Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

By Tony McKenna

This title offers a Marxist take on a selection of artistic and cultural achievements from the rap music of Tupac Shakur to the painting of Van Gogh, from HBO's Breaking Bad to Balzac's Cousin Bette , from the magical realm of Harry Potter to the apocalyptic landscape of The Walking Dead , from The Hunger Games to Game of Thrones .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781137526618

Book preview

Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective

Tony McKenna

© Tony McKenna 2015

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2015 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–1–137–52660–1

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For my mother and father, Gay and Mike

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

2 In Time : The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era

3 The Walking Dead: The Archetype of the Zombie in the Modern Epoch

4 Let Me In: The Figure of the Vampire as Kantian Noumenal

5 True Detective and Capitalist Development in Its Twilight Phase

6 Tupac Shakur: History’s Poet

7 Vincent van Gogh

8 The Song of Achilles: How the Future Transforms the Past

9 Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and the Nature of the Historical Novel

10 Balzac’s Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette

11 The Wife: A Study in Patriarchy

12 The Vigilante in Film: The Movement from Death Wish , to Batman , to Taxi Driver

13 A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones

14 Harry Potter and the Modern Age

15 The Hunger Games Trilogy – Art for the Occupy Era

16 The Politics of Deduction: Why Has Sherlock Holmes Proven So Durable?

17 Literary Love as Kantian Sublime: Wuthering Heights and The Sea, The Sea

18 Brief Loves That Live Forever: The Historical Melancholy of Andreï Makine

19 John Williams’ Novel Stoner and the Dialectic of the Infinite and Finite

20 From Tragedy to Farce: The Comedy of Ricky Gervais as Capitalist Critique

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the publishers of the following works for permission to reuse copyrighted material from them as the basis for the chapters indicated:

‘In Time: The First Hollywood Movie of the Occupy Wall Street Era’, Science & Society, 79(1) (Guilford Press, New York) 117–126.

‘Vincent van Gogh’, Critique Journal of Socialist Theory, 2011, 39(2), (Taylor and Francis, Oxford) 295–303. www.tandfonline.com

‘A Mirror into Our World: The Radical Politics of Game of Thrones’, published Monday, 7 April 2014 in Ceasefire Magazine. www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk

‘Harry Potter and the Modern Age’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 39(3) (Taylor and Francis, Oxford) 355–364. www.tandfonline.com

‘The politics of deduction’, Overland Literary Journal, 217/Summer 2014.

Introduction

It is 1961. In a small, spare auditorium a man is sitting behind a glass screen and speaking into a microphone. His voice is sharp and scratchy. He looks nondescript: middle-aged and balding, he is dressed in a tidy but dour suit, and his thick black-framed glasses give the impression of someone in the civil service, or a university lecturer perhaps. While he speaks, a group of people in the gallery hurriedly scribble into their notes. One of these is a lady somewhere in her 50s; with owlish features and penetrating, dark eyes – she squints in concentration as she tries to better make out the person doing the talking.

The scene is low key and muted, conducted in the spirit of a certain dry formality, so you might be forgiven for not realising that the man who is speaking from behind the glass is one of the twentieth century’s most notorious mass murderers, while the woman taking the notes will go on to be considered one of its greatest philosophers. Hannah Arendt was attending the trial of Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann in her capacity as a journalist for The New Yorker. Her observations and analysis of the event would yield one of the most provocative but fascinating accounts of the psychological nature of men like Eichmann, unfurling the psychic basis for the horrific war crimes they helped facilitate. In a period of time when the Holocaust was such an immediate and suppurating memory for a vast number, Arendt departed from the commonplace narrative, which – not unnaturally – tended to see men like Eichmann almost exclusively as criminal psychotics or deranged monsters.

