MARXISM and LITERATURE: 1

" In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch." MARX.

Historical materialism abhors a vacuum: that is, it does not accept that any aspect of man's development exists and can be studied except in relation to the mode of production — society's "real foundation." The institutions and ideas, the moralities, laws, concepts and knowledge held in any society are results of, basically, the way labour is organized and its products distributed. Thus the primitive measurement of land gave birth to geometry; the making of pots and baskets to the idea of capacity; the division of fields to the concept of justice, which is nomas in Greek that originally meant pasture.

Literature is one of man's oldest activities. From earliest times, man has recorded the impressions and ideals given him by social life, in plays, poetry and prose. The intention of these notes is to show the evolution of literature as something closely interwoven with the evolution of society. Beowulf and Bunyan, Juvenal and Joyce, Shakespeare and Damon Runyon show it; it is in the troubadors' songs, purveying the middle ages' new concept of romantic love, and in the epics of Homer, where kings' divine rights are backed by the gods' divine retribution.

"Literature" had better be defined, as far as that is possible. In one sense, it means just printed matter: furniture shops and political parties distribute literature, but nobody places it with Shelley's poems. On the other hand, political speeches and factual writings can and have become literature in the other sense: Cicero's orations, or Herodotus' histories, or White's Natural History of Selborne. When reading matter has given pleasure and satisfaction to many people for a long time, it must be called literature. That does not mean all books of long-standing fame must be good; many hold their places in the histories because they mark new trends and phases. In this writer's view, there could be no other justification for those monuments to hack writing, Scott's works.

Prose literature is a comparatively recent development. The earliest literature was in verse and unwritten; our knowledge of it comes from present-day primitive peoples. In their societies, the poet is not separated from his hearers by the barrier of literacy; poetry is generated spontaneously by everyday life and passed from mouth to mouth. The origins of speech itself are believed — see Malinowski, Ogden and Richards, and others — to lie in rhythmic sound-making as an aid to work. " The group worked together, like children in a kindergarten orchestra, and each movement of hand or foot, each stroke on stick or stone, was timed by a more or less inarticulate recitative uttered by all in unison. Without this vocal accompaniment the work could not be done." (Geo. Thomson, Marxism and Poetry).

When speech and skill were better developed, that accompaniment became unnecessary. It went on, however, as a rehearsal of work before the work was done — in other words, as a piece of magic. It still happens: Frazer in The Golden Bough and Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual give numerous examples. In these rituals music, dancing and poetry had a common origin. Plenty of labour songs are still known, in places where they have not been drowned by machinery: spinning songs, rowing songs, sea shanties and so on.

The incorporation of poetry in ritual meant its separation from ordinary speech and its association with magic. Thus, for barbarian peoples the poet is a prophet inspired by the gods (the status of the Old Testament psalm-singers). Said Plato: "All good poets are enabled to compose not by art but because they are divinely inspired or possessed. When they compose, they are no more sane than the Korybantes when they dance." The conception of poetry as magical, inspired and different from other speech has remained: that is why Shakespeare used verse for lofty sentiments and prose for commonplace talk, and why poets are still regarded as "weirdies" to-day.

The oldest written literature which is known is that of the Egyptians. From Memphis of more than four thousand years ago there are incised tablets with the folk songs of peasants and fishermen, the precepts of rulers, the bitter testament of a king who had escaped from assassination. The great age of Egyptian literature was roughly between 2000 and 1800 B.C., when the nobles had broken the power of the Pyramid Age Pharaohs. There were temple libraries, extensive private libraries, and a goddess of books named Safekh. The papyrus rolls include religious plays and pageants; there is "The Voyage of Sinuhe" — the original Sinbad — with stories of travel, exploration and military adventure, the earliest scientific writings and the earliest prophecies of a Messiah.

The growth of literature in this age — abruptly ended by the Hyksos' invasion of Egypt — is comparable with what happened in Britain in the Elizabethan era. A language had been perfected for writing. The boundaries of Egypt were extended, and Egyptian ships were going to every part of the known world. Navigation, irrigation to increase the agricultural yield, the building of huge cylindrical granaries — in a word, commerce — gave tremendous stimulus to the gaining of knowledge and to the imagination. There was another factor, too. As Ford Madox Ford puts it in The March of Literature: " You have to consider that all across Asia there was a continual, an unending, going and coming of merchants, of conquerors, of missionaries, of nomads, and that one body of men cannot come into contact with another body of men without maxims, practices, or merely material habits and knowledges getting transferred from one to the other."

