The Proletarian Novel

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By SEAN O'FAOLAIN Author:on the Proletarian Novel is still an aim rather than a reality its grammarians have already enough to go on to challenge the alternatives. Their task is not difficult since the modern novel is, patently, much like a large family of weedy words brought up on a thin diet of emotion.

When Hardy closed a long line of Prometheans, already behind him, Naturalism (which is the art of describing nothing;

i.e., slices of life hung in a vacuum) with the greatest possible

accuracy and SubjectiVism (which is the art of describing nothing with the greatest possible solemnity) were replacing the vigour of his predecessors.'

" What appears beautiful to me," wrote Flaubert, to his mistress, " would be a book about nothing, a book without any attachment to the external world, which would support itself by the inner strength of its style, just as the world supports itself in the air without being held up, a book which would be almost without a subject, or in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible. The most beautiful books aro those with the least matter."

That quotation I take from one of tM most vigorous and provocative analyses of the dying modern novel that I

have ever read—a book* which is certainly not about nothing —written by a young Communist who was killed only the other day leading an attack out of Madrid against what he must have felt "as the incarnation of all that is destroying the vigour of literature. And, thinking sadly of the epic line, the Defoc-Fielding-Balzac line, he adds this comment

on the course of the novel in the last century : Once this (Flaubertian) view was accepted the way was clear for the new "realism" which took a refined portion of life's anatomy as little interesting as the suburban street or the Mayfair party. Revolting against the narrow view imposed on their vision by this theory, others drew their inspiration from Freud and Dostoievsky in order to give us the poetic picture of their own stream of con- scioulinesii. So, in the end, the novel has died away into two tendencies whose opposition has as little about it that is important to us as the mediaeval battles of the ancients.

But what, then, is important to us ? And where does the so-called Proletarian Novel offer a definition of what is " real " in life ?

The Defoe-Fielding-Balzac line, it appears, defines the choice of the proletarian, because here character moves freely in action ; personality is intact and expansive ; and above all, the defining background of society is indicated realistically. But, once we use the word " realistically," we come against the rocks, that beset this question. We think of the heritage of that line ; may agree that such men as Sterne_ or Richardson disintegrated it ; pass over

Jane Austen as. an, ambiguous author—and come plump up against Dickens-. Dickens is the rock on which we all split. To the proletarian critic he is inunense, an undeniable genius, but a lesser man than Balzac. Why ? Simply because he is a romantic. He looked at Seven Dials and wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, and want, and beggary rose in his mind ; and then, sentimentalising reality, he wrote about it all as a fantaisiste. The charge is just. But to say that Balzac was greater than Dickens, or Dickens greater than

Balzac, remains a futile business. If there is a lack of realism in Dickens, there is is lick of gentleness in Balzac ; if Dickens does not know what evil is, Balzac does not know either humour or fantasy. It is merely a modern turn of the social conscience that finds Dickens unsatisfying; he is in spite of us and himself

a great artist. Clearly it is two different concepts of what is real that face one another here, not two artistic credos.

The Novel-anti - the People. J. Rttlplt Fox. ;.(4Wrenee and Wi:thart: 0E9'

But there was no second Dickens; and there seems to be small likelihood of our ever seeing another like hini. Society has taken on shapes and conditions that Make it well-nigh impossible for any man to revel again in life as he revelled' in it—or, rather, revelled about it, for the proletarian will insist that even in his time he had to evade quantities of life. And there is no denying that the novel has, in the meantime, gone down the blind alley of the highly-select region of artistic expression called Naturalism—the " slice of life " chosen with fastidious care.

The average man has become the hero, not the typical man, and this average man has about as much fire in him as a damp squib. The novel has avoided this blind-alley. only by the most extravagant and strenuous efforts to keep Romance alive, seeking wherever it can be found the inspira- tion of chance storms, as with Malraux in 'Cochin-Chinn, Faulkner among the death-flyers of New OrleanS, O'Flaherty among the Irish gunmen, Hemingway at Caporetto, and so onthe Lost Balloons of the novel flying from one " jag " to another " jag," sometimes succeeding, 'sometimes not, in running into the welcome storm of emotion—but not a method, surely, that is likely to establish any tradition, or give any novelist the slightest security over his own talent. They are the Individualists, the creative anarchists of the, modern novel.

All this, I think, is roughly true, and it is true that per- sonality disappears from life under the levelling conditions of our tithes. But how can one " engineer the soul," in Stalin's' phrase, if the soul is • not there to depict in action ? The' suburban clerk will never make a Toni Jones. We play be' sick and sore at the sight of man at war with his society, more likely man steam-rolled by it, but will that 'give us' another rollicking Pickwick ? The proletarian replies : " No.' What you must do is to depict man, at war with society, but in harmony with the course of history. There the epic note will return again, and •man be seen as lord of his destiny,' enlarged by the conflict of his body and facing- reality, offering to it, and drawing from it, the fullnesg of his being." • I have no doubt it can be done, 'and is, in fact; being' done. Any novel that acknowledges the full force of' cir-' cumstances, and allows human character the fulleSt play in those circumstances, must do all that. But there is this distinction, that what emerges from this conflict' betn-een the individual and circumstances is the indiVidual 'and not the circumstances. There is the further distinctiOn, denied by -Ralph Fox in his preliminary chapters on the theory of the Marxist novel, that 'the fate of man does' riot, for all of us; end "here, and that, in that belief, values will emerge' greater than the Material import of, let us Say', the " *ant and beggary' of Seven Dials." He lkiniself "offers us as a. subject the magnificent ,figure of Dimitrot the hero of-the Reichstag trial ; his own sacrifice, indefensible' on Marxiit grounds (fOr his 'utility- is" a writer was; judging by this fine' book, far greater;surely, than as 'a soldier), is 'a better one- the individualist hero breaking down, in the name of 'his own' ego, philosophies based 'ultimately on a mass That ego is, in the end, the main interest of every' novelist—that and the moral and philosophical 'implications' of alt activity that can never be seen other than in the purity of an individual life. If the Proletarian Novel, howeVer,' does no more than insist that the individual life must be a! full life, nothing omitted, neither in character nor conditions, it will-have done a great- deal to -restore vitality to the emasculated highbrow novel of the day.