GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM 679
as their examples," In other words, it is with representative
types chosen because of their typicality, rather than with
individual persons chosen because of their idiosyncrasies,
that the good novelist, that is to say the novelist who is
relating literature to "humanity in its advance to Socialism
, will concern himself.
(c) The theme of the bourgeois novel is the relations
between individuals. The commonest example of this
theme turns on the time-honoured question, "Will Miss X
marry Mr. Y or Mr. Z?" The pre-occupation with this
and similar questions is due to the isolation of the bourgeois
writer within his class, a class which has little part to play
in the movement of humanity towards Socialism; which
is, indeed, only too often opposed to that movement.
Because this class is essentially parasitic,
its work is non-
significant, that is to say, it bears no relation to humariity's
advance towards Socialism. Such work has neither interest
nor importance; it tends to be monotonous and its performance
is a matter of routine; what is more, it is taken
for granted that it should be such. Inevitably, then, the
bourgeois novelist will take his material not from the
working, but from the play life of his his material, therefore,
characters, and
will be frivolous when it ought
to be serious.
The true theme of literature, which is serious or good
literature in the sense defined, is I quote again from Mr.
Marshall "the complex struggle of our class society, its
changing forms, its conflicts, its triumphs and inefficiencies,
its struggle for justice against self-interest, its apparent
chaos and illogical order".
In recent years a considerable literature has grown up
which seeks to define the true function of the arts within
the framework of the presuppositions of Marxist theory.
The subject cannot be further developed here, but enough
has, it is hoped, been said to illustrate the communist
view of the arts as a superstructure built like religion, law
and morality upon the foundation of economic circumstance.
The foundation is at the moment that of a declining