The spontaneity is strictly controlled and within the patterns set up in the beginning. The effects are worked out in advance. This kind of writing, unemotional, uncommitted and uninvolved in the people's problems, is a cop-out and an escape in the heartbreak house of a dying, exploiting, murdering capitalistic society. It is the antithesis of progressive writing and art committed to and concerned with the people's problems and struggles and dedicated to throwing some light on helping to solve the people's problems and to ushering in a better society shaped to human needs rather than to exploitation, profits, poverty and wars. Historical fiction has history as a factual base to build upon.
Good fiction has to be experienced and lived.
It cannot be contrived and created from symbols and myths as the formalists and the New Critics demand. But Ellison has done this in writing the novel, Invisible Man . He says, in an interview in Shadow and Act , that the social realists are concerned with injustice, but that he is concerned not with injustice to Blacks but with tragedy and art. The symbols and their connections were known to me. I began it with a chart of the three-part division.