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Partisans Re-Viewed

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Partisans Re-Viewed PARTISANS RE-VIEWED Anne Thompson Submitted to the Institute of Education, University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1990 BIBL LONDIN UNIV ABSTRACT The following thesis is a case study, a history, of -a magazine, Partisan Review, over a period of twenty years (1934-1954) treating it as a series of texts together constituting a transforming discourse. A discourse constructed in and against a discourse of Americanism, itself constructed through an interplay with representations of Europe. Partisan Review was initiated in 1934 within the institutional and intellectual framework of the American Communist Party as an organ of the John Reed Club. In 1937 formal links with the Communist Party were severed and the magazine reappeared as nominally independent but with clear Trotskyist sympathies. After a period of non-alignment without any explicit political programme, an editorial in 1952 declared a neo- Liberal and anti-communist support for "Our Country and Our Culture". It is asserted that these shifts did not constitute radical breaks, but were constructed gradually. The thesis attempts to make the discourse and its process of transformation intelligible to the reader by mapping the emergence and inter-relations of key concepts (including Aestheticism, Alienation, National, Intellectual, Science.) It is argued that each concept or element was defined both by its opposition to an antithetical concept and its place in the discourse - by the specific combination or articulation of the elements. Three editorial texts from 1937, 1941 and 1952, are taken as exemplars, momentary crystallisations of this transformatory practice, and each is subjected to an analysis which attempts to unpick and to gloss its changing component elements and the transforming articulations between elements. TABLE OF CONTENTS page no. Abstract 2 PART ONE : METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW Introduction 6 Discursive Moments : A Methodology 9 Partisan Archaeology 19 Coherence or Contradiction? Essentialist Theses on Partisan Review 30 PART TWO : TEXTUAL ANALYSIS Introduction 56 Chapter One : A Sense of the Past/A Sense of the Present 68 Chapter Two : Incorporation or Resistance? 191 Chapter Three : Back to the Enlightenment/Back to the Future 247 Conclusion : A Stitch in Time? 313 Discussion 321 Acknowledgements 329 APPENDICES, NOTES, REFERENCES, INDEX Appendix One : Americanism and the Marxist Parties 331 Appendix Two : Communist Culture in the Twenties and Thirties 343 Appendix Three : Trotsky Papers 358 Appendix Four : The New Order Thesis 366 - 3 - Appendix Five : Art Criticism in Partisan Review 374 Appendix Six : Partisan Review and the Anti-communists 387 Notes to Part One 392 Notes to Part Two : Introduction 400 Chapter One 401 Chapter Two 415 Chapter Three 422 Notes to Discussion 433 Notes to Appendices Appendix One 434 Appendix Two 436 Appendix Three 438 Appendix Four 439 Appendix Five 440 Appendix Six 442 Bibliography 444 Index 458 DIAGRAMS 1. Summary of the Key Discursive Elements 67 2. Left Wing Parties and Organisations USA 1900-60 insert Stylistic Note Underlining is used for titles of books and for emphasis. Relics are used to indicate theoretical concepts, for quotations used to preface sections, for extracts from the three exemplary texts, and for phrases from other languages. PART <DN E METHODOLOGICAL OVERVIEW 5 INTRODUCTION This project is a case study of a magazine, Partisan Review, from its inception in 1934 as an organ of the American Communist Party's organisation of artists and intellectuals, the John Reed Club, to a point in 1954 when the magazine had identified itself with a post-war anti-communist Americanism epitomised in the assertions of its 1952 symposium "Our Country and Our Culture." The issues of the magazine are conceived of as a series of texts (see page 13 for a discussion of the terms text and context) which together constituted a discourse. A discourse which changed over time. Not an evolution - a serial transmission of an essentialist content - but a constantly mutating articulatory practice. A discourse constructed at particular historical conjunctures, in a context - socio-political (the economic climate, the state of left-wing politics, the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, the Second World War), intellectual (specifically re- formulations of Marxism) and aesthetic. The Self-definitions of American artists and intellectuals and their conceptions of theory and practice during the period were, it is suggested, constructed in and against a discourse of Americanism, itself constructed through an interplay with representations of Europe. PR was a discourse which worked on events' and debates of the period and played a part in constructing a set of discourses within which contemporary cultural products were "read". Thus PR was constructed in - 6 - and from a context. and at the same time helped to constitute the events which comprised the context and the interpretations which constituted the experience of the context. The methodological focus is on the Intelligibility of the discourse, an intelligibility provided by a mapping of the sequential appearance of key concepts (or "nodal points"2) and their cultural referents. Three editorial texts are taken as exemplars, momentary crystallisations of transformatory practice. It is suggested that only for a brief period in 1937/38 had the discourse of PR the possibility of being coherent in its own terms. That is, that the specific articulation of elements of the discourse did not rest on contradiction. In its early years it was not possible to valorise 'good" literature within the terms of the Party position on "partisan" literature; in 1952 it proved impossible to unify the elements within a new discourse of Americanism. The Trotskyist position - as expressed in the IFIRA manifesto of 1938 - allowed a coherent literary and political discourse, weaving together elements of an intellectualist and vanguardist collectively interventionist politics with commitment to a semi-autonomous individualist modernism. This examination of PR over a twenty year period rests on the following assertions : 1. that it was a discourse comprised of a series of texts which overflowed their borders to take their identity from the inter- relation of text and context; 2. that this identity is not given but a product of interpretative procedures. The reader/researcher constructs the intelligibility of the text; 3. that, in the case of this researcher's interpretation, this intelligibility is derived from the mapping of the sequential character of the central concepts in the discourse, their articulation and their cultural referents; 4. that it was a discourse which, except for a brief period, was delimited by the political discourses or apparatuses within which it was located, and thus incoherent. Discursive Moments : A Methodology I have asked myself on what their [Medicine, Economics or Grammar] unity could be based. On a full, tightly packed, continuous, geographically well-defined field of objects? What appeared to me were rather series full of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations. On a definite, normative type of statement? I found formulations of levels that were much too different and functions that were much too heterogenous to be linked together and arranged in a single figure, and to simulate, from one period to another, beyond individual oeuvres, a sort of great uninterrupted text. On a well-defined alphabet of notions? One is confronted with concepts that differ in structure and in the rules governing their uses, which ignore or exclude one another, and which cannot enter the unity of a logical architecture. On the permanence of a thematic? What one finds are rather various strategic possibilities that permit the activation of incompatible themes, or again, the establishment of the same theme in different groups of statement. Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the oeuvre of a collective subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations." (Foucault, 1972, p37.) Partisan Review has been written about extensively elsewhere - the subject, for instance, of Writers and Partisans by James B. Gilbert, 1967 and, more recently, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals : Partisan Review and Its Circle, Terry A. Cooney, 1986; several of its editors have written autobiographical works in which it figures prominently (William Phillips, A Partisan View : Five decades of the literary life; William Barrett, The Truants : Adventures Among the Intellectuals; Dwight Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist) and it makes appearances in most articles and books about, and by, the "New York Intellectuals", recently in Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Fells, 1973, Prodigal Sons : The New York Intellectuals and Their World, Alexander Bloom, 1986, and The New York Intellectuals : The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Alan M. Wald, 1987. Why should a literary magazine attract such attention and in what way can it be deemed to be a discourse? The conventional view is of the magazine as a
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