THE HIDDEN AGENDAS OF LITERATURE?

When Marx paused from pondering economics to think about literature – more to the point, when he wanted to show how literature reflected the economic reality that underpins everything[1] – he came up with the theory of ideology.

     The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms explains the concept as follows: “Literature is permeated by the ideology of the era and class from which it is derived.”

     That sounds unexceptionable enough: a statement, indeed of the obvious.  Shakespeare’s plays seem primarily to reflect the concerns of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; regardless of when or where they are ostensibly set.    Or consider a fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. Two major wars, one technological, one ideological; the incomprehension with which the returning warriors are treated; post-war socialism.  It all seems very like twentieth-century Britain at one remove.  Marx himself was permeated with his personal ideology: that of a rebellious nineteenth-century bourgeois German Jew who didn’t get a professorship. 

     The sting in the tail is the ‘class’ bit.  If one assumes, as is implied, that all literature is written by, or in the interests of, the ruling class, then literature reflects and reinforces the values of those with the money.

     The problem with this – and it may be the fault of Marx’s disciples rather than of Marx himself – is the impression it gives that writers have automatically been the stalwarts of whatever establishment they found themselves in, and concerned with propping up the status quo.  And while there is an element of truth – especially when writers relied on patrons for economic survival – it is striking just how counter-cultural many literary figures have been. 

     If we include Biblical writers among our examples – for the Bible is literature, whatever else it may be – then Jeremiah was persecuted by his superiors for his opinions, and Isaiah was reputedly sawn in half.  St Paul wrote some of his epistles while chained to a Roman centurion, and the John of Revelation was in the salt mines.  Those who see the Bible as the archetypal establishment text might reflect that Tyndale was strangled and burned by the Establishment for translating it, as Paul was beheaded by the Roman establishment for producing it in the first place.

     Malory was in prison when he compiled the Le Morte Darthur, and prison – for his political views – was where Richard Lovelace wrote what is arguably his best poem. Milton would probably have been sentenced to death if he hadn’t been blind. The Pilgrim’s Progress – with its unflattering depiction of the ruling class in the Vanity Fair episode – is another prison-generated text. 

     Alexander Pope’s Catholicism debarred him from university, and the effectiveness of Swift’s satire cost him promotion.  Voltaire was in the Bastille for an article actually written by some one else; although he would probably have written it had he thought of it.  Thomas Mann, rejecting the plaudits of the Nazis, chose exile... 

     Blake was put on trial for suspected subversion.  Shelley was kicked out of Oxford.  Byron was kicked out of English society, and – effectively – out of England.  And then there was the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. 

    St Paul and Wilde may have been poles part in their opinions, but both were united in their refusal to compromise with their respective controlling classes.  

     In James 4:4, to be the friend of the World (i.e. worldly society) is to be the enemy of God.  Contrary to the tidiness of Marxist reductionism, a significant number of writers seem to have been at odds with the World.  And regardless of actual religious persuasion: in their contempt for the World, the God-intoxicated Bunyan and the God-hating Shelley are at one.

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[1] It is typical of Marx that he should have chosen to focus on Timon of Athens: the most money-driven of Shakespeare’s plays, but hardly the one that the average Shakespeare admirer would take as representative.