Marxist Theory
The Essence of
Marxist Thought
There is no
scope in the present context to expound Marxist theory adequately. All that can
be done is to stress the aspects of it, the essential concepts, which are
relevant to understanding a Marxist approach to the study of literature. For
Karl Marx, and those closest to his way of thinking, all those modes of
thought, including literary creativity, are ideological and are products of
social and economic existence. Basically Man’s social being determines his
consciousness and the material interests of the dominant social class determine
how all classes perceive their existence. All forms of culture, therefore, do
not exist in an ideal, abstract form but are inseparable from the historical
determining social conditions. They exist, in other words, as a superstructure
to the basic economic structure of a society. This view was the exact reverse
of the Hegelian belief that the world was governed by thought and the
application of reason, whether it be human or divine. Philosophising about the
world alone was insufficient for Marx; the most important thing was to change
it. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote of
religion, morality and philosophy as ‘phantoms found in the brains of men’. But
in letters which he wrote in the 1890s Engels acknowledged that both he and
Marx recognised that art, philosophy and other forms of human consciousness
could alter the human condition and had a degree of autonomy. The special
status of literature was also recognised by Marx in the Grundrisse.
Greek tragedy was for him an anomaly because it seemed to represent a timeless,
universal achievement but was actually produced within a society with a
structure and ideology which he could no longer consider valid. How could such
a phenomenon continue to give aesthetic pleasure and be regarded as expressing universal
truths?
Socialist
Realism
Socialist
Realism is the term usually applied to the statesanctioned theory of art
favoured predominantly in the Soviet Union, and therefore known as Soviet
Socialist Realism, but it was also the dominant party aesthetic in other
Eastern European countries under the political domination of Russia after the
Stalinist period and the Second World War. Basically the ideal of nineteenth century
Russian realist literature was set up as the most suitable norm for a communist
aesthetic but it was given a doctrinaire edge. All other forms of modernist
experimental art and literature were considered to be the decadent offspring of
late capitalism. Only lip service was paid to the notion of artistic freedom.
In practise, a writer could not hope to get his work published if he or she did
not write to please the party. Lenin had made this explicit in his essay Party
Organisation and Party Literature (1905), in which he asserted that writers
were free to write whatever they wanted but, if they wanted to get their work published
in party journals, they would have to toe the party line. As all journals were
soon to become affiliated to the party, this provided writers, effectively,
with only Hobson’s choice. Literary critics were encouraged to praise those
writers of the past who had revealed insights into the social problems and
developments of their time, even though they might have been of bourgeois
origin themselves. Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens therefore
came in for special praise. All literature had also to address the interests of
the people as a whole. This quality was known as narodnost. And it had
to present a progressive and, of course, communist outlook for the future of society.
Georg Lukács
(1885–1971)
One of the most
admired Marxist critics is Georg Lukács, a Hungarian-born philosopher and
critic. He is associated with socialist realism but reveals great subtlety in
his arguments. He greatly admired many of the great Realist works of the 19th
century, especially when they revealed underlying contradictions in society. It
was for this reason that he praised the novels of the Prussian writer Theodor Fontane,
especially his short novel Schach von Wuthenow (translated as A Man
of Honour), which provides a disturbing critique of the Prussian code of
honour. For Lukács, it was ‘the pinnacle of German historical narrative art’.
In Lukács’ eyes, true Realism did not just depict the appearance of the social
world but provided ‘a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic
reflection of reality’. A Realist novel does not provide an illusion of reality
but is ‘a special form of reflecting reality’. A truly realistic work provides
a sense of the ‘artistic necessity’ of the scenes and details presented. The
writer reflects, in an intensified form, the structure of the society depicted
and its dialectical development. Lukács’ ideas are expounded most fully in two
major works: The Historical Novel (1937) and Studies in European Realism
(1950). In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957), he attacks
especially modernist literature. He rejected the static, ahistorical epic structure
of James Joyce’s work, and found modernist writing, in general, lacking in
historical awareness. Beckett and Kafka were condemned for these reasons. For
Lukács, modernist writers were too concerned about evoking an inner stream of
consciousness and the obsessions of isolated individuals. This he related to
the effects of living in late capitalist societies. One of the few
contemporaries he did admire was Thomas Mann, whom he considered an exponent of
a genuine ‘critical realism’. During a stay in Berlin in the 1930s he also
attacked the use of modernist techniques in the writings of left-wing radicals.
