BOOKS
53
has recently won the name of
reportage-that
form of reporting the crimes
of imperialist countries where a sensational treatment of effect is substituted
for an intelligent understanding ot causes. Much has been Omitted from
the book that another writer would have been tempted to put in-for
instance, all the Oriental quaintness, the saccharine, pseudo-Biblical folk
material, that Pearl Buck has recently purveyed to western readers, under
the guise of interpreting China. The interpretation of present-day China,
as Miss Smedley sees it, is now essentially an interpretation of the political
and economic forces that are in conflict there. Miss Smedley has none of
that Western chauvinism that expresses itself in the phrase: "the fascina–
tion of the Orient." Her purpose has been to resolve the age-old anti–
thesis between West and East, to express the East in the universal language
of present-day class. conflicts, to present the Chinese peasant with such
immediacy that the mid-western farmer, suffering the double visitation of
the drought and the AAA, will at once feel his kinship with the Chinese
farmer, oppressed by famine and debt-ridden to the landlords. She has
aimed not at emphasizing the cultural and psychological differences between
East and West, but at showing basic economic similarities. These dif–
ferences must, of course, exist, and their importance cannot be negated.
But
Miss
Smedley's writing does drive home one fact: that cultural and
psychological differences between East and West are only surface confor–
mations over the universal, rock-bottom class struggle; and that the class
struggle, in violent eruption, is shattering all cultural surfaces, making of
them everywhere only shifting landmarks.
I have said that the book is informed with political realism, that is to
say. Miss Smedley emphasizes the class motivations in her narrative, omit–
ting research into individual psychologies, into individual history. She has
not spoken at length of certain realistic aspects of the Red Army's progress
-aspects of which she gives us a hint when she quotes the orders of the
Army leaders disciplining the Army, forbidding murder, rape, and looting
on the part of the victorious peasants. Class-biased critics will se1ze on
this, and say that Miss Smedley has idealized the army, and misrepresented
the truth. But the "truth" that Miss Smedley wishes to present
IS
a very
specific and pragmatic truth, and not the universal truth of human nature,
which critics invoke when the work of radical writers offends their class
interests. She wishes us to know precisely what is happening in China;
and when she quotes the disciplinary orders of the Red Army, she gives
the gist of the whole situation: the disruptive individual act, the individual
will does exist; but the Red Army is a powerful force, channeling the
will of millions of partisans toward constructive social ends.
Besides, we are witnessing a revolution in literature where political
realism becomes also ar. resthetic quality. \Vhen bourgeois critics inveigh
against propaganda on the part of radical writers, what they really object
to is that the radical writer substitutes political realism for the old bour–
geois realism. Here the critic may be using <esthetics to hide a dass bias,
or his objection may arise from a sincere belief that the resthetics of
literature is a series of fixed and immutable canons without historical
