Marxist Criticism And/Or/Versus A Clearer Sense Of Justice

RICHARD LEVIN

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

I
  • This is a sort of response to Martin Coyle's article in the first issue of Renaissance Forum that criticizes my recent criticism of some of the New Historicist and Marxist or Cultural Materialist readings of Shakespeare.1 I will not try, however, to follow him in his point-by-point journey through my articles because I want to focus instead on the ethical aspect of that journey, culminating in his conclusion that 'What Dollimore and Greenblatt offer us is another way of reading [the Renaissance] which might enable us to move forward towards new ideas and even towards a clearer sense of justice', which, he says, I 'well know' (Coyle 1996, 35). There is no doubt that these two critics and the approaches they represent are giving us 'new ideas' (though I am less confident than he is that this is necessarily a 'move forward'); but I think his statement that they are also bringing us 'towards a clearer sense of justice' should be examined or, as we now say, put into question. Although he includes Stephen Greenblatt (and presumably other New Historicists) in this second claim as well, it seems to apply primarily to Jonathan Dollimore and his fellow Marxists, and so I will limit my examination to them.
  • I must admit that I was at first a little surprised by the idea (despite Coyle's assurance that I already 'well know' it) of reading Shakespeare criticism in order to attain 'a clearer sense of justice'. If my sense of justice required clarifying, I can think of many other activities that ought to do this much more expeditiously and effectively. But on further reflection I realized that this was in fact how most Marxist critics define their goal, since they regularly conclude their essays and books with a call for the creation of a more just society, or, in the words of Jonathan Dollimorre and Alan Sinfield (1994, viii), the 'transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class', 2 and in their attacks on the older critics, they regularly accuse them of supporting, or at least being complicit with, our unjust status quo. 3 (The New Historicists do not make either of these moves, which is one reason why I am excluding them from my interrogation.) They also use code-words like 'transformative' and 'emancipatory' to designate their criticism (which, again, New Historicists never do).
  • I think it is fair to assume, moreover, that this is the goal that originally brought them to Marxism and to Marxist criticism. In our part of the world, very few people become Marxists to please their parents, or to further their careers, or to avoid the Gulag, or even to promote their class interests, since they usually belong to the middle class. 4 They are motivated primarily by their sense of justice--or, more precisely, their sense of the injustice of the plight of the poor and the oppressed, which we used to call a 'social conscience'. That was why I was converted to Marxism many years ago, and I think my experience was typical. We would expect, therefore, to find these moral feelings of compassion for victims and outrage at their victimisation embodied in Marxist political writing, which has in the past served an important function in calling our attention to the ills of our society. In fact many of the reforms designed to alleviate these ills--the graduated income tax, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, collective bargaining, etc.--were initiated by Marxists and liberals or social democrats influenced by Marxism. We owe such reforms in large part to this strong ethical commitment, and I have no desire to minimize our debt.
  • Unfortunately, however, something often happens to these originary moral feelings of Marxists, including Marxist critics, after a prolonged exposure to Marxist doctrine: their morality becomes politicised. There is obviously a significant relationship between morals and politics, because the moral decisions of individuals occur in a social context and the political decisions of parties or governments affect individuals, and this relationship may be very complex--we can readily think of situations that present a real problem when our ethical and political judgments are in conflict. The problem with many Marxists (who have undergone the aforementioned exposure) is that they never have such a problem, since they always already know that all moral issues in the 'superstructure' come down to politics, and that all political issues come down to a Manichean class struggle in the 'material base' between the evil capitalist side, which is responsible for all the injustices of our society, and the good socialist side, which holds out the sole hope for eliminating them, so that 'the only real question', as Michael Sprinker insists, 'is: Which side are you on?' (Sprinker 1991, 116). This a priori reduction of ethics to politics and of politics to their base/superstructure paradigm, with its two polarised camps, makes things much easier for them, but makes them much less reliable as guides to 'a clearer sense of justice'.
  • The results can be seen, for example, in the lament of Malcolm Evans, a British Marxist critic, that Mao's Cultural Revolution came to an end:
    • through a turning of political sights back to the West and the sunset of cultural imperialism. Shakespeare, in the form of an English production of Measure for Measure, returned to Beijing along with the Coca-Cola advertisements.


