chapter one
The Study of the Political Novel
=The Importance of the Political Novel=
In an age in which progressively more men have engaged in politics
while the politics themselves have become increasingly complex,
any means for understanding these interrelated phenomena becomes
correspondingly more valuable. The techniques of science are constantly
being brought to bear upon this problem of understanding. But one of
the best means of enlightenment has been available for more than a
hundred years. Since its beginning the political novel has fulfilled
the ancient function of art. It has described and interpreted
human experience, selectively taking the facts of existence and
imposing order and form upon them in an aesthetic pattern to make
them meaningful. The political novel is important to the student
of literature as one aspect of the art of fiction, just as is the
psychological novel or the economic novel. But it is important in
a larger context, too. The reader who wants a vivid record of past
events, an insight into the nature of political beings, or a prediction
of what lies ahead can find it in the political novel. As an art form
and an analytical instrument, the political novel, now as ever before,
offers the reader a means for understanding important aspects of the
complex society in which he lives, as well as a record of how it
evolved.
=The Nature of the Political Novel: Problems of Definition and
Selection=
The political novel is hard to define. To confine it to activity in
the houses of Congress or Parliament is to look at the top floor of
the political structure and to ignore the main floor and basement
which support it. One has to follow the novelist’s characters, on the
stump and into committee rooms--sometimes even farther. But the line
is drawn where the political element is forced into the background
by the sociological or economic. The political milieu develops in
part out of the conditions described in Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_
and John Steinbeck’s _The Grapes of Wrath_. Although these books are
proletarian novels, to include them would be to open the door to a
flood of books that would spread far beyond the space limitations of
this study. Of course, proletarian novels which are also political
novels are included. Two such books are André Malraux’s _Man’s Fate_
and Steinbeck’s _In Dubious Battle_. But for the purposes of this
study, a cast of characters drawn from the proletariat is not enough,
even if they are oppressed economically and socially. They must carry
out political acts or move in a political environment. Also excluded
are novels such as Herman Melville’s _Mardi_ which treat politics
allegorically or symbolically. Here a political novel is taken to mean
a book which directly describes, interprets, or analyzes political
phenomena.
Our prime material is the politician at work: legislating, campaigning,
mending political fences, building his career. Also relevant are the
people who influence him: his parents, his wife, his mistress, the
girl who jilted him, the lobbyist who courted his favor. The primary
criterion for admission of a novel to this group was the portrayal
of political acts, so many of them that they formed the novel’s main
theme or, in some cases, a major theme. These acts are not always
obvious ones like legislating. In Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_ a mine
owner contributes financial support to political movements which
will provide a more favorable climate for his business. _In Dubious
Battle_ presents labor organizers who manipulate a strike to serve the
political ends of the Communist Party. The terminology of the theater
can be helpful in bridging the gap between the world of actual events
and the world of fiction. It helps to show how various aspects of the
actual political process are translated into the forms of fiction.
The author may concentrate his attention upon the actors--the public
officials who make decisions and wield authority on behalf of the
community or the whole society. A good many of the actors may not be
public officials, but rather private citizens whose acts are political:
voicing opinions, helping to select candidates, voting, attempting to
influence the political process, revolting. These actors, and those
who are public officials, may demonstrate factors in the overall drama
which are predominantly political in their consequences: attitudes,
social power, social stratification. The novelist will be concerned
with the roles the actors play and the lines they speak, the purposes
they have and the strategies they employ. He may concentrate upon the
interaction between these actors or between them and the audience--the
public. An author may choose to emphasize the drama as a whole rather
than the individual actors, highlighting the stage upon which it is
played out--the country or area of national life in which the scenes
are laid. This emphasis upon the drama will throw into sharp relief the
events and decisions in which the actors participate, and the framework
of rules or custom against which they take place.
The novels considered here deal with political activity at all
levels--local, state, national, and international. If, as von
Clausewitz said, “War is merely the continuation of Politics by other
means,” one may find politics in war, too. This study, therefore,
includes works on revolutionary as well as parliamentary politics. On
the international level especially one encounters group attitudes which
are politically relevant. The groups may be the conventional social,
economic, or political strata of British and American society, or they
may be those of the rigid Marxist state. Other relevant attitudes
spring from national characteristics, and many political novels
identify some of them. This definition is wide and inclusive, but so is
political activity.
