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A Theory of Literary Production A Theory of Literary Production ‘Few texts could more amply warrant re-publication in this series than Pierre Macherey’s indisputable classic. Here it was, in those heady days of insurgent “theory”, that many had their first introduction to Althusser’s innovative reading of Marx, Lacan’s recasting of Freudian themes, and the new configuration of literary-critical ideas that would shortly become known as post-structuralism. If things have moved on during the past two decades it is nevertheless far from clear that this movement has taken an intellectually or politically progressive direction. Indeed, Macherey’s landmark study may serve as a reminder of what was left behind in the rush to embrace a whole series of later developments that in truth possessed nothing like the same degree of critical acumen, philosophic depth, or strength of political engagement.’ Christopher Norris ‘Macherey’s book marked the first serious break with humanist literary criticism. Its emphasis on breaks and contradictions, repressions, absences, and silences and on ideological saturation and surcharge amounted to a revolution in literary method and analysis and constitutes the real power of this book after which literary criticism was never the same.’ Fredric Jameson ‘This is the most original and important book of its generation for integrating ideas of history, ideology and close reading: Macherey taught us to interpret the gaps and silences, the unconscious of the work. Today we need his conceptual clarity and thoughtful commitment.’ Alan Sinfield Routledge Classics contains the very best of Routledge publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times. For a complete list of titles visit www.routledgeclassics.com Pierre Macherey A Theory of Literary Production Translated from the French by Geoffrey Wall With a new introduction by Terry Eagleton and a new afterword by the author London and New York First published 1966 in French as Pour Une Théorie De La Production Littéraire by Librairie François Maspero This translation first published in 1978 By Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd First published in Routledge Classics 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Librairie FRANCOIS MASPERO/Editions LA DECOUVERTE, Paris, France, 1966 English translation © Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978 Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition © Terry Eagleton 2006 Afterword to the Routledge Classics Edition © Pierre Macherey 2006 Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN–13: 9–78–0–415–37849–9 CONTENTS Preface vii Translator’s Preface xii Acknowledgement xv Some Elementary Concepts 1 1 Criticism and judgment3 2 Domain and object5 3 Questions and answers9 4 Rule and law 13 5 Positive and negative judgment 16 6 Front and back 22 The genesis of a poem 24 Thaumantis regia 30 7 Improvisation, structure and necessity 44 8 Autonomy and independence 58 9 Image and concept: Beautiful language and True language 62 10 Illusion and fiction 70 vi contents 11 Creation and production 75 12 Pact and contract 78 13 Explanation and interpretation 84 14 Implicit and explicit 91 15 The spoken and the unspoken 95 16 The two questions 101 17 Interior and exterior 108 18 Depth and complexity 110 Some Critics 115 19 Lenin, critic of Tolstoy 117 The image in the mirror 133 20 Literary analysis: The tomb of structures 152 Some Works 175 21 Jules Verne: The faulty narrative 177 I The problem posed by the work 177 II Analysis of the work 183 III The function of the novel 256 Appendix: The thematic ancestor: Robinson Crusoe 268 22 Borges and the fictive narrative 278 23 Balzac’s Les Paysans: A disparate text 288 Appendix: Lenin’s articles on Tolstoy 334 Leo Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian revolution 334 L. N. Tolstoy 340 Leo Tolstoy and his epoch 345 L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labour movement 350 Tolstoy and the proletarian struggle 353 Heroes of ‘reservation’ 355 Forty Years On 362 Index 367 PREFACE Terry Eagleton Published in Paris in 1966, Pierre Macherey’s Pour une théorie de la production littéraire sent shockwaves through British left-wing liter- ary circles even before its translation into English in 1978. Written on the eve of the Paris evenements of 1968, the book already prefigured something of that radical upheaval in its theoretical adventurousness and austere lack of mystification. It arrived on the British scene in the early 1970s, when Marxist criticism was at its most militant and productive, and in this sense could not have wished for a more hospitable reception. A study which passed fairly unheralded in Paris, by an author who at the time held the modest academic post of maitre assistant, was suddenly cried up as la derniere chose by radical British critics who were looking for an alternative to Georg Lukacs (to whom this book is among other things an implicit riposte), and who were in any case coming increasingly under the theoretical influence of Macherey’s mentor, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Macherey’s own reaction to this celebrity, when he visited England in this period, was more one of shrugging Gallic viii preface bemusement than beaming delight: he was, he observed self- dismissively, a philosopher rather than a literary critic. Macherey, in fact, was the first Althusserian critic. What the book does, put simply, is to take a cluster of Althusser’s central concepts—production, problematic, ideology, scientific know- ledge and the like—and apply them to the literary work, which they were never really intended to illuminate. Yet to put it this way underestimates Macherey’s pathbreaking originality. What is at stake in the book is nothing less than a dramatically new way of approaching literature, one which in its unostentatious, low-key way scandalously smashes a whole range of liberal humanist icons. The literary text is not to be thought of as an ‘expression’ of the human subject or as a ‘reflection’ of reality. It has no depth, centre, unity or singular point of origin. It is the product not of an authorial intention but of a process of produc- tion, which like the production of a shirt or a scooter operates by procedures quite independent of what the producer has in mind. An author, Macherey remarks, is ‘the first reader of his own work’. There are equally radical implications for criticism. Criticism is not a reflection or reduplication of the literary work, but a work upon it which displaces it into another space altogether, and in doing so understands it in a way that it could not in principle understand itself. Rather than merely elaborating what one might call the self-consciousness of the work, reflecting the way in which, so to speak, it sees (or would like to see) itself, critical analysis, like the psychoanalysis on which much of Macherey’s method is modelled, is bent on revealing its ‘unconscious’ or hidden underside. Like the psychoanalyst listening to his or her patient, it grasps what is uttered in terms of what is not uttered—in the light of the text’s symptomatic repressions, eva- sions, slippages, self-contradictions and eloquent silences. It is in the ‘not-said’ of the work, not in what it proclaims or portrays, that its relation to history is most graphically exposed. Criticism preface ix ‘makes speak’ what the work must at all costs repress simply in order to be itself. Its job is not to extract some secret truth from the work, but to demonstrate that its ‘truth’ lies open to view, in the historically necessary discrepancy between its various components. How are we to understand this claim? To do so, we need to grasp something of Macherey’s notion of ideology. In typically Althusserian fashion, ideology is not seen in his book not as a determinate structure of ideas, but as the shapeless, amorphous stuff of everyday experience. (How valid one might judge such a summary equation between ideology and experience is a differ- ent question). Literature trades in experience, and to that extent its subject-matter is some historical ideology or other. But it does not just ‘reflect’ this ideology, as the cruder versions of Marxist criticism have maintained. Because literature is a formal affair—a matter of certain determinate strategies and operations —the work does not so much reflect ideology as ‘stage’ or ‘pro- duce’ it, lend it a definitive shape and outline. In doing so, however, it highlights those limits, absences and contradictions in the ideology which are not so visible to us in everyday life, where ideology is, so to speak, too close to the eyeball to be objectified. The literary work in Macherey’s view does not free itself from ideology, which would be yet another liberal-humanist illusion; but neither is it irredeemably sunk in it.
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