Marxism and literary history

Book Reviews

500 more to give pause for thought,

in this heavy but by no means ponderous Michael

volume. Shortland

University of Oxford

The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C, Kenneth 1986) 336 pp., $31.60/f20.

J Carpenter

(Cambridge

University

Press,

Scurvy probably killed over two million western Europeans between 1500 and 1800. Characteristically the disease crippled precisely the boldest and most venturesome explorers and traders and so provided a kind of natural barrier to exploration and trade. Scurvy also affected the outcome of military venturesoften because of differences in provisions, one army was virtually incapacitated by the disease while the opposing army was unaffected. Not surprisingly, therefore, this disease has had enormous political, economic and military ramifications. But scurvy has also had social consequences since during some historical periods some social classes were affected and others were not. Of course, the current opinion is that scurvy arises simply from adeficiency ofvitamin C, but there remain numerous unanswered questions and unresolved controversies about the vitamin and its need in human metabolism. Carpenter’s book is an excellent piece of work. He discusses the occurrence of scurvy in fifteenth century voyages of exploration and trade, in the British navy during the eighteenth century, in the arctic explorations of the nineteenth century, among infants of affluent families at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in various periods of war and famine throughout world history. Next come an interesting account of the discovery and isolation of Vitamin C and an examination of modern attemps to measure the requirements and to determine the role of the vitamin in human metabolism. Carpenter carefully and sympathetically considers the major theories that have been generated through the centuries to explain outbreaks of the disease. Throughout the book he gives thorough attention to the original sources and he scrupulously refrains from retrospective evaluation-the observations and theories are allowed to speak for themselves. Even his treatment of contemporary topics such as the controversy about the use of so-called megavitamins is even-handed and objective. Only in the last chapter, entitled ‘Retrospect’ does Carpenter evaluate earlier observations and theoriesin the light of contemporary beliefs. But here too Carpenter is quick to identify unanswered questions and to acknowledge that certain earlier observations are difficult to reconcile with existing theories. Carpenter’s book is richly footnoted and there is a bibliography of some seven hundred items. Anyone interested in further study of any chapter or topic can easily identify all the important relevant sources. All in all this is a remarkably fair, interesting, informative and useful book, and it is a valuable contribution to the field. K. Code11 Carter Brigham Young University, Utah

Marxism and Literary History, John Frow University Press, 1986), 275 pp., US$20.00 When the intellectual the oddest phenomena

(Cambridge,

Massachusetts:

Harvand

history of the late twentieth century comes to be written, one of with which that history will need to deal is the resurgence of

Book Reviews

50f

Marxism in English-speaking intellectual circles in the 1970s and 1980s. The oddity is less the fact of this resurgence than that it has been largely (in the United States, completely) independent of any political movements influenced by Marxist thinking. This divource from practical politics has led to it considering Marxism as primarily an intelectual phenomenon, separable from any actual historical attempt to organize society along Marxist principles. With only an occasional exception such as the work of E.P. Thompson, contemporary Anglo-Saxon Marxism has therefore neither engaged nor felt that it has needed to engage with the actual history of Marxism as a political force in the world; specifically, it has completely ignored the Eastern European experience and critique of Marxism. This does not mean, however, that this Marxism has operated within a purely Marxist frame of reference or been completely uncritical in its Marxism. But the primary nonMarxist tradition it has felt it needed to wrestle with has been that of Formalism and St~cturalism, from the work of Saussure and the Russian Formalists to that of Derrida and Foucault. The Marxist engagement with this tradition has sometimes been hostile,as can be seen in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory and Fredric Jameson’s The Prison House oflanguage. But the more enduring impulse, shared by both Eagleton and Jameson in other works, has been to try to marry Marxist and Structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Recognizing problems and gaps in classical Marxism, contemporary Marxist intellectuals have seen in post-structuralism a source of ideas to till in the gaps and solve the problems. This is the tradition within which Frow is working in Marxism andLiterary History.

