Congress held in New York in April, 1935._)
1. _Definitions_
The world stands at the crossways. It goes forward into the socialist
order, or human culture, not as we know it but as we aspire to create
it, will perish. I do not say the way forward is certain. The life of
man is at issue; and with man the alternatives are present, at all
times, of life or of death. They are present now. But this is certain.
To agonize within the present system, to refuse to get clear by the
social revolution of the working classes, means the plunge of Western
man into a darkness to which his productive and his intellectual forces,
if they continue uncontrolled, must doom him: a darkness from which even
the intimations of light that have made our present, will have vanished.
This makes clear that the cause of the socialist society is not,
finally, a political-economic problem: it is a cultural problem: it is
_the_ human problem.
I propose to show the specific value, in this crisis, of the literary
work of art—not as a chorus of revolutionary politics, not as an echo to
action: but as _an autonomous kind of action_. I propose to show that
above all in America today, owing to our peculiar cultural conditions,
the revolutionary writer must not be a “fellow traveler”: that his art
must be co-ordinate with, not subordinate to, the political-economic
aspects of the re-creation of mankind.
This requires some definition of history and of literary art (for we are
engaged in making history). Fortunately, I may point to the historic
sense of mankind, implicit in Marx, as of a body which, like all organic
life, evolves by reason of inward assimilations of an objective world
from which it wins sustenance and on which it reacts—all according to a
pattern which is the nature of the organism: a pattern which in man is
capable of great variations chiefly through the process of what,
vaguely, we call consciousness.
The part of consciousness, or if you prefer, of _experience_, in
historic evolution is important for us because it leads straight to the
social function of art. The work of art is a means (among other things)
for extending, deepening, our experience of relationship with life as
this organic whole. The feeling of intimate kinship with any part of the
objective world is what we mean by beauty. As this relationship expands
to an inclusive social form, it is what we mean by culture. The basic
social function of art is _so to condition men that they will, as a
social body, be the medium for the actions of growth and change required
by their needs_. These social actions, to be healthy, must be performed
within the true experience of _the whole of life involved_—and the
conveying, the naturalizing, of this experience is the especial function
of art.
I will make this plain. Suppose a man needs to hammer nails for his new
house. He must hit the nails square on the head. But in order to do
this, the man must be in good general condition. If his eyes are poor,
if his brain is dizzy, all his technical skill of wrist-action won’t
save him from hammering nails badly. No man, it is obvious, is in shape
for even an act so simple as hitting a nail on the head unless his body
and mind are a fit _medium_ for the job. No society of men or class of
men is in shape for any needed action, save in so far as it has been
conditioned to become the _effective medium_ for that action.
In simple societies, the prime conditioning arts are lyrical: they are
music, the song, the dance. By means of the experience absorbed and
sustained through them, the folk becomes the effective medium for the
kind of action its emotional and economic needs, and the needs of its
rulers, call for. In our world where a chaos of forces is breaking down
the life of man before our eyes, the chief conditioning art—although all
arts have their place—must be one to synthesize our complex pasts and
present, and to direct them. This is the art of words, by which man
captures the worlds and selves that have borne him, and renders them
alive with his own vision.
We know now, roughly, the kind of social action to demand of our
literary art. It is in general to condition men for the multitude of
direct actions of which their life consists: it is, with us, the crucial
task of conditioning our readers—who we hope will be the workers, the
farmers, and their allies, to become the effective medium of revolution.
This subtle process of _conditioning_ is not to be confused with the
work of direct _preparation_ for daily struggle: work which falls
primarily to the teachers, the theorists, the organizers of party and of
union, who are largely conditioned by the accumulated work of writers.
And it must be clear that this work of conditioning the social body,
however invisible it seems, is the direct action of the writers. Words,
of course, are also instruments for “preparation”: reportage, pamphlets,
slogans, manifestoes (this paper is a kind of manifesto), have their
legitimate uses in political work. But only in so far as the need of the
revolutionary _medium_ is understood; and as the main function of
literary art, _which is to create this medium_, prevails. The writer who
forgets this, in order to bend his art to some seemingly more immediate
task, weakens the organic health and progress of mankind by betraying
his integral part in it. And in a world full of hunger, of hideous
injustice, of threatening war, only a clarity rare, hard and heroic,
will hold the literary artist to his own often thankless, often
obscured, yet fundamental, action.
2. _The American Writer Under Capitalism_
I apply at once these definitions to the special problems of the
American revolutionary writer. To this end, we must first glance at the
general state of readers and writers in our country.
