Literature as a Domain of Ideological Class Struggle
Chapter 5 of Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019) by Barbara Foley
Chapter 5: Marxist Literary Criticism
This chapter of Barbara Foley’s book was assigned reading when I was a first-year college student taking a course in literary theory. So much of it went over my head; it was before I had started community organizing. Still, it had in no small way contributed to the reworking of my paradigm, and I ended up using Foley’s text in my final paper for the course.
I re-read this chapter last December, and it was gratifying to realize how much more I can appreciate it after a few years of learning from organizing practice. There are certainly still paragraphs that have me scratching my head, which impel me all the more to preserve this marginalia on kanto and return to it every now and then.
Foley includes epigraphs from Karl Marx in each chapter, and this chapter’s is taken from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“The social revolution cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.”
5.1 Rhetoric and Interpellation
Rhetoric is the persuasive power of literary texts. Rhetorical analysis (or any kind of literary analysis, for that matter) is not reading comprehension, but rather the revelation of a text’s underlying mechanics for trying to obtain our assent.
Interpellation is an ideological procedure in which a given text can reproduce a reading subjectivity (social identity), whereby readers can recognize themselves being a part of. Being an interpellated readerly subject involves a degree of misrecognition, insofar as selfhood has already been constructed and reified through hegemonic ideology beyond a given text. Reading practices and ways of knowing have been thoroughly socialized.
Much like all literary critics study an ensemble of stylistic devices, a Marxist critic pays attention to a text’s means of persuasion (rhetorical strategies) not merely to conceive of texts as linguistic artifacts, but to understand how they enable certain “structures of feeling,” a term introduced by Raymond Williams, which the Marxist critic recognizes as emerging from a social totality.
What makes a rhetorical criticism distinctly Marxist is its credence to the base-superstructure explanatory framework in its investigation of how a text interpellates its readers in relation to ruling-class hegemony. Foley lists sample concerns of the Marxist critic— To what extent does a text function as apologia? As critique? As a contradictory blend of the two?
5.2 Ideology Critique
Ideology critique is not really concerned with declarations in overtly political manifestos, so much as it is about laying bare the pre-cognitive “structures of feeling” pointing back to a material structure that a given text is premised upon. In this way, Marxist literary criticism functions as a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur.
Writers might be protesting a ruling-class ideology, but a Marxist critic seeks to lay bare any given text’s role in reinforcing ruling-class ideologies. For that reason, Foley uses the word “maneuver” to imply ideological strategies that may or may not be done purposefully by the author. Foley explains the ideological maneuvers of dehistoricization and naturalization that a Marxist critic is routinely suspicious of.
Dehistoricization is the portrayal of social phenomena as the feature of a timeless human condition rather than recognizing its specific historical construction. The example is given of original sin being supplanted by the more modern notion of human nature being inherently evil (i.e., greedy and individualistic) coinciding with the emergence of the capitalist marketplace. Dehistoricization then serves to purport that capitalism is aligned with intrinsic human nature.
Naturalization is the depiction of social behaviors and belief as the products of supernatural/non-human processes. The example is given of the “perfect storm” metaphor frequently invoked in journalistic discourse during the 2008 Great Recession, alluding to the summation of chance meteorological phenomena portrayed in Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm (1997). Naturalization then serves to justify social inequities as something not orchestrated by human actors and therefore beyond human control. Naturalization extends to more than the invocation of nature; it mystifies social causality and claims that things are just because they are, collapsing cause and effect. Foley states that naturalization is arguably the principal ideological maneuver of hegemonic reification.
Literary works that intend to criticize institutionalized oppression and the “structures of feelings” by which oppression is sustained still have trouble escaping the snares of hegemonic ideology. The example is given of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) having a protagonist that affirms meritocracy and individualist competition1 as necessary for success, as (SPOILER ALERT) Katniss has to kill other tributes (participants in the games who were, mind you, coerced just like her) to be able to escape with her life.
5.3 Symptomatic Reading
Symptomatic reading views a given text as a series of mediations, a testament to the irreconcilability of the social contradictions that manufactured the text in the first place. It allows Marxist critics to view a text’s mixed ideological signals as mired (however inadvertently) in the larger historical forces of the real world (not meant to be taken as a cursory historical context of literary conventions and contemporaneous sociological realities); literary works symptomatically register extra-literary concerns.
Louis Althusser defined ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
Foley analogizes symptomatic reading to the behavior of a psychiatric patient; a text gestures to what it cannot directly reveal. The task of the Marxist critic is to examine a text’s political unconscious so as to expose the strategies in place that repress its grounding in class-based oppression. Furthermore, uncovering the political unconscious is not to be taken as a psychoanalysis of the author or of characters.
