The Art of Living: History as Use-Value in The Romans in Britain

The Art of Living: History as Use-Value in The Romans in Britain SEAN CARNEY Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not have a cook at least in his service? . Brecht, "Questions of a Studious Working Man" British playwright Howard Brenton is unambiguous about his personal politics : "I have a Marxist view of the world [...] [I]f we are to survive and have a common destiny·it will be communist" (Preface, Plays: One xiii-xiv). The Romans in Britain is Brenton's grand, sweeping, epic view of colonial history, representing the Roman invasion of Celtic Britain and the English colonization of Ireland and drawing analogies between the two. Yet the critical representation of colonization in this play does not accord with a traditional Marxist view of history. As Robert Young points out in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Marx, "though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there" (2). Within the Eurocentrism of traditional Marxist discourse, the worst excesses of colonial violence must be rationalized by the dialectical Aufhebung that sublates nonwestern cultures within the western narrative of historical progress. However, The Romans in Britain's critical representation of colonialism need not be read as an outright rejection of the Marxist view of history. Here, I will argue that Brenton's Marxism accords with other twentieth-century attempts to retain a Marxist vision of history without the lotaJizing implications that Marxism inherits from its Eurocenlric, Hegelian background. In this, Brenton reflects the tendency in modem philosophical Marxism to valorize negation as a liberating force of history that undermines the totalizing movement of western imperialism. In The Romans ill Britain we are presented with a vision of Modem Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2004) 423 SEAN CARNEY history located not in the triumphant work of imperialist colonization, nor even in the movement of large collectives of human beings towards self-liberation through struggle, but instead in the isolated activities of dispossessed individuals. These isolated activities are bare acts of survival in the face of implacable necessity and cannot be interpreted as collective or political in any proper sense. They are, in my interpretation, acts of detenninate negation that are utopian because they are bound to the assertion of use-value. Brenton's historiographic vision emerges within,an English context, and in The Romans in Britain, there is visible a specific rejection of both major trends in English historiography at the end of the t970s: Brenton rejects the triumphalist Whig vision of historical progress as the successful actions of great men and major events but also veers away from the more overtly Marxist trend in social history triggered by E.H. Carr in his 1961 Cambridge lectures What is History? where he argued that historical progress was the work of economic, industrial, and class-based forces. I In the assertion of the importance of use-value within, or as, history, Brenton locates redemptive possibilities in that which Marx is often assumed to have dismissed from the modem world. The hope for collective liberation in the future necessarily rationalizes violent containment in the present: this is the unintended, totalizing violence of the Marxist dialectic that has troubled various twentieth-century philosophers engaging with Marxism. Jean-Paul Sartre considers the problem of totalization in his Critique ofDialectical Reason: "Marxism is strictly true if History is totalization. It is no longer true if human history is decomposed into a plurality of individual histories; ,or if, at any rate, within the relation of immanence which characterizes the fight the negation of each opponent by the other is on principle detotalizing" (16; emphasis in original). Sartre's critique seeks to resolve whether a dialectical view of history necessarily implies a totalizing historical force that manifests itself through antagonism and contradiction, or whether dialectical antagonism is the historical force th~t negates totality. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno state flatly, "Enlightenment is totalitarian" (4), implying that the liberating narrative of human reason and rationality, which includes the rationalism of Marxism, leads to an enforced positivism, sameness, and sense...