very small group of founders of the subculture of secession which
has accompanied industrial, commercial civilization since its beginnings. He differs,
however, from Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Stendhal, and other purely literary figures, in that
he was able to develop a completely worked-out world view, a philosophy of nature and of
human relations which could provide answers to the questions asked at the deepest —
or the most superficial — levels. As the cash nexus shut down over humane culture
like a net, strangling all other values but profit, the poets and novelists reacted —
Blake understood.
Sade, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, the philosophers of alienation, all to a greater or
lesser degree fail where Blake succeeds. In one way or another they themselves become
absorbed by the civilization they attack, and then it turns out, as their ideas are
accepted, that they only caricatured the system of values they attempted to subvert. Their
philosophies are each the philosophy of business enterprise hypertrophied, each after his
fashion. Blake is indigestible, although I remember long ago his “Ancient of
Days” was used as an advertisement for a public utility company. That bygone
advertising man chose more wisely than he knew. Blake’s famous picture is not of God
creating, with his compass, order out of chaos, but Blake’s diabolical principle of
lifeless rationalism reducing reality to empty quantity.
Herein lies the difference. Blake knew that his age was faced with a major crisis or
climacteric of the interior life. He could diagnose the early symptoms of the world ill
because he saw them as signs that man was being deprived of literally half his being. His
Prophetic Books may be full of cosmological powers derived from the long Gnostic tradition
of the emanation and fall of creation, but he is in fact concerned with the epic tragedy
of mankind as it enters an epoch of depersonalization unequaled in history. It is not
surprising that the followers of Carl Jung have been amongst the most revelatory
expositors of Blake. He anticipates most of Jung’s diagnosis and prescription, and
shares with him the same archetypal pattern or Olympiad of key symbolic figures. The
reason is not to be found in some mysterious universal oversoul or undersoul. It is simply
that human brains like human bodies are much alike, and men cope with those factors of the
mind, or those powers and relationships in life, that cannot be handled by a quantitative
rationalism in much the same way in all times and places, and most especially in crises of
the society or the individual.
Blake was not only right about the spiritual, intangible factors, the Guardians of the
Soul, or the testers and judges of the Trials of the Soul in ancient mythologies, that are
symbols of the struggles of the interior life and the achievement of true integration of
the personality. He was also right about the external factors — the evils of the new
factory system, of forced pauperism, of wage slavery, of child labor, and of the elevation
of covetousness from the sin of the Tenth Commandment to the Golden Rule of a society
founded on the cash nexus. A generation before the birth of Marx, and before Hegel, he put
his finger unerringly on the source of human self-alienation, and he analyzed its process
and consequences in a way not to be matched until the mid-twentieth century.
Blake certainly thought of himself primarily as a prophet, because he thought of the
artist and the poet as so, and the poet who turned away from such a role as a traitor to
mankind. Many Romantic poets since his day have claimed to be nabis, descendants
of the ecstatic prophets of early Israel and uncrowned legislators of mankind. Most of
them have really been concerned with themselves, with the destruction of the clerkly class
in a middle-class civilization, and the loss of both privilege and responsibility by the
age-old open conspiracy of the scribes . . . the disappearance of benefit of
clergy. Most of them have also been quite bad poets. For one Baudelaire or Nerval or
Rimbaud there have been thousands of extravagant poetasters, cheap occultists, and
hypnotizers of silly girls. Blake is also a very great poet.
The Prophetic Books are certainly the greatest, the most comprehensive and profound
group of philosophical poems in the English language. Only Milton’s Paradise Lost
can be compared with them. Milton may be the greater poet, although that is disputable,
but Blake is certainly the deeper seer. There is no question, though, but that they are
difficult reading, are best accompanied with a reliable commentary, or even preceded by
extensive reading in modern Blake criticism. They are an acquired taste. The best way to
acquire that taste is to read thoroughly the superficially simpler poems of the Songs
of Innocence and Songs of Experience and the early poems.
Blake’s songs are amongst the most lyrical in the language, and they are
distinguished by their uncanny lucidity. They are modeled on Shakespeare’s songs, and
at first sight share their simplicity, but, rather like Shakespeare’s plays, on
examination they reveal an ever-unfolding complexity of meaning. It is amusing that the
Age of Reason thought Blake mad, for he is distinguished by an extraordinary sanity in a
world in which men like him were being driven to the wall. No other poet of the main
tradition of secession from modern civilization is so lucid or so conscious of his own
logic of purpose. First things come first, and second, second. Blake has a clearly defined
scale of values, something Baudelaire or Hölderlin certainly did not have. This is why
his simplest lyrics have levels of lucidity, like an ever deeper and deeper gaze into a
clear depth which finds revealed greater content at each new level, and with each
discovery enters a new qualitative realm. The Prophetic Books only spell out in action and
discourse the progressive revelation of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience. An ear for the subtlest music of language and an eye for the ultimate
meanings of minute particulars combine to make Blake one of the greatest of all lyric
poets. But what this means is seeing plainly into the clear depths of the soul —
hence the inexhaustibility of these simple poems.
