When Sinclair’s Lanny Budd goes to the week-long Nazi Party orgy at
Nüremberg, he sees before him a people who have surrendered personal
responsibility to a father image quite as fully as did Silone’s simple
peasants. A people smarting from humiliating defeat had accepted the
dream of a thousand year Reich. And it had been sold to them by a man
as possessed as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Roderich Stamm in
_Heaven Pays No Dividends_ is oblivious to much of the transition that
takes place in Germany during the late twenties and early thirties.
Through his father’s conversations, however, he senses some of the
problems soon to be expressed in political action: “They contained
the whole uncertainty of our age. There was something intangible and
threatening in the air. It had all started with the world crisis and
the huge unemployment figures, and then the Nazis had come, and then
the Communists.” These forces and the movements which they precipitate
are too strong for a republic barely fifteen years old. A people used
to authoritarian rule reverts to it. When war comes Roderich realizes
“we were all involved, because all of us had capitulated before HIM
during all these years. We had all given HIM permission to start a war
at HIS discretion, when HE decided it was necessary.” One is justified
in distrusting stereotypes as inaccurate generalizations. But in this
case the stereotype is borne out and emphasized in the novel.
Many areas of these national portraits are only roughed in, with the
fine-line detail missing. In other places there are gaps. This is
partly because some of the groups of novels are small. It is also
due to the fact that the novelist does not exhaustively examine
voting trends, statistically analyze attitudinal changes, or plot the
frequency of government realignments. Sinclair frequently approaches
this method and Dos Passos gives some of the raw data upon which such
estimates can be made. But generally the novelist tends to proceed from
individuals to groups, extrapolating group behavior from individual
behavior. This is the method used by Koestler and Conrad. While it
does not have the statistical validity of the political scientist’s
work, it has advantages which complement it. The novelist, with his
artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes,
can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama
and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably
alive on the printed page.
chapter five
The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior
The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel
for classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of
overt political behavior--party membership, acceptance of discipline,
performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are
not parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a
background for the second. Although the first is economic, its validity
lies in the fact that party lines tend to follow economic ones, that
modern political theory, particularly that of revolution, has been
based increasingly upon economic facts as well as political ones. The
approach of this chapter differs from that of the previous one in
tracing behavior patterns which cut across national lines.