Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists

Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists

Marxism: Focuses • Dialectic Materialism -- Marx and Vulgar Marxism • Literature,Society & Ideology: Althusser and Gramsci • Marxist Literary Theorists: Macherey, Jameson and Eagleton • Foucault &文學社會學的多重互動模式

Althusser and Gramsci: Q & A • How does Althusser revise traditional marxism? • How are Althusser and Gramsci similar to and different from each other in their views of ideology/hegemony? Which do you agree with more? • How do they help us understand literature more?

Methodologies: Some Suggestions • Class relations, economic determinism and the influences of (literary) relations of productionin or of the texts • Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption Habits (e.g. overall commodification) • Art and ideology: contradictions within some ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a text or a group of texts.

Class relations, economic determinism Critique of Capitalist Society and Consumption Habits (e.g. overall commodification) Art and ideology 1. Social Reflection vs. Pierre Macherey’s the Textual Unsaid 3. Ideology: Eagleton’s Materialist Criticism 2. Jameson: Three horizons of interpretation Their views on History Methodologies: Some Suggestions (2)

Pierre Macherey –the split text; the textual unsaid • Reflectionism chap 5: p. 87; 90-91) • A text is as split as a Lacanian subject. • Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and its unconscious–or the hidden (and unintended) meaning caused by • literary form; (e.g. Prufrock as a Dramatic Monologue) • contradictions in ideologies; (e.g. T.S. Eliot’s) • the material conditions of production in the society in which the text is produced and consumed. (Modernist Society)

Pierre Macherey –the textual unsaid/unconscious • Is constructed in the moment of its entry into literary form.  literary genre as a constraint • the critics: do not look for “unity,” but for “the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions.” (Belsey 109)

the textual unsaid— example 1 • Sherlock Holmes –福爾摩斯 Its pattern: enigma followed by disclosure (with total explicitness and scientific spirit) by the investigator. The stories are “haunted by shadowy, mysterious and silent women.” The women have to be kept in the dark, so that the ability to scientifically analyze and interpret the evidence is the man’s.

the textual unsaid— example 2 • 1999 : Notting hill -- cultural stereotypes(source: http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/literature/althusserandmacherey.html ) Hugh Grant's repressed British mannerisms are contrasted to Julia Roberts' more laid-back American behaviour; Grant as an underdog—a mere second-hand bookstoore owner hoping to have a relationship with a movie star.

the textual unsaid—Notting hill • Notting Hill, has a large population of Caribbean immigrants. Most Londoners would associate Notting Hill with its yearly carnival, a celebration of Black British culture. • The film: the only black -- an American movie producer. “Race is an ‘unconscious’ element of the movie, and at the same time "what it cannot say." •  the film subscribes to the ideology of “Englishness.”

Pierre Macherey (for reference) • We should question the work as to what it does not and cannot say, in those silences for which it has been made. The concealed order of the work is thus less significant than its real determinant disorder (its disarray). The order which it professes is merely an imagined order, projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution of ideological conflicts, a resolution so precarious that it is obvious in the very letter of the text where incoherence and incompleteness burst forth […] This distance which separates the work from the ideology which it transforms is rediscovered in the very letter of the work: it is fissured, unmade even in its making. (Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production: 115)

Terry Eagleton’s Materialist Criticism General Ideology (GI) Authorial Ideology (AuI) Aesthetic Ideology (AI) • Literary Mode of Production (LMP) • General Mode of Production (GMP) The Text

Modes of production: General and Literary • General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary Mode of Production (LMP) • Every LMP is constituted by structure of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption“ ( Foucault and 林 later) • It's important to analyse the complex articulations of these various LMPs with the 'general' mode of production of a social formation. For instance, how oral LMP can keep its traces in a written text. • E.g. circulating library in the Victorian age, oral traces in novel and dramatic monologue; traditional novel vs. hyper-fiction; web ”page.”

General Ideology (GI), Authorial Ideology (AuI) and Aesthetic Ideology (AI) • GI is not an "ideal type of ideology in general," but the dominant ensemble of ideologies in social formation (54). (e.g. Modernist Ideology: alienation, individualism, liberal humanism, elitism, etc. ) • AuI is the effect of the author's mode of biographical insertion intoGI. (elitism Eliot’s emphasis on individual talents and tradition; his critique of capitalist society; his fear of woman) • Aesthetic ideology (e.g. of dramatic monologue, stream of consciousness)

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” • What is the poem about? How do you characterize Prufrock? What stages does he go through in this poem? • Who is the “you” he talks to? And the “we” that drown? • How does dramatic monologue help present the ideas of this poem? What ideologies does the poem criticize, support and/or embody? Eliot’s reading

T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Five parts (composes of fragments): • 1. Decision: “Let us go then”; (other: city; [room]) • 2. Procrastination: “And indeed there will be time.” ([room]; other: they; self: questions/manners/dress) • 3. Destination described, Self Doubted:“For I have known them all . . . “ (other: formulas and ornaments; self: coffee spoons, butt-ends, not crab or prophet, etc.) • 4. More Doubt:“And would it have been worth it. . .”(self: rituals, Lazarus, nerves; other: “one” • 5. Self-Rejection:“No, I am not Prince Hamlet” (self: the Fool, “we?”; other: mermaid)

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” --dramatic monologue A genre in which self-centeredness is both foregrounded and critiqued. But the self is usually coherent. Prufrock: fragments of objects, rituals and questions, self-images.

