From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Jul 08 2006 - 13:48:35 EDT
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329523759-110738,00.html
The poet of dialectics
Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work
of economic analysis. But, argues Francis Wheen,
it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece
which, with its multi-layered structure, can be
read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a
Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire
Francis Wheen
Saturday July 8, 2006
Guardian
In February 1867, shortly before delivering the
first volume of Das Kapital to the printers, Karl
Marx urged Friedrich Engels to read The Unknown
Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The story was
itself a little masterpiece, he said, "full of
the most delightful irony". We don't know whether
Engels heeded the advice. If he did, he would
certainly have spotted the irony but might have
been surprised that his old friend could take any
delight in it. The Unknown Masterpiece is the
tale of Frenhofer, a great painter who spends 10
years working and reworking a portrait which will
revolutionise art by providing "the most complete
representation of reality". When at last his
fellow artists Poussin and Porbus are allowed to
inspect the finished canvas, they are horrified
to see a blizzard of random forms and colours
piled one upon another in confusion. "Ah!"
Frenhofer cries, misinterpreting their wide-eyed
amazement. "You did not anticipate such
perfection!" But then he overhears Poussin
telling Porbus that eventually Frenhofer must
discover the truth - the portrait has been
overpainted so many times that nothing remains.
"Nothing on my canvas!" exclaimed Frenhofer,
glancing alternately at the two painters and his
picture.
"What have you done?" said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin.
The old man seized the young man's arm roughly,
and said to him: "You see nothing there, clown!
varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought you
here, then? - My good Porbus," he continued,
turning to the older painter, "can it be that
you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I am
your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?"
Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the
anxiety depicted on the old man's white face was
so heart-rending that he pointed to the canvas
saying: "Look!"
Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered.
"Nothing! Nothing! And I have worked ten years!"
He fell upon a chair and wept.
After banishing the two men from his studio,
Frenhofer burns all his paintings and kills
himself.
According to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue,
Balzac's tale "made a great impression on him
because it was in part a description of his own
feelings". Marx had toiled for many years on his
own unseen masterpiece, and throughout this long
gestation his customary reply to those who asked
for a glimpse of the work-in-progress was
identical to that of Frenhofer: "No, no! I have
still to put some finishing touches to it.
Yesterday, towards evening, I thought that it was
done . . . This morning, by daylight, I realised
my error."
As early as 1846, when the book was already
overdue, Marx wrote to his German publisher: "I
shall not have it published without revising it
yet again, both as regards matter and style. It
goes without saying that a writer who works
continuously cannot, at the end of six months,
publish word for word what he wrote six months
earlier." Twelve years later, still no nearer
completion, he explained that "the thing is
proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one
set about finally disposing of subjects to which
one has devoted years of study than they start
revealing new aspects and demand to be thought
out further". An obsessive perfectionist, he was
forever seeking out new hues for his palette -
studying mathematics, learning about the movement
of celestial spheres, teaching himself Russian so
he could read books on the country's land system.
Or, to quote Frenhofer again: "Alas! I thought
for a moment that my work was finished; but I
have certainly gone wrong in some details, and my
mind will not be at rest until I have cleared
away my doubts. I have decided to travel, and
visit Turkey, Greece and Asia in search of
models, in order to compare my picture with
Nature in different forms."
Why did Marx recall Balzac's tale at the very
moment when he was preparing to unveil his
greatest work to public scrutiny? Did he fear
that he too might have laboured in vain, that his
"complete representation of reality" would prove
unintelligible? He certainly had some such
apprehensions - Marx's character was a curious
hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished
self-doubt - and he tried to forestall criticism
by warning in the preface that "I assume, of
course, a reader who is willing to learn
something new and therefore to think for
himself." But what ought to strike us most
forcibly about his identification with the
creator of the unknown masterpiece is that
Frenhofer is an artist - not a political
economist, nor yet a philosopher or historian or
polemicist.