His attack on the playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht has become particularly
famous.
Bertolt Brecht
(1898–1956)
After reading
Marx in the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht, the German-born playwright, focused his
earlier anarchistic attitudes into more clearly defined communist convictions.
He wrote many clearly didactic plays (the Lehrstücke) and more complex
thought-provoking plays, mainly in exile from Nazi Germany. His theoretical
works on theatre practice revolutionised modern drama. He rejected entirely the
Aristotelian tradition of theatre: plot, fate and universality were out. He
employed techniques to bring about what he called a Verfremdungseffekt,
meaning literally ‘the effect of making strange’ and usually translated as
‘alienation’. It has much in common with the concept of ‘defamiliarisation’
coined by the Russian Formalists. By such methods he attempted to show up the contradictions
in capitalist society as something strange and unnatural, requiring change. His
actors were not to create the illusion of real people with whom audiences could
identify but should present caricatures revealing the inner contradictions of
the characters, the ways in which their behaviour was moulded by social forces
and their need to survive.
One aspect of
Brecht’s theory, which brought him into conflict with Lukács, was the rejection
of formal unity in a work. His ‘epic’ theatre consisted of a series of loosely related
episodes, rather than an all-embracing structure. The unities of time and place
were rejected. He did not believe in any ‘eternal aesthetic laws’ and, for him,
any dramatic device was acceptable if it served his purpose. He strongly
opposed what he saw as Lukács’ attempts to establish ‘purely formal and
literary criteria of realism’. He demanded constant adjustment to the
ever-changing nature of political reality: ‘to represent it the means of representation
must alter too.’
The Frankfurt
School
The name ‘The
Frankfurt School’ has come to be applied to a group of philosophers and
thinkers of other disciplines who were members or were associated with The Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. They practised what they
called ‘Critical Theory’. The leading figures in the group were Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. The institute moved to New York during the
Nazi period but settled back in Frankfurt again in 1950. Their analysis of modern
culture and society was very much influenced by their experience of Fascism.
Theodor Adorno
(1903–1969)
The leading and
most influential writer on aesthetics in the Frankfurt School was undoubtedly
Adorno. He criticized Lukács’ view that art could have a direct relationship with
reality. For Adorno, art, including literature, is detached from reality and
this is the very source of its strength. Popular art forms only confirm and
conform to the norms of a society but true art takes up a criticalstance,
distanced from the world which engendered it: ‘Art is the negative knowledge of the actual
world.’ He saw the alienation evident in the writings of Proust and Beckett as proving
such ‘negative knowledge’ of the modern world.
Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940)
Walter Benjamin
was closely associated with the Frankfurt School but he was very much a
maverick thinker. His early writing was on Goethe and German Baroque drama. His
best known essay is undoubtedly The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, in which he argued that modern means of reproducing works of
art, especially photography and film, have changed the special status of a work
of art. This is also true, of course, of the reproduction of musical
performances. Benjamin argues that works of art once used to have the quality
of uniqueness which he calls their ‘aura’. Even in the case of literature which,
of course, had long been available in multiple copies, this aura had been
maintained. Many kinds of modern works of art are actually designed with a view
to reproducing them, as is the case with art prints, for example. In the case
of the cinema there exist multiple copies without there being a real original
from which the film is derived. Benjamin believed this to be a good and beneficial
development, making art no longer something remote and awe-inspiring but
accessible to intelligent lay analysis. One might argue against Benjamin, of
course, that the result has been only to make much art more remote, obscure and
unfathomable. In another essay, The Author as Producer, he stresses the
need for socialist writers and artists to take full advantage of the potential
of the new possibilities of reproduction, and to use them consciously to
political effect. There is no guarantee of changing people’s thought merely
through the ready availability of works of art.
Lucien Goldmann
(1913–1970)
Lucien Goldmann
was a Romanian by birth but lived in France. He rejected the notion of
individual genius in the arts. He believed that works of art and literature
reflected the ‘mental structures’ of the class which engendered them. Great
writers possessed the ability to formulate and express these structures and
enable people to perceive them through the works. He developed a distinctive
form of Marxist literary theory he called ‘genetic structuralism’ which, as the
name suggests, also owes much to structuralist thought. He was interested in
tracing the relationships between a work of literature, predominant modes of philosophical
thought and ideology and specific social classes. There may be no obvious
surface parallels but they share structural similarities on a deeper level. For
this process of comparing parallel deep structures he used the term ‘homology’.