    (Evans 1986, 255)

    For him, evidently, all the suffering of the victims of what even the Chinese Communists now call the 'Ten Years of Chaos', the millions of innocent people branded as 'class enemies' or 'running dogs of capitalism' who were driven into exile and forced labor, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, 5 is much less moving than the horror of being permitted to drink Coca Cola or see a Shakespeare play (both were banned, along with all other imperialist bourgeois temptations, during the Revolution), since that meant the victory of the wrong side. In a similar reaction Fredric Jameson, the most prominent Marxist critic in America, regrets that
    at the supreme moment of the Cultural Revolution, that of the founding of the Shanghai Commune, [Mao] called a halt . . . and effectively reversed the direction of this collective experiment as a whole.


    (Jameson 1988, 2.208)

    What was wrong with this 'experiment', in other words, is not that it went too far but that it did not go far enough. 6 Presumably a few million more victims would have been worth it if that had prevented the reversal of direction toward the enemy camp. As Francisco de Medicis says in Webster's The White Devil, 'Tush for Justice!' (5.3.277). And this polarisation is even clearer in Sprinker's sneering response to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic: '"We've won, we've won," is the universal shout from Wall Street to the Bundesbank' (Sprinker 1991, 126). The rejoicing of most of the East Germans themselves at the dismantling of the hated Stasi, the introduction of democratic institutions, and the reunification of their country is irrelevant to him; the only thing that matters is that the evil capitalists 'won'. 7
  • The sense of justice motivating Marxist feminist critics often undergoes a further distortion because the a priori paradigm of Marxism requires them to locate the cause of sexism, along with all other social ills, in the 'material base' of capitalism, 8 which produces some strange moral judgments. Gayle Greene tells us that one of the dire 'effects of capitalism on woman' is that it 'reduces [them] to terms of appetite and trade' who have to 'sell' themselves (Greene 1980, 137). She does not tell us what capitalism reduces women from, but it can only be from the good old days of serfdom and jus primae noctis, when they were 'sold' by the men who owned them. One might think that selling oneself is a step up from being sold by someone else, but she must make it a descent in order to make capitalism guilty. And Catherine Belsey claims that a woman today in a 'liberal [i.e., capitalist] marriage', even though it is consensual and allows for divorce, is 'in reality' less free than a medieval wife in an arranged and indissoluble marriage, since the 'overt' external control of the ecclesiastical courts is replaced by 'new and more insidious forms of control' that are 'internalized and invisible' (Belsey 1985, 145, 147). She ignores the fact that 'internalized' controls operate in all viable societies, which otherwise would not be viable; and both of them ignore the a posteriori evidence that under 'late capitalism', although we still have a long way to go, women possess a greater degree of freedom and equality than in any other known society. That is not 'material'. Their need to blame capitalism for sexism blinds them to the much more oppressive sexism suffered by women, not only in feudalism, but also in most noncapitalist societies of the 'third world'. They have, in effect, sacrificed their feminist concern for women to their Marxist concern for class struggle.
