Reviewed by Roger Marheine
Marxist Literary Criticism Today by Barbara Foley. (London: Pluto Press, 2019. $16.50. 227 pages.)
Published in 2019 just as Covid was about to engulf humanity, Barbara Foley’s Marxist Literary Criticism Today (MLCT) has been somewhat overlooked and not given the credit it deserves. Quite frankly, it should be viewed as an instant classic in Marxist studies.
The book both follows in and goes beyond the grand narrative tradition of Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) and Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature (1977), Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and Francis Mulhern’s anthology, Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992). Most significantly, Foley’s work is the first introduction to Marxist literary analysis in over three decades.
Barbara Foley is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey, she serves on the Editorial Board of Science & Society, and she has authored over seventy academic articles and six major books, including the magisterial Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (1993). In the 1980s, while at Northwestern University in Chicago, her activism led to her participation in a protest against the Nicaraguan Contras; subsequently, she was denied tenure. Her praxis continued while at Rutgers, as she routinely participated in protests against U.S. imperialist wars and for social justice in the community. For twelve years, she was President of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Languages Association, often drafting position statements and encouraging faculty activism. In her “Acknowledgement” section, she cites her reading group, the “WMDs,” (Wielders of Marxist Discourse) as an ongoing inspiration for her work. Her exemplary praxis stands out as Barbara Foley is arguably the ranking American Marxist literary theorist-activist.
If you read one book on Marxist literary theory, MLCT would be an excellent choice. Its lucidity, its inclusion of scores of diverse texts, and its sharply applied Marxist theory are impressive. The book reflects serious insight on every page.
MLCT will be useful to entry level students who wish to understand Marxism (perhaps for the first time), but also helpful to those cultural thinkers who have plowed through the obtuse and arcane writings of authors within a variety of academic detours from Structuralism to Deconstruction to Post-Modernism. Because Foley is both a teacher and an activist, she seeks to clarify foundational concepts within Marxism, offers original and innovative reflections upon Marxist theory, and points toward the future of struggle itself. Foley seeks to generate ideas that help us change the world, especially during our current period of stifling neo-liberal hegemony.
The text is divided into two major parts. “Part I: Marxism” entails roughly one-third of the book and focuses on general Marxist concepts, including Historical Materialism, Political Economy, and Ideology. “Part II: Literature” directly addresses literary theory and features three subsections: Literature and Literary Criticism, Marxist Literary Criticism, and Marxist Pedagogy. The book contains a comprehensive Bibliography (twenty-nine pages) and informative Index.
Foley clarifies her purpose: “Given the inevitable impact of dominant ideologies on both individual writers and the literary conventions they deploy, a good deal of our attention will be devoted to ideology critique”. Asserting that Marxists must “always historicize,” she emphasizes “our exploration [is] how historically driven ideological contradictions work themselves out in individual works.”
She dismisses the easy sectarianism of some “Marxists” who only negate politically incorrect art: “The Marxist critic is not a scold, seeking out political shortcomings for exposure and punishment. Rather the goal of Marxist criticism—and pedagogy– is the development of a fuller dialectical understanding of the social totality giving rise to both doctrines and structures of feeling whether these clarify or obfuscate (italics added)” the historical reality.
In Part One, Foley shows full command of general Marxist theory, by historicizing dominant neo-liberal ideology. The cultural apparatus of the neo-liberal era champions a defeatism of economic justice campaigns, and promotes the psychology of obfuscation. She clarifies that personal isolation and psychological despair conflate to prevent meaningful assessments of workers’ historical conditions. Foley argues that instead of class struggle against exploitation, activists have turned to fragmented concerns, disparate issues, and thus divided agendas.
In the absence of a proletarian or precariat leadership, individual despair is fetishized, divorced from social-economic forces and is often portrayed in painful but simplistic family dysfunction stories. Political oppression as a focus gives way to sexual explorations and their discontents. Identity and happiness are reduced to sexuality transitions or ethnocentrism. Preoccupation with pronouns and gender neutral restrooms cancel out larger historical analyses.
Foley’s discussion of “alienation” demonstrates how that concept emerges in very different contexts, across cultures and historical periods. Standard (bourgeois) psychological conceptualizations of depression decontextualize despair and focus on an individual’s ability to adjust and adapt to capitalism’s most egregious oppressions. Foley’s historical materialist account of alienation demonstrates that psychological affliction is inevitably rooted in historical conditions.
