Proletarian Fiction in England

PROLETARIAN FICTION IN ENGLAND CHARLES I. GLICKSBERG "It is not emotion that destroys a work of art, but the desire to demonstrate someth.ing."-Andr~ Malraux, Preface to Days of Wrath. I THE Nooel and the People, a book recently published by Ralph Fox (who died fighting for the Loyalists in Spain) charges that modern fiction is characterized by complete intellectual bankruptcy , that it is feeble in quality and anaemic in content, faced with difficulties which it cannot overcome. He dismisses novelists like Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley because they lacked the knowledge and the understanding to report the whole truth, the ability to portray dynamic characters in interaction with their environment, characters who are master of their destiny. Yet he, too, warns against the dangers inherent in the bald politicalization of fiction. A survey of the English fiction of the last decade reveals at first glance no recognizable pattern; it is an incoherent medley of discordant themes and styles, ideas and techniques. But one thing is noticeable: a,n ideological trend does emerge. An increasing number of novels are concerned with the treatment of the contemporary social situation-its politics, its economic conflicts, its underlying significance. They lay particular emphasis on the proletariat as a class. There are works of fiction which deal with the familiar themes of the War, mass unemployment, destitution, strikes, communism, revolution. It is chiefly the younger writers who betray this heightened awareness of social issues. The wave of Marxism has swept over England, as it has over large parts of Europe ~nd America, but it has produced a strikingly uporthodox reaction there. It has not tempted the English writers to float with the ideological tide. In an age marked by an absence of deep-rooted spiritu.al attachments or enduring loyalties, any system of values which succeeds in taking the individual out of himself, out of his fragmentary, isolated state, will gain converts from the ranks of the literati. The writer at present is eager to win the certitude of faith, to identify himself with some broad social movement i.n which he can participate together with his 41 42 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY fellow men. Such a movement has the power of unifying his vague conflicting impulses and ideals, of enlarging and ennobling his limited personal existence. Though not to be trusted as an interpreter of Marx, Mr Middleton Murry is probably right in contending that Marxism represents for many people a surrogate for lost relig1on. The writer is essentially a believer, and his late interest in Marxism has been prompted largely by an ethical impulse: the desire to share in the fundamental task of creating a collectivistic society. To the discomfort, however, of Marxjst theoreticians like Mr John Strachey, English writers have fought shy of the rigid intellectual implications of dialectical materialism. They will gladly embrace any idea that promises to enlarge the scope. and increase the richness and value of existence, but if it threatens the integrity of their art or their creative function as artists, they will be up in arms. Even if they cannot refute the Marxist position logically, they will reject it intuitively. What is injurious to art, they conclude, cannot possibly be right. Especially in England has the resistance to the Marxist invasion been strong. It might be called a form of aesthetic sabotage, a sturdy opposition to party dogma and bureaucratic control of the arts, Marxism has been in the air-who ta-day can escape its pervasive influence? It has been widely discussed, but it has not gained that feverish, all-absorbing importance that it has acquired among novelistS and critics in America. · The writer as writer does not belong to a class. He cannot be fitted into any pure economic category. He is neither proletarian nor bourgeois, neither capitalist nor parasite. The living material he utilizes cannot be circumscribed within a hard-and-fast frame of political abstractions. Reality has no frame except the one he imposes on it. The frame and the picture are all of a piece. The pattern is creative, not conceptual. Hence Socialist realism, as the Surrealists have pointed out in thejr manifestos, is a misnomer. l...