Marxism as a Literary Theory: A Comprehensive Note

 

Marxism has been one of the most influential intellectual movements in the  history of ideas. Its influence can be seen in many fields like history, cultural studies, economics, psychoanalysis, sociology, cultural theory, etc. Marxist theory begins in the massive work of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) in the 19th century. Their writings mainly deal with the discipline of economics and politics. However, their analysis of society and the conditions of production affect analysis of culture also. And this is the significance of Marx as also of the later-day Marxist critics and thinkers.

Marxist approaches to literature occupy a wide field and have diverse forms. The theory and practice of Marxist criticism is based on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx and his fellow-thinker Engels. The theory claims that the evolving history of humanity, of its social institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of material production, that is, its overall economic ogranisation for producing and distributing material goods. Changes in the fundamental mode of material production bring about changes in the class structure of a society. This results in establishing dominant and subordinate classes. These classes engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage. The Marxists maintain that human consciousness is constituted by an ideology. By ‘ideology’, they mean the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which they perceive and explain what they take to be reality.

In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure. Base refers to the production forces, or the materials and resources, that generate the goods society needs. Superstructure describes all other aspects of society.it includes the culture, ideology, norms, and identities that people inhabit. In addition, it refers to the social institutions, political structure, and the state.

 

In literature, the main focus of Marxist criticism was the novel, especially the 19th century novel. Marx concentrated his economics and social analysis on this period. He was himself an avid reader of Charles Dickens in particular. The concerns of Marxist critics have been primarily social rather than individual. They explore the sociology (social condition) of the text as opposed to the psychology of individual characters. When characters are examined, it is usually as a way of exploring the wider social and historical forces of which they are seen as products social circumstances. Significant developments in Marxist literary criticism took place in the 1920s and 1930s. They centred largely on the issue of social realism.

 

The doctrines expounded by the Soviet Union writers (1932-34) were based upon Lenin's pre-Revolutionary statements as interpreted during the 1920s. They constitute what is called Socialist Realism. The theory addressed certain major questions about the evolution of literature, its reflection of class relations, and its function in society. The revolutions in European art, music, and literature around 1910 (Picasso, Starvinsky, T.S.Eliot, etc.) were to be regarded by Soviet critics as decadent products of late capitalist society. The modernist rejection of traditional realism left Socialist Realism as the leading custodian of bourgeois aesthetics. The combination of nineteenth-century aesthetics and revolutionary politics remained the focus of this theory. According to Raman Seldon, "The theory of the class nature of art (klassovost) is a complex one. In the writings of Marx, Engels and the Soviet tradition, there is a double emphasis on the writer's commitment or class interests on the one hand,and the social realism of the writer's work on the other". So, the writers are judged by the extent to which their writings reveal insights into the social developments of their time.

 

The early twentieth century Marxist criticism can be seen in several books. British Marxist Christopher Caudwell, in his ‘Illusion and Reality’ (1937), discusses English poets like Mathew Arnold, Swinburne, Browning and Tennyson and finds them reflecting only bourgeois illusion. In the Soviet Union also, a number of critics like Mikhail Bakhtin tried to combine Marxist theory with Russian Formalism. Bakhtin collaborated with PN. Medvedev to produce ‘The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship’ (1928), and also wrote ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’ (1929) with Valentin Voloshinov. In these works, they sought to evolve, what they called ‘sociological poetics’. These attempts were not very successful and ended in fiasco when the Russian strongman Stalin took over power.

 

The best known and probably most influential critic here is the Hungarian Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). His work concentrated mainly on the nineteenth century novel and questions of realism. "For Lukacs, as with most Marxist critics of his time”, says Roger Webster, a novel must be assessed on its ability to reflect the historical and material conditions of society. These were the main criteria of assessing its realism. Ralph Fox's work, ‘The Novel and the People’ (1937), is a good example of an English Marxist critic working along similar lines in the same period. Realism was not related to the ability of the text to show surface reality, rather the point to be marked was the extent to which the sense of the underlying historical relations were depicted. Lukac's concept of 'typicality was not the average representation of a character, rather it was when the objective forces at work in society were shown to determine his innermost being. Thus, Lukacs is concerned with the way the characters are shown a part of a total social and historical fabric. Lukacs and other Marxists rejected the subjective and the experimental nature of much modernist writing. He felt that such works deal with individuals rather than the more 'objective vision. Marxist  critics have not all been opposed to experimentation.

