6
PARTISAN REVIEW
failure to distinguish between the two may lie the primary obstacle to
an acceptable definition of Proletarian Literature.
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While of course all members of the proletariat are work:ers or potential
workers, the reverse does not necessarily hold true. By proletariat we
mean the property-less class, the exploited; we mean literally those who
have nothing to lose but their chains. Now it is plain that certain elements
among the American workingclass, at least up to the time of the crisis,
were not members of the proletariat in the ideological sense that we are using
the term. On the other hand, it is equally plain that today large sections
of the lower middleclass very definitely may be said to belong to the
proletariat. The growth of the proletarian novel in the United Stataes
can be measured accurately by the growth of the American proletariat
and the growing recognition among our writers of the existence and his–
torical significance of this proletariat.
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Without an understanding of the principles of Marxism, without
the existence of the Communist Party as the embodiment of these prin–
ciples in action, such ·recognition on the part of our novelists could never
have been so readily translated into terms of experience. Of course, the
principles of Marxism were there before the crisis, as was the Communist
Party. But for the novelist these principles, this action, had to be made
manifest in terms of the American masses and the writer's immediate en–
vironment before they could be of real value to him in his work: as a
creator. And this is precisely what has happened during the crisis. The
novelist, seek:ing to write truthfully about a new and bewildering set-up,
could turn to Marxism for the key and, studying Marxism, could turn to
the American scene for confirmation. It was only then that he was in
a position to shed the sense of aimless flux, the despair, cynicism and
nihilism of the previous decade and substitute in their stead a new purpose,
a new orientation and a sweeping historical perspective. At the same time,
the bourgeois conception of the novelist as bystander or spectator was also
exploded, and the writer came to see himself not as bystander but
as
parttctpant. Finally, he came to see society not as a static picture,
as
something which existed, but as something dynamic, something in the
process of dying and in the process of being born.
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All this, of course, is extremely sk:etchy, no more than a suggestion
or two, and on the whole valueless unless we take cognizance of the fact
that the novelist has not suffered an ideological sea-change through any
sudden burst of vision, but through a painful realization not only that the
