If one looks up volumes written on the subject of coffee, most likely they will take the form of table books or cookbooks with very little instruction, aside from a few attractive pictures of the drink, and perhaps some rudimentary tours of its various flavors, coupled with only a very few frustrating teasers of tips on how to make it. It is difficult to find any detailed exploration of coffee. In addition, aside from books totally centered on the subject, even the best breakfast books contain no explanation of the flavors of various types of coffee, nor do they explain the exact difference between espresso and cappuccino, brewed coffee or French press, or what are the costs and benefits of a Turkish grind.
This is very odd, seeing as how not only has coffee been one of the foundations of global civilization and trade as we know it, but also given the fact that the method of making coffee is the center of many disputes.
In Europe and America it has only a few hundred years of history, contrasted with hundreds of thousands in Africa, and yet as a worldwide commodity coffee is on the level of cereal grains and crude oil. Most of the modern workforce cannot start the day unless they have a cup of coffee. Indonesian students rise in the wee hours to have breakfast consisting of boiled bananas and coffee even from the age of eight. The coffee industry currently employs millions. All this, and yet finding information about it is still a matter of trial and error. When looking through my head for the recipe for my perfect cup of coffee, I find many points which I have had to acquire myself over years of consumption.
First of all, one should never buy pre-ground coffee unless desperate. Buy bags that contain whole beans, since once ground the flavor of coffee begins to dissipate almost immediately. If you’re one of those people lucky or rich enough to have your own grinder, then don’t grind more coffee than you need immediately. If you are like me and prefer more economical methods, have the store grind it for you and store it in Tupperware or some sort of airtight container. Never store in the refrigerator, for I have found that actually saps the flavor quicker, even if inside a container. When buying, never buy coffee beans that appear very oily or have an unpleasant aroma—that means they have been on the shelf for far too long. Some of the more corrupt, Machiavellian or otherwise hassled coffee house employees will still try to sell you these, but I have once or twice had employees refuse on principle and tell me the truth—that the beans were more for display and were several months old.
One should buy African or Latin American coffee beans. Obviously there are different kinds of coffee. Here in America the coffee is so weak one could look down through a full cup and read Ezra Pound’s poetry at the bottom. Meanwhile a cup of European coffee would have your average American dancing on the ceiling. From what I’ve tasted the ones grown in Africa and Latin America, and not say, Southeast Asia, are the strongest and possess the freshest taste. Coffees from Kuna or Hawaii are also very exotic-tasting. The biggest exporters of coffee worldwide are Latin American countries such as Brazil and Columbia, followed closely by Vietnam, whose coffee is simply infamous for being so foul that is has to be drunk with condensed milk. Any coffee has merit to it—Southeast Asian and Vietnamese coffee is economical and can be strong, but there is not much good flavor to it. Most coffee served here comes from Brazil, but I have gone out of my way to buy African coffees, which are usually the most intense.
As a general rule of principle, coffee should not be made in huge quantities, since that makes it harder to measure how many spoonfuls of grounds to put in the filter. This is not an absolute rule however, since I myself posses a 12-cup brewer. Coffee should be made in a glass coffeepot always. Coffee made in one of those heat-insulated tanks is always the most flat and tasteless stuff, while instant pre-ground coffee like that distributed to the workplace tastes of preservatives and cheap artificial flavors. Mound the coffee grounds gently and evenly in the filter basket, leaving no paper on the bottom exposed. Do not compact the coffee or press it down—you want the maximum exposure of water to the surface area of the grounds.
The pot and the cup should be very clean beforehand. I know there are some coffee drinkers who prefer to never wash their favorite cup or their pot, thinking that it somehow makes the coffee taste better. The problem is that all coffees are not the same, and built-up oils will definitely affect the flavor you taste if you decide to try a new species. Believe me, three-week-old traces of dried, stale coffee are not the flavors you want mixing with your freshly-bought Kenyan.
Of course the coffee should be strong and not weak. Why drink coffee if you’re not going to drink it? One should always take the cup to the coffee pot and not the other way around. The coffee should be freshly hot at the moment of being poured into the cup, and one should keep the coffee cooking until the moment it is poured. That said; do not let the coffee stay on the eye longer than is necessary to keep it hot, as leaving a pot on for several hours will noticeably rob it of its flavor.
Drink out of a mug or tall cup, not the flat, wide-mouthed type, since the mug holds more and the wide, stylish cups make the coffee go cold before finishing half of it. Pour the coffee into the cup first, before any sugar, milk or any other additives. It would be better also, unless you are desperately ravenous for a taste of coffee right this moment and cannot wait to cool it with milk, to blow on it and take a sip of black coffee before any additives in order to get the full, raw taste. Some people prefer to stylishly put sugar or milk in first, which hardly makes sense, since until you’ve poured the coffee you can’t know what amount of each to put in. In addition, there seem to be a great deal of people who prefer to dump milk or cream in their coffee before any sugar. The reason for this escapes me, since milk cools down the coffee and makes any sugar added afterwards that much harder to dissolve. Better to add any sugar first, while the coffee is still black and hot, so that it can dissolve quicker, and finish off with milk or creamer and a thorough stirring.
Health effects must be addressed here, since most of the population, while remaining somehow firmly convinced that tea of all sorts is simply wonderful for you, have no such conviction when it comes to the verdict of coffee. Let me stress that time and time again it has been found that coffee, caffeinated or not, has no link to heart disease, stroke or hypertension, even with those drinking more than four to six cups a day. No link has been found between it and high blood pressure, nor with high cholesterol levels. Coffee does not make you gain weight unless taken with a huge amount of sugar (which obviously can be said for any sort of food whatsoever) nor does it help you lose weight. No link with cancer has been found at any site on the human body either, except to lower the risk of colon cancer, for obvious reasons.
It is worth paying attention to such details as the grind of one’s coffee beans, so one can make sure to squeeze out the right number of strong cups that the purchased amount ought to represent. The typical drip grind is the very coarse grind you will find in most instant and pre-ground coffees. This makes the coffee about the size of small pebbles, and makes for a weaker brew. The finest grind of all, even finer than espresso and only available upon special request at coffee houses, is the Turkish grind. It grinds the coffee down so fine as to look like black powder, and render it so light that a sneeze in the wrong direction could be disastrous.
Different methods of brewing need different grinds, but there is no absolute rule of course. It also depends on how strong you want your coffee to be. A finer grind will expose more surface area to the hot water and give much stronger flavor, but oversaturation and bitterness can result. Coffee made for a regular drip brewer, unless one is a seasoned vet, should be about the roughness of table sugar. Espresso requires an extremely fine grind, only one notch in coarseness above the Turkish.
