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ture, Koestler is less than fair to Gide; and, keeping in mind the recent
news from Paris of the accomplishments of French writers, one is dis–
posed to admire more than ever the French genius for literature. In
"The Novelist's Temptations" Koestler's point is that to function prop–
erly the novelist must possess "an all -embracing knowledge of the essen–
tial currents and facts (including statistics), of the ideas and theories
(including the natural sciences) of his time." The saving proviso is that
"this knowledge is not for actual use.... It is for use by implication."
Even with the proviso, however, this appears to be an excessively ra–
tionalistic view of the literary process. Development and retrogression in
the novel can hardly be plotted on so simple a graph. The movements of
the imagination are tortuous and obscure; great works
of
art have often
been created by compuiEive and extremely one-sided talents (consider
Franz Kafka) . The element of knowledge in imaginative literature is easily
overestimated. What is important in writing as in art generally is the
quality of relevance-a quality perhaps synonymous with that "sense of
modernity" which Baudelaire stressed so frequently and for which he
praised artists like Courbet and Manet. This modernity can take various
and contradictory forms, some of them unrecognizable to those above
all concerned with being up to date. Kafka, for instance, is deeply mod–
ern not because the latest acquisitions of the social and natural sciences
are embodied in his fiction but because it is reverberant with the feelings
of loss and alienation characteristic of modern man. Being
au courant
with the latest facts and theories is desirable in itself and can certainly
do the novelist a lot of good. There is no need, however, to elevate such
useful knowledge to a pre-requisite of the creative life.
In the several pieces on Soviet Russia Koestler carries through a
powerful polemic against the myth-addicts in our midst, who have by
pow
accumulated sufficient numbers and influence to serve as a Fifth
Column aiding and abetting Stalin's foreign policy of duplicity and
aggression. Koestler strikes at the very foundations of the myth by dem–
onstrating that "economically the Soviet Union represents State Capital–
ism. The State owns the means of production and controls the production
and distribution of goods. The distinction between State Capitalism
and State Socialism is from the economist's point of view meaningless.
The difference between the two lies in the political and social structure
of the country, in the question 'The State controls everything, but who
controls the State?' " This is exactly the question that the apologists for
Stalinism never attempt to answer, for their entire case would collapse
if
they once ventured to examine from a principled point of view the real
nature of Soviet economy and the political superstructure which is sup–
ports. They invariably assume precisely what they must prove: that Rus–
sia is a socialist country, that between 1917 and 1945 nothing has essen–
tially changed. By refusing to examine fundamentals they can continue