To examine a text’s political unconscious, a Marxist critic looks for symptoms, not declarations. The political unconscious that gives way to repressive (ideologically-mystifying) strategies within a literary work can look like implausible narrative closure in novels or disrupted imagistic patterning in poems. The example2 is given of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848)3 having a conclusion unable to deviate from pro-capitalist liberalism, as (SPOILER ALERT) the wealthy mill-owner has a redeeming moment when he shows mercy to the trade unionist who killed his son. In that sense, the text is not as radically pro-Chartist as it makes itself out to be.
There’s a lot of discourse on how useful the notion of a political unconscious is: (i) some critics have argued that the political unconscious is not helpful for analyzing literary works that already seek to lay bare hegemonic ideas and beliefs; (ii) other critics claim the political unconscious minimizes the role of the author who did the work of writing and thinking through the given text; (iii) other critics complain that the political unconscious positions the Marxist critic as superior to a literary work and its author, thus undermining the democratic goals of the Marxist project; and finally, (iv) there are critics that consider the task of uncovering a political unconscious within any text to be taking away from the literary art’s aesthetic humanism, e.g., joy, hope, love.
Foley addresses each of these kinds of critics’ concerns, acknowledging that the first two concerns have validity, whereas the last two have no grounds to be sustained arguments: (i) there are still moments of unease and stammering inconsistency to be found within texts critical of capitalism, so the evaluative task then becomes how the possibility of a classless future is able to be represented or extrapolated from the class-bound present; (ii) paying attention to the matrix of capitalist social relations in a text isn’t in opposition to the given author’s situatedness, but informing the knowledge of authors as intermediaries and the text itself as their series of mediations; (iii) in the same way it wasn’t elitist for Marx to think about the mechanics of capitalism, Marxist critics don’t take a privileged position because they choose to view a text from the standpoint of historical totality; and (iv) the objection that Marxist critics are missing out on pleasurable reading to make drab, naysaying ideology-based analyses only obscures the ideology also encoded within the aesthetic humanism, e.g., joy, hope, love, supposedly characteristic of great literature.
5.4 Humanism
Marxist literary criticism is premised upon literary works being constituted by dominant ideologies that they need to simultaneously hide (evade) and shore up (reinforce and legitimate). From this perspective, humanism is another misleading universal which veils the social contradictions lying at the base of the socioeconomic alienation that a literary work often aspires to transcend. Foley references Bertell Ollman’s schema (the class-based historical matrices from which causes arise), framing humanism as another ideological maneuver that allows readers to interpret literary works encoding values that are timeless, universal, and uniform.
There is another school of thought within the Marxist tradition that rethinks the relationship of humanism to literature in a way that’s less accusatory, but still critical. This alternative approach views literature and other artworks as a product of a writer or cultural worker’s concrete labor who are in a position hostile to ruling-class hegemony. In this way, even if any given text underwrites dominant ideology, it also expresses a universal human yearning to transcend alienated productive relations. The autotelism of art (art as an end in itself) does not have to result in a stifling doctrine of art for art’s sake or a text’s independence from the world. Instead, art’s autotelism constitutes a rebellion against the capitalist marketplace’s ultimate fetish, money.
Marx stressed the writer’s alienation from the capitalist marketplace and how capitalist commodification is hostile to branches of spiritual production, such as art and poetry. Notably, his circle of friends included impoverished bohemian writers and artists, which explains his view of starving artists as social rebels. Marx also wrote at at time when art had not yet undergone the large-scale commodification. Still, Marx’s insistence on humanism remained consistent with historical materialist principles, in that it was premised upon how social formations that prioritize exchange value above all thwart universal human needs.
It’s not just productive forces that are fettered by capitalism’s alienation of labor, but also the realm of ideas and emotions. There is little meaning to liberation if it does not also mean humans can become increasingly capable of self-realization and self-determination.
Neither Marx nor Friedrich Engels viewed a writer’s class background as determinative of their ability to represent reality. Engels actually admired Honoré de Balzac for his literary works’ encapsulation of the fundamental social contradictions driving the destinies of people in his time through his characters, even as de Balzac himself was a conservative who favored the restoration of monarchy.
Engels cautioned writers of social problem novels against excessive didacticism (too doctrinal and instructive), advising that the author doesn’t have to spell out for readers (“serve the reader on a platter”) resolutions for the social contradictions that the text itself emerged from. The example is given of Margaret Harkness (who wrote under the pen name John Law) whose book A City Girl (1887) was appreciated by Engels as “a small work of art” and critiqued for working class characters he deemed too passive. He recommended that Harkness lean into the workers’ rebellious dispositions and their “attempts at recovering their status as human beings, [which] belong to history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism.”
