This became rather long, but there are a number of suggested readings/applications on offer. To make it a little more digestible, I've divided the essay into two parts.
marxism_part_i.pdf | |
File Size: | 78 kb |
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marxism_part_ii.pdf | |
File Size: | 57 kb |
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How to cite this article & others in the “series”
For Works Cited/Bibliographies: Belas, O. (2012). “Marxism Part I.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/. Retrieved [insert date when you read the article].
For citations in essays: “[quote]” (Belas 2012, p.x).
When using more than one article from this collection, arrange entries in Works Cited alphabetically according to essay title, then give year as 2012a, 2012b, etc.
Marxism Part I
Marx: A Very Brief Overview of His Aims and His Influence on Literature Studies
The basic thrust of Marx's work was towards an analysis of the social and economic history of humankind. He was concerned to expose the continued historical oppression of the working classes – be they the emerging slave class of tribal societies, the serf class of feudal society, or the proletariat of the capitalist age. Marx's theory of history owes a great deal to Hegel's dialectic method; crucially, though, Marx attempted to cast off Hegel's idealism, offering instead a materialist philosophy.[1] Here, “materialist” does not mean “materialistic,” a pejorative term for many of us today. By “materialist,” Marxists mean theories that focus on material, concrete, physical conditions, rather than abstract, ideal, or “spiritual” concerns.
The inexorable march of history, Marx conjectured, was towards communism. Each epochal shift – from tribal to primitive communal, to feudal, to capitalist – was brought about by irreconcilable class conflict (Marx 1983 [GI], 173-80). The only logical movement, once capitalism's class tensions proved unresolvable, was towards the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a phrase coined by J. A. Weydemeyer in 1852): simly (crudely) put, rule of the people for and by the people.
Theoretical Marxism and political communism, then, are not the same thing. Marx offers an interpretation or theory of what communism should be. While Marx envisioned the coming of a communist utopia he would hardly have recognized any of the twentieth-century manifestations of political communism. Marx's project was indeed a humane one; in a letter to Weydemeyer, Marx described his own contribution to the theories of social class and class struggle as follows:
1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class
struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the
abolition of all classes and to a classless society. (Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852; emboldening added)
By its very nature, then, communism proper would not be, for Marx, the replacing of one under-class with another, achieved by installation of totalitarian regimes. True communism would see the dissolution of class altogether. And because the history of humankind was, at its root, the history of economic organization and class struggle, the advent of communism would also mark the end of history (at least in the political-economic sense).
Along with Freud and Nietzsche, Marx is, arguably, one of the three most influential of modern philosophers.[2] Theoretical Marxism has certainly had a profound impact on literature study; indeed, there is no area of the arts and humanities that has not been significantly shaped by Marxist criticism. There is no denying, though, that academia – like so many other aspects of cultural life – is susceptible to trends and the lure of “The New.” By now, Marxism cannot claim to be a new critical approach or vantage point, and programmatic or dogmatic Marxist criticism is, today, a little unfashionable. But such intellectual fashions are probably best ignored; it is reasonable to suggest that one must have at least a cursory understanding of Marxism – even if one does not “speak” Marx-ese fluently – in order to negotiate the labyrinth that is literary theory: the works of such prominent thinkers as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Marshall Berman, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – to name but a few – are all heavily indebted to Marx; indeed, without Marx these thinkers' works could not have been thought in the ways that they were (see Works Cited). What follows is by no means a complete survey of Marx and Marxist literary theory; it is merely an introduction to a few salient aspects.
Base and Superstructure
The relationship in Marxism between a society's economic base and its (broadly) cultural superstructure is important, yet more complicated that it might at first seem. Understanding what is meant by “base” and “superstructure,” and what the relationship between the two is, is important, for as Raymond Williams suggests, the idea “of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis” (Williams 1973, 31). As far as Marxist literary theory goes, the concepts of base and superstructure might be applied to the social dynamics dramatized in a text, or to a consideration of literature's social-cultural role or function.
The base is the economic organization of a society: it is the industries, the work-forces, the technologies; the organization of workers, their relationships to one another and to their bosses; it is the sum total of the basic economic conditions by which people make their livings, and by which a society functions.
The superstructure is the ideological network (made of political, legal, juridical systems, for example) that is made possible by the organization of the base, and which shapes the kind of society we (think we) are. The superstructure shapes consciousness, but it is only possible because of the organization of the economic base. As Marx put it, “[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general” (Marx 1983 [CPE], 160).
This is a fairly serviceable definition of base and superstructure, but, as with so much in theory and philosophy, things are not quite so clear-cut as they, at first, might seem.
To begin with, while it might be reasonable to suppose that superstructural conditions are enabled only by the particular organization of the economic base, we must surely consider, also, the extent to which the superstructure exerts a limiting or controlling force on the base. For Marx, revolution in any epoch (be it feudal or capitalist) was inevitable; it was simply a matter, as mentioned above, of the different needs of the different classes (whose activities would, logically, be part of either base and superstructural activities) coming into irreconcilable conflict with one another (Marx 1983 [GI], 173-80 ).
That said, the fact that the working classes of any epoch are oppressed for as long as they are suggests that superstructural forces do affect the base to some extent. Williams is perhaps right, then, to suggest that the relationship of the base and superstructure is not simply one of, as he puts it, a “determining base and a determined superstructure” (Williams 1973, 31); rather, base and superstructure are part of a social feedback loop, the one influencing the other at all times. Engels, Marx's long-time collaborator, seems to suggest as much when he writes that “[t]here is an interaction of all these elements” of the base and superstructure, the sum total of which produces the final economic “movement” or development (Engels 1890).
In the twentieth century, Williams – drawing on the work of Gramsci – sought to formulate a more dynamic base-superstructure model. Base and superstructure, he argued, needed to be understood as areas of related and inter-related practices, not as imaginary “zones” of social-economic activity; not only are they engaged in a constant dialogue with one another, the practices that make up the base and the superstructure are themselves always shifting and changing (Williams 1973).
As well as the thinking critically about the dynamics of the base and superstructure, we must also ask: just what is the relevance of base and superstructure to literature studies? For while Marx and Engels were both acutely aware of and sensitive to the arts, the superstructure, as they write of it, tends to consist of political or institutional elements.[3] So where does literature sit in all this?
