POLITICAL CRITICISM: FROM MARXISM TO

CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Chapter 6

Karl Marx did not invent the idea that economic equality- the notion that social wealth should be distributed equally throughout a population- is better than inequality.

The purpose of the ideas, then, was to ensure that dominant group or class remained in power.

Literature is one important way for ideas to circulate in a culture.

Marx contended that all societies are organized around the production of the means of sustaining life.

Because material inequality is difficult to justify in itself, ideas and cultural values have become increasingly important for maintaining the unequal distribution of wealth.

For example, during the Middle Ages in western Europe, the social arrangement whereby the feudal aristocracy owned all the land while a class of landless peasants did all the labor was sustained by the circulation in the culture of ideals such as honor, fealty, and duty.

A few hundred years later, a new group- the capitalist class-assumed economic power, and the social dominance of these shopkeepers, manufacturers, and merchants was accompanied by new ideas such as individual liberty and political equality.

A Hazard of New Fortunes, business people are portrayed as being justified in their wealth, while those who argue for economic equality are depicted as disturbers of a social order that is deemed essentially right, despite imquality.

At their most determinist, Marxists hold that culture always is an expression of the prevailing social and economic situation.

And he is killed while his more aristocratic brother triumphs and is made king.

Later refinements of the Marxist position argue that culture is more complicated than this reflection theory makes it out to be.

Fissures of this kind are inevitable, and they constitute a contradiction that the society cannot resolve.

Some Marxists argue that ideology is similarly fissured and contradictory.

Wealth is made by the underpaid labor of large masses of people.

Marxists in the dialectical tradition such as Theodor Adorno also argued that art can play an antithetical and critical role in capitalist culture: that culture turns everything into a commodity, and commodity culture creates a way of thinking or consciousness appropriate to it.

Being fulfilled as a human being consists of owning a car; being creative consists of choosing the right cellphone.

Art serves a negative function in relation to this culture of uniformity, routine, and pacification.

Then, returning to the sense data armed with better concepts, the mind can perceive the data anew and look at them differently.

Our consciousness is naïve when we take in messages from consumer culture without questioning them.

As an act of negation, it opens up for consciousness other possibilities of awareness and of being.

Materialist Marxism, best represented in the work of Antonio Negri, differs from dialectical Marxism in that it emphasizes the anchoring of culture in materiality.

The scenes of an egalitarian and democratic sailor community aboard the whaling vessel in Melville’s Moby-Dick.

The theory of ideology has also been refined in recent years.

We misrecognize our true place in the world.Marxism survives as a tool of literary criticism in the

insight that literature is produced in societies characterized by class differences and that such difference leave their mark on literature.

Capitalists may proclaim the utopia of freedom, but that exhilarating feeling presupposes the slavery of millions in factories all over the world.

Not all scholars who emphasize the social and political dimension of literature are Marxists strictly speaking.

On the other are such upper class figures as Daisy Buchanan, whose remark I think she’s lovely uses a phrasing that one would never encounter in Wolfshiem’s world.

Novels, according to Bakhtin, are inherently heteroglossic in that they record a variety of different speech forms.

Having compared the Irish literary aesthetics of his era to a used handkerchief, Joyce is suggesting a similarity between the two poetic works Stephen has just produced.

Bakhtin also introduced the concept of the carnivalesque into literary-critical discussion.

It is dialogic rather than monologic.

Exercise6.1 Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(1)

Does King Lear give expression to the ruling ideas of the ruling class?

A little historical information always helps when dealing with such questions.

A new group of landless nobles came into being. Economic power has shifted, but political power remained in the hands of the nobles.

The merchants insisted on a role in governing the country through Parliament.

Exercise6.1 Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(2)

The economic fissure between old feudal nobility and new merchant bourgeoisie erupted into a political and military conflict led, by the century’s end, to a new political form in England, the constitutional monarchy.

How might this information aid a reading of the play?How else does he embody feudal ideas regarding

obedience, loyalty, duty, and the like?Does Lear play by the feudal rules?

Exercise6.1 Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(3)

That would seem to be the vocabulary of the new capitalists, not the language of honor and fealty.

Nobles felt that their value was inherent.Is she placed in an exchange economy at odds with the

values nobles are supposed to adhere to, at least in their ideology?

What is France’s role in all of this?Well may you prosper?

Exercise6.1 Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(4)

In the frame of the conflict between the feudal worldview and the emerging capitalist worldview, how should the actions of Goneril and Regan be interpreted?

