70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST it is false) could easily be ignored in this case since it melts away in moments of imaginative confrontation of the writer with the reality of his times. There could be another situation when we can notice an element of 'adjustment' or wishfulfilment in the world-outlook of the emergent democratic and progressive movement with which the writer has identified himself. This would introduce some obscurantism or sentimentalism in the ideology crystallising in his major works. We cannot here completely ignore the weakness of the ideology, but there would be a 'triumph of realism' here, too, to the extent that the writer has a correct sense of the direction of the historical movement and at least has been able to ask the right type of questions even when he has not come up with the right answers. Another distinct situation is of the writer who comes after the contradictions of a society divided into classes have intensified to such an extent that it has led to the emergence of a powerful working class movement with a political ideology based on Marxian dialectical materialism. The reactionary and obscurantist ideology present in a work produced in such a historical context could not be so easily ignored, since it would be intimately connected with some basic flaws in the sensibility and world-outlook of the writer. In this case it would mean that the writer persists in his false consciousness either because he is incapable of responding, or unwilling to respond, to the most outstanding facts of the social reality of his times. He has deliberately shut out from his imagination the challenging revolutionary experience of the working class and rejected the rational framework wherein this experience finds a proper articulation. Yet another case of a gap between the conscious ideology and the total grasp of realities embodied in the work of literature could be of the socialist writer who has accepted the intellectual formulations of scientific socialism, but only in an abstract form. Such a writer will not be able to realise the dialectical relation between theory and practice and he would not know how ideology could be mediated into experience. Consequently, ideology would be present in his art in an inert form. Since the ideology would not be the active informing principle behind his experience, we would notice no 'triumph of realism' in his work. Lukacs has discussed at length the complexities of this problem of relevance of the writer's conscious outlook to the literary value of his work. In fact it is rather surprising that Mr Thampi's article does not make any reference to the writings of Lukacs who in the course of his discussion of Balzac and Tolstoy as also in his comments on the 'socialist naturalism' and 'revolutionary .romanticism' has some valuable insights to offer on the complicated issue of the relationship between conscious ideology and literary value. Lukacs's concepts of'typicality' and 'perspective' can certainly be very useful in discussing this question and with their help we can judge how far the writer's conscious ideology becomes an integral part of his work. In discussing the literary value of a work, the chief consideration