The most "delightful irony" of all in The Unknown
Masterpiece, noted by the American writer
Marshall Berman, is that Balzac's account of the
picture is a perfect description of a
20th-century abstract painting - and the fact
that he couldn't have known this deepens the
resonance. "The point is that where one age sees
only chaos and incoherence, a later or more
modern age may discover meaning and beauty,"
Berman wrote. "Thus the very open-endedness of
Marx's later work can make contact with our time
in ways that more 'finished' 19th-century work
cannot: Das Kapital reaches beyond the well-made
works of Marx's century into the discontinuous
modernism of our own."
Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la
lettre. His famous account of dislocation in the
Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid melts
into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the
unreal city depicted by TS Eliot, or Yeats's
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". By
the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out
beyond conventional prose into radical literary
collage - juxtaposing voices and quotations from
mythology and literature, from factory
inspectors' reports and fairy tales, in the
manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The
Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as
Schoenberg, as nightmarish as Kafka.
Marx saw himself as a creative artist, a poet of
dialectic. "Now, regarding my work, I will tell
you the plain truth about it," he wrote to Engels
in July 1865. "Whatever shortcomings they may
have, the advantage of my writings is that they
are an artistic whole." It was to poets and
novelists, far more than to philosophers or
political essayists, that he looked for insights
into people's material motives and interests: in
a letter of December 1868 he copied out a passage
from another work by Balzac, The Village Priest,
and asked if Engels could confirm the picture
from his own knowledge of practical economics.
Had he wished to write a conventional economic
treatise he would have done so, but his ambition
was far more audacious. Berman describes the
author of Das Kapital as "one of the great
tormented giants of the 19th century - alongside
Beethoven, Goya, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen,
Nietzsche, Van Gogh - who drive us crazy, as they
drove themselves, but whose agony generated so
much of the spiritual capital on which we still
live".
Yet how many people would think of including Marx
in a list of great writers and artists? Even in
our postmodern era, the fractured narrative and
radical discontinuity of Das Kapital are mistaken
by many readers for formlessness and
incomprehensibility. Anyone willing to grapple
with Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to
"learn something new" from a reading of Das
Kapital - not least because its subject still
governs our lives. As Berman asks: how can Das
Kapital end while capital lives on? It is fitting
that Marx never finished his masterpiece. The
first volume was the only one to appear in his
lifetime, and the subsequent volumes were
assembled by others after his death, based on
notes and drafts found in his study. Marx's work
is as open-ended - and thus as resilient - as the
capitalist system itself.
Although Das Kapital is usually categorised as a
work of economics, Marx turned to the study of
political economy only after many years of
spadework in philosophy and literature. It is
these intellectual foundations that underpin the
project, and it is his personal experience of
alienation that gives such intensity to the
analysis of an economic system which estranges
people from one another and from the world they
inhabit - a world in which humans are enslaved by
the monstrous power of capital and commodities.
Marx was an outsider from the moment of his
birth, on May 5 1818 - a Jewish boy in a
predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a
Prussian state whose official religion was
evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland
had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic
wars, three years before his birth it was
reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews
of Trier became subject to an edict banning them
from practising in the professions: Karl's
father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to
Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. His
father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The
boy's other intellectual mentor was Heinrich's
friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured
and liberal government official who introduced
Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter
Jenny, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks
together the Baron would recite passages from
Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion
learned by heart - and later used as the
essential seasonings in his own writings.
In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes
with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from
Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his
own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday
picnics. There was a quotation for every
occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a
dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an
emotion - or breathe life into an inanimate
abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the
voice of Shylock (in volume one of Das Kapital)
to justify the exploitation of child labour in
factories:
Workmen and factory inspectors protested on
hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:
My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.
To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx
quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as
the "common whore of mankind", followed by
another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money!
Money's the curse of man, none greater! / That's
what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, /
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, /
Pointing out the way to infamy and shame . . .").
Economists with anachronistic models and
categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid
the penalty for wrongly imagining that
knight-errantry was equally compatible with all
economic forms of society".
Marx's earliest ambitions were literary. As a law
student at the University of Berlin he wrote a
book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel,
Scorpion and Felix, influenced by Laurence
Sterne's wildly digressive novel Tristram Shandy.