Foley compares five literary examples of alienation. First, she cites nineteenth century English poet Matthew Arnold who describes a “longing like despair,” which Foley observes is “a certain melancholy pleasure in contemplating the unchangeable loneliness of the human condition.” This is the comfortable alienation of elites who maintain the hopelessness of our social circumstances even as they live quite well within ivory towers and protected academic enclaves.
In contrast to Arnold’s assertions, Foley selects a poem of alienation directly rooted within working class oppression. In “Boy with His Hair Cut Short,” a 1938 poem by Muriel Rukeyser, a nameless boy and his sister maintain a futile optimism that he will get a job. The sister says, “You’ll surely find something, they can’t keep turning you down.” By not naming the two, Rukeyser posits them as representatives of the Depression Era’s masses of unemployed. Foley clarifies that they lack insight into their historical circumstances: “[T]hey misinterpret their situation. They cannot see beyond their brown room; what Marx called ‘the dull compulsion of economic relations’ confines them within the limits of dominant ideology.’” Their type of alienation can be seen everywhere in the U.S. today. Individuals fail to find work, are unable to pay for housing or food, and succumb to the most egregious living conditions.
Foley’s third example is the poem, “I Swallowed an Iron Moon,” (2014) by Xu Lizhi, the Chinese Foxconn worker who committed suicide by jumping from his seventeenth story workplace. Xu’s compelling imagery includes the swallowing of “industrial waste water” and “unemployment forms” that have mapped out his “rusted life.” Xu’s despair is rooted in his view that his situation is hopeless, that there is no future for Foxconn workers: “our youth died young, I spread across my country/ a poem of shame.” Foley documents that Apple earns an annual average of $400,000 per employee, mostly from Chinese Foxconn labor. Xu’s personal alienation entails our own consumption and commodity fetishism as we encounter the ubiquity of Apple products.
Significantly, Foley follows with a comparison of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats and Jamaica’s Claude McKay. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1919) projects and ominous yet vague foreboding. Its famous line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” references the collapse of the stable, the ordinary routine that crumbles during political crisis–especially revolution. Foley clarifies that Yeats encapsulates the despair felt by anti-revolutionary moderates when all moderation wavers: “There is a crisis in the hegemony of dominant ideologies.” Foley links Yeats’s troubled imagery to the consciousness of elites who fear militant disruption of the unjust social contract.
In sharp contrast to Yeats, the Jamaican poet, Claude McKay authored “If We Must Die,” as a response to America’s horrendous racial violence in 1919. McKay insists upon passionate intensity, a dynamic resistance. Yeats laments the passing of an era to the unknown future of rebellion. McKay celebrates the disruption, “dying but [always] fighting back.” Unlike the Chinese Xu, McKay lives in a revolutionary era and embraces its ideology. Foley’s historical materialist analysis clarifies different forms of alienation and despair. In bourgeois psychology, alienation and despair become conflated within a common pathology. In Foley’s assessment, one’s class position and ideological perspective define alienation quite differently. Elites “suffer” a vague ennui (Arnold) or a reactionary response to rebellion for social justice (Yeats). Working class despair is rooted in a failure of class analysis (“Boy…Haircut”), or the sense of revolutionary hopelessness (Xu). Foley posits working class rebellion (McKay) as the cleansing antidote to psychological despair. Today, as we endure the stifling neuroses permeating neoliberal culture, we are well-served by Foley’s critique of alienation.
Foley assails the bourgeois notion that art should be politically neutral, should stand alone (“art for art’s sake”), and should suggest but never assert truths or make overt arguments. A hallmark example of the neutrality position was Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” a 1926 poem that translates as “The Art of Poetry.” Foley notes the poem was a kind of manifesto for Modernism, and the right wing “New Critics,” who insisted on imagism over concept and showing over telling. Most significantly, this movement coincided with the great revolutionary movements in Russia and elsewhere. Such art not only retreats from social struggle but insists on a separation of art and history. Ultimately, a vacuous yet viciously anti-communist movement, the New Critics dominated major American academies well into the 1960s.
Foley reviews Marx’s thoughts on literature, by citing his admiration for English authors, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. She quotes Marx’s claims that these writers provide “graphic and eloquent pages” that reveal “more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together.”