  • A similar distortion of moral judgment can occur when Marxists deal with racism, which they blame again, as a result of the same a priori paradigm, on capitalism, which again ignores the a posteriori evidence of racist practices in noncapitalist societies and in members of the 'oppressed' classes living under capitalism. Tom Lewis, for example, applies 'a class perspective' to argue that '"racism" requires the power to oppress', so that black people, since they do not have power, cannot be racists (Lewis 1995, 104), which would astonish the Jewish victims of the Crown Heights riot of 1991 and the Korean victims of the Los Angeles riot of 1992. 9 It is certainly true that black people in America have very little power on the national scene, but they clearly have enough power in some local situations to engage in the same kinds of racist brutality as white people. This does not concern Lewis because, like the other critics we considered, his Marxist sense of justice and moral feelings of compassion and outrage are limited to politically correct victims--that is, the victims of capitalism. No others need apply.
  • Perhaps I can head off at the pass Coyle's favorite complaint about my 'lumping together' critics with different positions (Coyle 1996, 3, 4, 13, 14) by deposing for the record that I do not believe that every critic I quoted would accept every one of these specific views. Nor do I believe that these specific views are typical of Marxist criticism, since I obviously selected them for their shock appeal. I am claiming only that they all exemplify a significant tendency of this critical approach--the tendency to politicise and aprioritise morality. No such qualifications are required, however, for Alan Sinfield's statement that we live in 'an unjust social order' (Sinfield 1994a, 260, 265) because this specific view really is typical of the Marxist critics --indeed it is one of the principal tenets of their faith; and since it also bears directly upon Coyle's appeal to 'a clearer sense of justice', it will provide an appropriate conclusion to this section.
  • We should note, to begin with, that Sinfield is not saying merely that our society contains injustices, which no one would deny; he thinks it is fundamentally and inherently unjust. But what exactly does that mean? It cannot apply to all aspects of our society--to freedom of speech, for instance, or the writ of habeas corpus, or the reforms that I listed earlier (and credited to Marxism), which he presumably approves of. He must be referring primarily to the 'material base', to the capitalist system itself and its distribution of wealth. 10 But he does not explain why it is unjust, which would require him to define a just distribution and therefore to confront a very difficult problem. (There are three basic ways to define it--paying all people the same amount, or paying them according to their contribution to society, or according to their needs--and each one is 'unjust' to those who would benefit from another way.) Nor is this only a problem of definition. Since no societies are perfect, all moral judgments of them are necessarily comparative, which means that whenever someone asserts that we live in 'an unjust social order', we must always ask: compared to what actual or possible social order? Marxist critics typically avoid this crucial question, and Sinfield is very atypical (and courageous) in admitting, in another article published the same year, that he cannot think of a better alternative (Sinfield 1994b, 43). 11 But then the Marxist condemnation of our system is useless. Being told that it is fundamentally 'unjust' does nothing to clarify our sense of justice unless we are also told why it is unjust relative to a juster system.


