Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: colonialist literature, Kim, Kipling, Literary Criticism, literature, Marxist criticism, Rudyard Kipling
Kipling seems to fancy himself as the first Eric Schlosser. In his story Kim, the presence of the concept of the “other” is scarce, even nonexistent, to the point of a noticeable, glaring omission. British, Indian and Tibetan cultures have minor contradictions with each other, but none is presented as particularly “domineering” over one another even within the context of colonial relations. No one is demonized; no one is more advanced or nobler than the other. Whatever ideologies might justify it, there is no particularly sharp mention of the destruction of previous forms of social organization (symbolized by characters such as the Lama), which seem merely dizzied rather than lost. Without realizing it himself, since this is the nature of ideology to fill the gaps and to consist on what the text hides, Kipling has constructed here a highly differentiated examination of pre-globalization before such a term existed. One cannot separate the full explanation of imperialism from late nineteenth-century colonialism and the necessary spread of capitalist production that comes from those particular stages. Such a spread, such as that from Britain to India, is globalizing, and imperialism has the ability to hide cultural and ethnic conflicts as much as it has the power to aggravate them for monetary and political gain. This is what we see a slice of in Kim.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: book recommendations, books, literature, reading list, reading recommendations
Revisionism – Leopold Labedz
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens –Ward Churchill
Marxism, Revisionism and Leninism – Richard F. Hamilton
Criticism and Ideology – Terry Eagleton
Dickens Redressed – Alexander Welsh
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger – Terry Eagleton
Oxford Guide to Chaucer
Agents of Repression: the FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party & the American Indian Movement – Ward Churchill
Marxist Study of the Brontes – Terry Eagelton
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: alienation, Literary Criticism, literary genres, literature, Marxism, Marxist criticism, Modernism, postmodernism
The word “modernism” is intentionally ambiguous, and perhaps without realizing it is a fitting term for such a literary movement. In the most common usage it refers to the twentieth-century movement that began with the concept of the “modern” (obviously, since without this word how could one have modern-ism?) and ended up being a collection of authors and works characterized by efforts by the individual character and author to remold and reshape reality while reflecting its social ills. This is quite a simplistic analysis of an entire movement, but I will go into greater detail below.
Modernism took elements from realist literature in that it sought to realistically portray the growing social isolation and alienation of individuals caused by industrial capitalism. Characters are almost always withdrawn, and the entirety of the work contains a bitter cynicism bordering on absolute nihilistic despair. The main geographic sites for this movement were England and America post-Industrial Revolution, blooming during the periods between World War I and World War II, the main places where this system had taken hold. These first few decades of the new century begin with writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound D.H. Lawrence, who all stepped forward onto the literary scene by creating texts that were called highly experimental on content rather than merely form. This is the movement we now call “modernism,” though I don’t mean to use it in a reductive sense to imply that outside of these few head writers there exist no modernist movement.
The main characteristics of a modernist novel are as follows.
- The most prominent, noticeable facet of the modernist movement is severe alienation (even from one’s own work). It is important to realize that for a Marxist, the definition of alienation is a lack of control. This is why the worker is alienated from his work-he has no control over his workspace or the products he makes and consumes. Authors are not immune from this, and frequently show a coping mechanism for their alienation through experimentation with form and content. Many writers are themselves very conflicted about their proletarian, progressive or reactionary themes and the dialectic relationship between them becomes obvious within their work.
- The popular concept of the Victorian novel has overnight become meticulous to the new sped-up industrial capitalist life. Novels would now be leaner, meaner and with more bite.
- Frequently it put more emphasis on the individual over the social and outward, or is concerned with the outward only inasmuch as it affects the individual. Frequently showcases a central, heroic figure.
- Its operating ideological system is existentialism, or the belief that objective truth exists but it has no meaning for humans except the meaning we, as individuals or masses, create through acting upon reality. Often the work presents a world where chance makes things happen and the plot for the novel itself has no meaning except what the reader imposes on it.
- Frequently contains stream-of-consciousness ranting, a multi-narrative perspective, disjointed timelines and short, declarative sentences.
- Increasing skepticism about religious systems.
Moreover, these artists actually sought to challenge established systems by making their characters behave in ways outside the norm-much better than the reactionary “humanist” writers, with their hollow phrases overly concerned with form rather than content, and their content itself inhospitable to complex motivation and characterization, to actions and emotions “unacceptable” to petty-bourgeois reformism. Now for the bad news. Modernism, much like its even-lesser-defined evil twin sister postmodernism, gravitates towards a radically pessimistic vision of subjectivity as a rewarding experience for any given society. As in Eliot and Joyce, this leads to reactionary anti-social behavior, which then spawns uncompromising relativism and individualism, which would eventually give birth to the dreaded libertarian science fiction world of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Fahrenheit 451. Why is this movement “dreaded,” you ask? After all, they were only exposing the evils of government and the state, weren’t they? Yes, but unfortunately their works were not meant to represent the BOURGEOIS state, or organized religion (surely a much better and much closer twin of what they represent in their novels) but rather any state that the dominant ideology deemed “extreme.” As such, while the authors may not have directly intended as much (though Orwell certainly did), their works have become tools for imperialist propaganda. But hey, that’s another post.
