Am I Marxist?
A Brief Approach to Marxist Literary Theory

Culture in general and literary production in particular, is not separated from politics. As an ideological apparatus to reinforce power, or an instrument of dissidence –accusing or silencing specific areas of reality-, culture has a very active role in society. I agree with the Marxist idea of an unbreakable connection between literary and cultural production, and its historical context. I do not think there could be a literary work which reproduces all of society in a specific period of time, because it would be like a map of a city with the actual size of that city, completely covering its own representation–like in Borges’ story-. But at least, each literary work, even those that seem “innocent” or divorced from the context, through language is focusing in part(s) of that reality, of that specific context. In this sense, I subscribe to Bakhtin’s statement: “language is… a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and the hour” (676).
Marx focused on economic production and how capital functions in the society. I found his concept of commodity very useful: “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants to some sort or another” (665). It explains why, in order to exist, Capitalism has to constantly create new necessities to keep capital in circulation, and does this through marketing. In this sense, I believe we should re-think the whole concept of ‘state’ and the intellectuals as functionaries of that state –according to Gramsci (673) in the present society. We witness the birth of a third class, the consumer class, which is not as related to production of commodities as to their consumption, so the ideology is focused in “feeding” that class with (false or real) necessities.
Bakhtin believes that the heteroglossia of language is always evident in a novel and I agree with him. He states: “the novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types”(674). It expresses the idea of the novel as a miniature universe in which we find traces of other universes inscribed in it. In this sense, the author is the purveyor of a specific ideology, which he expresses through his literary work, either accusing, silencing or just describing. Macherey talks about the silence in a literary work as an entity full of meaning. But he states that: “we can see that meaning in the relation between the implicit and the explicit, not on one or the other side of that fence” (706).
Zizek states that “an ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it, start to function as arguments in its favor” (724). And according to Althusser, each society has specific ideological apparatuses to form, to spread and to maintain the power through the dissemination of a specific ideology. The function of the ideology, at the end, is to sustain the reproduction of the productive apparatus itself, so as to keep classes happy in the realm of their own class.

Limits of the Marxist approach –or what I think are their limitations-:
We need to be aware that a literary text does not exist just to be (re) interpreted by critics, but to be read by the public, to be sold as merchandise, as a commodity. It exists in relation with the reader; it was written, at first instance, to be read, and in order to be read it becomes merchandise. At entering the marketing, it follows its rules and becomes a consuming product. When talking about how a text is read, in the case of Macherey’s essay, for instance, analyzing those zones of silence is just one of the different levels of reading or interpreting a text. We also have to take into consideration how the text is written, I mean, if it is an allegory of something else, if it is talking in codes or if it is explicit. When the reader confronts a text, there is always a process of deciphering something. That is why a text is always a new reading –and of course, I am just hyperbolizing the matter-, or at least, it could bring us news in a second or third reading. Each reader would have a different experience with the same text, since each reader would approach the text with a specific and peculiar point of view.
I think that trying to interpret what the author says in a specific literary work is a difficult task since the silence, the allegories, everything, could be just a fictional and intentional game. I mean to say that sometimes the critic or the reader could have a divergent interpretation of the literary work.
When talking about the ideological State apparatuses, Althusser states, “each of them was the realization of an ideology… being assured by their subjection to the ruling ideology… an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material” (695). Even though I agree with this idea, I feel that there is something left outside: the possibility of the existence of ideology out of the apparatuses’ limits. I think, for instance, in the Zapatista Movement in Southern Mexico: it has its own apparatuses outside of the national government; it is like a parallel world within the realm of another system that confronts it all the time. So, the Zapatista Movement subverts the power and has an agency role which is not well explained in Althusser’ essay.
I think that in the same way Bakhtin talks about how we live in different languages, and how there is a language of the day, of the professional group, of the people of the same age, etc, etc, we live in different ideologies even when there could be a predominant one –such as the consumerism’s ideology today-. Zizek says: “an ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality… when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself” (723). Nevertheless, I wonder if there is such coherence in a subject, in an ideology, that makes human beings to accept an ideology without challenging it. Maybe I am just talking by myself: I have the tendency to question everything and I believe human beings are many in one, as in Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.


Other ideas that did not fit in the previous two pages:
- My main question on Marxist theory is what would be the next theory to interpret the world. With all its weakness, there has not been another theory that explains better how societies function. I recognize that I have little to criticize about Marxism because I agree with it more than I disagree.
-Why, for instance, we –thinkers- earn more money than people who build houses? Is our labor more important than theirs? NO! But we are part of the ideological apparatuses of the state. We have a function: to help to keep an order. Are we more intelligent, capable or better than they? NO! But we are led to think so in order to “justify” our place in society and therefore, to play our political/ideological role. Of course, we could have a dissidence role also.
-Marx says: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class” (657) and according to him, this ‘revolutionary class’ could arise because of the own contradictions within the ruling class, between the ‘thinkers’ and the active part of this class. However, according to him, this contradiction fails to develop further when that ruling class realizes it is endangered. I do not agree with this idea because reality is more complex than that.
-When Macherey talks about “the classic problem of interpretation of latent meaning” (704) I think we need to see the reader as an agency because the interpretation depends on the reader –which takes us back to the problem stated by Bakhtin among reader, reading and the text. So, we need a convention (or at least, to accept that could be more than one convention) to approach a literary text. At this point, I feel I need to look back to Johnson’s ideas on Writing: the text is a dialogic instance: it always could be re-read, re-interpreted, re-appropriated and so on.
-Even when I did not talk about this in the first page, I have to say that I find Bakhtin’s ideas on language and heteroglossia very attractive and useful, specifically when he states: “the topic of a speaking person takes on quite another significance in the ordinary workings of our consciousness, in the process of assimilating our consciousness to the ideological world. The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (682). At the same time, I think that language could be –and in fact it is- a political and ideological instrument.
-When I first read Bakhtin’s essay, I was not aware from where nor when he wrote it; knowing this (his essay was written in the 30’s) gives another approach to the text as an essay that actually talks about totalitarism and Stalinism. When reading Bakhtin’s essay on carnival, I was thinking about a Peruvian movie I watched just a few weeks ago: Madeinusa, which retells the story of an indigenous community during part of the holy week –from God’s death to his resurrection- when people could do everything since God is dead and does not see the people’s sins. It is, in some way, the same base of the carnival: the subversion of the traditional values.

Bibliography:

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackbell Publishing, 2004.