=Joseph Conrad: Colonial Politics and Revolution=
Joseph Conrad’s _Nostromo_ (1904) may be read as a history if one
interprets it as a typical case of government-making by foreign
industrial interests in late-nineteenth-century South America. With
the American Holroyd as his silent partner and financial backer,
British-educated Charles Gould uses the wealth of his San Tomas silver
mine to finance the successful revolt of Occidental Province from
the Republic of Costaguana, which is in the grip of the tyrannical
Montero brothers. A good deal of actual history is injected through
the reminiscences of old Giorgio Viola, who had fought under
Garibaldi across South America to Italy. But it was in _The Secret
Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_ that Conrad recorded more memorable
history. Both books give extensive accounts of revolutionary and
counter-revolutionary activities. A superb artist, Conrad did not
need to go to a series of actual events and people. His imaginative
synthesis of the factors which produce them created, however,
a true pattern of this whole complex of revolutionary activity.
Besides the sensitive exploration of the characters of Razumov,
Nathalia, and Victorovitch, one finds actions which characterized the
movement in which they were swept up. Conrad presents the espionage
and counter-espionage, the bomb plots, and the abortive revolts.
Though he wrote out of revulsion at revolutionary activity, his
point of view did not blind him to the miseries of Czarist Russia.
With artistic integrity, he described the repressive commissions,
their imprisonments, exiles, and executions. His account of the fate
of Mikulin, chief of Czarist counter-espionage, makes extremely
interesting reading in 1954. For Mikulin one could almost substitute
Koestler’s Rubashov:
Later on, the larger world first heard of him in the very hour
of his downfall, during one of those State trials which astonish
and puzzle the average man who reads the newspapers by a glimpse
of unsuspected intrigues. And in the stir of vaguely seen
monstrosities, in that momentary, mysterious disturbance of muddy
waters, Councilor Mikulin went under, dignified, with only a calm,
emphatic protest of his innocence--nothing more. No disclosures
damaging to a harassed autocracy, complete fidelity to the secret
of the miserable _arcana imperii_, deposited in his patriotic
breast a display of bureaucratic stoicism in a Russian official’s
ineradicable, almost sublime contempt for truth; stoicism of
silence understood only by very few of the initiated, and not
without a certain cynical grandeur of self-sacrifice on the part
of a Sybarite. For the terribly heavy sentence turned Councilor
Mikulin civilly into a corpse, and actually into something very
much like a common convict.
It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine
democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its
enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.
=The Soviet State: Its Roots and Growth=
It was this same Czarist Russia of which Turgenev wrote in _Fathers
and Sons_. Examining Nihilism, he also looked at contemporary events
such as the emancipation of serfs and the attempts of some landowners
to improve the lot of their workers despite agrarian disturbances.
Violently anti-revolutionary, Dostoyevsky replied in _The Possessed_ to
what appeared to him to be Turgenev’s advocacy of revolution. In his
massive and powerful novel he showed the agitation produced by groups
such as the “quintets” organized by Pyotr Verhovensky, themselves the
forerunners of the Communist cells.
In Koestler’s _Darkness at Noon_ Dostoyevsky’s nightmare becomes an
even more terrible actuality. In his introductory note Koestler writes:
The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical
circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of
the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of
men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of
them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to
their memory.
Through flashbacks the reader sees Stalin, Lenin, and the members of
the First International Congress. Not only does he witness the breaking
of Rubashov for his trial, but also the series of cold and merciless
acts of expediency which have eroded the soul of the old Bolshevik
and left him ready for his final service to the Party. Koestler
describes the agonizing process by which the confession is extracted.
Gletkin, his interrogator, supplies the rationale for the whole
performance and for most of the repressive acts of the state as well.
In some ways, Rubashov is reminiscent of Trotsky, with his pince-nez,
his record as a commander in the Revolution, his extensive service
outside Russia, and his onetime rank as a top Communist. (A closer
resemblance to Trotsky is that of the Party’s fictitious scapegoat in
1984. Emmanuel Goldstein, with his fuzzy hair and small goatee, is the
arch counter-revolutionary, the author of _The Theory and Practice
of Oligarchical Collectivism_.) _Darkness at Noon_ is a stark and
brilliant book. Artistically satisfying, it also presents a record of a
characteristic phenomenon of Russian Communism.
=Marie-Henri Beyle [Stendhal]: Napoleonic Panorama=
Thirty-nine years after he followed Napoleon’s armies into Italy,
Stendhal published a sweeping novel of that era. _The Charterhouse of
Parma_ follows the career of Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo,
from birth to death. It shows the influence upon his life of his
beautiful, devoted, and scheming aunt, the Contessa Gina Pietranera.