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: book review, Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, Marxism, Marxist, Marxist criticism, Marxist Literary criticism, Marxist reading, Super Size Me
This book will doubtlessly go down in history as the favorite palm book of the elitist, petty-bourgeois American social democrats and liberals. If you are looking for a manual on how to look down on the working class and lumpenproletariat for not having enough money or education to “know” to shop exclusively at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods, this is your book. If you wish to imagine yourself as part of a “new generation” of liberals with upturned noses pointed towards cheap food and the foolish people who buy it, and not bother to make a worthwhile analysis of why they buy it, this is your book. Finally, if you wish to remain blissfully unaware that farmers’ markets and organic stores are every bit as exploitive as Burger King, this is most definitely your book.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. After all, not all is lost here-Schlosser does a good job of portraying the exploitation of immigrant labor and the horrible working conditions inherent in the fast food industry. He also does a great job cataloguing how GREED is inherent also in capitalism and thus in its red-headed stepchild, the fast food industry.
He does NOT, however, examine how Whole Foods is nearly five or six times as expensive as your average fast food restaurant (since it too operates on a profit-motivated capitalist system), and how that might be a factor in fast food’s popularity among the lower classes. Instead, he seems to thumb his nose at those who dare not spend extra money on organic beef instead of using the check from their below-minimum-wage job to pay their rent. There are some families (immigrants especially) that are simply too poor to afford good food, not to mention fast food is available and addictive. Fast food restaurants, like gun stores and liquor stores, infest poor neighborhoods. Might there be a reason behind this? Not in Schlosser’s world.
The over-intellectualization should be a given when reading a book written by a journalist, but there’s enough here to make even your most dyed-in-the-wool urban liberal queasy. When an author tries to draw parallels between the specific rise of fast food and the life-long alienation of American workers, between fast food and High School dropouts, one begins to scratch his head.
Schlosser is frequently quite reactionary. For example, in one chapter he notes that robberies at fast food joints occur because those they employ members of the youth, poor people and minorities-groups responsible for much of the nation’s crime, he says. I found this quite disturbing. Is he suggesting these “high-risk individuals” should not be given jobs? He concentrates much on the question of brand fetishism, but also on the Freudian analysis of the fast food chain as a “papa” figure, rather than a chemical addiction and irreplaceable “choice” given by schedule and financial situation.
It pains me to blast this book so savagely, since Schlosser’s heart is obviously in the right place. However, his elitist approach and complete lack of working class analysis must be criticized, as well as his blaming the fast food industry instead of the system that produced it. This book was not a truly critical look at the system. His pleading to the reader to “do the right thing and look beyond what is profitable” is moralist and does not realize that the kind of “morals” he speaks of protect private property and the eternal interests of empire. He suggests stopping ads targeted at children, but then goes on to suggest that this will only happen when we, as individuals, decide to not buy anything from fast food places. Yeah, sure. Good luck with that.
The Republican/Democrat argument is irrelevant and breathtakingly naive. Both bourgeois parties protect and defend the wealthy interests these operations he seems to despise, as well as the small stores he seems to think are the solution. In another section, he suggests that the lure of employment at McDonalds is causing teenagers to drop out of High School. (Seriously, what?) If kids are having to support families, that highlights a social and economic problem, not the “foolishness” of working at McDonalds. He then goes on to link employment at fast food joints to dying because of on-the-job injuries, not realizing such things happen in every industry. Shock, petty-bourgeois and bourgeois store owners do not care about their workers!
More deeply, Eric Schlosser falls for the capitalist trap of bourgeois culture-beauty instead of truth, or in his case ugliness instead of truth. He provides no meaningful analysis of a system which allows such commercial capitalist relations to exist, and provides much history of the food chains themselves while magically giving no historical analysis as to the societal conditions which gave rise to the business IN THE FIRST PLACE. Yes, McDonalds flourished in 1961. WHY?
In the final analysis, his work is objectively pro-imperialist. He does not speak out against capitalism and exploitation-rather against BIG capitalism and VISIBLE exploitation. Most of his complaints themselves are capitalist and reactionary to the core. “Can’t we go back to the SMALL business owner?” (As though he were any less exploitive!) “Globalization homogenizes others!” (Not realizing, or more than likely ignoring, the fact that it can equally foster and exaggerate differences for political needs).
If nothing else, this book, as well as the movie “Super-Size Me” represent a growing tendency of the neo-liberal and social democratic movements to privilege reformism instead of actual solution to social conflict and “Golden Age”-favoring nostalgia of the “good ole days” to the actual, eternal realities of imperialism. His text, in the end, reduces itself to a mere gelatinous pile of complaints, utterly worthless, fattening and with no nutritional value, much like the food he so rails against. The irony of all this is supreme if one realizes that the small capitalist world they want back is absolutely impossible in an imperialist world. Liberal writers’ nostalgia and future hope for some unsullied traditional early capitalist culture where the small business owner rules and production relations are kept at the capitalist level cannot be seen as anything but reactionary. The base may have moved on, but the superstructure drags behind, wishing for better days.
