NEIL BELTON discusses some of the questions raised by Terry Eagleton's recently published book, Criticism and Ideology (New Left Books, £9.95).
Criticism and Ideology is the most consistent and articulate attempt to develop an explicitly Marxist discourse appropriate to literature that has appeared in England since 1937. British Marxism has traditionally rested on Caudwell's laurels when it approached literature, and the poverty of most efforts in this direction is all the more startling by contrast with the relatively rich Marxist or proto-Marxist tradition in British historiography represented by Hill, Hobsbawm, Thompson and Stedman-Jones. The explanation for this imbalance is paradoxically to be found in the very importance of literary culture in Britain, as the 'displaced site of totalising theory', in Perry Anderson's words. (1) The characteristic modern representatives of the British critical tradition have been T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, with Leavis as its most effective and dominating exponent.
Eagleton's book is unusual and difficult because at the level of literary theory a virulent resistance to conceptualisation, a minatory rejection of the 'abstract' fluently enforced by Leavis and his journal Scrutiny, have become rooted and hegemonic. A classic instance of this intransigent empiricism is the dispute between Leavis and Rene Wellek in 1936, in which Wellek attempted to force Leavis 'to define the underlying principles of his practice', which led Leavis to convict Wellek for 'philosophising': 'Words in poetry invite us not to "think about" and "judge" but to "feel into" or "become"'. (2) This rigorous dichotomy between 'abstraction' and 'concretion' is reinforced by an unembarrassed logical circularity in formulations like 'the ideal critic is the ideal reader' [3] and an equally irreducible circularity in the obsession with organic form— 'what the prompted words in association portend gets its definition as the creative work builds up'. [4]
Such a crude summary of the position of Leavis and Scrutiny hardly explains the extraordinary potency it has exercised in British culture, but at least allows us to identify Eagleton's predecessors, with whom he attempts to break decisively. Criticism and Ideology falls into three main parts: a critical account of the work of Raymond Williams, the most significant cultural critic on the left in post-war Britain; a discussion of the literary text comprising a classification of the constituent levels whose mutual articulation produces the text, a discussion of the relation between ideology and literary form, and a demonstration of that relation in English literature in the period 1850-1939; and an attempt to grapple with the problem of evaluation in materialist criticism.
Eagleton's critique of Williams develops from an awareness of the obvious and awkward complicity of the socialist critic and the organicist aesthetician in the same oeuvre. What Eagleton calls a 'Left-Leavism', with its emphasis on the 'lived' and the 'knowable community', results in a theory vitiated by three main flaws:
1. An idealist epistemology, stemming from a conflation of productive modes so that different levels of the social formation are collapsed into the 'empty anthropological abstraction of culture' (p.26). This subjectivising of the social formation, reducing it to the categories of the lived, carries with it an implicit conception of historical structures as self-contemporaneous rather than as dislocated and articulated together into a totality.
2. An organicist aesthetics appropriating and evaluating the literary text in terms of wholeness, integration and spontaneity and refusing a knowledge of the text other than as a communion between reader and text in an organic, non-contradictory unity. In addition, such an aesthetics involves a crippling historical relativism because the critic is always in place as continuous with the culture which he is studying, measuring the authenticity of his own experience as an experience of the culture, measuring the authenticity of the culture on his own pulses in a balanced rhythm which denies literature's historical specificity. Although Williams has never been guilty of the emptiest gestures of which such an aesthetics is capable (canonising Dickens by allusions to Shakespeare, for example), a further consequence in his case of reducing history to a continuum is a highly selective, occasionally documentary approach to the literary text, concentrating on those passages in, say, Hardy or Dickens which best 'express' characteristic tensions in both our culture and theirs.
3. A corporatist sociology in which the concept of class is subordinated to that of a 'whole way of life', a culture potentially extensible to the whole human community.
These three major faults are traceable, in Eagleton's view, to Williams's fundamental 'Romantic populism': 'Williams's political gradualism rested on a deep-seated trust in the capacity of individuals to create new meanings and values now — meanings and values which will extend (at some infinite point in the future?) to socialism. The creation of new values which is in fact only enabled by revolutionary rupture was read back by him as a description of the present' (p.27). As a consequence, 'Williams often manoeuvred himself into the contradictory position of opposing a crippling hegemony whose power he had simultaneously to deny, because not to do so would have suggested that "ordinary people" were not, after all, the true creators of meanings and values' (p.28). Coupled with this political ambiguity, Eagleton notes his 'reticent and ambiguous' stance on 'Insurrectionary organisation' (p.39), and chides him for his outraged denunciation of the first Wilson Government for having 'taken (our) values and changed them' (p.35).
