Marxism and Lyric

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Notes on Marxism and the Lyric Author(s): Hugh H. Grady Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, Marxism and the Crisis of the World (Autumn, 1981), pp. 544-555 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207882 . Accessed: 31/03/2014 06:09
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NOTES ON MARXISM AND THE LYRIC
Hugh H. Grady
Marxistliterarycriticismhas been largelyconcernedwith dramaand the novel since the days when Marx plannedhis unwrittenwork on Balzac's Comidie humaine. Lyric poetry, with its traditionalprehas seemed occupationwith love, death, nature,and transcendence, resistantto criticalmethodsseekingto discoverin the literarywork the reflectionof specificsocial conflicts and historicalconjunctures; it has seemed more amenableto purely formalist approaches.The New Criticism, the triumphantcountercurrent to the Marxist criticism of the twentiesand thirties,developedits powermost convincingly in close and subtle readings of lyric poems that Marxism seemedpowerlessto confront as deeply. Marxistswho have undertakenthe analysisof lyric poetryhave often attemptedto importthe techniquesof novel and dramatheory to the realm of the lyric and sought to find in individual poems the reflection of sociohistoric forces and conflicts. In what follows, I will examinethe pitfalls of this procedure and then counterposewhat I believeis a more fruitful Marxistapproachto the lyric. A good illustrationof what mightbe termedthe "novelistic"or "realist" approach to poetry is Norman Rudich's article, "Coleridge's 'KublaKhan':His Anti-PoliticalVision," which arguesthat Coleridge's celebratedlyric-often taken as an early example of symbolistpodsiepure-is actually"an adequateexpressionof Coleridge's estimate of his relation to his time."' Throughthe association of KublaKhanwith Napoleon-a link that Rudichattemptsto
'Norman Rudich, "Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan': His Anti-Political Vision," in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. Norman Rudich (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1976), p. 236. Literature 0010-7484/81/0004-0544 $1.00/0 XXII, 4 Contemporary of the University of Wisconsin System ? 1981by the Boardof Regents
demonstrate through a straightforward examination of Coleridgean prose sources-Rudich asserts that "the most concrete meaning of the poem" is "its critique of the institution of the State" (p. 236) and that the poem crystallizes a general "anti-political vision" at which Coleridge had arrived in response to the disappointing outcome of the French Revolution. The details of Rudich's argument, however, are less important here than the general method he employs in his attempt to forge a Marxist approach to the lyric. The method is essentially indistinguishable from old-school historical and biographical criticism, with a few reversals of evaluation and a difference in what Rudich calls "point of view." It is as if the hallmark of a Marxist approach to the lyric were sensitivity to hidden political allusions, all the more so in the case of a poem that Coleridge passed off to the world as the fragments of an opium dream. But Rudich's approach is wholly dependent on the contingencies of a particular poem's thematics. If we cannot find similar hidden politics in, say, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we are presumably unable to provide a "Marxist" reading. In addition, the method of reading poems as reflecting determinate historical and biographical currents is open to the line of attack that formalism so successfully mounted against the old historical scholarship in our century. If we are really interested in that sort of thing, we are better off reading biographies and diaries, where "political content" is so much clearer. Most poetry readers, including Marxists, are looking for something else. Behind this particular reading of Coleridge lies a more basic aesthetic theory sketched in a brief paragraph near the beginning of the article:
The aestheticis a specificmode of ideology, whichsimultaneously reflects, interprets, evaluates and generalizesthrough mimetic structuresof discourse, the real world of concrete human activity; the artist shapes an versionof humanaction out of a particular form of matter;he imaginative createsobjectswhichembodyand revealin theircontourstypicalsituations of life, particularactions endowed with visible and potential meanings whichtranscend theirparticularity. (p. 217) Rudich is assuming that the work of art achieves significance because it is a "model" of reality, a mimetic structure of "types" in the sense defined by LukAcs in his middle-period writings on
