Yesterday the German writer Karl Marx would complete 200 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. He influenced and was influenced so much by literature that there is a literary criticism with his name. He was a studious of Balzac's works. His writings helped the awareness against exploitation and injustice, and brought the politics and solidarity to the workers, until then totally excluded from political participation and opinion. This post is a summary of three article. The first was published at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Marx. The second was published at http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com.br/2010/12/influence-of-karl-marx-on-modern.html. The third was published at https://books.google.com.br/books?id=Z63PgY7W1lkC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq. The fourth was published at
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German sociologist, historian and economist. He published with Friedrich Engels "The Communist Manifesto," the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also published the movement most important book, Das Capital. Marx and Freud have influenced life and literature in the 20th century more deeply and extensively than the earlier great thinkers and scientists like Copernicus and Darwin influenced the life and literature in their own respective areas. Marx and Freud had very different fields and orientations. While Marx was basically a social philosopher, Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis. Marx's philosophy is known as "dialectical materialism." No place is given by him to the soul or the spirit. According to him, religion is the opium of the masses. He adopted the Hegelian dialectic to give a materialist account of social formations. His concept to class conflict is a basic point. Conflict arise from the desire to control the means of production. So far as English literature is concerned, Marx's impact manifests itself in four different ways: 1) A greater concern for the poor exploited masses, without any overt projection of the Marxian ideology. Even non-Marxian writers tend to give a greater representation to the working class in their works. In the novels of Arnold Bennett, for example, we have mostly working-class heroes. 2) Use of literature as a means of communistic propaganda, See, for example, the English Socialist theatre of today. 3) A tendency to subvert the conventional literary forms by condemning them as constructs of the bourgeoisie. 4) A reaction against Marxian ideology which seems to encourage statism as against the concept of the sanctity and freedom of the individual and abject materialism as against higher values of life. Of all the literary genres it is the novel that allows an author to represent life the most comprehensive. There have been practically no English novels based on Marxian theories like the materialistic basis and class struggle, there have been novels representing the life of the poor, exploited classes with all its unrelieved gloom. Two novelists who wrote such novels with some distinctiveness were George Gissing and George Moore. Moore unlike Gissing, was a rare combination of an uncompromising realist and a refined aesthete. George Orwell's well-known novels, Animal Farm and 1984 are satires on Socialism and Stalinism. The former has the form of an allegorical fable. The latter came after World War II. This novel is a vision of a world ruled by dictatorship of the Stalinist style, taken to an extreme in which private life and independent thought are all but eradicated by surveillance and propaganda. Marxian thought has had a impact on literary criticism all over the world. To Marx, literature was only part of the "superstructure" of which the "base" was formed by economic conditions and dispensation of a society. In its purity Marxian criticism tends to be simplistic if not severely blinkered. But it has its own insights to offer. The Marxian school has in its ranks such great critics as Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Macherey, to name just a few. Several latter-day critics have tried to relate Marxism with Structuralism, psychoanalytic theories and even Reconstruction criticism, leading to new insights if not comprehensive systems.
Let us try, to imagine what effect Balzac's work actually had or could have had on Marx, as both a reader and a writer. Marx's interest in reading Balzac's fiction need not have been limited to its uses for "illustrating" his scientific analyses and historical investigations. Thus, it can not be simply a question of speculating on how Balzac's fiction provide Marx with a "dramatic medium" for representing history, an "unconscious depiction" of social reality. History becomes accessible and assimilable to Marx not despite but through Balzac. The assertion of Marx's "Balzacian" is akin to attempts to approach these issues fron the other direction, that is, from a perspective that tries to preserve the critical functions of Marxism within literary analysis generally, and in particular to discern the dimensions of a Marxist or political unconscious in Balzac's own literary creations. Both Marx and Balzac are concerned with in the practice of their respective crafts. For them, it is not a question simply of trying to gain access to historical reality as or through texts, fictional or factual, but particularly of discerning the fictionality of our sense of reality, as well as the sense of reality that may be communicated through our fictions.
Marxism is understood as a philosophy of history. It is an attempt to formulate a scientific theory of human societies. It suggest a programme of political action for bringing about change in society by making free from explotation and tiranny. However, It should be remembered that Marx himself was aman of letters and a scientific critic. In order to understand the Marxist view of literature, it is necessary to take into account the relationship between literature and life, literature and society and literature and social, political, and economic conditions. In this regard, the terms like 'base and superstructure', 'ideology' ans 'socialist realism' are of a greater help here for having a clearer sense of the relationship between Marxism and literature. Marx held a view that the social relations are bound up with the way they produce their material life. The capitalistic class owns the means of production and the proletarian class whose labour the capitalist buys for his own profit. Georg Lukacs was a Marxist critic. He represents a flexible view of the role of ideology. In his opinion each great work of literature creates its own world which is unique and seemingly distinct from everyday reality. However, great realists like Balzac and Tolstoy who are called as 'masters of realism' bring life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life and create typical characters who manifest to an essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch. These novelists become successful in producing a fictional world which is a reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all its motivating contradictions. Thus, the fictional world of such writers becomes harmonious with Marx conception of the real class-conflict, economic and social contradictions, and the alienation of the individual. Lukacs has made use of the major critical concepts like 'totality' and 'world historical'. These concepts are essentially Hegelian. Thus, for Lukacs, the realist writer penetrates through the accidental phenomena of social life for making open the essences of a condition by selecting and combining them into a total form and putting them in concrete experience. He further remarks that the rise of realists writers takes place from a history which is visibly in the making. For example, the rise of historical novel as a genre at a point when there was a revolutionary turbulence in the early 19th century. He says that writers like Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy can produce realist art because they are present at the tumultuous birth of an historical epoch. They are engaged with the vividly exposed conflicts and dynamics of their societies. Here, the basis of their formal achievement is the historical context.
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