She shows that Engels admired Heinreich Heine’s “Song of the Silesian Weavers” (1844). The Silesian weavers had revolted in mass against their factory conditions. Foley reviews Lenin’s admiration for Tolstoy’s writing which exhibited his compassion for the peasants as a revolutionary force, yet as Lenin emphasized, Tolstoy’s analysis was historically eclipsed by the proletariat. She cites the English communist William Morris who argued that aesthetic pleasures were central to a communist society. Morris’ News From Nowhere, portrayed a revolution firmly grounded within historical materialism. Foley reminds us of German Communist Bertolt Brecht’s famous adage that “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Brecht’s statement insisted on breaking from the mimetic theory of art (art as a mirror to human society) as asserted by the ancient Greek, Aristotle.
Foley traces the famous debates between Brecht and Gyorgy Lukacs on Communist literary aesthetics. Lukacs’s contributions were significant especially his work on reification. Foley praises Brecht’s observations on art during fascism. She quotes Brecht’s claim that, “the dehumanization of capitalism in its fascist phase,” requires new art forms that unmask the prevailing social views as merely the views of those in power. Brecht’s views are for Foley, “first and foremost an assault upon the dominant ideologies producing false notions of totality.”
Finally, Foley provides an overview of late 20th century’s retreat from critiques of exploitation including those of Theodor Adorno and others, notably in the Frankfurt School. Foley notes wryly that Adorno “was skeptical about the desirability of proletarian revolution.” She argues that Adorno advanced “anti-realist modernism” seen in such works by Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame). Beckett’s nihilism became fashionable and paved the way for the dreary dismissal of all “realisms.” Consider the postmodernist, Jean JacquesLyotard’s rejection of “all grand narratives.” Instead of historical materialist methodology, Lyotard insists on history as fragmented, hopelessly opaque, and static. Foley traces the parallel insistence by Britain’s neo-liberal prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who argued that “There is no alternative” (TINY)–the ironic assurance that all politics is for nil, as she pursued the vicious neoliberal assault on British workers, particularly the coal miners. Foley makes clear that post-modernism is the hand maiden of neo-liberalism and is fundamentally an assault on the political imagination.
Foley displays particular insights in the depiction of race and racism within American letters. She criticizes Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American literary classic, as revealing the limits of Twain’s liberal imagination: “Negation as movement forward was, in Twain’s eyes, impossible; the text’s reification of Jim…corresponds with Twain’s deeply pessimistic view that the only available negation was movement backward.” Twain’s apparent opposition to racism was blunted by his historical period encompassing intense racial terror– the period after Reconstruction. Twain’s limited imagination could not come to grips with race as a “structure in dominance,” aided and abetted by the state’s complicity as a function of the needs of capital to ensure a compliant Black workforce.
In contrast to Twain’s work, Foley cites Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. She reveals her skillful use of radical pedagogy when she declares, “If Huck Finn is taught alongside a text like Frederick Douglass’s…, Twain’s portraiture of both slavery and racism displays both his entrapment within the dominant ideologies that his text appears to contest.” Foley contrasts Twain with Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, the story of the naïve Spanish elite who could not grasp that a rebel slave force had seized their ship. Unlike Twain, Douglass and Melville grasped the critical need for slave rebellion, and by implication the need for a greater class revolt.
MLCT impresses with historical materialist clarifications. Time and again, Foley reflects on comparisons and contradictions that startle with their originality, linking so-called “high” culture with mass distribution creativities. Who else could link Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman, Richard Wright’s Native Son and Shakespeare’s King Lear, Marge Piercy and T.S. Eliot, Sophocles’ Antigone and Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the hip hop group NWA (N-ggers With Attitude) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s ”We Call Them Greasers,” E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Gray with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Irish poet W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” with Claude McKay’s “If we must die,” and Kendrick Lamarr’s “Damn?” Recently, renowned Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson passed away. Jameson, a giant in literary studies, contributed greatly to Marxist literary criticism. However, Jameson was not an activist outside elite academic circles, and his prose tends toward the esoteric and even at times, the obtuse.
Foley makes no such error. Her writing is grounded in the activist’s perspective, to communicate lucidly and invite the reader to grasp the implications for their praxis. MLCT is a masterful work of historical materialism, a much needed Marxist critical text that clarifies our current cultural conditions and shows a path forward. It is quite frankly an extraordinary scholarly work, revealing remarkable conceptual clarity, and composed in a masterfully lucid prose. Barbara Foley has provided us with a text of enormous use value.
–Roger Marheine taught English at Pasadena City College and is now retired. His interests include war culture and resistance literature.
