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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 1, Winter 1958, pp. 23–29.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Has there ever been a novel in which a character is as politically motivated as Koestler’s Rubashov in Darkness at Noon and, at the same time, is a round, complicated person like James’ Princess Casimassima? Has there, in short, ever been a really successful political novel?
If we want to answer these questions seriously, our first task is to embrace a certain vagueness. The novel is hard enough to define in itself – and when all is said and done we should be glad to settle for E.M. Forster’s masterful imprecision: a novel tells a story. Given this shaky beginning, things get even trickier when we speak of a “political” novel. Since the term does not indicate a general style, like naturalism or impressionism, since it is a definition in terms of subject matter, we seem to be faced by a miserable critical alternative. On the one hand, we can define the political novel so broadly that it encompasses almost the whole history of the novel and thus becomes vague and useless. Or else, we can specify our definition more carefully and run the risk of inventing a sterile and artificial construction.
In his recent, provocative study of Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe attempted to cut this Gordian knot. To one reviewer, his definition seemed arbitrary and whimsical, but one suspects that this was because he was unaware of the intricacies involved. Howe wrote:
“By a political novel I mean a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting – though again a qualification is necessary, since the word ‘dominant’ is more than a little questionable. Perhaps it would be better to say: a novel in which we take to be dominant political ideas or the political milieu ...”
Let this stand as a working definition. It simplifies, it is highly subjective, and it is probably as well as we will ever be able to do. But once having accepted it, let me state a perspective somewhat bleaker than Howe’s: the successful political novel will either be a roman a clef, the charade of a sociological analysis, or else the politics will be swallowed up by the apolitical. The first alternative, the method of Darkness at Noon, 1984, The Iron Heel, may produce works of a limited, though undeniable, genius. The second may result in a masterpiece, as in the case of Man’s Fate, but the technique is the subordination of the political to some other dominant motive – that is, the book practically ceases to be a political novel.
Why is this true? In part the answer is historical, it is found in the development of the novel, in particular it is the consequence of its complex relation to the fate of bourgeois society. And in part, the answer is formal, it involves the intrinsic difficulty of integrating politics into the felt narrative, of marrying Rubashov to the Princess Casamassima.
ALL OF THIS IS A WAY of saying that politics has bypassed the novel as a really significant subject matter.
The rise of the novel was contemporaneous with the bourgeois revolution. In the political order, feudalism was swept away, production was rationalized, the incredible complexity of modern life became a fact. In the aesthetic order, the novel was, in part, a reaction to this fact. As Lukacs put it in his study of the historical novel:
“The changed relationship between the psychology of men and the economic and moral circumstances of their life had become so complex that a broad representation of these circumstances, an extensive formulization of these interrelationships, became necessary if men were to be shown as the concrete children of their time.”
Thus it was that the novel was a revolutionary art form. For it shattered most of the old conventions, it sent literature probing into every corner of human life. In Fielding, for example, there is an exultant, liberating rush of art toward experience, one which burst through the classical cannon of the separation of styles. In Johnathan Wild Fielding wrote:
“... in all, we shall find that there is a nearer connection between high and low life than is generally imagined, and that a highwayman is entitled to more favor with the great than he usually meets with.”
And in France, Balzac was becoming “the secretary of French society,” and probing that incredibly thick and populous world of La Comedie Humaine.
These novels were soaked in society – for that matter, Lionel Trilling has defined the very essence of the novel in social terms. In Balzac, for instance, there is the careful delineation of the various classes and strata, of the ancien regime, the Napoleonic bureaucracy, the restorationists’ impotence, even of the French underworld, for he shared Fielding’s notion that the life of the criminal illuminated that of the bourgeois. And yet, the best of Balzac’s work was not political in the terms of Howe’s definition. When a novel of his is dominated by the political structure and setting (Les Employés), it is a failure; when his romantic spirit dominates, and the political observation becomes the subordinate stuff of his vision (Le Cousin Pons, Père Goriot, etc.) he produces masterpieces.
Balzac is, of course, an almost perfect case, and therefore an extreme one. But much of the same can be said of Walter Scott’s historicism and the many novels which it inspired. At its beginning, the novel was almost pervasively social, but not political in the sense of concentrating upon the superstructure of society, the political milieu. The reason for this is not too difficult to see. At this point, during the period of the rise of the bourgeoisie, there was as yet no global critique of society. The nearest thing to such a vantage point was the ideology of reaction, and that is why a Balzac, with his prejudice for feudalism, was able to create the most finely structured image of the new world to be found in his time.