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Europeanrealism.2In other words, categoriestaken from a theory wholesaleto the realmof the lyric; of realismare being transported the result is that a theoreticalformula intelligible(but not, in my opinion, finally satisfactoryeven for the case of realism)with regard to the novel loses its force and explanatorypower in confrontation with the lyric. The lyric is assumed to possess the "mirror-ofresults.That society" qualitiesof Balzac'snovels, with Procrustean is why Rudich ends up in his article demonstratingso modest a thesis:that Coleridge'sallusivepoem impliesa set of clear, delimited conceptsabout Napoleon, the FrenchRevolution,and the state;and that these concepts are attributableto Coleridge and not the delusions of a left-wing critic. The Marxistframeworkdissolves into an empiricalessayof literarybiography,only to emergeat the end as a set of values by which the critic here praisesand there chides the revealedColeridgean "ideology."3 The offhand use of this war horse of the Marxistlexicon, "ideology is to emphasize its systematic, ideational character(as op"traditional" Marxist criticism of the lyric, for the term, as a number of recent writers have noted, has assumed a bewildering array of meaningsboth within and without the Marxisttradition, meaningswith correspondingly complexconnotations.What are we to understandby Rudich'sassertionthat the aestheticis "a specific mode of ideology?" In a recentbook RaymondWilliamsdiscusses several of the basic meaningsof the term in the Marxisttradition; the two most prominentare: (1) "a systemof illusorybeliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrastedwith true scientific knowledge";and (2) simply "a system of beliefs characteristic of a particularclass."4 Clearly, to view art as a mode of ide2I refer to Studies in European Realism, Realism in Our Time, and Writerand Critic; these attempts to humanize a dreary party-line preference for "realism" within the Soviet bloc are milestones in the history of culture in the U. S. S. R. and Eastern Europe but are eclipsed in relevance to the contemporary Western critic by the "early" Luk cs of Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness. For a contrary view, arguing for an essential continuity in Lukdcs' immensely productive career, see Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 160-206. 'Coleridge's "Tory twaddle" is deprecated (p. 227), and he is praised for foreshadowing Marx (p. 238). 4Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 55-75.
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ology is to emphasizeits systematic, ideational character (as opposed to its emotionsand conceptualtensions)and to posit a derivathat is clearlyinadequate tive relationto the economicinfrastructure art in explanatorypower;and it is to fail to graspwhat distinguishes In and expression. categorizing from othermodes of communication literature as a form of (an ultimately class-based)ideology, one courts the dangerof reducingsubjectivityitself to "an atom of objectivity," in HerbertMarcuse'sstrikingphrase.5This is precisely what happenedin the case of Stalinist literarycriticism, in which cameto be seen as simplya sign of bourgeoisdecadence. subjectivity Thereis, however,a fruitful alternativewithinthe Marxisttraditionto the "poetry-as-ideology" school, and, Marcuseis one of its leading practitioners. Maynard Solomon's massive anthology Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporaryprovides the strongeststudy in English for this neglectedbut significantdimenThe work of the Frankfurtschool writers sion of Marxistaesthetics.6 is the most important twentieth-centurysource for a renovated Marxistliterarycriticism,and I will thereforefocus on their contribution to aesthetictheory. But many of the basic conceptsinvolved had been developed independentlyin England in the thirties by Caudwell,whose book Illusion and Reality, with all its Christopher flaws and unevenness,remainsthe most ambitiousattemptat a full Marxisttheory of lyric poetry and deservessome mentionhere. Unfortunately,in a central section of the book entitled "The English Poets," Caudwellsuccumbsto the very mechanisticmaterialismhe condemnsin the book's opening section. In three disastrouschapters,7a thumbnailliteraryhistoryis forciblygraftedonto Marx'saccount of England's economic developmentin Capital. Poetry is simplythe ideology of the bourgeoisie,its evolutionnothingbut the unmediatedexpressionof bourgeoisconciousnessas it developedin each era. For example, "Elizabethanpoetry in all its grandeurand insurgenceis the voice of this princelywill, the absolute bourgeois
'Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 4. 6Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York: Vintage, 1974). See especially the essay by Solomon, "Marxism and Utopia," pp. 457-67. 'Ironically, these are the most frequently reprinted sections of Caudwell's book, serving well as examples of Marxism's supposed reduction of literature for mainstream literary critical casebooks, such as Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds., Romanticism: Points of View, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970).
