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E491: History of Literary Criticism Marx's View of Art, Selections Al Drake | 520 Hum. M/W 12:00-1:00 | ajdrake@ajdrake.com Let's try to deal with Marx's conception of art's relation to the economic "base." According to UC Irvine Prof. Michael Clark (in my paraphrased notes), "Marx shows that Greek mythology must be situated between the arts and economics. Greek art derives from Greek mythology, not directly from nature or from material conditions." Clark says further that "art does not imitate nature; it comes from a representation, an ideological concept or outlook, which is determined by the material relations of European societies." Professor Clark's point about the indirect relation between artistic production and the basic economic, material relations that hold in a given society is well stated. The Greeks created their works of art by thinking within the terms of mythology, which mythology is itself already a distorted representation of the "material conditions of existence." As Marx says, he is no Marxist, at least not in the crude sense that we have come to associate with socialist realism. (In fact, Marx received a fine classical education--in his youth he wrote poetry and drama--and he never lost his admiration for Greek and Latin art or for Shakespeare. Did you know that Friedrich Engels, too, dabbled in the arts, and that he translated some of Thomas Carlyle's work?) But perhaps there's no need to dwell upon Marx's acknowledgment that art does not keep pace directly with changes in the material conditions of production. Everyone knows that that is the case, so what is the problem Marx faces? His choice of Greek art in representing the difficulty is the thing upon which to focus. Why, indeed, asks Marx, do we nineteenth-century moderns still love Greek art? Our admiration, he implies, comes down to nostalgia for an age, for a set of social relations, perhaps, that we well know can never recur. There will never be another Oedipus Rex, another Iliad or Odyssey. How could anyone believe in Hermes the Messenger when we ourselves can exert much the same power over physical nature, say by sending telegraphs or by taking the railroad train over vast distances in incredibly short periods of time? Marx's explanation, interestingly, involves a teleological view of the past; Marx says that we admire the Greeks because they were "normal children." Thus, we grown-up Europeans still wish we could be as frank, beautiful, and fresh as those children, the Greeks. Marx is implying that just as a child matures (passes through certain stages of physical and intellectual growth), so too do whole societies. Modern European man, then, may look back upon the charming Greeks, with their brand new confrontation of the great philosophical problems, and so on, and long for the recovery of a lost, happy childhood. Does this remind you of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" ode, with its lament over the loss of a primal, less self-conscious, more perfect state of being? I may be wrong here, but it sounds to me as if Marx is ascribing our love for the Greeks to the same kind of nostalgia for an anterior, better state that we find in romantic poetry. What do you think Marx means by describing appreciation of ancient art this way? What might he be getting at? Does his description go along with the general Marxian view that art is somehow the site of mystification about the real relations between human beings that inhere within a given economic and social system? In other words, by placing the Greeks "out there" as an unreachable standard for our own art and even for our own behavior, are we nineteenth-century capitalists mystifying ourselves? Or is our admiration of the ancients more or less harmless because we know the grounds for it? Does Marx himself seem to participate in the admiration he is describing? Are the Greeks his ideal for art, too? Do you find Marx's explanation of the persistence of engagement with and appreciation of the Greeks convincing?
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