Arendt endeavoured to offer a deeper explanation. She coined an iconic phrase to describe the genocidal activity of the Nazis – she referred to it in terms of ‘the banality of evil’. By this she did not mean that the Holocaust was banal, for the murderous pitch and scope of its violence was without precedent in the historical record. Nor did she mean that we, as human beings, have become so inured to the violent occurrences in our history – that the horror of the Holocaust might appear to us in mundane terms. What she in fact argued was that Nazism had helped cultivate a new type of historical subject; that Eichmann was a breed of bureaucrat who had been so deeply integrated into the mechanisms of the bureaucracy – the routines, the legal minutiae, the nexus of structure and authority – that his fundamental being had been abstracted from those who were the victims.

For Eichmann, the victims appeared foremostly in their guise of a statistical quota which had to be achieved; the industrial murder of millions was merely part and parcel of a necessary and ongoing logistical project. Eichmann’s evil, then, lay in this: his essential banality. A functionary, a creation of the bureaucratic machine – his monstrousness resided in the fact that he was so immersed in the processes of regulation and policy that he had ceased to think the human beings – who were on the other side of those processes, who were the victims of them – as thinking, living entities whose lives achieved a parity with his own. It was this deficit in thought, this singular lack of imagination and empathy, which Arendt so expressly captured with that one phrase: ‘the banality of evil’.

One of the other awful aspects of the Nazi regime, of course, was the fate of free thought more generally. As a totalitarian regime, only the most propagandistic elements in art and culture were tolerated, dissenters were arrested and killed, and the smoke from the bonfires of burning books cast a pall of darkness across a culture which had once given us Hegel, Goethe and Heine. But the book burnings were about something more than the need to eradicate those political ideals which were immediately and coherently opposed to the Nazi ideology. Yes, the works of ideologues such as Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Georg Lukács were destroyed. But alongside this, works of fiction were obliterated as well – novels by writers such as Franz Kafka, D H Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and many others. There was something more than the simple and brutal pragmatics of repression on offer here: the Nazis wanted to eradicate more than the ability to think; they wanted to eradicate the ability to feel too.

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy offers us a pithy but profound description of the function of art; he argues that the viewer/reader/listener must be ‘infected by the author’s condition of soul.’¹ Such a description seems to capture something of the essence of the artistic, which lies in the transmission of profound feeling from the artist to the recipient in and through the mediation of the aesthetic object – the painting, the song, the film and so on. In describing evil’s banality, Arendt drew attention to the bureaucratic mechanics which undergird totalitarian regimes and set the basis by which the subject – the regime functionary or party man or woman – is abstracted from the object of his or her oppression. It seems to me that the aesthetic process operates in precisely the opposite direction; that is to say, in it – the object of the process – the receiver of the transmitted emotion, is ‘compelled’ to experience a metaphysical identity with the subject in and through his or her encounter with the art the subject has produced.

The distinctions of separation which exist between the artist and the receiver – distinctions of time and place, age and gender, race and class, occupation and language, even life and death (for the artist might have succumbed many years before) – are for a time collapsed in and through the aesthetic experience. The artist through the mediation of the art object ‘infects’ the receiver with his or her conditions of life even if those conditions have long since perished. The receiver encounters the spiritual substance of the artist embodied in the aesthetic object, frozen in eternity, and that encounter proves joyous or moving, cathartic, terrifying or inspiring. Above all, it excites empathy. And such empathy represents an existential threat to ‘the banality of evil’. It works to weaken and undo it. The Nazis burned literature and paintings not simply because they were cultural grotesques but because, in their belligerent and unconscious fashion, they recognised that the social system which they had cultivated was premised on a process of abstraction and that art fatally undermines that process by its very nature. Nazi culture didn’t just happen to be aesthetically poor – it was required to be in order to ensure its efficacy and its cohesion. On a perverted and subliminal level, the Nazi destruction of art was a recognition of art’s social power.

In today’s world, however, art is rarely accorded its power. In the UK in 2012 education secretary Michael Gove implemented a series of reforms, and one of these included the requirement for younger children to learn poetry. This measure in particular was widely derided, and one was aware at the time of the conviction – carried by the press and the TV stations – that poetry is little more than a whimsical indulgence on the part of the out-of-touch, the intellectual fodder of the hoity-toity. But this was also part and parcel of a more general implication: science, business, economics, maths – such things are necessary to impart to our children – but art has little practical value, and its unchecked absorption always carries the danger of leaving the child with his or her head in the clouds, unable to relate to the practical necessities of day-to-day reality.

