they had trekked from the British Government with its officials and its missionaries and its laws that made a black man as good as his master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless, where wild beasts and savage men, and grim waterless plains, had given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive. Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names of peace and thankfulness. They had built their homes and their churches; and as God had chosen them for a people, so did they choose him for their God, cherishing their separateness that was now his Will. They set their conquered enemies apart, ruling them with unsmiling justice, declaring “no equality in Church or State,” and making the iron law that no white man might touch a black woman, nor might any white woman be touched by a black man.
This is a patriarchal society, ruled by men such as Jakob Van Vlaanderen, a political leader who privately calls the members of Parliament “his span of oxen.” Fiercely nationalistic, they hate the British, and as they fought them so they fight any force, even a sociological one, which threatens their hard-won supremacy. In the Union of South Africa there are willing British subjects and British sympathizers, but they have not been represented by a group of novels as fine as these of Paton’s. This is perhaps due to the fact that they do not form so homogeneous a cultural and ethnic group as do the Boers and their descendants. For another thing, the political star of the Boers has been in the ascendant in the past few decades, while that of the pro-British has seemed about to set as it did in India.
GERMANY: A SELF-PORTRAIT
When Sinclair’s Lanny Budd goes to the week-long Nazi Party orgy at Nüremberg, he sees before him a people who have surrendered personal responsibility to a father image quite as fully as did Silone’s simple peasants. A people smarting from humiliating defeat had accepted the dream of a thousand year Reich. And it had been sold to them by a man as possessed as any of Dostoyevsky’s characters. Roderich Stamm in Heaven Pays No Dividends is oblivious to much of the transition that takes place in Germany during the late twenties and early thirties. Through his father’s conversations, however, he senses some of the problems soon to be expressed in political action: “They contained the whole uncertainty of our age. There was something intangible and threatening in the air. It had all started with the world crisis and the huge unemployment figures, and then the Nazis had come, and then the Communists.” These forces and the movements which they precipitate are too strong for a republic barely fifteen years old. A people used to authoritarian rule reverts to it. When war comes Roderich realizes “we were all involved, because all of us had capitulated before HIM during all these years. We had all given HIM permission to start a war at HIS discretion, when HE decided it was necessary.” One is justified in distrusting stereotypes as inaccurate generalizations. But in this case the stereotype is borne out and emphasized in the novel.
Many areas of these national portraits are only roughed in, with the fine-line detail missing. In other places there are gaps. This is partly because some of the groups of novels are small. It is also due to the fact that the novelist does not exhaustively examine voting trends, statistically analyze attitudinal changes, or plot the frequency of government realignments. Sinclair frequently approaches this method and Dos Passos gives some of the raw data upon which such estimates can be made. But generally the novelist tends to proceed from individuals to groups, extrapolating group behavior from individual behavior. This is the method used by Koestler and Conrad. While it does not have the statistical validity of the political scientist’s work, it has advantages which complement it. The novelist, with his artistic insight and his ability to shape his material as he wishes, can highlight his concept of a particular national character with drama and human interest to make this hard-to-define quality come memorably alive on the printed page.
chapter five
The Novelist as Analyst of Group Political Behavior
The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel for classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of overt political behavior—party membership, acceptance of discipline, performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are not parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a background for the second. Although the first is economic, its validity lies in the fact that party lines tend to follow economic ones, that modern political theory, particularly that of revolution, has been based increasingly upon economic facts as well as political ones. The approach of this chapter differs from that of the previous one in tracing behavior patterns which cut across national lines.
ECONOMIC GROUPS
The Lumpenproletariat
In trying to use these indices of group behavior it is no longer possible to deal in general terms such as “the poor.” Though “proletariat” may be precise enough for Marxism, even this term is too inclusive for close analysis of the material in these novels. Several gradations are possible within this least fortunate group on the economic scale. Professor Ambrogio Donini’s introduction to the Italian edition of The Pine Tree and the Mole identifies the lowest group in that novel as members of the lumpenproletariat. These people are not the workers whose taking of the factories Taddei fleetingly mentions. They are the lowest stratum of Livorno’s life, the drifters and criminals from whom the Fascists recruited members for their Black Shirt squads. It is their motivation as much as their behavior which differentiates them from the workers. While groups of militant workers are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their whole group, these members of the lumpenproletariat seem to be entrepreneurs. Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists not to help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because he is personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job his employers are paying him to do. Very often in these novels one encounters Communists trying to destroy Socialists ostensibly because Socialism is thought to be a palliative rather than a solution to the worker’s problems. But these underworld figures do not have even this theoretical justification.