The “French press” is a glass pot with a lever that cooks coffee out of beans the same way tea is steeped out of tea leaves. The French press has no strainer or filters to separate the grounds from the water, only a lever that pushes the grounds to the bottom. This lets it infuse with the water properly. You will want to grind your coffee very course for this method. If you grind too fine, not only will you have unreasonably strong coffee, it will also be impossible to push the lever down and press the grounds to the bottom if the grind is too fine and you’ll end up drinking powdered grounds.
A French press is a must for someone who likes their coffee very strong, but it must be mentioned that it would be easy to abuse this method. A few cups of French press coffee will send the average drinker to a wide-eyed, hand-shaking state of caffeine high. The taste is simply exquisite however, since the French press does not filter out the oils and fats of coffee beans, while your paper filters and drip-brewers absorb them. Hence the oil spots on the top and the deeper, richer flavor. A French press should be enjoyed in moderation for all except those who wish to explore a yet-unforeseen level of horrendous caffeine addiction. That said, a French press is a well-kept secret that can be requested at almost all coffee houses, and is usually very cheap, though they never seem to put it on the menu.
A lot of these tips are controversial among coffee fanatics, including the question of whether sugar should be added to coffee at all, since coffee is meant to be bitter, but these disputes only highlight how commonplace and passion-inducing the whole art and practice of coffee-drinking has become.
Less Than Zero is a novel, or perhaps a very short semi-autobiography, about rich young Americans in college, in Los Angeles. In a word, it is a much less innocent Catcher In the Rye. Reading this 22,000-word novel (barely longer than a short story) is as easy and as inexplicable as the feeling of gazing out a sunny window for a long period of time.
As the dear reader may or not may not know, your author is a near life-long fan of Mr. Ellis’s work, even though I am quick to label it reactionary. As I have mentioned before in my essay on postmodernism, his documentary-like style does an excellent job of examining the emptiness of life under bourgeois capitalism while at the same time doing all it can to romanticize the basis of it. Ellis sneers at the age’s excesses while at the same time flaunting its greatest achievements. The good news is, that is barely pronounced here at all, and not nearly to the extent it would be in his second book, The Rules of Attraction.
Most of the focus is on the main character Clay, who narrates the story alone, but Ellis has masterfully made it feel as though it is third-person rather than first. This is because Clay is a passive narrator; he makes no harsh judgments, he does not limit our vision to his own. Clay has no investment in the world around him—he merely watches and observes, opportunistically waiting for a chance for personal gain, while at the same time trying not to hurt anyone too badly. He is as confused and as hesitant as a youth with no identity to go with his lines of cocaine would be. In effect, this means there is never any overbearing “voice” or narrator in the story to impose a definite moral compass. Hence the reader will join Clay in his amoral, directionless carnality and in his careful disconnection.
There is much that is remarkable about Less Than Zero, for example the fact that it has virtually no plot (which is very much a good thing, there are far too few stories without plots these days; it only makes it more life-like), but more than anything what stands out is something Ellis is known for—his descriptions of sexual encounters.
These are far less frequent here than say, in his magnum opus novel American Psycho, but they are his typical fare in that they have no pornographic appeal (quite the opposite), and are narrated with an emotionless, callous tedium and arrogant boredom which is fairly common in modern fiction, but never done quite this well. In fact, these sex scenes are only concentrated versions of the attitude of which the rest of the novel is made. A book like this, which deals with the deepening disconnections between people under the alienation of capitalism by brutally insisting on the facts, is common, but Ellis has a voice of his own that is refreshing and pure.
Two of the consequences of the breakdown of religious belief under today’s imperialism (polls today show today that less people are religious than ever before) are 1) an increase in social awareness, and, paradoxically, 2) an increase in the focus on individualism and the physical side of life. For if there is no higher plane beyond the grave, surely the sole purpose of life, the highest goal any being can dedicate himself to (or so the capitalist logic goes), is to expanding and enhancing himself, to improving oneself by amorally experiencing every sensation in this world.
Taken as a whole, Ellis’s books are moralistic vilifications of human nature as selfish, bratty and excessively hedonistic, all the time not realizing that these are merely symptoms of a larger disease: the alienation felt by all, especially the youth he seems so disgusted with, under capitalism. As brilliantly honest and taboo-bashing as his stories are on the surface, and as hilariously dead-on his parodies of the so-called “American dream” may be, deep down his purposes are undeniably conservative.
Mr. Ellis would not answer to someone calling him a pessimist, though all his books are about angsty, egoistic and childish characters dealing with loneliness and drug addiction. What makes him unique is that he avoids the trap that his fellow postmodernist writers, such as the infamous Chuck Palahniuk, so often run into. Ellis refuses to say that by desensitizing oneself to the ugliness of the world, one will end up finding life more worth living, nor does he repeat the older-than-dirt cliché that “ugliness and violence can be beautiful in a way.”
No, Ellis is far too royalist for that. He has cultivated the image of the California Bohemian, the libertine, eccentric and educated “artist” who while stressing fulfillment, also stresses ethics. He sees no “better” possible relations for mankind, he sees only the avoidance of “excessive” excesses. In his mind’s eye, he sees himself as the post-beatnik, clean-cut rebel, while at the same time the lone guardian of a feudal code of honor, a pair of hands holding back the deluge of a thousand spoiled young Marquis De Sades.
To add a personal touch to this review, I read this marvelously short book that says so much in one day, in perhaps two sittings. There are no chapters to speak of, merely sections of perhaps a few paragraphs each, separated by spaces. It makes the work gently episodic but never choppy. There is nothing here as balls-out violent and raw as the sex-and-murder scenes from his later American Psycho – there is nothing here that seeks to “grab the reader by the throat” or make him experience challenging slices of animal emotion.
Less Than Zero flows so smoothly and so straightly that it can only be compared to a modern, R-rated Catcher In the Rye. Never have I read a book that so beautifully captures the lost, barren irreverence of youth while doing it in such a streetwise manner. There is never any attempt to impose an intensity or a purpose to the narrative; it merely exists. As such, it is intensely relaxing even as it is profound and fleeting. Here, Ellis does something that so few authors can do gracefully: he relaxes his grip, and he lets the story flow.
Kipling, Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson all address the colonial experience through a hermetically sealed bubble of subjective, individual unreality. Alex Garland in The Beach, Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho all explore the emptiness of bourgeois ideology in modern urban man within this same bubble, frequently arriving at the most reactionary and hedonistic of places. Why are they reactionary?
