July 16, 2006

Marx as Literary Genius

Karl Marx biographer Francis Wheen sees Das Capital as more than a political economic treatise. It's a literary achievement of the first order. The number of literary references in the first volume--the only one completed before Marx's death--is astounding:

In 1976 SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's literary references. The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler - as well as allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels, popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.

Wheen writes,

The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ("Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore"); or as a Victorian melodrama; or as a black farce (in debunking the "phantom-like objectivity" of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality, Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy, stripping off the gallant knight's armour to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy ("Like Oedipus, the actors in Marx's recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do," C. Frankel writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought). Or perhaps it is a satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx's version of capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, alienated Yahoos.

To look at Marx's thought--as opposed to Marxism with all its strains--simply as a theory of exploitation and alienation is to look at Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nation without his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Doing such ignores the richness of thought contained in both men's works. It takes economics far from simply being about money.

"The Poet of Dialectics" [via Arts & Letters Daily]

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