Politics and the Novel, by Irving Howe

[p026] Politics and the Novel. By Irving Howe. A New Left Book, Stevens & Co., 21s. In his preface Howe defines his limitations. ‘This book is meant primarily as a study of the relationship between literature and ideas . . . My interest was far less in literature as a social testimony than in the literary prob- lems of what happens to the novel ' when it is subjected to the pressure of politics and political stresses.’ He attempts to examine the effect of the intrusion of political ideology into the structure of the novel in a broad and ambitious survey of litera- ture from Dostoyevsky to Koestler and Orwell. The first part of the book deals with the novelists from Stendhal to the turn of the century and does not penetrate further into the relationships between society and art more than do the conventional literary critics. Howe treats politics as a formal, rather conventional and somewhat abstract intrusion. In his treatment of Henry James’ The Bostonians he is taken to the theme of ‘alienation’ or estrangement in bourgeois society, especially in the case of women. The treatment of the themes of political literature in the 20th century centres around Mal- raux, Silone, Koestler and Orwell. Out of this discussion arises the reaction of the artist to Stalinism and also to revolutionary politics. Howe treats Trotsky as some kind of Bolshevik romantic and compares his History of the Russian Revolution with Man’s Estate and _ Silone’s Fontamara and Bread and Wine. Howe shares with Orwell a horror of totalitarianism and although he con- demns its inhumanity denies dialec- tical analysis any capacity to explain these phenomena. At this point politics becomes a mystery and the literary critic wonders what he missed in his previous analysis. T.O. The second sex