The primary sources of this study are eighty-one political novels. Over
half of them are by Americans. The next largest group is the work of
English writers. Other novels are taken from Italian, French, German,
Russian, and South African literature. These eighty-one novels are the
minimum necessary to give an understanding of the political novel. At
the same time, this is the maximum number that could be included in the
study. Only in the case of the English and American political novel has
an attempt been made to trace the development of literary genre. Some
of these novels are used because they show artistic excellence, others
because they show how the form developed historically. More American
than English novels are used because they are more readily available,
many of them in inexpensive, paper-bound editions. It was not possible
to attempt the same outline with the other literatures because of
the brevity of this study. For some of them, too, a sufficiently
representative group of political novels was not available.
Most often the authors deal with their own countries, although they
sometimes write about a foreign land. Some of them are hard to
pigeonhole: Henry James, an American expatriate writing about London
terrorists in _The Princess Casamassima_; Joseph Conrad, an Anglicized
Pole analyzing Russian revolutionaries in _Under Western Eyes_; Arthur
Koestler, an Austrian-educated Hungarian living in France, describing
the Moscow trials in _Darkness at Noon_. This is one reason why it
is more fruitful for present purposes to avoid strict concentration
on national literatures and to accept valid insights into national
characteristics and behavior patterns no matter what the language of
their source.
=Characteristics of the Political Novel=
In _The Charterhouse of Parma_ the witty and urbane Stendhal says,
“Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle
of a concert, something loud and vulgar yet a thing to which it is
not possible to refuse one’s attention.” His own work contradicts
the great French novelist, yet his comment is perfectly accurate for
many other novelists. Politics in some modern novels of political
corruption, such as Charles F. Coe’s _Ashes_, do seem loud and vulgar,
and in books like Upton Sinclair’s the reader may hear not one pistol
shot but a cannonade. But this is not to say that the use of political
material must disrupt a work of literature. The trick, of course, is
all in knowing how. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an artistically weak,
politically successful work in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, while Fyodor
Dostoyevsky produced a politically unsuccessful, artistically enduring
classic in _The Possessed_.
The quality of these novels varies widely, just as would that of a
group dealing with religion, sex, or any other complex, controversial
theme. In general, the European novels considered here attain a
higher level than the American books. This is partly because only the
better European novels are treated. But they are also superior to
the best American works, except for a few comparatively recent ones,
because of the wider variety of political experience presented, the
greater concern with ideology and theory, and the deeper insight
into individual motivation and behavior. This in turn is probably due
to several factors. From the time when the United States attained
its independence until the end of the first quarter of this century,
it possessed a relatively stable set of doctrines and frames of
reference (compared to those existing in Europe) within which the
individual led his political life. Although American parties rose and
declined, although the Union was preserved, its borders expanded, and
international responsibility accepted, this evolution was orderly and
limited compared to that which occurred in Europe. The Declaration
of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights provided a
stable yet sufficiently flexible political framework. Europe during the
same period reverberated with the French Revolution, the Napoleonic
Wars, the unification of Germany and Italy, and the Russian Revolution.
These were violent changes not only in theory but in the actual form
of government. It is not unnatural then that American political novels
range over a relatively narrower area, with their main emphasis on
local or national subjects, while those of European authors delineate
changing, conflicting, and radically different ideologies and resultant
events. It is only since the 1930s, with the increase in centralized
government, the impact of international Communism, and the recent
appearance on both the Right and the Left of what seem to be threats
to traditional American freedoms, that the American political novel
has begun to approach the European in breadth of theme, concern with
political theory, and interpretation of varying political behavior
patterns.
The larger number of bad novels in the American group is also due
to the fact that more American novels are treated. Because of their
greater availability both for research and teaching, it is possible to
show the evolution of this genre in the United States. In doing this
one is able to examine the good ones, old and new, such as Henry Adams’
_Democracy_, John Dos Passos’ _District of Columbia_ trilogy, and Irwin
Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_. One pays, however, by suffering through
period pieces such as F. Marion Crawford’s _An American Politician_.
Less obtuse politically but nearly as abysmal artistically, is Paul
Leicester Ford’s _The Honorable Peter Stirling_. One is compensated,
however, not only by the view of a developing genre, but also by the
recording of significant periods in American national life and of the
people who helped shape it, as in the Dos Passos work, and by the
sensitive and penetrating analysis of central problems in contemporary
life, as in Shaw’s novel.
The English political novel is also uneven. That its depths are not
so low as those in the American novel is due in part to the political
heritage which its authors share with their colleagues on the
continent. Its authors work from a long and rich political history in
which the evolution has been less violent but no less steady.