It is possible to view literature as belonging to the superstructure. Take the novel. If one views the novel as emerging from certain eighteenth-century social and economic changes (which occur at the base) (see, for example, Watt 1957), then this seems reasonable. The novel, we might say, is a superstructural development, made possible by changes in the economic base.
But if one were to turn to a critic like Walter Benjamin (himself a formidable Marxist thinker), we might be persuaded that literary forms and their writers are better understood as operating at base-level. Precisely because types and forms of writing are affected and made possible by activity at the base, it is here that writing and writers should be operating. Moreover, it is technological change that will democratize writing, and inaugurate it as a mode of political activism (Benjamin 1934). The author, says Benjamin, should be thought of as a producer, and must rise to this role. Benjamin is writing in the 1930s, and so when he speaks of technologies of mass production he is thinking of mechanically reproduced forms such as the newspaper and photography (Benjamin 1934; Benjamin 1936). Such technologies and forms, he suggests, may signal the disappearance of depth and the uniqueness that once distinguished “great” art. But
as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois
press, begins […] to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer. (Benjamin 1934, 225)
At a time when fascism posed a global threat, Benjamin saw the politicization of art as a crucial move against fascism's “aestheticization” (apologies for the unwieldy coinage [not mine]!) of politics. Benjamin's is one of the subtler arguments for the democratization of art and the “proletarianization” (again, apologies!) of writing. But other writers have shared his view of the the writer as worker, and writing as work – Dos Passos (1935) and Atwood (2002), to name but two separated by time and style.
Example: Chester Himes
Briefly, then, an example of a way in which base and superstructure might be factored into our literary criticisms.
Chester Himes was an African American writer, who had two literary careers: following Richard Wright, whose protest novel Native Son was both critically admired and popular (it knocked Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath from its bestseller spot), Himes had a difficult and, financially speaking, ultimately unsuccessful run as writer of realist protest fiction. After moving from America to Paris, as a number of American writers did in the inter- and post-War years, Himes was persuaded to write hard-boiled detective fiction (in the vein of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and others). At this Himes proved incredibly successful – this began in the 1950s; in France, he remains to this day a poster boy for Gallimard publishers.
Himes's turn from “serious” to commercial genre fiction might be understood in terms of the base-superstructure nexus: he ended up writing, and making a living from, whatever it was that social and economic forces conspired to make possible. But of course, there are many of us who would wish to defend genre fiction from so dismissive an attitude. Were one to turn one's attention to Himes's work itself, interpretations a little more nuanced and sustained are possible.
Consider TheEnd of a Primitive, the work that marks Himes's transition from a writer of “literary” to genre fiction. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and charts the difficulties – artistic, sexual, racial – of a young writer, Jesse, trying to make his way in New York. The novel ends in the death of Jesse's white lover, Kriss, whom Jesse has killed whilst blind-drunk. On seeing the body, Jesse knows that he must be the murderer, although he has no recollection of this, thanks to his intoxication.
Himes, in rather didactic fashion, makes it clear to his reader that we are to see the murder as indicative of the social pressures acting on African Americans, pressures that restrict aesthetic and romantic/sexual choice: Jesse is unable to publish his work, because the market, he is told, will not support his sort of writing; it does not fit with the public's conception of black literature and “The Black Writer.” The death of Jesse's lover also seems to be the natural, implosive conclusion for a relationship that society will not sanction.
The style Himes uses in Primitive is an interesting vehicle for all this: third-person perspective is used, but much, if not all, of the novel is focalized through Jesse. And throughout the text, the clipped, minor syntax of newspaper reports and headlines is used to articulate Jesse's thoughts and perceptions – it is as if the very form and style that, for Benjamin, promised to democratize art, is now the means through which Jesse realizes there is no place for him in society. The democratization of art leaves no room for the Artist (that Jesse so wishes to be), while the dynamics of base and superstructure leave no room for anything other than a prefabricated pop image of “The Black Artist,” an image to which Jesse can or will not conform. There seems, in Himes's novel, to be no place at all – at least in America – for the Jesses of African American artistic culture.
Such a reading might be framed by, or organized around, a conception of the base-superstructure dynamic, and the place of literature within it. After all, it was Himes's firm conviction that his public failings as a writer were as much, possibly more, to do with social and economic forces, than with the writing itself. One might be tempted to say there was at least a grain of truth to this; out of America, Himes did very well, commercially and critically.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer (1944, 1969). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John cumming. London:
Verso.
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Benjamin, W. (1934). “The Author as Producer.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.
Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken. 220-238.
Benjamin, W. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuninations. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
Berman, M. (1988). All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Penguin.
Dos Passos, J. (1935). “The Writer as Technician.” [Contributed to the eponymous proceedings of The American Writers’ Congress (April 1935).]. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. 545-548.
Eagleton, T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Engels, F. Letter to J. Bloch. 21 September 1890. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm. Retrieced 20 November 2012.
Himes, C. (1997). The End of a Primitive. New York: Norton.
[Note: This novel was written in the 1950s, but underwent various revisions; this publication date indicates the Norton edition, not when the novel was written]
Marx, K. (1983). The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin.
From this collection: GI – selections from The German Ideology.
CPE – selections from A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Preface
Marx, K. Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Singer, P. (2001). Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Williams, R. (1973). “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Culture and Materialism.
London: Verso, 2005. 31-49.
[1]For clarification on Hegel's influence on Marx, see Singer's books on both Marx (2000) and Hegel (2001).
[2]In 2005, Marx was voted the Greatest Philosopher, by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time. The show is archived online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9jg.
[3]“The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.” (Engels 1890)
*****
For Works Cited/Bibliographies: Belas, O. (2012). “Marxism Part I.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/. Retrieved [insert date when you read the article].
For citations in essays: “[quote]” (Belas 2012, p.x).
When using more than one article from this collection, arrange entries in Works Cited alphabetically according to essay title, then give year as 2012a, 2012b, etc.
