An Ever So Basic Introduction to Marxist Approaches to Literature
See also The English
Studies Book p. 105112.
Introduction:
Let’s begin with a word from the bearded bloke himself:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on
the contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness.
Karl Marx, Preface and Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy
extracted in John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader
(Harvester, 1994), p.198.
In other words, we shouldn’t think that the ideas that shape our lives are somehow the
product of some abstract notion of divine reason (as many Enlightenment philosophers
suggest) but rather that everything that is thought or can be thought is the product of
actual, material conditions. As Raman Selden, explains it, ‘Legal systems, for example, are
not the pure manifestations of human or divine reason, but ultimately reflect the interests
of the dominant class in particular historical periods.’ (A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary
Literary Theory, second edition (Harvester, 1989), pp.24-5.)
Or, as a hugely influential Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, puts it:
Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously ‘born’ in each individual
brain: they have had a centre of formation, of irradiation, of
dissemination, of persuasion.
Antonio Gramsci, ‘Ideology. Popular Beliefs and Common Sense’ in Tony
Bennett et al (eds.), Culture, Ideology and the Social Process (Open
University Press, 1981), p.200.
What does this have to do with literature?
These ideas have wide-ranging implications for literary criticism. Liberal humanist
criticism tends to view the text as the product of an individual writer who is solely
responsible for creating meaning. This text embodies timeless, universal values, expresses
an idea of human nature which is stable and unchanging and is a self-contained, coherent
entity. In this model, so long as the reader pays sufficient attention to the text, they
would be able to recover the writer’s meaning. (In liberal humanist criticism, the reader
doesn’t make meaning). If the reader cannot fathom the writer’s intentions, it is because
they lack literary competency and this is where the professional literary critic makes his (it
is generally a he) intervention.
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Context is Key
What liberal humanists tend to ignore is the social, economic, cultural and historical
conditions of both the writing and the reading. Marxist criticism seeks to establish the
significance of the material circumstances in which the text is produced and consumed,
and insists that aesthetics are not distinct from politics and economics. Very broadly
then, a Marxist critic sees texts as cultural products to be understood in terms of what
Roland Barthes calls ‘the determining weight of history’ (see ‘The Great Family of Man’
in Mythologies).
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, extracted in Jon Elster (ed.), Karl Marx: A
Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.277.
Culture is […] organisation, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s
own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one
succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s
own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous
evolution, through a series of action and reactions which are independent of one’s own
will […]. Above all, man is mind, i.e. he is a product of history not nature.
Antonio Gramsci, ‘Culture’ in Tony Bennett et al (eds.), Culture, Ideology and the Social Process
(Open University Press, 1981), p.193-4.
Ideology
One concept which is fundamental to Marxism is ideology. This is an incredibly slippery
term and needs careful definition. It is important to us because:
Ideology is inscribed in signifying practices - in discourses, myths, presentations and
representations of the way ‘things are’ - and to this extent it is inscribed in language.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (Routledge, 1981), p.42.
In Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams gives three definitions of the word:
1.
A system of belief characteristic of a particular class or group.
2.
A system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - that can be
contrasted with scientific knowledge.
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in John Storey (ed.), Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harvester, 1994), p.153.
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The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the
ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from The German Ideology (1845-6), extracted in Jon Elster
(ed.), Karl Marx: A Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.302.
It then follows that ideology is the category of illusions (or false consciousness) by which
the ruling class maintains its dominance over the working class. What is important about
all these things is that they are seen to be natural, common sense, ideas that we don't
even question. Ideology operates below consciousness. What is in fact political, partial
and open to change is represented as eternal and universal.
Ideology, by definition, thrives beneath consciousness.
Dick Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979), p.11.
It is precisely its spontaneous quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be
made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to correction, its
effect of instant recognition [...] which makes common sense, at one and the same time,
'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious.
Stuart Hall, cited by Dick Hebdige, ibid., p.11.
We’ll explore how these ideas come to seem natural in a moment.
False consciousness is so powerful, its effects so insidious that it is difficult for the
individual subjects to think themselves free of it – Blake’s phrase ‘the mind-forg’d
manacles’ describes this process well.
3.
The general process of production of meaning and ideas.