The Babylonians, too, had their literature, and the immense flow of Chinese poetry began more than a thousand years B.C., long before the Emperor Shi Hwang Ti ordered the burning of books. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt at that time, assimilating the legends of the Creation and the Flood that had been carried from Babylonia and went with a dozen more Egyptian myths into the compendium of propaganda and folklore that is the Old Testament. And, in the same period still, the man or men Homer gathered the folk-legends and hero-myths of barbarian Greece into the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Greek epics were tales of past glories, composed when the first warlords had been driven out of Mycenae and Sparta by others like themselves. They began as extempore sung lays; for two centuries they existed in a dozen different forms, until an Athenian tyrant commissioned what would to-day be called a definitive edition; they were gone over again about 150 B.C. by Aristarchus of the library of Alexandria. Even the ancient world doubted that Homer had much to do with them, and even- the ancient world doubted the stories: Herodotus,for example, thought it moonshire that a world should fight for a woman when virgins were cheap in the market place. The real fact is that the Greek epics were a popular heritage, passed on by countless bards, of mythology and tradition.

Yet they were great and skilful works. The historical conditions of early Greece made them so. Thus, they were not written for generations; when writing was widely practised in Greece, they were heard and not read — they thrived in and were moulded by the declamatory traditions of the Greek festival and the agora. When finally they were written down there were skilled hands to do it. Then there is the question — too wide to go into here — of the Greek conception of beauty in simplicity; it went into their epics as it did into their architecture and sculpture, and it derived mainly from the physical environment. Greek epics were inspired by war. Drama was the product of agriculture. Beginning with magic ritual, it evolved as religious drama with the poet speaking as a god. In the growth of Greek democracy in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., tragedy became part of the great religious festivals." It was employed from above," says Ford, "by the governing class to instil into more or less turbulent proletariats the lessons of discipline and of obedience to rulers who had behind them the divine beings of Olympus."

That is near enough to the truth. The ideas of retributive justice and retributive law are the core of Greek tragedy, as they are of the Homer epics. Of the latter, Kelsen says in Society and Nature: "Retribution is regarded — always and everywhere — as a kind of trade in which good is exchanged for good and bad for bad. Thus it is said at the beginning of the Iliad, "Whoso obeys the gods, to him do they gladly give ear." The whole character of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles is the demand for obedience to the gods, who represent but an idealized human authority. Divine law is personified in Dike, the goddess of righteousness and punishment. In Euripides, third of the great tragic dramatists, the religious theme gives way to a national one, but authority suffers no loss.

Euripides' nationalism was a sign of the times: the rivalry between Athens and Sparta was approaching its climax. When the walls of Athens were torn down and the Spartan hegemony established in 405 B.C., the curtain fell on Greek tragedy. The other celebrated dramatist, Aristophanes, was a political propagandist; an aristocrat, anti-democrat, pro-Spartan. His comedies aimed at sitting targets — the Athenian democracy, the philosophers and artists who got few chalks under the Spartans' Thirty Tyrants. Lysistrata, enjoyed nowadays for its bawdiness, was a plea for Athens to make peace with Sparta; The Birds and Peace clamoured for alliance with the Lacedaemonians.

The conflicts between the states and the victories of Alexander reduced Greece's population and sent commercial and cultural leadership eastwards. The museum and library at Alexandria became a storehouse and a refuge, the home of second-rate poets and philosophers and finally the cradle of theology. A small colony of Greeks—Theocritus, Bion, Moschus — lived in pretty, sheltered Sicily and produced pretty, sheltered pastoral poems for a few years until Alexandria called them too. Ptolemy was generous.

When Greek epics and tragedies were flourishing, the Romans were a barbarian tribe. By the beginning of the Christian era the importation of arts and artists from Rome's province Greece, commissioned by millionaire connoisseurs, was enormous. Cicero decried the Greek arts, but the others borrowed from them. Virgil, Ovid and Lucan were official poets of the court while Rome became a great, busy, money-mad city, reflecting the manners and upper-class ideals but little of the real life of that time. Petronius and Apuleius saw to the last matter; the former, with his shrewd uproarious pictures of parvenu and low-life alike, one of the greatest realists ever.

The separation of everyday life from what is called literature must be evident, through all this. The sweated populace of Rome knew and cared nothing of bucolics or hexameters. All the same, they had something in the nature of a last word. Their language — Latin, but only coincidentally resembling the classic tongue of Seneca or Livy — spread over Europe. It became the language of the Romance period — that is, of Chaucer, Ronsard, and the others who stand at the beginning of modern European literature.

R. COSTER.

NOTE.—In addition to many other opinions, the writer thinks the provision of book lists with articles rather unctuous. However, for those who are interested, he recommends the works cited. Erman's The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians is the standard work on its subject,and Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens is worth anybody's time. There is also Lafargue's very good essay, " The Origin of Abstract Ideas," in Social and Philosophical Studies.

FORUM (internal Socialist Party discussion journal for better understanding), May 1955