Introduction: “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
“Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton was first published in 1982 as part of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series (Volume 14). This essay holds significant importance in the realms of literature and literary theory due to its insightful exploration of Pierre Macherey’s Marxist approach to literary analysis. Eagleton delves into Macherey’s concept of the “transcendental unconscious” and its implications for understanding the underlying ideological structures at play within literary texts. By examining Macherey’s work, Eagleton sheds light on the ways in which literature can both reflect and challenge dominant social and political ideologies, offering valuable insights for scholars and students alike.
Summary of “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
- Macherey’s Critique of Neo-Hegelianism:
- Pierre Macherey attempts to liberate Marxist literary criticism from neo-Hegelian and empirical ideologies.
- He emphasizes moving away from the concept of the “author as producer” that focuses on art’s relation to its material base and superstructure.
- Quotation: “Macherey’s project is nothing less than the liberation of Marxist criticism from every taint of Hegelianism and empiricism.”
- Macherey’s Althusserian Approach:
- He applies Althusserian epistemology to literary criticism, distinguishing criticism from its object, the text.
- For Macherey, criticism produces a new discourse that reveals what the text does not explicitly say, unlike empirical criticism that treats the text as a spontaneous given.
- Quotation: “Criticism is not an ‘instrument’ or ‘passage’ to the truth of a text, but a transformative labor which makes its object appear other than it is.”
- Text as a Determinate Object:
- The literary text is seen as a determinate object shaped by specific conditions and labor. The author does not “create” but “discovers” the narrative, indicating that the text has its own necessity that cannot be altered.
- Quotation: “The necessity of the text is not the reflection of the author’s sustaining, unifying intention.”
- Internal Contradictions and Ruptures:
- According to Macherey, every text is characterized by internal ruptures and contradictions, which are essential to its identity. These internal diversities are not merely a reflection of an underlying unity but the very structure of the text itself.
- Quotation: “The work is constituted by an interior ‘rupture’ or ‘decentrement’ worked upon its initial situation.”
- Silences and Absences in the Text:
- Macherey argues that the truth of a literary work lies not in what it explicitly states, but in its silences and absences. This absence becomes a key feature of the text, revealing the gaps and limits in the ideological structure.
- Quotation: “The text puts the ideology into contradiction by illuminating its gaps and limits, revealing ideology as a structure of absences.”
- Distancing Ideology Through Literary Form:
- The contradictions within the text reveal its ideological limits, showing how the text distances itself from ideology. However, this distancing does not automatically subvert ideology; it can also support it, depending on the historical and ideological context.
- Quotation: “Form distantiates the ideological, but whether it subverts or underwrites depends… upon the historical and ideological situation in which the text is situated.”
- Rejection of Structuralism:
- Macherey critiques the structuralist approach, which seeks to decode hidden meanings within the text. For him, the significance of the text is not found in its “depth” but in its external relation to ideology and other texts.
- Quotation: “The work hides nothing, keeps no secret, is entirely ‘readable’ and offered to view.”
- Literary Text as an Active Force:
- The literary text does not merely reflect ideology but actively engages with it, transforming it in the process. This interaction reveals the ideological absences and contradictions that underlie the work.
- Quotation: “The literary work, in thus transforming the ideological illusion, implicitly yields a critique of its own ideological status.”
Literary Terms/Concepts in “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
| Literary Term/Concept | Explanation | Quotation/Explanation from the Text |
| Author as Producer | A Marxist concept emphasizing the role of the author in relation to the material base and superstructure, often seen as politically indeterminate in certain contexts. | “The ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history.” |
| Epistemological Break | A concept by Althusser, applied by Macherey to establish a radical distinction between literary criticism and the text it analyzes. | “Macherey’s intention is to inaugurate a radical ‘epistemological break’ with what has come before.” |
| Text as a Determinate Object | The idea that the literary text is not a reflection of the author’s intent but the result of specific historical and material conditions, with its own internal necessity. | “The literary object is determinate, and so can be the object of rational study.” |
| Internal Ruptures | The concept that a literary work is characterized by contradictions and breaks, which are essential to its structure and meaning. | “The work is constituted by an interior ‘rupture’ or ‘decentrement’ worked upon its initial situation.” |
| Silences and Absences | Refers to the unspoken elements within a text that reveal deeper ideological tensions and contradictions, shaping the text’s meaning. | “Criticism…makes speak the text’s silences.” |
| Normative Illusion | A critical error that measures the text against an ideal model or normative expectations, ignoring the text’s specific materiality and conditions of production. | “The normative illusion constitutes a refusal of the object as it is: it ‘corrects’ it against an independent, pre-existent model.” |
| Ideological Contradiction | The idea that texts do not merely reflect ideology but engage with its contradictions, revealing ideological limits and absences. | “The text puts the ideology into contradiction by illuminating its gaps and limits.” |
| Empiricism | A critical approach critiqued by Macherey for treating texts as given objects, which can be known merely through observation without transformation. | “Scientific criticism is the antagonist of empiricist critical ‘knowledge’.” |
| Form as Distantiation | The idea that literary form distances itself from ideology, potentially subverting or supporting it based on historical and ideological contexts. | “Form distantiates the ideological.” |
Contribution of “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton to Literary Theory/Theories
- Critique of Empiricism in Literary Criticism:
- Eagleton highlights Macherey’s rejection of empiricist approaches that treat the text as a given object to be passively interpreted. Instead, Macherey advocates for a transformative critique where criticism actively produces new knowledge by engaging with the silences of the text.
