Trang Minh
"Elaborate on this idea of the function of form, if you will?" asked Derek."The conventions of literary form, within which a writer works, codify a concept of reality, a world view construct, a Weltanschauung. Concepts of time, space, consciousness, history, et cetera, are reflected in and represented by narrative conventions. To change these conventions is to represent a change of world view. Some writers do this more consciously than others, of course, while most never engage in formal innovation at all. Form in many respects is its own content: it carries tacit content in codifying the assumptions upon which a world view is based. To freeze form is to ossify the cultural life of any people."
"Socialist realism, you feel, is completely static?" Derek asked. "By insisting on only one type of form, it short-circuits dialectical processes in a culture?"
"Of course," Minh answered, then paused thoughtfully. "In the terms of an earlier discussion I remember us having: socialist realism restricts literary form to the analogical representation of only the most orthodox version of Newton's world view. Let us not forget that the temporal symmetry (which permits time reversal) implicit in Newton's laws of motion is rejected by dialectical materialism. In socialist realism, flashbacks are frowned upon and stream-of-consciousness forbidden: these narrative conventions muddy the waters of a strict interpretation of linear time. Kozyrev's new idea about time flowing at different rates at different places was a violation of socialist realism! Perhaps the fact of this violation is the key to a realist interpretation of why his ideas were ultimately rejected. It's paradoxical, actually. A system of thought that professes itself wedded to dynamism, once it comes to power, everywhere promotes rigidity and stasis - often to the chagrin of its adherents. The problem has to do with the structure of the dialectic itself, I think. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; and so on, but! not to infinity. The repetitive cycles unfold themselves like a closing spiral about a central linear axis of progress. And this axis of history has a terminus: the utopia of pure communism. But where is the accounting for how and why the cycles stop? No adequate accounting is provided. And the interest of the adherents of the theory is in getting the whole thing stopped, not in the dynamism of it all. Their only real interest is in the act of stopping, for which they have no theory! It's all very surprising and really quite silly."
"All this was discussed here in the 30s?"
"In round about ways. Not in quite the terms I have just used, of course."
"Hmmmm." Who would have thought Viet Nam was so involved in this?
"We read L'HUMANITE and MONDE and got trickles of the debate as it occurred in France; we heard of the ProletKult spirit in the post-revolutionary period and the first Congress of Soviet Writers in '34; we watched Barbusse waver over the depths and heard of Andre Gide's flirtation and defection (some of us with glee); we knew about the agit-art utilities of photomontage as exemplified by, for instance, Gustav Klutsis. And we had our own debates and exemplary debaters: Hoai Thanh for the idealist position, Hai Trieu for the realists. And let it not be forgotten that Confucianism in many ways predisposed us Vietnamese by providing sympathetic ears for the realist argument."