Perhaps this conviction carries a particular weight in England – the birthplace of industrial capitalism and the self-made man, a country whose earthy pragmatic soils allowed the hard, austere principles of classical utilitarianism to take root and acquire definition. It is often difficult to mount a defence of art in the face of such hard-headed pragmatism, but I have begun this book with a description of the Nazi regime for a reason, as it seems to me that a consideration of those social forms which necessitate the overwhelming suppression of art also provide us with a potent reminder of why we need art in the first place and where its true value lies. But in making the argument that art isn’t simply a luxury but a social necessity, one is then confronted by a broader question: What makes a work of art great? We may concede that art is important, even integral, to the life of our species, but why are some works of art more significant than others?

The question of what makes superior art has often been related to the way in which it is created. Here a vivid polarisation has emerged. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the success of art depends on its ability to be ‘for its own sake’ – that is, it should remain untrammelled by socio-historical concerns, not to be pervaded by any kind of ethical or political subtext. On the other, there are those who aver that art must reflect and carry palpable social truths, that a political or ethical content must consciously be employed to raise the receiver to a higher level of social awareness. But while this is a debate whose flames are still fanned in contemporary aesthetic and philosophical circles, it is worth remembering that it has a somewhat more seasoned lineage too.

By the late-eighteenth century Kant had already discerned the one-sidedness of both these views. If the aesthetic object is regarded as exhibiting some ‘purpose’ which is present in the phenomenal world more broadly and conditions the work of art itself, such a ‘purpose’ would denude the work of its freedom and independence. The artwork would become a way to some specific and practical goal which lies outside it. Or to put it in the Kantian refrain, it would be a means to an end rather than an end in itself. One can sense the truth of this in our everyday lives. When we watch an advert on TV, we are rarely moved or inspired for no matter how appealing the images or sounds it projects are, we are always aware that they exist only as a means to an immediate and practical end – the need for sales. But, argued Kant, if the aesthetic object is experienced as having no ‘purpose’ whatsoever – that is, if it holds no necessary connection to the logic and determinations of the broader phenomenal reality – then it could only ever be experienced in a purely subjective manner according to the individual in isolation. It would lack universality. It would be impossible to say, for example, that one painting is better than another, any more than one might say a taste for mayonnaise is superior to that for ketchup.

Kant was forced into the paradoxical conclusion that the aesthetic object must encompass both purpose and purposelessness. It must have purpose in order for it to retain the aspect of universality which is part and parcel of all great art. It must be purposeless in order to avoid the reduction of the aesthetic object to some immediate and practical aim or agenda. And the way in which Kant achieves a synthesis of ‘purposeful-purposelessness’ provides one of the most abiding and original parts of his philosophical system. It is worth perusing his solution in its bare outlines.² An object like a chair has a practical purpose in the way in which a painting of that same chair doesn’t. One does not try to sit on the painting. The purpose of the chair is expressed by its physical actuality. It has four legs, and these should be of roughly equal length if the chair is to retain equilibrium and better serve the purpose of being sat upon. But a tiger too has four legs, and its legs also serve its purpose best when – like the chair – they are roughly of the same length and in proportion to one another. The purpose of the tiger, however, is markedly different from that of the chair – as anyone who tried to sit on the tiger could swiftly attest.

But although both chair and tiger are, so to say, at cross purposes, there are a set of formal elements which are conducive to the purposes of both – that is, equilibrium, symmetry and balance. The tiger hunts better if it possesses these things, and likewise the chair is more comfortable when sat upon. These elements, then, are purposeful to both but without being restricted to the specific purpose of either – that is, the need to sit or the need to hunt. In this way, Kant has provided us with the notion of a ‘formal objective purposiveness that nevertheless lacks a purpose’.³ In the aesthetic object – the elements of symmetry, structure, balance, continuity and so on – excite our sense of beauty with their ‘purposiveness that nevertheless lacks a purpose’.