    • II

  • I suspect that by now many of my readers will be asking what all this has to do with criticism. Well they may ask. Although all the people I quoted are, so far as I know, certified professional literary critics, they seem to be more interested in making (and feel qualified to make) pronouncements in other disciplines, such as history, economics, political science, and sociology. Nor are they unusual in this respect, since it is possible to travel through substantial portions, even entire essays, of recent literary criticism (not only by Marxists) without encountering a single literary work. (Coyle might say that those essays are simply by-passing the middleperson in order to proceed directly to their goal of improving our sense of justice.) But of course most Marxist critics also interpret literature, and we frequently find in their interpretations the same tendency toward politicising and aprioritising ethics that appears in their extraliterary activity. I want to look at five Marxist readings of Shakespeare that exemplify this tendency; the first three were criticized by McAlindon or me in the articles that Coyle criticized, so he presumably had them in mind when making his claim about justice.
  • One of the best known Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare is Jonathan Dollimore's 'King Lear and Essentialist Humanism' (Dollimore 1993, 189-203), which Coyle discusses at some length (Coyle 1996, 31-33) without explaining what it teaches us about justice. His silence is understandable because Dollimore is primarily concerned, not with moral questions, but with a political opposition between the bourgeois ideology of 'essentialist humanism', defined as the 'mystified' belief in human nature, and 'materialism' (i.e., Marxism). He claims that Lear uses the materialist perspective to 'demystify' essentialist humanism by revealing that 'human values' like kindness are 'dependent upon' and 'operate in the service of' the 'material realities' of 'power and property' (197-98, 202), 12 so that it teaches a Marxist lesson about the relation of the superstructure to the base. The trouble is that Cordelia, Edgar, and Kent never learn this lesson but go on being kind to Lear and Gloucester after these two men lose all their power and property, while the lesson is already known by Goneril, Regan, and especially Edmund, whose 'revolutionary insight' into the errors of essentialist humanism makes him the chief spokesperson for the truth (198, 201). This reading, then, reduces our moral judgment of the characters to a political judgment, which is determined a priori by the class conflict of good proletarian materialism versus evil bourgeois essentialism, which in turn requires us to side with the unjust characters against the just ones. Another tush for justice!
  • The essay on King Lear by Kiernan Ryan (1995, 98-105) does not invert our sense of justice, but it too reduces the morality of the play to a Marxist political lesson that comes, again, from the material base. He claims that the 'causes' of the tragedy 'are housed beyond the conscious culpability of individuals' in 'the injustices of a stratified society' that is 'class-divided', which leads us 'to seek the implied solution' in socialism (102-4). The trouble here is that all the tragic actions in both plots involve relations between members of the same class and so cannot be caused by class division, as I argued in one of the articles that Coyle discusses. 13 Ryan's interpretation not only ignores the facts of the plot, moreover; it also ignores our ethical response to that plot because, he insists, it 'compels us . . . to delve deeper than a moralistic critique of the characters allows' and to see that the social structures 'determine' their actions and 'deny them the option of being otherwise' (100-1), which, if true, would mean that there can be no 'culpability of individuals' or 'moralistic critique' of them, since they would not be responsible for their actions. But it is not true; even though all the characters are products of the same society, they do not behave in the same way--Cordelia and Regan, for example, chose very different options in their treatment of Lear, and we judge them accordingly. Ryan has, in effect, eliminated these 'moralistic' judgments, which would discriminate between just and unjust actions, for the sake of his a priori Marxist doctrine that the real cause of any superstructural action must always lie in the base.