Eagleton has performed a valuable service in treating the 'Culture and Society' tradition to an openly materialist analysis. Yet Eagleton's revaluation contains a disturbing political pessimism which masquerades as a militant optimism. The gesture of revolutionary deferment, postponing the creation of 'new value' to some post-revolutionary reconstruction, is a drastic elision of the passage between the present situation and such a conjuncture. Eagleton speaks as though a revolutionary assault were on the order of the day, while condemning British social democracy — the only mass movement of workers on the horizon — as uniformly inert. Of course, there is structural complicity between the values of the 'Culture and Society' tradition — suasion, connection, extension — and the reformism of social democracy, but the blunt dismissiveness of one side of Eagleton's equation (the prospects for revolutionary organisation in Britain) seriously unbalances the other side (the deferment of alternative value to a revolutionary crisis).
There is a serious over-estimation of the achievements of Marxist politics at work here. Eagleton's analysis employs Althusserian categories fluently and well, but in this case the failure to relocate Williams and the political effects of his work more precisely in the history of post-war Britain results in a kind of formalism, a 'theoreticist' evaluation of the structure of the work. A brief biographical juxtaposition of Eagleton and Williams illuminates the kind of role a more sympathetic analysis might assign to Williams in the period 1948-68 while nevertheless acknowledging Eagleton's measurement of his distance from Marxism. Eagleton mentions his previous close involvement with Williams, but the eristic mode of argument he employs does not do full justice to the nature of his own development as a critic. His first book, Shakespeare and Society (1967), dedicated to Williams, is concerned with an abstract conflict between spontaneous self and social responsibility in the interactions of textual characters and uses a methodology of unadulterated 'practical criticism'. His study of the determinations of the Bronte sisters' fiction, Myths of Power (1975), is an examination of the novels in terms of their immediate historical, biographical and sexual movements and, while being a historicist work, it is definitely Marxist. That he could make such a transition in his third book, in the space of less than a decade, is indicative of the extent to which Marxism had become available, almost respectable, as a result of the 1968 events and the resurgence of interest in neglected Marxist writers. This is in stark contrast to the situation of Williams in 1946, enclosed by the Cold War and isolated as an intellectual from any Marxism but the lucid schemes of dogma.
Eagleton's 'deferment' of any development of revolutionary values until, precisely, a revolutionary situation, has important aesthetic consequences which will be mentioned briefly later. First it is necessary to approach the problem of the relation between ideology and literary text, a subject which occupies the central portion of Criticism and Ideology. While remaining indebted to Althusser for his conceptual apparatus, Eagleton rejects the formulation of this relation which Althusser offered in Lenin and Philosophy, where it is claimed that real art gives us a 'view' of the ideology to which it alludes, so that Balzac and Solzhenitsyn provide a 'view' which presupposes a "retreat", an "internal distanciation" from the very ideology from which their novels emerge. They make us "perceive" (but not know) in some sense from the inside the very ideology in which they are held', Eagleton's objection to this position is that it begs the question as to how the aesthetic is constituted by a prior exclusion of un-'real' or inferior art, and thus evades the problem of value. He holds that the text is characterised rather by its production, its putting-to-work of ideology in such a way that the ideology is not transcended nor merely reproduced as a 'world view' but enacted in a way analogous to a dramatic performance, a production which is ordered with a certain textual logic but is in no sense reducible to its founding text.
