by Julian Markels
September 2003 ISBN: 1-58367-097-1 $19.00 paper 160 pp. Literary Studies
"Sophisticated theorizing and deft interpretations. . . . A significant contribution to Marxist theory and the theory of the novel." -- JIM PHELAN, Professor of English, Ohio State University and editor of Narrative
"An excellent work. . . . Literary critics, economists, and sociologists will find stimulating new approaches here to the vexed question of class in today's changing world." -- ANNETTE RUBINSTEIN, author of American Literature: Root and Flower and The Great Tradition in English Literature
"There are no books in this field as skilled, as beautifully written, as well-informed, and as fully and wonderfully accessible as The Marxian Imagination." -- JAMES KINCAID, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California
The Marxian Imagination is a fresh and innovative recasting of Marxist literary theory and a powerful account of the ways class is represented in literary texts.
Where earlier theorists have treated class as a fixed identity site, Markels sees class in more dynamic terms, as a process of accumulation involving many, often conflicting, sites of identity. Rather than examining the situations and characters explicitly identified in class terms, this makes it possible to see how racial and gender identities are caught up in the processes of accumulation that define class. Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of great literary works, often written by non-Marxists.
In a field notorious for its difficulty, it is also a remarkably accessible text. Its central arguments are constantly developed and tested against readings of important novels, ranging from Dickens' Hard Times to Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible. It concludes with a telling critique of the work of the major Marxist literary theorists, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson.
Table of Contents PART I: The Literary Representation of Class Chapter One - A Marxian Imagination Chapter Two - Class in Dickens from Hard Times to Little Dorrit Chapter Three - Representing Class in the Realist Novel PART II: Some Consequences for Critical Theory and Practice Chapter Four - "Socialism-Anxiety": The Princess Casamassina and Its New York Critics Chapter Five - The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur Chapter Six - Denying the Imagination in Marxian Cultural Studies: Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible <http://www.monthlyreview.org/marximaginationxcerpt.htm> Notes Index
About the Author JULIAN MARKELS is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University, Columbus, and the author of _The Pillar of the World: "Antony and Cleopatra" in Shakespeare's Development_ and _Melville and the Politics of Identity: From "King Lear" to "Moby Dick"_ [<http://www.press.uillinois.edu/pre95/0-252-01995-4.html>].
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/marxianimagination.htm> *****
***** Julian Markels, "Socialism-Anxiety: The Princess Casamassima and Its New York Critics," _College Literature_ 27.2 (Spring 2000), pp. 37-56
. . . In his 1907 Preface to the New York Edition, James recalls the novel's gestation with impassive assurance. He says that from his long habit of walking the streets, Hyacinth Robinson "sprang up for me out of the London pavement" as "some individual sensitive nature . . . capable of profiting by all the civilization, all the accumulations to which [the London streets] testify, yet condemned to see those things only from outside-in . . . mere wistfulness and envy and despair" (1908, 1:vi). His envy and despair lead him to adopt "an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social faith" (1:xvii), and for his story to arouse "pity and terror" it was then only necessary "that he should fall in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at the moment of his most feeling and most hating the famous `iniquity of its social arrangements'" (1:xvii).
All this sounds as if he was fully in command of a classical tragedy at the time he sat down to write. But in the tragedies to which James compares his, Hamlet and Lear arouse pity and terror by confronting two moral positions between which there is no easy choice, and the conflict between a love of worldly beauty and a vindictive social faith whose substance is mocked by inverted commas is not that sort of conflict. The beauty of the world will trump vindictiveness every time, and there can be neither pity, terror, nor much engaging suspense in watching it do that.