  • In his reading of Othello, Peter Stallybrass (1986) deploys the concept of 'displacement'14 to prove that the play, even though it appears to focus on the first two terms of the race-gender-class triad, is really about the third, which Marxists know is the 'baseic' cause of the other two, as we saw in the passages from Greene, Belsey, and Lewis. Othello's love for Desdemona is actually 'class aspiration', which is 'displaced onto the enchanted ground of romance' (134). His race is also a displacement, since 'the construction of Othello as "black"' is a 'mark' to indicate his inferior class status that is 'overcome by his marriage' (135). And the threat of 'subversion' is 'displaced' onto Iago, who is a 'projection of a social hierarchy's unease' or a 'function of the projected fears of class hierarchy' (140-41). The reading is generated by some interesting observations about the role played by 'woman's body' in the class tensions of early modern (formerly Renaissance) Europe; but the result is to reduce women to a 'passive terrain on which the inequalities of masculine power were fought out' in a 'displaced class conflict' (140-41). And it again reduces our moral judgments of the characters to a political judgment of the 'class hierarchy'. Othello and Iago do not seem to be guilty of anything--indeed Iago could not be guilty since he is only a 'projection'. The real culprit is, as in Ryan, 'the dominant culture' (140).
  • Jean Howard does not rely on displacement in her reading of Much Ado About Nothing (1994, 57-72), but she too creates a distinction between what the play appears to be about and what it is really about. She focuses on the two crucial 'theatrical deceptions'--Don John's trick to prevent the marriage of Hero and Claudio and Don Pedro's trick to promote the marriage of Beatrice and Benedick--and argues that, while the play seems to contrast them in terms of a 'moral' difference between the two deceivers, making Don John malicious and Don Pedro benign, this 'obscure[s] the social differences justified and held in place by moral categories' (63). The difference in their status is what really matters, for the illegitimate Don John is a 'social outsider' trying to 'contest' the 'power' of Don Pedro, who is at the top of the social scale (59, 61). Thus we encounter again the Marxist doctrine that the superstructure (morality) is always determined by the base (class). But Howard is a feminist as well as a Marxist and finds here not only class oppression of the 'marginalized' bastard but also gender oppression of the 'marginalized' women. Hero turns out to be a victim not so much of Don John's trick as of the society's 'misogynist dictum that all women are whores' that leads the other men to credit the false evidence against her, and of Don Pedro, who uses his 'authority' to endorse it (68). And Beatrice is, along with Benedick, a victim of patriarchy because Don Pedro's trick is designed not to benefit them but to 'assert control over these two renegades' and ensure their 'interpellation into the gendered social order' (62, 66). The result is to annul our moral judgments of the characters; in fact Howard announces that she is 'substituting a political and social for a moral analysis' to show that 'the play's production of heroes and villains' is 'a strategy for holding in place certain inequalities of power' (60, 72). Although Don John is the 'play's designated villain', he is only waging a kind of class war against Don Pedro and the unjust society and for this is made a 'scapegoat' (60-61). And although Don Pedro may seem like a hero, he is really the closest thing we have to a human villain since he spends all his time exercising 'power' over others in order to 'strengthen the existing social order' of 'aristocratic male privilge' (61-62). But the real villain is once more the social order itself.
  • I have saved until last the most startling of these examples, an essay on The Tempest by Lorie Jerrell Leininger (1980), who is also a feminist. Her thesis, quite simply, is that both Miranda and Caliban are 'exploited or oppressed' by Prospero and that Miranda should therefore 'join forces with Caliban' so that these two victims can 'set each other free' (292). Now we know only three things about Caliban's relationship to Miranda: he tried to rape her (1.2.347-48), he wants to use her as a breeding machine to produce many little Calibans (1.2.350-51), and he offers her body to Stephano as an inducement to persuade him to kill Prospero (3.2.104-5). One might suppose that he would not make a very promising ally for any woman, let alone for an avowed feminist; but Leininger does not allow his inconvenient moral lapses to stand in the way of her political project. She casts doubt on the rape (289, 292), passes over without comment his desire to people 'This isle with Calibans' (289), and does not even mention his plan to use Miranda as sexual bait for Stephano--instead she claims that 'Prospero needs Miranda as sexual bait' for Caliban to justify the 'enslavement of the native' (289). Like Greene and Belsey, she is willing to sacrifice her feminism to the more 'basic' claim of the class struggle. Apparently she believes, on the usual a priori grounds, that men oppressed by classism cannot really be guilty of sexism, just as Lewis believes that they cannot really be guilty of racism.