=The Novelist and the Political Scientist=
The differences between the methods of the political novelist and the
political scientist are worth studying. Their intentions are often
at variance. Whereas the scientist is dedicated to objectivity and
statistical accuracy, the novelist is often consciously subjective; if
his work is intended as a political instrument, as were _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ and _The Possessed_, scrupulous attention to the claims of the
other side will invariably lessen the emotional impact and political
worth of the novel. If a scholar sets out to examine the rise of
Nazism, he will have to treat not only the Beer Hall Putsch and the
Reichstag fire, but German history and the German national character as
well. He will chronicle the effects of Versailles, the staggering of
the Weimar Republic, and the growing strength of the Brown Shirts. He
will be concerned with national attitudes, with the relative strength
of the parties that vied with the National Socialists. His study will
gauge the effects of the aging Hindenburg and the demoniac Hitler on
a people smarting from defeat, searching for a scapegoat, and longing
for a resurgence. And all this will be backed with statistics where
possible. It will be a cogently reasoned analysis with documented
references to available sources. Also, the study will be aimed at
a fairly homogeneous and well-defined audience. The appeal will be
intellectual. If emotion creeps in, the work is probably bad.
The novelist who is to examine these same events will present them
quite differently, even apart from the techniques of fiction. If he is
a rather dispassionate chronicler of human foibles and frailties such
as, say, Somerset Maugham, he will probably portray a group of people
through whose actions the rise and significance of Nazism will become
meaningful. The reader will probably observe the drifting war veteran,
the hard-pressed workman, the anxious demagogue. Out of these lives and
their interactions will emerge an objective study of the sources of
a political movement and of the shape it took. If the novelist is an
enthusiastic Nazi, the book will reflect his particular bias. The storm
troopers will become heroic Horst Wessels, the young women stalwart
Valkyries, the Führer an inspired prophet and leader. Out of the novel
will come a plea for understanding or a justification of violence and a
perverted view of German national destiny. The book will be emotionally
charged, a calculated effort to produce a specific desired response.
If this series of historical events is used by a Frenchman, they will
undergo another change. There will probably be an evocation of the
Junker mentality, of Prussian militarism, of hordes of gray-green
figures under coal-scuttle helmets. If this novel is not a call to
arms, it will be a warning cry to signal a growing danger. These three
fictional books will use the same staples of the novelist’s art, yet
each will differ from the others in motivation and attitude. They will
portray aspects of the same complex of events treated by the political
scientist, but this will be virtually their only similarity.
A disadvantage for the novelist is his need to make his book appealing
enough to sell and to make his reader want to buy his next novel.
Although the scientist too must make his work as polished and
interesting as he can, the novelist does not, like him, find his
readers among subscribers to the learned journals. He cannot rely
upon sales prompted by the need to keep abreast of research in a
specialized field. If a novelist is to stay in print, political
savoir-faire and intellectual capacity are not enough. He has to sell
copies. Perhaps this is one reason why all but a few of these novels
have a love story accompanying the political theme. Sometimes the
love story inundates it, as in _An American Politician_; in other
novels, such as Sinclair’s _Presidential Agent_, it is peripheral and
pieced out with flirtations. It may be that these novelists include
this element because love is as much a part of life as politics. Its
nearly universal presence is a reminder, however, of one aspect of the
novelist’s task and one way in which his work differs considerably from
that of the political scientist.
The advantages of the novelist’s method over the political scientist’s
compensate for the drawbacks. These advantages do not necessarily
produce a better work, one which gives more insight into a problem
or explains it better. They do, however, offer more latitude and
fewer restrictions. The novelist may use all the techniques of the
political scientist. Sinclair’s Boston is studded with as many
references to actual events, people, and documents as most scientific
studies, although it is permeated by a violent partisanship which
would make a scholarly study highly suspect. But this points up one of
the novelist’s advantages: he can use the methods of scholarship to
document his case and then supplement them with heroes and villains who
add an emotional appeal to the intellectual one. This string to the
novelist’s bow is a strong one. He can create a character like Shaw’s
Clement Archer in _The Troubled Air_, while the scientist is forced to
use opinion research, carefully documented sources, and well-verified
trends in treating the problem of deprivation of livelihood as a
penalty for suspected political unreliability. Sometimes the scientist
uses case histories, but the subjects are often identified by initials
and treated with such antiseptic objectivity that almost no emotional
impact comes through. The loss of Clement Archer’s job, because he
has employed actors blacklisted for suspected Communist activity by
a newsletter acting as a self-appointed judge, presents this general
problem with more frightening immediacy and reader-involvement than an
excellent scholarly study could ever do. Archer becomes one embodiment
of the problem--a rather naïve but courageous liberal made into a
sacrificial goat because of his fight for what he believes to be
traditional and critical American rights. If he wants to, the novelist
can use historical personages to flesh out his story. Although the
reader does not see him in its pages, Dos Passos’ _The Grand Design_
uses the figure of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the background as one of
the mainsprings of the action. An individual may appear in transparent
fictional guise. The _roman à clef_ has many representatives in the
political novel. Pyotr Verhovensky in Dostoyevsky’s _The Possessed_ has
been identified as the revolutionary Sergei Nechaev. Hamer Shawcross in
Howard Spring’s _Fame Is the Spur_ is thought to be Ramsay MacDonald.