Yet James's condescension to socialism in the retrospect of the Preface is not what informs his novel, and neither is his implication in the Preface of having been in command of his subject from the beginning. Here is his notebook entry for August 10,1885, a month before The Princess's first installment was to appear:
It is absolutely necessary that at this point I should make the future evolution of The Princess Casamassima more clear to myself. I have never yet become engaged in a novel in which, after I had begun to write and send off my MS., the details had remained so vague . . . The subject of the Princess is magnificent, and if I can only give up my mind to it properly --- generously and trustfully -- the form will shape itself as successfully as the idea deserves. (James 1947, 68)
He was feeling his way at the time far more than he later acknowledged, and we can suppose that the details remaining vague to him pertained less to Hyacinth's love of beauty -- a subject on which James already felt more deeply than perhaps anyone else alive -- than to Hyacinth's social faith as a worthy competitor to that love. Here he would be breaking new personal ground, and here it can be useful to follow him initially in his letters written while the novel was in process.2
In these 1885-86 letters to his brother William, Grace Norton, and Charles Eliot Norton, James comments regularly on contemporary public affairs, which included a sex scandal involving a leading politician, a bomb set off in London by "Irish dynamiters," a military defeat in the Sudan, and a riot by the London unemployed, who smashed windows of houses three doors from James's while he was out of town -- or, in other words, multiple episodes of proletarian protest and colonial resistance to the British capitalism that socialism was trying to challenge (James 1974-84, 3:64).
Some of James's reaction to all this is standard hostility and denial: he says, for example, that no matter how the Home Rule debate turns out, the Irish will have a civil war in which "they will stew, in a lively enough manner, in their own juice" (1974-84, 3:122-3); and, in a classic reflex of hegemonic self-deception, he says that the London riot was the work not of the "real unemployed" but of"the great army of roughs and thieves" (3:115).3
All the more remarkable, then, amidst such statements are James's repeated reflections on the decline of England as a historical process transpiring before his fascinated eyes. To Charles Eliot Norton he compares the "rotten and collapsible" condition of the British upper classes to that of the French aristocracy before the Revolution, or even better, "the heavy, congested, and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down." But this time, he says, the barbarians will come up -- "from the black depths of the (in the people) enormous misery" (1974-84, 3:146). After telling William that the London riots were the work of roughs and thieves, he goes on to say that "there is, at any rate, immense destitution. Every one here is growing poorer -- from causes which, I fear, will continue" (3:115). And to Grace Norton he writes,
The possible malheurs, reverses, dangers, embarrassments, the "decline," in a word, of old England, go to my heart, and I can imagine no spectacle more touching, more thrilling and even dramatic, than to see this great, precarious, artificial empire, on behalf of which, nevertheless, so much of the strongest and finest stuff of the greatest race (for such they are) has been expended, struggling with forces which, perhaps, in the long run will prove too many for it. (James 1974-84, 3:64-5)
Thus overlapping his political temporizing is his vocational excitement at being a witness to history. He had insisted in "The Art of Fiction" on an analogy between painting and fiction -- "as the picture is reality, so the novel is history" -- and his sense of England's decline as thrilling and dramatic reflects an aroused historical imagination markedly misaligned with his personal politics (1984, 46). This may also explain his Notebook entry that the subject of The Princess is "magnificent" but that he has never been less clear about how to proceed. For if he sees no end to the "immense destitution" produced by Britain's "artificial Empire," then the socialism he incorporates in his "magnificent subject" asks to be dignified not only rhetorically, as a believably tragic alternative for his hero, but also historically, as capitalism's self-created antagonist. This combined pressure of socialism is enough to threaten James's personal politics, and in giving his mind generously to his novel so that its form would shape itself, he was impelled to plunge headlong into difficulties that he could not be confident in advance of negotiating.
The form that finally shaped itself was a Bildungsroman in which Hyacinth Robinson, a bastard child raised in poverty and apprenticed to a bookbinder, develops both the aesthetic sensibility of a skilled artisan and the proletarian sympathy of a wage-laborer. After becoming an anarchist and swearing before the great leader Hoffendahl to perform an assassination when called upon, he is introduced to the world of art and literature on a scale he could not have imagined by the Princess Casamassima, a breathtaking aristocrat sympathetic to anarchism. His deepening conflict as he awaits his signal is then represented mainly through his relations with the Princess and Millicent Henning, his childhood playmate of the London slums. And by the time his signal comes to assassinate the Duke, both women have betrayed him sexually, leaving him only his beloved London as a source of solace and guidance. By now London exists for him as both "an immeasurable breathing monster" and "the richest expression in the life of man" (James 1908, 2:266); and as if under its aegis, he turns his gun on himself.
