Marxist Literary Criticism and the New Historicism
Prof. GODOFREDO B. QUEDDENG chairs the Department of Languages, Literature and the Humanities-College of Arts and Sciences, SLSU. He obtained his AB Philosophy and English at Immaculate Heart Mission Seminary, Baguio City; his master’s degree in English at the Manuel S. Enverga University Foundation, Lucena City; and earned units in Ph.D., Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.
Marxist literary criticism and the new historicism share a good deal for both recognize in literary text, as Belsey says, “not knowledge but ideology itself in all its inconsistency and partiality.” They situate literary criticism in a larger framework of cultural criticism, what Eagleton called “rhetoric” and “discourse theory” which attempts to understand literature as historically situated practices that encompass power as much as knowledge. Both criticisms also veer away from the old historicism as they disrupt both the hierarchy of history as the determining context of literature history is reconceived as a field of discourse in which literature an criticism make their own impact as political forces ad participate in an historical dialectic.
Marxism is a highly complex subject, so as Marxist literary criticism. “Marxist criticism analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it; and it needs, similarly, to be aware of its own historical conditions.” To give an adequate amount of Marxist critic is to examine the historical factors that shape his criticism. “The most valuable way of discussing Marxist criticism, then, would be an historical survey of it from Marx and Engels to the present day, charting the way in which criticism changes as the history in which it is rooted changes.” For Elaine Showalter, Marxist criticism “offers a science of the text, in which the author becomes not the creator but the producer of a text whose components are historically and economically determined.”
Before we start speaking then of Marxist literary criticism let us first try to understand what Marxism is. Marxism “is a scientific theory of human societies and of the practice of transforming them, i.e. that the narrative Marxism has to deliver is the story of the struggles of men and women to free themselves from certain forms of exploitation and oppression.”
Marxism owes its contents to many sources. First, it owes its content from the German philosophy of the 19th century, especially to two thinkers, Hegel and Feuerbach. Hegel whose idealism, “all being is to be reduced to the being of the spirit,” is radically rejected for a radical materialism, “all being is to be reduced to the being of matter, object of labor; spiritual phenomena are but epiphenomena of matter.” Although Hegel is turned upside down, he remains the great philosopher of Marxism because they owe him the dialectic method of thesis—antithesis—synthesis and historicity, that reality is not static but as a product of historical evolution. Feuerbach whose rejection of all religion, “religion is opium,” is taken over by the Marxists. Inn Marxism man is the center (atheistic humanism).
Second, Jewish thought and Christianism supply Marxism with two important ideas, the idea of the salvation history and the idea of salvation. History is not a sequence of cyclic periods or a time sequence wherein nothing much happens; it is a growth towards salvation. For the Marxists, history develops itself necessarily towards Parousia: the final victory of the proletariat, the classless society. Marxism thinks to fulfill a messianic role: to free mankind from alienation through capitalism. This alienation is not dependent on free will but it is a law of nature: man in his history is necessarily liberated by a renewed mankind. The proletarians are the chosen people to fulfill this task. He who obstructs must be eliminated.
Third, the influence of the economists who explained history not by means of theories but by means of social and material conditions. By labor, man truly becomes what he has to be. Hence, from the very beginning he finds himself in a tension with nature and with fellowman, the two motors of history. Classless original society, the economy of the ancient world based on slavery, the feudal period, the actual period of capitalism, the end of the struggle of the classes: classless community society. Marx gives as diagnosis of his time the opposition between the capitalists, those who possess the production means, and the proletariat who are exploited and suppressed. The permanent anxiety of the proletariat in capitalism is a factor of progress. When the proletariat becomes aware of its role, and that is the task of Marxism, then it will establish the salvation state by a bloody revolution and the production means will become the possession of all.
