Marxism and Literary Criticism by Eagleton Terry;

Author:Eagleton, Terry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The Reflectionist Theory

The question of partisanship in literature is bound up to some extent with the problem of how works of literature relate to the real world. Socialist realism’s prescription that literature should teach certain political attitudes assumes that literature does indeed (or at least ought to) ‘reflect’ or ‘reproduce’ social reality in a fairly direct way. Marx, interestingly, does not himself use the metaphor of ‘reflection’ about literary works, [10] although he speaks in The Holy Family of Eugène Sue’s novel being in some respects untrue to the life of its times; and Engels could find in Homer direct illustrations of kinship systems in early Greece. [11] Nevertheless, ‘reflectionism’ has been a deep-seated tendency in Marxist criticism, as a way of combating formalist theories of literature which lock the literary work within its own sealed space, marooned from history.

In its cruder formulations, the idea that literature ‘reflects’ reality is clearly inadequate. It suggests a passive, mechanistic relationship between literature and society, as though the work, like a mirror or photographic plate, merely inertly registered what was happening ‘out there’. Lenin speaks of Tolstoy as the ‘mirror’ of the Russian revolution of 1905; but if Tolstoy’s work is a mirror, then it is, as Pierre Macherey argues, one placed at an angle to reality, a broken mirror which presents its images in fragmented form, and is as expressive in what it does not reflect as in what it does. ‘If art reflects life’, Bertolt Brecht comments in A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948), ‘It does so with special mirrors’. And if we are to speak of a ‘selective’ mirror with certain blindspots and refractions, then it seems that the metaphor has served its limited usefulness and had better be discarded for something more helpful.

What that something is, however, is not obvious. If the cruder uses of the ‘reflection’ metaphor are theoretically sterile, more sophisticated versions of it are not entirely adequate either. In his essays of the 1930s and 1940s, Georg Lukács adopts Lenin’s epistemological theory of reflection: all apprehension of the external world is just a reflection of it in human consciousness.[12] In other words, he accepts uncritically the curious notion that concepts are somehow ‘pictures’ in one’s head of external reality. But true knowledge, for both Lenin and Lukács, is not thereby a matter of initial sense-impressions: it is, Lukács claims, ‘a more profound and comprehensive reflection of objective reality than is given in appearance’. In other words, it is a perception of the categories which underlie those appearances—categories which are discoverable by scientific theory or (for Lukács) great art. This is clearly the most reputable form of the reflectionist theory, but it is doubtful whether it leaves much room for ‘reflection’. If the mind can penetrate to the categories beneath immediate experience, then consciousness is clearly an activity—a practice which works on that experience to transform it into truth. What sense this makes of ‘reflection’ is then unclear. Lukács, indeed, wants finally to preserve the idea

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