BOOKS
297
Pierre Macherey's
A Theory of Literary Production
appeared in
1966, the year before Derrida launched deconstruction by publishing
three books, including
Of Grammatology.
Some polemical pages
against Barthes and an inconclusive essay on Borges might be read as
anticipatory replies to deconstruction. A marxist is hardly likely to
leave unchallenged a theory which claims that texts lift themselves by
their own bootstraps into the celestial void of cancelled meaning.
Macherey's mentor was Louis Althusser, who in the early sixties was
busy re-inventing marxism and passing off his own theories as a new
reading of Marx, radically original because utterly faithful. The
application of Althusserian theories of reading to literary criticism was
inevitable. Macherey's writing is predictably awful. He never sinks to
the leaden tedium of Derrida's baroque verbal shenanigans, but the
cause of the bad writing is the same: an indiscriminate ambition to be
"clever." What makes Macherey's application of Althusser interesting
is that he abandons the traditional defense of realism, long synony–
mous with marxist criticism, and instead adopts-with polemical
feints to cover his tracks-a modernist, formalist conception of the
literary work.
It
is autonomous, complex, contradictory (Cleanth
Brooks said "ironic"), and qualifies and tests mere ideas about experi–
ence ("ideology") by submitting them to the transmuting power of
form and dramatic perspective. The author's problem is not simply to
reflect reality, but to make a literary work, and in this labor he uses
forms bequeathed by earlier authors. Consequently, in some sense all
works are about the drama of their own creation.
Macherey attempts to graft this conception of literature onto
marxism by denying a single formalist dogma, unity.
If
present reality
can be captured in a unified, complete image, then change is unintel–
ligible. But history dynamically moves toward the classless society and
human liberation, impelled by real contradictions. Literature registers
this dynamism, but
py
means of its own specific, autonomous contra–
dictions. Macherey finds these in a clash between the author's "ideolog–
ical project, " his deliberate intention to reflect his times, and his choice
of formal means from the repertoire of literary history.
In
a long
reading of Jules Verne's
The Mysterious Island,
Macherey tries to
show how an intent to exhibit man's conquest of nature by science is
tested by Verne's choice of a form derived from Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe.
Macherey is too narrow-Goethe's
Faust
and the romailtic cult
of genius also lie behind Verne. But his point is to prove that when
ideological intention and formal means are brought together, both are
dialectically transformed in a way that illuminates the author's his tori-
