Slaughter on Ideology

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TERRY EAGLETON reviews Marxism, Ideology and Literature by Cliff Slaughter, published by Macmillan at £4.50.

Important though this per- ware •r ust now mstonvaly The Seduction of Joe Tynan, reviewed Better known for. its devotion to Middle Eastern autocrats than to Marxist art, Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party seems an unlikely source for a study of Marxism and literature.

Yet Çliff Slaughter, veteran Healyite, has produced what is in some ways a valuable, usable study of precisely that subject.

The chief merit of Slaughter's lucid, trenchant account is that it situates the Marxist study of literature firmly within political analysis.

Liberating 'Marxist criticism' from the academy, Slaughter integrates a Marxist theory of art with Marx's overall materialist theory of the capitalist mode of production.

Exchange For Marx, labour under capitalism is inevitably abstract labour, producing commodities whose concrete qualities exist for the sake of their exchange value, for the goal of profit.

Indor cuch a retam art becomes a commodity like any other; but because artistic labour is irreducibly concrete and particular, it confronts bourgeois society as something of a scandal.

Moreover, it offers a model of what a non-abstract form of labour might be like-a labour process which existed to develop creative energies rather than to alienate and repress them.

Immortant thaunh this norSlaughter spective is, it assumes distinct dangers in Slaughter's hands.

For such highly general, abstract discussion of art assumes that there is, indeed, something called "Art'-some single, universal activity whose "essence' is the creative transformation of human energies.

Such an idea has precisely been the stock-in-trade of bourgeois idealism.

Abstract

Slaughter, like idealist art critics, tends almost unconsciously to celebrate 'Art' as such, in the abstract; it is less a question of the particular material effects of particular works of art, than the universal "creative' qualities of Art-in-general.

In fact Slaughter seems unaware of inct how hictorirallv relative a term like 'art' is.

Was Homer really literature' for the ancient Greeks? Was the Parthenon a work of art' for them, in the sense that it is for us?

How far is Slaughter an historical materialist when he speaks of the 'essentially human experience' which art (all art?) is supposed to embody.

Lukacs

Such language is ironically very close to that of the supposedly 'greatest" Marxist literary critic of the century, Georg Lukacs.

Ironically, because Slaughter's chapter on Lukacs is an excellent, highly principled expose of Lukacs's Stalinism, and its devastating effects on his literary theory.

But when Slaughter rightly rejects some of Lukacs's bourgeois-idealist formulations ('the enduring spell of all works of art that evoke life's inexhaustible dynamism'), it is difficult not to feel that he has not slid dangerously close to such Romantic abstractions himself.

Of the various Marxist critics with whom he deale Clanchter VILIA properly singles out two as outstanding: Trotsky himself, and the German art critic Walter Benjamin.

The virtues of both men are impressively analysed; but their inevitable limitations are wholly ignored.

literature is 'thinking in images' -a hangover from Russian Romanticism which the Russian Formaliste riohtlv tank anart Trotsky He also fails to mention that brilliant though much of Trotsky's literary criticism is, it never effectively breaks with the actual techniques of bourgeois criticism, whatever its profound differences of perspective.

Excessive

Benjamin's concern with the material modes of production of art is valuably emphasised; but his latent "technologism'-an excessive trust in the technical Benjamin forces of artistic production themselves-is passed over in silence.

So, indeed, is the whole of Benjamin's mystical, Messianic, Jewish-apocalyptic thought, which confronts anyone trying to appropriate Benjamin as a traditional Marxist with a severe problem.

For Slaughter, in undialectical fashion, there are problems only with those thinkers with whom he disagrees; his celebrations are consistently uncritical. million in one primary election in a single state: and this was before the Presidential race itself gets underway!

Yet Alda's liberalism leaves him blind to such realities and a million miles away from the struggles of the American working class. He offers only an abstract look at bourgeois political morality.

This is not simply the fruit of Alda's own shortcomings. It is linked to the lack of any workers' party in the USA-any mass party committed, in however partial a way, to struggle for the interests of the Us labour movement.

Any attempt to analyse US politics without grasping this It is characteristic of Slaughter's failure to break entirely with bourgeois humanism that he feels constrained to place the word 'science, when applied to literature, in inverted commas.

Literature, one assumes, is too fragile and delicate a plant for such grubby handling, a matter of 'creativity' rather than 'categories' He makes some telling points against Althusserian literary 'science', ', and rightly criticises my own earlier tendency to uncritically adopt Althusser's idea of "ideology'.

But his equal rejection of my own concept of a 'literary mode of production' is difficult to salter Benjamin; and his irita tion with Althusserianism sometimes descends to a mere grousing about too many complicated as thouch Marx him accused of this by any petty bourgeois.

The defects of the book, however, are substantially outweighed by its merits.

It is passionate, committed and intelligent, and should be of the to reading for any student must wind up as a superficial, moralistic exercise trapped between the two US capitalist parties.

Acting

The most worinwhile aspect of the film is the superb acting by Barbara Harris (as Tynan's wife) and Merryl Streep.

But even Harris' performance finds it impossible to.overcome the unconvincing banality of Alda's script in which the happy family unit is supposedly restored.

Splendid acting cannot remedy the weaknesses of this lightweight and superficial film.

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Slaughter, for example, supports Trotsky's view that