- Quotation: “Criticism…is a transformative labor which makes its object appear other than it is.”
- Rejection of the “Author as Creator” Concept:
- The theory disputes the romanticized idea of the author as a creator who imposes unity on the text. Macherey sees the author as a discoverer rather than an inventor, operating under the constraints of ideological and narrative structures.
- Quotation: “It is mere mystification to speak of the author as a ‘creator’.”
- Focus on Internal Contradictions and Silences:
- Macherey introduces the concept that the contradictions, ruptures, and silences within a text are integral to its meaning. These silences reveal the ideological limits within the text, moving beyond traditional readings that seek a unified meaning.
- Quotation: “The task of criticism is to theorize the necessity of this diversity.”
- Text as a Site of Ideological Conflict:
- Macherey views the literary text not as a reflection of ideology but as an active space where ideology is produced and contested. This positions the text as a battleground of conflicting ideologies rather than a passive vessel of ideological content.
- Quotation: “The text produces ideology…and in doing so it reveals in its own internal dislocations the gaps and limits.”
- Contribution to the Althusserian Tradition:
- Macherey applies Althusserian epistemology to literary criticism, focusing on how criticism and literature belong to different realms of knowledge production. This epistemological break is a radical departure from both Hegelian dialectics and empiricism.
- Quotation: “His intention is to inaugurate a radical ‘epistemological break’ with what has come before.”
- Revolutionary Approach to Literary Form:
- Macherey challenges traditional formalist theories, proposing that form is not a mere reflection of ideological content but a distancing mechanism that reveals the ideological tensions and absences within a text.
- Quotation: “Form distantiates the ideological, but whether it subverts or underwrites depends…upon the historical and ideological situation.”
- Criticism as a Science:
- He proposes that criticism is not simply a hermeneutic task of interpreting a text’s hidden meanings, but rather a scientific process of constructing new knowledge that highlights the conditions of a text’s possibility, including its inherent contradictions.
- Quotation: “Scientific criticism…establishes a decisive rupture between itself and the object, distancing itself to produce a new knowledge of it.”
- Literature as Ideological Production, Not Reproduction:
- Eagleton emphasizes Macherey’s view that literature does not reflect reality or ideology but produces it. This is a key distinction in Marxist theory, asserting that literature actively shapes and transforms the ideological world rather than simply mirroring it.
- Quotation: “Rather than ‘reproducing’ ideology, the text produces it, setting it in motion and endowing it with a form.”
Examples of Critiques Through “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
| Literary Work | Critique through Macherey’s Theory | Quotation/Explanation from the Text |
| Jules Verne’s Fiction | Verne’s fiction attempts to represent bourgeois progress but is ideologically constrained to use images from the past. This contradiction creates an internal ideological torsion. | “Verne’s fiction ‘wants’ to represent bourgeois progress as a march forward to the future, yet finds itself enforced to represent this march in images bound to the past.” |
| Henry James’ Novels | James’ aesthetic redefinition of fiction as organic form is tied to material shifts in literary production but does not necessarily reflect an ideological transformation. | “The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England…is not clear how such material mutations become an active element.” |
| Thackeray’s Henry Esmond | While this novel differs in its production mode from Thackeray’s serialized works, it does not fundamentally alter his ideological stance, illustrating the gap between form and ideology. | “Though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel’s form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact.” |
| Tolstoy’s Works (Lenin’s Critique) | Tolstoy’s work is described as a selective mirror of the Russian Revolution, reflecting fragmented and partial images rather than a straightforward ideological reproduction. | “If Tolstoy’s work is indeed a mirror, then it is an angled, selective one thronged by fragmented images, as notable for what it does not, as for what it does, reflect.” |
Criticism Against “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
- Risk of Formalism:
- Macherey’s focus on literary form as a site of ideological distantiation can lead to a Marxist variety of formalism, where form is treated as having an essential and unchanging function.