This is how Barthes understands the term. Barthes differentiates between denoted
(literal) and connoted meanings. Connotation describes the interaction which occurs
when a sign meets the feelings, emotions and cultural experiences and values of the signsystem user. To put it another way, this is when meaning becomes subjective. Barthes
argues that connoted meanings are constrained by the pressures of ideology.
Louis Althusser, ISAs, RSAs and Interpellation
The common sense ideas of ideology come seem natural because of what Althusser calls
ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses): religion, education, the family, the legal system, the
political system, and most important for our purposes, the media and culture.
Althusser makes a distinction between RSAs (Repressive State Apparatuses) like the
police and the army which function by violence, and ISAs which function by ideology.
This means that Althusser's conception of the way in which ideology functions is deeply
pessimistic because he sees ideology as having unlimited power to subordinate and
construct identities for its subjects. Moreover, Althusser disputed Marx and Engels’ view
that ideology should be understood as what Tony Bennett calls ‘the inverted reflection
[…] of real social relationships’.
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Althusser argues that ideology has its own material existence. The ideas of a human
subject, he maintains, exist only in his/her actions, and these actions are inserted into
practices which are, in turn, ‘governed by the rituals in which these practices are
inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus’, such as a church, a school
or a political rally.
Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (Routledge, 1979), p.113.
According to Althusser, ideology function through a process he calls interpellation.
Interpellation is way in which concrete individuals are ‘hailed’ as subjects by ideology. We
recognise ourselves, we feel addressed and thus are forced into a pre-allocated subject
position.
The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of
individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in John Storey
(ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harvester, 1994),
p.160-161.
Hegemony
What Althusser does not really account for is what happens when ideology enters into
conflict with lived experience. Clearly an ideology cannot be sustained if the experience
of an individual subject contradicts it.
In order to cope with the fact that the lived experience of subordinated groups is in
contradiction with the image of society constructed by ideology, there has to be a way to
continuing to exert control over the masses and, to explain this, we need to explore a
new concept: hegemony.
Hegemony theory was developed by an Italian Marxist called Antonio Gramsci while he
was imprisoned by Mussolini during the 1930s. Gramsci was attempting to explain why
the Italian masses were capitulating to Fascism when it was demonstrably not in their
interests to do so.
Hegemony is the term used to refer to a process whereby the dominant class don't rule
over society but lead through an implementation of a consensus view. This is supposed
to result in a large measure of social stability because the subordinate classes appear
actively to support and subscribe to the values of the dominant class.
What hegemony suggests is that conflict is contained rather than controlled.
As Gramsci argued, it is an 'unstable equilibrium', one in which power has to be won,
reproduced and sustained. A key characteristic of hegemony is concessions to
subordinate groups within society, and the incorporation of their interests and desires
into those of the dominant group.
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[…] the dominant group is co-ordinated concretely with the general interests of the
subordinate groups, and the life of the state is conceived of as a continuous process of
formation and superseding of unstable equilibria […] between the interests of the
fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups – equilibria in which the
interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short
of narrowly corporate economic interest.
Antonio Gramsci, ‘Hegemony’ in Tony Bennett et al (eds.), Culture, Ideology and the Social Process
(Open University Press, 1981), p.199.
There is an image in a poem by Ruth Fainlight called ‘Here’, which describes exactly this
process.
... the iron hand wears
Such a velvet glove…
Ruth Fainlight, ‘Here’ in Jeni Couzyn (ed.), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets
(Bloodaxe, 1985), p.138.
In this way, although resistances may be overcome, they are never entirely eliminated.
Gramsci's conception of the way in which ideology functions is much more fluid and
optimistic than Althusser's because he holds out the possibility of social change - even if
he doesn't go as far as Marx himself who believed that false consciousness will be
overcome and that social change was thus inevitable. For Gramsci, ideology is a site of
struggle which leaves room for negotiation within power structures. Nothing is fixed.
Ideology and Literature
What all these definitions have in common, despite their differing emphases, is the
discrepancy between how things are and how they are represented to us. In German
Ideology, Marx likened the functioning of ideology to a camera obscura, in which ‘men and
their circumstances appear upside down’. This upside down version of reality, ‘arises just
as much from [men’s] historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life process.’ As Catherine Belsey’s quotation shows, these
representations are disseminated through signifying practices: writing a poem or a novel,
making a film, staging a play, painting a picture. Therefore, the Marxist critic will argue, it
follows that novels, poems and plays will embody and transmit a certain ideology.
