Literature and Politics

In the 1930s Jean Devanny was criticised in Australia for writing Marxist tracts thinly disguised as fiction.  But her novels were not just about a future communist Australia, they were also about the workers’ reform movement.  In her promotion of this movement, Devanny went beyond a Marxist concept of history in arguing that social action is a vitalistic process that would unleash the passions, desires, creativities, and impulses of the individual and of the collective body.  In Sugar Heaven (1936) the two approaches are combined with a strong narrative drive reflecting the determined teleological push towards the magnificent socialist future which is interrupted by the idea of life itself as an active and open-ended force.  There is double-horizoned future in this novel, because the emphasis shifts from the socialist telos of communism to the near future, the futur proche, towards which the push of life is surging.  In Devanny’s novels, there is a transformation of the vital impetus of the individual in the spontaneous outpouring of heightened emotions in the mass movement for industrial and social reform. There is an uneasy partnership between the intellectual commitment to socialist doctrine and the socialist future, where the subject is not only cognisant of social injustice but also a sincere student of socialist theory, and the feelings of excitement and enthusiasm arising out of the reform movement.  This excitement reflects an anti-programmatic vitalism which is essential for collective action but which must always be harnessed and made to service socialism’s rational agenda. This focus on intense feeling lends a syndicalist inflection to the writing and invites us to consider Devanny’s revolutionary vitalism as a peculiarly Australian manifestation of the syndicalist concept of élan ouvrier, the workers’ impetus – an impetus which is also manifest in the novels of other Australian writers in the 1930s.