Marxism Part I
Marx: A Very Brief Overview of His Aims and His Influence on Literature Studies
The basic thrust of Marx's work was towards an analysis of the social and economic history of humankind. He was concerned to expose the continued historical oppression of the working classes – be they the emerging slave class of tribal societies, the serf class of feudal society, or the proletariat of the capitalist age. Marx's theory of history owes a great deal to Hegel's dialectic method; crucially, though, Marx attempted to cast off Hegel's idealism, offering instead a materialist philosophy.[1] Here, “materialist” does not mean “materialistic,” a pejorative term for many of us today. By “materialist,” Marxists mean theories that focus on material, concrete, physical conditions, rather than abstract, ideal, or “spiritual” concerns.
The inexorable march of history, Marx conjectured, was towards communism. Each epochal shift – from tribal to primitive communal, to feudal, to capitalist – was brought about by irreconcilable class conflict (Marx 1983 [GI], 173-80). The only logical movement, once capitalism's class tensions proved unresolvable, was towards the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a phrase coined by J. A. Weydemeyer in 1852): simly (crudely) put, rule of the people for and by the people.
Theoretical Marxism and political communism, then, are not the same thing. Marx offers an interpretation or theory of what communism should be. While Marx envisioned the coming of a communist utopia he would hardly have recognized any of the twentieth-century manifestations of political communism. Marx's project was indeed a humane one; in a letter to Weydemeyer, Marx described his own contribution to the theories of social class and class struggle as follows:
1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class
struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the
abolition of all classes and to a classless society. (Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852; emboldening added)
By its very nature, then, communism proper would not be, for Marx, the replacing of one under-class with another, achieved by installation of totalitarian regimes. True communism would see the dissolution of class altogether. And because the history of humankind was, at its root, the history of economic organization and class struggle, the advent of communism would also mark the end of history (at least in the political-economic sense).
Along with Freud and Nietzsche, Marx is, arguably, one of the three most influential of modern philosophers.[2] Theoretical Marxism has certainly had a profound impact on literature study; indeed, there is no area of the arts and humanities that has not been significantly shaped by Marxist criticism. There is no denying, though, that academia – like so many other aspects of cultural life – is susceptible to trends and the lure of “The New.” By now, Marxism cannot claim to be a new critical approach or vantage point, and programmatic or dogmatic Marxist criticism is, today, a little unfashionable. But such intellectual fashions are probably best ignored; it is reasonable to suggest that one must have at least a cursory understanding of Marxism – even if one does not “speak” Marx-ese fluently – in order to negotiate the labyrinth that is literary theory: the works of such prominent thinkers as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Marshall Berman, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – to name but a few – are all heavily indebted to Marx; indeed, without Marx these thinkers' works could not have been thought in the ways that they were (see Works Cited). What follows is by no means a complete survey of Marx and Marxist literary theory; it is merely an introduction to a few salient aspects.
Base and Superstructure
The relationship in Marxism between a society's economic base and its (broadly) cultural superstructure is important, yet more complicated that it might at first seem. Understanding what is meant by “base” and “superstructure,” and what the relationship between the two is, is important, for as Raymond Williams suggests, the idea “of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis” (Williams 1973, 31). As far as Marxist literary theory goes, the concepts of base and superstructure might be applied to the social dynamics dramatized in a text, or to a consideration of literature's social-cultural role or function.
The base is the economic organization of a society: it is the industries, the work-forces, the technologies; the organization of workers, their relationships to one another and to their bosses; it is the sum total of the basic economic conditions by which people make their livings, and by which a society functions.
The superstructure is the ideological network (made of political, legal, juridical systems, for example) that is made possible by the organization of the base, and which shapes the kind of society we (think we) are. The superstructure shapes consciousness, but it is only possible because of the organization of the economic base. As Marx put it, “[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general” (Marx 1983 [CPE], 160).
This is a fairly serviceable definition of base and superstructure, but, as with so much in theory and philosophy, things are not quite so clear-cut as they, at first, might seem.
To begin with, while it might be reasonable to suppose that superstructural conditions are enabled only by the particular organization of the economic base, we must surely consider, also, the extent to which the superstructure exerts a limiting or controlling force on the base. For Marx, revolution in any epoch (be it feudal or capitalist) was inevitable; it was simply a matter, as mentioned above, of the different needs of the different classes (whose activities would, logically, be part of either base and superstructural activities) coming into irreconcilable conflict with one another (Marx 1983 [GI], 173-80 ).
That said, the fact that the working classes of any epoch are oppressed for as long as they are suggests that superstructural forces do affect the base to some extent. Williams is perhaps right, then, to suggest that the relationship of the base and superstructure is not simply one of, as he puts it, a “determining base and a determined superstructure” (Williams 1973, 31); rather, base and superstructure are part of a social feedback loop, the one influencing the other at all times. Engels, Marx's long-time collaborator, seems to suggest as much when he writes that “[t]here is an interaction of all these elements” of the base and superstructure, the sum total of which produces the final economic “movement” or development (Engels 1890).
In the twentieth century, Williams – drawing on the work of Gramsci – sought to formulate a more dynamic base-superstructure model. Base and superstructure, he argued, needed to be understood as areas of related and inter-related practices, not as imaginary “zones” of social-economic activity; not only are they engaged in a constant dialogue with one another, the practices that make up the base and the superstructure are themselves always shifting and changing (Williams 1973).
As well as the thinking critically about the dynamics of the base and superstructure, we must also ask: just what is the relevance of base and superstructure to literature studies? For while Marx and Engels were both acutely aware of and sensitive to the arts, the superstructure, as they write of it, tends to consist of political or institutional elements.[3] So where does literature sit in all this?
It is possible to view literature as belonging to the superstructure. Take the novel. If one views the novel as emerging from certain eighteenth-century social and economic changes (which occur at the base) (see, for example, Watt 1957), then this seems reasonable. The novel, we might say, is a superstructural development, made possible by changes in the economic base.
