VIII MARXIST AND NEO-MARXIST CRITICISM

Marxist literary theory starts from the assumption that literature must be understood in relation to historical and social reality as interpreted from a Marxist standpoint. The fundamental Marxist postulate is that the economic base of a society determines the nature and structure of the ideology, institutions and practices (such as literature) that form the superstructure of that society. The most direct form of Marxist criticism, what has been called 'vulgar' Marxism, takes the view that there is a straightforward de­ terministic relation between base and superstructure, so that liter­ ary texts are seen as causally determined by the economic base. The selection from Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality adopts this position in discussing Victorian poetry. The Hungarian theorist, Georg Lukacs, a Marxist in the Hegelian tradition, also sees literature as reflecting socio-economic reality, but he rejected the view that there was a simple determinis­ tic relationship between the two. He argues that the greatest liter­ ary works do not merely reproduce the dominant ideologies of their time but incorporate in their form a critique of these ideolo­ gies. Thus in his view the realism of the realistic nineteenth-century novel, the literary genre he was most sympathetic to, what he calls 'critical realism', is not merely mimetic but incorporates a recogni­ tion of the contradictions within bourgeois society. To achieve this, it sometimes has to break with realism in the mimetic sense, as for example in the exaggeration of Balzac's characters. Lukacs's artistic criterion is 'typicality'. Realistic or naturalistic works which focus on what he regards as the un typical or the bizarre, or works in which technique is emphasised more than content, are criticised by him. He thus tends to be unsympathetic to modernist literature, as 'Critical Realism and Socialist Realism' shows. Lukacs's anti-modernism was criticised by such Marxists as Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin in 'The Artist as Producer' argues that a truly revolutionary art must break radically with traditional forms since even works which use conventional techniques to attack capitalism will tend merely to be consumed by a bourgeois audience. Socialist artists must place the emphasis Of} production rather than consumption by using radical techniqu("s, as Brecht does in his epic theatre, to

158 Marxist and Neo-Marxist Criticism 159 uncover the relations of production and compel the audience to adopt a political standpoint towards them. Whereas Marxist criticism until the 1960s was mainly of interest to those committed to Marxism as a system, more recent Marxist criticism has had a much wider influence. The main reason for this is that Marxist thinking has entered into fruitful relationships with other sets of ideas. Louis Althusser has been a particularly significant figure as he was a Marxist philosopher who had clearly been influenced by structuralism and psychoanalysis. He criticised Hegelian-influenced Marxist theories which were attracted to notions of totality and instead emphasised the 'decentred' nature of the 'social formation' which was made of various levels. This led him to reject the so-called 'vulgar' Marxist view that works of art are wholly determined by socio-economic forces and to argue that they have 'relative autonomy' and are 'overdetermined', that is, determined by a complex network of factors. Althusser's work created mental space for critics who were sympathetic to the polit­ ical aims of Marxism but unhappy at the restrictive nature of most earlier Marxist criticism. Althusserian influence has affected all contemporary Marxist critics to a greater or lesser degree. Terry Eagleton is a Marxist critic of long standing but his more recent work has engaged with Althusserian Marxism and post-structuralism without rejecting tra­ ditional Marxian concepts. Thus in the essay included here he retains the Marxian concept of ideology but modifies traditional Marxian formulations and argues that the relation of the literary text to ideology should be seen in terms of 'overdetermination'. Ellis and Coward attempt a more far-reaching alignment between Marxian concepts and other sets of ideas - structuralism and post­ structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristevan semiology, dis­ course theory, feminist theory - and create what has been called a 'syncretist' form of criticism in which Marxism is only one element among many, as their discussion of Roland Barthes's book SjZ indicates. Fredric Jameson, the leading American Marxist critic, has been influenced by Althusserian concepts and also favours aligning Marxism with contemporary theories such as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, but he has strong connec­ tions with traditional Marxism of the Hegelian totalising type since, for him, Marxism can subsume and incorporate within itself all other forms of thought. In contrast to the anti-interpretative tendency of much structuralist and post-structuralist influenced criticism, he supports an interpretative critical approach in which Marxism functions as the 'master code'.