Two Marxist writers of the 1930s developed critical practices which offer a very different approach to literature from that typified by Lukacs. The dramatist Bertolt Brecht introduced the concept of defamiliarization by breaking with the conventions of theatrical realism. The term for this technique was the 'alienation effect'. The work of German critic Walter Benjamin, who was a staunch supporter of Brecht, is very significant. He argued that the technical revolution of the early 20th century in terms of the media and mass circulation of books of all kinds enabled everybody to be an artist. This was because the means of expression were becoming easily available. He saw the artist not as someone producing a detached reflection of contemporary spirit of reality (zeitgeist) but something that was integral to it. Thus, his sympathy towards modernism is quite evident in a period when most of the Marxist thinkers condemned it.

 

The Frankfurt School, which was the other name for the Institute for Social Research, was founded by Carl Grunberg in 1923. 1t was the first Marxist research centre associated with a major German university. The leading figures of this school are Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. They opposed Benjamin's ideas about the mass circulation of art. They dismissed realism as reinforcing conventional ways of thinking. The kind of literature for which they argued was one that expressed a detachment from reality. Adorno's conception of art, in particular, is quite different. He stresses the need to go beyond what is palatable to the masses. The Italian critic Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) has adopted certain fundamental categories for his analysis of culture and society. He has used terms like instrumentalism, reductionism, ideology, hegemony, etc. He is against traditional Marxist theory. According to Gramsci, literature participates for hegemony in society. It may help oppose oppressive hegemony by suggesting and popularizing new types of hegemony.

 

The French critic Pierre Macherey combined Marxism with structuralism in his ‘A Theory of Literary Production’ (1966). He believed that form cannot be separated from ideology, because a literary work is limited by time and space and it cannot be free from the historical reality to which it is tied in complex ways. History is not directly to be grasped in literature. To do so, one has to access the ‘unconscious’ of literature and the job of a critic is to grasp history in a text in its gaps, fissures or absences. There is no order in a text but an imagined one. For these analogies, Macherey is indebted to Freudian  psychology.

 

The French Marxist Louis Althussar (1918-90) was another  theorist who gave a new direction to Marxism. He views literature generally as performing a rather ambiguous function. It acts as a form of ideology, blinding people to their real conditions of existence. It is also capable of detaching itself from the very ideology in which it participates. According to Althussar, some literature reinforces the dominant values, some questions them, and some does both. His work ‘Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays’ (1971), which is a collection of essays, had a great impact on critical thinking of the time. His ideas were responsible for the break with the old reflective model of Marxist criticism.

Besides, he substituted the concept of 'social formation tor the Marxist notion of 'totality. The social formation is a structure with various levels and is without any fixed centre; it is a totality but in it the economic level that determines other structures and levels. Various elements of the social formation are legal, religious, educational and cultural which he calls 'ideological state apparatuses’(ISA). He also did not agree with the Marxist view of ideology as being a false consciousness. Instead, it was defined as the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

Two British critics who have perhaps contributed most to recent Marxist theory are Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. Fredric Jameson views Marxism as the only antidote to the advance of Western monopolistic capitalism. According to Jameson, literature works as a form of ideological discourse which represses historical truth. In his The Political Unconscious (1981), he tries a reconciliation of the types of Marxism propounded by Lukcas and Althusser respectively. This inclusivist formulation also envelopes non-Marxist critical approaches like formalism,structuralism and poststructuralism.

Terry Eagleton's position is rather different from that of Althusser, and other Marxists. According to him, "Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But It also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history”. Besides, ideology for him becomes a much more complex area than some Marxists think. Eagleton views the novel as ultimately reinforcing the status quo through its complex strategies. He argues tor a re-conception of literature by changıng the ways in which literature is constructed as a body of culture and knowledge. He does not agree to the negativistic view that history has gaps and absences. He modifies it to mean that history is present in the text as ideology and the reality claimed to be present in the text is only 'pseudo reality’.

The Marxist approach has actually flourished in the West in the form of a critique, a discourse tor interrogating all societies and their texts in terms of certain specific issues-race, class, Culture, etc. Marxist criticism is an important area of theoretical work and a significant contrast to other critical approaches.