Let’s take a novel as an example. Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction consists entirely of stream-of-consciousness rantings from a revolving door of different narrators. As might be expected, each narrator has his/her own voice and subjective take on things. The characters themselves are all incredibly empty and tainted by what can only be called “selfishness,” and they all find solace in hedonism through drug abuse and promiscuous sex. Do I even need to say all of them are secretly depressed and feel hollow, corrupted and lost?
What does this plot mean? Either this is supposed to be a representation of the state humanity under bourgeois ideology finds itself in (which would be a progressive work), or, more likely, it is meant to be a moralistic social critique of the state of young people today with the idea that they should “correct themselves” by falling back into the places alloted for them by the dominant social order.
Fight Club fares even worse. It starts off as an idealist “liberal” critique of consumerism, which then evolves into a promotion of primitivism and secular humanism, and then of course takes its petty-bourgeoisie ideas to their logical conclusion at the end, where it becomes an essentially fascist and militarist work.
Most entertainment today does this sort of thing—showing a world that has no meaning with all the class interests and prejudices that entails. What does this mean?
Never have intellectuals and artists displayed the hubris they show here, attributing to themselves the power to arbitrate all meaning. In the postmodernist movement, their celebration of complexity and ambiguity becomes a form of boundless egoism. Richness of meaning, which sounds good to most of us, cannot take the form of no limits on meaning, which would amount to meaninglessness.
For more information, see: Samuel Beckett. (Yes, ANY of his works.)
As Marx said, the dominant ideas of any era are the ideas of its ruling class. What does this culture say about the class nature of our society and what class interests does this movement represent? It is a petty-bourgeoisie, or small landowner or producer, way of thinking.
Why is this? Generally speaking, the petty-bourgeoisie, when tackling a problem, thinks in a subjective and one-sided way. He does not practice Marxist dialectics, which analyzes things concretely and rationally from every possible angle in order to get an objective and complete picture of reality, but instead starts from his own wishes, preconceived notions and subjective desires about how actual conditions should be. People who live in imperialist countries, intellectuals or more privileged strata of society (wealthier people, whites, petty-bourgeois) who are detached from the concrete conditions of reality often think in this way, because they have only book smarts and lack practical knowledge.
What the idealists, the postmodernists and the “free speech” advocates fail to understand is that a man’s mind is not his own. Who would deny that in each society throughout history man has operated in personal relations independent of their own will?
One of the chief discoveries of the science of Marxism, and materialism in general, is: it is not consciousness that determines reality, it is reality that determines consciousness. To imagine that the mind alone, in this case the individual mind, and the will, in this case that treasured idealist concept of the “free will,” can change reality based only on its own individual wishes is the most vulgar form of bourgeois and capitalist ideology.
How is this inherently capitalist ideology? Since subjectivism and relativism (“nothing is true, it’s all just in your mind”) is the logical ideology of late industrial capitalism, where individualism has taken its toll and everything becomes dependent on what you think, rather than what exists. This sort of thinking is also beneficial to capitalism, since it fuels the “I can make the world my own” attitude of the small producer.
This is reflected especially in the idea that scientific and materialist minds are somehow “intolerant” or “imposing” by subjecting others’ beliefs to the scientific method. This view ignores the fact that it doesn’t matter at all what one thinks of reality; what matters is what is objectively true and what is not.
The argument is frequently made that if the individual believes it hard enough or passionately enough, then it must be true. Hence, “religion is objectively true for religious people.”
Putting aside the fact that this so-called “objective truth” is therefore neither objective nor truth, this whole capitalist and postmodernist way of thinking digs its own grave.
To expand on this, here are a few key points to consider, that MUST be conceded:
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Reality functions and exists outside man’s own individual mind. This must be a given, since if one individual dies, reality does not cease to exist. Therefore reality is separate from the individual.
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Reality is not changed by the individual mind alone. If someone is falling from a cliff, wishing it is not so does not make it stop. Similarly, no matter how hard you wish it, you cannot push your hand through a solid wood table. You can imagine it, but the fact remains that your molecules repel the molecules of the wood. Even if you got two people together, one who admitted he could not pass through walls, and one who was absolutely convinced he could, the fact could still be shown objectively that both of them were incapable of it. The man who believed he could pass through walls would not be able, materially, to cross into the next room.
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If reality is separate from the individual mind, and is not affected by it, we must then admit that the two can disagree and be completely parallel.
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If we admit that the two can disagree, then there must be such a thing as concrete objective truth and mere fantasy. If the desires of the mind were the same as reality, then they could never be separate.
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Therefore, what is true and existing can only be measured not in wishes, but in matter.
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Finally, if all of the above is true, then we must say that not everything the individual mind believes is true, and that in order to be proved true it must pass the scientific method.
From these points, we can see that there are perceptions that are correct, right and actually existing, and there are those that are incorrect and not actually existing.
Logically, if something cannot be weighed or measured, it does not exist. Otherwise the very concept of “not existing” becomes moot, since the sole definition of “not existing” hinges on not being able to prove that it DOES exist.
Why? Because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is impossible for me to prove that something can’t be done. Likewise, it is impossible to prove that something does not exist. So the only definition that there can be for not existing is the absence of proof that it does exist.
For example, it would be impossible for me to prove that there are not pink dragons flying everywhere, except for me to point out the absence of material evidence: no sight of them, no feeling of wind from their wings.
Conclusion: the capitalist ideas of relativism and postmodernism are bankrupt. Reality exists outside the individual mind, and there are right ideas and wrong ideas, as well as true and false ideas.
Filed under: Common Sense, Food & Drink, Khrushchevism/ Brezhnevism, Marxism-Leninism, Revisionism
As much of a bourgeois decadence as alcohol is, I occasionally indulge. And by occasionally, I mean more and more lately. Fermented grain cereals in liquid form combined with water and spices and canned for my convenience really should not be my frequent companion, but between being surrounded on all sides by capitalists and revisionists, and my nerves being almost shot from the lack of relief through writing, I feel it is a way to help balance me out. The only concern is when it becomes a habit, the possibility of which should be insanely obvious to anyone.
I have Scottish roots that go from my last name to the red hairs in my beard. As such, I have serious alcohol genes that could make hardened lush Jack Kerouac blush with envy. I’ll have to watch my ass before I become addicted the way most of my extended family is. As well, the number of authors who were alcoholics during their lifetimes (Orwell, Hemingway) or drank themselves to death (Kerouac, Melville) is always fresh in my mind as a literature person. Clearly by even drinking I’m playing Russian Roulette.
