38
PARTISAN REVIEW
similarly the case with Nietzsche, with William Blake, with Melville-!
mention only the greatest of them.
In the work of each of these men there is a powerful, living, breathing!
impulse to communion; but the communion is of a belated sort; from which
I would dr!lw this highly instructive conclusion, that it is not to be held
against a writer, if he addresses himself at first to but a handful of readers.
I was, I must confess, a bit alarmed when, at the \Vriters Congress in
Moscow, I heard workers of all kinds and in large numbers saying to
the writers: Talk about us, write about us, take us as your subject. For
the function of literature is not--or at least, is
not merely"--that
of a
mirror; yet up to the present time, literature in the U.S.S.R. has been
practically content with such a role. It has given us, it is true, a namber
of outstanding works of this sort; but it should not stop there. The thing,
the chief thing it may be, is to aid that new specimen of humanity, whom
we so ardently desire to 'see born, in his struggle to free himself of shack–
ling falsehoods, in his efforts to shape and plan himself. So far as that
goes, this was the thought which was admirably expressed at the Moscow
Congress by Bukharin, Gorky himself and many others. Literature is not
satisfied with imitation; its role is. an informing one; its
busin~s
is to
suggest, to create.
Those great unacknowledged geniuses of whom I was speaking, whvse
works are today printed in enormous editions, have contributed a good deal
more to that self-knowledge which it lies within man's province to achieve,
and which he ought to seek, by forging within themselves an undreamed
of sincerity, than they would have done had they been content with a
mere portrait of man as he then was, or believed himself to be. To look
for communion is well enough; but it sometimes happens that communion
is not immediately to be had. In my own case (and I must beg your
pardon for the persnal allusion), coming of a middle-class family, with a
middle-class background, I could not but feel from the beginning of my
career that everything in me which was most my own, which was most
worth-while and valorous, was by way of
bein~
a direct and immediate
protest against the lying customs and conventions with which I was sur–
rounded. And so, today, in that capitalistic society in which we are still
living, it seems to me all but impossible that literature should be anything
other than a literature of opposition.
Communion with his own class is out of the question for the bourgeois
writer; and as for communion with the people-well, I should say that
it is equally impossible, so long as the people remain what they are today,
so long as they are not what they might be, what they should be, what
they will be, if we lend them our aid. The only thing left is to address
the unknown reader, the reader to come; and the way to be sure of reaching