We have never lacked literary talents. But the economic soil in which
they rooted was washed away ere the roots could hold. We have had great
writers. They have been influential abroad, where an organic cultural
life possessing what we still lack—memory and consciousness—could employ
them. Here, a Poe, a Whitman, a Thoreau, a Melville, could win only
sentimental disciples because the discontinuity of ethnic and industrial
conditions made their message obsolete more quickly than a generation
could mature to hear them. We Americans are weak—infinitely weaker than
the peasants of China, America Hispana, or old Russia—in that intuitive
connection with soil and self and human past, which makes of a folk an
effective medium for creative action. In this, our common state of
cultural malnutrition, the need of sound literary art cries aloud. But
our writers have been attainted by the disease they must help to cure. A
sense of impotence, derived from their unconnectedness with the vital
classes of the American world, has delivered them up to a succession of
European fads and dogmas; and their reflections of foreign literary
styles, like the shallow glints of a kaleidoscope, have added up to
nothing. When they have turned to our world, our writers have been
unable to resist the overpowering pulls of the capitalist system. They
have been entertainers, purveyors of candy and cocktails. When at the
end of the War, they began to rebel in numbers, their revolt was hollow:
an exhibitionistic beating of drums or a snarl and a sneer.
Now the deepest cause of their subjection as writers, and of their
impotence, is the hidden ideology of the American system, which—liberal
and conservative alike—most of our writers have absorbed. _And this is
painfully to the point_, because—whether they know it or not—the same
ideology prevails among our revolutionary writers. Far too many of us
have taken over the philosophy of the American capitalist culture that
we are sworn to overthrow.
3. _The American Revolutionary Writer_
This American ideology, which has ruled from the beginning—from the time
of those prophets of bourgeois business: Benjamin Franklin and Alexander
Hamilton, the true masters of our way of life—is a shallow, static
rationalism derived from the thinnest, not the deepest,
eighteenth-century minds of France and Britain: an empirical rationalism
based on fact-worship, on a fetishism (both unscientific and unpoetic)
of the finished cut-and-dried report of the five senses, which is not
remotely related to the organic rationalism explicit in Spinoza and
implicit in the historical dialectic of Marx. Had this vulgar
rationalism ruled in seventeenth-century England and France, there would
be no modern science. It is, since it ignores the organic and evolving
nature of man, by definition the foe of all creative work: the foe,
therefore, however hidden, of art and revolution.
Briefly, I will disclose symptoms and attitudes in our revolutionary
writers, which reveal (although the writers know it not) this sterile
philosophy....
(1) Disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art; in its integral place
_as art_ in the organic growth of man and specifically in the
revolutionary movement. This self-distrust makes the writer capitulate
_as artist_: leads him to take orders, _as artist_, from political
leaders—much to the dismay of the more intelligent of said political
leaders. It moves the American writer to misapply in his art borrowed
foreign definitions of values which have cogence in their place and time
of origin; but are meaningless here. This is a carry-over of the faddism
of middle-class American writing.
(2) From the same inorganic view of life and hence of art, comes the
servile or passive concept of revolutionary literature as primarily
“informational,” “reflective,” “propaganda.” This is, of course,
borrowed from the mid-Victorian, middle-class idea of utilitarian or
moralistic art. There is no reason why good literature should not be of
high documentary importance, and have a strong political appeal. Indeed,
in a dynamic age like ours, a profound literary art, insofar as it must
reveal the deepest evolving forces of man at the time, must be
“propaganda” for these forces and for the goal of these forces. But this
kind of propaganda derives from the work’s effectiveness as literary art
and is dependent on it.
(3) What murders the effectiveness of so much of our revolutionary
writing? The clue is the word “murder.” We all know that murder is a
conspicuous American trait: there are more murders, we are told, in the
United States in a day than in some European countries in a month. Now
murder is a sort of short cut: it is an oversimplified solution of a
problem—say, a nagging wife or husband—by simply getting rid of them. It
eliminates the _life_ of which the problem is a factor. What murder is
to the art of life, this dead philosophy is to knowledge; and translated
into literary terms it becomes “oversimplification.” Call it, if you
prefer, a kind of misplaced or _forced_ direct action. Here are some of
its results:
(a) Novels, aiming to reveal the revolutionary portent and substance
of our world, which are stuffed with stereotypes ... or imitate the
spiced journalese of newspaper reports of surface events ... or echo
the bravado (hiding weakness) of the Hemingway-Dashiell Hammett
school ... or borrow the drab pedestrian effects of Victorian
realism—as if these were adequate to convey the body—tragic, farcical,
explosive, corybantic, tender, deep as hell and high as heaven, of
American life!
(b) Proletarian tales and poems which portray the workers as half-dead
people devoid of the imagination, soaring wills and laughter, which
are the springs of creation—and of revolution.