Why has there been this impulse to complement Marxism with post-structuralism? Because it is painfully obvious that the cultural and aesthetic theory implicit in classical Marxism is utterly inadequate. Classical Marxism’s theory of culture is a reflection theory, in which cultural superstru~ures reflect an economic base and are ultimately determined by it. And the best art for classical Marxist aesthetics realistically reflects social, historical reality in a precise parallel to the way cultural superstructures reflect the base. Obviously this is not a very satisfactory theory of art and culture, so understandably Marxists want to move beyond it. Yet it is deeply questionable whether the Marxist alliance with post-structuralism is the right way to do so. Hans Robert Jauss in his wonderful essay, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, argues that Marxism will stay imprisoned by its reflection model as long as it focuses on the production of art and ignores its reception. But the only Marxist criticism that is compatible with Jauss’s insight is that being developed by Jerome McGann, who argues that textual scholarship is the best way to capture the concrete historical life of the work of art. Frow cites Jauss extensively and his title would seem to place him on the side of Jauss’s literary historicism, but his book is far more theory than history, precisely the kind of decontextualized theorizing Jauss has challenged so sharply. So Frow’s Marxism a~d~iterary~jstory offers us little that is traditionally Marxist and what it offers instead doesn’t seem to take us towards ‘literary history’ as much as away from it. It is certainly well understood by now that the main line of post-structuralist and deconstructive critical theory in the English-speaking world-despite its radical tone-has been quite conservative in its effect and implications. Its language of ‘undecidability’ and ‘aporias’ has simply been one more way to assert the autonomy (and therefore apolitical nature) of art; its finding the same deconstructive themes in all texts has been one more way to deny history and the reality of historical change; and finally, in an era of canon revision, deconstruction has held on to a restricted, already given and quite conservative notion of the canon. Frow of course sees all this as weil as I, yet he nonetheless asserts that post-structuralism can be taken in a radical and radically historic& direction. But Frow fails, at least as far as this reader is concerned, to show how the post-st~cturalist models

502

Book Reviews

he takes from Derrida and Foucault enable a more genuinely historical or political understanding of literature. If so far I have been concentrating on the general project of Frow’s book rather than its specifics, that is because there is an enormous gap between the two: the book simply fails to deliver on the overall project and the claims made at the beginning. Anyone seeking a general introduction to contemporary Marxist cultural and literary theory would be well advised to start with Marxism and Literary History; Frow’s exposition of the work of Eagleton, Jameson and others is exceptionally able and clear, far clearer in many cases than the work he is discussing. Frow is extremely well read but never gratuitously allusive, and his discussion of post-structuralist theorists such as Derrida and Foucault is always penetrating and intelligent. But none of this quite adds up to a book on Marxism and literary history. Frow argues against a traditional Marxist approach that would situate ‘real’ history outside literature and demand that literature attach itself to that ‘real’ history; he also argues that literary history can and should be constructed on its own terms. But the move of denying any necessary determination of literature by history runs the risk of severing any connection between literature and history at all. Reading Frow, one almost longs for a little vulgar Marxism, as it is difficult to see much difference between Frow’s literary system with its own internal history and the privatist conception of literature as its own self-referring universe that he wants to move away from. It is a lot easier to say that one has escaped the ‘prison house’ of formalism than it is to actually escape, and Frow’s post-structuralist Marxism seems to leave him firmly locked up. The more promising alternative to formalism, in my view, is that offered by Jauss’s stress on the reception of the work of art and its life in the world. But this is a route Frow rejects. In a passage discussing how the ‘function of class legitimation is a recurrent function of the Homeric epics’. Frow argues that this is not because ‘of any inherent formal or thematic property but purely and simply through their fetishized value as the Classic’ (181). Here, in separating the text from the use made of it, he returns to an essentialist conception of the text as separate from history. Only by connecting the text to its uses, by seeing the ‘text’ not as a text but as a ‘work’, can a truly historical conception of literature be established. Frow comes closest to this conception in his use of the notionof intertextuality. But in his intertextual analyses, Frow seems curiously indifferent to the task of precisely specifying the relevant intertexts: ‘closeness ofreference to specific texts is not the most important criterion’ (146). But I would argue that unless intertextuality is taken as a play of specific texts in a specifiable relation, any precise historical sense will be dissolved in a play of textuality. Derrida or de Man would reply that such specificity is an illusion, but this is hardly a position from which to construct-as Frow claims to want to do-a new Marxist historicism. Thus, Frow’s attempt to fuse Marxism and post-structuralism-influenced of course by Althusser’s work in this direction-seems unlikely to take him in the direction he wants to go. Here, E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty ofTheory is undeniably relevant, perhaps less for its critique of Althusser’s theory which is admittedly weakened by Thompson’s almost flag-waving brand of British empiricism than for its insistence upon the necessity for any Marxist to deal with ‘1956’, Thompson’s shorthand notation for the revelations of the monstrous history of Marxism and the Marxist states. Arguing against a ‘vulgar Marxist’ teleological vision of history, Frow writes that ‘Marxism is not the predestined heir of history but the possibility of a radical break with its patterns-which are patterns of oppression and repression, of violence and suffering’ (230). But anyone who presents Marxism today as representing only a break with the historical pattern of repression and violence is in urgent need of a little historicizing himself. Such a portrait can stem only from wilful deception or extreme self-deception. But this also enables one to make sense of the curious alliance between Marxism and post-structuralism: Marxists intent upon denying the actual record of Marxism in the

