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Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 14: Marx and Marxisms , September 1982 , pp. 145 - 155
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1982
References
1 Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris, Maspéro, 1966).Google Scholar
2 Strictly speaking, there cannot for Macherey be ‘internal ideological contradictions’, since the function of ideology is to create an imaginary unity from real historical contradictions. There can only be contradiction between an ideology and what lies beyond its repressive limits—history itself. The text ‘puts the ideology into contradiction’ by illuminating its gaps and limits, revealing ideology as a structure of absences. In doing so, the text puts itself into question too, manifesting a lack or dissonance within itself.
3 There are other, fruitful comparisons to be drawn between Macherey and Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud is clear that the task of the analyst of dreams is not simply to lay bare the meaning of a distorted text, but to explain the meaning of the text-distortion itself—a distortion which produces a radically mutilated discourse characterized by gaps, obscurities and ambiguities, by ‘breaks in the text’.
4 The first article, reprinted from the journal Littérature (No. 13), can be found in the Oxford Literary Review 3, No. 1 (1978)Google Scholar; the second has appeared in the American journal Sub-stance No. 15 (1976).Google Scholar
5 Part of this paper has been published previously in an article, ‘Pierre Macherey and the Theory of Literary Production’, Minnesota Review N.S. 5 (Fall 1975), 134–144. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the Minnesota Review for permission to re-use this material.Google Scholar