Monday, 12 August 2019

‘Tolstoy’s silences are eloquent’!!!

Interpretive Criticism | An Ideological Fallacy

In the previous blogpost we discussed on a few salients pertaining to ‘consciousness as a social product,’ and how all the literary, cultural and artistic output of a given society, are manifestations of the ‘forms of consciousness’ that’s determined by the given society’s relation to the ‘means of production’; or in other words, how they are all aspects to its ideological conditioning!

This post intends to give an overview of Pierre Macherey’s seminal work titled, A Theory of Literary Production (1966) in which he vouches to this aspect of a literary text as a ‘creation’ of its forms of consciousness or ideological conditioning of which it is a part of!


That said, there are lots of commonalities, similarities and convergences between Gerard Genette’s ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’ and Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, but just a cursory look into their hypotheses would give out the proverbial ‘chalk and cheese!’

To Genette, then, Structuralist criticism purposes or proposes to form a poetics or a theory for a scientific study of literature, through a study of literary works. Macherey also in like fashion, advocates the formulation of a scientific theory of literature, and thereby proposes a scientific literary criticism!

However, Macherey’s text takes a sharp detour from thence on, and goes ahead to contest the claims of literary critics who cry on rooftops that the function of the critic is to explicate with finesse the meaning inherent within a text!

To Macherey, since all literary and cultural output are manifestations of the ideology or the forms of consciousness of a given society, if a literary critic has to produce authentic, genuine knowledge concerning a literary work, [and not an ideological misrepresentation of it,] she should avoid the ‘interpretive fallacies’ that have been, by default, the staple of such readings!

To put it short, interpretive criticism is in essence a misnomer or an ideological fallacy!

Because, to Macherey, a literary work is NOT the creation of an individual author! [Don’t you see the savour and the flavour of Structuralism here?] On the other hand, a literary work is an ‘ideological product’ ‘created’ out of a socially determined methodology of production!

Macherey explicates more on this by saying that, the raw material or the ingredients of a literary work are then ‘ideological materials’, which are made up of systems of belief and value, cultural affects, linguistic impacts, popular opinion, and all the related devices available to an author at this particular point of creating a literary work!


If ideology then is a ‘discourse of class-interest,’ it goes without saying that, it would sure misrepresent the reality of the social set up, in which protest voices or rebel voices could always be muted or silenced!

To put it short, to Macherey, ideology is the ‘language of illusion,’ as it does not reflect or reveal the real condition of real objects and things, but of an imaginary condition of imagined objects and things!

Hence a conflicting set of differentiated meanings always surround the text concerned! A text is, therefore, incomplete or insufficient in itself, of which Macherey says, a text is always ‘decentered’!

In Macherey’s own words -

In so far as ideology is the false resolution of a real debate ... pursued by the risk that it cannot envisage - the loss of reality!

Ideology is a false totality!

It is silent on that about which it has nothing to say. We should therefore preserve the expression in all its ambiguity: it refers to that ideological horizon which conceals only because it is interminable, because there is always something more, but it refers also to that abyss over which ideology is built. Like a planet revolving round an absent sun, an ideology is made of what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of.

This is the sense in which Lenin can say that ‘Tolstoy’s silences are eloquent’.

Thus we can gauge the distance which separates the work of art from true knowledge (a scientific knowledge) but which also unites them in their common distance from ideology. Science does away with ideology, obliterates it; literature challenges ideology by using it. If ideology is thought of as a non-systematic ensemble of significations, the work proposes a reading of these significations, by combining them as signs. Criticism teaches us to read these signs.

We seem thus to have exhausted the meanings of the concept of the mirror: it is the meeting place of reflections which arc shaped on the ground of a blind surface, just as colours, at the right moment, constitute a picture on the canvas. Lenin teaches us that it is not so simple to look in the mirror: he has undertaken a rigorous scrutiny of mirrors.

In the margin of his Letter on the Blind, Diderot tells the story of a young lady of Salignac:

Sometimes for a joke she would stand in front of a mirror to dress herself up and imitate the looks of a coquette preparing for the fray. Her mimicry was so accurate that it caused great laughter/ It is better to close our eyes to this laughter. If it is a game we might ask who is being tricked, the mirror which replies, or the one who thinks he sees the blind person because he contemplates his reflection.

But in this performance the one who does not see is confident: near to her image, she controls it. Of the same person, Diderot tells us : ‘When she listened to singing she could distinguish brown and blonde voices.’ When night blinded the eye she found a more certain vision. ‘As night approached, she used to say that our reign was ending and hers was about to begin.’

We do not know whether night, that ‘queen’, triumphing over images, preserves images or makes them disappear; does she only know of them? Thus the Lettre sur les aveugles, with this time the famous Saunderson, necessarily introduces us to a science of reflections, ‘I asked him what he meant by a mirror: a machine, he said, which throws things into relief far from themselves, if they are properly positioned in relation to it. It is like my hand which does not have to touch an object in order to feel it.’

‘A machine which throws things into relief far from themselves’: the mirror endows an object with new proportions, studies objects through other objects which are not quite the same. The mirror extends the world : but it also seizes, inflates and tears that world. In the mirror, the object is both completed and broken : disjecta membra.

If the mirror constructs, it is in an inversion of the movement of genesis: rather than spreading, it breaks. The images emerge from this laceration. Elucidated by these images, the world and its powers appear and disappear, disfigured at the very moment when they begin to take shape. Hence the childish fear of the mirror which is the fear of seeing something else, when it is always the same thing.

In this sense literature can be called a mirror: in displacing objects it retains their reflection. It projects its thin surface on to the world and history. It passes through them and breaks them. In its train arise the images.

The next chapter on this book, (Chapter 20) is a delightful treat for the literary surgeon! It's titled, ‘Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures!’

With this simple teaser, herewith I pause!

To be continued…

image: amazondotcom

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