After these experiments, he admitted defeat:
Suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch
was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight
of the distant realm of true poetry like a
distant fairy palace, and all my creations
crumbled into nothing . . . A curtain had fallen,
my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods
had to be installed.
Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered
by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a
long rest - whereupon he at last succumbed to the
siren voice of GWF Hegel, the recently deceased
professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy
was the subject of intense dispute among fellow
students and lecturers. At university, Marx
"adopted the habit of making extracts from all
the books I read" - a habit he never lost. A
reading list from this period shows the
precocious scope of his intellectual
explorations. While writing a paper on the
philosophy of law he made a detailed study of
Winckelmann's History of Art, started to teach
himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus's
Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read Francis
Bacon and "spent a good deal of time on Reimarus,
to whose book on the artistic instincts of
animals I applied my mind with delight". This is
the same eclectic, omnivorous and often
tangential style of research which gave Das
Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.
As a student Marx was infatuated by Tristram
Shandy, and 30 years later he found a subject
which allowed him to mimic the loose and
disjointed style pioneered by Sterne. Like
Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of paradoxes
and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and
whimsical tomfoolery, fractured narratives and
curious oddities. How else could he do justice to
the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of
capitalism?
"What does it matter to you what people whisper
here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the
Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk."
Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the
line in his preface for the first volume of Das
Kapital to warn that he will make no concession
to the prejudices of others: "Now, as ever, my
maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go your own
way, and let the people talk]." From the outset,
then, the book is conceived as a descent towards
the nether regions, and even in the midst of
complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a
vivid sense of place and motion:
Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the
market, where all that goes on is done in full
view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems
open and above board. We will follow the owner of
the money and the owner of labour-power into the
hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold
of the portal above which is written, "No
admittance except on business". Here we shall
discover, not only how capital produces, but also
how it is itself produced. We shall at last
discover the secret of making surplus value.
The literary antecedents for such a journey are
often recalled as he proceeds on his way.
Describing English match factories, where half
the workers are juveniles (some as young as six)
and conditions are so appalling that "only the
most miserable part of the working class,
half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up
their children to it", he writes:
With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15
hours, night labour, irregular meal-times, and
meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves,
pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found
the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in
this industry.
Other imagined hells provide further
embellishment for his picture of empirical
reality:
From the motley crowd of workers of all callings,
ages and sexes, who throng around us more
urgently than did the souls of the slain around
Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of
overwork, without referring to the Blue Books
under their arms, let us select two more figures,
whose striking contrast proves that all men are
alike in the face of capital - a milliner and a
blacksmith.
This is the cue for a story about Mary Anne
Walkley, a 20-year-old who died "from simple
overwork" after labouring for more than 26 hours
making millinery for the guests at a ball given
by the Princess of Wales in 1863. Her employer
("a lady with the pleasant name of Elise", as
Marx notes caustically) was dismayed to find that
she had died without finishing the bit of finery
she was stitching. There is a Dickensian texture
to much of Das Kapital, and Marx gives the
occasional explicit nod to an author he loved.
Here, for example, is how he swats bourgeois
apologists who claim that his criticisms of
particular applications of technology reveal him
as an enemy of social progress who doesn't want
machinery to be used at all:
This is exactly the reasoning of Bill Sikes, the
celebrated cutthroat. "Gentlemen of the jury, no
doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has
been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the
fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary
inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only
consider! Where would agriculture and trade be
without the knife? Is it not as salutary in
surgery as it is skilled in anatomy? And a
willing assistant at the festive table? If you
abolish the knife - you hurl us back into the
depths of barbarism."
Bill Sikes makes no such speech in Oliver Twist:
this is Marx's satirical extrapolation. "They are
my slaves," he would sometimes say, gesturing at
the books on his shelves, "and they must serve me
as I will." The task of this unpaid workforce was
to provide raw materials which could be shaped
for his own purposes. "His conversation does not
run in one groove, but is as varied as are the
volumes upon his library shelves," wrote an
interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited
Marx in 1878. 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.
