Marx and Modern Fiction by Edward J. Ahearn (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews241 important documentation on a seventeenth-century life in science/philosophy and those interested in the topic should consider examining the volumes on the next trip to a major research library. Maria Sibylla Merian, like Anna van Schurman , was a member of the Labadist sect. EDWARD J. AHEARN. Marx and Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. 231 p. In this valuable contribution to a growing body ofAmerican reassessments of Marxist aesthetics, Ahearn concentrates on the practical application of Marx to specific works offiction, unlike other American Marxists who, in various ways, take account of post-structuralism—Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, and Michael Ryan, just to name some of the major ones. The concrete results of Ahearn's close readings, which range from Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, are impressive and open paths that call for further exploration. However, despite Ahearn's successes, his approach still raises some questions about methodology. In reading Marx and Modern Fiction, I'm frequently reminded of two other American assessments ofthe modern condition via Marx: Jameson's The Political Unconscious and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air. Although an oversimplification, we could call Berman's approach that of critical pluralism and call Jameson's approach that of the master narrative with its need, as Ahearn puts it, "to master and subjugate all conflicting theory" (xi). Ahearn's Marxism does not have Jameson's theoretical scope, nor does it have Berman's diversity. However, these differences give Ahearn's book its own virtues. To some degree, Marx and Modern Fiction can be seen as an advantageous compromise between Jameson and Berman. Two advantages ofAhearn's book are accessibility and scope. While Marx and Modern Fiction lacks the theoretical comprehensiveness of The Political Unconscious , it also lacks that book's theoretical remoteness. Furthermore, Ahearn manages to apply Marx to a more diverse set of specific literary cases. He addresses women's fiction (Jane Austen); feminist criticism (Luce Irigaray); homosexuality in the writings ofBalzac, Melville, and Faulkner; and he is able to recuperate works (The Golden Bowl and Ulysses) whose "aestheticism," Marxists tend to say, deserves at best only lukewarm approval. At the same time, Ahearn's treatment ofhis material is not such as to subsume Marx under the imperatives of cultural phenomena like modernity—an over-determination which Perry Anderson calls, in his review of Berman's book, a lack of "periodization ." Nonetheless, although Ahearn does a thorough and sophisticated job of linking the literary works to their respective economic and world historical contexts, his definition of large epochal shifts, such as what constitutes the modern, seems harder to locate. Of the seven authors examined, only threeJoyce , James, and Faulkner—would conventionally qualify as "modern" writers. I'm not unwilling to see Austen, Flaubert, Balzac, and Melville as modern, but there could be more discussion ofwhy I should. One might say in Berman's study 242Rocky Mountain Review historical periods lose something to modernity, while in Ahearn's study modernity loses something to historical periods. The question of what constitutes modernity raises other questions about Ahearn's interpretation ofMarx. The book's first chapter delineates what Ahearn views as the necessary concepts of Marx. The book then proceeds to analyze how well the works offiction correspond to these concepts. There is something slightly circular in this process which the book's chronological route, beginning with Marx and ending with Melville, reinforces. Furthermore, although Ahearn attempts to preserve the unity ofMarx's thought (as I think he should) by drawing impressively on the full range ofMarx's writings from the Paris manuscripts to Capital, in practice he relies most heavily on Marx's earlier writings with special attention to the themes ofalienation and consciousness. Using the Grundrisse , Ahearn makes his case in the following manner: "Doubtless Marx is committed to the central validity of the wide-ranging discipline of political economy , but no 'theory of levels' intrudes: there are a variety of ways to appropriate reality, all different but apparently all existing on the same 'level' " (3). When Ahearn puts it this way I'm inclined to agree with him. But in other instances, the use...