FORM AND CONTENT
37
often been turned into satire and rejection of the bourgeois way of life.
Similarly, an examination of other important contemporary writers would
reveal that their importance is dependent on their sensitiveness to current
sensibilities, and that these sensibilities are encompassed by the outlook of
revolutionary writers. Modification, of course, takes place-but nevex
destruction.
If
languages forms and their living equivalents are to be
regarded as social phenomena, it follows that the art of a new class in–
troduces decisive slants into a
continuum
of sensibility and art works
erected upon phases of current sensibility.
Misunderstanding of this process and of the underlying relation of
fonn to content have produced many false notions about the way revolu–
tionary artists are creating forms for their new themes. In discussing
"style" as an expression of the values of a class, Sidney Hook writes:
"We may mean either that the technical elements of a work
have grown out of a new .;ocial experience or that technical
elements already in existence have been fused in a new way
or filled with a new content ... But even in literature it is
clear that some formal elements, e.g., the sonnet form, re–
portage, the autobiographical novel, may be used indifferently
to express·disparate political and social interests. In painting,
realistic technique may serve revolutionary or non-revolu–
tionary purposes. In music, the same tunes are often the bat–
tle songs of Fascists in Germany and of Communists in
Russia."
In this apparently single idea, Hook makes a variety of errors. First,
there is no such distinction between the fusion of old "technique" and the
development of new ones from a new social experience. All important
art effects a fusion of tradition and experiment. And proletarian art is
no exception. Then Hook is using the term
form
to denote those external
shapes discussed earlier in this essay. When he argues that "realistic
technique" or "reportage" · may serve opposed political purposes, Hook is
saying little more than that both a Fascist and a Communist wear trousers.
It is only by seeing form and content as united by the fundamental sensi–
bility of the artist that the distinction between the form of revolutionary
and non-revolutionary art can be recognized.
If
fascists have used the
songs of communists in Germany, it is not through any formal creation,
but because the triumphant rhythms, of an Eisler song, for example, can
be demagogically adapted to the misguided enthusiasm of fascist masses.
In the belief that he is following Engels, who wrote that both he and
Marx often neglected the formal side of culture, in the polemical necessity
of opposing their contemporaries who denied the economic factor, Hook
further argues that the pattern of cultural development often depends
upon "certain, relatively irreducible, technical factors, and that for some
purposes, an explanation in terms of these technical factors may be valid."
