https://socialistaction.org/2017/08/24/marxism-and-literature-or-bread-and-roses/
Marxism and Literature, Or Bread and Roses
/ 19 hours ago
Jane_Austen_coloured_version
By JOE AUCIELLO
“You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a
knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind” (V.I. Lenin, “The
Tasks Of The Youth Leagues,” Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 413).
“… we can still learn from Balzac and Tolstoy, but should we really be
urging comrades to read … Jane Austen?” (Ian Birchall, International
Socialism, Series 2, Number 5, Summer 1979, p. 70).
Marxism provides a critical method that is useful and necessary to
explain the broad sweep of literary history and also to analyze
specific, individual works of literature.
We might first attempt to answer the underlying question, “Why bother?”
After all, capitalism gives us a number of urgent matters to discuss. I
think we can answer this question strongly and without apology. There
are several important and overlapping approaches.
First, we concern ourselves with art because the need for it is within
us as human beings; it’s part of what defines us as human. The means of
expression change along with economic growth, and with it come changes
in form and genre, but underneath it all is a vital need for
self-expression. We are hard-wired to tell stories and to see, read, or
hear them.
What’s more, if you believe, as I do, that viewing and reading are also
creative acts, imaginative activities, then the scope of art cannot be
defined narrowly but much more widely.
Our own political movement—that is, the labor movement in the United
States—argued strongly for art. More than a hundred years ago a textile
strike by immigrant workers in Lawrence, Mass., made famous the song
“Bread and Roses.” Its praise for women is well remembered, but it also
includes a kind of programmatic demand for art and culture: “Hearts
starve as well as bodies/Give us bread, but give us roses.”
And the next stanza adds, “Small art and love and beauty their trudging
spirits knew/Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses,
too.” More than a hundred years later the struggle for a life free from
alienation and oppression, a life where hearts do not starve but
prosper, is still our struggle.
Secondly, the analysis of art inevitably becomes an analysis of the
society and culture that produced that art. The analysis of literature,
for instance, becomes an analysis of the ideas within literature, of its
social content, and a criticism of the social relations embedded in the
work. Such a criticism complements and may even complete the political
critique that Marxists typically would advance. In other words, art
reveals society, and in that illumination art suggests certain political
lessons.
A third reason to concern ourselves with art is this: If art reveals
society, art can also influence society. Art and literature highlight,
comment upon, satirize, etc. all of the political and economic issues of
their time. Art can make new all that is taken for granted. In the novel
alone, think of how this point is shown by this list of characters:
Oliver Twist, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Raskolnikov, Bigger Thomas,
and my favorite, Yossarian.
How to approach art from a Marxist view?
In Marxist literary criticism, various theories have been developed.
Naturally enough, they all derive, in the first instance, from the
commentary of Marx and Engels themselves. Marx and Engels never found
time to work out a fully articulated critical method for literature, but
they did at least provide the ingredients for it.
The source material of Marx and Engels on art and literature roughly
falls into three broad categories:
1.General: the theory of historical materialism, observations about the
relationship between the economic base of society and the institutions
and ideas that emerge from it and a critical method of analysis.
2.Fragments: This includes comments on literature and art found in
published works, letters, and recollections from family and friends.
3.Literary References: This includes how Marx and Engels use literary
references to illustrate a political or economic point or cite examples
from literature.
The first of these sources allows modern critics in the Marxist
tradition to analyze literature by means of analogy. We can look at how
Marx and Engels critiqued philosophy, religion, law, etc. and
essentially transfer their method to literature, allowing for the fact
that art will be connected less directly to the economic base.
The letters and published commentary provide a direct, if limited and
narrow, approach to literary analysis that can be applied to other
literary works.
Let’s briefly cite two well-known examples from Marx’s and Engels’
comments. The first is from Marx in an 1854 letter where he praises
Dickens, Thackeray, “Miss Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell” for their ability to
portray a literary portrait of the English middle class: “The present
splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England, whose graphic and
eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths
than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists
and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle
class.”
Our second reference comes from an 1888 letter by Frederick Engels: “…
‘La Comédie humaine’ gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of
French ‘Society,’ describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year
from 1816 to 1848, the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie
upon the society of nobles … and around this central picture he groups a
complete history of French Society from which, even in economical
details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property
after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed
historians, economists and statisticians of the period together.”
Marx’s and Engels’ letters suggest an analysis that looks to broad
trends of artistic and cultural development that can be connected to
developments in the productive relations of society. Their emphasis and
source of their praise is on history and the extent to which literature
is able to reveal the conflict and turmoil that lies beneath the surface
of everyday life—in Marx’s words, the “political and social truths.” The
emphasis is less on aesthetic concerns and more about the theme and
content of a work.
Overall, these comments suggest an analytic approach that demonstrates
how the social conditions shape, if not determine, the artistic work and
cultural products in general. Generally speaking, and to oversimplify
matters, this broad overview approach that shows how art can illuminate
social reality and class struggle has been the preferred method of most
of the Marxist thinkers who write about literature.
Without entering into a long series of quotations, we can refer to at
least some of the following: Lenin’s articles on Tolstoy, Luxemburg’s
article on Korolenko, Lunacharsky’s essay “Theses on the Problems of
Marxist Criticism,” and Trotsky’s book “Literature and Revolution,”
where he examines the different trends in pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian
literature.
So, allow me to repeat what I said at the outset: Marxism provides a
critical method that is useful and necessary to explain the broad sweep
of literary history and also to analyze specific, individual works of
literature. We can assert this point in the following way: The
literature of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails presents itself as “an immense accumulation of texts,” its unit
being a single text. Our investigation must therefore begin with the
analysis of a text.