But if one were to turn to a critic like Walter Benjamin (himself a formidable Marxist thinker), we might be persuaded that literary forms and their writers are better understood as operating at base-level. Precisely because types and forms of writing are affected and made possible by activity at the base, it is here that writing and writers should be operating. Moreover, it is technological change that will democratize writing, and inaugurate it as a mode of political activism (Benjamin 1934). The author, says Benjamin, should be thought of as a producer, and must rise to this role. Benjamin is writing in the 1930s, and so when he speaks of technologies of mass production he is thinking of mechanically reproduced forms such as the newspaper and photography (Benjamin 1934; Benjamin 1936). Such technologies and forms, he suggests, may signal the disappearance of depth and the uniqueness that once distinguished “great” art. But
as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois
press, begins […] to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer. (Benjamin 1934, 225)
At a time when fascism posed a global threat, Benjamin saw the politicization of art as a crucial move against fascism's “aestheticization” (apologies for the unwieldy coinage [not mine]!) of politics. Benjamin's is one of the subtler arguments for the democratization of art and the “proletarianization” (again, apologies!) of writing. But other writers have shared his view of the the writer as worker, and writing as work – Dos Passos (1935) and Atwood (2002), to name but two separated by time and style.
Example: Chester Himes
Briefly, then, an example of a way in which base and superstructure might be factored into our literary criticisms.
Chester Himes was an African American writer, who had two literary careers: following Richard Wright, whose protest novel Native Son was both critically admired and popular (it knocked Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath from its bestseller spot), Himes had a difficult and, financially speaking, ultimately unsuccessful run as writer of realist protest fiction. After moving from America to Paris, as a number of American writers did in the inter- and post-War years, Himes was persuaded to write hard-boiled detective fiction (in the vein of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and others). At this Himes proved incredibly successful – this began in the 1950s; in France, he remains to this day a poster boy for Gallimard publishers.
Himes's turn from “serious” to commercial genre fiction might be understood in terms of the base-superstructure nexus: he ended up writing, and making a living from, whatever it was that social and economic forces conspired to make possible. But of course, there are many of us who would wish to defend genre fiction from so dismissive an attitude. Were one to turn one's attention to Himes's work itself, interpretations a little more nuanced and sustained are possible.
Consider TheEnd of a Primitive, the work that marks Himes's transition from a writer of “literary” to genre fiction. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and charts the difficulties – artistic, sexual, racial – of a young writer, Jesse, trying to make his way in New York. The novel ends in the death of Jesse's white lover, Kriss, whom Jesse has killed whilst blind-drunk. On seeing the body, Jesse knows that he must be the murderer, although he has no recollection of this, thanks to his intoxication.
Himes, in rather didactic fashion, makes it clear to his reader that we are to see the murder as indicative of the social pressures acting on African Americans, pressures that restrict aesthetic and romantic/sexual choice: Jesse is unable to publish his work, because the market, he is told, will not support his sort of writing; it does not fit with the public's conception of black literature and “The Black Writer.” The death of Jesse's lover also seems to be the natural, implosive conclusion for a relationship that society will not sanction.
The style Himes uses in Primitive is an interesting vehicle for all this: third-person perspective is used, but much, if not all, of the novel is focalized through Jesse. And throughout the text, the clipped, minor syntax of newspaper reports and headlines is used to articulate Jesse's thoughts and perceptions – it is as if the very form and style that, for Benjamin, promised to democratize art, is now the means through which Jesse realizes there is no place for him in society. The democratization of art leaves no room for the Artist (that Jesse so wishes to be), while the dynamics of base and superstructure leave no room for anything other than a prefabricated pop image of “The Black Artist,” an image to which Jesse can or will not conform. There seems, in Himes's novel, to be no place at all – at least in America – for the Jesses of African American artistic culture.
Such a reading might be framed by, or organized around, a conception of the base-superstructure dynamic, and the place of literature within it. After all, it was Himes's firm conviction that his public failings as a writer were as much, possibly more, to do with social and economic forces, than with the writing itself. One might be tempted to say there was at least a grain of truth to this; out of America, Himes did very well, commercially and critically.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer (1944, 1969). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John cumming. London:
Verso.
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Benjamin, W. (1934). “The Author as Producer.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.
Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken. 220-238.
Benjamin, W. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuninations. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
Berman, M. (1988). All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Penguin.
Dos Passos, J. (1935). “The Writer as Technician.” [Contributed to the eponymous proceedings of The American Writers’ Congress (April 1935).]. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. 545-548.
Eagleton, T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Engels, F. Letter to J. Bloch. 21 September 1890. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm. Retrieced 20 November 2012.
Himes, C. (1997). The End of a Primitive. New York: Norton.
[Note: This novel was written in the 1950s, but underwent various revisions; this publication date indicates the Norton edition, not when the novel was written]
Marx, K. (1983). The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin.
From this collection: GI – selections from The German Ideology.
CPE – selections from A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Preface
Marx, K. Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Singer, P. (2001). Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Williams, R. (1973). “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Culture and Materialism.
London: Verso, 2005. 31-49.
[1]For clarification on Hegel's influence on Marx, see Singer's books on both Marx (2000) and Hegel (2001).
[2]In 2005, Marx was voted the Greatest Philosopher, by listeners of the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time. The show is archived online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9jg.
[3]“The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.” (Engels 1890)
*****
How to cite this article & others in the “series”
For Works Cited/Bibliographies: Belas, O. (2012). “Marxism Part II.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/marxism.html . Retrieved [insert date when you read the article].
For citations in essays: “[quote]” (Belas 2012, p.x).
When using more than one article from this collection, arrange entries in Works Cited alphabetically according to essay title, then give year as 2012a, 2012b, etc.
Marxism: Part II
This part of the essay on Marxism looks at more broadly Marxist approaches to literary criticism, and to several more key terms.
Marx and Historicist Interpretations of Literature
An early point we can make about Marxism in relation to literary study is this: the move towards historicist analyses of texts – that is, critical interpretations which assume that literary texts cannot be properly understood apart from their historical contexts – is a move inspired in no small measure by Marx's theory of history, of human language-use and self-consciousness as “social product[s],” and his conviction that people are very much products of their environments (Marx 1983 [GI], 174]. The historicism of Marxist criticisms is in many ways an extension of Marx's axiom “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (Marx 1983 [GI], 170).
