WHAT IS A PROLETARIAN NOVELf
13
James
T. Farrell:
My personal opinion is that too much of revolutionary criticism, both
theoretical articles and specific literary criticisms, is tending toward the
creation of a kind of revolutionary scholasticism that can only breed
sterility. Again and again, I have read pieces of revolutionary criticism
where the writer approaches his subject from the outside, with no apparent
realization that literature is a process, and that if it be understood, one
must get inside the process, use the .k::nowledge of literary traditions
and the manner in which they have developed. Instead of approaching their
material in this manner, our critics sometimes just stay on the outside,
look in through the window, and then build their own theories and esti–
mations. The general procedure seems to me to be something of the fol–
lowing. Marxian thought in general, and the conception of th·;: class struggle
in particular, is used as source for first premises. Then these premises are
developed by a simple process of logical extension into an adequate gen–
eralized conclusion. The conclusion is then pasted onto the subj ect of
literat::re, without any testing of it in terms of literary developments and
traditions.
This kind of revolutionary scholasticism has led critics again and again
into a self indulgence that is often merely a gratuitous exercise of their
typewriters and their minds. Thus they have had their periods when
they have discussed the question, what
subj·~cts
can the proletarian writer
use in his work:, and then have listed these subjects. Or again they have
issued calls that America develop its Maxim Gorky. Or they have made
their predictions that in the future, there will be proletarian Prousts
greater than Proust. And they have shown an extreme consciousness of
categories, particularly the categories of bouegrois and proletarian. Often,
however, they had not made clear what is the meaning of these categories,
and how are they using them. Are they, for instance, merely descriptive
categories to describe typ·es or classifications of books, or are they standards ?
And after categories are established, there is that second task. Finding
out what a certain book is, bourgeois, revolutionary, proletarian, or what ?
They neglect, in these exercises, a simple if taultolgous factor. That books
make the categories. That books make literature and that to establish
literary theories, and deal in literary criticism, one must understand books,
understand the process whereby literary traditions develop, and make an
effort to apprehend the relationship between literary developments and
the
social backgrounds and historical traditions out of which they develop.
It is frequently in dealing with the relationship between culture and
what Marx termed the material relationships in a society, that our critics
