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(Originally published in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1990, Vol. 23 Issue 2, pp. 218 ff. )

LAWRENCE S. SCHWARTZ, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), pp. 256, $24.95.

There is widespread recognition these days that literary criticism is, whether it admits it or not, a political enterprise. There is also a general acknowledgement that, in the years following World War II, the New Critics and the New York intellectuals set a cultural agenda that implicated criticism in a nexus of elitist and anti-communist assumptions, despite these critics' insistence that they were rescuing literature from the toils of political evaluation. But most literary scholars have only a vague understanding of the mechanisms by which Cold War ideological hegemony became established and tend to rely upon overly generalized "Weltanschaung" theories to support their insights. Lawrence Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism illuminates this dark corner of our historical knowledge, for it offers a detailed, subtle and nonreductionist account of the specific process by which the imperatives of postwar U.S. foreign policy worked their way into the critical reevaluation and subsequent canonization of one literary artist, William Faulkner.

Schwartz's thesis is that Faulkner's emergence as a writer of undisputed genius   --  an estimate confirmed by his reception of the Nobel Prize in 1950  --   is inseparable from the emergence of "the new conservative liberalism of postwar America" and "the revised political position of the United States and the new hegemony of its corporate interests" (28). Through the thirties and early forties, Schwartz argues, Marxist and sociological critical approaches were widely endorsed by critics, and Faulkner was generally viewed as a talented but idiosyncratic and second-rate novelist. Even those critics who were later to celebrate his genius  --   Alfred Kazin, Mark Schorer, Allen Tate, for example  --  either adjudged his work provincial and quirky or disregarded it altogether; while Malcolm Cowley, who undertook to spur a Faulkner revival with his publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946, first met with only limited success. It was only when the Humanities Commission of the Rockefeller Foundation drew together the New Critics and the New York intellectuals through its sponsorship of Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review, Schwartz contends, that there began a serious and concerted quest for a writer who had had no associations with 1930s literary radicalism and who would simultaneously embody the "regional consciousness" and the "universality" (94) that were appropriate to a writer representing the United States in the era of the Marshall Plan. Faulkner was the chief beneficiary of this quest.

Perhaps some readers will accuse Schwartz of offering an overly conspiratorial and simplistic portrait of literary-historical causality, crudely reducing complex cultural developments to an efflux of imperialist expansion. But one strength of Schwartz's book is that it takes into full account the multiplicity of causes operating in the postwar ascent of Faulkner's fame and fortune. Through an exhaustive examination of Faulkner's income from his various projects in the 1940s, for example, Schwartz demonstrates that the novelist's ability to write for the screen and to produce potboilers  --   Sanctuary and, to a lesser extent, The Wild Palms  --  was crucial to his survival through those years, as well as to keeping his other works in print. What is more, the specific economics of the book trade  --  the influx of capital after the war and, especially, the emergence of mass paper back marketing  --   operated crucially in his favor. In addition, the tireless publicizing efforts of Malcolm Cowley  --  who was continuing the literary biography of his generation, begun in Exile's Return (1934), from a now definitively nonmarxist perspective, thus reconstituting his own critical image in the process  --  played a crucial role in the Faulknerian revival. In other words, Schwartz recognizes the extent to which the revised estimate of Faulkner's work was overdetermined by a number of factors; the larger social forces embodied in the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation were necessary but not sufficient to assure the novelist's rise.

Yet Schwartz does argue convincingly for the necessary causal role played by capitalist institutions more or less consciously bent upon setting an ideological agenda that would consolidate support for the postwar anti-communist crusade. Faulkner's own contribution to the "weapon[ry] [of] the Cold War" may have been "unintentional" (210), but his very championing of the integrity of the isolated individual ended up serving some very crude commercial and political interests. A second strength of Schwartz's study, then, is that it challenges the reader to reconsider the validity of what the analytic philosopher Richard Miller calls the "ruling class hypothesis" in political theory. Where currently popular neo-Marxist theories tend to decenter the locus of hegemony, and where Foucauldian theories stress the extent to which "power is everywhere," Schwartz insists upon a more orthodox  --  and in this instance compelling  --  Marxist model that posits human activity as the more-or-less conscious reflection of class imperatives, and cultural practices as mediations of capitalist power relations. His careful empirical description of the relation of the New Critics and the New York Intellectuals to the Rockefeller Foundation provides a fascinating glimpse into the complex process by which the postwar critical establishment, in seeking financial support for its favored journals and graduate programs, participated in a "comprehensive effort in cultural planning" (140-41). Moreover, Schwartz's detailed account of the heated debate accompanying the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949 reveals not only the process by which the emergent cultural elite clustered in the Bollingen Committee resolved their own internal conflicts but also the militancy with which they took on the remnants of the left/liberal critical community who condemned the Committee's award to the politically reactionary poet. It would be difficult to come away from reading Creating Faulkner's Reputation with the conviction that the 1950s literary arbiters were unaware of the political dimensions of their critical program.

If Creating Faulkner's Reputation has a weakness, it is that Schwartz does not more forthrightly deal with Faulkner's fiction itself. This is not to say that Schwartz should have expanded his study to include a reassessment of the politics of Faulkner's novels, a project that clearly would have proved unmanageable. But I found myself occasionally bothered by Schwartz's unwillingness to come to terms with the issue of literary evaluation or even to characterize the novelist's work in less pseudo-neutral language. For example, Schwartz announces that his study will demonstrate "the instability of aesthetic criteria" and show that "literary reputations rise and fall dramatically because the critics reflect not universal, but relative, literary values which are, in large measure, historically determined" (2-3). Yet he compromises this methodological stance by stating that "this analysis does not debunk Faulkner's genius or talent, or question the intrinsic literary merit of his novels and stories" (2)  --  as if "intrinsic literary merit" were in some way prior to, and separable from, the vagaries of literary reputation. Moreover, Schwartz's insistence upon describing Faulkner's work solely in terms of its stylistic qualities  --   density, difficulty, opacity  --  weakens the overall political thrust of his argument, for it suggests that the postwar critical establishment sought out Faulkner's work primarily for its appeal to their intellectual elitism, rather than for the conservative attitudes regarding race, gender and class that it frequently  --   if at times problematically  --  purveys. In a study that raises so many urgent issues about the politics of criticism, Schwartz's hesitancy in grappling with the social values at the core of Faulkner's oeuvre is somewhat puzzling -- particularly since the critique of repressive textual politics is a staple of so much contemporary literary scholarship, and hardly sets the critic far to the left of the mainstream.

This complaint is a very minor one, however. Schwartz's study is primarily directed toward elucidating the historical process by which Faulkner became great, and in this task it succeeds admirably. With the publication of Creating Faulkner's Reputation, scholars uncritically assuming Faulkner's genius will have to query and historicize their criteria for evaluation. This book has changed the landscape of Faulkner scholarship and is indispensable to an understanding of Faulkner's place in literary history.

Barbara Foley, Rutgers University