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will . ... "This is the transition from Milton to Dryden. The idealisation of compromise between rival classes as 'order' and 'measure'-a familiar feature of reaction-leads to the conception of the Augustan age, which passes by an inevitable transition into eighteenth-century nationalism.. ." (pp. 96-97). "The bourgeois trammelled by the restraints of the era of mercantilism is Prometheus, bringer of fire, fit symbol of the machine-wielding capitalist" (p. 105). "The next phase of bourgeois poetry is therefore that of 'commodity-fetishism'-or 'art for art's sake'- and is given in the false position ... forced on him by the development of bourgeois economy" (p. 116). The section ends with the assurance that, with the new revolutionary stance adopted by Auden, Lewis, Spender, and Lehman, "the bourgeois contradiction passes into its synthesis" and the new age of poetry is beginning in the era of the "final capitalistic crisis," designated hopefully as the period "1930-?" With the book in press, Caudwell was off to Spain, where he was killed in action February 12, 1937, unable ever to revise his work. In the following account of some other aspects of Caudwell's theory, I concentrate on those features of the theory that appear to me most sound, ignoring the many false starts and illusions which time and history have revealed to us. What remains is substantial and valuable. One of Caudwell's central ideas is that art, including poetry, is a specialized moment of the subject-object relationship that is humanity's relation to reality, a moment opposite and complementary to that of science. Both art and science are "illusions" in Caudwell's terminology since each abstracts a part of the subject-object dialectic in order to reveal aspects of reality otherwise obscured. Science eclipses human subjectivity through its creation of a "phantastic"the word is Caudwell's--ideal witness capable of observing reality dispassionately, while art renders objectivity into a "phantastic" medium through which human subjectivity is fully expressed (p. 210). In this part of Caudwell's theory, poetry is, so to speak, removed from the superstructureand incorporated into the base: Thus the developingcomplex of society, in its strugglewith the environment, secretespoetryas it secretesthe techniqueof the harvest,as partof its non-biologicaland specificallyhuman adaptationto existence. The tool adaptsthe handto a new function,withoutchangingthe inheritedshapeof the handsof humanity.The poem adaptsthe heartto a new purpose,with8ChristopherCaudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London, 1937; rpt. New York: International, 1973), p. 86.
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out changingthe eternaldesiresof men's hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasywhich is superiorto his presentrealityprecisely becauseit is a world of superiorreality-a world of more important reality not yet realized,whose realisationdemandsthe very poetry which it. Hereis room for everyerror,for the poemprophantastically anticipates whose very reason for poetic treatmentis that we cannot poses something touch, smell, or taste it yet. But only by means of this illusion can be exist. (p. 37) broughtinto beinga realitywhichwouldnot otherwise In his incorporation of Freudian psychology, his attempt to define a uniquely human essence, and his emphasis on art as creation rather than mimesis, Caudwell parallels a branch of the Marxist tradition from which he is otherwise far removed, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and their followers.9 Caudwell and the Frankfurt school theorists have arrived at their versions of subjective Marxism from opposite poles within the Marxist tradition.1' Working with the scientistic notions that he had encountered in his study of the 1930s Marxist-Leninist classics-and in the general left milieu of the time in Britain-Caudwell discovered the necessity of positing some sort of "species-being""' for humanity, some basic conception of what differentiates the human species from the rest of nature: the genotype, as he calls it. And at this point Caudwell's argument takes
'The fullest account of the history and theories of this remarkable collection of theorists in English can be found in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). 'oSee Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury, 1980), particularly pp. 155-63, for the most recent argument for the existence of two "poles" within the Marxist tradition. Unlike Gouldner, however, I argue here that the "critical" or "subjective" pole is to be preferred over the "scientific." "The standard translation of Gattungswesen, a central term in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For a succinct explication of its meaning, see Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 82-84 etpassim. In the debate over the relationship between the "young" and "mature" Marx, this term, which Marx borrowed from Feuerbach, has been central since, in effect, "species-being" is what the young Marx's alienated man is alienated from. In recent Ma.rxology the proponents of a unified view of Marx's writings, ably represented by Ollman and Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961), and more succinctly in Tucker's introduction to The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), had seemed to have driven from the field the party-line proponents who see the young Marx as "pre-scientific" until Louis Althusser revived the Stalinist deprecation of the young Marx in so-