Works of art can certainly serve to criticize the social background against which they are written. Indeed, the African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois (himself a Marxist thinker) once declaimed, “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. […] I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (DuBois 1926). Here, DuBois is speaking in strident terms of propaganda as a mechanism for promoting, accelerating, or even bringing about freedom and equality for “black folk” (DuBois 1926). But Marxist-historicist interpretations of literature can also view texts as reflecting or embodying certain ideologies (systems of beliefs) of their day. In this sense, literary texts are as much social-historical documents as they are “pure” works of art, which some critics might try to strip of all social, political, historical particularity.
Example: The Great Gatsby
To give an example that will be familiar to most readers: we might view Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) as a critique of the so-called “Jazz Age” and its consumerist excesses; a critique made all the more poignant when one considers the fact that the novel's publication was quickly followed by the Great Depression. However, we might excavate the text for signs that just as Fitzgerald is able to distance himself from his own times in order to write Gatsby, his text also encapsulates the zeitgeist (spirit of the day or age), the widespread anxieties around such issues as gender, racial, and sexual identity. Moreover, one might argue, the text never entirely relieves itself of the burden of other related anxieties – the desire for class mobility, for example, and the possibility of acceptance into another class on equal terms. Were this truly possible (but for Gatsby, it seems that ultimately it is not), it would give credence to the national myth that in America – that most modern of democratic experiments – one can truly make and fashion oneself in the image one desires.
One attraction of this approach to literary analysis is this: such an interpretation (though it would, of course, require far more detailed textual justification than is offered here) requires little or no Marxist theoretical jargon; nevertheless, it bears a residual, yet easily seen, Marxism. An interpretation that reads the text as very much a sign of its historical times need only be aware of, and grounded in, the axiom with which we began this section: “consciousness does not determine the world, but the world consciousness.” Indeed, to read and interpret literature in such historicist fashion is very much in keeping with the spirit of Engels and Marx's aesthetics (regardless of whether a “heavy” theoretical language is used), for they “considered it absolutely impossible to understand art and literature proceeding only from their internal laws of development” (Blunden). That is, art cannot properly be understood in “purely” formal and aesthetic terms, term that divorce artworks from their historical context. Art, for Marx and Engels and their followers, “ is one of the forms of social consciousness and it therefore follows that the reasons for its changes should be sought in the social existence of men” (Blunden; italics added). Artworks, then, are produced by social forces; but artworks also embody, represent, or reflect the social forces that have produced them.
If artworks are both the productions of and ideological “mirrors” of social forces and organizations, then this goes some way towards explaining why each era produces an aesthetically coherent yet unique body of art. Writers in the twenty-first century cannot write like those of the nineteenth. Or, rather, to write “like” the great nineteenth-century writers will never be anything more than a “writing like”; mere imitation, which will only ever amount to parody or pastiche. The air of authenticity that great works of literature have comes from their responding to and being produced by particular socio-economic forces. When these forces change, so too will the aesthetic response of artists. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, “Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice” (Marx & Engels 1970, 108).
“Life is Not Determined by Consciousness, but Consciousness by Life”: Marxism, “Human Nature,” Class, and Identity
The Marxist view of the person as a product of her environment is crucial in Marxist and post-Marxist criticism. The contributions of Marx, as well as the “linguistic turn” of Nietzsche and Freud's development of psychoanalysis, pave the way for constructionist views of human identity and “human nature.” Briefly put, constructionists understand identity and its component parts (sex, gender, race, class and so on) as socially constructed or built: that is, we learn and acquire our identities; what we call identity and “human nature” are not the outward expressions of something innate or “natural” that lies somehow “within” us.
Part of Marx's legacy, then, is a change in what we can understand by the term “human nature.” After Marx, to talk of human nature is very much to talk of the behaviours and characteristics that a society accepts as “natural.” “Nature” and “the natural” become, post-Marx, normative concepts rather than concepts of something universal and static “inside” of us. Today, we might say, if something is said to be “natural,” what this really points to is a value or set of values that are so deeply ingrained in a culture as to be virtually unquestionable. But this does not mean that those values have always been there, nor that they always will. The “natural,” in a broadly Marxist vision of culture, refers to the assumptions and values upon which a society is built, not to “God-given,” unchangeable “laws of nature.” This is a view of “nature” and “the natural” as socially constructed and externally imposed upon us, rather than as an expression of some “inner essence.”
Example: “Them & [uz]”
Another approach to interpretation of literary texts – and one which, as before, does not rely heavily on technical jargon – would be to begin with a broadly Marxist view of the person being shaped, built, constructed by their social-cultural world (once more, “life is not determined by consciousness, but...”), and to build analyses around this notion. We might consider, for example, the extent to which the poetic voice in Tony Harrison's autobiographical poem “Them & [uz]” (Harrison 1978) has been formed by class-based prejudices, which the speaker experienced at school, years during which, it seems, accent (taken by the speaker's teachers as a token of class), was a bar that prevented access to English poetic culture: “Poetry,” our poet is told, is “the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”
Note here the different values embodied by “poetry” and “prose,” and the class assumptions that accompany each - “prose,” far less valued by the teacher than “poetry,” is here a linguistic and stylistic marker of the “lowly” working classes. In this poem, voice – often used as a metaphor for individual identity – initially blocks the speaker from an imagined literary heritage. By poem's end, the speaker realizes something; he realizes, for example, that “Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhyme,” if spoken with the “right” accent. That is, the Cumberland accent of Wordsworth, not the “Received Pronunciation” so often touted as “standard” or “neutral,” and which Harrison so incisively mocks and critiques in this poem. The speaker realizes that the English poetic tradition is in fact composed of multiple regional – and by extension, “classed” – voices, including, more recently, his own (indeed, perhaps we should speak of “traditions,” rather than “tradition”). Of course, he quips, you cannot entirely prevent others' attempt to mould you to a particular social, class-based model: “My first mention in the Times / automatically made Tony Anthony!”
One must not miss the irony here: having been either blocked from Shakespeare altogether or relegated to the arena of the fool's “prose,” success sees our speaker dubbed “Anthony” by the Times, the nation's paper of record. Anthony, of course, is one of Shakespeare's romantic heroes; and Anthony, of course, does not speak in “prose.”