Self-aware speaks to himself; worries about his reputation (like the man from the inferno) of his appearance; (prepare a face) Indecisive:“there will be time.” (vs. “To His Coy Mistress) Good-intentioned (with love) The city: Sick and dirty, (evening, back street, sawdust restaurant, fog & smoke,) 2. The polite society good-mannered, ritualistic (plate, toast, tea, etc.), but superficial and judgmental (the eyes that fix you). Reading (1) – Prufrock’s Self vs. Society

Self-Centered;projects his spiritual malaise on his physical environment John the Baptist; Lazarus Self-Rejection—the self he rejects is the “social self,” which is no different from the others in society 1. The city: --working class invisible; -- etherized evening; 2. The Universe turned into a ball; 3. The other –mermaid; something mythically remote and romantic.  anticipate Eliot’s interest in classical culture. 4. The Lady– unknown and inexpressive. Reading (2) Prufrock: Self-Pity vs. Self-Love

T. S. Eliot’s authorial ideologies • Son of an aristocratic St. Louis family • His Aesthetic Ideology: A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him.”--Correlatively, the duty of the poet, as Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture, ”is only indirectly to the people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve.”--Thus he dismisses the so-called ”social function” of poetry.

T. S. Eliot and Women (1): His Wife • Vivien Haigh-Wood, the pretty but nervous English girl . • She ended in madness, a development which in retrospect seems inevitable but for which Eliot felt partially responsible and for which he forgave himself only in old age, if ever. • This burden is the biographical shadow behind a motif recurrent in the poems and plays--the motif of "doing a girl in," of wife murder. (Also, sense of alienation) • Eliot’s struggle to cope emotionally and financially with Vivien Eliot's illness …[leads] him first to exhaustion, and then, in 1921, to collapse.

T. S. Eliot and Women (2): Possible gay tendency? • Eliot on “The Waste Land”“[V]arious critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me, it was only a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life: it is just a piece of rhythmic grumbling."  "The Waste Land" as an elegy to a male lover, Jean Verdenal, who died in WWI and to whom Eliot dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. (Eliot qtd in Flanzbaum) • New biography (2005): • never consummated his marriage to Vivien; only saw his wife once between 1932 and 1947. • valued his friendships with men more than his relationships with women. • Yet Eliot preferred his mother to his father and had an important friendship with Virginia Woolf.” (Flanzbaum)

Eagleton on Eliot • Totality and Tradition: Goes to Europe with a mission of re-defining the organic unity of its cultural traditions, and reinserting provincial England into that totality. • The organic unity of late Romanticism + classicism; “the surrender of ‘personality’ to order, reason, authority and tradition.” 2. A latent contradiction: between Eliot’s concern for art as organic order and his insistence on the sensuously mimetic properties of poetic language. (e.g. “Traditional and Individual Talent” vs. “Love Song) 3. The metaphysical poets as a solution. 4. “The Waste Land”– Cultures collapse, but Culture survives, and its form is The Waste Land.

Eliot’s views of culture and tradition–culture as religion (for reference) • Culture - `that which makes life worth living': one's total way of life, including art and education, but also cooking and sports. • By tradition, also, Eliot means both a conscious and an unconscious life in a social continuum.... He speaks of culture metaphorically as the `incarnation' of a religion, the human manifestation of a superhuman reality. A culture's religion `should mean for the individual and for the group something toward which they strive, not merely something which they possess.‘ (Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003. )

Materialist Criticism on “Prufrock” (GI)-Fragmentation/Alienation of “Selves” (AuI):Tradition (fear of woman) (AI): Monologuist’s subjectivity/ Cubism/ “love song” • (LMP—Literary Circle): The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry…" (1917) • (GMP): Exploitation of Laborers (the unsaid) vs. Polite Society; Prufrock-Littau (furniture wholesalers) vs. J. Afred The Text

Jameson’s three horizons of criticism • from immanent analysis to transcendent one 1. Structuralist analysis (e.g. binaries): a level of immanent analysis, = text as a symbolic act 2. Ideology analysis: a level of socio-discourse analysis, = text as class discourse 3. an epochal level of Historical reading = text as being embedded in a field of forces of the dynamic of various sign systems. (The textual heterogeneity can only be understood only as it relates to social and cultural heterogeneity outside the text.)

Macherey on History • the work is the writer’s response to a situation — it is an answer to a problem/question he sets himself — and he can be ideologically aware of what this question is. The real problem, however, is the question of that question — the first question is already an answer to another question— the first question (the one the writer might be aware of) is an ideologically conditioned question posed by the writer’s historical situation.

Macherey on History work = response to ideological question ideological response to history (the question behind the question).

Eagleton on history • Text Signifier Signification Signified IDEOLOGY Signifier Signified History The relation between text and ideology: like that between theatric performance and a play.

Jameson on History • History as an absent cause: • "it [History] is inaccessible except through textual forms. and . . . our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious." (33)

References • British Writers. Supplement 5. George Stade and Sarah Hannah Goldstein, editors. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. • Terry Eagleton Criticism and Ideology. • Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Methuen, 1980) • Flanzbaum, Hilene. ”Eliot's troubled sexuality.(T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet)(Book review).”English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Wntr 2007 v50 i1 p120(5)

Next Week • Another View on Society: M. Foucault's Views on Discourse and Power (Reader: chap 7: pp. 147-57) • Girl Interrupted ("Faces of Madness“—maybe later or for reference)

Marxism 3: Methodologies and Marxist Literary Theorists