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on a subjective coloration in a project constantly threatened-at times quite overcome-by mechanicalmaterialism.For what constitutesthe humangenotypeis basicallythe capacityfor "labor," includingits componentof imagination(the ability mentallyto create forms not "given" in nature),a componentMarxhad insistedon in one of the many theoreticalasides of Capital. And thus does Caudwell arriveat an originalversionof subjectiveMarxism,with important implicationsfor literarycriticism. The Frankfurtschool had arrivedat its version of subjective Marxism(which it calls "CriticalTheory") largelythrougha study of the young Marx and his Hegelian sources, the classical German philosophicaltraditionin general, and the early writingsof Georg The philosophicalproblem of the natureand function of Luk~tcs. humansubjectivityis, of course, a centralconcernof this tradition; and Marxism, it was argued, belongs in this context, to which it makesspecificcontributions. A convenientdocumentthat sets forth severalbasic themes of CriticalTheory'sapproachto art is Marcuse'sessay, "The Affirmative Characterof Culture," originally publishedthe same year as Caudwell'sposthumousworkin 1937. Marcuse'sstartingpoint is an inquiryinto the formationof the conceptof the beautiful(including the artistic);he arguesthat the conceptis definedin Greekthoughtin opposition to the "useful" and the "necessary." This particular antinomy, Marcuseargues, replicatesthe class structureof ancient Greeksociety, particularly the divisionbetweenmentaland manual labor. But it becomesfundamental to the entireWesternculturaltradition: the world of beautyis reservedfor a culturalelite, while the majorityof humanityis relegatedto the cheerlesstask of the production of a materiallife increasingly robbedof beauty. In the capitalistera, Marcuseargues,the fact of divisionhas not altered, but the frank Greekacceptanceof this state fundamentally of affairs has been replacedwith an uneasyconscience,and culture has been redefinedas a universalrealm of freedomopen to all segments of society. But, of course, the universalityhas been abstract and unrealizable, in the firstplacepreciselybecauseclass differentiation remainsunassailable.In this new context, high cultureis subject to stronglycontradictory pressures:
phisticated, neo-structuralist form in such writings as For Marx (New York: Vintage, 1970). Althusser has in turn come under fire from the British Marxist humanist E. P. Thompson in the recent The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978).
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It containsnot only the justificationof the establishedform of existence, not only quiescence aboutwhatis, but but also the painof its establishment: of what could be. By makingsufferingand sorrowinto also remembrance shattered in the forces, greatbourgeoisarthas continually eternal,universal life. By paintingin the lumiof everyday heartsof men the facileresignation nous colors of this worldthe beautyof men and things and transmundane happiness,it has plantedreal longingalongsidepoor consolationand false in the soil of bourgeoislife.12 consecration The sphere of culture, the realm of art and beauty, at once gives the lie to the idea of the sufficiency of everyday life as it now exists and presents itself as a new rite offering consolation and secret meaning to its devotees. Along with one's personal life of family, friends, and religion, it offers a locus within modern society for the experience of freedom, happiness, beauty, and value. And yet, abstracted from daily life, it has been constantly transformed into mere opiate and consolation. These notions overcome the one-dimensionality of the art-asideology position, and they help bring certain features of lyric poetry into clear focus. In the first place, we can begin to grasp the meaning of lyric poetry's historical specialization as a nonrealist genre. If we recognize in the tradition of the European realist novel in which Lukacs grounded much of his criticism the confrontation of bourgeois society with what it is, we must also recognize that in the lyric, bourgeois society attempts to confront what it is not. Poets confront what Caudwell calls the genotype and the young Marx the human essence: the substratum of human needs and yearnings, unfulfilled and unrealized within historical society. We can recognize this feature of the lyric even in its ironic mode, in, say, Baudelaire's spleen, Eliot's Unreal City, or Plath's cold despair and anger, for all these modes of irony reveal their objects in the light of an implied ideal by which reality is measured and judged. The lyric has become the specialized literary genre for Utopian vision, for the construction of realms of imaginative freedom that would escape the very conditions which have given rise to the necessity of their expression (only) as poetry. We could say that the lyric is a reflection of social conditions, but only as a photographic negative is a reflection. The lyric seeks to reverse the registers of reality as it now exists. It is an expression and formation of the human impulse to Utopia.
'2HerbertMarcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture," in his Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 98-99.
