Literature and Reality by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast [Fast, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

14

THE WRITER who purports to make art today must uncover the truth in every area of investigation; and in every area of investigation, he must relate the instant moment to the historical whole. And he must not only exhibit the truth, but demolish the untruth. And when one considers how much of the accepted fabric of our environment is woven from falsehood, one realizes the extent of this problem.

I do not say that he must succeed in all of these areas; but he must attempt. Precisely because he exists at the moment—in a historical sense—when class society is giving way to classless society, he faces one of the most difficult tasks set before writers in all the literate experience of mankind. The defamation of culture in which fascism indulges had no quantitative comparison in the past; and that tendency of capitalism to freeze into formalism—which I discussed before—becomes overwhelming during this last period of imperialism. And for precisely that reason, because it is the last period, the end, the finish, the moment where there is literally no second chance.

To make this plain, the following, from John Somerville’s Soviet Philosophy, is most valuable. Speaking of the literal in its vulgar and mechanical sense, he says:

“Photographic realism or naturalism in the realm of art is analogous to what formal logic is in the realm of science, or mechanistic materialism is in the field of philosophy. It fails to see in things what they are being transformed into. It transfixes reality, and in so doing, devitalizes and kills it. It accumulates minute details, but discerns no pattern, sees no forest, only trees; no whole, only fragmentary parts. It is blindly empirical, fruitlessly static.”24

This is very well said, indeed, and if we add to it the understanding that naturalism is another side of the formalistic coin, we begin to realize the extent of the barriers modern reaction places in the path of the artist. Thus, writers like Gwyn Thomas and Alexander Saxton, have the task not only of seeing the forest, but very often of clearing it as well.

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