Let’s recall Marx’s important view that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch
the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force.’ Marxist critics will explore the degree to which a text
challenges dominant ideology or perpetuates it.
Again, different Marxist critics take different approaches.
One group of Marxist critics champions realism (and in particular the nineteenth-century
realist novel) because they make clear the relationship between literature and history,
aesthetics and economics. A key figure here is Georg Lukacs.
In the works of a great realist, everything is linked with everything else. Each
phenomenon shows the polyphony of many components, the intertwinement of the
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individual and the social, of the physical and psychical, of private interest and public
affairs.
Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (1950) in David Craig (ed.), Marxists on Literature
(Penguin, 1975), p.288.
Lukacs was highly critical of Modernist writers because they dwelt on the exceptional not
the representative, on characters’ interiority rather than their relationships with society.
We have seen why this polarity [of the eccentric and the socially average] – which in
traditional realism serves to increase our understanding of social normality – tends in
Modernism to a fascination with morbid eccentricity. Eccentricity becomes the necessary
complement of the average; and this polarity is held to exhaust human potentiality.
Georg Lukacs, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ (1963) in David Lodge (ed.), Twentieth Century
Literary Criticism: A Reader (Longman, 1972), p.484.
Attenuation of reality and the dissolution of personality are thus interdependent: the
stronger the one, the stronger the other. Underlying both is the lack of a consistent view
of human nature. Man is reduced to a sequence of unrelated, experiential fragments; he is
inexplicable to himself.
Georg Lukacs, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ (1963) in David Lodge (ed.), Twentieth Century
Literary Criticsm: A Reader (Longman, 1972), p.480.
Conversely, a theorist like Theodor Adorno, extols the virtues of Modernism because its
avant-garde techniques and self-conscious difficulty is disruptive to dominant bourgeois
ideology. As Raman Selden explains, ‘Modernist writings are particularly distanced from
the reality to which they allude, and this distance gives their work the power of criticising
reality.’ (A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, second edition (Harvester, 1989),
p.34.)
Art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large
number of mediating links. Nevertheless, as art it remains the antithesis of that which is
the case. […] Even Lukacs will find it impossible to get away from the fact that they
content of works of art is not real in the same way as social reality.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’, in Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (Verso,
1980), p.159.
By dismantling appearance, [Kafka and Beckett] explode from within the art which
committed proclamation subjugates from without, and hence only in appearance. The
inescapability of their work compels the change of attitude which committed works
merely demand.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment, in Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 1980), p.191.
A Marxist like Bertolt Brecht tries to resolve these two positions by extending Lukacs’
concept of realism. As a practitioner, he rejected the sort of socialist realism advocated
by Lukacs, but, in trying to reach a large working-class audience, he was equally opposed
to some of Adorno’s more elitist assumptions: ‘the terms popular art and realism become
natural allies’. His essay ‘Popularity and Realism’ (included in many collections of
Marxist, Cultural and Art Theory and of Brecht’s essays) is a vital intervention in these
complex debates.
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Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society/unmasking the prevailing
view of things as the view of those who are in power/writing from the standpoint of the
class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human
society is caught up/emphasizing the element of development/making possible the
concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’ in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrision (eds.), Modern
Arts and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Paul Chapman/Open University, 1982), p.229.
Notice that the sort of writing all these critics are talking about might be understood as
‘literary’ and belonging to ‘high’ culture. With the possible exception of Brecht who
loved Hollywood gangster films and popular music, traditional Marxist critics aren’t too
keen on popular culture. Theorists of the Frankfurt School, like Adorno, bemoan the
fate of high culture in the era of late capitalism; the problem with mass culture, as they
see it, is that it offers no individuality, no spontaneity, no scope for the imagination.
Cultural products merely inscribe the ideology and interests of multi-national
corporations. Popular culture, to more traditional Marxists, is just another example of an
ISA. It is not until more recently that Marxist theorists like John Fiske have turned their
attention to popular texts. Often invoking hegemony theory or Bakhtin’s idea of the
carnivalesque, they have found in them the potential for ideological resistance or at least
potential for ideological resistance in the people who consume them.
A very crude summary
Marxist criticism asks two, related, questions:
1. What is the relationship between a text and the material conditions of its production?
2. What is the ideology inherent in a text and how does it relate to dominant ideology?
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