(c) Laborious essays in criticism and literary history in which the
organic bodies of the works of poets and prosemen are mangled and
flattened to become mere wallpapering for the structure of a political
argument.[15]
(4) In these refusals, often by men of genuine literary gift, to
recognize the material for a deep revolutionary art, lies the one
ideological taint. Its final evil is to turn Marxism itself into a
dogmatically, mechanically _shut_ philosophy. And the effect of this,
were it to prevail on our eager, unschooled and sensitive youth (workers
as well as writers), would be to repel them: indeed, to drive many of
them (and not the worst because the worst bewildered) to seek a home in
reactionary schools of thought which do lip service to old forms of
man’s organic intuitions.
If the youth of America are drawn by the decayed loyalties of
nationalism and church into the ranks of fascism, it will be _in part_
because our revolutionary writers have been thwarted, by this dead
rationalism implicit in the dying capitalist culture, from making clear
that life today—in the depths that call for sacrifice, loyalty and
love—is on the side of revolution.
The American revolutionary writer ... to act his part, which is to
create the cultural medium for revolution ... must see life whole. He
will have a political creed; if he is a generous man, it will be hard
for him to forgo some share of the daily political-industrial struggle.
But his political orientation must be within, must arise from, his
orientation to life as an artist. Any course of action, any creed, lives
within the dynamic substance of life itself: _and this substance, in all
its attributes, is the business of the artist_. Therefore it is proper
to state that the artist’s vision of life IS the material of his art.
There is much confusion among us as to “material” and “subject.” The
subject of a book is a mere label or container; it may mislead or be
empty. Our revolutionary poet or proseman, by his loyalty to the working
class (whether born in it or not) and by his natural selection of
strong, expressive subjects, will write more and more of the struggles
of farmer and worker. But if his vision be sound, it will make—_whatever
his subject_—the material for revolutionary art. The term “proletarian”
applied to art should refer to the key and vision in which the work is
conceived, rather than to subject. It should be a qualitative, not a
quantitative, term. A story of middle-class or intellectual life, or
even of mythological figures, if it is alight with revolutionary vision,
is more effective proletarian art—and more effective art for
proletarians—than a shelf full of dull novels about stereotyped workers.
I wish to characterize two of our specific problems.
We writers have two highways for reaching mastery of our material. We
must go into life ... in persons and in self. These two ways are really
one; and the writer must follow them together, else he will make headway
in neither. If we look upon persons or classes, save with the eye of
self-knowledge, we will not see them; and if we look inward upon self,
save with an eye disciplined by objective understanding, we will see
only the mists of egoism which are the tree self’s denial. Even more
complex is this double way we must take, and never cease from taking. If
we look upon persons of one class we will not know them unless we see
the class opposing. If we look upon the present of any scene, we will
not know it unless we see within it the past ... and its dynamic
direction: its future. _This is the dialectic of the artist._
Because classes are in mortal conflict, _and because we have taken
sides_, does not mean they have nothing in common: it means they have
life in common. The class struggle, for us, is a focus of light, a
modern form, by which timeless ingredients of human nature common to
every person are revealed. It is not a substitute for understanding, but
a kind of _spectrum_ wherein hunger, passion, love, pity, envy, worship,
dream, fear, despair and ecstasy receive a dynamic modern order.
The other branch of our simultaneous highway is the self. Self is the
integer of value and of social action, the norm and form of life as man
may know it. The revolutionary writer must understand the _person_, or
his portraits of social struggle will be flat and ephemeral as the
poster on a billboard. As early as Shakespeare, Cervantes and Racine,
the artists were creating the image of the “lonely Soul,” the “atomic
will”—an image which served to make the _medium_ in which the
Protestant-bourgeois, individualist economy could flourish. We must have
poets to sing the image of the new and truer person: the person who
knows his integration with group and cosmos; the person through whom the
Whole speaks.
Only by bringing home the timeless human values in the class struggle to
every member of the exploited classes and to the sensitive of all
classes (for under capitalism all decent men and women are oppressed)
can the writer stimulate the will to revolutionary action. Only by
deepening his comprehension of cultural historic forms, such as
religion, in which, however faultily and impurely, man’s profoundest
intuitions of his organic nature were embodied, can the writer touch the
_spirit_ of the American worker and farmer and middle class, to release
their spirit from obsolete forms into new creative channels. And only
thus can we save them from the decayed devotions which are the
treacherous bait of the fascists.
Thus, for the American revolutionary writer to give less than the whole
picture is poor philosophy, poor art—and poor strategy.
We are aware there is war; we have declared this war to be ours; and we
know that in war strategy is important. But this is a war whose
battleground is the world—the world of extension and, no less, the world
of inward depth. In this battle are countless separate struggles. Many,
engaged on their particular fronts, are forced by the crisis of their
position to ignore its relativity in the whole; or to misprize and
forget values which do not appear to apply to their one urgent need.
