Marxism and the Writing of Fiction

98 MINNESOTA REVIEW SCOTT SANDERS MARXISM AND THE WRITING OF FICTION To the critic, Marxism offers a powerful theory for interpreting the connection between literary and social phenomena. But what does a study of Marx have to offer the practicing novelist, who is interested in comprehending , not literature, but the world? This question was much asked in America in the 1930s, and it needs asking again, because once again we are faced with a breakdown in our society and our understanding. Unlike many who answered this question in the thirties, I do not believe that Marxism can or should dictate a political program, a subject matter, or a style. What it has to offer is more radical: a rationale for the novelist, an ethics, and a worldview . In each of these dimensions Marxism differs markedly from what I will call modernism. I am readUy aware that, even if we confine ourselves to novels in English, modernism is a kaleidoscopic phenomenon, susceptible of no simple definition. No schema wUl impose order upon the literary form which includes works by James, Lawrence, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Barth, Beckett, Pynchon, Mailer, and Burroughs. But for the purpose of specifying the alternative vision furnished by Marxism, I present a schema anyway, leaving it to the reader to judge how accurately my description of modernism fits the most celebrated English and American novels of this century . As a novelist working in the English language, I describe the modernist aesthetic which is my immediate inheritance, and which, if I am to comprehend my world in my art, I feel I must alter in a direction suggested by Marxism. I A fictional worldview informed by Marxism would be diametrically opposed to a modernist worldview in the following respects: (1) it is historical, conceiving the fictional present as a moment in a process, hence with antecedent conditions and future consequences; (2) it treats consciousness, and therefore character, as fundamentally social; (3) it regards society as a human construct, alterable by human effort; (4) it respects the concrete conditions of living, in particular the conditions of work; and (5) it takes all social groups, all character types, as its potential subject matter, asserting the interconnectedness of the social totality. SANDERS 99 By contrast, the worldview implicit in the modernist novel tends toward the following paradigm: (1) it is ahistorical, divorcing the fictional present from past and future, conceiving it as timeless, or as fated; (2) it treats consciousness , and therefore character, as private, with a dynamic of its own, in isolation from shared life; (3) it regards society as alien, hostile, fixed-or, if mutable, as subject only to nonhuman agencies; (4) it either neglects the material conditions of getting and spending, housing, the practical affairs of living, or else it treats them as epiphenomena of consciousness; and (5) it prefers those social types who are radicaUy at odds with the dominant society, either because, like writers, teachers, and lawyers, they live by their inteUect in a materialistic society, or because, like criminals and drug addicts, they stand outside the law. The single most important point of difference is the first one, since it implies all the rest. The historical perspective is at the heart of Marxism, forcing us to see our present predicament as the outcome of past events and conditions , and hence forcing us to recognize the possible futures which we can create out of the materials which surround us. Our given state no longer appears to be the product of nature or of superhuman forces; we are no longer prisoners of the moment. The sense of historical process is as important for understanding individual character as it is for understanding society as a whole. For the novelist, plot, that despised convention of nineteenth century fiction, is an echo of history, an abstract of the larger consequential process at work in society. To say that plot is a simplification is to state the obvious ; to say that it is outmoded is to abandon hope of integrating individual lives, to deny that reality is historical. The exploration of mind, both consciousness and the unconscious, especially mind in extreme states, is the single greatest achievement of the modernist novel...