Introduction: Starting with Zero

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

A debate emerged in literary studies in the past several decades around what many see as
the importation of politics to an endeavor that should concern itself with purely literary
issues. The argument against the importation of politics assumes, of course, that politics
was not in literature in the first place and that literary criticism, even when limited to a
concern for form, style, theme, and the like, is not implicitly shaped by political choices.
That question becomes especially marked when one considers works such as Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, a novella about the brutalities of economic colonialism, or
Shakespeare's Henry plays, which depict a ruler who engages in an unprovoked invasion
of another land that resulted in thousands of deaths. A purely "literary" examination of
the works in terms of narrative irony or rhetorical eloquence would seem to ask a great
deal of readers. They have to ignore the palpable political issues these works address in
order for literary form to be the main topic of critical conversation.
The entry of politics into literary discussion, beginning in the 1970s, was not so much
an entry as a re-entry. If one goes back far enough in the library, one will find works of
criticism in the nineteenth century that deal with liberalism in English literature or the
way political struggles are rendered in literature. But in the era after World War II, when
the US and the Soviet Union were engaged in a "Cold War," it was difficult for literary
critics to frame literature politically, especially if that framing meant drawing on the
concepts and vocabulary of Marxism. Marxism was critical of capitalism, and during that
era, the "West" defined itself in terms of the defense of capitalism against the egalitarian
aspirations of Marxist socialism.
The end of colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s spurred a new interest in Marxism and
in Left politics in the US and in England. It was the generation of scholars who entered
the profession during these years - Richard Ohmann, Martha Vicinus, Paul Lauter, Terry
Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and others - who were responsible for the re-entry of politics
into literary study. Among other things, they argued that the exclusive concern with form
that the New Criticism fostered was itself political. The erasure of history from literature
constituted a turning away from crucial matters of political substance without which
literature would not be literature. One could, of course, choose to study John Donne's
poetry exclusively in terms of the structure of paradox, but that would be to ignore the
rather loud din of battle in the background, as the English Civil War slowly unfolded.
There are many modern varieties of political criticism, and it is not unusual for
political critics to combine approaches - feminism, Marxism, Post-structuralism,

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Political Criticism

post-coloniality, etc. One of the most enduring forms of political criticism is Marxism.
Although ostensibly a doctrine concerned more with economics and politics than with
culture and literature, Marxism has from its inception in the late nineteenth century given
rise to statements about the nature of art, literature, and culture. In contrast to Formalist
approaches, which isolate the literary work from its historical context, Marxism begins
with the assumption that literature can only be understood if its full context - historical,
economic, social, economic, cultural - is taken into account. Moreover, for Marxists,
literature is an active agent in its social and cultural world. It can work to expose wrongs
in a society, or it can paper over troubling fissures and make a class-divided society seem
unified and content. One major assumption of Marxists is that culture, including
literature, functions to reproduce the class structure of society. It does so by representing
class differences in such a way that they seem legitimate and natural. But many writers,
themselves at times influenced by Marxist ideas, take up the pen (or the word processor)
as a weapon in "class struggle." When Upton Sinclair wrote in a realistic vein about the
wrongdoings of the giant meat companies in the US in The Jungle, he hoped to change
the world by influencing public opinion, and he succeeded.
Marxism derives from the work of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who lived in
Paris and London in the middle of the nineteenth century, a time of severe industrialization that was creating a new class of industrial workers that he called the "proletariat." When Marx wrote his major works The German Ideology (1846), The Manifesto
of the Communist Party (1848), and Capital (1867), the ideals of socialism (that wealth
should be distributed more equitably, that class differences should be abolished, that
society should be devoted to providing for everyone's basic needs, etc.) were emerging in
counterpoint to the principles and realities of industrial capitalism - individual freedom in
economic matters, an intractable inequality in the distribution of wealth, severe class
differentiation, and brutal poverty for those without property. It was also a time of
revolution. Across Europe in 1848, monarchies were overthrown by democratic uprisings,
and nations long dominated by others struggled for independence. In 1870-1, workers
seized power in Paris, and the Commune briefly established an egalitarian alternative to
capitalism before it was defeated by reactionary armies and the participants executed. It
was a time when "bourgeois" society itself, which was organized around the ideal of the
private accumulation of wealth in an economy unhampered by state regulation, was being
challenged for the first time. That Marx was deeply influenced by his historical context is
itself a lesson in Marxist methodology. According to Marx, we are all situated historically
and socially, and our social and historical contexts "determine" or shape our lives. This is
as true of literature as it is of human beings: literature is not, according to Marxist
criticism, the expression of universal or eternal ideas, as the New Critics claimed, nor is
it, as the Russian Formalists claimed, an autonomous realm of aesthetic or formal devices
and techniques that act independently of their material setting in society and history.
Rather, literature is in the first instance a social phenomenon, and as such, it cannot be
studied independently of the social -relations, the economic forms, and the political
realities of the time in which it was written.
Marxist literary criticism has traditionally been concerned with studying the
embeddedness of a work within its historical, social, and economic contexts. Some
Marxist criticism argues that literature reflects unproblematically the values and ideals of
the class in dominance. In order to make it onto the stage at all, Shake-

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speare's plays had somehow to address (which is to say, accept and further) the values
and ideals of monarchial English culture. Shakespeare's history plays all celebrate
kingship not because he was a political conservative but because the material context of
literary production places limits on what can and cannot be said or expressed at a
particular historical moment. Shakespeare could not have expressed counter-monarchial
ideas and still been "Shakespeare," that is, someone hired to produce plays for the king's
court. All literature is in this respect "determined" by economics, by the translation into
cultural limitations and imperatives of the sheer weight of how material life in a society
is conducted. Those limitations range from the choosing of what will or will not be
published to the implanted selection procedures that readers inherit from schooling
within a culture and that shape what and how they read (whether or not they can even
understand the language of a play like Lear, for example).
This "reflectionist" approach to literature has been supplanted by critical approaches
that emphasize the complexity of the relationships between literature and its ambient
context. While some contemporary Marxist critics continue to emphasize the role of
literature and of culture in reproducing class society, others look for ways in which
literature undermines or subverts the dominant ideologies of the culture. One function of
literature is to offer those on the losing end images that assure them that their situation of
relative deprivation is the natural result of fair play and fair rules, not of systematic
dispossession that is a structural feature of the society. In Shakespeare's plays, for
example, the lower-class characters, though likeable and comic for the most part, seem to
deserve their lower-class status. Their speech and patterns of thought suggest less refined
natures than those possessed by their "betters," who usually happen to be aristocrats. The
plays legitimate class division.
But literature also displays signs of contradictions (between classes, between
ideologies and realities) that threaten society from within and are put on display in
literature. No matter how much it spuriously resolves contradictions in society between
the rich and the poor or between an ideal of "freedom" and a reality of economic
enslavement, literature must also show them forth for all to see. According to this
approach, all attempts to naturalize social divisions reveal their artificiality, and all
ideological resolutions put their "imaginary" quality on display. In Shakespeare's plays,
for example, the nobility may consistently triumph, but the very necessity of depicting
such triumph over adversaries suggests that there is trouble, rather than peace and
universal contentment, in the society. In the effort to reassure the nobility, the plays draw
attention both to divisions in society and to the need on the part of those in power to
make those divisions seem easily resolvable. The very effort suggests that the class
differences harbor potential dangers for the rule of the aristocracy.