Aesthetics and the Roots of Socialist Realism in African Literature

Abstract

The matter of aesthetics in literature is more profound than in most other forms of art. As children, the whiff of a brand-new book and the illustrations on the cover of a reader greatly excite us as things of beauty. As we mature in reading, however, we now know 
that we have to go beyond the beautiful cover of a book: a novel, a play or a collection of poems to find the real beauty in that book. Now beauty in art, literature, becomes philosophical; it becomes the artistic ways and means by which the writer tries to play on 
our hearts’ desires for the pleasure that comes from a story and its message. The critical realist writers simply present a picture of what Chinua Achebe describes as “the burning issues” in society, cast literary innuendos at the villains that represent the actual leadership villains in society, and leave the matter there, maybe for God to take action. The Marxist or socialist realist writers, however, think differently. They posit that man, not God, is responsible for the rot in society, and so man, not God, has to change the narrative by overthrowing the societal despoilers and the socio-political status quo. Therefore, this paper accounts for the emergence of the Marxist literary work of art in which the masses, the marginalized have-nots, are pitches against the privileged, capitalist haves who they eventually dislodge in a revolution. That is the revolutionary aesthetics or the Marxist socialist realist literature.