“Pride and Prejudice”
To discuss the validity of a Marxist approach to literature, it’s only
fair to select an example that is not overtly political. We’ll take for
consideration Jane Austen’s novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” published in
1813. Briefly put: the novel is a story of courtship and romance set in
England of the early 1800s.
Before proceeding further, we should consider the role of the author in
producing this work. Of course,it was written by a human being who lived
in a certain time and place, who had certain experiences but not others,
who occupied a certain position in class society, and was of a certain
gender, with all the opportunities, perspectives, etc. that might
reasonably apply to that gender.
Terry Eagleton, for instance, called attention to the class position of
Jane Austen, “in whose work the situation of the
pride-prejudice-title-pageminor gentry offers a peculiarly privileged
focus for examining the conflicts and alliances between aristocracy and
bourgeoisie” (“Ideology and Literary Form,” from “The Eagleton Reader,”
ed. Stephen Regan).
We’ll begin with a consideration of some additional formal, literary
qualities. In fact, by focusing on a few words, key words, we open up a
window from the novel to the larger social landscape, the world in which
the story lives.
In Chapter III we are introduced to Mr. Bingley, a wealthy, eligible
bachelor and a friend of a major character, Mr. Darcy. Mr. Bingley is
notable for his decency and goodness. His “amiable qualities” are set
against his friend’s “disagreeable countenance”—thus setting up these
characters as foils, in which the positive features of one highlights
the negative features of the other. One has what the other lacks. These
qualities, along with several more virtues and a few shortcomings (Mr.
Darcy is more handsome and clever), combine to produce a well-rounded,
balanced character description.
This kind of formal criticism is absolutely necessary for an
understanding of the novel. Marxist criticism does not reject but
absorbs and builds on this level of analysis. Our method is to go beyond
the world of the novel and into the world of its time. So, let’s move to
some historical and political considerations. We do so, in the first
place, in order to understand the novel better.
Relations between the sexes have been aptly described by Engels as
follows: “The modern individual family is founded on the open or
concealed domestic slavery of the wife.” The husband, on the other hand,
enjoys “a position of supremacy without any need for special legal
titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois, and the
wife represents the proletariat” (“The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State,” p. 137, International Publishers, 1970).
This is indeed the world of “Pride and Prejudice”—and decades beyond.
Simply put, the husband is powerful; the wife is powerless. This
relationship of gross inequality is fortified by law, endorsed by
religion, and supported by tradition. The social isolation of an
individual family would only favor the authority of the husband.
The word “patriarchy” does not overstate the circumstances. The law of
primogeniture ensures that wealth and landed estates are passed on to
the first male heir of the family—not divided in some fashion among all
the children. Then, entailment requires that this heir essentially
maintain an estate so that it could, in turn, be inherited by his male
heir. Entailment also means—and this is especially important to the
Bennets—that absent a male heir, land and property would go to the
nearest male relative. He could determine what inheritance the female
relations might receive, if any.
Once we understand the reality of the social relations in which the
author lived and in which the work was formed, and once we bring this
knowledge to bear on the text, we cannot help but obtain a more full and
complete understanding of what we have read or observed.
In reference to “Pride and Prejudice,” we can return to the novel with
some greater insight. Given what we know of marriage in England in the
first half or so of the 19th century, we can regard Mrs. Bennet, for all
her flaws, a little differently. Her worry and resolve to get her
daughters married, and married well, gives her ample reason to “suffer,”
as she says. What’s more, the necessity of marriage for women and the
perils it may contain, which turn out to be an important sub-plot of the
novel, show readers that Mrs. Bennet is not nearly as frivolous and
foolish as she is often portrayed. So, too, Mr. Bennet’s attitude of
amused indifference is not so admirable in its disregard of the social
realities in which his daughters are entwined.
Furthermore, an unmarried woman has a vital reason to determine whether
a future husband will be “amiable” and “agreeable.” The quality of her
life and the possibility of her happiness depends considerably upon the
extent to which the man possesses these virtues, perhaps even more than
the fortune he may also possess.
So, even in this small example, we can conclude that going further than
the pages of a novel allows us the opportunity to know that novel better
than if we had confined ourselves strictly to the text. Greater
understanding or art, and, with it, greater appreciation and pleasure
are essential elements of literary criticism. It is also, to use
different concepts, a successful combination of theory and practice.
At this point in the commentary – to speak in terms of method – it would
be appropriate for a Marxist critic to pivot to the present, to consider
at least the novel’s themes, especially for the world in which the
reader lives. An analysis of literary style, techniques, form, and so on
would hardly be out of place, either. To develop these points properly,
an additional article would be necessary.
Finally, though, from our look into “Pride and Prejudice,” what can be
determined about the analytical scope of Marxist literary criticism?
We can point to a set of provisional conclusions:
•Marxism operates on the “macro” level, showing how the broad sweep of
social history and class conflict affects the trends and development of
literary history.
•Marxism also contributes on the “micro” level, that is, the traditional
study of literary techniques and methods.
•Marxism combines these approaches, revealing how they are connected. In
this process, each is enhanced by the other.
The Marxist critic will go further by relating past to present, by
situating the literary work’s conflicts and themes, etc. into
present-day reality in order to understand more deeply the ideology and
conflicts of our time.
It’s a kind of “permanent revolution” in criticism: in fulfilling the
traditional function of a literary critic, the Marxist investigation
into art must grow over directly to include a historical dimension that
develops into a social critique.
Thus, if the overall purpose of art is, to borrow the classical
expression, “to delight and instruct,” to provide pleasure and
knowledge, then Marxism carries out its political mission by helping
literature fulfill its artistic one.
Illustration: Jan Austen, in a portrait based on a drawing by her
sister, Cassandra.
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August 24, 2017 in Arts & Culture, Books.
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