Marxism Theory Gyorgy Lukacs, Terry Eagleton & Raymond Williams
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Gyorgy Lukacs
Gyorgy Lukacs was a Hungarian philosopher and Marxist aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism. His works on Marxism are a departure from the Orthodox Marxism of the Soviet Union. His was an enormous endeavor to understand and clarify Marxism. Literary critic MAR Habib considers him “the profoundest philosopher Marxism has yet produced.”
Lukacs initiated his study of Marxism as a sociologist. However, he was not only a thinker in the Marxist tradition but also a literary critic. He investigates the novel as a literary form in his seminal work The Theory of the Novel. This work introduces the term ‘transcendental homelessness’.
This concept explains a longing “for utopian perfection that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality.” However, Lukacs, later on, wrote an introduction wherein he dismisses The Theory of the Novel. He also considers it a ‘romantic anti-capitalism.’
Lukacs had a disregard for some of the modernist writers such as Kafka, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett for his preference of Thomas Mann’s attempt towards the condition of modernity.
Lukacs studies the development of the genre of historical fiction in his work The Historical Novel. In this work, he argues that consciousness of history was not much developed before the French Revolution. He explains that the realization of human existence as evolving and constantly changing was brought about by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars.
He regards Walter Scott as the representative of such historical consciousness which is reflected in his novels wherein social conflicts and historical transformations are mostly highlighted.
Lukacs further argues that French realist writer Balzac and Russian realist writer Leo Tolstoy adopted the style of Scott. He regards them as progressive writers. This evinces Lukacs’s longing for a return to the realist tradition and his disapproval for modernist disregard for history.
In his essay “Realism in the Balance”, Lukacs advocates Thomas Mann as writer of traditional realism. He is critical of the modernist movements and their practitioners who laid emphasis on individualism. He has a disregard for modernist movements for he finds a lack of revolutionary spirit in them.
Lukacs considers Thomas Mann a good realist for he successfully creates a contrast between the appearance and the essence, between the characters’ consciousness and the reality in isolation.
On the other hand, modernist writers portray reality as it appears, they don’t look beneath the surface of immediate perception of reality. According to Lukacs, it is only realist writers who transcend the immediate and subjective perception of reality and see reality in relation to society.
Terry Eagleton
Born in a working-class family in England, Terry Eagleton was a Marxist literary theorist and critic. His writing includes a wide range from the 19th and the 20th centuries to 1970s Marxist tradition and from Marxist literary-cultural analysis to the need for theory. His historical materialist approach makes him a Marxist critic.
However, he, in his writing, considers other critical trends that become compatible with his Marxism. This compatibility becomes possible because modern literary theories are somehow a reaction against the ideas of New Criticism such as literary texts are autonomous and self-contained.
Eagleton’s work Literary Theory: An Introduction is a study of literary approaches. He reflects on theory as essentially political. He views that no literary or artistic work is apolitical since it serves the interests of the ruling class of society. His approach despite being that of Marxist tradition is open to new critical traditions such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction.
However, he thinks that theories such as New Criticism, Formalism, Post-Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, and Deconstruction are ahistorical and ideologically suspicious because they rather complied with the interests of the ruling system than challenged them.
Eagleton emphasizes that literature be considered one amongst cultural phenomenon. His advice to his readers is that the study of literature should focus on social issues. He further says that the goal of literature is to produce better people while taking into consideration the social transformation.
Eagleton wrote after theory after the period of High Theory which is a period Foucault, Derrida, and postmodernists. In his After Theory, he talks of the achievements and defects of the cultural theory.
He views that cultural theory reflected upon social issues such as gender, sexuality, race, power, and environment. He sees defects of cultural theory in the inability of cultural theorists to deal with important social issues. Another defect is that cultural theorists preach transgression which he thinks is a capitalist phenomenon.
The second part of After Theory contains ideas derived from Aristotle and Marx that human beings are essentially political. They are political in terms of their need for the community to survive and of their activities which do not have meaning outside the human community.
He argues that the realization of human capacity can only be possible in a good society and when society is oppressive, the thorough development of an individual is not possible. His After Theory not only studies aspects of cultural theories such as achievements and defects but also offers new paths to be explored as ethics and politics tied together.
Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams was a Marxist cultural theorist, novelist, critic and socialist thinker. His writings encompass a wide range of literary and cultural studies and history. As a Marxist thinker, he made an important contribution to the Marxist tradition of literary theory but was reluctant to call himself a Marxist.
However, he considered himself a socialist. The chief feature of Williams’ theory is that his ideas are a translation of his practical involvement in political activities, not merely a result of his erudition.
Williams, in his early phase of writing, emphasized on ‘close reading’ of literary texts. Later on, his study rather moved towards cultural studies. Not that it was a departure from literature, Williams was still involved in literature through his fictional works.
Williams considered literature one amongst many cultural practices and rejected the idea that it is a privileged category. His other idea concerning literature is that literary work cannot be seen in isolation but rather be seen in the cultural context.
He even had a disregard for the term literature that he thought included privileged forms of writing under its purview with the exclusion of other forms of writing. His view was that ‘writing’ not ‘literature’ is the appropriate term that can encompass all forms of writings.
One of Williams’ major works is Culture and Society that studies the culture of the West. His Culture and Society (1958) is a departure from conventional ideas about culture. In this book, he nullifies the idea that culture is a result of material conditions.
His view is that cultural forms contribute to the development of society. This thought led him to coin the term ‘cultural materialism.’ This book dwells upon ideas of writers such as Edmund Burke, William Cobbett, William Blake, William Wordsworth, George Orwell, and others.
Though Williams was a theorist himself, he was never reluctant to point out the shortcomings of theory. He argued that rejection of history by theories such as formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism is erroneous.
For him, the rejection of history is a rejection of the possibility of change. This stance makes him believe in human efforts that he thinks can change conditions of existence. In this sense, he was a Marxist humanist.
Williams advocated human agency and their role in history in the face of post-structuralism’s emphasis on ‘de-centering’ man. Many of his contemporaries believed that meanings and values were impossible.
On the other hand, Williams believed in man’s creative and constitutive faculty that, he views, can change his own creation of meanings and values. This stance of his speaks of possibility and openness and denies narrowed notions of theory.