So I’ve discovered a method that I find acceptable—I only drink a few beers/drinks until I get to the stage where I feel the rush, the endorphines, the abandon that comes from getting drunk, without sinking further. It is just enough so that I cannot drive but also enough I am not “wasted.” It is more drunk than simply drinking one or two beers, but far below the dizzy, stay-on-the-couch-all-night mode. Usually there is some sleep disturbence in the form of either going to sleep early or waking up early, but no hangover to speak of. The number of beers I drink varies before I reach this magical “in-between” zone, but not only is it stimulating to the mood, I find it actually helps with my writing and improves my concentration, rather than dulls it as usual.
In light of recent events, such as my recent emotional “episode” when I found out one of my best comrade friends was a dyed-in-the-wool revisionist, have driven me to use this method in leiu of serious recreational heavy drinking. It was quite devastating to a staunch non-revisionist Marxist-Leninist such as myself.
This particular friend, whom I had known for quite some time, had been one of my closest comrades. He was one of the reasons I became what I am today. He was the main reasons I abandoned Trotskyism and “anti-Stalinism,” and had been the most hardline Maoist I ever knew. I considered him as practically a Hoxhaist, or at least a Maoist worth recognizing as a non-revisionist. He even upheld Hoxha!
Naturally, I was overjoyed when I learned he would soon be relocating to my country and my particular area. My plans were to invite him to join my organization, since a true Marxist-Leninist party is short on hands in this age of revisionist poisoning. This would be a glorious project, a unity that could take on the entire movement!
Then, precisely two days ago, he abruptly began asking questions about the revisionist Castroist party, the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL) in the US. When asked what I thought of them, I of course replied they were revisionist and thus an enemy of the people. I stated the truth: that the PSL is a theoretically weak organization that supports anyone who ever even called themselves “socialist,” from Ho Chi Minh to Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, with no respect for Marxism as a science. They also support modern capitalist China and uphold it as “socialist,” and, worst of all, they are apologists for the post-Stalin leadership of the USSR, from Khrushchev to Gorby, and the colonialist invasions of Hungary, Czechoslavakia and even Afghanistan. To put the icing on the cake, they even support Castro.
Yes, Castro—the most revisionist, social democratic leader in the world today, the puppet of post-Stalin Soviet imperialism that turned the entire island of Cuba into a Dominican-Republic-style plantation for the USSR’s empire. My friend of course replied he was okay with all of this, and would probably join the PSL. He also supported all the above-mentioned invasions, even Afghanistan, a non-Warsaw Pact state. If Breznhev’s invasion of Afghanistan can be justified, so can the Vietnam War.
This may seem completely ridiculous, to get so worked up over a friend’s political views. But you must understand—for a Marxist-Leninist, hearing one of your friends has been a revisionist all along is like learning he has cancer. “I’m sorry, he has revisionism. It’s malignant.”
From 2004.
Borneo, Malaysia
Sabah
The time is 7:15 am, May 30th, the place is Planet Kinabalu Backpacker’s Hostel. Like the rest of Malaysia and Southeast Asia in general, Sabah is fairly hot and humid, although by this time I have adjusted to the heat. I no longer drip sweat, but rather just become sticky. Myself, Tony & Jay took a dirt-cheap flight here from Bangkok yesterday via Asian Air. We are currently sharing a room full of bunk beds with 2 other guys, one Korean (even though he lives in Bangkok), and the other from um….somewhere else. He’s the silent type so I don’t know. Man, this is poorly written. I have been on this trip for 4 full days now and have traveled to 3 countries in that time, from Korea to Thailand to Malaysia. I didn’t write any entries for the days I spent in Bangkok, because we were having too much fun, plus we are going back so there will be time later.
I spent about 1000 Baht, which is almost exactly 25 dollars, on various meals, drinks and new clothes—a silvery-grey t-shirt with a Chinese (?) symbol on it that for all I know might mean “fuck off,” and some big, billowy sleeping pants they call sailor pants. I finally met Jay’s much-heard-about girlfriend, Magalee (god I hope that’s the right spelling). I found her very cool and down-to-earth, even though sometimes her accent is impenetrable. An exotic-looking, very pretty one that girl is. Yes indeed. She stayed behind in Bangkok though, she has an internship. Poor thing. Everyone from school left, and now she’s stuck at the New Siam Guesthouse alone for 3 weeks while we’re here.
Tried to e-mail home. Success questionable. Love the iced coffee they serve here. Went out for a beer last night and played pool. Lost game to Zow, but beat Jay. Traded dollars for Baht and Baht for Ringgit, which is the currency here. Goddamn, this is some pretty fucking good chocolate milk. Drinking my weight in bottled water every day. 40 Baht to the dollar, not sure how many Ringgit, although Malaysia seems to be much more expensive than Bangkok. Food mad good. Bangkok market exciting, Malaysian cities more toned-down. Stamps on passport accumulating. Pretty paper money. Tiger beer is the shit. No severe sunburn to speak of yet, sunscreen seems to be doing its job. J&T bought black Malaria capsules in a local pharmacy, even though it’s a bit 11th hour. I am the only one awake right now, aside from the guy whose nationality I don’t know, who has already left as I write this. When he waved and said bye I noticed he had a pack like mine, for all I know he could be American. I want breakfast. Need coffee. Now.
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: coffee marxist, Marxist literary theory, reading list, reading recommendations
Marxist Perspectives on South Korea in the Global Economy – Martin Hart-Landsberg
On Juche In Our Revolution – Kim Il-Sung
Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism – Shanghai textbook
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde – Collins edition
Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – Fredric Jameson
The Illusions of Postmodernism – Terry Eagleton
Rural North Korea Under Communism – Mun Woong Lee
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: Canterbury Marxism, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, coffee marxist, Marxism, Marxist Literary criticism, Marxist reading
Geoffrey Chaucer, more than any other medieval author, showcases the new ideological superstructure that was to accompany the radical shift of the economic base during the transition from feudalism to mercantile and, eventually, industrial capitalism in Europe. To put it simply, the purpose of his work was to ready the historical period for the dominating role of the new bourgeoisie rising to power from the ashes of feudalism. The social dilemmas haunting English culture at the time, such as the preoccupation with class, race, property, finances and marriage are dealt with almost without exception in the Canterbury Tales, each one given the treatment of examination through the bourgeois lens.