And is it not possible to sense the truth of the Kantian formulation? Who hasn’t gazed upon some great painting only to be powerfully moved but without being sure quite why? To sense within the painting a profound and higher purpose while remaining unable to articulate in coherent and specific terms what that purpose might be. But though the Kantian solution was a brilliant exercise in dialectical reasoning, in establishing a synthesis of purposeful-purposelessness, that great philosopher only ever attended to the formal side of the question. That is to say, his purposeful-purposelessness treated only visual-logical forms abstracted from particular functions – symmetry, proportion and balance; these elements are considered in isolation as components which the individual, generic ego generates in the process of constituting and making palpable the phenomenal reality. A painting by Titian might exhibit these elements in a masterly fashion, as might a painting by David, but those same elements – symmetry, proportion and balance – tell us little about why Titian has chosen to paint one of the lesser gods in the Greek pantheon frolicking with an underdressed nymph, while David, for his part, has focused on a great French revolutionary slumped dead in his bathtub.

To even begin to answer those questions, we would have to interrogate the period in which each artist produced; to come to terms with its pervading religious tenets and its political, legal, cultural forms; and above all the fundamental social conflicts which pervade it. In other words, the formal aspect of aesthetic critique would always necessitate a given historical content. A Marxist account is perfectly attuned to this type of content because Marxism more generally endeavours to elucidate the social contradictions which underpin epochs and which provide the necessity by which one flows into the next – the contradictions which people generate in their lives as productive beings, labouring on the world in order to guarantee their subsistence and transforming themselves and the historical forms of their social organisation in the process. It provides the analysis of the historical forms through which the art object is filtered and takes shape.

As a student, I once came across an analysis of the novel Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. The writer, a Marxist historian,⁴ suggested that the story’s liveliness and its potency lay in the fact that it typified one of the fundamental socio-historical contradictions of the period. The novel was published in 1873 at a time when a rapacious, recently born industrial capitalism was expanding across the globe, laying down train tracks in order to facilitate its economic march. But, noted the author, because the new social order had not yet been consolidated, it was constantly bumping up against the old-world forms it sought to displace. So, for instance, if you were travelling by train across North America in the latter part of the nineteenth century, you might well have had the stressful experience of being attacked by some of the Native American tribes whose lands had been stolen away by the railway barons. The dramatic tension, the haphazard excitement, the sense of fear and obstacle – all the elements which underpin Phileas Fogg’s epic journey – are also the products of the manner in which the contradiction in the broader historical sweep had been distilled and exhibited in the novel’s aesthetic.

And in my view, the novel also confirms the Kantian formulation of ‘purposeful-purposelessness’. Jules Verne, we surely imagine, did not start out with the ‘purpose’ of exhibiting the conflict between the old epoch and the new; at no point, can we assume, did he make a conscious effort to best depict in fantasy form the central, historical and sociological contradictions of the period in which he, the artist, was enmeshed. What Verne wanted to do – and what he succeeded in doing rather finely – was to write a rip-roaring adventure yarn where a heroic Englishman of an upper class bent accepts and prosecutes a lucrative bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days. But although the ‘purpose’ of the work is not to provide a conscious and rational appreciation of the socio-historical contradictions of the given period, nevertheless history’s form, its underlying movement, its development – its own ‘purpose’ if you will – is crystallised indirectly and unconsciously in and through the interplay of the imaginary characters and the context of the dilemma they face.

Broadly speaking then, one must try to identify within the work of art the crystallisation of a broader historic necessity: the reason why the work has arisen at this moment, at this particular juncture, and how its greatness lies in its ability to preserve in a moment of eternity the historical contradiction and mood of the epoch more generally. But at the same time, we should be aware that those elements are manifested only in a fantastical, individualised and profoundly unconscious form which can never be read directly and mechanically from its historical basis. One might even invoke Freud here – as it seems to me that the wonderful, topsy-turvy spectres and emanations of the aesthetic imagination stand in relation to the ebb and flow of historical development in much the way the unconscious mind relates to the conscious one; or to put it a little more concisely, art is the medium in which history dreams. And I suppose that makes the chapters which follow my own attempt to interpret some of history’s dreams: to see in Harry Potter, the work of Vincent van Gogh, the songs of Tupac Shakur, the characters of Breaking Bad or the comedy of Ricky Gervais the unconscious working out of the deeper and more abiding development of what the great German philosopher G W F Hegel would describe as ‘world spirit’.