Aesthetic Life, the Work of Art, and Alienation
Our capacity to lead an aesthetic life is developed through our social existence – so would a Marxist say. It comes from our interactions with the material world, and our use, moulding, crafting of nature. Under the controlling gaze of the bourgeoisie, and in the context of capitalist economic organization, the working classes are alienated (that is made strange or alien to...; radically separated from...) in a four-fold way.
1) workers are alienated from the products of their labour, which are, in the era of bourgeois capitalism, commodities (things the ultimate aim of which is to generate profit for the bosses); 2) workers are alienated from their own labour – they work for the betterment of another, an exploitative boss, not themselves or their own aesthetic satisfaction; 3) workers are alienated from themselves, their own bodies. Not only are workers separated or alienated from the products of their labour and that labour itself (both of which are now under the control of someone else); but, because it is the worker who must carry out the work, they are no longer in control of their own selves, their own bodies. The general economy (that is, organization) of labour under capitalism can be summed up thus: “The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production increases in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. The more commodities the worker produces, the cheaper a commodity he becomes” (Marx 1983 [EPM], 133). 4) Finally, while man is by “nature” a social and socially organized animal, under capitalism the worker is not only alienated from herself, she is also alienated from her fellow human beings. Capitalism throws the proletariat into a competitive and ruggedly individualistic relation with one another.
Examples: Atwood and Saunders
Anxiety over alienation is worked through to great effect, but in very different ways, in Atwood's “fictional essay” (the generic label is a strange one) “Voice,” and Saunders's stories “Pastoralia” and “Sea Oak.” In “Voice,” the speaker – possibly an Atwood persona – considers the relationship one has to one's God-given voice (just what “voice” is a metaphor for must be given some careful consideration here). This short piece considers the extent to which one's sense of self is bound up in the notion of “voice,” and considers the implications of losing one's (metaphorical?) voice.
If we take “voice” to be a metaphor for the authorial voice, then we can read Atwood's piece as a negotiation of the necessary alienation the author must endure in relation to her work, in order to have a public voice at all. Ironically, the very thing in which one's identity as a writer is bound up, is also the very thing one must be prepared to be alienated from if one is to have one's “voice” “heard.” The fact that one is forced to work through the metaphorical richness of Atwood's “voice” using other bodily and sensual metaphors is a fitting reminder of Marx's materialism: he was aware that to talk of people is to talk, in a radical way, about bodies, not abstracted, spiritualized “essences.”
In “Voice,” then, the “voice” as metaphor links the speaker's sense of corporeal (bodily) self to the self that is embodied and externalized in the work of art. “Voice” is a fitting metaphor for this negotiation of identity and alienation: the voice is, strangely, a part of and apart from the body; it is produced by and in the body, and yet we often think of it as being disembodied, in a way that our arms, legs, heads are not.
In Saunders's “Pastoralia” and “Sea Oak,” we are treated to investigation of the body as the means and product of labour, from which the workers are radically alienated. In “Pastoralia,” the nameless narrator works as a caveman in a theme park. His body is the commodity, it is the product that the theme park is selling. In various ways throughout the story – the extended “conversations” the narrator has with his wife via fax; the restrictions of co-workers to “Separate Areas” after working hours – we witness the narrator experiencing the four-fold alienation outlined by Marx. It is the narrator's own body – as the commodity that the theme park “owns” and sells – that is both the source and means of this multiple alienation.
A similar dynamic and process of alienation is presented in “Sea Oak,” in which the protagonist works as a stripper in order to raise enough money to move his family out of the sink estate in which they are trapped. Constantly struggling to make enough money to realize his aim, the protagonist is visited by his apparently undead aunt, who tells him in no uncertain terms that if he thinks he's ever going to move on, then he is going “to have to show some cock.” A clearer dramatization of alienation from one's own body and self would, I suggest, be hard to find! In these stories, the body becomes the site and symbol on which Marx's four-fold alienation is concentrated; alienation in these stories is, as it were, written on the body.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer (1944, 1969). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John cumming. London: Verso.
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Attwood, M. (2006). “Voice.” The Tent. London: Bloomsbury. 21-24.
Benjamin, W. (1934). “The Author as Producer.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken. 220-238.
Benjamin, W. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuninations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
Berman, M. (1988). All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Penguin.
Blunden, A. (transcriber). Preface. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/art/preface.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Dos Passos, J. (1935). “The Writer as Technician.” [Contributed to the eponymous proceedings of The American Writers’ Congress (April 1935).]. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. 545-548.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1926). “Criteria of Negro Art.” First published in the journal Crisis vol. 32 (October 1926), 290-
297. Reproduced http://www.webdubois.org/dbCriteriaNArt.html. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
Eagleton, T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Engels, F. Letter to J. Bloch. 21 September 1890. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm. Retrieced 20 November 2012.
Fitzgerald, F.S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2007.
Harrison, T. (1978). “Them & [uz].” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fourth Ed. Eds Ferguson et al. New York:
Norton, 1996. 1766-67.
Himes, C. (1997). The End of a Primitive. New York: Norton.
[Note: This novel was written in the 1950s, but underwent various revisions; this publication date indicates the Norton edition, not when the novel was written]
Marx, K., and F. Engels (1970). The German Ideology: Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three and
Supplementary Text. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 2004.
Marx, K. (1983). The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin.
From this collection: GI – selections from The German Ideology.
CPE – selections from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface
Marx, K. Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Saunders, G. (2000). Pastoralia. New York: Penguin-Riverhead.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Singer, P. (2001). Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Williams, R. (1973). “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Culture and Materialism. London: Verso, 2005. 31-49.
For Works Cited/Bibliographies: Belas, O. (2012). “Marxism Part II.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/marxism.html . Retrieved [insert date when you read the article].
For citations in essays: “[quote]” (Belas 2012, p.x).
When using more than one article from this collection, arrange entries in Works Cited alphabetically according to essay title, then give year as 2012a, 2012b, etc.
Marxism: Part II
This part of the essay on Marxism looks at more broadly Marxist approaches to literary criticism, and to several more key terms.
Marx and Historicist Interpretations of Literature
An early point we can make about Marxism in relation to literary study is this: the move towards historicist analyses of texts – that is, critical interpretations which assume that literary texts cannot be properly understood apart from their historical contexts – is a move inspired in no small measure by Marx's theory of history, of human language-use and self-consciousness as “social product[s],” and his conviction that people are very much products of their environments (Marx 1983 [GI], 174]. The historicism of Marxist criticisms is in many ways an extension of Marx's axiom “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (Marx 1983 [GI], 170).
