Marxism and Literature

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How often have revolutionaries interested in literature bemoaned the fact that Marx never did write that monograph on Balzac? How many times have we read that Marx and Engels had more important things to do than provide us with a fully worked-out aesthetic theory?

All too often, untortunately;

and all too often such lamentation has been merely. an excuse for inactivity, for unwillingness to grapple with the complex relationship of Marxism and literature.

Here at least is a book which goes beyond the commonplaces of Marxist literary criticism and suggests certain theses on the subject.

It provides no final answers, mind, but is instead "content to broach a few basic issues and raise some fundamental questions." (Preface p.vi).

And in the space available - just 76 pages of text, excluding notes -the book succeeds exceedingly well, providing both an outline and a critique of the positions of such The central question for Marxists dealing with this topic is the precise relationship which exists between society and literature.

Terry Eagleton rightly takes issue with that rigid schema which presents literature as nothing but the passive reflection of the economic base.

Art is, to be sure, part of society's superstructure; but its position within that superstructure, and its consequent relationship to the base, is a highly mediated one: a dialectical relationship which prevents us from reducing the art work to some sociological equivalent.

Art is not then the mere expres sion of a reality which exists outside it, but is instead an imaginative reconstruction of that reality in accordance with its own specific Artistic production is, of course, interwoven with all other material production, but within that context it is relatively autonomous.

NOT PASSIVE The artist is neither a mystical creator who conjures his art out of Ia void, nor is he the passive register of every change in the economic base.

He is a socially determined individual, belonging to a particular class at a determinate moment 'in history and producing his art with certain materials and techniques at his disposal.

Ie paraphrase Marx, the artist, ¡nates his own art-work, but he does hot make it just as he pleases. I.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, a whole set of factors prevailing at that time: the cultural and material poverty of bourgeois society at the end of World War I; the revolutionary upsurge in Europe, sparked off by the momentous events in Russia; Eliot's own isolated and ambiguous position within English society and his nostalgic and reactionary conservatism; his debt to Fraser and Bradley; his membership of a conceited literary coterie whose major mode of publication was the little magazine; the kind of audience he knew would read his poetry; the self-conscious experimenting with avant-garde literary devices etc. (Cf Eagleton pp.14-17).

The task of the Marxist critic is to synthesize all these elements and thereby fully to explain the poem.

Our task is not to abstract one element from many (eg. the political position of the author) and to use this as the touchstone of the work's value.

All the major writers of the 20th century - Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Yeats - were politically reactionary; indeed, each connived at fascism for certain periods of their lives.

But this does not invalidate their art. On the contrary, the fact that they produced great art is entirely explicable. For:

'in the absence óf a genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois the most society, could produce significant literature." (Eagleton, p.8).

Summary political judgements of the sort that raised such mediocrities as Serafimovich and Gladkov (who were they?) to the level of classics because of their devotion to Stalin have thus nothing in common with Marxist literary criticism.

The task of Marxists is not then to rifle literary works in a vain search for references to the proletariat and the class struggle.

Such was the method foisted upon the world by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia during the late twenties and thirties. Terrified by what it didn't understand it could only vilify and degrade; whatever failed to serve its interests was denounced as "counter-revolutionary" and injurious to socialism.

In this spirit, Radek described James Joyce's work as a heap of dung teeming with worms, and accused Mysses (set in 1904) of historical untruthfulness since it failed to mention the Easter Rebellion (which took place in 1916!)

Such philistinism was; of course, nothing but the literary counterpart to the bureaucratic barbarism of Stalinist Russia; just as the Thermidorean reaction coiled itself round Bolshevism and attempted to squeeze all life out of it, so too it coiled itself around literature and choked it.

A fight against the Stalinist against the Stalinist theories of "proletkult" and "socialist realism"

It is for this reason that Trotsky included a section on culture in his work The Revolution Betrayed. And in this he was merely continuing : the work he had begun in 1924 in his masterly Literature and In like fashion, Lenin was obliged to polemicize even in the very last article he wrote - Better Revor, late at too great length and Fewer But Better - against those too flippantly on 'proletarian culture'."

For Lenin, as for Trotsky, the duty of Marxists is to educate the working class, to assist them in assimilation of bourgeois culture as the necessary precondition for the creation, not of their own "proletarian' culture, but of a truly classless ie. socialist culture.

And such assimilation, they add, has nothing in common with that servile kow-towing to the "giants of literature" which permeates all petty bourgeois criticism: in literature as in politics the attitude of the proletariat is wholly entical.

In this present transitional epoch only two alternatives now exist -socialism or barbarism. The former will mean the inauguration of a truly human culture, free from the shackles of bureaucratism and the iron grip of commodity production.

The latter course means the extinction of culture as we know it. No other class but the working class can resolve this dilemma. Just as Engels could say at the end of his pamphlet on Feuerbach that "the German working class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy" international working class is the inheritor of mankind's culture.

Only a socialist revolution in the coming historical period can avert the catastrophe which stares mankind in the face. "The turn is now to the proletariat ie. chiefly its revolutionary vanguard."

Terry Eagleton's book will not resolve the present crisis of revol utionary leadership. But it will surely help the revolutionary movement attain a clearer subtler, more scientific approach to the problems of literature and literary criticism.

If it succeeds in that then it will have helped free us from those 'theories' which serve to repress and smother the true potential of the international working class.

For that reason alone Terry Eagleton's book deserves to be studied by all socialists. Marxist literary criticism is not just another academic tool; it can be a usetul weapon in the struggle for our own emancipation.

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SOCIALIST PRESS, Wedresday 8tl ieptember 1976 Alter that, the government was lterally paralysed and Ayub was forced to resign.

The country was handed over to Genernal Yahya Khan to prepare for the first General Election in victimise progressive the province. 12: Abdur-Rehman, leader of the Joint Labourers Action Committee; (MMMA) was murdered in Lahore in April 1974. 13. Different Marxist leaders,

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critics as Lukacs, Goldmann, Benjamin, Brecht and Macherey.