On the Decline of Natu·ralism
Philip Rahv
a
U!TE A FEW PROTESTS
have been aired in recent years against
the sway of the naturalist method in fiction. It is charged that
this method treats material in a manner so flat and external as to
inhibit the search for value and meaning, and that in any case,
whatever its past record, it is now exhausted. Dissimilar as they
are, both the work of Franz Kafka and the works of the surrealist
school are frequently cited as examples of release from the rou–
tines of naturalist realism, from its endless bookkeeping of exist–
ence. Supporting this indictment are mostly those writers of the
younger group who are devoted to exper.imentation and who look
to symbolism, the fable, and the myth.
The younger writers are stirred by the ambition to create a
new type of imaginative prose into which the recognizably real
enters as one component rather than as the total substance. They
want to break the novel of its objective habits; some want to intro–
duce into it philosophical ideas; others are not so much drawn
to expressing ideas as to expressing the motley strivings of the
inner self - dreams, visions, and fantasies. Manifestly the
failure of the political movement in the literature of the past
decade has resulted in a revival of religio-esthetic attitudes. The
young men of letters are once again watching their own image in
the mirror and listening to inner promptings. Theirs is a program
calling for the adoption of techniques of planned derangement as
a means of cracking open the certified structure of reality and
turning loose its latent energies. And surely one cannot dispose
of such a program merely by uncovering the element of mystifi–
cation in it. For the truth is that the artist of the avant-garde has
never hesitated to lay hold of the instruments of mystification
when it suited his purpose, especially in an age such as ours, when
the life about him belies more and more the rational ideals of the
cultural tradition.
It has been remarked that in the long run the issue between
naturalism and its opponents resolves itself into a philosophical
dispute concerning the nature of reality. Obviously those who
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