Influence of Karl Marx on Modern Literature

Introduction:
Marx and Freud have influenced life and literature in the twentieth century more
deeply and extensively than the earlier great thinkers and scientists like Copernicus
and Darwin influenced the life and literature in their own respective eras. Karl
Marx (181883) and Sigmund Freud (18561939) had very different fields and
orientations.
While Marx was basically a social philosopher, Freud began his career as a doctor
specializing in the physiology of the nervous system and the treatment of such
disorders as neurosis and hysteria. He soon became the founder of psychoanalysis
and thereby one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. And as regards
Marx, he started with the study of Hegelian dialectic at the university in Berlin and
Bonn but soon gave a new direction to socio-political thought by publishing, along
with Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). This makes him the "father of
Communism." Freud's psychoanalytical theories and Marx's Communism both
proved revolutionary and highly impactful throughout the world.
Let us now consider the impact of Marx on twentieth-century English literature.
Marxian Thought and English Literature:
Marx's philosophy is known as "dialectical materialism-." No place is given by him
to the soul or the spirit. According to him, religion is the opium of the masses
which keeps them in a world of material reality. He adopted the Hegelian dialectic
to give a materialist account of social formations. His concept of class conflict is a
basic point. Conflicts arise from the desire to control the means of production. He
attacked the laissez-faire policy which allows the industrialists and capitalists to
exploit the working class without let or hindrance. Marx was for Communism, i.e.,
the supremacy of the community of workers rather than of a few individuals in
control of the entire wealth and its generating sources. The proletariat should rule a
country jointly instead of a king or an elected parliament, which normally protects
vested masses throughout the world. His teachings inspired the Russian Revolution
and then the Chinese, not to speak of another dozen or more on smaller scales
throughout the world.
Fourfold Influence:
So far as English literature is concerned, Marx's impact manifests itself in four
different ways:
(i) A greater concern for the poor exploited masses, without any overt projection of
the Marxian ideology. Even non-Marxian writers in the twentieth century tend to
give a much greater representation of the working class in their works. In the
novels of Arnold Bennett, for example, we have mostly working-class heroes. And
Lawrence's proletarian hero sometimes walks away with an aristocratic lady.
(ii) Use of literature as a means of communistic propaganda. See, for example, the
English Socialist theatre of today.
(iii) A tendency to subvert the conventional literary forms and techniques by
condemning them as constructs of the bourgeoisie. Here the Marxians are on the
avant-garde ground.
(iv) A reaction against the Marxian ideology which seems to encourage statism as
against the concept of the sanctity and freedom of the individual and abject
materialism as against spiritualism and "the higher values of life." Witness George
Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm.
Influence pa-Poetry:
Let us now consider the influence of Marx on English poetry, drama, novel, and
literary criticism of the twentieth century, in this order.
The impact of Marx is most clearly discernible in the work of Oxford poets of the
1930s, viz., W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis
MacNeice. They were committed leftists the aim of whose poetry was the
propagation of Communist ideology. Poetry in their hands become political action,
a contribution to the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie the ruling elite. At
least two of the four Oxford poets got actually involved in the Spanish Civil War.
Auden is now given the status of a major poet of the twentieth century. In the
1930s he was the voice of his generation. Linda Williams observes: "His verse is
full of topical reference to the social and international crises of the time; it gives
direct expression to the anxieties of the contemporary intelligentsia as perhaps no
other writer has done." Spender for some time remained a member of the
Communist Party and as such supported the Republicans' cause in the Spanish
Civil War. His poetry is less overtly propagandist than that of Day-Lewis.
MacNeice had Socialist leanings but was not a committed leftist.
Influence on Drama:
G.B. Shaw was a Fabian, a mild kind of Socialist, to start with. Several of his
"problem plays" are built around the problems created by the economic
exploitation of one section of society by another. His first play Widowers' Houses
is about slum-landlordism. Mrs. Warren's Profession is about the economics of
prostitution as a profession in a laissez-faire, exploitative society. And so on. Shaw
had the passion of a debunker rather than of a rigid ideologue. Galsworthy in his
plays like Strife, Justice, and The Silver Box tries to highlight class struggle,
miscarriage of justice, the irrationality of consigning criminals to solitary
imprisonment, and so on. In the 1950s several dramatists came under the influence
of Brecht. The most important of them was Arden who used the theatre like Shaw
for a thorough exploration of political and social ideas. Contemporary British
theatre is dominated by Socialists like David Edgar and David Hare.
Influence on the Novel:
Of all the literary genres it is the novel that allows an author to represent life the
most comprehensively-even more than he can in drama because whereas drama
only shows, the novel can both a show and tell. That is why the novel all over the
world has been the most eligible literary medium of propaganda. But, strangely, in
England no Marxian novels worth the name have appeared in modern times;
propagandists have used drama instead.
But if there has been practically no English novels based on Marxian theories like
the materialistic basis of social formation and class struggle, there have been
novels representing the life of the poor, exploited classes with all its unrelieved
gloom. The two novelists who wrote such novels with some distinctiveness were
George Gissing and George Moore. Gissing was influenced more by Schopenhauer
than by Marx. Cazamian observes about him: "Bitterness sank to the core of his
nature, and permeated all his fibers; it became the very food of his imagination
Gissing describes the diseases of society without any hope of curing them. He
believes neither in the philanthropy of the rich nor in the revolt of the poor." In his
novel Demos, "the career of a plebeian agitator...teaches us the vanity of the
socialist dream."
George Moore, unlike Gissing, was a rare combination of an uncompromising
realist and a refined aesthete. He tries to make beautiful artifacts out of the gloomy
ugliness of life. Cazamian says: "George Moore reconciles the audacity of crude,
brutal observation with the sensuous refinement of a voluptuous aesthete.
George Orwell's well-known novels Animal Farm and 1984 are satires on
Socialism and Stalinism. The former has the form of an allegorical beast fable. The
latter came after World War II. According to Andrew Roberts, this novel is "a
vision of a world "ruled by dictatorships of the Stalinist style, taken to an extreme
in which private life and private thought are all but eradicated by surveillance,
propaganda, and the systematic perversion of language."
Influence on Literary Criticism:
The Marxian thought has had a tremendous impact on literary criticism not only in
Socialist countries but the world over. Marx did not have a comprehensive theory
of art and literature, but his fierce attack on bourgeois idealism has given new
directions to literary criticism. To Marx literature was only part of the
"superstructure" of which the "base" was formed by economic conditions and
dispensation of a society. In its purity Marxian criticism tends to be simplistic if
not severely blinkered. But it has its own insights to offer. The Marxian school has
in its ranks such great critics as Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson,
Gramsci, and Macherey, to name just a few. Several latter-day critics have tried to
relate Marxism with Structuralism, psychoanalytic theories, and even
Reconstruction, leading to new insights if not comprehensive systems. In England
Raymond Williams (192188) has been the best-known Marxian critic. Among
the practicing critics in today's England Terry Eagleton (1948 ) is by far the
most eminent.