The Dialectic of Hope

DESPITE the widespread despair of the twentieth century, or perhaps to some extent because of it, there has developed since the Second World War an increasing interest in the phenomenon of hope. In philosophy, Gabriel Marcel, the French Christian Existentialist, and Ernst Bloch, the German Marxist, have written significantly on the theme.' More recently, theologians from Europe and the United States have explored it in an effort to develop an eschatological theology of revolution while psychologists and social analysts have used it as a basis for the study and treatment of the mentally ill or as a platform from which to launch social change.2 Literature, too, especially prose fiction, reflects this inclination toward affirmation. R. W. B. Lewis, in his introduction to The Picaresque Saint, contends that the novelists of an older generation (Joyce, Proust, Mann), although men of incomparable literary genius failed to attend to the visible life of men, to the shape of their actions, the motives of their hope.3 On the other hand, he continues, the novelists of the succeeding generation (Moravia, Silone, Camus, Faulkner, Greene and Malraux), while by no means facile optimists, have centered not upon the ubiquity of sickness and death but on

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