Tea at Trianon: Marxism And Literature: 3 Key Ideas

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Marxism And Literature: 3 Key Ideas

From The Collector:

What do we know about Marx’s relationship to literature? Nobody studies literature for no reason, and it is often worth trying to situate an abstract, theoretical approach in the more subjective, personal reasons for developing said approach in the first place. In short, Marx was an exceptionally voracious reader whose reading habits were as omnivorous and multi-lingual as they were quantitatively extensive.

Marx made several early attempts at literary writing as a young man, including an unfinished novel and a fair amount of poetry. He also left several proposed projects on literary or literary-adjacent subjects unfinished at the time of his death: one on the theory of art and culture and another one on Balzac’s novels. Yet, as Terry Eagleton (whose work this article owes a great debt to) puts it, the direct engagement with literary topics in the work of Marx and his main intellectual collaborator, Friedrich Engels, is fairly thin on the ground.

[...]

It is particularly important in the context of an artwork that it is seen as the product of work. It is the culmination of a productive process, and just as a certain kind of historical situation gives rise to certain industries, certain patterns of labor, and resource distribution, a certain kind of historical situation gives rise to certain kinds of art.

One of the ways this manifests is in the so-called ‘sociology’ of literature, which includes an attempt to study the social conditions that go into the production of a work. These include, but are not limited to, the social demographics of both writers and readers, literacy, the economic and social constraints on publishers, and determinations of taste. It is important to distinguish this discipline from Marxist criticism, which tends to attempt to understand works of art themselves in light of these insights about society. (Read more.)