Karl Marx and World Literature

S. S. Prawer

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844677108
• eBook ISBN: 9781781689530
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

"Very few men," said Bakunin, "have read as much, and, it may be added, have read as intelligently, as M. Marx." S. S. Prawer's highly influential work explores how the world of imaginative literature-poems, novels, plays-infused and shaped Marx's writings, from his unpublished correspondence, to his pamphlets and major works. In exploring Marx's use of literary texts, from Aeschylus to Balzac, and the central role of art and literature in the development of his critical vision, Karl Marx and World Literature is a forensic masterpiece of critical analysis.

1 · Prometheus

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‘Prometheus is the foremost saint and martyr in the philosopher’s calendar’

(MEW EB I, 265)

(i)

THERE is much in Marx’s early life which might have seemed to predestine him for a literary career. As his daughter Eleanor recalled in later years:

He was a unique, an unrivalled story-teller. I have heard my aunts say that as a little boy he was a terrible tyrant to his sisters, whom he would ‘drive’ down the Markusberg at Trier full speed, as his horses, and worse, would insist on their eating the ‘cakes’ he made with dirty dough and dirtier hands. But they stood the ‘driving’ and ate the ‘cakes’ without a murmur, for the sake of the stories Karl would tell them as a reward for their virtue.¹

His fellow pupils at school feared him because of the ease with which he composed satirical verses and lampoons. He was introduced to Ovid, Cicero, and Tacitus at school, as well as to Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and Thucydides; a gifted teacher, Vitus Loers, who had published commentaries on Ovid, succeeded in arousing in his pupil an enthusiasm for that poet which brought in its wake attempts to translate the libri tristium into German verse, and admiring references to the same work in later life. A taste for the eighteenth-century German classics was nourished by his father (who held up Schiller, in particular, for his son’s admiration); while the Marx family’s neighbour at Trier, Karl Marx’s later father-in-law Ludwig von Westphalen, induced him to share his own admiration for Shakespeare. ‘He never tired’, Eleanor told Wilhelm Liebknecht, ‘of telling us about old Baron von Westphalen and his wonderful knowledge of Shakespeare and Homer. He could recite whole cantos of Homer from beginning to end, and most of Shakespeare’s plays he knew by heart in English and in German alike.’ Marx’s father, on the other hand, Eleanor adds, ‘was a proper “Frenchman” of the eighteenth century. He knew his Voltaire and his Rousseau by heart as old von Westphalen knew his Homer and Shakespeare.’² The young Marx’s school reports praise his performance in literary subjects and his ability as a translator, though his German essays are said to be ‘marred by an exaggerated striving after unusual picturesque expression’.³

In an essay he wrote for his school-leaving examination, Marx addressed himself, in 1835, to the subject: ‘A Young Man’s Reflections on the Choice of a Career’; and among the careers there envisaged that of a Dichter, a writer of imaginative literature, figures at least in passing. The career a young man should choose, the young Marx declares in 1835, should be

one that is most consonant with our dignity, one that is based on ideas of whose truth we are wholly convinced, one that offers us largest scope in working for humanity and approaching that general goal towards which each profession offers only one of the means: the goal of perfection … If he works only for himself he can become a famous scholar, a great sage, an excellent imaginative writer [Dichter], but never a perfected, a truly great man.⁴

Two related themes are here lightly touched which will recur in Marx’s later work. The first of these is the urge to become more than just a professional man, even if the profession chosen be that of a poet—the urge to work for others, to benefit humanity at large. This connects with a second theme, familiar to the age of Goethe, a theme given memorable expression in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, in Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man, and in Hölderlin’s Hyperion: the yearning for fullness of development, for overcoming the limitations imposed by that division of labour without which no modern society can function. There is nothing highly original in such sentiments; many boys at the end of their school career will have had similar thoughts. The same is true of Marx’s reflections, in this same school-leaving essay, on the different kinds of limitation that inevitably circumscribe a man’s choice of profession. Some of these are due to individual and physical factors; but Marx also stresses the social determinations which force a young man to fit himself into a pre-existent framework: ‘To some extent our social relations have already begun before we are in a position to determine them.’⁵ By itself this observation too is unremarkable enough. But it was Marx who made it; and if we look at it in the context of his whole career we can at least sympathize with the (often ridiculed) view of Franz Mehring, who thought he saw the germ of Marxism in this one sentence from a school-leaving exercise. Mehring might, in fact, have employed his hindsight further by pointing to the way in which the Latin essay Marx wrote at the same time and for the same purpose sought to explain the Romans’ alleged neglect of the arts and education before the Punic wars by their absorption in agriculture. Eloquence, the young Marx goes on to explain, was deemed unnecessary, for men spoke with few words about what had to be done, and regarded the content of their speech rather than elegance of form; nor did Roman history, in this early time, need rhetorical elaboration, for it only recorded things done, and confined itself to the compilation of annals.⁶ Marx was often to speak, in later years, of what linked intellectual and artistic pursuits to a nation’s economy; and the place of rhetorical elaboration and polished writing in historiography was to occupy him more than once as he tried to assess the relation of ‘belletristic’ virtues to the pursuit of truth.

As a university student, first at Bonn and later at Berlin (1835–41) Marx spent a good deal of time on the study not only of history, philosophy, and law, but also of literature. He heard lectures by A. W. Schlegel on Homer and Propertius, by F. G. Welcker on Greek and Latin mythology, and by Bruno Bauer on Isaiah; he copied out extracts from the aesthetic writings of Lessing, Solger, and Winckelmann; he tried to keep up with what was new in literature (alles Neueste der Literatur);⁷ he schooled his style by translating from Tacitus and Ovid; he joined a rhymers’ club to which the poets Emanuel Geibel and Karl Grün also belonged; and he wrote a good deal of poetry. In a letter to his father, dated 10 November 1837, in which he drew the sum of his experiences so far, Marx noted a natural affinity between moments of change and the lyric mood: ‘At such moments … an individual becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swansong, partly the overture of a great new poem that is trying to find its right proportions amid brilliant colours that are not yet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Prometheus
• 2. The Lantern of Diogenes
• 3. Shylock, Timon, Mephistopheles
• 4. Mysteries of Paris
• 5. Praxis and Ideology
• 6. From Grobianus to Jean Ziska
• 7. World Literature and Class Conflict
• 8. The Reign of Pecksniff, Crevel, and Crapülinski
• 9. Historical Tragedy
• 10. Orators and Culture-heroes
• 11. Models and Metaphors
• 12. Capital
• 13. Book-worming
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Select Bibliography
• Index