His most famous working out of the procedure was in his study of the French
dramatist Racine (Le Dieu Caché). In Pour une Sociologie du Roman (1964),
he provided a ‘homological’ study of the modern novel compared with the
structure of market economy.
Louis Althusser
(1918–1990)
Louis
Althusser’s ideas are also clearly indebted to structuralism. He abhorred the
notion of order and systems with central controlling principles. Social
structures consist of various levels in complex interaction with each other and
often in mutual conflict. One level may dominate the rest at any time but this
is itself determined by economic factors. In A Letter on Art, Althusser
considers art to be located somewhere between ideology and scientific knowledge.
A work of literature he sees in a somewhat negative light: it neither provides
a full understanding of the real world, nor does it simply lend expression to
the ideology of a specific class. But it does make us aware of the ideology
which governs both its and our own existence in society.
In fact,
Althusser presents in his writing two theses concerning ideology. The first is
that, ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their
real conditions of existence’. The second thesis relates ideology to its social
origins. For Althusser ideology works through the so-called ‘ideological state
apparatuses’. These include the political system, the law, education, organized
religion etc. Ideology has a material existence in the sense that it is
embodied in material systems. Thus, everything we do and everything we involve
ourselves in is, in some way, ideological. When we believe that we are acting according
to free will it is really in accordance with the dominant ideology. In
accordance with his belief that social structures are not systems with central
controlling principles, he also asserted that ideology in capitalist societies was
not dominated by the self-interest of a small group who use it to exploit others.
Those who profit from the system are as blind to its effects as others. One of
the causes of this blindness is the very force of ideology itself. It convinces
us that we are real ‘concrete subjects’. We see as natural whatever ideology
wants us to see as part of the natural order of things.
Critics
influenced by Althusser’s ideas have attempted to show how, in novels, readers
are often invited to become part of a world which is depicted as essentially free,
peopled by individuals who behave in autonomous ways. Such novels also give the
reader the illusion that he or she is free when, in fact, they are also in the
grip of an ideology. Many Marxist critics, however, have not been happy with
the implied deterministic view of ideology set down by Althusser. He seems to
allow no scope for nonideological thought or action.
Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937)
The Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci did not contribute specifically to literary theory but
his ideas have influenced many Marxist literary critics, notably the British
critic Raymond Williams. Gramsci’s concept of ideology is less deterministic
than that of Althusser and allows room for dissent. Writing in the 1930s in
Fascist Italy, Gramsci was fully aware of the power of ideology and of ‘the
consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction
imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’. For Gramsci, it was
possible for the individual to resist what he called the ‘hegemony’: the domination
by a ruling ideology through ‘consent’ rather than ‘coercive power’. Under
‘hegemony’ the citizens of a state have internalised what the rulers want them
to believe so thoroughly that they genuinely believe that they are expressing
their own opinions. But this hegemony does not, as Althusser believed, blind
all members of the society to the truth of the situation. It is possible to become
aware of the dominance of ‘hegemony’ and resist its effects, even if it is
impossible to escape completely its influence. This is the loophole of which the
artist can take advantage.
Pierre Macherey
Another
important influence on British critics in the 1960s and 1970s was Pierre
Macherey. In A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Macherey considered
a text not as something ‘created’ but as ‘produced’. Whatever authorial intentions
might be and whatever aesthetic standards might prevail at a given time, the
literary text is never completely ‘aware of what it is doing’. He regarded literary
texts as being pervaded by ideology and it was the job of the critic to look
for the cracks and weaknesses in the surface of the work, caused by its own
internal contradictions. The title of a later essay summarises this view as The
Text Says What It Does Not Say. In order to reveal the ideology in a text
the critic must focus on what the text represses rather than overtly expresses.
The cracks are the gaps where the author failed to make a thought conscious. To
some extent, this approach pre-figures that of poststructuralism but, whereas
Macherey considered his approach to be scientific and leading to objectively
true interpretations, poststructuralists believed that there was no such thing
as objective truth.
Raymond Williams
(1921–1988)
The British
critic Raymond Williams took as his task a complete reassessment of the British
tradition of cultural thought. In Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958),
he defined culture as ‘a whole way of life’. He was very much aware that in any
given society there is more than one single culture, each with its own ‘ideas
of the nature of social relationship’. The coexistence of different cultures does
not mean that there cannot also be a common culture: ‘…there is both a constant
interaction between these ways of life and an area which can properly be described
as common to or underlying both.’ While granting the ‘vital importance’ of
literature, he was instrumental in establishing a broader base for cultural
studies: ‘For experience that is formally recorded we go, not only to the rich
source of literature, but also to history, building, painting, music,
philosophy, theology and social theory, the physical theory, the physical and
natural sciences, anthropology, and indeed the whole body of learning.’