Therefore we writers must know the breadth and depth of the whole
struggle: know its background and its foreground: know its ultimate
values within its immediate aims: in order that, by the common
experience of our work, the balance and unity be kept; that in the fever
of struggle no human heritage of truth and freedom languish; and that
the great war for Man move, without error or blindness, to its issue.
_Our_ special work is the universal. In our field there can be no
strategy but the whole truth.
If a writer doubts this, I doubt he is an artist.
If we believe that communism is the organic next step of the world to be
released by freeing the world’s forces of health, we must believe in the
art revealing man’s depths which bear this destiny. We will embody in
our work the substance of life: the blood, the bone, the eye, the
conscious embrace of necessity whose child is freedom—knowing that in so
far as we create this truth, we are moving, and moving those who hear
us, toward the Revolution.
_vii. The Writer’s Part in Social Revolution_
(_An address to the International Congress of Writers for the Defence
of Culture, held at Paris, June 21–25, 1935._)
We are all here, not as Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, but as men of
letters who conceive their art as an articulation of the human spirit.
Each of us bespeaks his class and his country only in so far as he
voices deeply his self, and thereby voices mankind. This is the
irreducible character of the artist. Whether he knows it or not (and in
our day, most do not know it, whence the fragmentary and corrupted
nature of their works and of themselves as men), the artist is one who
acts on the premise that the universal lives in the particular; that
cosmos lives in the person. This is the meaning of the mysterious words
“beauty” and “truth” applied to art. As we share the universal in a
particular form—a painting of a tree, a story of a beggar—we call it the
experience of beauty. We feel the unity between self and some other
object, a unity which (far from destroying) heightens and _makes true_
the particularity of both the self and the object. And whether we know
it or not, we value this experience of truth and beauty; we love it as
somehow good. This is another irreducible trait, beneath our
differences, of us all. The conflicts of our actual existence may so
weary and confuse us that we believe we long for death; may fill us with
distrust and despair: it is love of life, none the less because wounded
and twisted, that writes the darkest of our pages. In so far as a man
seeks beauty, he knows that life _is_ value; for the recognition of
beauty is nothing but the joyous acceptance of our part and our
participation in the body of living.
In periods of normal cultural rhythm, when the social body moves
moderately well in all its organs, this act of conscious participation
in life as a whole, the essential act of the artist, can remain implicit
in the quiet body of his story or song or picture. Such times see no
Congress of Writers such as this one. But today the forms and modes of
human existence, unevenly evolved, have broken the equilibrium which is
life itself. Today, the active and aggressive faith in life, the
revelation of its intricate harmony, which is the sole science of the
artist, is so at variance with the actual world that we feel the need of
a direct action, transcending the solid, quiet, slow certainty of art,
to reinforce our love and our vision in the experience of the people.
All this may seem to you irrelevant esthetics. But you must pardon me,
for the application I wish to draw from it (my brief message to this
Congress) is relevant.
The revolutionary hour in which we live is but the present phase of the
process, centuries old and destined to outlast almost the memory of
economic conflict, whereby man (not a privileged, exploiting class, but
man as a whole) will emerge into a conscious culture; even as the child
at a certain physiologic stage must become adult or go down into
degeneration. The key of the present phase of the long process is
economic; therefore the importance of the class struggle and the
imperative of entering it on the side of the workers. But the process
itself, now as ever, is organic. By which I mean that _the whole of
man_, heart and mind, subtlest sense and deepest intuition, as well as
belly and loin, must partake of it—or it miscarries.
The orthodox revolutionary creeds, which are the technique of the
transition of this crucial hour, do not comprehend the whole man. They
stress, rightly, the aspects of mass social-economic action. They slight
other parts of man: the intuitive, the intimate, the personal which
leads to the cosmic—phases which are the concern of the creative writer.
But since the process of man’s growth must at all times be complete,
these phases too must enter the revolutionary movement. Since they lag,
blame not the political leaders but the writers. Since in consequence
even the immediate economic aspect of the whole process lags, and
threatens to miscarry, again blame (at least in part) the writers.
Excluding the hordes of parasites and peddlers who dare call themselves
“writers” only in a world where illiteracy thinks it can “read,” we
might divide our writers into two groups. The first stress the sensuous,
the personal; strive perhaps after the mystic; ignore utterly the masses
of men, and that vast region of each man’s life involved in economic
forces. The other group, often recruited or converted from the first, in
the enthusiasm perhaps of their discovery of the social-economic factor
limit themselves to it or at least permit their awareness of the
intimate, infinite dimensions of human life to become dulled. Their
work, like the first group’s, is inorganic. And what is worse, the great
Cause—man’s rebirth—to which they are devoted continues, because of
them, deprived of elements needed to make it whole and to make it live.