420
PARTISAN REVIEW
nalism cannot communicate with equal heat and facility? Surely
its vogue cannot be explained by its radicalism. Its real attraction
for the millions who read it lies elsewhere--perhaps in its vivid
recreation of a "slice of life" so horrendously unfamiliar that it
can be made to yield an exotic interest.) The sympathy of these
presumably political writers with the revolutionary cause is often
.genuine, yet their understanding of its inner movement, intricate
problems, and doctrinal and strategic motives is so deficient as to
call into question their competence to deal with political materiaL
In the complete works of the so-called proletarian schqol you
will
not find a single viable portrait of a Mantist intellectual or of any
character in the revolutionary drama who, conscious of his histori·
cal role, is not a mere automation of spontaneous class force or
impulse. What really happened in the 1930's is that due to certain
events the public aspects of experience appeared more meaningful
than its private aspects, and literature responded accordingly. But
the subject of political art is
history,
which stands in the same rela–
tion to experience as fiction to biography: and just as surely as
failure to generalise the biographical element thwarts the aspirant
to fiction, so the ambition of the literary Left to create a political
art was thwarted by its failure to lift experience to the level of
history.*
Experience is the main but by no means the total substance
of literature. The part experience plays in the esthetic sphere
might well be compared to the part that the materialist conception
of history assigns to economy. Experience, in the sense of this
analogy, is the substructure of literature above which there rises a
superstructure of values, ideas, and judgments-in a word, of the
multiple forms of consciousness. But this base and summit are not
stationary: they continually act and react upon each other.
It is precisely this superstructural level which is seldom
reached by the typical American writer of the modern era. Most
of the well-known reputations will bear out my point. Whether you
approach a poet like Ezra Pound or novelists like Steinbeck and
*For. the benefit of those people who habitually pause to insist on what they call
"strictly literary values," I might add that by "history" in this connection I do not
mean "history-books" or anything resembling what is known as the "historical novel"
or drama. A political art would succeed in lifting experience to the level of history
if
its perception of life-any life-were organised around a perspective relating the art–
ist's sense of the
society of
the dead to his sense of the
society
of the living and the
as yet unborn.