Thus, the novel began with a social realism (usually mixed with romanticism), with a rush into the complexity and depth of the new bourgeois society. Yet, this did not produce a “political” novel in Howe’s sense of the term. (The nearest thing to it was Stendahl.) But, and this is the paradox, the worldview of the rising novel, that of realism, is almost a precondition for the political novel – the only real chance which such a type of literature had for existence was in this period. For then, reality was seen as solid, palpable, as there, and in such a world politics is a meaningful subject. Later, when politics became more pervasive, when the ideological critique of society was everywhere available to the artist, this world had disappeared, and this is partly why the most brilliant and insightful analyses of society were to be anti-political. An impressionist political novel, a surrealist political novel, these are almost unthinkable categories, because there is an irreconcilable contradiction between style and content, form and matter. Thus it was that the two halves necessary to the synthesis of a political novel – a realistic Weltanschauung in which politics is meaningful, and a political ideology – were sundered by history.
And here, one must dispute Howe’s formulation. He writes:
“The ideal social novel had been written by Jane Austen, a great artist who enjoyed the luxury of being able to take society for granted: it was there, and it seemed steady beneath her glass, Napoleon or no Napoleon. But soon it would not be steady beneath anyone’s glass, and the novelists’ attention had necessarily to shift from the gradation within society to the fate of society itself. It is at this point, roughly speaking, that the kind of book I have called the political novel comes to be written – the kind in which the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society, has penetrated the consciousness of the characters in all of its profoundly problematic aspects ...”
My quarrel is with a confusion of society and politics in this statement. Quite early in the development of the novel, indeed, in the time of Jane Austen, the problematic idea of society was present in the novel. Balzac is proof enough. But it was not a political idea, and that is the significant dividing line. To develop the question as Howe does is to miss the historical perspective and to tend toward seeing the political novel in its formal aspect, an element which is certainly important but only partially revealing of the actual process. (Incidentally, this criticism is made within a framework of feeling that Howe’s book represents a thoughtful, even brilliant, approach to a difficult subject.)
But turn now and look at the second half of the historical situation: the fact that the main direction of the novel became more and more estranged from politics at the precise moment that ideological movements made the political novel a real possibility, that the formal development of the novel was at odds with a political subject matter.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French novel was already moving far away from its beginnings. The liberating, tumultuous force of realism was dividing in two directions. One, via Flaubert, was toward the coldness of realism, and eventually away from society itself toward that magnificent aesthetic accomplishment of our time, the art of the interior self. The other road, that of Zola, was reducing the all-embracing vitality (and romanticism) of realism to a more mechanistic view which ended up in the dead end of the “slice of life.” Both movements were a reflection of the loss of elan in bourgeois society, the new threat from the rising socialist movement. That they were simultaneously anti-bourgeois in content, and soaked in the spirit of the bourgeois world, is only one of the paradoxes that result from the intricate relationship of art to society.
Franz Mehring wrote somewhat prophetically of this situation before the First World War (that his method was somewhat mechanistic does not destroy the validity of his conclusion). He saw that naturalism was only “halfway,” that it was simply representing, but that it had not achieved a really critical standpoint. And he felt that unless it did gain a new vantage, that it would go over to the side of decadence. His disjunction, it turns out, was sound – and the fact is that naturalism was unable to rise above itself. The truly great works of the novelistic imagination in the twentieth century have thus been produced by those bourgeois anti-bourgeois who were the magnificent, creative victims of decadence. And the high road of the novel has not been toward a new synthesis of the old naturalism and the new politics, but rather along the way of the disintegration of society. The characteristics of the best novels entre deux guerres are as Erich Auerbach recorded them: “multipersonal representation of consciousness, time strata, disintegration of the continuity of exterior events, shifting of the narrative viewpoint ...” In such a tendency, there was little that was conducive to the development of a political novel.
This is not to say that the novel had escaped politics. That is impossible. Rather, the political criticism was not expressed politically, for it was not merely society which the crisis of the superstructure called into question: it was all of reality. As Phillip Rahv put it in his Image and Idea, “... (the) artists are no longer content merely to question particular habits or situations or even institutions; it is reality itself which they bring into question.” Thus, on the one hand, naturalism had become so constricted that it could not rise above its narrow view of the world and achieve a political novel; and the anti-naturalistic trend, the method of greatness in our time, had gone beyond politics.
Two apparent exceptions should be noted. The first is that magnificent flowering of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian novel. Here there was a greater concern with politics. This higher consciousness was partially a function of the same situation which so politicalized the Russian working class: the pervasiveness of Czarist backwardness and autocracy. And yet, Dostoyevsky at his most political, say in The Possessed, has also gone beyond politics, that is, the political question is viewed, not primarily in terms of power or social class, but as it relates to the individual pathos, above all, to the problem of religion That, among other things, is why his most political novel, The Possessed, is inferior to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. In the masterpieces, there is no real pretense at political analysis, and the other element is clearly dominant.