Finally this book is intimately related to my own direct and personal experience of art, literature and culture. I can recall as a very young child moving house, going to a new school and experiencing what often felt like a lonely, alien and hostile environment. The palliative to that external world was always the rich inner one which I could disappear into any time I opened up the covers of a good book. And I can remember that sense of immersion so vividly; I recall staying up into the early hours, cosseted under the covers with a torch and a book, unwilling to disengage from those fantasy realities where I was so much more than a frightened small boy. I remember the sense of losing myself in that infinity of worlds. As we get older, as our critical faculties more and more assert themselves, I think the ability to slip into the silver, snow-swept forests of the magical terrain which opens up just to the back of the wardrobe is something which is increasingly difficult to exercise. So, above all, this book is a work of love – a paean to those wonderful artists, writers, singers and poets who have helped me find that ability once more.

¹  L Tolstoy, What Is Art?, (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis: 1996) p.140.

²  Naturally, this cannot be developed with much depth or accuracy in the space of a few paragraphs. For a more detailed consideration of Kant’s aesthetic from a Hegelian-Marxist viewpoint, please see T McKenna, ‘Kantianism and the Judgement of Beauty in Light of the Problem of True Totality and its Basis in the Forms and Structures of Social Existence’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 42(2), (Taylor & Francis, Oxford: 2013) p. 183–195.

³  I Kant, Critique of Judgement (Werner S. Hackett, Indianapolis: 1987) p. 74.

⁴  E Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, (Orion House, London: 1996) 61.

1

Breaking Bad: Capital as Cancer

As the online reference in Wikipedia has it, ‘To Break Bad’ means ‘to go wrong; to go downhill; to go bad; to turn toward immorality or crime’. And it is just such a transition – the movement from middle-aged affable chemistry teacher Walter White to the ruthless, dead-eyed drug lord Heisenberg – which underpins the narrative of the award-winning series Breaking Bad. Walter White is a good man, and it is only the imposition of an indifferent and remorseless fate which inflicts his body with an equally interminable cancer; it is the crushing cosmological injustice visited upon him – the piling medical bills and the suffocating worry for the future of his family – which finally causes Walter to break bad.

Or is it? This is the question which has fascinated critics and viewers across the spectrum. How much is Walter the helpless victim of an implacable fate? How much is he the agent of his own eventual monstrousness? When we see Walter at the start of the series, he feels like a fundamentally sympathetic character. There we watch him in the classroom, fervently holding forth on the mysterious laws of chemical composition – the infinite, infinitesimal possibilities of atoms and compounds – and yet, despite the sublimity of his convictions, and despite the genuine enthusiasm which they inspire in him, he is rarely able to rouse his students from their apathy. The most he can hope to merit is an acquiescent grunt of adolescent acknowledgement. There is, then, something fundamentally lonely about this middle-aged man, standing out there at the front of the classroom, lost in the void of his own esoteric interest.

And yet, every now and again, we sense something else: a shadow falls across his gaze, a darkness flickers in his eyes, a glimmer of contempt. Only it is more than that, for some of the students Walter is teaching are also the cruel, carefree debutantes who – wealthy and with time on their hands – mock Walter as he polishes their cars during the second job he works in order to make ends meet. Every now and then, we, the audience, glimpse something in the nondescript chemistry teacher’s eyes which is beyond contempt; his well-worn, weather beaten and gentle countenance transfigured into a violent grimace of loathing, and it is then, from deep inside, we feel Heisenberg – his dark alter ego – begin to stir.

As the series progresses, we learn more about Walter’s back story; we learn that