[Another Rexroth essay on Blake]
“I rose and fell with Napoleon,” said Henri Beyle, who called himself Stendhal.
If the Revolution put the middle class into power in France, Napoleon attempted to make it
heroic and internationalize it, as the aristocracy of the Almanach de Gotha are
international, and once claimed heroic virtues. The Red and the Black is the
story of an inglorious Napoleon, a man of energy without a chance. Stendhal’s hero,
Julien Sorel, is the Revolutionary adventurer trapped in the Restoration — as, of
course, was Stendhal himself. The novelist differs from his character in insight. He is
always aware that he in his youth had liberated himself from the mediocrity that oppressed
him.
Philosophes and Jacobins had hoped to make the middle class intelligent and
heroic. Stendhal had given up that hope. Again and again he spoke of his work as a lottery
ticket that would pay off in fifty or a hundred years. No one ever wrote more masculine
novels. He knew that they would be read in his time mostly by idle women — spoiled
duchesses and disappointed wives of businessmen: exactly the women who destroy his hero,
Julien. So the violent arrogance of The Red and the Black is a kind of seduction,
an assault on the spurious chastity of its public. For fifty years he was read only by
such women and by the few intellectuals who shared his sensuous scorn. Then his reputation
began to grow. He took his place easily with the radical critics of modern life of the end
of the century. By the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Red and the
Black he was acknowledged as the greatest of French novelists.
Hypertrophied or dissociated, the style he invented is still dominant in French
fiction. Popular writers as diverse as Mrs. Voynich and Simenon have modeled themselves
directly on him. More significant, The Red and the Black established the type and
fixed the pattern of the novel as black comedy. In his youth Stendhal longed to be the
Molière of the nineteenth century, a great comic poet. He couldn’t write proper
French verse, so he thought he had failed. He had not. The Red and the Black is
the first modern overturned tragedy, the first black comedy. Julien Sorel is a comic
Napoleon, a Bonaparte with frayed cuffs and patched shoes, mocked in Bartholomew Fair. To
the immature readers of the last century, his story was a tragedy. To men of the world who
read it in the twentieth, it is a comedy, but of the grimmest sort. “The world is a
tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.”
Hardly another man of letters has been as much a man of the world as Stendhal. Henri
Beyle — dragoon; grocer; Napoleon’s governor of Brunswick; commissary officer on
the retreat from Moscow; consul in Civita Vecchia, the port of Rome; wit of the salons of
the Empire and terror of those of the Restoration; lover of actresses, courtesans, and
noblewomen — this is a man to whom words were always instruments of action. So to his
hero, Julien Sorel, ideas are a backwash of blocked action. He struggles to act and
expresses his frustration in thought. His interior monologues are designed by Stendhal to
ironically illuminate action, like the speeches of Thucydides, and never to impede it.
Julien’s thoughts are Stendhal’s irony. His own are expressed in
Julien’s acts. This is what gives his narrative its extraordinary pace and intensity,
unique in its time and rare in any. There had been nothing like it before in any European
language except Icelandic. Others had been colloquial and barbarous unwittingly. Stendhal
strove always to write in the manner of urgent speech. From his youth he studied operative
prose, witnesses in court, technical descriptions, dispatches, orders, the Civil Code, the
language of people who meant business with words. He is an adult writing for adults. In a
letter from burning Moscow he says, “I saw things sedentary authors would not see in
a thousand years.”
Everybody acts out in The Red and the Black — Julien, the hero of the
armed will; Mathilde, the tragic Renaissance princess; Madame Renal, the helpless victim
of a grand passion. Stendhal is very explicit in underlining their self-dramatizations.
They are not, though they think they are, forced on by tragic necessity. On the contrary,
their acts, including those of the final scenes, are gratuitous indulgences from which at
any time they can withdraw. Their adventures are certainly sensational, but Stendhal
preserves, in the face of the unbridled Romanticism of his characters, a more than
Classicist imperturbability — Dumas in an iron mask. He is never the victim of his
characters, never overthrown by the passions he creates. His is the armed will; he is the
master of narrative Bonapartism.