Yet although the text 'establishes a relation with ideology by means of its forms' (p.84), this textual logic, 'the logic of the text's content' (p.85), circumscribes that formal operation so that it takes place according to 'the form of the problematic which the text operates' (p.84). The literary text is thus a compacting, intensifying production of its general ideological matrix, it is ideology raised 'to the second power' (p.85). The function of a materialist criticism is to examine 'two mutually constitutive formations: the nature of the ideology worked by the text and the aesthetic modes of that working' (p.85). Against Pierre Macherey (to whose 'Pour une théorie de la production littéraire' he is heavily indebted), who envisages literature opening the 'unsaid', the symptomatic absences of ideological discourse by its internal distanciation of ideology, Eagleton posits a 'differential relation' between text and ideology. An implicit typology of texts, some radically contesting the dominant ideological discourse in which they are inserted, others merely recasting their ideology in more or less reflexive though specifically aesthetic ways (as in Stalinist 'socialist realism') is set against Macherey's concept of the text illumining in its distortions and absences the peculiarities of ideology's relationship with history. In the course of his discussion of Macherey's theory, Eagleton objects to the notion of contradiction being produced in the literary text as an effect of the form bestowed by the text on ideology. He suggests that contradiction in the text is more characteristically an effect of the encounter within the text of antagonistic ideologies, a clash which he describes as 'the genesis of much major literature' (p.95), so that we get a production of 'an ideological formation characterised by a high degree of "dissolution"' (p.95).
In abandoning Macherey's concept of the internal, distortive distanciation of ideology in the literary text for one which regards the text as a 'process whereby ideology enters into a mode of relation with self peculiarly enabling of its self-reproduction' (p.98), Eagleton is attempting to develop a more nuanced theory of form which accounts for the variant and complex relations that may be established within the text. This potent 'self-reproduction' of ideology is of course not a reflection of a given text's surrounding ideology, but occurs 'athwart' that ideology, so that the greater the degree of 'decentredness' and contradiction in the text, the more effective and valuable the textual production of ideology becomes. Eagleton is arguing, essentially, for a theory of the text as typically a peculiarly effective production of a dominant ideology in crisis. In this sense, Eagleton's concept of 'text' is restored to a certain original innocence of the ideological by inhabiting it so vigorously, because in practice the theory produces an appearance in the text of a given ideology in more or less conflictual form. Before dealing with particular examples of this process provided by the chapter on 'Ideology and Literary Form', it is worth noting one aspect of Eagleton's discussion of 'Categories for a Materialist Criticism' which is relevant to his rejection of Macherey.
The section on the constituent elements of the literary text is perhaps the most satisfactory in the entire essay, devoted to a brilliant exposition of the relations between general mode of production, literary mode of production, general ideology, authorial ideology and aesthetic ideology, whose conjuncture produces the text which in turn 'actively determines its own determinants' (p.63). It is impossible to do justice here to the skill with which Eagleton demonstrates the articulation of the five levels of textual production he has isolated, and a couple of examples must suffice in what is inevitably a concentration on the crucial weakness in the text as a whole. Showing that the literary mode of production is rarely a homogeneous, symmetrical reflection of the general mode of economic production, but can bear the existence of 'structurally conflictual' modes of literary production, Eagleton points to the co-existence of historically distinct modes, as in the interaction of 'oral' and 'written' literary modes in sixth century Ireland (the oral mode representing a significant historical 'survival') and in the case of a literary form which anticipates altered social relations and so enters into contradiction with the dominant literary mode of production (a historical 'prefigurement'). Distinct LMPs (to employ the shorthand which Eagleton adopts in this section) 'constitute an "asymmetrical" totality' (p.45).
In a discussion of the relationship between GMP and LMP, he emphasises the social relations of literary consumption as a powerful determinant of the LMP, producing in capitalist society (in which the LMP is a specific branch of general commodity production) the development of 'borrowing' as an important relation between consumer and LMP. In the specific context of Victorian England, the circulating Library functions as an element in the field of aesthetic ideology, intervening directly to create the fashion for novels in three volumes or of equivalent length, and thereby reinforcing certain formal tendencies of classical realism, such as the elaborate foreclosure of any hesitation about the meaning of what is represented that we know as the realist plot.
These are merely brief examples from a condensed and powerful analysis, but it is possible to say that perhaps because he is discussing the determinations of the text in general terms, the tendency of Eagleton's remarks in this section is to emphasise the historically limited aspect of textual production. He objects to Macherey's theory of the text forcing ideology 'up against the wall of history' because ideology per se cannot contradict itself, ideological space being 'curved like space itself' and having no 'outside' (p.95). Therefore, Eagleton concludes, it is only as a conflictual production of ideology to the second power, such that the text produces, resolves and reproduces ideological conflicts (cf. p.101), that the real relation between ideology and text can be understood. But it can be objected that a foreclosure of this protean ideological conflict does operate in the text, particularly in realist forms, where the text clearly effects a formal resolution of contradiction. Put as baldly as that, such an emphasis is dangerously 'formalist', but needs to be made against Eagleton's ambiguous structuralism.