To exhibit such unique ideological turns, Chaucer must have lived in quite tumultuous times, which indeed he did. “They were years of social and political unrest. [....] Wyclif and his followers were challenging the institutions and beliefs of Christendom; and the whole idea of the feudal hierarchy was under pressure from the peasant’s demands for rights, the demographic collapse following the Black Death, and the continuing rise in the importance of money rather than land or rank in the social machinery” (1). In short, the economic base of society was greatly disrupted to the point of bourgeois revolution. In some ways, this collapse would prove fortunate for Chaucer’s art. Artists in the feudal era often faced a unique obstacle to their works in that the production of all art required a wealthy backer, almost always the royalty or the clergy, to support the efforts of the sculptor, painter, musician, et al. The role of the artist only began to take on a more uninhibited form when the concept of the bourgeoisie began to emerge from mercantile capitalism. In this way we can see Chaucer’s work as relatively progressive petty-bourgeois relativist literature before such terms even existed.
Within the Prologue to the tales, the pilgrims and their roles in medieval society at first seem like a characterization of all the classes and divisions of labor, a simple mélange of social and political groups. This is statement is essentially true-Chaucer was aware of the class structure of the society that willed him into being and is making a commentary about the flaws in that system and what he would like to see replace it. Chaucer’s work frequently shows characters who are members of or are representative of certain social classes that overstep boundaries and then are not scolded by the text to fulfill their allotted role in society. In addition, while he begins the Prologue as a tyrannical and authoritarian “voice of the author” who seeks to cease any further discussion of ambiguity, Chaucer seems to intentionally avoid using any central moral framework for the story. Christianity is frequently presented, but one moral code alone is never chosen as supreme, and in fact the entire work seems hostile to such a concept. There is a hidden motive behind this particular portrayal.
Despite his fine upper-class language and romance writing, Chaucer displays a fine set of what we as modern readers might vulgarly term “neo-liberal values.” His tales are journeys into the consciousness of the individual that at first seem to transcend their roles in society, but unintentionally expose how their individual superstructures are dependant upon dominant forms of production (such as the examples of the noble knight and the vulgar miller, whose personalities are determined by their social class). This truth is lost on Chaucer however, since the very notion of class transcendence in the first place is revolutionary for the Middle Ages. Chaucer is therefore “[...] ironically substituting for the traditional moral view of social structure a vision of a world where morality becomes as specialized to the individual as his work-life” (2). Chaucer is aware of his and humanity’s status as individuals defined by humanistic subjectivity, and thus demands his own bourgeoisie to earn their soon-to-be-had leadership by falling in line with such a philosophy. Even more concealed is the idea that Chaucer has no control over his work, that he really is a simple “narrator” standing outside his tales as he is in the Prologue. The fact that the author loses control of his own writing once published is a structural fact of capitalism and feudalism alike.
Each pilgrim of the Tales carries forth Chaucer’s vision of neo-liberal individual rights and a bourgeois-ruled society. Witness for example the Knight’s Tale, an introduction of a wonderful chivalric knight (literally) stained with the blood of imperialism. In it, two knights use the principles of chivalry and courtly love to fight to the death over a woman and are manipulated by the “gods” into foolishly killing each other. Chaucer is mocking “chivalric” imperialist principles here-”the Knight’s Tale [...] can support both an ironic and a positive evaluation of the Knight’s moral character, seeing him both as an ideal and as anachronism” (3). It becomes clear through his prologue that he is a Crusader, one magically able to attend every Crusade. He is described chiefly in moral attributes rather than appearance, highlighting the gaping difference between the ideal and the blood reality.
In a similar vein, the prologue of the squire has an air of mocking about the young man. He is a twenty-year-old man that is highly lustful yet covered in finery, and has pretensions of being an artist and painter even as he is the son of an imperialist soldier. It is nothing less than the refutation of “an authoritative and malicious mystification by those who rule in order to control the ruled” (4). These two stories are clearly criticisms of the entire institution of knighthood and not just jabs taken at a particular icon. The knight is a historically obsolete character, a feudalist ideal whose values are ridden asunder by his liberal squire.
It is significant that the Tales starts with the knight, who is then interrupted by the various assembled peasants and drunks. The Knight’s Tale is at the head of the Canterbury Tales pilgrims-the one with the highest social standing. The interruption of the miller shows a very different sort of hierarchy: characters are refusing to stay in their place. There are contradictions between adjacent stories such as the miller’s, the knight’s and the reeve’s. There is a complete disregard of nobility going on here. The ordered and the vulgar sit side-by-side in Chaucer’s world-he has shown the finery of culture and also spun it upside-down to reveal its underside, the crumbling of feudal ideas in the 14th century.
This sort of motif is in line with the genre of the estates satire. “Estate satires, which aim to give an analysis of society in terms of hierarchy, social function and morality, were widespread throughout Western Europe. They work by enumerating the various ‘estates,’ the classes or professions of society, with the object of showing how far each falls short of the ideal to which it should conform” (1). Chaucer has gathered under one roof many different strata: those who fight, those who rule, those who pray and those who work. Each pilgrim is named by his profession or standing-rarely is any name given to them. They come as individuals, the author and audience of what they are expected to do.
The miller, much like the knight, is an implicit refutation of feudalist morals even as he is a refusal of the refined world, a self-imposed division which not only fails, but refuses, to achieve solution. The transition between the two shows the ideological contradiction at the beating heart of the Canterbury Tales-the double dialectic at work in the text. “‘Petty-bourgeois ideology’ exists as a strikingly pure and contradictory unit of elements drawn from the ideological realms of both dominant and dominated classes in the social formation,” (6) as typified by the knight and the miller, respectively. But the miller is also an important symbol of a deeper fissure in Chaucer’s new mercantile society-the transition of the main productive forces to urban areas from rural ones.
The pilgrims themselves may be interpreted as mostly rural folk, some of which have never been out of their small peasant towns, on a journey to a city setting. This is not a meeting free of clashes-the miller’s personal flaws and sheer vulgarity come from his class position as a product of predatory mercantile capitalism, which is uprooting the rural world. He is the protest against the traditionalist values of the political and cultural by means of satire.
Chaucer’s ideological paradox between the old feudal writer as a servant of the crown and the new role of production as the mouthpiece of the rising petty-bourgeoisie showcases, more than anything else, a fight-to-the-death between hierarchal vision and radical subjectivity. Unfortunately for Chaucer, he sees this contradiction within his society not as the rise of one class over another but as the fight between abstract and reactionary concepts of “personality” over “bureaucracy.” His humor contains realism only inasmuch as it contains elements of the real-laughter for him contains social use-value in the form of his ideas of personality. Thus the parody of the miller and his respective tale becomes an important weapon against the ideas he strives to tear down.