In its sharp definition, breathless pace, crowded frames, melodrama, The Red and
the Black anticipates the methods of the cinema — so much so that it is hard to
understand why it has never been made into one of the classic motion pictures. But its
characters are like so many modern people whose disasters are spread on the newspapers:
they seem to have seen too many movies. As the novel progresses, their actions acquire an
ever-increasing, ever more agonizing ridiculousness. Finally everything explodes in the
black comedy of Julien’s pistol shots, which, like Uncle Vanya’s, kill nobody,
and the novel ends in a denouement, a merciless crescendo, followed by a sarcastic
anticlimax — the last role-playing of the Renaissance princess. The mercilessness is
not that of tragedy, but that of the deepest comedy.
Julien Sorel is destroyed by the mean unreality of the world in which his Napoleonic
campaigns of sex and ambition are planned. But he is destroyed before he starts. His
battles must be fought not with armies, but with the limitless fraud of organized society.
Stendhal keeps the fraudulent character of all his engagements steadily in view; this is
the touchstone of all moral evaluation. The Red and the Black and his other great
novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, are dramas of gamesmanship on a crooked table
— one lost, the other won. “Molière,” said young Stendhal, “ridiculed
the vices that corrupt society. Today we must attack the vice of the spirit of society
itself.”
Fraud empties motive of content. As we follow the story and try to analyze the
relationships of the characters, they recede from us and become masks which conceal
appetites for power. The emptiness of their desires is the measure of their absurdity. The
tale of charismatic personalities with nothing to do is the height and depth of comedy.
Stendhal could look back to the outburst of primitivism, the hour of revolt, the actual
street fighting, and he identified himself with Napoleon, whose purported principles of
intellectual integrity, rational imperative, honor, and the “career open to all the
talents” was a freebooter’s ethic, not a class one, least of all either
bourgeois or aristocratic. Bonapartism is the religion of the New Man who rose from
nothing to the greatest heights in history. A generation later, Julien Sorel is only an
upstart, who carries his revolution about with him as Pascal did his abyss. This does not
make him a tragic figure, but his reflection, backward into history, makes Napoleon a
comic one.
The Red and the Black is far more than a charade of a philosophy of history or
a sociological theory. It is first of all one of the most perfectly constructed and told
novels. It establishes the novel securely in the place of the dramatic poem. It is further
a great personal utterance. It is not only a judgment of the history Stendhal had lived
through, but a subtle and ruthless judgment of himself. “I am Julien,” he said.
Like a Russian Nihilist, Julien seeks pure act and embraces the guillotine. As a man of
ego and will, he struggles toward liberation from the principle of individuality. Stendhal
called a term to action in the sensuous audacity of a life of planned moderation. His
liberation was precisely his individuality.
Is Marx a classic? Most economists and sociologists today, including many serious
Marxists, consider the theoretical system of Karl Marx, as a scientific structure, either
a failure or no longer relevant. Yet more people live under Marxism as official
state-established doctrine than live under all other orthodoxies put together. More men
live in Marxist states today than had lived in all organized states from the Neolithic
period to the birth of Marx.
The number of adherents to a doctrine does not make its basic documents classics. We do
not consider the multiplication table or the metric system a classic. Where Marx competes
with mathematics, history, to which he made his appeal, has proved his axioms,
propositions, and assumptions false as a coherent system. In the economically more
advanced capitalist societies, the material misery of the working class has not increased.
The workers have not become more revolutionary. Economic crises of ever-increasing
frequency and severity have not occurred for a generation. Laissez faire has
disappeared, and even minor economic relationships are subject to government and
corporation planning.
The more industrially advanced societies have been, the less their labor movements have
been influenced significantly by Marxism and the more rapidly they have moved away from
class conflict. The economic interpretation of history or of current events has been
successful only when modified by so many qualifications as no longer to be the
comparatively simple tool Marx and Engels imagined they had forged. The simple triadic
structure of the Hegelian dialectic has been abandoned by all but the most naïve
dialectical materialists as verbalism more sterile than scholastic logic. Even orthodox
Marxists obviously think pluralistically, polyvalently, and then cast their ideas into the
grammar of dialectic. In the Marxist states, the working class has not established the
dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary, their workers have less influence on
government than do those in the United States or Great Britain.
It is true that there are Marxist arguments which explain away each of these dilemmas
separately. If only one or two points were apparently false, it might be possible to save
the entire system by doctoring them. But when all have become so evidently dubious to the
unprejudiced observer, the structure has obviously disintegrated. Marxism is not classic
in the sense in which the works of Darwin, Newton, or Euclid are classic. Yet Marxism is
not only enforced by law over a third of the earth’s surface; it is passionately
believed in by millions who are subject to no coercion whatever.