Such an emphasis is also provoked by the schematic survey of 'some relations between a sector of the major literature of the last century and the ideological formations in which it is set' (p.104). The starting point of this analysis is a certain over-view of English bourgeois ideology which uses Gramsci's distinction between 'organic' and 'traditional' intellectuals — corresponding to those of an emergent social class and those whose intellectual categories are survivals of previous social conditions — to express what Eagleton sees as the crucial problem facing that ideology: how 'to produce a set of potently affective mythologies which might permeate the texture of lived experience of English society' (p.102). The solution for what is described as 'Utilitarianism' ('an impoverished empiricism unable to rise to the level of an ideology proper', p.103) was to turn to the heritage of organicist, Romantic humanism. The difficulty here is that what Gramsci, following Marx, noted about the relation between 'organic' and 'traditional' castes in 19th century England was a description of an already highly developed symbiosis. It is doubtful whether one can speak of a utilitarian mode of thought and view of life as being at any stage the most important defining ideology for the British bourgeoisie, never forced to reject aristocratic mediation of its political power and apparently solidly entrenched behind the mythology of the Constitution.
Eagleton's formulation posits an original moment of ideological crisis, inscribing a tension in the ideological matrix of literature and thus enabling a rich conflictual presence of ideology to come into play, and this arbitrary split between Romantic organicism and utilitarian empiricism tends to undermine the historical foundation of the entire survey. A further effect of this split is an ambiguity about the precise status of 'organicism' in the social formation. Is it a general ideology, as Eagleton initially seems to suggest, or is it held in constant tension with the values of industrial capitalism in general (a contrast implied in his remarks on D.H. Lawrence) in which case the classic opposition of the 'Culture and Society' tradition is reinstated? It should be said in fairness to Eagleton that the extreme condensation necessary for a consideration of the entire output of nine of ten writers in sixty pages inevitably produces a certain historical tenuousness, and indeed the sheer courage of the attempt means one is reduced to arguing over the general lines of interpretation. Nevertheless, the continual reappearance of a conflict between organicism and utilitarianism, or corporatism and individualism, in the analysis of widely differing texts (those of George Eliot and Joseph Conrad, for example) deprives the concept of organicism of much of its precision.
Coupled with this imprecision is a tendency to reduce these texts to a mediated expression of their authors' class position, and to impose on that mediation a schema of ideological conflict at the level of form. George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss is seen as the site of a clash between 'tradition' and 'progress' which her work more generally tries to resolve, a conflict embodied in this case in the tension between 'a kind of descriptive pastoral' and the 'complex psychological drama' of Maggie Tulliver's development (p.115). 'Pastoral' and 'psychological' are immediately hypostatised as distinct literary discourses (elsewhere he describes Dickens's early fiction as a 'traffic-jam of competing fictional modes — Gothic, Romance, moral fable, "social problem" novel, popular theatre, short story, journalism, episodic "entertainment"', p.126), when the point is to analyse the specific aesthetic effects of the text. The validity of these categories remains unquestioned, thereby obtruding on a materialist aesthetics the dubious baggage of 'genre' and 'convention'. Again, in discussing Eliot's characteristic omniscient irony, Eagleton states that this 'blend of genial patronage and tentative irony focuses an ideological conflict. It exposes the contradiction between a rationalist critique of rural philistinism .... and a deep-seated imperative to celebrate the value of such bigoted, inert traditionalism, as the humble yet nourishing soil which feeds the flower of higher individual achievement' (p.115). It is difficult to agree with this assessment of Eliot's narrative irony. In the 'classic' realist text irony is, rather, the assured instrument for sealing off the possibility of such conflict under the sign of reason, placing the ideologically critical in a secure framework of balanced destinies.