We meet her lover, Conte Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, Minister to
Prince Ernesto IV of Parma and politician extraordinary, and become
privy to the intrigues of the court. This large novel is crammed with
incident--duels, assignations, affairs, prison-breaks, and even the
assassination of a monarch. Besides all this, Stendhal relates some of
the major events in French and Italian history during nearly thirty
years. In particular, we see Napoleon’s triumphal entries into Italy
in 1796, 1801, and 1815. Fabrizio even participates on the fringes of
the battle of Waterloo. With each arrival and departure, Napoleon’s
adherents and those of the Austrian Emperor play musical chairs
for the positions of power. Even after Napoleon has been banished
to Elba a struggle goes on between Liberals (or Jacobins) and the
proponents of absolute monarchy. The Liberal cause is perverted in
Parma by the rascally General Fabio Conti, who ironically serves as
Ernesto’s political jailer, but the temper of this movement in Europe
is reflected in the thoughts and actions of many of the characters.
Describing authoritarian government and the struggles against it, as
well as the interrelation of a corrupt church and a corrupt state,
Stendhal’s classic successfully fuses the lives of his people with the
times in which they lived.
=André Malraux: Comintern v. Kuomintang=
Nearly a hundred years later André Malraux wrote of a time of
political chaos in _Man’s Fate_. But the span of his novel was four
months rather than thirty years. Malraux gives a detailed account
of Chiang Kai-shek’s military victory of 1927 in Shanghai and his
subsequent crushing of the Chinese Communist forces which fought him.
Not only does he examine the roles of the immediate participants--the
White Guards, the governmental army, the “Reds” and “Blues” of the
Kuomintang--but also the intervention of outside forces as well--the
Russian Communists, the Shanghai bankers, the French Chamber of
Commerce, and the Franco-Asiatic Consortium. Malraux explores both the
military and economic aspects of the struggle. Kyo Gisors feels that
triumph here will mean “the U.S.S.R. increased to six hundred million
men.” Ferral, head of the Chamber and the Consortium, realizes that it
will also mean the end of his group’s commercial penetration of the
Yangtze basin. _Man’s Fate_ may be read for these insights into the
uprising of 1927 and also for background on the formulation of the
Communist decision which kept the armies of Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh,
and others within the Kuomintang until they gained enough strength to
defeat it.
=Jean-Paul Sartre: The Shadow of Munich=
Jean-Paul Sartre’s technique in _The Reprieve_ (1947) may remind one of
a photographer whose camera mechanism has gone awry. What he is trying
to do is clear, but it does not quite come off. Covering the week of
September 23-30, 1938, the novel is kaleidoscopic. Using more than nine
distinct couples or groups, Sartre jumps from the activities of one
to another with no transition. The scene may change from sentence to
sentence or even within a sentence. He obviously does this to portray
events which are happening simultaneously. He also uses this technique,
apparently, to give some sense of the chaos that reigned during the
week when Europe was on the verge of war. To show the impact of these
events upon France, he has selected his people from many strata
of French society. Interspersed between all these semi-fragmented
stories and incidents are dialogues between the politicians: Hitler
and his aides, Daladier and Bonnet, Chamberlain and Halifax, Sir
Nevile Henderson and Sir Horace Wilson. Through its characters the
novel ranges over Europe from England to the Sudetenland, finally
arriving at Munich. The book’s last two paragraphs serve as an example
of this technique which has a cumulative effect but which can be
extremely troublesome to a reader accustomed to conventional narration.
Daladier’s plane lands at Le Bourget as Milan Hlinka, a loyal Sudeten
Czech, hears of his country’s dismemberment:
A vast clamor greeted [Daladier], the crowd surged through the
cordon of police and swept the barriers away; Milan drank and said
with a laugh: “To France! To England! To our glorious allies!” Then
he flung the glass against the wall; they shouted: “Hurrah for
France! Hurrah for England! Hurrah for peace!” They were carrying
flags and flowers. Daladier stood on the top step and looked at
them dumbfounded. Then he turned to Leger and said between his
teeth:
“The God-damned fools!”
=Fascism through Italian Eyes=
Collectively, the novels of Ezio Taddei, Alberto Moravia, and Ignazio
Silone present a history of Italy during the years that saw Mussolini’s
rise, reign, and ruin. Taddei’s _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ (1945)
is set in Livorno in 1919. On one social level the novel follows
the career of Michele Pellizari, whose political odyssey leads him
from the Italian Socialist Party to the Fascist Party, and eventually
to a return to the land of his peasant people. On another level the
novel relates the rise of Rubachiuchi from jailbird to Fascist agent
provocateur and party official. There are many long passages throughout
the book in which Taddei drops his characters to go directly to a
recital of the events which led to the triumph of the Fascists. He
describes the return of war veterans filled with unrest and plagued
with unemployment. He records the failure of the Socialists as the
Fascists deliberately fill their Black Shirt squads with convicted
criminals. He sets down the workers’ capture of the factories and
finally the Fascist march on Rome.
In _The Conformist_ (1951) Alberto Moravia is more concerned with
a psychological portrait of Marcello Clerici than he is with the
description of the period. But in analyzing the trauma-inspired desire
for conformity which led to his job in Mussolini’s secret police,
Moravia tells a good deal about the political climate of Italy of
yesterday--from the palmy days of the Ethiopian campaign to the time
of the retribution which leaves Marcello and his family dead by the
roadside from the bullets of a strafing Allied plane.
