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.Small landholders are shownto be as bad as tenant farmers in their racial politics.In a lengthy interchangetoward the end of the narrative, McCurtain argues with one of the electoratewhom Caldwell gives the archetypical name  the farmer. As if to illustrate theirrationality of the people and the bankruptcy of public debate, the farmerchides McCurtain only on the particulars of the case: it would have been moreErskine Caldwell s Challenge to Gone with the Wind 97effective and less costly for the taxpayers if the sheriff had used bloodhoundsto track down Clark before the mob got to him, argues the yeoman (133 37).Itis also a cotton farmer named Harvey Glenn, finally, who makes a decision tohand Sonny over to the mob.Caldwell s representations of the tiller of the soil,whether tenant or small landowner, were clearly out of step with the aestheticsof  We re the people. Interestingly, Richard Wright urged readers to see Troublein July as a mirror of reality in his praise of the novel.He reminded them thatthe crazed and seemingly outlandish character Narcissa Calhoun, who wantedevery white voter in the county to sign a petition to send all blacks back toAfrica, was no mere hyperbole:  Caldwell was serious, no matter how fantas-tic it sounds, for such notions are being aired in the halls of Congress today( Lynching Bee 115).However, many critics on the left did not see realistic social commentaryin Caldwell s writing in large measure a result of the premium they placed onthe representation of  whole individuals and on the avoidance of its inverse,caricature.What united the critique of caricature for many left critics of the1930s was adherence to a dialectical Marxist realism that predominated aes-thetic theory in the 1930s, even in the critique of the  fellow traveling KennethBurke.A sophisticated theory of proletarian realism came together in the workof the Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the leadinggroup of Marxist literary critics in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1932.This the-ory was exported to the United States and Germany through the Soviet-basedjournals International Literature and Literature of the World Revolution, as wellas through the translations of the work of Georg Lukács and RAPP forerun-ners Franz Mehring and Georgi Plekhanov in the New Masses, Partisan Review(U.S.), and Linkskurve (Germany).According to this aesthetic, the novel shouldideally be a space where  typical (i.e., emergent) character types are shown ina process of becoming within a complex and shifting social environment.Themajor conflicts of the age were to be represented through a story of everydaycharacters, who should be flawed yet capable of change, and whose positivetraits would find full expression in the new historical formation charted by thenovel.In order to achieve this effect, characters could not be represented as sim-plistic, placardlike caricatures but rather as individuals depicted with enoughpsychological depth to convey the contradictory and dynamic nature of theiremergent consciousness.Such an individual, so portrayed, was referred to as the living man. 8Though RAPP was disbanded by the Soviet government in 1932 to makeway for the theories of socialist realism, one sees its influential ideas used toevaluate literary texts in the United States both before and after that date, albeit98 Erskine Caldwell s Challenge to Gone with the Windoften in diluted form (arguably, they entered a ground made fertile by ear-lier American strands of realist literary and drama criticism from the likes ofWilliam Dean Howells and Henry James).9 The reviews of Caldwell were noexception.Most of Caldwell s reviewers on the left evaluated him using estab-lished RAPP parameters: namely, the psychological complexity of characters,the ability to convey dynamic individuals in changing, fluid contexts, and thecapacity to select the most relevant set of social forces as the central theme.Inmost all of these attributes he was found lacking.For example, Edwin Rolfenoted in the New Masses in 1933 that Caldwell  must go beyond mere sympa-thetic depiction into the higher sphere of dialectical development of charactersplaced in situations that clamor for treatment today. Remarking on the char-acter Pluto Swint, he added,  the sense of growth or change is conspicuouslylacking (32 33).Similarly, Jack Conroy wrote in 1932 that  somehow his char-acters fail to emerge full-blown, and added that he lacked the proper  sociol-ogy to put them in motion (27).In the New Republic in 1935, Burke very lucidlycompared Caldwell s treatment of his characters to a scientist who removes thehigher centers of a frog s brain to simplify its responses to stimuli.The frogjumps or croaks when prodded, but loses its free will in the process.Reveal-ing his preference for psychological complexity and holistic representation, heconcludes,  What the decerebrated frog is to the whole frog, Caldwell s char-acters are to real people ( Caldwell 51).Later in the same essay Burke con-trasts the automatons created by the southern writer with the  complex realistictexture of the social novels of nineteenth-century realism (52).A later NewMasses reviewer revealed a penchant for the layered, fluid settings of dialecticalrealism, writing in 1938 that although Caldwell s short story collection South-ways  lacks power, its author  has developed a more dynamic control of thesetting than in his earlier works (Shukotoff 24).Judged by such standards, Caldwell s novels are not really proletarian, anddefinitely not dialectical in the sense outlined above [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]