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As Maynard Solomon wrote in an essay on the foremost Marxisttheoristof Utopian vision, ErnstBloch, the Utopian vision is not given a priori;it is formedthroughthe confrontationof desire and reality, from the disharmony of "is" and "ought," and as such a between dialectical requires interplay feeling and reason. To understand the specificways in whichthe modernlyric fulfills these functions, we need to incorporateits history into the outline of Horkheimerand Adorno's central study, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 13
In that work, Horkheimerand Adorno define the centralityto the capitalist organizationof society of technical or instrumental reason, the methodology of the natural sciences transformedinto scientism,throughwhichhumanreasonis said to arriveat truthonly of subjectivity,value, and emotion-just as throughthe suppression capitalist production generates the best of all possible worlds forces of the market. Modern throughthe play of the instrumental art and poetry have been decisivelyshapedthroughthis process of in whichtechnicalreasonhas beenestablishedas the Enlightenment, preeminentlyserious mode of thought in the form of empiricism, logical positivism, and their modern descendants.After the false start of neoclassicism,in which poetry for a while was subjectedto the instrumentaldefinitions of the literarycriticismof the Age of "modern" Reason, romanticismestablishedthe characteristically notion of art as the repositoryfor humanvalues and emotions not availablein society as it had come to be organized.(Perhapsironically, this phenomenoncorresponds reasonablywell to T. S. Eliot's diagnosisof a "dissociationof sensibility"in the poetryof the bourgeois era in England.)In any case the romanticinventionof "art" as we know it has shapedmodernart as irrationaland otherworldly,at times lackinga mediationthroughcriticalreasonto realityor, as in Mallarmeand the hermetictraditionhe founded, seeking through reason to seal off from realityits dazzlingdisplaysof freedomand creativity. This increasingirrationalityof poetry, I should emphasize,is not only a matterof changingconceptionsof poetry, but also and more importantlyan evolution of techniqueswithin poetry itself. in manyways by each of the litThe changehas been conceptualized and "isms" that have proliferated circles, movements,cabals, erary
"Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
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in literaryhistory since the nineteenthcentury. We can, however, distinguishtwo broad streamsof modernpoetic theory, originating from Baudelaire'stwo most influential successors, Mallarm6and Rimbaud. Rimbaud'stradition, recapturedand developedin surrealism, groundspoetic vision within the desiresand capacitiesof a human subjectivity constantly repressedby history. But in principle the aestheticis attainablewithin the historicalprocess. The poet brings the fire back to earth for the rest of humanity(animalsas well, says Rimbaud), and he incites a desire for revolutionarychange-not through didacticism,but through an imaginativevision. Rimbaud neverallows his visionarypoetryto be finallycapturedconceptually; vision born of desire he never finally dissolvesthe emotion-charged the aestheticas a He preserves into a delineatedmentalarchitecture. privileged realm decisively other than the deplorable banality of bourgeoislife, but he does not excludethe historicalrealizationof the vision a priori (as Mallarm6does). Rimbaud'spassionatehope for millennialsocial change providesthe emotional power of some of his finest lyrics. Mallarme,in contrast, sees the lyric as an eternal,metaphysical moment, alwaysother and alwaysbeyond. In the famous imageof a late sonnet, the poet is a swan trappedin a frozen lake and beating his wingsin vain, unableto achieve"la r6gionoi vivre." We are far from Rimbaud'simageof the poet as Prometheus,thief of fire. Although Rimbaud'saestheticis obviously more amenableto Marxism, it is importantto realize that both of these conceptions follow from the contradictory position and role of art in contemporary society, and the recognitionof this dual nature is the starting point of an adequateMarxisttheoryof the lyric.14To give some idea of how these theoreticalnotions might work in explicationsof specific poems, let us returnbrieflyto Coleridge's"KublaKhan." In the first place, we need to recognizethat the historicalcontext in whichthe poem is writtenincludesthe historyof poetryitself and that this lyric, as part of the general romantic movement, is helping to define a new mode throughits abandonmentof explicit metaphorand its cultivationof the deviceof the romanticsymbol-a poetic figure in which the older, clearlydefined interplayof vehicle
'4For a fuller treatment of these concepts see my unpublished dissertation, "Unified Sensibility Reconsidered: Reason and Emotion in Metaphysical and Symbolist Poetry," University of Texas, 1978.