The governor-dictators who rampage through Dos Passos’ _Number One_,
Adria Langley’s _A Lion Is in the Streets_, and Robert Penn Warren’s
_All the King’s Men_ look and act much like Huey Long. The novelist
ranges backward into time as does the scientist. Maugham’s _Then
and Now_ brings to life the wily Niccolo Machiavelli, and Samuel
Shellabarger’s _Prince of Foxes_ reexamines the sinister Cesare Borgia.
When the novelist goes forward into time he need not be confined
to a mathematical extrapolation of birth rates, trade balances, or
electoral trends. Instead, he can create, whole and entire, the world
which he thinks will grow out of the one in which he lives or which
he sees emerging. The scientist may attempt to define the group mind
or examine pressures toward enforced conformity in political thought.
But George Orwell in _1984_ creates his own terrifying vision of
the world thirty years from now. And this story is frighteningly
believable. It does not even require Coleridge’s “willing suspension of
disbelief which constitutes poetic faith.” With its three super states
perpetually at war, its Newspeak vocabulary including “thoughtcrime”
and “doublethink,” its omnipresent Big Brother, 1984 reflects aspects
of our world out of which the novelist’s vision grew. Besides the
political apparatus which Orwell builds, he creates a protagonist,
Winston Smith, one man out of all the masses of Party members and
Proles who revolts against the system, providing the reader with a
focus for personal association. The reader follows him through his
round of duties in the Ministry of Truth, into his state-forbidden love
affair, and finally down into the depths of the Ministry of Love where
he is tortured into conformity before he will be “vaporized” and poured
into the stratosphere as gas. If he likes, the author can move at
will seven centuries into the future, where Aldous Huxley erected his
_Brave New World_. From a world of mechanization, deteriorating family
ties, and ascendant pragmatic science, he can artistically extrapolate
a planet ruled cooperatively by ten World Controllers. Embryos are
conditioned within their glass flasks and then decanted into a rigidly
stratified society where stability has outlawed change and Ford has
replaced God. And there are memorable people--sensuous Lenina Crowne,
and the Savage, a “natural man” who commits suicide rather than choose
between prehistoric primitivism and soulless modernism.
Not only does the novelist have complete freedom in time and space,
he has the right to use any of the devices found attractive in
communication since the first articulate primate squatting in the
firelight gave his interpretation of experience to his hairy brothers.
The point of the story can be driven home or made more palatable
with laughter, suspense, or a cops-and-robbers chase that will make
it memorable. Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish guerrillas and Ignazio
Silone’s Italian peasants are often amusing. The reader may remember
the inspired profanity or the droll proverbs; he will also remember
the fight against Fascism and oppression. From _Darkness at Noon_ the
reader will take with him Rubashov’s midnight arrest, the wait for the
NKVD bullet in the back of the neck; he will retain, too, the irony of
the disillusioned Bolshevik destroyed by the monster he helped create.
This attempt to differentiate the novelist’s approach from the
scientist’s is not meant to prove that the novelist’s is better. It
is simply different, representing another aspect of the difference
between science and art. Each discipline tries to describe and
interpret experience. Where one does it by means of well-defined,
rigidly controlled techniques within generally accepted boundaries,
the other is highly flexible, embodying a view of life shaped by an
individual set of preferences and dislikes, talents and blind spots.
Each of these divergent methods offers advantages and disadvantages.
One should not go to political novels expecting to find, except in
rare cases, complete objectivity, solidly documented references, and
exhaustive expositions of political theory. He should not always
anticipate credibility. When problems are presented, the reader may not
find answers or even indications of the directions in which they may
be found. But one cannot go to a scientific monograph with the hope of
meeting in its pages someone whose life is an embodiment of a problem,
or whose survival represents the gaining of a goal, his death the
losing of it.
