THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF THE STUDY
3.2 Definitions of Marxism and its historical development
3.3.1. Fredric Jameson and his ideas of a Marxist literary theory
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of these plays. The theoretical positions of Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Georg Lukacs will be used as the lenses through which to view these texts.
3. 3. From theory to theorists: Exploring Jameson, Lukacs’ and Eagleton as theoretical models for Marxist literary theory
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and visual culture, and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1995), a collection of essays on American and world cinema. Jameson also published a book on Adorno, Late Marxism (2007), where he presents the great cultural critic of the Frankfurt school as a key theorist. As Jameson’s theoretical position continued, his works treat Marxism as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework, within which other methods function as local or sectorial tools. By Jameson’s standard, Marxism had surpassed a continuous emphasis on the struggle in history, economics and politics. In so many fields he demonstrated an ideological reflection of a Marxist perspective.
In a well-researched book, The Political Unconscious, he articulated his intellectual position. Jameson advocates the pre-eminence of Marxism on the grounds that its socio-economic entirety offers “the most comprehensive framework in which gender, race, class, sexuality, myth, symbol, allegory, and other more limited concerns can be explored and interpreted.” (Jameson, 2013, p.69) What Jameson perceives in this statement is a reminder that Marxism as a theory did not exactly offer the position of an all-inclusive perspective as offered in his silent yet salient literary and theoretical cultural position. It is therefore important in trying to see how the all-inclusive vision of Jameson is able to talk to the works selected for analysis in this study. Do these plays have a reflection of gender, class, race, symbol etc. as envisioned by Jameson? To respond to this means that sensitive attention must be paid to some of the issues in the plays that will allow for such justification. In Death and the king’s horseman, there is a representation of gender which Soyinka seems to unconsciously portray. All the protagonists in the play are male. The play begins with the death of the king who according to tradition must be accompanied by his horseman (Elesin) to the great beyond. The horseman is expected to commit a ritual suicide that will enable him to escort the king to the realms of transition where the king will unite with the world of the dead, transform into a deity and commune with the living. The character who again obstructs or intercepts in this ritual suicide is a male (Mr. Pilkings). The ritual suicide is obstructed thereby disrupting the cyclical world of the Yoruba cosmos.
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The later suicide committed in the play is carried out by the horseman’s son who returns from England and faces the failure of the father as a weakling who failed to live up to his responsibility as a cultural man. His suicide therefore was an attempt to correct his father’s failure. However, his father could not hold the shame of still living under such circumstances and proceeds to also commit suicide. The series of the suicide acts only contribute to the threnodic catastrophe that had tampered with the Yoruba cosmos. Through the series of events, Soyinka offers strength and trust in the male characters. He intentionally silences the voice of the women rendering them voiceless. The women only represented part of the common people of the community whose role does not have a direct relevance to the cosmic order. Soyinka does not consider them central in resolving or existing in this spiritual world of transition. This view offers a gendered perspective for literary analysis which Jameson appreciates from a Marxist perspective.
The issues of class and race are raised in Soyinka’s play. Apart from the gendered depiction that an analysis of the play can offer, it also represents within it a class structure. If the women are silenced, it means that politically, economically, socially and even culturally they are disadvantaged and cannot belong to the bourgeoisie class. Most of them if not all are represented by Soyinka as market women whose services enrich the king, the elders and chiefs.
This class division by gender is not far from the society of today especially in such societies where the feminist propaganda is still weak. In addition, the question of race is still very well reflected in the play. The supposed ritual suicide was an African ritual especially among the Yoruba people of South- West Nigeria, but Pilkings, a white sergeant, disrupted this ritual. Although Soyinka advises against a possible interpretation of this play as a clash of cultures (race), there is no denying the literary presence of such a clash.
In Rotimi’s Kurunmi and Ogunyemi’s the Vow, the representation of gender, race, class, symbols etc. as an all-inclusive vision for a Marxist analysis according to Jameson is significant. While Rotimi’s Kurunmi centres on the political war between Ibadan and Ijaye on who becomes the next king according to tradition, Ogunyemi’s The Vow touches on the autocratic nature of the king
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who feels that his decision is final and that no member of the community is capable of challenging it. In Rotimi’s Kurunmi just as in Ogunyemi’s The Vow, the leaders are representatives of the bourgeois class. While the dead king in Kurunmi changes the tradition of his people and advocates the enthronement of his son as the next king, Kurunmi condemns in strong terms such a political move and offers his life as a resistance. Rotimi’s Kurunmi also renders more voice to the men and silences the voice of the women. The same scenario features itself in Ogunyemi’s the Vow and this justifies the inclusion of a Marxist literary analysis as provided by Jameson.