Marx expressed in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), that while literary criticism and realist storytelling (“the weapon of criticism”) must not replace a politicized understanding of the violent, exploitative workings of capital (“criticism of the weapon), theory and literature also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses (“material force must be overthrown by material force”) .
Theorists in the Marxist tradition, such as Vladimir Lenin and William Morris, have insisted that the proletarian revolution should not entail the abandonment of art and literature for their ideological origins in the exploiting class, but the reclaiming of cultural heritage previously only accessible to the ruling class and its minions.4
Antonio Gramsci distinguished between literary works that he had an aesthetic appreciation for and those that instilled within him a “moral enthusiasm” that made him a “willing participant in the artist’s ideological world.” He wished for a creative expression where he would not have to choose between formal appreciation and political affirmation.
Walter Benjamin asserted that any document of civilization, no matter how aesthetically moving works of literature and art may be, is at once a document of barbarism. Foley explains his statement as humanism never making its way to us in a pure state, and always bearing the marks of the history that hurts5.
5.5 Realism
Engels defined realism as “the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.”
The foremost theorist of realism in the Marxist tradition, George Lukács, mostly dealt with novels. For him, the typical protagonist is not the focus of attention in a realist novel because his “middling qualities” allow him to embody the pressures and possibilities of that historical time and place. To Lukács, only critical realism could represent the dialectic of human history.
According to Lukács, it is not a writer’s skill level so much as it is the epistemological framework (how knowledge is formed, ways of knowing) made visible or concealed by the current social formation during a historical period. The example is given of the period after the 1848 revolutions, in which there was a rehashed class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat in European society, thereby making it more difficult for writers to create realist works when class contradictions were purposefully being obfuscated to legitimate bourgeois class rule.
Bertolt Brecht criticized Lukács’s theorization of realism and presented an alternate one, in which the autotelism of art (art as an end in itself) can evade the real world’s social contradictions and not necessarily function as an antidote. He viewed the primary role of literature to be questioning why that reality exists instead of depicting a coherent representation of reality. In other words, Lukács’s literary realism embodies the dialectics6 of totality (fluid social formations belonging to the whole of history), whereas Brecht’s version requires an assault upon dominant ideologies producing false notions of totality.
Both Lukács’s and Brecht’s theories of realism were formulated in response to fascism in the mid-twentieth century (World Wars I and II). Writers and critics were rising to the aesthetic and political challenges of that time; theorizing literary realism was not based on some abstract interest, but a material challenge.
Theodor Adorno took a difference stance on realism than both Lukács and Brecht. Unlike Lukács and Brecht, Adorno did not see literature and criticism as necessary or sufficient facilitators of revolution. Adorno was part of a group of philosophers (in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) skeptical towards creative works aspiring to protest against the status quo because of their adherence to prevailing modes of representation and thus, their persistent reification of alienated productive relations. Foley states that Adorno found modernist anti-realism7 the only suitable mode of critical representation for capitalist modernity.
Foley maintains that we are still in the longue durée of capitalist modernity, even as the pressures of reification have proliferated in the 21st century with neoliberalism, globalization, and rapidly advancing information technology. Foley reasons that debates about new social conditions (albeit, in a still-capitalist reality) necessitating new epistemologies and politics can risk fetishizing novelty and mistaking appearance for essence. The question of what artistic forms are more likely to reveal and shroud social contradictions under capitalism still remains.
5.6 Proletarian Literature and Alternative Hegemony
Foley outlines a few theoretical questions about the goals of Marxist literary criticism— Do literary works that expressly attempt to articulate a revolutionary outlook use different rhetorical strategies from those that don’t? Does this then mean that Marxist critics adopt a different criteria for analyzing these works? How do we characterize texts that contain what Amilcar Cabral calls the cultural “seed of opposition” and what Robin Kelley calls “freedom dreams”? How do texts aspiring to construct an alternative common sense (as per Gramsci in Chapter 5.4) figured at a time when the revolutionary tide is ebbing define the function and features of politically radical literature in comparison to texts that are produced when class contradictions are cresting?
There are various terms for literature within this broadly subversive tradition, including: literature of social protest, resistance literature, leftist literature, radical literature, partisan literature, literature of commitment, revolutionary literature, literature of alternative hegemony, proletarian literature.
Foley states that “proletarian literature” is a useful term because of its direct connection to Marxism and the abolition of class systems, as well as it being a temporal and geographic descriptor.
Foley finds that “working-class literature” reproduces rather than abolishes the ideology of class as a demographic and positivist given (empirically backed-up).
Foley considers the disadvantage of “literature of alternative hegemony” to be its mere implication of class rather than explicit naming, which reduces class to just another identity among others (like race, gender) instead of framing it as something that has the revolutionary ideological power.