Chaucer’s treatment of religion through the symbolism of religious figures continues his methodology thus far by ushering in that most dreaded of all academic philosophies, relativism, in the tales told by the friar, the summoner, the monk and other figures of the prevailing religious order. Chaucer calls attention to the failure of human institutions to impose any final authority and insists that such a task must be left to the Almighty. Just as the Prologue reveals no overarching purpose to the tales, so does he refuse to give it a dictating overarching morality.
In the Monk’s Tale for example, a monk simply refuses to stay within his cloister, and enjoys good living at the expense of the townspeople, violating his vow of poverty and obedience. He refuses the doctrines of St. Benedict and St. Augustine, to whom he pledged his fealty. “Chaucer avoids any simple conformity to the stereotype, and what conformity there is takes a highly individualistic bent” (1). Indeed, the monk favors money over god, is lustful towards barmaids, wears opulent clothes and is generally rebellious. He freely commits what the Church terms “sin,” and yet Chaucer seems to fittingly have little bad to say about him.
In fact, Chaucer seems to admire the monk’s personal strength and his willingness to challenge established orders, even the one he is representing. He claims he is “fair for the maistrye, an outridere…a manly man, to been an abbot worthy.” Chaucer genuinely likes the monk and is fond of what he symbolizes within the story-unlike the other religious figures presented, such as the friar and the summoner, who wear a virtuous face and merely hide their corruption, the monk’s honesty and undying control over his own life has rendered it a moot practice to conceal his fleshy desires.
Chaucer’s mission in presenting the reader with characters such as the monk is a re-alignment of class society. Chaucer demands his bourgeoisie be a class with cultural knowledge that is worthy to assume their roles. The spiritual predominance in aristocratic rule is therefore liquidated in order to show that the court and clergy will fail in their tasks to assimilate the masses below them, whose ideologies are at the present time more liberal then theirs, unless they learn to relax the religious doctrines of the old order. Chaucer thereby liberalizes the absolute moral values of the Catholic Church out of existence for his (and the bourgeoisie’s) purposes. Chaucer never goes all the way with his individualism, however, since he is careful within the Canterbury Tales to confine it only as a debased egoism and never allow it to drift into nihilism.
To avoid such an unthinkable path for the time, he makes sure to keep his characters closely linked with their positions of work within society, even as they find ways to drift beyond them. “The pilgrims become individuals who have been assigned these functions, men and women enacting externally imposed roles toward which each has his or her own kind of relationship” (5). The ideological interplay thus generated within creates a gripping dialectic of interests as social groups come together to achieve power over one another, within the Tales themselves as well as Chaucer’s own mind. Often a power interest has been pre-generated by the pilgrim’s investment in an institution, such as the aforementioned examples of the knight and the reeve. The particulars of behavior are thus linked with their institutional sponsors to produce a conflict of unique superstructures.
The Tales is thus one of the earliest examples of literary organicist values, which integrate class ideology forcibly as a train-wreck into a unitary humanist “worldview.” As a result we are left with competing classes and modes of storytelling-fabliaux, poem, prose, romance and Gothic alike-all meshed together. The very structure of the story makes its thesis clear, as all the stories work together as organs to become a greater whole, more than the sum of their parts. This sort of metaphysics could be the basis for nothing else than liberal capitalism.
Feudal ideology in 14th century England among the aristocratic classes faced significant fractures. Chaucer therefore offers an idealist bourgeois critique of social relations while affirming the virtues of capital. Realism, as Chaucer envisions it, involves the unraveling of pretensions, the egalitarian distribution of personality and individuality, the holding of irreconcilable rules in precarious balance. The general ideology of the text is of course, liberal reformism. The aristocrats are losing their economic supremacy. The traditional intellectual of Chaucer thus unites, as they have done many times historically, with the new dominant bourgeois classes. This line of thought would give rise later to the Romantic humanist tradition of writers such as Coleridge and Lord Byron.
While it is not true that subjectivity only comes forth as a result of certain systems, since it has always been a part of history, to be institutionalized to the extent it has by bourgeois culture authors like Chaucer are needed to saturate the market and thus the culture. This sense of literary production and the works of great authors played an important role in the development of the sense of the “British nation” and the resulting imperialist identity politics. Thus it is a habit of history to viciously assimilate the author and his works as pawns of the formation of a hegemonic bourgeois empire.
The Cook’s Tale is the easiest and most readily available encapsulated example of the rot and seedy underbelly of the London people’s society that Chaucer hopes to expose. The cook’s story is not necessarily solicited, but he forcefully interjects his tale as a response to the reeve. The cook is angered by the reeve’s malevolent words, and decides to take matters into his own hands. This is a rather revolutionary metaphor on the part of Chaucer-the working class man of the group is publically objecting the actions of a feudal serf lord, an exploitive landowner who is the old servant of the crown. The cook discusses working for land-owning characters in his fabliaux, which seems to revel in prostitution, gambling and other lower class vices. This portrays the opinions of different classes, with one class content with the status quo and another seeking to condemn its unfairness.
In the Man of Law’s Tale, there is a contrast between the struggling philosophy student and the greedy lawyer. The lawyer admits that his knowledge has no aim except making him money. The tale’s “repeated motifs of the sufferings of the high-ranking suggest tragedie in its non-dramatic Chaucerian form” (1). A large part of the tale is devoted to legal explanation of the proceedings as well as Biblical verses-the story itself seems to be about divine intervention when Custance is repeatedly stricken with suffering and yet remains wholly Christian. The tale is as much a caricature as it is a story encouraging Christian principles, though this is kept at bay by Chaucer’s inclusion of reminders that the story is being dictated by a corrupt lawyer.
Chaucer’s societal analysis continues throughout each of the tales-the Friar’s Tale, which shallowly appears at first to be a moralist Platonic “warning fable,” is actually an appeal to view the greed of officials as logically resolvable. The Shipman’s Tale shows that like all capitalists, thievery, piracy and murder are the shipman’s chief methods of capital gain, and shows the crumbling of the domestic as a sheer ironic exercise inevitable given the oppressive social relations between people. One might mistake Chaucer’s criticism and sarcastic condemnation of the excesses of British culture as genuine attempts to destroy, rather than alter, the system producing corrupt characters like the summoner, the friar and the prioress. While the Shipman’s Tale may in fact be a criticism of the values of mercantile capitalism, it is also more of a criticism of the limits of such commercialism instead of a condemnation of the system as whole. Readers often fail to see the tree for the forest.
