Blotner The Political Novel

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98826-000-0
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 166 Seiten

The author explores the novel as a political inculcator, covering novels and novelists of the U.S., Great Britain and the Continent. (Google)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blotner, Joseph

Leseproben

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. THE UNITED STATES Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Civil War Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a prime example of the novel as political instrument both in intent and effect. Harriet Beecher Stowe declared in her preface that The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away with the good effects of all that can be attempted for them.... The book did more than awaken sympathy; its millions of copies helped rouse the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, creating in part the political climate out of which the Civil War grew and mustering moral support for its prosecution. But the novel’s effects were not confined to America. In Literary History of the United States Dixon Wecter called it “the most influential novel in all history,” and Harold Blodgett noted that it was used in the campaign that secured England’s Reform Act of 1867. Raymond Weaver, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, notes that half a million Englishwomen signed an address of thanks to the author, and that Russians were said to have emancipated their serfs after reading the book. The hero of Edgar Lee Masters’ Children of the Market Place says the book “was not really true,” but he records the praise it won from Macaulay, Longfellow, George Sand, and Heine, and adds, “The winds of destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.” Translated into nineteen languages, the novel was also dramatized. Eliza’s flight across the ice and Simon Legree’s cruelty have become hackneyed, but the author did not rely exclusively on such melodrama and tugging at the heartstrings. The plot is interlarded with case histories of slavery—mothers whose children were taken from them, women sold for “breeders,” men taken from their families and sent down into the deep South. The reader may feel that Legree is a villain so fiendish as to be unbelievable; he may find the angelic Little Eva’s death scene, in which she cuts off golden curls and distributes them to the sobbing family and retainers, cloying or emetic. There are other characters, though, worth observing. Senator Bird of Ohio, who had formerly supported the Fugitive Slave Act, shelters Eliza before sending her to a Kentuckian who had freed his slaves and now runs a stop on the Underground Railway. Artistically the novel is very bad. Its structure sprawls, its melodrama creaks, and its sentiment oozes over hundreds of pages peopled more often by cardboard figures than believable human beings. This is another case, however, in which the reading public paid no attention to critical standards. Mrs. Stowe concluded her novel with the warning that not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God! Her words were prophetic, and her book helped to bring about the dies irae of which she spoke. Albion Tourgée: The Blunders of Reconstruction Just as the political novel helped to prepare the way for the Civil War, so it commented upon the events which followed it. In A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), two awkward but intensely felt books, Albion Tourgée criticized the tremendous blunders of the federal government in the Reconstruction era. Using the same techniques of case history, pathos, and melodrama as did Mrs. Stowe, Tourgée applauds the intent of the federal Reconstruction program but is outraged and cynical at the way it was carried out. He praises the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau but laments its dissolution and the government’s virtual abandonment of the Negro. Like Mrs. Stowe, Tourgée states the problem as dramatically and appealingly as he can; then he offers his solution: education. Both of Tourgée’s novels close with appeals for federal aid to education in the South. The Negro is obviously in greatest need, but the aid is meant to be spread over the entire educational system. Discarding all pretense at fiction and writing directly to the reader, Tourgée concludes A Fool’s Errand by telling him that “Poor-Whites, Freedmen, Ku-Klux and Bulldozers are all alike the harvest of ignorance. The Nation can not afford to grow such a crop.” Perennial Theme: Corruption In the 1880s the American political novel began to shift from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the theme of corruption. This subject was explored extensively during the next five decades. Whether the scene was the national capitol, as in Henry Adams’ Democracy (1880), or a ward in New York City, as in James L. Ford’s Hot Corn Ike (1923), the theme was the same—the betrayal of public trust for private ends. Although many of these novels were written in the resurgent school of Realism, all of them, in their depiction of pervasive corruption, were capable of being political instruments through the nature of the material which they treated if not through their author’s intent. Whether the writer declaims through his hero against public robbery or simply tries to present dispassionately what he sees, the revulsion of the reader at the travesty of American political ideals is likely to be the same. There was one notable exception to this trend. It was Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). Projecting his story into the future, he wrote of an America under the dictatorship of an Oligarchy serving the interests of the large corporate and industrial groups. The reader learns that the Oligarchy was eventually overthrown, but the book concentrates upon a fictitious era of horrors unequalled until the appearance of Orwell’s 1984 forty years later. In his introduction to the novel, Anatole France called London a Revolutionary Socialist. This he was, and—in the novel, at least—a devoted Marxist as well. The book was clearly meant to be a political instrument. Its fulfillment of this aim may be judged by a comment of Stephen Spender in his contribution to The God That Failed (1950). He remarks that Harry Pollitt, a high official of the English Communist Party, had told him that in his opinion The Iron Heel was “the best revolutionary novel.” The Communist view of the propaganda value of literature makes the comment significant. Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism. Upton Sinclair’s books were among those which marked the beginning of a transitional phase in the American political novel. In them a new theme was added to that of political corruption: the rise of leftist and radical forces. Oil! (1926) focuses on Bunny Ross’s political journey to the far Left. Bunny’s father, J. Arnold Ross, is one of the tycoons who selects, pays for, and elects an American president. Naming names and placing places, Sinclair sends his characters into the campaign of 1920. Verne Roscoe says that he is negotiating with Barney Brockway of “the Ohio gang.” Sinclair writes that “he made exactly the right offers, and paid his certified checks to exactly the right men,” and Warren Harding was nominated. The fifty million dollars poured into the campaign by the oil interests (according to Sinclair) helped to finish the job. The account of the naval reserve oil lease scandals which follows makes Sinclair’s position on the activities of a powerful lobby very clear. More an exposé than a work of art, the novel describes attempts to hinder the organization of the oil workers and the strikes and strike-breaking which follow. The book ends with an attack upon an evil power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor. Two years later Sinclair threw himself into a vindication of the characters and lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The cast of Boston (1928) includes the fictitious Thornewell family, but they are all dwarfed by the two Italians whose careers ended in the electric chair. Sinclair presents the case as an effort by the city and state governments to dispose of two representatives of the anarchist movement which was thought to threaten society’s foundations. He maintains that the government was...