Foley provides the framing of “family resemblance” as potentially useful for characterizing a diverse body of anti-capitalist literature. The core constitutes pro-community revolutionary literature. One level beyond the core is proletarian literature that is class-conscious, but not necessary revolutionary. Even further outward from the core are texts that suggest the need for a world without exploitation, without explicitly naming class consciousness. Foley contends this framework has the advantages of avoiding liberal pluralism while also being inclusive of oppositional political perspectives. Furthermore, this framework of anti-capitalist literature groups texts by shared affinity, as opposed to a checklist of traits.
What we call this broad genre of texts is not as important as the challenges it poses to the practice of literary criticism, which Foley renders out: (i) the standards of Marxist literary criticism for an emergent radical literary culture; (ii) the extent to which the political unconscious remains a useful framework for this body of work; and (iii) the relationship of literature falling within this radical terrain to utopia.
Ideology not only entails distortion, but also limitation of vision, so even revolutionary texts bare traces of the hegemony they contest.
Ernst Bloch conceives of utopia not as a “compensatory” one embodied in any literary work that circumvents harshness, but the “anticipatory” one heralded in texts that points toward the real possibility of a better world.
Radical writers seek to invoke the present concretely while imagining its negation in a world that hasn’t yet come into being (necessarily abstract). Radical literature attempt to represent the seeds of a better world buried in the soil of the current capitalist world, i.e., confront the contradiction between what is and what can be.
There is a range of possibilities for what literature can look like as a practical tool: mirror or hammer, reflection or transformation, portrayal of what is or anticipation of what may be. This profound consideration of literature is a core tenet of Marxist criticism.
I recently saw this TikTok that asks what the Hunger Games would have been like if Katniss was ugly. Case in point for Foley. Still, I have some thoughts about Foley’s reading.
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I’m not sure if Collins’s “pit[ting] young people against one another in a blend of gladiatorial combat and the reality show ‘Survivor’ ” necessarily “affirms meritocracy and competition as intrinsic to success” in the way that (I think) Foley claims (129). It’s one thing to identify the function of the Hunger Games within the world of Panem as reifying meritocracy and obedience to the Capitol (an ideological maneuver that Foley points out); it’s quite another thing to suggest the text itself affirms (or has some sort of residual positive outlook toward) meritocracy. Just think of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)— does Rushdie’s text affirm pagan blasphemy simply because it is depicted? I am inclined to believe in Foley’s theoretical solidity (after all, she did write this whole book on Marxist literary theory), so it’s possible I’m flattening her argument and missing something.
My reading was that the fascist Capitol regime under President Snow enforces the ideological standard of individualism to alienate the districts and confuse any efforts of collective resistance, so of course, the victory that comes with “winning” the Hunger Games is bloody and impure precisely because it takes place under a fascist regime. It’s allegorical and not supposed to be difficult to recognize realistic parallels (as Foley states, “fairly easy to spot”). Does Collins not then paint us an image of why it’s urgent to do away with meritocratic values if the goal is a wholly transformed and better society? If the reader takes away that Katniss is a hero to be admired, then I would argue they missed the point of the book (I think, here, I’m not necessarily arguing against Foley’s reading). Katniss interpellates us as part of a capitalist regime in the real world; she’s relatable (re: “admire[d]”) because she’s just as compromised as the rest of us. See this Instagram post below, from Geneva L. White (@genevalw).
Foley also lists Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946) as another example in which a literary work is bound to the history that hurts (borrowed from Frederic Jameson’s words; see footnote 5). I literally wrote in the margins “omg? a Filipino example.” My ears prick up whenever I get to see a part of myself represented in media. Sadly, I have not read it yet. I am debating whether to read Bulosan or Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart (2018) first. I enjoy Castillo’s prose; it’s so sharp and spicy.
I actually read this novel and wrote a comparative analysis paper on it and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in the spring semester of my sophomore year for a class in Victorian Fiction. Mary Barton (1848) was introduced to me as a novel of the middle class, but of course, this assigned category became complicated further along in the course.
I am really thankful for the education I got through my literature professors. It has changed everything, if not instilled a more confident curiosity within me. I still return to my class notes.
To convey her point about Marxist theorists and labor organizers valuing artistic enjoyment, Foley refers to the phrase “Bread and Roses,” a slogan in the early 20th century used for women’s suffrage and labor movements. Rose Schneiderman, a feminist labor organizer, gave a speech in 1912 in support of women’s suffrage in Ohio, in which she said, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” Love that.
This phrase comes from Fredric Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981).
I would recommend reading the Wikipedia section on “Marxist dialectic” to contextualize the way Foley uses dialectic in this text.
I’m still trying to sources an accessible explanation on “anti-realist modernism” as Foley describes Adorno’s stance in this chapter (149).