Williams’ work is sometimes compared and contrasted with his contemporary
Richard Hoggart, who also broadened the base of literary studies to include popular
literature. Hoggart has a warm engaging style and a strong sympathy for working
class culture, as evidenced in his study The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of
Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (1957).A
major difference between Hoggart and Williams is that of the nature of their
political commitment. Williams’ approach was determinedly historical and
materialist and in fact he eventually described it as ‘cultural materialism’.
It was only in Marxism and Literature (1977) that he finally identified
himself as a Marxist.
Terry Eagleton
(1943–)
In Criticism
and Ideology (1976), the British critic Terry Eagleton revealed the
influence of Pierre Macherey’s concern to find the cracks and contradictions in
a text. In this early work, Eagleton was interested not in what made a text
coherent but what made it incoherent. The influence of Althusser is also
evident. There may be apparent freedom in a text but it is not free in its
reflection of the dominant ideology. In this work Eagleton analysed a number of
canonical British novels, exploring the relationships between literary form and
ideology.
In the late
1970s Eagleton was greatly influenced by poststructuralism. He came to believe
that deconstructive theories could be used to undermine all absolute forms of knowledge,
although he also rejected the deconstructive denial of the possibility of
objectivity. He now believed that it should be the role of the critic to
analyse critically accepted notions of what constituted literature and reveal the
ideologies behind them. He thought that the critic should interpret
non-socialist works ‘against the grain’ to reveal a socialist perspective.
Eagleton shares
with Walter Benjamin an admiration for Brecht. Benjamin admired Brecht’s own
re-reading of history ‘against the grain’, and this inspired Eagleton to devote
a whole book to Benjamin: Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary
Criticism (1981). Benjamin viewed history as always obscuring the
significance of events by selective reactionary memory, and Brecht made
audiences see history from the perspective of the downtrodden.
Eagleton’s ideas
undergo constant change. He has utilised the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques
Lacan and the ideas of Jacques Derrida. His own Literary Theory, An Introduction
(1983, second edition 1996) provides a witty and perceptive analysis of
major literary schools, concluding with doubts about the very viability of
literary theory as an independent discipline. A recent book by Eagleton, After
Theory (2003), takes a whole new perspective on the future of cultural
theory. I shall take up some of these issues in my own final chapter.
Fredric Jameson
The American
theorist Fredric Jameson has been greatly influenced by the Frankfurt School.
He explored Marxist theories of literature, especially with reference to their dialectical
aspects, in his Marxism and Form (1971). He returns, in fact, to a
reconsideration of Hegel’s philosophy, in its investigation of the part to the
whole. Any object is bound up in a larger whole, is part, for example, of a specific
historical situation. The aspects of literature that a critic analyses must
also always be seen in relation to the critic’s own historical situation.
In The
Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson retains his earlier dialectic
approach but also incorporates various other, often conflicting modes of
thought, such as structuralism and poststructuralism. The influence of
Althusser is also evident. Jameson sees ideologies as ‘strategies of containment’,
providing acceptable explanations but suppressing contradictions. The solutions
provided by works of literature also suppress historical truths. He also believes
that the ‘story’ is an essential ‘epistemological category’ of the human mind. We
can only understand the world in terms of stories. Scientific, cultural and
historical accounts are all created narratives. Jameson took his title from
Freud’s concept of repression which he extends from the individual to the
collective level: ideology represses revolutionary ideas. He provides a complex
rethinking of Marxist thought about social structure and follows the view of
Althusser that society is a ‘decentred structure’ in which various levels
retain some degree of autonomy. The heterogeneity of society is reflected in
the heterogeneity of texts: literature is essentially a mirror of the society
in which it is produced. All kinds of interpretative methods can be applied to
a text, and will reveal something actually present in the text but each method
of interpretation applied will also reveal something about the ideologies governing
both the author’s and the critic’s worlds. In Postmodernism, or The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson maintains that postmodernism is
not only a currently fashionable style but the ‘cultural dominant’, in Roman
Jakobson’s sense, of our times. It conditions the way we perceive and interpret
our entire world.
