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Chapter Three The Cult of Reason COMING HOME The world the novel makes proposes its own causality and contingency. To treat post–World War II Marxist fiction solely as a declension narrative, due to the ultimate disasterof the Communist movement in 1956, is to miss one of U.S. culture’s most significant streams. Customary accounts of the “Long Retreat ” of literary radicalism obviouslycontain some truth, and there are sound reasons why the political parable of the clean sweep of Cold War liberalism in fiction has had its remarkable run.1 But scores of novelists once affiliated with or newlydrawn to the pro-Communist Left would be a forceful presence in every cultural register even in the worst of times. Others worked quietly in the margins and in a fewcases experienced rehabilitation in the 1960s. Novels of this era cannot be assessed en bloc from a single aesthetic viewpoint; they must be broken up and reassembled in multiple contexts as a Cubist portrait renders objects from contradictory angles. This chapter tells their story. The prevailing radical climate of the 1930s depicted socialism as both inscribed in the historical process and requiring a literary defense. The latter came through the adherence of hundreds of writers to an underlying rational order expressed in the paradigms of social realism. This “Cult of Reason ,” essential to both the proletarian and people’s culture varieties of novels, evokes the atheistic belief system of the French Revolution that went by that name. It was plain in the calls to reason in the literary criticism of Samuel Sillen and frequently evidenced through writers’ fidelity to an official mode of Communist rationality based on a “category thinking” about history, class, and the functions of art. Only in the late 1940s would there take root the heretical notion that reason was not sowell served by this Communist variety of Marxist positivism, thereby giving rise to the contingent thinking that was a precursor of Communist literary modernism. Although they did not theo- 85 The Cult of Reason rize reason as Janus-faced as did Adorno, radical novelists began to search for a deepened sense of the idea of experience, an investigation that gave rise to the need for new strategies to transform sensibility. Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock might stand for this postwar reintroduction of a “new contingency,” a critical rationality posed in opposition to the positivist one that was promoted by Communism. Afterward came works by Ann Petry (1908–97), Jo Sinclair (born Ruth Seid, 1919–65), and John Sanford (born Julian Lawrence Shapiro, 1904–2003), exceptional art with an even more vigorous interest in the terms of its own creation. Most radical writers of the 1940s, emerging from a preoccupation with fighting fascism abroad and still stuck on the memory of the left-wing vision of the 1930s, were only dimly conscious that their latest novels, social realist or reaching beyond, were already part of the formation of a countertrend to the newly evolving Cold War reconstrual of the past. Fearing leaped ahead of the pack with his visionary insight that the advent of a Consumers’ Republic created an unforeseen challenge to the procedures of artistic representation. In his pursuit of a literary form adequate for the truly radical imagination, Fearing discerned the disorientation underway owing to the new era’s amplification of commercialization and commodification, even though the Cold War’s “enforced forgetting,” a revision of national collective memory, would require several more years to reach a climax and was hardly the consequence of consumerism alone. Like all novelists, Fearing arranged constellations of characters and events to reveal his ideas, but there was a distinguishing sensibility. For Fearing and those veterans of Marxism drawn increasingly toward the new contingency and away from the Cult of Reason, the meaning of new experiences could not emerge through old categories unable to absorb the particularity of unanticipated postwar phenomena. Their art began to search for forms and dramatic events to express the new notions, such as the idea that the import of any phenomenon could come into sight only when configured with other phenomena . What Fearing still shared with the social realists was the view that society strives to preserve and reproduce itself through the activities of individuals , the very conduct through which persons maintain a class structure that is fundamentally antagonistic to their needs. But his writing after 1939 increasingly suggested that positivist rationality could no longer be regarded as having established categories of understanding and alternatives a...

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