BOOKS
473
Gradgrindean and calculating utilitarianism and an unmediated leap into a
left-wing utopia. If criticism seeks to represent or know a literary work , it
becomes a mere exercise of authoritarian power, imprisoning the object in a
specular image. It must instead be "nonrepresentational," must become
itself the "writerly" discourse Barthes yearns for.
Lukacs long ago analyzed this curious combination of a crude positivism
with a solipsistic idealism (the essays are reprinted in
Writer
and
Cn'tic).
In
philosophical terms , current French thought has discovered Nietzsche and
stuck there . But later thinkers as diverse as Whitehead, Heidegger, and
Polanyi have all carried philosophical investigation onto quite different
ground . Within literary criticism, as Lukacs argues, the answer to the false
dichotomy posed by formalism and its "radical" critique is to recall-yet
again-that by "imitation" Aristotle never meant "photographic realism."
" Representation" in literature moves dialectically from reality-that is, from
the essential forces determining existing social conditions-to the representa–
tion of reality through form , through those compositional principles which
are
the author's" ideology" ; and thence back to reality through "practice,"
through the "tendentious humanism" which, in Lukacs's analysis, connects
great literature with the dynamic , evolving forces in concrete reality . Neither
reality nor its representation in thought and literature is a static, fixed struc–
ture. Both terms and their interrelations unfold dialectically. Lukacs 's criti–
cism grasps this dialectic process as a totality without falling into a naive
positivism or a formalistic idealism. "Representation" is dynamic, dialectic ,
and finally critical.
Sarrasine
protests tendentiously and humanistically
against the mutilating reduction of artistic and all other human relations-of
human beings themselves- to commodity terms, a reduction against which
the narrator and the woman he tells his story to are equally powerless.
Barthes's halfhearted economic allusions, further vitiated by the attempt to
cram Saussure and Derrida down Marx 's throat, are simply inadequate to
penetrate to the social relations which lie behind Balzac 's narrative and
behind literature itself. For that, we would need to draw on Lukacs , on Walter
Benjamin, and on the heritage of the Frankfurt School and "critical philos–
ophy." After half a century, these great thinkers are still grossly neglected ,
and at a time when mere eccentricities from Paris are followed with the closest
attention and touted everywhere. This essentially Marxist tradition could
restore to criticism its proper task, which is to develop flexible and precise
intellectual resources to analyze literature's power to represent the conditions
of our existence, that is , to interpret them and, through interpreting , help us
change them.
Donald Marshall