    • III

  • I hope it is clear that I am not lumping these essays together, for I have deliberately chosen them to exemplify five quite different Marxist strategies to achieve the same goal of reducing ethics to politics and reducing politics to the base/superstructure paradigm. They also share, as a necessary corollary, the tendency to reduce the individualised, morally-defined characters to representatives or even 'projections' of an abstract political entity like class or ideology. Some Marxists, however, try to turn this around by accusing the older, formalist Shakespeare criticism of reductionism. Ryan objects to its 'reductive, moralistic kind of reading' that fails to see that 'Shakespeare's greatest tragedies compel us to probe beyond moralism' (1995, 72-73); Evans says that in it 'the political is transformed into the personal' (1986, 74); Dollimore complains that previous critics of Measure for Measure have 'taken . . . at their word' the claim of Vienna's rulers that they are concerned about sexuality, instead of realizing that this is 'displaced' from class issues (1994, 72-73); and Howard, who does not invoke displacement in her reading of Much Ado, uses it against 'humanist' critics who 'have depoliticized the play by moralizing it, . . . thus displacing a political analysis' by 'a characterological focus' (1994, 57, 60). In a similar move, Coyle asserts that my 'real project' is 'to depoliticise criticism' (1996, 13).
  • This argument, however, is unfair to the formalists (and to me), since there is no reason why a criticism that deals with the characters as individual moral agents cannot also take into account the social or political dimension of the action. Indeed A. C. Bradley, who is often reviled as the arch-villain of 'characterological' criticism of Shakespeare, insists that the tragic hero's fate is caused by a combination of his internal traits and 'the circumstances where we see the hero placed' (Bradley 1904, 21). But it is clear that many of these Marxist critics are not content with a treatment of society as merely one of the causal factors; they want it to be the most important factor, so that anyone who fails to acknowledge this becomes guilty of the crime of 'depoliticising'. It is also clear that they do not derive this conception of causation from the text itself, because we saw several of them admitting that the play in question 'seems' to present the issues in moral rather than political terms, or 'displaces' them from the political to the moral. They bring the conception with them to the play since they always already know that, in literature and in life, issues in the base must be the ultimate, underlying cause of issues in the superstructure, the cause of all other causes, and therefore are necessarily 'deeper' and 'more fundamental' (Dollimore 1994, 80; Heinemann 1991, 78; Ryan 1995, 101). (Compare the assumption in Coyle 1996, 28 that the political considerations in the Henry IV plays have to be 'more serious than the depiction of Prince Hal'.)
  • It will come as no surprise to learn that I do not accept this base/superstructure paradigm and its subordination of ethical to political judgments, but that does not mean that I want to reverse the causation and subordinate the latter to the former, which is just as wrong. We obviously need to recognize the importance of both (as well as the relations between them); and the relative weight that should be given to each will depend on the particular situation or the particular text in question. Of course there are literary texts--Brecht's plays, for example--that present political issues as fundamental and therefore should be interpreted in those terms. And I pointed out earlier that there are situations in life where we are faced with a difficult decision because our ethical and political judgments are in conflict. What I object to, once again, is the a priori reduction of ethics to politics, which has very pernicious consequences. It provided the justification for the sacrifice of the moral rights of individuals for the sake of the political goals of the state that is seen in the routine despotism of all Marxist regimes, as well as the more spectacular excesses of Stalin's purges, Pol Pot's holocaust, and Mao's Cultural Revolution (which Evans and Jameson support on this basis, in the passages quoted above). In criticism its results are not as deadly, to be sure, but we found that it often leads to the annulment or even reversal of our ethical judgments of the individual characters. Rather than accuse the older humanist critics of 'depoliticising' literature, therefore, it seems more accurate to accuse many of these new Marxist critics of 'demoralising' it, with demoralising effects on our sense of justice.
  • The base/superstructure paradigm also has a demoralising effect on women, because it dictates, as I already noted, that gender oppression is the result of class oppression in the material base and so will disappear when the class system is eliminated in that base. As a consequence Marxist regimes refused to permit movements for women's rights, on the ground that under socialism women already had, by definition, all their rights and so could no longer experience any discrimination because of gender. (Try telling that to the victims of the enforced breeding policies in Ceausescu's Socialist Republic of Romania.) And in criticism, as some feminists have complained, 15 this doctrine has frequently resulted in the erasure of gender issues or the claim that they are only a 'displacement' of class issues, which we saw in several of the readings examined earlier. We also saw that even some avowed feminists like Greene, Belsey, and Leininger were prepared to sacrifice their concern for women to their Marxist concern for the class struggle; in fact, of all the critics we discussed, Howard is the only one who achieves a kind of balance between these two concerns, and she too will sometimes subordinate the female characters to the male contest for 'power' (Howard 1994, 59).