Works of art can certainly serve to criticize the social background against which they are written. Indeed, the African American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois (himself a Marxist thinker) once declaimed, “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. […] I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (DuBois 1926). Here, DuBois is speaking in strident terms of propaganda as a mechanism for promoting, accelerating, or even bringing about freedom and equality for “black folk” (DuBois 1926). But Marxist-historicist interpretations of literature can also view texts as reflecting or embodying certain ideologies (systems of beliefs) of their day. In this sense, literary texts are as much social-historical documents as they are “pure” works of art, which some critics might try to strip of all social, political, historical particularity.
Example: The Great Gatsby
To give an example that will be familiar to most readers: we might view Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) as a critique of the so-called “Jazz Age” and its consumerist excesses; a critique made all the more poignant when one considers the fact that the novel's publication was quickly followed by the Great Depression. However, we might excavate the text for signs that just as Fitzgerald is able to distance himself from his own times in order to write Gatsby, his text also encapsulates the zeitgeist (spirit of the day or age), the widespread anxieties around such issues as gender, racial, and sexual identity. Moreover, one might argue, the text never entirely relieves itself of the burden of other related anxieties – the desire for class mobility, for example, and the possibility of acceptance into another class on equal terms. Were this truly possible (but for Gatsby, it seems that ultimately it is not), it would give credence to the national myth that in America – that most modern of democratic experiments – one can truly make and fashion oneself in the image one desires.
One attraction of this approach to literary analysis is this: such an interpretation (though it would, of course, require far more detailed textual justification than is offered here) requires little or no Marxist theoretical jargon; nevertheless, it bears a residual, yet easily seen, Marxism. An interpretation that reads the text as very much a sign of its historical times need only be aware of, and grounded in, the axiom with which we began this section: “consciousness does not determine the world, but the world consciousness.” Indeed, to read and interpret literature in such historicist fashion is very much in keeping with the spirit of Engels and Marx's aesthetics (regardless of whether a “heavy” theoretical language is used), for they “considered it absolutely impossible to understand art and literature proceeding only from their internal laws of development” (Blunden). That is, art cannot properly be understood in “purely” formal and aesthetic terms, term that divorce artworks from their historical context. Art, for Marx and Engels and their followers, “ is one of the forms of social consciousness and it therefore follows that the reasons for its changes should be sought in the social existence of men” (Blunden; italics added). Artworks, then, are produced by social forces; but artworks also embody, represent, or reflect the social forces that have produced them.
If artworks are both the productions of and ideological “mirrors” of social forces and organizations, then this goes some way towards explaining why each era produces an aesthetically coherent yet unique body of art. Writers in the twenty-first century cannot write like those of the nineteenth. Or, rather, to write “like” the great nineteenth-century writers will never be anything more than a “writing like”; mere imitation, which will only ever amount to parody or pastiche. The air of authenticity that great works of literature have comes from their responding to and being produced by particular socio-economic forces. When these forces change, so too will the aesthetic response of artists. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, “Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence, while the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice” (Marx & Engels 1970, 108).
“Life is Not Determined by Consciousness, but Consciousness by Life”: Marxism, “Human Nature,” Class, and Identity
The Marxist view of the person as a product of her environment is crucial in Marxist and post-Marxist criticism. The contributions of Marx, as well as the “linguistic turn” of Nietzsche and Freud's development of psychoanalysis, pave the way for constructionist views of human identity and “human nature.” Briefly put, constructionists understand identity and its component parts (sex, gender, race, class and so on) as socially constructed or built: that is, we learn and acquire our identities; what we call identity and “human nature” are not the outward expressions of something innate or “natural” that lies somehow “within” us.
Part of Marx's legacy, then, is a change in what we can understand by the term “human nature.” After Marx, to talk of human nature is very much to talk of the behaviours and characteristics that a society accepts as “natural.” “Nature” and “the natural” become, post-Marx, normative concepts rather than concepts of something universal and static “inside” of us. Today, we might say, if something is said to be “natural,” what this really points to is a value or set of values that are so deeply ingrained in a culture as to be virtually unquestionable. But this does not mean that those values have always been there, nor that they always will. The “natural,” in a broadly Marxist vision of culture, refers to the assumptions and values upon which a society is built, not to “God-given,” unchangeable “laws of nature.” This is a view of “nature” and “the natural” as socially constructed and externally imposed upon us, rather than as an expression of some “inner essence.”
Example: “Them & [uz]”
Another approach to interpretation of literary texts – and one which, as before, does not rely heavily on technical jargon – would be to begin with a broadly Marxist view of the person being shaped, built, constructed by their social-cultural world (once more, “life is not determined by consciousness, but...”), and to build analyses around this notion. We might consider, for example, the extent to which the poetic voice in Tony Harrison's autobiographical poem “Them & [uz]” (Harrison 1978) has been formed by class-based prejudices, which the speaker experienced at school, years during which, it seems, accent (taken by the speaker's teachers as a token of class), was a bar that prevented access to English poetic culture: “Poetry,” our poet is told, is “the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!”
Note here the different values embodied by “poetry” and “prose,” and the class assumptions that accompany each - “prose,” far less valued by the teacher than “poetry,” is here a linguistic and stylistic marker of the “lowly” working classes. In this poem, voice – often used as a metaphor for individual identity – initially blocks the speaker from an imagined literary heritage. By poem's end, the speaker realizes something; he realizes, for example, that “Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhyme,” if spoken with the “right” accent. That is, the Cumberland accent of Wordsworth, not the “Received Pronunciation” so often touted as “standard” or “neutral,” and which Harrison so incisively mocks and critiques in this poem. The speaker realizes that the English poetic tradition is in fact composed of multiple regional – and by extension, “classed” – voices, including, more recently, his own (indeed, perhaps we should speak of “traditions,” rather than “tradition”). Of course, he quips, you cannot entirely prevent others' attempt to mould you to a particular social, class-based model: “My first mention in the Times / automatically made Tony Anthony!”
