DARKNESS at NOON and the POLITICAL NOVEL the Usefulness

REED B. MERRILL

DARKNESS AT NOON AND THE POLITICAL NOVEL

The attempt to escape ideological and utopian distortions is, in the last analysis, a quest for reality. -- Karl Mannheim

Faith is a wonderful thing; it is not only capable of moving moun- tains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse. -- Arthur Koestler

The usefulness of the term "political novel" remains some- what controversial. In what continues to be the most useful, if problematical, study of the subject, Irving Howe's Politics and the Novel (1957), Howe maintains that it is not a genre since the term does not designate any "fundamental distinctions of literary form". Nevertheless, throughout his book he uses the term to make generic distinctions. Howe's assessment of the generic validity of the political novel echoes that of Wellek and Warren, who define "genre" as a "grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (spe- cific meter or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose - more crudely, subject and audience)".1 And they find little difference between social or political novels (an opin- ion shared by Howe), a proof, they maintain, that the generic term is too murky and lacking in precise substance to be of theoretical use. Howe reduces the term "political novel" ad absurdum when he says: "I meant by political novel any novel I wished to treat as if it were a political novel, though clearly

1 Ren~ Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), p. 221.

Neohelicon XIV]2 Akad3miai Kiad6, Budapest John Benjamins B. 1I., Amsterdam 246 REED B. MERR[L one would not wish to treat most novels that way. There was no reason to". ~ The fact remains that the term clearly meets generic require- ments as well as Wellek's and Warren's definition; that it con- tains distinctive elements which set it apart from other novel- istic types; that rather than being an unclassifiable socio-political amalgam - in the drawing room sense of the early novels of Disraeli or Henry Adams, as suggested by M. E. Speare, 3 or in the theoretical sense of Theory of Literature - its inner form consistently concerns the inherent conflict between the individual and political ideology or, as Arthur Koestler puts it, the ethical problems of ends versus means. It would be dif- ficult to find a better example of a political novel that personi- fies the genre at its best than Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, a work which Howe finds to be more a propaganda piece and didactic tract than a viable novel. Howe believes that the political novel is necessarily a lesser form because its ideological biases overwhelm the novel's most profound purpose - to combine life experiences and ideas into synthesis (cf. Howe, 22). Of course, an ideologue can turn what should be the dia- lectical tension of ideas in conflict with ideologies into a tract, but that is certainly not to say that a successful dialectic cannot be displayed by an author who has no ideological axe to grind. Such is the case in Darkness at Noon. The subject matter of any political novel will obviously concern this critical problem of narrative point of view, and certainly, because of their authors' obvious ideological biases, many novds (Sholokov's

Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Fawcett Books, 1967), p. 18. (Further references to this work will be made by page number only.) 3 Morris Edmund Speare, The Political Novel: Its Development in England and in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1924). Although Speare's work is outdated, it is of historical value because it illustrates the radical changes in political process from the early nineteenth-century novel to the late nineteenth-century novel.