10
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be not a novel (when it is good work) but reportage, the diary, the
sketch:
i.e.,
it is commendably true to ·experience but lacks that selective
ordering of experience under the control of a dominating social point of
view which is the primary condition of form in literature.
At present, the proletarian novel at its best represents that region of
American life where the skilled worker merges with the petty bourgeoisie:
i.e.,
where the worker has once had a bourgeois education and a bourgeois
point of view and where the petty bourgeois is coming to discard his bour–
geois education and point of view. The line of distinction, therefore, is
delicate between two such masterly novels as Cantwell's
Land of Plenty
(in which the skilled worker is becoming conscious of his power) and
Herbst's
The E>.·ecutioner Waits,
in which the petty bourgeois is becom–
ing conscious of his belonging with th·e proletariat.
At the present moment, therefore, the proletarian novels that have
received the most praise are novels "from the point of v:·ew" of the class–
conscious proletariat, but are actually written by and for the P'-"tty bour–
geoisie who have achieved or are achieving this point of view under the
pressure of events.
But this definition of the proletarian novel purports to be
~ialectic
in part since it repres·ents a direction rather than sets up a norm.
As
events change we may expect a change in emphasis:
i.e.,
a continued shift
of focal interest more and more upon the proletariat itself. Mai:Leish's
Panic
could not have been written five years ago and we may predict
that nothing like it can possibly appear two years hence. We may predict
also that Miss Herbst will in future novels shift her focus from the middle
bourgeois members of the family she is treating towards the problems and
interests of its simon pure proletarians.
At the same time a reciprocal activity will take place within the
proletariat itself. As the proletarian grows in understanding of himself
he will become more interested in the novel both as reader and as writer,
and proletarians as a class will cease to be themselves in the old sense. ·
For the term "class-conscious proletariat" itself represents not an absolute
norm but one whose very nature tends to be transformed under the in–
fluence of the direction it follows in the progress of history.
With this change in emphasis will come changes in the technique of
writing either ( 1) away from the great bourgeois styles, such as the
stream of consciousness or (2) towards a new utilization of them which
will make them under the new emphasis the more communicative and the
more self-consistent or ( 3) (as I think the more probable) first in the
first direction and later in the second.
At the present time the influence of Marxism is greater upon the
form of the proletarian novel than upon its style.
