theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Society 105
rationalistic explanation, it is unable to provide a rational founda-
tion for aesthetics and hence criticism and evaluation. This is, of
course, true of all extrinsic approaches to literature. No causal
study can do theoretical justice to the analysis, description, and
evaluation of a literary work.
But the problem of "literature and society" can obviously be
put in different terms, those of symbolic or meaningful rela-
tions: of consistency, harmony, coherence, congruence, structural
identity, stylistic analogy, or with whatever term we want
to designate the integration of a culture and the interrelationship
among the different activities of men. Sorokin, who has analyzed
the various possibilities clearly, 33 has concluded that the degree
of integration varies from society to society.
Marxism never answers the question of the degree of dependence
of literature on society. Hence many of the basic problems
have scarcely begun to be studied. Occasionally, for ex-
ample, one sees arguments for the social determination of genres,
as in the case of the bourgeois origin of the novel, or even the
details of their attitudes and forms, as in E. B. Burgum's not
very convincing view that tragicomedy "results from the impact
of middle class seriousness upon aristocratic frivolity." 34 Are
there definite social determinants of such a broad literary style as
Romanticism, which, though associated with the bourgeoisie, was
anti-bourgeois in its ideology, at least in Germany, from its very
beginning? 35 Though some kind of dependence of literary ide-
ologies and themes on social circumstances seems obvious, the
social origins of forms and styles, genres and actual literary
norms have rarely been established. 36
It has been attempted most concretely in studies of the social
origins of literature: in Bucher's one-sided theory of the rise of
poetry from labor rhythms ; in the many studies by anthropolo-
gists of the magic role of early art; in George Thomson's very
learned attempt to bring Greek tragedy into concrete relations
with cult and rituals and with a definite democratic social revolution
at the time of Aeschylus; in Christopher Caudwell's somewhat
naive attempt to study the sources of poetry in tribal emotions
and in the bourgeois "illusion" of individual freedom. 37
Only if the social determination of forms could be shown con-
clusively could the question be raised whether social attitudes