Likewise, the famous Wife of Bath’s Tale is a plea for equality on behalf of women, with a female character giving a reaction to the subjugated and “well-behaved” woman in the man of law’s story. She says that she has been married five times and, instead of discussing the honesty and virtue of matrimony and chastity, she turns her tale into a shocking justification of multiple marriages and multiple sexual partners. This cannot be seen as anything but a criticism of women’s role in marriage under the feudalist system, where they were treated much like property instead of reciprocal partners and equals to the men.
The progressive elements of Chaucer are frequently used (or rather exploited) by his western liberal critics, who use such ideas of equal rights and of cutting oneself off from the past to become a “modern person” as a tool to make his works another simple catalogue of western liberal anxieties. This is partially true, since the complexities of Chaucer’s historical context challenged the clergy, class society and medieval imperialist organizations of Catholic feudalism in general. However, it is exceptional to note that the Canterbury Tales also serves as a preview of the characteristics of the emerging “modern” bourgeois nation-state and gives insight to Chaucer’s unique status in elevating it through his fiction.
Works cited:
1) Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
2) Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. CUP Archive, 1973.
3) J. Carruthers, Mary. “Review: [untitled].” Modern Philology 89(1992): 390-394.
4) Ann Knapp, Peggy. Chaucer and the Social Contest. Routledge, 1990.
5) Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.¬¬
6) Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. 2006. Verso, 1976.
Filed under: Art & Culture, Oddities, Reactionary Watch, Women's Rights | Tags: Audition, Horror films, Ichi the Killer, Japanese films, Marxism, Marxist analysis, Marxist criticism, Marxist reading, Takashi Miike, Tarantino, Visitor Q
I have made quite a disturbing discovery lately-Takashi Miike’s work is extremely reactionary. Yes folks, I’m afraid it’s true. My favorite dark horror director from back in my Satanist individualist days was a right-winger all along.
For those not familiar with his name or his work, Miike is best described as the Japanese Quentin Tarantino, though his works are much more about unbelievable violence and confusing non-linear plots than even Tarantino’s. American audiences who have not seen Ichi the Killer, Audition or The Happiness of the Katakuris may recognize him as the sunglasses guy from the movie Hostel.
Miike’s films often are a mixture of horror, sexual allegory and comic book gangster and superhero flicks. They often are very surreal and cartoony while at the same time being gritty as can be while never losing an ironic touch. There’s also usually a guy being cut in half or a woman being raped as well. This is the sort of pointless violence that is featured in all of his films.
I was contemplating his film Visitor Q the other day and it occurred to me that the film boils down to nothing more then a conservative endorsement of the traditional Japanese “family unit.” The violence and taboo-bashing contained within the film is not so much to celebrate the crumbling of the society that produces the family unit as a product, as I originally thought, but rather a validation of the necessity of family roles. Through the catharsis of violence and sexual deviancy, eventually everyone in the movie resumes their “proper” household place. The father goes back to being a provider, the mother a nurturer, the son and daughter as loyal, obedient offspring.
The sick images that Miike has indulged the audience in thus render themselves not as representations of the harmful psychological side-effects of bourgeois society, but as the moralist warnings of WHAT COULD HAPPEN and what has happened to disrupt that society. Things like this only make it more apparent that I can never go back to being a non-Marxist. There is simply no way I can forget what I have learned.
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: Emily Bronte, Heathcliff., literature, Marxism, Marxist criticism, Marxist reading, Victorian, Wuthering Heights
The majority of Victorian literature is the product of the petty-bourgeois class, and Wuthering Heights is no different. The tumultuous ideological storms contained within demonstrate a crisis in the ideology of the 19th century Victorian petty-bourgeois class to which Emily Bronte was born. Frequently, novelists and intellectuals have a reflective role to play at a point of history where a crisis has impacted the prevailing base and has thereby begun the upward quake to the very spires of the ideological superstructure. The crises in the areas of estate, racial tensions and the family unit are all explored, but more than anything else, Wuthering Heights marks the crisis of individuality versus custom, since the contradiction between the social expectations of class privilege and the selfhood advocated by the rising neo-liberal capitalist system is the very essence of Victorian bourgeois consciousness.
From the start, Bronte seems more interested in showing the reader a world that is beset by the same conflicts as her own rather than an escapist daydream. Terry Eagleton says that “Wuthering Heights is [...] an apparently timeless, highly integrated, mysteriously autonomous symbolic universe” (1), which utterly defies the prevailing methodology of fiction literature to remove the reader from the discord of his existence. Most fiction novels come close to portraying what we would call “myths,” that is, the illusory resolutions of real contradictions within society for the purpose of the story in such a way as to validate ideology and the societal status quo. Although it is inherent to fairy tales and children’s stories that the hermetically-sealed bubble of this world never be burst, oftentimes with adult novels this purpose is stricken by strains in achieving its “proper” ideological closure. Indeed, the novel itself loyally reproduces the various disasters assaulting Europe, manifested in individual characters.
Marx’s pamphlet Wage Labour and Capital, written the same year that Wuthering Heights was published, addresses some of the social contradictions of the epoch, such as “the June Struggle in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragicomedy of Berlin’s November 1848, the desperate exertions of Poland, Italy and Hungary, the starving of Ireland into submission-these were the chief factors which characterized the European class struggle between bourgeoisie and working class” (2). In addition, it is important to know that the reverberating waves of the Industrial Revolution were being felt in Europe, starting the process of the unstoppable freight train ride from mercantile capitalist to industrial capitalist relations. This is the producing agent of the novel’s chief narrative subtext: “that [...] passion and [the] society it presents are not fundamentally reconcilable-that there remains at the deepest level an ineradicable contradiction between them which refuses to be unlocked, which obtrudes itself as the very stuff and secret of experience” (1). Bronte herself would most likely have a few ideas about that, being a petty-bourgeois “lady” who subtlety criticized British imperialism.
Whereas many novels would choose to show a young lady ending up wealthy and happy without compromising her dreams, morals or her fidelity to the petty-bourgeois ideals carved out for her, Wuthering Heights chooses to depict characters who are forced to choose between desire and social standing, love and money, passion and economic well-being. As is a common theme in Victorian novels about women, the pivotal catalyst for the story comes when Catherine Earnshaw must choose between two men-Heathcliff the wild, fiery-eyed gypsy and Edgar the safe, certain path of education, class position and property. Catherine’s reasons for choosing Edgar are as rational as they are brutally calculating: “‘because he is handsome and pleasant to be with [....] and he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband’” (3). Emily Bronte may have tried, like her characters, to erect magical, glittering towers of a kingdom of romantic dreams around her in order to escape the Darwinian existence of capitalism, but in the end they crumbled to dust as surely as Catherine and Heathcliff’s did. No doubt this was a common personal crisis in England at the time.
