The Novel and Revolution (review)

REVIEWS 117 derous, pedantic. According to him, Marxist criticism stands or faUs not as one "contribution " in an array of critical approaches but on its claim to shift the very terrain of the debate. The dialectic scope ofMyths ofPower and the general soundess of its interpretations might indeed have so influenced the critical canon. But if Marxist criticism is to shift the terrain of the debate, an audience larger than a smaU coterie of other Marxists wiU have'to read it, and how many non-Marxists wUl slog past a sentence that reads: By "overdetermination", Althusser seeks to describe the way in which major contradictions in soceity never emerge in "pure" form; on the contrary, they act by condensing into complex unity an accumulated host of subsidiary conflicts , each of which conversely determines the general contradiction. (8) Such usage is justified only in extremis; Eagleton's language too often mystifies when it is obUgated to do the reverse. Finally, Eagleton sometimes pushes his points farther than necessary or vaUd. In reading Charlotte's novels, with their tendency toward a fusion of contradictions, as myths thereby "enacting a growing convergence of interests between two powerful segments of a ruling class bloc" (119), he forces one to question whether the structuraUst mediation between the personal and social, the fictive world and the "real" one is not, after aU, too facile. The Uteral similarities between them are demonstrably accessible to "content sociology." And one need not make complicated arguments about the relation between base and superstructure to recognize that whatever structural similarities exist between the body politic and imaginative Uterature, the material differences between them are of at least equal significance. If a structuraUst methodology is to become more than games-playing (which many Marxists have accused it of being), it cannot divorce the attention too far from the data it examines. In spite of these reservations, Myths ofPower does, I think, accompUsh Eagleton's aim: to possess the work more deeply by attending at once to its existence as an organization of language and as a product and part of history. On the whole, it provides a useful model for applying a Marxist structuraUst methodology to the analysis of a specific body of Uterature. DEBORAH ROSENFELT Alan Swingewood. The Novel and Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1975. 288 pp. =L7.95. Alan Swingewood is an EngUsh sociologist who first came to general notice with 77ie Sociology ofLiterature (London, 1971), written in collaboration with Diana Laurenson. The title was inauspicious: it promised to perpetuate, rather than interrogate , that ritual coupling of empirical Uterary facts with empirical social ones which had for so long proved the ideological device for displacing a materiaUst aesthetics into a sector of bourgeois social "science". Diana Laurenson's own contribution-a lengthy, eclectic survey of "The Writer and Society"-turned out to be exactly this: an empiricist amassment of "Uterary-sociological" information ungoverned by any theoretical problematic. But sandwiching that section were two theoreticaUy curious pieces by Swingewood himself: the first a sketch of some classical texts in Uterary sociology (Taine, Marx, Lukacs, Goldmann), the second a critical commentary on some novelists (Fielding, Sartre, Camus, OrweU and others). I caU these essays "theoreticaUy curious" because they seemed never quite to settle an insistent problem of the relationship between sociological description and theoretical critique. Swingewood's case, such as it 1 18 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW was, remained stubbornly implicit, diffused at each point by the seeming necessity to reproduce another's argument or a fictional text. Nevertheless, a certain theoretical position indubitably lay latent within the pages of this work, a position which receives richer elaboration in this latest book, and which has emerged sporadically in one or two briefer articles.^ It is, in short, an historical-humanist problematic, which arises from (and easily süps back into) a recognisable brand of EngUsh*empiricist Left-liberalism . Before examining that ideological tendency in greater detail, it may be worth offering a rather more impressionistic comment on the palpable "texture" of Swingewood's work. Stylistically, his writing exudes a sense of rapidity, and at times of careless haste. Commas are omitted, flatly descriptive sentences are slung perfunctorily together with Uttle sense of inflection, the...