Finally, Marxism owes its content from the influence of the Russian terrorists. From a first emotional reaction it becomes a rationalistically justified way of acting: terrorism as a tactical means for the revolution. The morality is purely machiavellistic, “all means are good to reach the goal.” This is the origin of the practical guide for revolution of which basic rule sounds “to reach power use force for the bodies (police state, concentration camps, etc.) and lie for the spirit (political propaganda). The meaning of life for the Marxist is to fulfill his role in the salvation history, the realization of the proletarian paradise by means of the world revolution.
Similarly, Marxist criticism has a significant role to play in the transformation of human societies for it
“is a part of a larger body of theoretical analysis which aims to understand ideologies—the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times. And certain of those ideas, values and meanings are available to us only in literature. To understand ideologies is to understand both the past and the present more deeply; and such understanding contributes to our liberation.”
Although Marx and Engels are better known for their political and economic rather than literary writing, art and literature were “parts of the very air Marx breathed” for he was “scrupulously sensitive to questions to literary style.” The pressure of aesthetic concepts can be detected behind some of the most crucial categories of economic thought he employs in his mature work. Engels and Marx’s comments on art and literature are scattered and fragmentary, glancing allusions rather than developed positions.
Marxist criticism involves more than what has become in the west as the ‘sociology of literature’ which
“…concerns itself chiefly with what might be called the means of literary production, distribution and exchange in a particular society—how books are published, the social composition of their authors and audiences, levels of literacy, the social determinants of ‘taste’. It also examines library texts for their ‘sociological’ relevance, raiding literary works to abstract from the themes of interest to the social historian.”
Marxism is not merely a ‘sociology of literature’ for its aim is “…to explain the literary work more fully; and this means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history.”
The originality of Marxist criticism lies not in his historical approach to literature but in its revolutionary understanding of history itself. The seeds of the revolutionary understanding are in Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology:
“The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men’s material behavior... we do not proceed from what man say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as described, thought of, imagined, conceived in order to arrive at corporeal man; rather we proceed fro the really active man… Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness”
This manner of approach that conforms to real life starts out from the real premises. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as it is with the empiricists, or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with idealists. Where real life starts, positive science, the expounding of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men.
A fuller statement of the seeds of revolutionary understanding of history can be found on the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique Economy:
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material product forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
Taken together these ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’ form what Marx calls the economic ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’. From this economic base or infrastructure emerges a ‘superstructure’ – certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production, e.g. in Capitalism, the capitalists. But social structure also consists of certain definite forms of social consciousness, such as political, religious, ethical, aesthetic etc., which in Marxism is called ideology. The function of ideology is also to legitimate the power of the ruling class in the society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.
According to Belsey, in Althusser’s reading of Marx, ideology “is not simply a set of illusions but a system of representations (discourses, images, myths) concerning the real relations in which people live. But what is represented in ideology is not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals to the real relations in which they live.” Ideology as presented is both real and imaginary. Real in that it is the way in which people really live their relations to the social relations which govern their conditions of existence but imaginary in that it discourages a full understanding of these conditions of existence and the ways in which people are socially constituted within them. Althusser talks of ideology as a ‘material practice’ for it exists in the behavior of people acting according to their belief.
Art in Marxism is a part of the ‘superstructure’ of society. To understand literature then is to understand the total process of which it is a part. Literary works are not only explained in terms of the author’s psychology for they are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world. They have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or the ideology of an age. That ideology in turn is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter into a particular time and place. It is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated.
To understand a work of art is then to do more than interpret its symbolism, study its literary history, and add footnotes about its sociological facts that are in it. It is also to understand the complex, indirect relations between the work and the ideological work it inhabits—relations that emerge not just in ’themes’ and ‘preoccupations’ but in style, rhythm, image, quality, and form. This of course presupposes an understanding of the ideology of a particular social class, which is a complex phenomenon, for it may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world. To understand an ideology one must analyze the precise relations between different classes in a society. To do that means grasping where those classes stand in relation to the mode of production.
