Marxist Criticism (2)

A key figure is the fist major Marxist critic, namely the Hungariar, Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). He developed the critical theory of ‘reflection’, seeing literary works as reflections of a kind of system that was gradually unfolding. In his view, the novel, for instance (and he had much to say about this genre), revealed or ought to reveal underlying patterns in the social order and provide a sense of the wholeness of existence with all its inherent contradictions, tensions and conflicts. Like many Marxist critics he was mainly concerned with content; hence his adverse comments on writers who were preoccupied with form, technique, literary ingenuity and innovation. Lukacs created his own idea of realism and failed (or declined) to see that modernist writers were also capable of realism—albeit of other and different kinds. Hence his disagreement with the modernist techniques of Brecht (and with Theodor Adorno, too), another Marxist and a didactic dramatist who was at pains to show social injustice. Brech made clear his attitude to socialist realism thus: “We shall take care not to ascribe realism to a particular period, Balzac’s or Tolstoy’s, for instance, so as to set up purely formal and literary criteria of realism.” He rejected anything formulaic on the grounds that reality changes, and in order to represent it the means of representation must also change. Thus, it follows that Lukacs and his followers would hardly approve of formalism, futurism, epic theatre (qq.v.) and many other innovative theories and developments.

The Frankfurt school of Marxist aesthetics is associated with the Institute of Social Research founded in 1923 and affiliated to the University of Frankfurt. During the Nazi period it was exiled (in 1933) to New York, from which it returned to Frankfurt in 1949-50. This school (whose chief spirits were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse) rejected realism more or less completely and developed what is known as ‘Critical Theory”. They were much influenced by: (a) their experience of a totalitarian regime and Fascism; (b) their experience of American mass culture, capitalism and commercialism. Both the Nazi and American societies were regarded as “one-dimensional”.

Adorno advanced the theory that literature does not have direct contact with reality. He favored modernism in literature because it is ‘distanced’ from the reality it seeks to describe, and this ‘distancing’ enhances its critical reality. Thus, knowledge of reality is achieved indirectly or obliquely. As he put it: “Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world”. Horkheimer was in favor of the avant-garde (q.v.) and modernism because they are hostile to passivity, acquiescence and submission to the political and artistic status quo, and thus to any form of inhibitive or repressive ideology. Their views were worked out in terms of Marxist beliefs and principles. Marcuse works through the idea that the autonomous work of art negates a repressive society.

(To be continued ...)