The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

termed an ideological formation. Such a
formation is always complex and contradictory,
but it is never innocent. Its
impulse is to stabilize and unify the
various meanings, values and representations
in which a society lives out its own
experience, in ways which help to secure
and reproduce the power of its ruling
class. ‘Literature’, then, might be said to
represent the class struggle at a specific
level; in writing, reading, interpreting and
evaluating we are already, consciously or
not, engaged in a struggle over linguistic
meanings which is intimately related to
systems of power.
‘Vulgar Marxist’ criticism accepted
this conclusion with a vengeance, reducing
literary texts to a mere reflex or
symptom of history, content to determine
the political ‘tendency’ of the work. The
major traditions of Marxist criticism,
however, while firmly locating literature
in its historical context, nevertheless
granted it a high degree of ‘relative autonomy’.
It is never merely a ‘reflection’
or ‘expression’ of historical forces, but a
specific, highly codified social practice
with its own conditions of material production
and reception (cf. LITERARY MODE
OF PRODUCTION), its own conventions,
devices and histories (cf. CREATION). Its
ideological significance is to be sought
not merely in its abstractable political
content, but more rewardingly in its
forms – in its narrative structures and
generic rules, its habits of language and
characterization, its modes of imagery
and technical mechanisms. ‘History’ and
‘ideology’ are not merely the extraneous
outworks of a literary text: as the intimately
informing pressures at work
within its very capacity to signify, they
are constitutive of its very being.
Historically speaking, Marxist criticism
might be roughly if conveniently
divided into two main types. On the one
Marxist criticism 137
hand, has been what one might broadly
term a genetic criticism, concerned to
relate the literary work to its historical
and ideological conditions of possibility.
The scattered literary writings of Marx
and Engels themselves, drawing as they
do on the aesthetics of Hegel, fall into this
category, as do Lenin’s well-known articles
on Leo Tolstoy, or Trotsky’s sensitive
accounts of his Russian poetic contemporaries.
The eminent Hungarian Marxist
critic Georg Lukács also belongs to this
lineage: his work aims to identify the
complex relations between certain historical
epochs and the rise and fall of certain
literary forms, such as REALISM. The great
bourgeois realists, still able to ‘totalize’
history into a complex significance by
deploying characters and events at once
sharply individuated and historically ‘typical’,
give way at a point of political crisis
to the disturbed, private, more fragmentary
forms of MODERNISM. In the work
of Lukács’s disciple Lucien Goldmann,
Marxist and STRUCTURALIST themes are
interwoven to provide a similarly genetic
account of the flourishing of French
seventeenth-century tragedy.
Lukács and Goldmann inhabit an
Hegelian, ‘humanistic’ current of Marxism
for which many of the traditional categories
of bourgeois aesthetics (unity, truth,
beauty and so on) are still valid. The later
work of Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey
and others has interrogated these assumptions,
grasping the literary text as divided,
uneven and contradictory, forced by its
complicities with ideology into certain
revealing gaps, silences and absences
whereby it ‘deconstructs’ itself and betrays
its ideological hand. Such critics have also
been more concerned with literature as a
form of analysable ‘production’ than an
author-centred ‘creation’.
But for both Lukács and Althusser,
‘Literature’ itself remains a largely