WH.1'T IS .1 PROLETARIAN NOVELf
7
class struggle exists, but of his own position in that struggle. In general,
men are not moved so much by what happens to other men as by what
happens to themselves, and the assault on the living standard of the writer
and his brother professionals, as well as the shrinking of his economic
horizon have been most instructive. There has also been the living ex–
ample, over a period of years, of writers under fascism and under social–
ism. Other contributory factors could be mentioned, but we are not
concerned here so much with what makes a proletarian novelist as what
mak.es a proletarian novel. It seems plain, however, that it is not the
class origin of the novelist that matters but his present class alignment,
not the period of history in which he sets his story, or the kind of charac–
ters he writes about, but his ideological approach to his story and charac–
ters, which approach is entirely conditioned by his acceptance of the Marx–
ian interpretation of history. And not only acceptance, but the use of this
interpretation as a compelling factor in his work.
• • •
If
we were to look back: to the time of the F-rench revolution we
should find critics using consciously and belligerently the term Bourgeois
Literature, in contradistinction to the expiring feudalistic literature, just
as we now use the term Proletarian Literature in contradistinction to the
literature of the dying bourgeoisie.
A
century later, however, when the
gains of the French Revolution were already long established and the
bourgeoisie firmly in the saddle, critics no longer used the term Bourgeois
Literature. Novelists and critics alike moved freely in a generally accepted
body of ideas. It is only today, as capitalism draws toward its close, that
the term has come to be used again, as negatively as it was once used
positively, and alongside the new term Proletarian Literature. The in–
ference would seem to
be
that such terms as Bourgeois Literature or
Proletarian Literature are what might be called
beginning and end terms.
They are used only when the ideological superstructure and the economic
base have not become either entirely united or entirely
di~united.
They
represent the same struggle being conducted on the cultural front, and at
the same time
1
as the struggle on the economic front.
•
• •
These critics who conceive the problems of proletarian literature in
the U. S. and the U.S.S.R. as essentially the same err seriously. The
proletarian novelist in the U. S. is, at least in part, destructive in his work:;
i.e.,
he aims to destroy the existent remnants of capitalist society; he
is a revolutionist. The Soviet novelist, on the other hand, aims
to conserve the victories of the Revolution and to build construc–
tively upon this foundation. There can be a unity in the Soviet
novel that is difficult, if not impossible, to attain in the con-