This tendency to see form as the site of acute ideological conflict in the social situation of its producer conceals, ultimately, a form of historicism. This is occasionally expressed directly; George Eliot, we are told, 'as the daughter of a farm agent' (p.112) naturally found her locus of value in rural society; Dickens, as a petty bourgeois writer, was 'able to encompass a richer, more significant range of experience than those writers securely lodged within a single class' (p.125) — precisely the point which the mechanical determinist George Gissing made in his Charles Dickens: a critical study (1898). One must oppose this with Eagleton's own analysis of the specificity of the literary mode of production under capitalism: 'although the literary social relations in general reproduce the social relations of the general mode of production, they do not necessarily reproduce those social relations as they hold between the particular individual agents of the literary reproductive process' (p.53). Eagleton by no means downgrades the [illegible] he discusses to expressions of class interest, but locates an ideological conflict in his authors' class positions which dramatises the ongoing historical quarrel between 'organicism' and 'empiricism'. This in turn produces a tendency to see each writer's development as a life-work miming a developing acuteness in the social contradictions upon which it is articulated, moving through varieties of contradiction between 'corporatism' and 'individualism' to a final, inadequate resolution of that contradiction — he sees Finnegan's Wake as a result of the novel's 'struggle to escape the degradation of becoming a commodity'; as a consequence, 'its author .... becomes a producer without consumers' (p.157). Each set of texts enacts the same failure of the ideology of liberal humanism, in crisis, to find a viable alternative. The exceptions are the novels of Dickens, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Lawrence's Women in Love, all of which are 'decentred' in relation to the tradition of organicism. This chapter, 'Ideology and Literary Form', deserves a much more extended review to account adequately for the questions it raises, and the necessary concentration on general weaknesses in this discussion should not be allowed to obscure the fact that a vast sweep of literary material has been compressed into it. (For an analysis of a version of this chapter published in New Left Review, see Francis Mulhern, 'Ideology and Literary Form: a comment', NLR 91.)
Finally it is necessary to describe the consequences of the foregoing for Eagleton's treatment of evaluation, which as he rightly states has been downplayed in favour of a neutral relativism in recent criticism. Literary value is for Eagleton part and parcel of his view of the relation between ideology and literary form: value is a 'function of a particular process of textual production which is itself a sustained relation.... to an ideological formation' (p.185). The 'valuable' text is 'a theatre which doubles, prolongs, compacts and variegates its signs, shaking them free from single determinants, merging and eliding them with a freedom unknown to history, in order to draw the reader into deeper experiential entry into the space thereby created' (p.185). Eagleton notes that Marxists have hesitated to speak about aesthetic value, just as they have hesitated to speak about morality: as long as both are merely ways of defining the constriction consequent on the limitation of productive forces by the relations of production, Marxists must anticipate the 'measureless' development of all capacities by the revolution, a thesis based on the famous comparison of the bourgeois and 'modern' revolutions in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 'there the phrase went beyond the content, here the content goes beyond the phrase'.
The concept of form as 'the structure of a ceaseless self-production' (p.184) which can be grasped here and now in materialist analysis of the literary text, in the text as typically literary — neither 'a random splay of pluralist sense' (p.168) nor a merely superficial recasting of ideology — has two important related consequences. The first is a strange academicism already apparent in the choice of texts realised as decentred in relation to the organicist tradition (Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence), accompanied by an implicit rejection of the modernist tradition epitomised by Joyce ('splay of pluralist sense') and also, effectively, of Brecht, whose concern was not with the 'flexing' and 'compacting' of the already-written. Eagleton has a contradictory attitude towards this tradition, admiring its achievements but, via his theory of aesthetic value, remaining outside it. Secondly, cultural struggle, as an intervention in aesthetic practice to create a revolutionary art, is effectively negated, postponed to a post-revolutionary boundlessness — as we have already seen in his discussion of Raymond Williams. This neglect of materialist aesthetic practice has been a tragic weakness on the left as a whole. Within Trotskyism, perhaps as an unfortunate consequence of Trotsky's own highly cultivated, perceptive but aesthetically conservative view of literary culture, the art of the Revolution, wrote Trotsky, 'is not behind us, but ahead of us' (Literature and Revolution, p.111, Ann Arbor edn.). It is a tribute to the seminal nature of Eagleton's text that at least now discussions on this and many other cultural questions in Britain must be grounded in more precise and avowedly Marxist terms.
FOOTNOTES
1. New Left Review 50 (July-August 1968): 'Components of the national culture'.
2. [illegible] by Wellek in Modern Language Review, vol.69 (1974).
3. [illegible]
4. [illegible] p.297.