These two approaches to the study of politics complement each other,
just as the physician and clergyman both mean to keep their identical
patient and parishioner well and whole. The novelist can, however,
enter well into the scientist’s field. When he deals with actual
events, he tries to record them as they happened. If the names and
places are changed, he is usually faithful to the manner or meaning of
the events. In _Bricks Without Straw_ Albion W. Tourgée assures the
reader that these events or others exactly like them took place during
the Reconstruction era in the South, and there is no reason to doubt
him. Sinclair’s _Oil!_ exhaustively treats the Sacco-Vanzetti case; it
is completely opinionated, but it is a historical account, nonetheless,
of one of the most memorable political cases in American history.
More than a historian, the political novelist is also an analyst. He
sees cause-effect relationships at work, he looks into stimulus and
response, motivation and satisfaction. Stendhal is not content merely
to describe military and political events during the Napoleonic era; he
goes beneath the surface to explain what some of them meant.
=The Purposes of This Study=
This examination of the political novel will go beyond simply charting
its development. In order to examine it as a distinct literary form, it
will be necessary to discuss its practitioners, the literary techniques
they use, the purposes they aim at, and their success in achieving
them. More than this, there will be attention to the function of these
political novels, at the time they were written and now in our time.
In the forefront will be an attempt to show what the reader can learn,
whether he approaches this body of work from a particular discipline
such as political science or literature, or whether he goes to it as a
general reader wanting either enlightenment or entertainment.
The purposes and scope of each chapter indicate the purposes of the
study as a whole. Chapter Two, “The Novel as Political Instrument,”
examines the effect of the political novel on politics. Some novels
contain heroes presented against a political background which might
just as well have been mercantile or medical; other novels are intended
to have politics as their subject; still other novels are meant to
have definite political consequences. This chapter is chiefly concerned
with novels of this last type. But it is necessary to look at others,
too, for in creating life in his novel the artist will often reflect
his own preferences, and they may affect those of his reader. Chapter
Three, “The Novelist as Political Historian,” describes the way in
which the writer may weave into his story the threads of history,
recording not only the lives of his creations, but actual events in
the lives of nations. By virtue of his special skills, he can recreate
these events with a vividness found in few scholarly histories. Chapter
Four, “The Novel as Mirror of National Character,” is devoted to an
examination of the cultural and national differences discernible
in these novels. There appear to be some denominators of political
behavior which remain common no matter what the scene of action. This
chapter deals with the numerators, the quantities which vary from
culture to culture. Chapter Five, “The Novelist as Analyst of Group
Political Behavior,” demonstrates the insight the novel can give into
political actions which derive from group attitudes, pressures, and
responses rather than individual ones. The novelist may use several
indices to determine how a society is structured, which of its groups
is most homogeneous, which most apparent in the effect it has upon
the body politic. Chapter Six, “The Novelist as Analyst of Individual
Political Behavior,” shows how the basic unit in all political
equations is treated. The novelist portrays the person who moves in
the main stream of politics and the one who stands on its edges. In
most cases the acts of these people are examined--their motives, their
effects. As in any other kind of fiction, characters are created who
are complete individuals, believable and unique. But sometimes they are
also typical of a number of people. Chapter Seven, “Some Conclusions,”
emphasizes the major points made in the study. It also discusses what
may be expected of the political novel in the future. The annotated
bibliography gives the author, title, and date for each novel.
In terms of organization, this study proceeds from the most direct
relationship between the novel and politics to the least direct
relationship. Chapter Two shows how this art form can actually
influence the political process. Chapter Six, on the other hand,
indicates the way in which the novel treats the individual, who, with
the exception of the outstanding leader, has far less direct influence
upon politics than groups or nations. Chapter Three deals with the way
in which the novel has recorded some major events in the political
scientist’s field from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Chapters Four through Six proceed from larger to smaller political
units.
In short, the aims of this study are to indicate the gradual
development of the political novel in England and the United States,
to show what it has produced in several other countries, and to
demonstrate the insights it can give in this area of human behavior to
students of literature, politics, and related disciplines, and to the
general reader.
chapter two
The Novel as Political Instrument
A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular
faction is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent.
A writer may sternly tell himself at the outset that he will be
completely impartial, only to have the reviewers note all sorts of
bias, real or imagined, of which he may not have been conscious. This
happened to Turgenev when he published _Fathers and Sons_, and it
continues to happen every year. The intensity of the authors’ feelings
varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing interest. The novels
in this chapter were included because they contain definite opinions,
sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them never exhort
the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s point of
view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the
reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist
gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course
of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted
beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely
as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into
the mailboxes of a sleeping city.