Book Reviews

503

world and upon holding on to the original Utopian impulse of Marxism find helpful if surprising bedfellows in the post-structuralists. Both share the belief that, in Frow’s words, ‘in this play of mirrors, the real is endlessly deferred through its reiterated variant intertextual production’ (197). But a Marxism unable to come to terms with its own history is not the Marxism that ought to be helping criticism escape the ‘prison-house’ of formalism. Marx would not have felt that the ‘real’ was endlessly deferred, and the endless deferral of reality found in the post-structuralist Marxism of intellectuals closeted almost exclusively in the elite educational institutions of the English-speaking world will not give us the literary history promised by Frow. His work is post-structuralist Marxism at its most intelligent and sophisticated, but what it reveals above all is how far such a ‘Marxism’ is from anything one could properly call a ‘philosophy of praxis’. Frow calls for ‘a practice which can continually, and effectively, pose to itself the question of its own use and usefulness, the question of the extent to which it reproduces or transforms institutional structures of knowing, the question of its ability to generate a textual politics (a political positioning of texts)’ (234). I would ask John Frow to pose these questions to himself a little more deeply than he seems to have done here. Reed Way Dasenbrock New Mexico State University

The Ages of Man. A study in Medieval Writing and Thought, J.A.Burrow (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) xii+212pp.,$39.95. ‘ . one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.’

But seven is not the only number with special appeal, and medieval and ancient thinkers also devised schematizations of the human life which posited three, four, five, six or ten ages. Professor Burrow’s book is a learned guide to these learned speculations. He groups his material into scientific theories, which claimed a biological or astrological foundation, and those which explicitly invoked analogy, such as that between the ages of man and the epochs of human history. He then goes on to explore how models of the life-cycle could be used normatively. Sometimes they provided a standard to be transcended, as in the case of the puersenex of medieval hagiography, the ‘wise head on young shoulders’, who, by grace or effort, exhibited qualities proper to another stage of life. The natural cycle could also be affirmed, however, though it appears from the author’s analysis that the positive affirmation of the natural course of human growth and change was not as common as its use as a restrictive stereotype, designed to deride and shame such chronological incongruities as the precociously serious or the elderly lover. This book is erudite, but sometimes densely so. There can be no quarrel with the extensive quotations in the original languages (along with translations) and the wide scope of the learning gives the work potential value as a tool of reference, but at times the catena of names becomes clogged and packed, making the experience of reading laborious. For example, on pp. 111-12 an opening sentence with the caveat. ‘There are far too many instances of puer senex and puella senex in saints’ lives of the centuries after the Norman Conquest to allow more than a quick sampling here’, precedes a paragraph in which we salute in passing Matthew Paris, the Legenda aurea, the Life of William of Norwich, the Legends of HoIy Women, Barlaam and Josaphat and the Middle English Ypotis. In reading this book, one is sometimes tempted to wonder if an anthology format might have presented much the same material in a more digestible form. There is the model of Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935).