Edmund is likened to the sisters by the word prosper?How does he embody the new skeptical rationalism?How does this new skeptical rationalism connect with the

capitalist ideal of class mobility?Edgar parallels Cordelia, and like her he embodies feudal

ideals.

Exercise6.1 Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(5)

How else is he associated with feudal values?How should the character of Kent be understood in the

frame of this argument?And how do you read the Fool?How might it be said to take sides with the aristocratic

ideological position?Does it show you, by denying it, a revolution about to

happen?Can you see this on the horizon in the play?

Exercise6.2Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast(1)

This might be called Bishop’s protest poem.How can one have a miracle for breakfast?What does Bishop’s attitude seem to be toward the

difference between rich and poor?And what does it signify that she compares those about to

serve the meal to kings of old?The first stanza concludes with an explicit, if humorous,

reference to the Christ story- One foot of the sun/ steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

Exercise6.2Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast(2)

The next stanza makes the Christ reference more explicit.Or does she mean nature?What does Bishop seem to think of him?What are the final two stanzas about?How do you interpret the final two lines?Utopianism is a positive term in Marxist thinking.How might the poem be said to be utopian?

Exercise6.3Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(1)

How does this story register the effects of poverty?It begins by noting that is not much furniture in the house,

and later we learn that only certain rooms are used to save money on heat.

Which do you think Munro is emphasizing more here, chance or choice?

Wealth is often associated with fine manners, and poverty with their absence or lack, but one suspects that wealth allows one more easily to afford certain things.

Exercise6.3Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(2)

What is wrong with Mrs. Loony Buttler?The other emblematic character in the story is Matilda.How does Mrs. Buttler rationalize refusing Morris?Is it possible to understand Joan’s situation in part 2 of the

story as somehow connected to her impoverished childhood?

What in the mean time has Morris become?What it meant by that image?

Exercise6.3Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(3)

It or its absence can make or break relationships, and apparently it can make or break people.

Why is it significant that Matilda more or less becomes her mother?

Finally, how do you read the relationship between the poem and the story?

And what then would be the meaning of Morris’ final remark that I wasn’t wrong?

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(1)

The ideology that is most powerful in the United States is the ideology of freedom.

The trade- off is that workers gain money to give them the freedom to do certain things like eat, own a house, and take vacations for a few weeks out of the year.

So can one really say that workers under capitalism are free?

The large portion of their lives will be spent in routine, uncreative, unfulfilling work for someone else whose resulting wealth provides him or her with the real basis for freedom.

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(2)

In order to live and work and survive in a society, one must adopt its reigning ideas and adapt one’s behavior and beliefs to them.

It is the cognitive equivalent if the lottery, the ticket that might make one instantly rich if the numbers by some trick of fate turn out in one’s favor.

The best way to achieve acquiescence in a system of rigid economic inequality is to make it appear as if the system is open to all and that ultimate placement in that system is the product of a simple competition between varying talents or skills.

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(3)

Chains are made to seem a pleasing part of one’s wardrobe.

Consider Working Girl, a film about a young woman, Tess McGill, who works as a secretary in New York and takes night classes in business and proper English in order to better her station.

Formerly middle-class Americans, in other words, were being pushed into menial, low-income lives with little change of significant changes in income or status.

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(4)

Why would so painful a reality be represented altogether differently in a major film of the era, one that takes suffering and anguish and transforms it into a chipper, feel-good evocation of hope, success, and transforms?

Working Girl is a very good example of this.Here is the story of the film: Tess’ boss Catherine is a

wealthy, well-educated, and successful businesswoman.What are the signs of her class location?How does she contrast with Catherine in this regard?

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(5)

Tess breaks out of the routine of her life by assuming Catherine’s identity.

What is the significance of Trask?Or does she really not contend against them? Is her story

meant to reinforce them?Moreover, who gains from Tess’ idea?The film takes the structural inequality between his station

as owner and her station as worker devoted to increasing his wealth for granted.

What about her relation to her former friends in the secretary pool?

Exercise6.4 Working Girl(6)

Tess can look down at her friends and be grateful she is no longer stuck with the mass of secretaries.

On this particular ladder of success, they rest comfortably on her head.

In watching the film and appreciating uncritically its story, we must endorse and celebrate inequality as much as individual success.

Tess rebels against her old life in order to be respectfully obedient in her new one. That apparently is all that system allows.