Literature may be a part of the superstructure but it is not the merely passive reflection of the economic base as stated in Engel’s letter to Joseph Bloch I 1890:
“According to the materialist conception of history, the determining elements in history are ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., - forms of law – and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma – also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and many cases preponderate in determining their form. “
In the above letter Engel wants to deny that there is an equal correspondence between base and structure for some elements of the superstructure constantly react back upon and influence the economic base. The materialist’s theory of history denies that art can in itself change the course of history but it insists that art can be an active element in such change. Marx selected the arts to show the complex and indirect relation between base and superstructure:
“In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns of Shakespeare. It is even recognized that certain forms of art, e.g., the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art, such begins; that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of art, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified.”
In the above, Marx is showing us the unequal relationship of the development of material production to artistic production: that it does not follow that the greatest artistic development depends upon the highest development of the productive forces. This is clearly evidenced by the Greek producing major arts, e.g., the epic, in an economically undeveloped society. Marx argues that the
“Greeks were able to produce major art is not in spite of but because of the undeveloped state of society. In ancient societies, which have not yet undergone the fragmenting division of labor known to capitalism, the overwhelming of ‘quality’ by ‘quantity’ which results from commodity-production and the restless, continual development of productive forces, a certain measure or harmony can be achieved between man and nature – a harmony precisely dependent upon the limited nature of Greek society.”
From Marx’s formulation in the Grundrisse two questions emerge: the first concerns the relation between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ and the second concerns our relation in the present with the past art. Marx says clearly that the aspects of society, base and superstructure, do not form symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history. Each element of a society’s superstructure – art, law, politics, religion – has its own tempo of development, its own internal evolution, which is not reducible to a mere expression of a class struggle or the state of economy. Art, as commented by Trotsky, “has a very high degree of autonomy, it is not tied in any simple one-on-one way to the mode of production.” Art’s relation to the real history of its time is highly mediated.
To the question, how we moderns still find aesthetic appeal in the cultural products of the past, vastly different societies, Marx answered that
“It is because our modern history links us to those ancient societies. We find in them an undeveloped phase f the forces which condition us. Moreover, we find in those ancient societies a primitive image of ‘measure’ between man and Nature which capitalist society necessarily destroys and which socialist society can reproduce at an incomparably higher level.”
We ought, in other words, to think of ‘history’ in wider terms than our own contemporary history, that it is a product of history. Another answer is presented by Bertolt Brecht who argues that
“…we need to develop a historical sense… into a real sensual delight. When our theatres perform plays of other periods they like to annihilate the distance, fill in the gap, gloss over the differences. But what comes then of our delight in comparisons, in distance, in dissimilarity – which is at the same time a delight in what is close and proper to ourselves?”
In Marxism, ideology “is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social function and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.” For Plekhanov “all art springs from ideological conception of the world; there is no such thing as a work of art entirely devoid of ideological concern,” But Frederick Engels’ remark, that “art is far richer and more opaque than political and economic theory because it is les purely ideological,” suggests that at has a more or less complex relationship to ideology. What is then the relationship art has to ideology?
Two opposite positions are available here. One, presented by ‘vulgar Marxist’, claims that “literature is nothing but ideology” – works of literature are just expressions of the ideologies of their time. Such position can not account why there are literature that actually challenges the ideological assumptions of their time.
The second position answers this through Ernst Fisher and Louis Althusser. Fisher contends that “authentic art always transcends the ideological limits of its time, yielding us insight into the realities which ideology hides from view.” Althusser argues that
“…art can not be reduced to ideology: it has, rather, a particular relationship to it. Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the world, which is, of course, the kind of experience literature gives us too – what it feels like to live in a particular conditions, rather than conceptual analysis of those conditions. However, art does more than just passively reflect the experience. It is within ideology, but also manages to distance itself from it, to the point where it permits us to feel and perceive the ideology from where it springs.”
