One of the most significant recent movements in the interpretation of American literature has been the revitalization of the critical method of V. L. Parrington. Like Parrington, such writers as Marius Bewley, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler and Leo Marx synthesize “main currents” in American literature and thought. Again, like Parrington, they posit initially a universal dialectic in American experience that accounts for the distinctively American quality of these patterns in our culture. In many ways this movement has been estimable. It has illumined large areas of our national experience and expression. It has also proved that a brilliant critic can forge intellectual history and myth criticism into an exciting and revealing tool of cultural research.

Yet despite my admiration for synthetic criticism, I am troubled by certain misgivings and reservations concerning its usefulness as a tool of literary criticism, and would like to explain these doubts. My example of a work of synthetic criticism is Leo Marx's “Two Kingdoms of Force,” an article that I will examine in relation to Frank Norris's The Octopus. I choose Mr. Marx as an example of a synthetic critic because I find him the most satisfying and the most suggestive of the group I have named, and am therefore moved to examine his critical method as representative of the group. I choose The Octopus as my example of a literary work not because I wish to explicate it (I have published explications elsewhere), and not because Mr. Marx's comments on it are more or less satisfying than those on other works. Rather, I know more about Norris's novel than any other work discussed by Mr. Marx and can best demonstrate my general thesis by using it. In addition, I will introduce W. F. Taylor's The Economic Novel in America to help clarify the issues involved in my discussion.

Mr. Marx believes that a “common denominator” in much American literature is “the opposition between two cardinal images of value. One usually is an image of landscape, either wild or, if cultivated, rural; the other is an image of industrial technology.” This opposition is not the result of a writer's direct reference to the historical fact of industrialism. Rather, the impact of industrialism has caused opposing “psychic states” to cluster around the opposing images of the landscape and the machine.