regarded in going down to defeat, much as Oedipus
or Macbeth was regarded:
you put a strong person-
ality through the wringer of society and then am-
biguously labeled the process 'destiny'
or 'fate.'
The
concept of classical tragedy remained in force.
Julien Sorel, surely, is the ancestor of the fiction
of the past hundred years; and because, owing to
his influence, most novelists have undertaken to study
human character in terms of complex psychology and
emotions, we have come to suppose that such a study
is the function of fiction at its best. Taking the long
view, I should far from disagree;
nor will I deny
that until recently any other view would have been
regarded as nonsense. We have only to recall how
most of us first reacted to
A
fa
recherche du temps
perdu,
in which the nineteenth-century tradition of
the novel culminates.
A dozen years ago Proust's
demonstration of a disintegrating world,
as com-
pared with his molding of character,
his inquest
upon the sensibilities and his depiction of manners,
was thought of as secondary; most of us read the
work with no more or less social consciousness than
we would have studied the declining years of the
Roman Empire, or the
ancien regime
in eighteenth-
century France. We noted, of course, the disintegra-
tion, we saw the causation behind it; but primarily
we surveyed the last flare of nineteenth-century
genius through the eyes of nineteenth-century critic-
ism. Some of us today may too far bend Proust to a
thesis, but almost nobody can now read him as al-
most everybody then did. The same thing applies to
Henry James and others.
The decisive growth, during the past few years,
of a predominantly social literature and criticism-
of which strictly proletarian literature and strictly
Marxist
criticism form a great part but not the
whole-reflects
far more than a newsgath-erer's
awareness of the disorder of our times. For not only
has the writer,
as writer,
been curious and inves-
tigative of what goes on around him; also the values,
formerly distinguishable,
by which he once lived as
private individual,
as writer,
and as citizen, have
tended more and more to coincide. In the old writer
with a purely subjective morality,
matters were
oftenest just the opposite: he was likely to repent
in literature for sinning in life, and to make of his
art a constant compensation for his character.
A
Dostoevsky or Baudelaire finds the moral dichotomy
between what he is and what he aspires to be the
very breath of his inspiration,
the very secret of his
intensity. But the social-minded writer today, con-
fused and lacking in inner unity though he often is,
does tend increasingly to act and write on the same
plane, aware that his actions and his writings have
behind them, not only the same social impulse, but
the same social pressure. It is not only a question of
values-that
when society is in crisis a man's per-
sonal crisis should wait; it is equally a question of
sense-that
man's private solution may prove utterly
6
worthless if it conflicts with the soc.ial solution when
it comes. But there can be no doubt that the moral
issue involved is more important
than the practical
one. To withdraw into a shell, no matter how
austerely,
is not at this juncture a maintenance of
high values, but merely a pretense of maintaining
them. During a period so overwhelmed by threats of
war, fascism, unstabilized markets,
unemployment,
labor difficulties, curtailed freedom of speech and
so much else resulting from the interaction of these
forces, any attempt at aloofness becomes irrespon-
sible: for progress now is not only impeded by
stupidity,
but mortally threatened by malevolence.
Olympianism and the long view can serve us today
only by acting as a brake, not against action itself,
but against undisciplined and over-hasty action; to-
day's critic is bound to be chiefly a fighter; today's
criticism must be-and in culture's behalf must be-
chiefly in the nature of pamphleteering.
For, however well it may chime in with Marxism,
social literature is all the same much more than a
plot hatched to spread the gospel; it overwhelming-
ly expresses,
quite as much as Rousscauism or the
idea of democracy or any other thing ever did, the
time-spirit.
Neither is it a plot to dethrone all we
have held sacred and even self-evident
in literary
tradition;
the subject-matter
must simply,
given
time, evolve its corresponding esthetic.
After all,
literature is a history of patterns and symbolisms
founded upon man's approach to living. The gods
who fertilized Greek literature perished when they
ceased to be a viable concept; the Church,
which
for centuries inoculated literature,
has lost_ almost
aU the power it had formerly to nourish art. In the
same manner Chivalry went under as a mobilizing
force, and so, except when used half-ironically,
did
the Aristocratic Ideal. The Individual,
as master or
victim of his own philosophy,
has been the last of
the great concepts to dominate creative literature;
and it too may, for a time or just possibly for all
time, have lost its urgency. (It is worth noting that
it alone of the great concepts has been, at bottom,
anti-social.)
At any rate if the protagonist
of
present-day literature has become Society itself,
whether represented overtly in the class struggle, or
more ambiguously as a vulnerable and changing or-
ganism, there is nothing either perverse or ill-found-
ed about its sovereignty.
Literature must go where
life goes; and whether it makes for better or worse
art, today the fate of men consumes our interest
more than the fate of man.
Let us make no bones about the fact that it is im-
possible to write, or to write about, social literature
without taking sides. This may seem to impose upon
both novelist and critic a propagandist
role wholly
out of keeping with our traditional
conception of the
artist's stance. To a great extent, however, the con-
fusion is verbalistic. To me it seems a truism, though
to others (thinking,
perhaps,
of such a writer as
OCTOBER,
1936