  • My objection to this paradigm is based not only on its consequences but also on its defective logic. As I explained in one of the articles that Coyle criticizes, it confuses the necessary condition of an action with the sufficient cause. The society of King Lear, for example, where kings and fathers have absolute power, property is inherited, and so on, constitutes the necessary condition for the actions, which could not occur (at least in the same way) in a different kind of world, but it is not in itself sufficient to cause those actions, for if it were all the characters would act alike. This is also obvious in real life: our socio-political context both enables and constrains our moral choices by making certain choices possible and others impossible, but it does not make the choices because within these limits we are free to choose. This is just another way of saying that ethics is influenced by but is not reducible to politics, and I am happy to report that on this question Marx himself agrees with me: in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he states that 'men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves' (Marx and Engels 1978, 595). He believes, as I do, that although men (we would now say people) cannot choose the conditions under which they make choices, they still can make choices and so make history--indeed it would be pointless to call upon the workers of the world to unite unless they had the ability to choose whether or not to do this. Therefore Ryan's contention that the social structures in Lear 'determine' the actions of the characters and 'deny them the option of being otherwise' (Ryan 1995, 100-1) is false not only to the facts of the play but also to Marx's own doctrine. And it is false to the lived experience of the very people who, I acknowledged at the outset, made a moral decision to become Marxists, which cannot have been determined by the social context when most of their contemporaries growing up in the same society did not make the same decision.
  • I do not want to close without considering another criticism leveled by Coyle against the old 'moralistic' or 'characterological' approach to Shakespeare--his claim that it 'offers the modern reader nothing' (Coyle 1996, 28), which is similar to Ryan's complaint that it offers 'no idea why Lear might be worth studying by people who are living now' (Ryan, 1995, 99). This is a strange argument because, so far as I can tell, most lay people (i.e., non-academics) who read Shakespeare or go to see his plays are very interested in the individual characters and in the emotional and ethical responses that they evoke. (Many spectators are also interested in the acting, of course, but that is usually valued for its ability to 'realize' the character.) Coyle and Ryan, however, are not thinking about these people, certainly not about the spectators (as their references to reading and studying reveal); they are thinking about what interests them, and therefore do not realize that their argument actually points in the opposite direction, since if the plays should be viewed as representations of the class struggles of early modern England, as many of the Marxist critics tell us, then it is hard to see why most lay people today would be interested in them. It is even harder to see why they would be interested in those 'transformative' conclusions about creating a more just society that I mentioned at the outset, since we found that this society cannot be defined. The Marxists' conception of the plays and of the goal of criticism does not strike me as what Coyle calls a 'move forward', even though I am no admirer of the thematic New Criticism that preceded it, despite his claim that 'self-evidently' I want 'to take us back to where we were' (Coyle 1996, 35). Thirty years ago Alfred Harbage observed that this thematic criticism of Shakespeare, then in its heyday, asks us to 'trade our birthright of great artistry for a mess of third-rate philosophy' (Harbage 1966, 37), which I think is true. And I think it is just as true that much of the new Marxist criticism of Shakespeare asks us to trade the concrete and rich ethical complexity of his characters and plots for a mess of abstract and vacuous political bromides.
  • Michael Dobson reported to his British readers that at the 1992 conference of the Shakespeare Association of America, 'the word "ethics" was making an audible comeback against the word "power"' and 'someone definitely said "character"' (Dobson 1993, 22). He suggests that this may mark a turning of the tide, but I do not think we are yet in a position to tell. It is a fact, though, that in the past few years a number of critics, including Wayne Booth (1988), Martha Nussbaum (1990, 1995), James Phelan (1996), Daniel Schwarz (1991), and Tobin Siebers (1992), to name just a few, have published books about the moral content of literature. I had better explain, for the last time, that I would not dream of lumping these people together, since they present different views on this subject and disagree about many things. But they do share a few basic ideas: they believe that novels and plays involve 'characters' who engage our ethical feelings and judgments; they do not reduce ethics to politics (although some of them also discusss the political aspect of literature); and they assume that the ethical education, or refinement of our ethical sensibilities, that they are concerned with must come from the literary texts themselves rather than from someone's criticism of them. I suspect that they would be as surprised as I was by Coyle's assertion that reading the Marxist critics (or any others) can give us 'a clearer sense of justice', although I can now see that he was right in a way, because interrogating some of these critics has helped to clarify my sense of justice by providing me with edifying examples of what justice clearly is not.