The other exception concerns a series of contemporary novelists, most of them veterans of the revolutionary movement: Malraux, Silone, Camus, Sperber, etc. But here again, I would argue that their books either are an unfleshed political analysis (Orwell’s 1984), or else that they are concerned with issues more ultimate than politics (Camus’ Plague, Malraux’s Man’s Fate). The real synthesis, the hypothetical image of the political novel with which I began – the marriage of Rubashov and the Princess Casamassima – is not achieved in the work of these writers.
But finally, there is the one real exception, the work of genius which forces us to cast all of this in terms of general tendency and historical fact rather than as a literary law: Conrad’s Nostromo. In this book, there is the feel of social life (almost Balzacian in its force), political vision, even political prophecy. Perhaps nowhere else in the art of our time is there such an image of capitalism and imperialism. It is F.R. Leavis’ inability really to recognize how central the politics of Nostromo are that leaves his estimation of it somewhat up in the air. And at the same time, there is a wealth of deep characterization, a world of individual human beings.
And yet – even here, in this magnificent exception, the process we are describing is visible. For in Nostromo, and particularly in the person of its hero, there is always present that deeper theme of alienation and loneliness. This novel is richer than Lord Jim or Victory, but there is a real continuity, a focus upon the problem of the anguish of failure; the modern, slightly blurred hero seen at his supreme moment. Still, Nostromo is a synthesis and this makes it one of the finest works of the political novel – or, in a sense, the only achieved political novel.
Thus, history played a trick on the political novel. When the realistic view of the world was present, which is essential to the incorporation of political ideology into the novelistic imagination, the ideology was not. When the ideology had emerged, the novel, in its main tendency, had moved away from the solid, objective concern with the external world. Both events are complexly related to the rise and decline of bourgeois society, but their brunt is unmistakable: they made the political novel, as a serious art form, an exceptional case, they exiled it from the mainstream.
BUT THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT of the novel does not account for the lack of political novels all on its own. We also must take note of an important formal consideration, one which casts a great deal of light on some of the attempts to write political novels in our time.
In the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, The Past Recaptured, Marcel Proust wrote, “True art has nothing to do with proclamations – it completes itself in silence.” And, a little later, “A work which contains theories is like an object upon which one leaves the price tag.” There is both truth and paradox in these comments. The paradox resides in the fact that Proust’s polemic against ideas in the novel occurs in a section, some seventy pages long, devoted to critical theory. But the truth is that there is at least a tension between the novelist’s task of portraying the felt human world and any attempt on his part to engage in ideological discussion. Indeed, this section of Proust’s own book, valuable as it is in itself, is unquestionably a flaw, not so much because it is an abstract discussion, but because it is much too long, that it is not organic with the rest of the book.
If, then, we abstract from the overly formalist bias of impressionism which Proust brings to his subject, we can recognize, not a contradiction, but a tension, between the fictional purpose and the discursive idea. In the novel itself, this tension has expressed itself in two forms. On the one hand, there are the books in the tradition of the roman a clef; on the other hand, there is the tendency of the perception of reality itself to overpower ideology in the novel, to shatter any real possibility of a synthesis.
It would be wrong to dismiss the first type of political novel out of hand. But we certainly have to admit that it is characterized by a certain thinness, that it never reaches the really profound. Evelyn Waugh’s political satires (say, Black Mischief), Orwell’s 1984, London’s Iron Heel and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon represent the wide range of possibility for this genre. And yet all of them have this in common, that their characters tend to be “flat,” that they are defined, not so much by a complex of human and social inter-relationships, but by their function of acting out a political theory. We do not feel that Rubashov is motivated by his unique and distinctive personality, but rather he acts according to Koestler’s analytic conception of the old Bolsheviks during the Moscow Trials.
Lukacs was greatly concerned with this problem of the typical, and made a sharp distinction between two approaches to it. He wrote:
“Thus, the type, according to Marx and Engels, is not the abstract type of classical tragedy, nor the figure in Schiller’s idealistic generalizations, and even less that which Zola and the post-Zola literary theory have made of it, the Average. The type is rather characterized as that striking personality in whose dynamic unity true literature reflects life, comprehending in its contradictory unity the most important social, moral and spiritual contradictions of a period, bringing them together in a vital unity.”
If we accept this distinction (as I do), then it is obvious that the authors of the novels we have just been discussing fail to create “types.” And even in their politicalization of character they are thereby cut off from a genuine and moving profundity.