- Quotation: “Though his contention that form distantiates the ideological is suggestive, why should this distantiation automatically be subversive?”
- Neglect of Reader Reception:
- Macherey’s early work focuses solely on the production of the text, neglecting the role of reader reception and the historical context in which a text is interpreted. This overlooks how texts “live” through their interactions with readers.
- Quotation: “His early work…completely suppresses the reality of the literary text as an historically mutable practice which ‘lives’ only in the process of its transaction with particular readers.”
- Overemphasis on Ideology as Homogeneous:
- Macherey, following Althusser, tends to treat ideology as a non-contradictory and homogeneous illusion. This downplays the internal contradictions and class struggles that shape ideology, leading to an overly rigid understanding of how texts engage with ideology.
- Quotation: “Ideology, however, has no such homogeneity…it is certainly homogenizing in tendency, but it nowhere, fortunately, has the success which Macherey assigns to it.”
- Abstract View of Ideology and Art:
- By focusing on how texts distort or transform ideology, Macherey’s theory risks treating literary works as abstract constructions, distancing them from the material and historical realities they engage with.
- Quotation: “Macherey’s formalism is in part a result of his Althusserian notion of ideology…as a structure of absences rather than something engaged with historical contradictions.”
Representative Quotations from “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton with Explanation
| Quotation | Explanation |
| “Criticism is not an ‘instrument’ or ‘passage’ to the truth of a text, but a transformative labor which makes its object appear other than it is.” | Macherey views criticism as an active process that transforms the text, rather than merely uncovering an already present truth. |
| “The necessity of the text is not the reflection of the author’s sustaining, unifying intention.” | This challenges the traditional view of the author as the unifying force of a text, emphasizing instead the text’s own internal structure and necessity. |
| “The text puts the ideology into contradiction by illuminating its gaps and limits, revealing ideology as a structure of absences.” | Macherey’s theory focuses on the ideological gaps and contradictions within a text, showing how the text exposes the limits of its own ideology. |
| “Form distantiates the ideological, but whether it subverts or underwrites depends…upon the historical and ideological situation.” | Here, Eagleton emphasizes that the distancing function of form does not always lead to subversion; its impact is contingent on historical context. |
| “Every work is constituted by an interior ‘rupture’ or ‘decentrement’ worked upon its initial situation.” | Macherey asserts that every literary text is internally divided, characterized by contradictions and ruptures, rather than a harmonious unity. |
| “The ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history.” | Eagleton critiques the applicability of the “author as producer” concept, arguing that it may not be relevant across all periods of literary history. |
| “The work’s ‘necessity’ is not an initial ‘given’ but a product…the meeting-place of several diverse ‘lines of necessity’.” | The text’s internal necessity is not pre-determined by the author but emerges from the interaction of various conflicting elements within the work. |
| “The text produces ideology…and in doing so it reveals in its own internal dislocations the gaps and limits.” | Rather than simply reflecting ideology, Macherey suggests that literary texts actively produce ideology, while also exposing its limitations. |
| “It is necessary to determine what a text lacks—lacks without which it would not exist, would have nothing to say.” | This quotation highlights the importance of the absences in a text, which are crucial to its meaning and existence according to Macherey’s theory. |
| “The postulate of the work’s unity, which has always more or less haunted bourgeois criticism, must be unequivocally denounced.” | Macherey rejects the notion that literary works possess a unified meaning, a view prevalent in traditional, bourgeois criticism. |
Suggested Readings: “Macherey and Marxist Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton
- Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 1983. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/literary-theory.
- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/lenin-philosophy.htm.
- Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. https://www.routledge.com/A-Theory-of-Literary-Production/Macherey/p/book/9780415772860.
- Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. MIT Press, 1971. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262620208/the-theory-of-the-novel/.
- Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Methuen Drama, 1964. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/brecht-on-theatre-9780413388001/.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken Books, 1968. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176085/illuminations-by-walter-benjamin/.
- Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801492228/the-political-unconscious/.
- Balibar, Étienne, and Pierre Macherey. Reading Capital. NLB, 1970. https://www.versobooks.com/products/1718-reading-capital.
- Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marxism-and-literature-9780198760610.