I suppose a classic, in the common sense of the word, is a literary work that is
universally accepted for its aesthetic merits, moral insight, relevance to the human
condition. It is in this stricter sense that Capital or the Communist
Manifesto is a classic. Significantly, as brute facts moving in the course of history
have invalidated much Marxist economics as science, the defense of Marxism has shifted to
the writings of the young Marx — particularly to the Economic and Philosophical
Notebooks of 1844. As critics have pointed out that the socialization of production
and distribution in the Communist countries has not done away with alienation but, on the
contrary, seems to be increasing it even over that which prevails in the capitalist
countries, the defense of Marxism has shifted to the doctrine of alienation itself.
Alienation as Marx held it in his youth is an aesthetic concept, and the great documents
of later Marxism are aesthetic realizations of it.
The Communist Manifesto is far from being a practicable program for today. As
a friend of mine once said, Hitler immediately realized all the emergency programs of the Manifesto
and in addition made May Day a legal holiday. The Manifesto is relevant because
it is a symbolic criticism of values. Its appeal is of the same nature as that of a poem
or play. It is a dramatic objectification of conflicts and dilemmas and denouements that
are interior.
The irreducible structure of the Marxist myth is self-evidently that: a myth, a final
eschatology — the Fire of Revolution, the Judgment of Proletarian Dictatorship and
Terror, the Second Coming, when the Golden Age of primitive communism will return
unimaginably glorified in a new kingdom of brotherly love and divinization of man.
Marx is compared to the Hebrew prophets. He is much more like the writers of
apocalypse. One of the characteristics of organized Marxism is its melodramatization of
life. The faithful live in a state of subjective apocalypse, an interior vision, which
transforms all exterior reality, so that man seems to be, in the most trivial affairs, in
boring and inefficient meetings and humdrum tasks, an active participant in the conflict
of immense metaphysical entities incarnated in himself, his comrades, and their enemies.
It is impossible to understand the literature of the capitalist epoch without
understanding the alienation that is characteristic of it and is shared by all its major
writers. Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoievsky deal most explicitly with the
alienation that finds symbolic expression in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé Stendhal,
Flaubert, Henry James.
The young Marx started with the assumption that all labor is alienated and that genuine
self-activity liberated by revolution would be a manifold aesthetic creativity surpassing
ultimately for each and every man that of the greatest artists.
On the eve of the 1848 revolutions he dropped the term, because of its Hegelian
metaphysical connections. From the cash-nexus passage of The Communist Manifesto
onward, alienation is identified with commodity production for the competitive market and
with the moral consequences of the industrial process under capitalism, but the term
itself is abandoned.
Marx’s revolution is a vision of the transformation of a metaphysical quality of
the abstraction “Man.” Man the hypostasis, never each separate unique human
individual, will cease to be self-alienated and become divinized in a great apocalypse in
which the contradictions between all the antitheses — essence and existence, act and
knowledge, form and content, being and becoming — will be consumed in a great
synthesis.
The forces of classical economics are turned into the figures of Classical tragedy and
the great beasts of the Hebraic visions of the end of history. The dry abstractions of
“the dismal science” — constant and variable capital, labor power, surplus
value, the falling rate of profit — are inflamed with irresistible moral imperative
and become dramatic personalities. Scientific necessity turns into hubris and nemesis.
Fallacies of scientific analysis are overwhelmed by the convincingness of the Manifesto
or the great passages of Capital as objectifications of spiritual conflict. The
reader is swept up and put on the stage. He becomes an actor in a plot of which the motor,
the hidden all-pervading concern — human self-alienation — is the same
existential absurdity that reverberates behind the clash of battle, of pride and shame,
comradeship and treachery, in The Iliad, that sociological document Simone Weil
called “The Poem of Force.”
* * *
A reading list for Marx is not easy to compile, because of the extreme tendentiousness
of editors and translators. The best general life is Franz Mehring, Karl Marx,
now in Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press. The appendices are by the
German Stalinist editor of the posthumous edition and are false and misleading. The best
current discussion of contemporary post-Bolshevik Marxism is George Lichtheim, Marxism
in Modern France (Columbia University Press). It has an extensive and reliable
bibliography.
There are many editions of selected writings, the minor works, and the first volume of Capital.
The complete Capital, three volumes in the authorized translation, is published
by Charles Kerr. Almost everything else is published by International Publishers. The
books popular with the “New Marxists” are Early Writings (McGraw-Hill).
By far the best general introduction in English is Karl Korsch, Karl Marx
(Wiley). It is the only one that is uncorrupted by some sort of sectarianism.
[NOTE: Korsch’s Karl Marx is online
here.]
Selections from Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth) and More Classics Revisited (copyright 1989 Kenneth Rexroth
Trust). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Both of these volumes are in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get them.
[Other “Classics Revisited” essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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