This is not to say that these books are valueless. Well done, as in the case of 1984, they can be deeply moving. But they cut themselves off from a certain human complexity, they lose a feeling of depth and inter-relationship which has been the particular genius of the great novel.
On the other hand, there are “political novels” which are filled with the intricacies of personality, in which the characters move, not according to an analysis or as the charade of an ideology, but as unique personalities. And here, we can see the formal problem of the political novel in all its acuteness. For when this is attempted, the almost inevitable result is that the book actually subordinates the politics to other values and motivations – the novel becomes less political.
The classic case of this process is Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate. Some time ago, William Empson wrote of it, “... the heroes are communists, but they are frankly out of touch with the proletariat; it is from this that they get their pathos and dignity and the book its freedom from propaganda.” I would go much further than Empson: for the ultimate values, the motivational spring of Man’s Fate is not political at all. The Chinese Revolution is the setting in which Malraux approaches the theme which has been central to his writing from the very first: death. And the real point of the book is not the inter-relationships which arise in the course of a revolutionary attempt to emancipate man from exploitation, but the drama of the aristocratic hero’s fight to transcend his own mortality. (In his later art criticism, the painter was to function in the same way as the politicals of his novels: Malraux’s Goya is Kyo from Man’s Fate in another guise.)
Why does this happen? In part the answer is historical, along the lines which we have already discussed. Malraux (and Silone and Camus) are the children of bourgeois culture even in their hatred of the bourgeoisie. They have the consciousness of modem man, and this is their general vantage point. And rather than being unique and separate authors, the representatives of a distinguishable genre, they are contemporary novelists who deal with the modern concern in terms of politics, in a political setting, and not as politics.
But there is also a formal consideration (though it is, of course, related to the historical). Politics is not "ultimate.” It is, however intricately, a reflection of more basic realities of human existence. This means that under the most favorable historical circumstances there will be a tendency to go “beyond” politics. And in an age such as ours, when it is precisely the basic realities (indeed, the very reality of reality) which has been brought into question through an unprecedented and total crisis of society, it is almost inevitable that the most political of novelists will go beyond politics. In short, the formal difficulty, the one which Proust discussed, has been made all the more effective by the specific cultural conjunction of our time.
Under the very best of circumstances, then, there would be many difficulties in writing a masterly political novel. In our time, the actual situation has led to a bifurcation of the political novel into its two parts, and has inhibited a genuine synthesis. On the one hand, we have provocative, stimulating books (all the more personal because of their journalistic immediacy) which are political but by that fact miss the fullness and complexity of life which is characteristic of the novel at its best. And on the other hand, we have novels written by politicals, even with political settings, but there the politics tends to be stagecraft and not the real substance of the book.
IT IS WRONG TO THINK that there is any simple and single literary category, the “bourgeois novel.” Such terms are the invention of a sterile, mechanistic determinism. And yet, we cannot utter a really complex judgment about the novel unless we understand its relation to the rhythm of bourgeois culture.
In part, what we are dealing with here is the persistence and pervasiveness of bourgeois culture, precisely at the moment of its decline. It was one of Trotsky’s more flashing insights to note, in Literature and Revolution, that the most characteristic cultural expressions of a society occur at the moment of its decline, during the imminence of its downfall. The political novel is, quite literally, impossible today in the sense of a real synthesis. So is the social novel. For that matter, one can cogently argue that the novel itself, as an art form, is nearing dead-end.
For the object is gone, culturally speaking. The tactile, palpable external world which was at the center of centuries of Western art is no longer there. And the process in literature for over a century has been toward subjectivity. In the doing, we have received magnificent works of the imagination, the various, eclectic, exciting and probing gift of decadence. We cannot deny Mann’s insight: our sickness has been creative. It goes without saying that the price is too high, monstrously so, that our beauty, warped and deformed but beauty nevertheless, is the consequence of a social agony and that a human being must prefer an insipid peace to a hundred Guernicas. Yet the major point that I wish to make here is not political or moral, but critical.
As long as our present cultural situation lasts – and in all of its permutations it will continue as long as our social situation does – we are cut off from a whole series of literary creations. Among them is the political novel. But that is not so serious, for that is a subclass of a subclass. The disturbing question is the one posed and answered by Orwell in his essay Inside the Whale. Are we now in a plight where we can say, as Orwell did, that there is the “impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself in shape?” Is the situation of the political novel, its dead end, the symptom of a much deeper malaise which infects all our literature? I would not be as aggressively pessimistic as Orwell – nor so optimistic as to rule out the possible truth of his grim insight.
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