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The Spike or Victoria College Review 1941

II

II

But such is not the complete picture of contemporary literature. Many of the writers mentioned above are without doubt great artists—there are few who would deny this—but by their false view of society, by their distortion of the human personality, and by their frenzied escape into sordid isolation, they must stand down before those writers who, though perhaps not so talented, are preserving the historical association of literature with the people, with man as the creative factor in history, who have seen that 'reality is created by the inexhaustible and intelligent will of man, and that its development will never be arrested' (Gorky); who realise that the corruption which disgusts the bourgeois writer is not the result of a moral disease but of a social system in decay. These are the writers of social realism. Gorky has said—

Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery—that is how we got realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we add—completing the idea by the logic of the hypothesis— the desired, the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism which is at the basis of myth and which is highly beneficial in that it tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way. 3

The artist must have, as fielding said, 'a quick and sagacious penetration into the true essence of all the objects of our contemplation.' i.e, he must not only know reality as it is, but where it is going. In imperialist society, America has produced more and better artist along this line than England. 'English writers have been slow to abandon the liberal attitude of their predecessors. But the last few years have shown an ever-quickening responsibility. The threat of Fascism has been more persuasive than the traditional poverty with which capitalist society has always rewarded the artist. The ivory towers are draughty nowadays. It's warmer in the street.' 4

Engels wrote to Miss Harkness in 1888 that 'the revolutionary resistance of the page 12 working class against the oppression of its environment, its feverish attempts, conscious or half-conscious, to obtain its human rights are a part of history and may demand a place in the sphere of realism." These writers are convinced that the class struggle and the role of the proletariat do demand a place in the sphere of realism. In fact, these features of contemporary life are so important that a book which portrays modern society otherwise presents a false picture. 'We are living in an epoch of deep-rooted changes in the old way of life, in an epoch of man's awakening to a sense of his own dignity, when he has come to realise himself as a force which is actually changing himself.'

It was certain that this literature could not escape the accusation of dogmatism. That the accusation is untrue is merely proof of the situation portrayed by these writers. To quote Engels again— 'I am far from finding fault,' he tells Miss Harkness. 'with your not having written a pinchbeck Socialist novel, a "tendenz Roman" as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author.' The out-look is not preached but appears naturally from the circumstances and the characters themselves. It is not a dogma, but a guide to action based on fact. As Radek puts it:—

Realism does not mean the embellishment or arbitrary selection of revolutionary Phenomena; it means reflecting reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrariety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality— the reality of socialism. .

Yet it is true that some writers have written from a dogmatic point of view. Splender has in particular pointed out this fault. Bukharin explains it thus—

The tendency which can frequently be observed in our own Marxian ranks—namely, a purely nihilistic attitude to the problem of form as such— is entirely wrong. In such an event literary research resolves itself into nothing but a superficial social-class characterization of the so-called ideological content of the poetic work, which, in Its bare, rudimentary and over-simplified form, is carried over into the characterization of the poet as a poet. As we have seen, however, form and content constitute a unity, but a unity of contradictions. Moreover, such an attitude leads people to understand by 'content' what is, properly speaking, the ideological source of the content, and not its artistic transformation.

The best representative of these writers have, however, not fallen into this trap. The subject-matter, imagery, and style of the writer of social realism do not lose all individuality, are not reduced to uniformity. We have only to read U.S.A., The Grapes of Wrath, The Magnetic Mountain, On the Frontier, to see this. And the tremendous development of the short story by socialist writers finally removes the accusation.

With Radek, we do not doubt that the time is coming when a great revolutionary literature will be created, and these are undoubtedly its beginnings.