Rahv, Philip 1908–1973: Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue

Experience is Rahv's word; it turns up on virtually every page of [Essays on Literature and Politics 1932–1972]. Sometimes he uses it to mean everything in life that the mind should encounter not by chance but by purpose and an intuitive sense of what it needs. So he speaks of "a dichotomy between experience and consciousness" as the typical American disability. But sometimes he uses it to mean 'felt life' rather than 'life's total practice,' and in that sense it is hard to see that there could be a dichotomy between experience and consciousness. I can only explain this ambivalence by saying that to Rahv experience was the grander term and that while he revered consciousness and was stirred by ideas, he knew that consciousness can be deployed in a vacuum and that ideas can easily be handled as separate objects, consumer goods. If experience were construed as felt life, it would name the only life he cared about. Consciousness in excess of experience was a menace, fashionable in several theories of literature which contrived to be persuasive to naive readers who wanted to be relieved of the chore of being serious. True consciousness would act in the service of experience, trying to understand it in its diversity and depth and latitude, and would be ready to find itself by losing itself in that understanding. In one of his last essays on Henry James, Rahv thought that James had failed to encounter "the richness, the depth, and the ultimately terrifying gratuity of man's being-in-the-world." His failure could have only one cause, the failure of his consciousness to engage with enough experience and with experience sufficiently exacting and recalcitrant to enforce a sense of that appalling gratuity.

To Rahv, the politics of literature could be tested only in the novel and in the phase of its realism; roughly, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, with Joyce as virtually the end of a great human action. Dostoevsky was crucial precisely because a reader of Rahv's persuasion would have to wrestle with him and understand him by fighting with him till dawn. Rahv fights Dostoevsky over God, immortality, Christianity, 'the sphere of the numinous,' his lurid spirituality. All of this is alien to Rahv, and to make it tolerable he has to show how deeply it consorted with the other side of Dostoevsky, his secularism and naturalism. There is no doubt that Rahv wanted to see Dostoevsky drawn over at last into a commitment to the song of the earth rather than the song of Heaven and Hell. He quotes William James as saying that "the earth of things, long thrown into shade by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights," and he shows Dostoevsky's genius touching that earth at last, with whatever degree of vacillation. Rahv would not have it otherwise.

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