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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Therefore, what is true and existing can only be measured not in wishes, but in matter.
-
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: 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: 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.
Filed under: Literary Criticism | Tags: form and content, John Milton, literature, Marxism, writing tips
The form of a poem or story (as opposed to its content) is not merely ornamental or window-dressing, nor is it merely “fleshing out” the content. It has its own life within the text, and forms as simple as the note arrangements of classical music or the rhyming pattern (or lack thereof) of a piece of poetry can better expose the need that the production of the work fills. Take-for a ready example-the lines of the Devil in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. When Satan speaks, the parameters of the rhyming schemes seem to melt away, replaced by whatever the character seems to want to say instead of what the syllable count allows. The flow of the poem is thus disrupted greatly by his presence. He ends every line with a violent or intense word, appropriately as he speaks of “dripping poison” into other’s lives to make up for his own bitterness at his inability to experience “sweet interchange.” In this way, the formlessness of those verses showcase the character’s desire for chaos and destruction, in this case of the poem structure, and his intense hatred for all things orderly and peaceful with the enjambment of each line.
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: 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.
