8
PARTISAN REVIEW
literary ideology. They fought valiantly to win a place for proletarian
writers in American literature. Joshua Kunitz brought to America
some of the experiences of Soviet writers. Some of our poets have
been searching jor poetic forms and themes that adequately express the
emotional equivalents of the social-economic scene. But only in the novel,
the most successful genre of our literature, have any far-reaching at–
tempts been made towa.rd the solution of these problems.
Looking A head
These problems cannot be solved by decree or dogma. Solutions wili
be made step by step, in the course of the continuous interaction of literary
theory and literary practice.
In
this editorial, however, we wish to indi–
cate several means of approach.
The very existence of two main types of revolutionary writing, the
more intellectual and the more popular, shows that there is a division in
our audience in terms of background and class composition. Workers
who have had no literary education prefer the poetry of Don
W~t
to
that of S. Funaroff, whereas intellectuals reverse this choice. The prole–
tarian writer should realize that he is functioning through his medium
within the . vanguard of the movement as a whole. As such, his task. is
to work out a sensibility and a set of symbols
unifying
the responses and
experiences of his total audience. Insofar as this cannot be done over–
night, his innovations must be constantly checked by the responses of his
main audience, the working class, even while he strives to raise the cultural
level of the masses.
The question of creative method is primarily a question of the imagi–
native assimilation of political content. We believe that the sensibility
is the medium of assimilation: political content should not be isolated from
the rest of experience but must be merged into the creation of complete
personalities and the perception of human relations in their physical and
sensual immediacy. The class struggle must serve as a premise, not as
a discovery. This the "leftist" does not do on the grounds that such a
method dilutes the political directness that he aims at; a,::tually, however,
he deteats his purpose, inasmuch as he dissolves action and being in political
abstractions. To a Marxist the bourgeois claims of universality are
an empty concept; those elementS in art that have been called universal are
merely those that have recurred so far. The problem of the revolutionist
is not to seek universals but usables, for his task is to create a synthesis
~nd
not merely an innovation. Ultimately, of course, the question of
usables involves, first, the retaining of the cultural acquisitions of humanity