Since art gives us the experience of the situation, which is equivalent to ideology, it allows us to see the nature of that ideology, and thus begins to move us towards that full understanding of ideology, which is scientific knowledge. Pierre Macherey explains this by distinguishing ‘illusion’ (meaning, essentially, ideology) and ‘fiction’. For him illusion—the ordinary ideological experience of men—“is the material on which the writers goes to work; but in working on it he transforms it into something different, lends it a shape and structure. It is by giving ideology a determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits, that art is able to distance itself from it, thus revealing us the limits of that ideology.” In doing this, Macherey claims, art contributes to our deliverance from the ideological illusion.
For Althusser and Macherey is more than an amorphous body of free-floating images and ideas. In any society, it has a certain structural coherence and therefore be the object of scientific analysis. Since literary texts belong to ideology they too can be the object of such scientific analysis: it would search out the principle which both ties the work to ideology and distances from it. To do this, however, means grasping the literary work as a formal structure, a subject to be discussed in Formalism.
On the other hand new historicism, a term coined by Stephen Geenblatt, is a result of reconception of history and the historicity of literature.
The historical approach of to literary criticism has traditionally sought to accomplish three goals. First, to cast light on and clarify the text itself, i.e., to establish the date of composition and the authoritative text as well as identifying a text’s reference to history—specific allusions to actual people, political events, economic development, etc. Second, to describe the author as an artist with a significant past and predisposition to write in a certain number. Third, to grasp a literary work as it reflects the historical forces that shaped it initially, to understand how an historical moment produced a particular work of literary art.
Such criticism then endeavors, as Hippolyte Taine said, to recover “from the monuments of literature, a knowledge of the manner in which men thought and felt centuries ago.” From this viewpoint, the literary critic necessarily studies history directly since the literary text is an object produced by the operation of history. History, in this case, is superior to literature in that it shapes literature and determines its nature. Literature then, as concluded by Stephen Greenblatt, is “to mirror the period’s belief, but to mirror them as it were, from a distance.”
New Criticism has reconceived history and history of literature erasing the hierarchy of history over literature. It does so with Terry Eagleton’s use of deconstruction to redraw the boundaries of history as discipline, with Michel Foucault’s view of history a discursive practice, what is possible to say in one era as opposed to another, with Hans Robert Jauss, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Eugene Vence’s views of history as a language, with Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that” history can not be divorced from textuality , and all text can be compelled to confront the crisis of undecidability revealed in the literary text,” and with Hayden White’s view of history as a narrative, a narrative sequence marked by inexplicable gaps or ruptures. In general, these conceptions of history also abandon any notion of history as direct mimesis; any belief in history is a mere imitation of events in the world.
Now history, like literature, is seen as a product of language and both represent themselves as formed in sequence of gaps, as a narrative discourse. The new awareness is that history, like a fictional narrative, exists in a dialogue with something “foreign” or “other” to it that it can never be contained or controlled y the historian. History is now a knowing that is a making that never quite makes what was intended. We can make history as process of repetition, as T.S. Eliot imagined, so that what was valuable in the past is continuously regained, or history as apocalyptic promise to be fulfilled in time, as Northrop Frye envisioned it, or history as a series of irrational ruptures, as Friedrich Nietzsche and Foucault imagined it. But whether as repetition, apocalypse, or rupture, history is not an order in the world that simply is copied but an order of encounter with the world that Heidegger called Dasein, “being-in-the-world,” a conception of making and participating with the world all at once.
New historicism attempts to situate literary works within an historical matrix but it does not necessarily define that matrix as a relationship between a base and a superstructure. Rather it describes both history and literature in terms that eschew universalizing and transcendental descriptions and draws upon, instead, the “discursive” presuppositions. For Greenblatt “the study of literature is the study of contingent, particular, intended, and historically embedded works.” This concept shows that literature is not autonomous. Separable from its cultural context and hence divorced from the social, ideological, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed.
