As a creative writing major in college, I and the rest of those who aspired to become writers were oh-so terrified of not being able to comply with the social-realist mode, whether you were writing poetry, short stories, essays, genre ad infinitum.
More so, most of us were absolutely horrified by the idea of being under Professor Edel Garcellano and his protégés (who would likely fail you or make your whole semester the bowels of hell as soon as he and his minions knew that you were a CW major because that meant that you were under the whole banner of “Art for Art’s Sake”, which meant that your writing was useless).
The more time one wannabe writer spent in the CW program, the more one became pressured to be a social-realist. Or at least, a certain kind of social-realist, the kind that renders life from an almost scientifically precise perspective. You write what you see and emphasize the wrong things in society. The imagination had no place in this hierarchy, even if you were, in a way, still depicting reality.
Simply put, we were always asked, “Is life like that? Of course, not.”
Now, who would want to keep on writing and reading about a reality that would only depress you, make you spit vitriol and later on desensitize you? Because, after all, life is like that, and it is as if all of us had no escape and no hope. The so-called “experimental” or those who deigned to imagine were scoffed at, ignored, “smashed” (as one Marxist friend termed it), and discarded.
In the end, social-realist writings were labeled depressing, angry, bitter and hopeless, and the experimental or those that dared to imagine or hope were deemed useless and trash because they are too idealistic.
It is true that it seemed that for the longest time, a Marxist perspective seems to wear the same sign in the gates of Hell “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.” What is viewed as Marxist is the depiction of life, of how much we suffer because of the present state and structure of society.
Bleak.
Blech.
And then I found Bloch.
According to Bloch, the depiction of reality in realism, naturalism and social-realism kills the spirit. What the writers in this mode did was to make life as it is so real to the people that we had become confined to it. We simply accept it as the way things are.
These writers have forgotten to show what the world ought to be, at least, according to the Marxist agenda. They have forgotten to give the world hope. The state of literature had become so locked in reality that it has forgotten to imagine. According to Bloch, it is the capacity to imagine and to dream that change things and the Marxist agenda is to change things.
Genuine realistic poetry does not only depict the facts of life, but isolates and manipulates them (towards the Marxist agenda) in order to facilitate the dialectic process, that would, in turn, facilitate the needed change. It serves as an impetus for movement.
This process needs a precise imagination, meaning an imagination that has direction (and the direction of course leads to the Marxist project). This imagination will only achieve direction if it is dialectically trained (or inculcated with Marxist thought). This direction moves toward a great world, a world of a classless society, where the bleakness of capitalism is destroyed and transformed; the same bleakness that is being espoused by the kind of realism that alienates imagination.
A great world, a great realism, emerges from great poetry. Great poetry comes from the ability to dream and to imagine. It is difficult to reconcile the dream world, the “inner life” or the “spiritual” with the material world. [MLT 87] Nevertheless, this is what Bloch suggests: philosophical idealism exaggerates one feature of knowledge (i.e. Marxism) and that idealism exists at the starting point of any creative endeavor. That when it is not put to use, then it results in “nothingness,” in a state of “non-expression, non-creation, and non-representation” which would totally defeat the whole purpose of realism much more Marxist realism. [MLT 87]
Marxism will reconcile the material with the ideal. And Marxist realism in poetry will show what will and ought to happen instead of what is happening. Marxist realism means that the ideal or imaginary is real and will become real.
This perspective will make poetry an (if not the) agent of change and of the future.
What we need then is the missing link of the literary evolution, a Marxist with an imagination, a Marxist that hopes: this is what Bloch was saying.
Now, imagine a hopeful Marxist writing poetry.
I laugh my ass off every time I do that.