Three of Ignazio Silone’s powerful novels, _Fontamara_, _Bread and
Wine_, and _A Handful of Blackberries_, deal with Italian political
history from the middle thirties to the years immediately following
World War II. Writing from exile when the Fascists were in power,
Silone consistently dealt with the repression of the Italian peasant.
Although he always focuses on small places such as Fontamara,
Pietrasecca, and San Luca, his characters are in a sense generic,
representing the non-Fascists who want only enough bread and wine to
live life decently with a little comfort and security. Silone describes
the regimentation of Italian life in the city as well as the village.
He also shows, as does Koestler in _Darkness at Noon_, the destruction
of the Communist Party after the rise to power of a dictatorship of the
Right. _A Handful of Blackberries_ has as its background the resurgence
of the Italian Communist Party after the fall of Mussolini. But Silone
preserves a continuity with his earlier books by a continuing account
of the struggle of the peasants against the landed families. In this
book the Tarocchi family is the equivalent of Prince Torlonia in
Fontamara. Fascism has been crushed, but the great landowner is still
the force which the peasant must fight to keep his small plot.
=Alan Paton: The Trek of the Boers=
Alan Paton’s _Cry, the Beloved Country_ and _Too Late the Phalarope_
detail the bases of South Africa’s explosive contemporary political
life. The anti-Negro legislation, the segregation, the police control
of the native peoples are all set forth. Paton’s moving novels record
the individual tragedies which transpire in this climate of tears and
violence. They also show their historical antecedents. The red flashes
which Pieter Van Vlaanderen wore on his shoulders during the war meant
that he would fight anywhere in Africa. To some this made him
a Smuts man, a traitor to the language and struggle of the
Afrikaner people, and a lickspittle of the British Empire and the
English King, fighting in an English war that no true Afrikaner
would take part in.
Here is a historical fact that illustrates the division between the
peoples of South Africa. Another is the Immorality Act of 1927, which
typifies another great source of conflict and causes Pieter’s ruin.
=Richard Kaufmann: The Third Reich=
Richard Kaufmann’s _Heaven Pays No Dividends_ (1951) is one of the
better books to come out of post-war Germany although it is not, as
its cover enthusiastically declares, the “modern _All Quiet on the
Western Front_.” Roderich Stamm is a completely non-political young
art historian who drifts into Nazi organizations because life is made
rather unpleasant for one outside them. His father, however, is an
economist who becomes attracted to the Nazi movement, lectures at
meetings, and eventually rises to an important post in Hitler’s Foreign
Ministry. As a gunner in a flak battery, Stamm fights in France,
Russia, and Germany. He emerges from the war minus several teeth,
an arm, and all his illusions. Each of the girls he has loved has
married or died. Through his eyes the reader sees the events leading
to victory in Paris and defeat on the road from Stalingrad. But one
also meets Gestapo men like Alfred Karawan and officials like Heinrich
Himmler. This novel chronicles the sound and fury of politics and war
as it explores the effects on the German people of the rise and fall
of the Third Reich. Less political than most novels in this study,
Kaufmann’s book has a good deal in common with many of them. The lives
of its people are played out against a backdrop of local, national, and
international affairs. And the novelist records not only the comings
and goings of the individuals he creates, but also the events of the
world in which they live.
chapter four
The Novel as Mirror of National Character
A political novel invariably reveals the attitude of its author toward
the national groups from which its characters come. Often the author
may seek to draw a national portrait by describing political behavior
which he believes is peculiarly characteristic of Spaniards or Greeks
or Englishmen. Two novels which thus portray the Russians are _Under
Western Eyes_ and _The Possessed_. The reader may work with a body
of novels which do not deliberately attempt to delineate national
character, and yet he will still arrive at some conception of national
behavior patterns. He can do this by assessing the subjects treated. If
most of the novels deal with underground activities, coups d’état, or
revolutions, he is justified in assuming that this is a people which
takes its politics seriously, and emotionally. If most of the novels
concern parliamentary give and take, clever use of rules, strategic
marches and countermarches, he has a right to conclude that this
national group has achieved some degree of political sophistication.
In dealing with the American novel one has to draw conclusions in this
way. There is a great deal of close attention to tactical and strategic
moves, but there is not too much scrutiny of larger behavior patterns.
The appraiser must use whatever materials seem capable of giving
insight: detailed discussion which is precisely in point, a recurrent
basic situation, or a group of themes whose frequency of appearance is
a good indication of their importance and relevance.
Enough American and English novels are included here to justify drawing
some conclusions. Some of the other national literatures discussed,
however, are represented by relatively few books. Since they constitute
a small sample, one can draw only tentative conclusions. But almost
all these novels are by very talented writers whose work is considered
representative of the best in this genre within their national
literatures. They are novels which offer skilled portrayals of life by
artists entitled to a hearing on their own merits. In order to extract
as much from the novel as possible in this area, comments on nations
have been accepted from foreigners where they seem valid.