One must not miss the irony here: having been either blocked from Shakespeare altogether or relegated to the arena of the fool's “prose,” success sees our speaker dubbed “Anthony” by the Times, the nation's paper of record. Anthony, of course, is one of Shakespeare's romantic heroes; and Anthony, of course, does not speak in “prose.”
Aesthetic Life, the Work of Art, and Alienation
Our capacity to lead an aesthetic life is developed through our social existence – so would a Marxist say. It comes from our interactions with the material world, and our use, moulding, crafting of nature. Under the controlling gaze of the bourgeoisie, and in the context of capitalist economic organization, the working classes are alienated (that is made strange or alien to...; radically separated from...) in a four-fold way.
1) workers are alienated from the products of their labour, which are, in the era of bourgeois capitalism, commodities (things the ultimate aim of which is to generate profit for the bosses); 2) workers are alienated from their own labour – they work for the betterment of another, an exploitative boss, not themselves or their own aesthetic satisfaction; 3) workers are alienated from themselves, their own bodies. Not only are workers separated or alienated from the products of their labour and that labour itself (both of which are now under the control of someone else); but, because it is the worker who must carry out the work, they are no longer in control of their own selves, their own bodies. The general economy (that is, organization) of labour under capitalism can be summed up thus: “The more wealth the worker produces, the more his production increases in power and scope, the poorer he becomes. The more commodities the worker produces, the cheaper a commodity he becomes” (Marx 1983 [EPM], 133). 4) Finally, while man is by “nature” a social and socially organized animal, under capitalism the worker is not only alienated from herself, she is also alienated from her fellow human beings. Capitalism throws the proletariat into a competitive and ruggedly individualistic relation with one another.
Examples: Atwood and Saunders
Anxiety over alienation is worked through to great effect, but in very different ways, in Atwood's “fictional essay” (the generic label is a strange one) “Voice,” and Saunders's stories “Pastoralia” and “Sea Oak.” In “Voice,” the speaker – possibly an Atwood persona – considers the relationship one has to one's God-given voice (just what “voice” is a metaphor for must be given some careful consideration here). This short piece considers the extent to which one's sense of self is bound up in the notion of “voice,” and considers the implications of losing one's (metaphorical?) voice.
If we take “voice” to be a metaphor for the authorial voice, then we can read Atwood's piece as a negotiation of the necessary alienation the author must endure in relation to her work, in order to have a public voice at all. Ironically, the very thing in which one's identity as a writer is bound up, is also the very thing one must be prepared to be alienated from if one is to have one's “voice” “heard.” The fact that one is forced to work through the metaphorical richness of Atwood's “voice” using other bodily and sensual metaphors is a fitting reminder of Marx's materialism: he was aware that to talk of people is to talk, in a radical way, about bodies, not abstracted, spiritualized “essences.”
In “Voice,” then, the “voice” as metaphor links the speaker's sense of corporeal (bodily) self to the self that is embodied and externalized in the work of art. “Voice” is a fitting metaphor for this negotiation of identity and alienation: the voice is, strangely, a part of and apart from the body; it is produced by and in the body, and yet we often think of it as being disembodied, in a way that our arms, legs, heads are not.
In Saunders's “Pastoralia” and “Sea Oak,” we are treated to investigation of the body as the means and product of labour, from which the workers are radically alienated. In “Pastoralia,” the nameless narrator works as a caveman in a theme park. His body is the commodity, it is the product that the theme park is selling. In various ways throughout the story – the extended “conversations” the narrator has with his wife via fax; the restrictions of co-workers to “Separate Areas” after working hours – we witness the narrator experiencing the four-fold alienation outlined by Marx. It is the narrator's own body – as the commodity that the theme park “owns” and sells – that is both the source and means of this multiple alienation.
A similar dynamic and process of alienation is presented in “Sea Oak,” in which the protagonist works as a stripper in order to raise enough money to move his family out of the sink estate in which they are trapped. Constantly struggling to make enough money to realize his aim, the protagonist is visited by his apparently undead aunt, who tells him in no uncertain terms that if he thinks he's ever going to move on, then he is going “to have to show some cock.” A clearer dramatization of alienation from one's own body and self would, I suggest, be hard to find! In these stories, the body becomes the site and symbol on which Marx's four-fold alienation is concentrated; alienation in these stories is, as it were, written on the body.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Adorno, T., and M. Horkheimer (1944, 1969). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John cumming. London: Verso.
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: CUP.
Attwood, M. (2006). “Voice.” The Tent. London: Bloomsbury. 21-24.
Benjamin, W. (1934). “The Author as Producer.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. E. Jephcott. New York: Schocken. 220-238.
Benjamin, W. (1936). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuninations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
Berman, M. (1988). All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Penguin.
Blunden, A. (transcriber). Preface. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/art/preface.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Dos Passos, J. (1935). “The Writer as Technician.” [Contributed to the eponymous proceedings of The American Writers’ Congress (April 1935).]. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Eds. Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. 545-548.
DuBois, W.E.B. (1926). “Criteria of Negro Art.” First published in the journal Crisis vol. 32 (October 1926), 290-
297. Reproduced http://www.webdubois.org/dbCriteriaNArt.html. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
Eagleton, T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Engels, F. Letter to J. Bloch. 21 September 1890. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm. Retrieced 20 November 2012.
Fitzgerald, F.S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. Peterborough, ON: Broadview P, 2007.
Harrison, T. (1978). “Them & [uz].” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fourth Ed. Eds Ferguson et al. New York:
Norton, 1996. 1766-67.
Himes, C. (1997). The End of a Primitive. New York: Norton.
[Note: This novel was written in the 1950s, but underwent various revisions; this publication date indicates the Norton edition, not when the novel was written]
Marx, K., and F. Engels (1970). The German Ideology: Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three and
Supplementary Text. Ed. C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 2004.
Marx, K. (1983). The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin.
From this collection: GI – selections from The German Ideology.
CPE – selections from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface
Marx, K. Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.htm. Retrieved 20 November 2012.
Saunders, G. (2000). Pastoralia. New York: Penguin-Riverhead.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Singer, P. (2001). Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Williams, R. (1973). “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Culture and Materialism. London: Verso, 2005. 31-49.