What of Das Kapital's own literary status? Marx
knew it could not be won second-hand, by the mere
display of other men's flowers. In volume one he
scorns those economists who "conceal under a
parade of literary-historical erudition, or by an
admixture of extraneous material, their feeling
of scientific impotence and the eerie
consciousness of having to teach others what they
themselves felt to be a truly strange subject". A
fear that he could himself have committed this
offence may explain the anguished admission, in
the afterword to its second edition, that "no one
can feel the literary shortcomings of Das Kapital
more strongly than I". Even so, it is surprising
that so few people have even considered the book
as literature. Das Kapital has spawned countless
texts analysing Marx's labour theory of value or
his law of the declining rate of profit, but only
a handful of critics have given serious attention
to Marx's own declared ambition - in several
letters to Engels - to produce a work of art.
One deterrent, perhaps, is that the multilayered
structure of Das Kapital evades easy
categorisation. 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 do justice to the deranged logic of
capitalism, Marx's text is saturated with irony -
an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for
the past 140 years. One exception is the American
critic Edmund Wilson, who argued in To The
Finland Station: a study in the writing and
acting of history (1940) that the value of Marx's
abstractions - the dance of commodities, the zany
cross-stitch of value - is primarily an ironic
one, juxtaposed as they are with grim,
well-documented scenes of the misery and filth
which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson
regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical
economics. No one, he thought, had ever had so
deadly a psychological insight into the infinite
capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious
or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others
when we have a chance to get something out of
them for ourselves. "In dealing with this theme,
Karl Marx became one of the great masters of
satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist
since Swift, and has a good deal in common with
him."
What, then, is the connection between Marx's
ironic literary discourse and his "metaphysical"
account of bourgeois society? Had he wished to
produce a straightforward text of classical
economics he could have done so - and in fact he
did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later
published as Value, Price and Profit, give a
concise and lucid précis of his theories about
commodities and labour:
A man who produces an article for his own
immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a
product but not a commodity . . . A commodity has
a value, because it is a crystallization of
social labour . . . Price, taken by itself, is
nothing but the monetary expression of value . .
. What the working man sells is not directly his
labour, but his labouring power, the temporary
disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist
. . .
And so on.
Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this
can be understood by any intelligent child: no
elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no puzzling
digressions or philosophical excursions, no
literary flourishes. So why is Das Kapital, which
covers the same ground, so utterly different in
style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain
speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave
these lectures he was also completing the first
volume of Das Kapital. A clue can be found in one
of the very few analogies he permitted himself in
Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his
belief that profits arise from selling
commodities at their "real" value and not, as one
might suppose, from adding a surcharge. "This
seems paradox and contrary to everyday
observation," he writes. "It is also paradox that
the earth moves round the sun, and that water
consists of two highly inflammable gases.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by
everyday experience, which catches only the
delusive nature of things."
The function of metaphor is to make us look at
something anew by transferring its qualities to
something else, turning the familiar into the
alien or vice versa. Ludovico Silva, a Mexican
critic of Marx, has drawn on the etymological
meaning of "metaphor" as a transfer to argue that
capitalism itself is a metaphor, an alienating
process which displaces life from subject to
object, from use-value to exchange-value, from
the human to the monstrous. In this reading, the
literary style Marx adopted in Das Kapital is not
a colourful veneer applied to an otherwise
forbidding slab of economic exposition, like jam
on thick toast; it is the only appropriate
language in which to express "the delusive nature
of things", an ontological enterprise which
cannot be confined within the borders and
conventions of an existing genre such as
political economy, anthropological science or
history. In short, Das Kapital is entirely sui
generis. There has been nothing remotely like it
before or since - which is probably why it has
been so consistently neglected or misconstrued.
Marx was indeed one of the great tormented giants.
·This an edited extract from Marx's Das Kapital:
A Biography, part of a series, Books that Shook
the World, published this month by Atlantic and
to be serialised in Review in coming weeks. Next:
Christopher Hitchens on Paine's Rights of Man
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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