Influence of Karl Marx on Modern Literature

Introduction:
Marx and Freud have influenced life and literature in the twentieth century more
deeply and extensively than the earlier great thinkers and scientists like Copernicus and
Darwin influenced the life and literature in their own respective eras. Karl Marx (1818—83)
and Sigmund Freud (1856—1939) had very different fields and orientations.

While Marx was basically a social philosopher, Freud began his career as a doctor specializing
in the physiology of the nervous system and the treatment of such disorders as neurosis and
hysteria. He soon became the founder of psychoanalysis and thereby one of the seminal
figures of the twentieth century. And as regards Marx, he started with the study of Hegelian
dialectic at the university in Berlin and Bonn but soon gave a new direction to socio-political
thought by publishing, along with Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). This makes him
the "father of Communism." Freud's psychoanalytical theories and Marx's Communism both
proved revolutionary and highly impactful throughout the world.
Let us now consider the impact of Marx on twentieth-century English literature.
Marxian Thought and English Literature:
Marx's philosophy is known as "dialectical materialism-." No place is given by him to
the soul or the spirit. According to him, religion is the opium of the masses which keeps them
in a world of material reality. He adopted the Hegelian dialectic to give a materialist account
of social formations. His concept to class conflict is a basic point. Conflicts arise from the
desire to control the means of production. He attacked the laissez faire policy which allows the
industrialists and capitalists to exploit the working class without let or hindrance. Marx was
for Communism, i.e., the supremacy of the community of workers rather than of a few
individuals in control of the entire wealth and its generating sources. The proletariat should
rule a country jointly instead of a king or an elected parliament, which normally protects
vested masses throughout the world. His teachings inspired the Russian Revolution and then
the Chinese, not to speak of another dozen or more on smaller scales throughout the world.
Fourfold Influence:So far as English literature is concerned, Marx's impact manifests itself
in four different ways:
(i)         A greater concern for the poor exploited masses, without any overt projection of the Marxian
ideology. Even non-Marxian writers in the twentieth century tend to give a much greater
representation to the working class in their works. In the novels of Arnold Bennett, for
example, we have mostly working-class heroes. And Lawrence's proletarian hero sometimes
walks away with an aristocratic lady.
(ii)        Use of literature as a means of communistic propaganda. See, for example, the English
Socialist theatre of today.
(iii)       A tendency to subvert the conventional literary forms and techniques by condemning them as
constructs of the bourgeoisie. Here the Marxians are on avant-garde ground.
(iv)       A reaction against Marxian ideology which seems to encourage statism as against the concept
of the sanctity and freedom of the individual and abject materialism as against spiritualism
and "the higher values of life." Witness George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm.

Influence pa-Poetry: Let us now consider the influence of Marx on English poetry, dirama,
novel, and literary criticism of the twentieth century, in this order.
 The impact of Marx is most clearly discernible in the work of Oxford poets of the
1930s, viz., W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. They were
committed leftists the aim of whose poetry was the propagation of Communist ideology.
Poetry in their hands become political action, a contribution to the proletaian struggle against
the bourgeoisie the ruling elite. At least two of the four Oxford poets got actually involved in
the Spanish Civil War.
Auden is now given the status of a major poet of the twentieth century. In the 1930s
he was the voice of his generation. Linda Williams observes: "His verse is full of topical
reference to the social and international crises of the time; it gives direct expression to the
anxieties of the contemporary intelligentsia as perhaps no other writing has done." Spender
for some time remained a member of the Communist Party and as such supported the
Republicans' cause in the Spanish Civil War. His poetry is less overtly propagandist than that
of Day-Lewis. MacNeice had Socialist leanings but was not a committed leftist.
Influence on the Novel:
Of all the literary genres it is the novel that allows an author to represent life the most
comprehensively-even more than he can in drama, because whereas drama only shows, the
novel can both show and tell. That is why the novel all over the world has been the
most eligibleliterary medium of propaganda. But, strangely, in England no Marxian novels
worth the name have appeared in modern times; propagandists have used drama instead.
But if there have been practically no English novels based on Marxian theories like
the materialistic basis of social formation and class struggle, there have been novels
representing the life of the poor, exploited classes with all its unrelieved gloom. The two
novelists who wrote such novels with some distinctiveness were George Gissing and George
Moore. Gissing was influenced more by Schopenhauer than by Marx. Cazamian observes
about him: "Bitternesssank to the core of his nature, and permeated all his fibres; it became
the very food of his imagination   Gissing describes the diseases of society without any hope of
curing them. He believes neither in the philanthropy of the rich, nor in the revolt of the poor."
In his novel Demos, "the career of a plebeian agitator...teaches us the vanity of the socialist
dream."
George Moore, unlike Gissing, was a rare combination of an uncompromising realist
and a refined aesthete. He tries to make beautiful artifacts out of the gloomy ugliness of life.
Cazamian says: "George Moore reconciles the audacity of crude, brutal observation with the
sensuous refinement of a voluptuous aesthete.
George Orwell's well-known novels Animal Farm and 1984 are satires on Socialism
and Stalinism. The former has the form of an allegorical beast fable. The latter came after
World War II. According to Andrew Roberts, this novel is "a vision of a world "ruled by
dictatorships of the Stalinist style, taken to an extreme in which private life and private
thought are all but eradicated by surveillance, propaganda, and the systematic perversion of
language."
Influence on Literary Criticism:
Marxian thought has had a tremendous impact on literary criticism not only in
Socialist countries, but the world over. Marx did not have a comprehensive theory of art and
literature, but his fierce attack on bourgeois idealism have given new directions to literary
criticism. To Marx literature was only part of the "superstructure" of which the "base" was
formed by economic conditions and dispensation of a society. In its purity Marxian criticism
tends to be simplistic if not severely blinkered. But it has its own insights to offer. The
Marxian school has in its ranks such great critics as Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Fredric
Jameson, Gramsci, and Macherey, to name just a few. Several latter-day critics have tried to
relate Marxism with Structuralism, psychoanalytic theories, and even Reconstruction, leading
to new insights if not comprehensive systems. In England Raymond Williams (1921—88) has
been the best-known Marxian critic. Among the practising critics in today's England Terry
Eagleton (1948— ) is by far the most eminent.