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and tenor is left undefined: that is, in "Kubla Khan" the images of pleasure dome, enclosed garden, chasm, moon, and woman radiate circles of suggestiveness and allusion without the sharply defined conceptualizations of the traditional metaphor. As readers, we define levels of meaning without sharp boundaries, integrating, say, Rudich's discovery of a level of political allusion into a more general and less specified realm of signification. Poetic language intensifies its traditional quality of multidetermination as it defines itself over and against the discourse of technical reason, with its characteristics of unilinearity and clarity. Rudich is right in seeing in "Kubla Khan" a kind of antipolitical message, but this is not only a result of Coleridge's own personal evolution. It is, rather, the direction of postromantic poetry in general, part of a larger evolution away from rational discourse of all kinds and towards a newly "pure" cultivation of the nonrationalistic resources of language. Henceforth poetry will seek its locus of being in the underside of the dialectic of enlightenment, seeking to found a realm of pure subjectivity where value, emotion, and imagination find their freedom. Thought is not abandoned in this new poetry, but it tends to become self-reflection and self-conceptualization-aesthetic thought. (The self-reflecting or metalinguistic quality of modern poetic language, I would argue, is not the essence of poetry, but rather a historical feature of the poetry of technical societies.) Thought in "Kubla Khan" is a good example of this tendency. This highly allusive poem moves toward a kind of self-conceptualization in its conclusion, when the poet's voice declaims that, through the intercession of the "damsel with a dulcimer," he could, "with music loud and long," buildthat domein air, Thatsunnydome!those cavesof ice! And all who heardshouldsee themthere, And all shouldcry, Beware!Beware! His flashingeyes, his floatinghair! Weavea circleroundhim thrice, And close youreyesin holy dread, For he on honey-dewhath fed And drunkthe milkof Paradise. The vision is identified as imagined, created vision, surrounded with the aura of archaic religion and magic and associated with the allied arts of music and dance. There is, indeed, excellent reason for the
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traditionalassociationof the poem with symbolistpodsiepure, for such a conceptionis containedwithinthe poem as self-commentary. What constitutes the created, poetic vision is precisely the "aesthetic" itself: that which is given in vision and transcribed through entity constituted(as Rudich poetic imagination-a self-designating by imagesof this world. But suggestedin his brief aestheticremarks) these images are fused into an aestheticform decisivelyother than the world we know, for here are harmony, beauty, meaning, passion, and depth-a fully human world, in sharp contrast to the reality of the "person on business from Porlock" whose visit destroyedthe revery, accordingto the Shandeannote of introduction Coleridgeappendedto the poem. We are at the beginningof the era of art as negativemysticism,as a cultivationof feeling and thought through undefined symbol whose aim is precisely to bypass the "fixities and definites" of technical reason and to establish a new and autonomous category: the aesthetic, an ideal realm which inhabits the place where God had been (ratherthan abandoningit as Enlightenment thought-and many versions of Marxism-have tendedto do), but groundingitself in the humanpower of imaginative creationratherthan in an external,transcendent power. It is the othernessof the poem that bids for our comprehension; the poem is anythingbut a mirrorof reality.And the questionthat a renovatedMarxisttheoryof the lyric must seek to answeris: what is this otherness, which strikes us so forcefully with the aura of familiarityand at-homeness? Ernst Bloch has come closest to the answerwith his notion of the Utopian vision, although Shelley and Rimbaud,among others, have offered similar conceptions:unacknowledged legislator, thief of fire. The lyric has become a specialized,though not exclusive, genreof Utopian vision in the modernera, the attemptto symbolize a world not yet attained, though groundedin our deepest human needs, a world of imaginationthat we encounterwith a shock of recognitionbecauseit is our own, though always absent. The motto of a renovatedMarxisttheoryof the lyric, then, is not to be found in Marx's problematicbase-superstructure schema, but ratherin a remark found in an 1843letterto Ruge: "the world has long dreamed of somethingof which it only has to become conscious in order to
possess it in actuality."
5
Austin, Texas
'SQuotedin Solomon, p. 58.
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NOTES ON MARXISM AND THE LYRIC

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