. . . Beyond and behind the Princess and Millicent, Hyacinth has had all along a transcendent love for London in all the contradiction of its imperial history. His final impulse toward Millicent is inseparable from his love of London, and through all his oscillations between radical politics and civilized refinement, his travels to the country and the continent, London has remained his necessary element.
The London in whose East End are forty thousand men out of work is also the London in whose Hyde Park "He wanted to drive in every carriage, to mount on every horse, to feel on his arm the hand of every pretty woman in the place" (James 1908, 1:169-70). And after Medley and Paris and Venice have enlarged and deepened his first response to Hyde Park, he returns to London, where,
as the great city which was most his own lay round him under her pall like an immeasurable breathing monster he felt with a vague excitement . . . that it was the richest expression in the life of man. There were nights when everyone he met appeared to reek with gin and filth and . . . he wondered what fate there could be in the great scheme of things for a planet overgrown with such vermin. If it was the fault of the rich, . . . that made no difference and only shifted the shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effects. (James 1908, 2:266-68)
London's conjunction of proud imperial history with people reeking with filth constitutes its richness, and socialism's aroused opposition to this richness makes the terrestrial globe seem a visible failure.8 Hyacinth's vision here is tragic, and it sustains his commitment to the revolutionary cause despite his devastating reservations:
What was most in Hyacinth's mind was the idea . . . that the flood of democracy was rising over the world . . . that whatever it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom a magnificent energy . . . When this high healing uplifting tide should cover the world and float in the new era, it would be its own fault . . . if want and suffering and crime should continue to be ingredients of the human lot. (James 1908, 2:262-63)
. . . The revolution's energy is an historicized energy for which it can be held accountable, and it is for the sake of this accountability that Hyacinth resists the efforts of all who love him to release him from his oath. Here James's imagination reaches to socialism's anxiety for itself, and if Hyacinth is self-deluded, it is not in the political naivete with which he is often charged but in the error of judgment made by someone finely aware and richly responsible that led James to compare him with Hamlet and Lear.
The force of imagination that led James to connect bourgeois society's dominant anxiety with revolutionary socialism's emergent anxiety also led him toward Marx and Engels's tragic view of history as a contradictory process. Jeffrey Vogel argues that Marx and Engels saw the Enlightenment values of human rights and human progress as subject to an "irreconcilable conflict" that is "unavoidably painful" (1996, 36). Whereas liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill and John Rawls claim it is always possible to choose an alternative that can be justified to those victimized by one's choice, for Marx and Engels there is no way to justify to their victims such things as Greek slavery or North American genocide that were nevertheless instrumental to human progress:9 "Marx and Engels argue . . . that, during long periods of history, the opportunity for cultural and material progress and innovation by a few has depended on the extorted labor of the many" (41-42). Marx's lifelong admiration for classical Greece entailed an awareness that without slavery there could have been "no Plato, no Praxiteles, and no Parthenon" (39), and this parallels Hyacinth's awareness of London as both an "immeasurable breathing monster" and "the richest expression in the life of man."
Marx and Engels also recognized that the contemporary bourgeoisie are personally innocent of the evils of capitalism even if their class demise will end the tragic conflict between human rights and human progress. Yet for them revolution becomes at particular junctures a moral responsibility: "Marx clearly did side with the Paris Commune . . . even though he thought . . . that this first exemplary attempt at working-class democracy would fail . . . he rarely hesitates to say that certain protests against exploitation by the working-class and its political leaders are premature or utopian" (Vogel 1996, 57). Henry James's historical imagination does not reach to the question whether his revolutionists might be premature. What's crucial for him is the depth at which they are implicated in something as dramatic and thrilling as England's decline, and in Hyacinth Robinson's "healing uplifting tide" threatening to overwhelm a high civilization that also produces untold misery, James's finally actualized respect for socialism brings him to Marx and Engels's tragic sense of history. . . .
Markels is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and author of The Pillar of the World (1968) and Melville and the Politics of Identity (1993). ***** -- Yoshie
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