In a later work which addresses the elusive world-system as a whole, Jameson contends that it is capitalism and its development of commodification and reification that offers the motor and matrix of today's world-system, especially after the fall of Soviet communism. Subsequently though, his work can be appreciated as a series of efforts to provide a Marxian method of interpretation and aesthetic theory.
Jameson, in recognition of the basic conceptual inadequacies of the Marxist thought symptomatically adopted a wide range of theoretical positions which range from the ideas of structuralism to the invention of post-structuralism, from psychoanalysis to postmodernism into his theoretical position, which has brought about a unique eclectic and innovative sort of “Marxian literary and cultural theory” (Jameson, 1979, p.66). Jameson’s position on Marxism is holistic and all encompassing, providing an eclectic substance for the literature to survive. For Jameson, literature is the engine room that enables other societal elements to function. Hence, Jameson's Marxism is far from conventional. He employs a dual hermeneutic of system and utopia to criticize the ideological workings of cultural texts while setting out their utopian dimensions, which comprises those ideas of a better world that offer perspectives from which to criticize existing society (Roberge, 2011). Jameson’s position here clearly appropriates itself to the textual representation of Soyinka’s Death and the king’s horseman, Rotimi’s Kurunmi and Ogunyemi’s The Vow. The ideas of Jameson are strengthened in these plays with their clear portrayal of the ideology of the age as well as the authors’ ideological positions that influenced
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their writings. The plays are all centred on the culture of the Yoruba people of South-West Nigeria and to some extent on how the clash of cultures between traditional African and Western counterparts ensue. The plays reflect the political ideology of the ruling class and the attempt to legitimize power. The failure to achieve this usually resulted in suicidal acts.
Far from the ideas of Marxism, Jameson was further influenced by the ideas of another Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, where he also developed a hermeneutical and utopian kind of Marxian cultural theory. The focus of Jameson here is on the utopian dimensions which find expression in imaginary (fantasy), knowledge (science) fiction and other forms of popular culture and which he believes contains utopian and critical moments. His deep interest is also attracted to realist texts, which he thinks provide both understanding and criticisms of existing capitalist society which is intrinsically evident in the selected plays. Lukacs' idea on realism and on the historical novel powerfully influenced Jameson's way of absorbing and positioning literature. Although he did not totally align with Lukàcs' arguments against modernism, he made substantial and substantive use of some key Lukacsian categories including reification, the method through which human beings are used to describe the fate of culture and how human beings function in a contemporary capitalist society (Sim, 2013).
The inclusive conception of Jameson that paves the way for the interrogation of literary works from a Marxist viewpoint ranging from science, psychology, culture, fiction etc. as well as Lukacs’ realism, strengthens a profound literary analysis. It is to be emphasised that the Lukacsian-Hegelian pointers of Jameson's work and ideologies comprise the contextualizing of cultural texts in history, the broad chronological categorisations, and the use of Hegelian- Marxian dialectical groupings and methods. Dialectical criticism for Jameson encompasses the effort to blend competing positions and approaches into a more comprehensive theory as he demonstrates in The Prison-House of Language (Jameson, 1975), where he integrates essentials of French structuralism and semiotics, as well as Russian formalism, into his theory. Dialectical criticism for Jameson involves questions, classifications and methods, while carrying out
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tangible analyses and studies. Categories for Jameson articulate historical content and are read in terms of the historical environment out of which they emerge.
Jameson evolved a grounded; integrating thought which provides a methodical context for cultural studies and a theory of history within which dialectical criticism can operate. These characteristics continue to be operational in Jameson's works with the totalizing element coming more significantly (and controversially) to the fore as his work evolved. The Political Unconscious (Jameson, 1981) in particular encapsulates the comprehensive theoretical synthesis and systematic articulation of Jameson’s approach. This text presents an articulation of Jameson's literary method, a methodical account of the history of literary forms, and a buried history of the systems and styles of subjectivity itself, as it traverses through the field of culture and experience. Jameson also employs a Lukacsian-inspired historical narrative to tell the story of how cultural texts contain politically unconscious, buried narratives and social experiences, which require sophisticated literary hermeneutics to decipher. By political unconscious, Jameson talks of those political elements, attributes and visions contained in a text and which proceed from the author’s creative authority. One specific narrative of The Political Unconscious concerns, in Jameson's striking expression, "the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its schizophrenic disintegration in our own time"
(Jameson, 2013, p. 9).
What Jameson summarily presents and develops in his Marxist literary theory is an exploration of those buried narratives imbedded in a text which he considers are unconscious of the ideological vision of the author. He explores this position in The political unconscious. He also developed the eclectic brand of Marxism where he proposed an all-inclusive consideration of societal factors that are evident in a text and which are influential in a literary analysis. Jameson sees many such theoretical positions ranging from structuralism, post- structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis etc. having a profound impact on Marxist literary analyses which are appropriate for the literary texts of this study.
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