    • Notes

  • Coyle also criticizes two recent articles by Tom McAlindon with which I am in general agreement, but I would not presume to respond for him. [Back

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  • Hawkes (1995, 16) quotes and endorses this statement at the end of his own introductory chapter. Similar 'transformative' conclusions appear in Barker 1984, 116; Belsey 1985, 224; Bristol 1991, 43; Cohen 1987, 38-39; Cotter 1995, 128; Dollimore 1993, 271; Eagleton 1983, 210, 217; Evans 1986, 264; Jameson 1988, 2:208; Leninger 1980, 292; Lentricchia 1983, 163; McLuskie 1994, 106; Ryan 1995, 135; and Sprinker 1991, 126-28.[Back
  • Coyle refers to this accusation (29) and may be using it in his remark about my 'political agenda' (18), which he never explains. For some clearer examples, see Boose 1987, 709; Boyarin 1991, 315; Dollimore 1993, xiii; Drakakis 1995, 289; Eagleton 1983, 196; Evans 1986, 263; Howard 1994, 63; Lentricchia 1983, 10; Margolies 1988, 52; Moi 1983, 4; Morton 1996, 472; Ryan 1995, 2; and Sinfield 1983, 40. I put it too in question in Levin 1997.[Back
  • There is an old joke that in a typical Communist Party cell in America, the only members from working-class backgrounds were the undercover FBI agents.[Back
  • In the Guangxi region some were not only killed but eaten (Binyan 1993, 4).[Back
  • Compare the unreconstructed Stalinist who even now insists that 'the system hasn't had a chance to show its real capabilities' (quoted in Bayley 1993, 4). This kind of thinking is also found on the far Right--there are Americans who still believe we lost in Vietnam because we stopped bombing too soon. Such people will not let history teach them any lessons they do not want to learn.[Back
  • The Bundesbank actually lost a lot of money in the exchange of currency and the cost of modernizing and depoluting the Marxist factories.[Back
  • See Cotter 1995, 119; Greene 1981, 41; McLuskie 1994, 90; and Moi 1983, 10.[Back
  • He elevates it to 'the L.A. rebellion' (Lewis 1995, 107) and does not mention its victims.[Back
  • His only example is a school-leaver who has the 'humiliating' job of 'stack[ing] shelves in a supermarket, all day every day, for £2.00 an hour' (Sinfield 1994a, 264). He does not explain who would perform this necessary task in a just society, or how a just wage for it would be determined.[Back
  • He is not unique, however; see the admission in Bristol 1991, 43 that the Marxists' alternative is 'imaginary' and has no 'substantive social content'.[Back
  • See McLuskie 1994, 106 for a similar assertion about 'the material conditions which lie behind' family and personal relationships in King Lear.[Back
  • Coyle (1996, 17) says it 'is not an argument likely to convince many' but does not tell us why. Margot Heinemann (1991, 78-79) also locates 'the causes of disaster' in Lear in its 'unjust society' that is 'divided between extremes of rich and poor'.[Back
  • It comes of course from Freud, who posits a psychic mechanism that causes it. Marxists cannot explain who or what does the displacing or why, but that does not prevent them from using the concept. Thus Dollimore (1994, 73-80) argues that the sexual anxieties in Measure for Measure are a 'displacement' of 'much deeper' political anxieties about 'more fundamental' class issues. [Back
  • See Boose 1987, 727-35 and Neely 1988, 7-15 (cited in Coyle 1996, 1). Neely (9-10) singles out Dollimore's reading of Measure for Measure as an example of the 'new materialist' essays in which 'explorations of gender are blocked, displaced, or deferred', and notes that it 'elides prostitution with any transgressive sexuality and then with other forms of social disruption' and is silent about 'issues of women, sexuality, and prostitution', so that 'which oppressions can or cannnot be addressed seems curiously selective'.[Back

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