Wuthering Heights takes another turn away from typical bourgeois novels at this point in the story by showing the realistic consequences of Catherine’s actions. Though her marriage has assured her and her child’s well-being, it does not resolve the fundamental crises of the text, but rather compounds them exponentially and eventually leads to her and Heathcliff’s deaths. There is no romantic, happy ending for Bronte’s world. Catherine is the product of a sexist and classist society-a “woman” as defined by her own age. Her transformation from a rebellious young girl to a “lady” through her stay at the Grange only reinforces the notion of her choice as a social product instead of a reactionary result of “women’s nature.” It is shown as a real-life structural fact of the role of women in 19th century capitalist society.
Catherine, in her complicity with the bourgeois agent Edgar’s wishes, thus seeks to establish herself as the great martyr of self-destructive and self-sacrificing reformism. She shall win influence and power by working within the system instead of outside of it and will take care of her beloved Heathcliff in the process. She sees her capitulation to society as a means to an end within itself, a strategy for ending the heartless relations of the Heights. In the end however, it is all for naught. She soon finds that a woman, like a member of the working class, can have no true power within the restraints of the bourgeois system. She will always be under the influence of a father, a husband or a brother no matter what social position she holds, and the society has been molded to prevent emancipation from such relations. She will never be “out of her brother’s power.”
Heathcliff fares no better in his attempts to fit himself into his allotted role in class society. He disappears for a number of years and hardens himself, losing his ability to “succumb” to love in order to acquire enough cultural capital to “win” Catherine back from Edgar. In the process he essentially sells his cultural capital in exchange for property rights and financial capital. From his childhood onwards, “Heathcliff revolts, rather like Ireland against Britain, because of the barbarous way he is treated; only Catherine will grant him the recognition he demands, and even she, perfidious little Albion that she is, sells him out for Edgar Linton. In the end, even the liberals will rally to the landowners” (4). Heathcliff runs into the waiting arms of the bourgeoisie, seeking to become a willing member of the ruling class.
Heathcliff succeeds in his quest to become one of the petty-bourgeoisie that have oppressed him, going by brutal methods from a landless peasant laborer to a member of the rural bourgeoisie. He cheats Hindley out of the Heights, and once installed sets about becoming a ruthless landlord himself. Like the petty-bourgeois class to which he and Bronte both belonged, Heathcliff finds himself a great walking contradiction of class interests. As a “dark-skinned” former peasant he wishes to fight oppression, and as a landlord he seeks to forcefully acquire capital. He still nurses the ideal of a relationship with Catherine, but the characters have been so changed by their crises that the dream is rendered simply impossible. Catherine and Heathcliff, as an oppressed woman and an exploited peasant worker respectively, seem at first to have a chance at happiness, but it is absolutely impossible in the world of Wuthering Heights to acquire cultural or financial capital and still maintain self-integrity in a world defined by class positions.
Furthermore, except for Heathcliff’s childhood rebellion against the Lintons, neither character seeks outward revolution as a true solution to social injustice-both Heathcliff and Catherine run into the jaws of the society they despise in order to destroy it from within, an adventurist excursion which ends up costing them their lives. Wuthering Height’s undeniable liberal anxiety about social revolution thus comes to build itself upon the very doctrines that bourgeois capitalist ideology and tyrannical patriarchy rest upon. Wuthering Heights does not rebel directly against oppressive forces, but remains trapped within its own bubble, forever extending its bitter, trembling hands to the uncaring, stormy sky and cursing the heavens. Characters are victims of their own self-imposed personal hell, shackled by the chains of class slavery and its willing agent, reformism.
As well as gender and class oppression, the ideas of racial and cultural tensions are powerful preoccupations in Wuthering Heights, as they were in Bronte’s England. While the white, liberal abolitionist movement wrote poems and stories relating to slave revolts in the British colonies, Bronte wove symbols of cultural conflict into her own tale. The racial discrimination and subjugation deriving from the dominant ideology of British imperialism is set loose upon the young Heathcliff when the vagabond trespasses on the Lintons’ farm. The bourgeois Lintons then absorb him into their household, though only as an unwanted outsider. “As an alien, Heathcliff is brought into the family structure” (1). In capitalist society, the family is both a biological and convenient economic order for work and socialization. Imperialism, as we know, is the product of the capitalist crisis, generated by the desperation of the capitalist class to acquire more territory, resources, markets, subjects and workers. As Victorian capitalism rapidly moved toward the imperialist phase, it became necessary to dominate foreign peoples. The result of this was institutionalized racism and colonialism. As it is in reality, so it is in the Heights, where Heathcliff is subjugated to work the land for the prosperity of his white “slave-owners.”
Heathcliff’s race is kept intentionally ambiguous so as to make his character’s metaphor universal for colonized peoples. He is described by Mrs. Linton as “‘exactly like the son of the fortune-teller, that stole my tame pheasant’” (3), indicating he is probably a gypsy. In Heathcliff’s racial features and dark complexion, the Lintons “read his nature and his destiny, and they find in it a license to punish him for crimes of property putatively committed by others of similar appearance” (5), thus making him into a convenient servant for them. A crisis in the economic base of the Linton farm caused by Heathcliff’s appearance thus gives rise, in a reductive sense, to an essentially imperialist superstructure.
Unfortunately, as has been said before, the novel fails to carry through the portrayal the threatening collective energy of the slave workers of the West Indies, India, Africa and other British colonies of the time. “Read as a discontented worker, Heathcliff does not behave in a particularly dangerous manner. He does not form alliances with other workers (Nelly, Joseph, or Michael, for example), as the middle class most feared discontented laborers would. Instead, Heathcliff simply makes an [...] individualistic rags-to-riches plot, a plot that in fact reinforces the values of capitalism” (5). Just as both Catherine and Heathcliff failed to achieve any sort of revolutionary solution to their situations, so does Bronte fail to envision a truly revolutionary way for oppressed nationalities to rise against their masters in a direct way without simply integrating.
Instead of an easily-resolvable myth, Wuthering Heights is a novel that portrays a myth of a much darker, sweeter color-it is realist in the sense that it offers a realistic copy of the social conflicts within the culture and the European dialectic paradox between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies.
Works cited:
1) Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
2) Marx, Karl. Wage Labour and Capital. Peking, PRC: Foreign Languages Press, 1978.
3) Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 4th Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1991.
4) Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. New York: Verso, 1995.
5) Meyer, Susan. Imperialism At Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1996.
