I’ve been rather enjoying some novels of late. I just finished Sinclair’s Oil! and am in the middle of London’s The Iron Heel. Both are pretty explicitly communist books and have this revolutionary optimism, kind of like a book equivalent to early Eisenstein films. There are these bits of The Iron Heel that could pass as quite trenchant prose of today which is refreshing.
Oil! is fascinating to me because it has so many contradictions. It’s kind of not great–vast swaths of the book are Sinclair reporting everything that happens–yet the first and last chapters display quite incredible captivating prose. The last line invokes oil as some kind of demonic metaphor as a material accelerant of capitalism and really hits because the prior 400 pages of “then this happened.” Everyone learns about him in school but I’m not sure anyone reads him, he’s very explicitly a communist or at least a sympathetic socialist. There’s even random tidbits in the book that sound like parapolitical/acid-marxist stuff of today which is kinda crazy considering how old it is. There was some throwaway bit reflecting on how radio broadcast tech homogenizes thought, which perfectly echos that feeling we (or at least I) have nowadays that society is sort of trapped by phones–how can we possibly change things when peoples thoughts are suggested through the capitalist controlled broadcast technologies…
Even crazier is apparently he later wrote these Lanny Budd novels which from wikipedia hit all the parapolitical conspiracies, but unfortunately I don’t know if I could make it through that much more of his stenographic prose.
Anyone else read any revolutionary novels like this? I feel like there’s more of this before the 1950s when anglosphere intellectuals got turned off of communism by Khrushchev’s secret speech.
“You can see those graves, with a picket fence about them, and no derrick for a hundred feet or more. Some day all those unlovely derricks will be gone, and so will the picket fence and the graves. There will be other girls with bare brown legs running over those hills, and they may grow up to be happier women, if men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon which killed Ruth Watkins and her brother—yes, and Dad also: an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.”
If only the entire book had prose the quality of the last chapter! I think my dream author would be Dickens if he were a communist in the early 20th-century… oh well…
The early films of Sergei Eisenstein that propagandize communism and the Russian revolution. Battleship Potemkin, Strike, and October are the three that I have in mind (and have actually watched). Strike is the weakest, but has some more intimate and personal tones as well as some excellent naturalistic shots of daily life at the time. Battleship Potemkin is the most famous and retells the mutiny of the titular battleship during the 1905 uprising. October is really excellent and probably the height of Eisenstein synthesizing high-art film-making with a revolutionary purpose, but I think it may have been censored due too being to abstract for the purpose of the film that he was asked to make. (Not sure if censored is the right word, sometimes western resources apply the word very liberally.)
All these films are available without copyright, though the best viewing experience is to track down a DVD (check the library!) as these predate synchronized scores. A physical reissue of a public domain film from the early silent era often budgets in producing a decent score, which is expressly not PD. Some versions available on the internet have poor-quality scores or even AI generated audio.
I’ve been rather enjoying some novels of late. I just finished Sinclair’s Oil! and am in the middle of London’s The Iron Heel. Both are pretty explicitly communist books and have this revolutionary optimism, kind of like a book equivalent to early Eisenstein films. There are these bits of The Iron Heel that could pass as quite trenchant prose of today which is refreshing.
Oil! is fascinating to me because it has so many contradictions. It’s kind of not great–vast swaths of the book are Sinclair reporting everything that happens–yet the first and last chapters display quite incredible captivating prose. The last line invokes oil as some kind of demonic metaphor as a material accelerant of capitalism and really hits because the prior 400 pages of “then this happened.” Everyone learns about him in school but I’m not sure anyone reads him, he’s very explicitly a communist or at least a sympathetic socialist. There’s even random tidbits in the book that sound like parapolitical/acid-marxist stuff of today which is kinda crazy considering how old it is. There was some throwaway bit reflecting on how radio broadcast tech homogenizes thought, which perfectly echos that feeling we (or at least I) have nowadays that society is sort of trapped by phones–how can we possibly change things when peoples thoughts are suggested through the capitalist controlled broadcast technologies…
Even crazier is apparently he later wrote these Lanny Budd novels which from wikipedia hit all the parapolitical conspiracies, but unfortunately I don’t know if I could make it through that much more of his stenographic prose.
Anyone else read any revolutionary novels like this? I feel like there’s more of this before the 1950s when anglosphere intellectuals got turned off of communism by Khrushchev’s secret speech.
Oil! last paragraph:
If only the entire book had prose the quality of the last chapter! I think my dream author would be Dickens if he were a communist in the early 20th-century… oh well…
I’m interested in learning more about these Einstein films. Can you share an example or two?
The early films of Sergei Eisenstein that propagandize communism and the Russian revolution. Battleship Potemkin, Strike, and October are the three that I have in mind (and have actually watched). Strike is the weakest, but has some more intimate and personal tones as well as some excellent naturalistic shots of daily life at the time. Battleship Potemkin is the most famous and retells the mutiny of the titular battleship during the 1905 uprising. October is really excellent and probably the height of Eisenstein synthesizing high-art film-making with a revolutionary purpose, but I think it may have been censored due too being to abstract for the purpose of the film that he was asked to make. (Not sure if censored is the right word, sometimes western resources apply the word very liberally.)
All these films are available without copyright, though the best viewing experience is to track down a DVD (check the library!) as these predate synchronized scores. A physical reissue of a public domain film from the early silent era often budgets in producing a decent score, which is expressly not PD. Some versions available on the internet have poor-quality scores or even AI generated audio.
Oh awkward, I misread and thought you were talking about Albert Einstein since I knew he was a socialist. lol