Marxist Literary Criticism Today by Barbara Foley;

Author:Barbara Foley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Symptomatic Reading

This recognition that many texts send out mixed ideological signals to their readers brings us to a consideration of the role played by ideological contradiction and symptomatic reading in Marxist criticism. When they focus upon ideology critique, Marxist critics often emphasize the ways in which literary works serve an apologetic function that sustains ruling-class hegemony. When they examine texts symptomatically, however—that is, as reflections, however inadvertent, of the social reality that they would deny or transcend—Marxist critics can also discover an objectively critical dimension in the texts they read. For just as society is riven by contradictions, so too are the literary works emerging from it; a given text’s failure fully to control the rhetorical signals it sends out to its readers can be taken as testimony to the irreconcilability of the social contradictions that have generated the text in the first place. Marxist critics can adopt this seemingly inconsistent interpretive stance—that is, viewing the text as signaling at once apology and critique—not because they have decided to bend the stick back in the direction of abstract humanism, now proposing that literary works, qua literature, somehow manage to transcend the limits of ideology and speak the truth about the human condition. Rather, this recovery of the text’s critical dimension hinges upon the proposition that the text’s relationship to its origins is oblique. The text does not wear its politics on its sleeve, so to speak; its relationship to what Marx called the “real foundation” needs to be ferreted out and brought to light. But when this is done, the recovery of origins enables an unmasking of the reasons for the masking.

These origins are, of course, in history: the project of symptomatic reading is premised upon the notion that history supplies the ground—the “untranscendable horizon,” as Jameson puts it—that enables critique in the first place. This ground is not just the historical context that helps the reader grasp the literary conventions relevant to a text or its references to contemporaneous sociological realities; much mainstream criticism also pays heed to such matters. Instead, for the Marxist, the literary work is constituted by its embeddedness in history; it cannot be understood apart from the ways in which it is shaped and constrained by material existence. The proposition that readers should “always historicize” does not require them to engage in extensive historical research in order to affix a given text in the circumstances of its production (although such grounding in the concrete particularities of the historical moment is indeed necessary at times). Rather, we are called upon to view a given text as a mediation—indeed, a series of mediations—of the contradictions shaping the world from which it has emerged. Even if the text eschews direct representation of that world, it is a response to that world, an answer to a question posed by that world. Lord of the Flies can thus be read, at least in part, as a reaction to the imagined threat of communism in the wake of World War II;

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