Marxism and Literature

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams

Review by: Berel Lang
Source: The Philosophical Review , Oct., 1978, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 642-644
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2184473
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BOOK REVIEWS
MARXISM AND LITERATURE. By RAYMOND WILLIAMS. New York,

Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. 217. $10.00 (cloth); $2.95 (paper).
This is a frustrated as well as a frustrating book. Presented by its pub-

lisher as one in a new series of "Marxist Introductions" meant both to
introduce and to "make an original contribution" to the relation be-
tween Marxist theory and other intellectual disciplines, Marxism and
Literature realizes neither intention. It has little to say about the historical
background-past or future- of the central issues in Marxist aesthetics
and literary theory, and it stints on literary examples which its own con-
ceptual distinctions are supposed to illuminate. The result is a work
about (and sympathetic to) Marxism which turns out to be ahistorical
and abstract in the pejorative senses of both those terms which Marxism
itself has so pointedly criticized. The moments when the author, who is
Professor of Drama at Cambridge and who has elsewhere written
acutely about Communications as a social institution, brings to bear his
knowledge of the making and consuming of literature are rewarding;
but these are also few and difficult to extricate.
Williams divides his book into three sections, each composed of brief
topical chapters, often with no connecting link between them. (Sty-
listically, Marxism and Literature thus elaborates the form of Keywords
[1976] in which Williams had the valuable idea of composing an "ideo-
logical dictionary" of common concepts; there, too, I would note, he
came up short on historical origins.) It is not, however, until the third
section, titled "Literary Theory," that literature becomes the center of
focus; thus, more than two-thirds of the volume passes in a discussion of
the "Basic Concepts" (Section I) and "Cultural" (Section II) of Marxism
in general before the subject of the book's title comes up for discussion.
The elements of Marxist theory that are given individual chapters fall
under standard headings-"Base and Superstructure," "Determina-
tion," "Ideology," and so on. (One wonders if each volume in the series
of Introductions will spend time re-acquainting the reader with these
concepts; why not perhaps an Introduction to the Introductions?)
Williams' position as an interpreter of Marxism emerges clearly if not
explicitly from this discussion, in particular his emphasis on the dynamic
or fluid character of the historical process. So, for example, in the
account of base and superstructure according to which the former shapes
both the variety and individual character of social institutions, we must
realize that the terms of the distinction are themselves in process "' . ..
'The base' is itself a dynamic and internally contradictory process . ..
(82). Again, with respect to language, and contra Saussure and the
structuralists: "The internal dynamics of the sign .. . must be seen as
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BOOK REVIEWS
necessarily connected with the social and material as well as the formal
dynamics of the system as a whole" (43). The line between science and
ideology must also be challenged, since it presupposes "the received (and
unexamined) assumptions of 'positive, scientific knowledge,' freed of
the 'ideological bias' of all other observers" (64). In a separate chapter,
Williams makes much of Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" which, far
beyond its original political reference, turns for Williams into an
account of the "realized complex of experiences, relationships and
activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits" (Williams'
words, 112)-a metaphor, in effect, for the structure of historical reality
as such.
Williams' account of these issues, with its strong overtones of pragma-
tism, resembles that of numerous contemporary "humanistic" inter-
preters (for example, Kolakowski, Petrovic, Vazquez); unlike most of
this group, however, Williams ignores the fact that the adequacy of his
account is not self-evident either as an historical reconstruction of
Marxism or as a philosophical position. Until recently, in fact, the
weight of the critical tradition has been in the opposite direction-
emphasizing the difference, for example, between science and ideology (if
only to preserve Marxism's own claims as a science), arguing for the
determinant force of the base with respect to superstructure; even, in
Stalin's remarkable essay on "Marxism in Linguistics" (most remark-
able perhaps for the position it takes), proposing for language a status
independent of social history or change. Obviously, Williams is entitled
to a place in one camp or the other of these Marxist schismatics (there
is sufficient distance between Marx and the Marxists, it seems, to war-
rant applying the term to both camps); but it is hard to understand why
or even how he could claim that place without letting on that he is
coming down on one side in a continuing argument. Moreover, the test
for any proposed resolution of such issues as they affect the analysis of
literature lies in its power to explain specific literary "facts"-and
Williams rarely provides instances of how his account works, let alone of
how it works better (or more faithfully) than do alternate interpretations
of Marxism, or than do philosophical accounts which are alternatives to
Marxism.
To be sure, Williams affords insight into the social mechanism by
which literature has been institutionalized. So, for example, his com-
ments on the development of the concept of literature as an historical
corollary to the concepts of taste and "imaginative" writing; his parsing
of the term "aesthetic" as initially an antihistorical (art as noninstru-
mental) but finally only an ahistorical category; his general comments
on the evolution of genre-distinctions within literature. But these
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BOOK REVIEWS
glimpses, too, are left unsustained. We see nothing, for example, of the
social context for the 18th and 19th century discussions which converge
on the concepts of the "aesthetic" or of taste; and although it is sugges-
tive to learn that ideological values distinguishing literary forms (for
example, between fiction and nonfiction) have social-in this case,
bourgeois-origins, the force of that suggestion fades as we hear by way
of evidence that in "pre-bourgeois" conceptions of literature "verse
normally included what would now be called 'historical' or 'philosoph-
ical' or 'descriptive' or 'didactic' or even 'instructional' writing, as well
as what would now be called 'imaginative' or 'dramatic' or 'fictional' or
'personal' writing and experience" (147). For whom? one asks-
Aristotle? Quintillian? Dante? And Williams does not stay to answer.
In sum, then, the apercus which Marxism and Literature provides hardly
warrant its claims as an introduction and as a contribution to what is
recognizably one of the important contemporary areas of aesthetics and
critical theory. In comparison: as an introduction, Terry Eagleton's
Marxism and Literary Criticism is informative and also manages to go
beyond the material it recapitulates; Frederic Jameson's writings (for
example, Marxism and Form) which are less designedly informational
indicate the potential theoretical reach of Marxist criticism. I juxtapose
these two current sources to Marxism and Literature mainly to suggest that
the intentions set for the latter might-as well as should-be realized;
Marxism and Literature itself, however, adds little to what has been done.
BEREL LANG
University of Colorado, Boulder
LANGUAGE, MIND, AND KNOWLEDGE. Minnesota Studies in the

Philosophy of Science, vol. 7. Edited by KEITH GUNDERSON. Minne-
apolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press, 1975. Pp. vii, 424.
$17.75.
Some philosophical volumes, like good wines, are improved by seven

years of aging before consumption, but usually the proceedings of con-
ferences should be consumed sooner as verite ordinaire. This collection
derives from a 1968 conference and has not been improved by the
lengthy delay. Almost all of the contributions concern knowledge of
language and questions about what aspects of language are "in the
mind," but the papers vary widely in scope, style and presuppositions.
The first paper, by David Lewis, presents a refinement of the defini-
tion of convention discussed in his Convention. In "Languages and
language," a convention is a particular type of regularity in action or
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Review

Reviewed Work(s): Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2184473

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