Social Action and Literary Fable: Some Openings for Dialogue

40 MINNESOTA REVIEW BRUCE ERLICH SOCIAL ACTION AND LITERARY FABLE: SOME OPENINGS FOR DIALOGUE Marxist literary scholars are often amazed at the idea of their activity held by some colleagues of other persuasions. Cries of "reductionism!" still echo, or, the unkindest cut of all, that "Marxist criticism makes it unnecessary to read the book!"—presumably because one is busy reading the Cambridge Economic History instead. But when real dialogue does occur, it usuaUy centers around at least two familiar issues, the "intrinsic/extrinsic" and "profundity " arguments. Since the latter strikes more terror but is easier to deal with, let us begin with profundity. Literature, it is sometimes held, constitutes not only an artifact of language, but aje ne sais quoi, a force to delight and to teach, to inculcate humanistic values, and that beside art's affective power, references to the rising bourgoisie seem either trivial or evasive. Put down The Communist Manifesto, we are counseUed, and take up Matthew Arnold instead. To this, a Marxist might suggest that Niels Bohr defined "profundity" as "anything people do not understand ," adding that his job as scientist and educator was to remove the "profundity" from physics. Marx argued very similarly about human coUective life (to which culture is integral): "Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."1 Unless we assume the irrelevance of art (that inutility is its virtue), then some theory of how and why socially organized mankind imaginatively expresses itself is unavoidable ; the/'e ne sais quoi simply won't do. The issue then reduces to which method or poetics you decide to select—be it New Critical, Marxist, psychoanalytic, etc.; but we must assume that social life is knowable and its products functional, before any discourse (including Matthew Arnold's) is possible.2 I want to return, later, to this matter of "value" from a different perspective. The other argument, however, more common and more serious, is one version or another of what Wellek and Warren caUed the difference between "intrinsic " and "extrinsic" approaches to literature. We understand, the Marxist often hears, how social factors or the history of ideas might affect writers and the milieu ofwriting; these are "influences" in the broad sense, deserving a secondary place in examining art, but, literaUy, external to that entelechy, the poem, drama, novel. We do not understand, therefore, how Marxists hope to merge the specificaUy economic with the specificaUy literary: how any- ERLICH 41 thing but a fortuitous connection can be established between the materials of art (stylistics, metaphor, myth, genre, etc.) and the process of economic production . These are two distinct orders of fact, and just as Lily Campbell's reading of Holinshed will not, of itself, account for Shakespeare's history plays, so neither will generaUzations about the decline of feudalism and rise of capitalism give us King Lear. Plainly, this argument goes to the very possibility of a Marxist theory of literature and culture. It merits reply. Marxists work from the economic to the literary by insisting, first, that "social being determines consciousness." The classic statement is: "The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness " (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, pp. 182-183; references to this collection wiU hereafter be noted "SW").3 Marx describes "social formations," whose "base" is the "mode of production": i.e., the total means (land, factories, technology) for creating the goods without which society could not last a day; to carry out this production, men enter into specific relationships which (unknown to them) generate such apparently autonomous institutions as law, political parties, religion, philosophy, and the arts-the "superstructures" of that social totality. Marx identifies two "classes" in any formation: those who own and those who labor (other groups emerge, but are subsidiary to those fundamental antagonists), and asserts that the now latent, now open struggle between them over control of what is produced remains the motive force of recorded history...