New Left Review I/91, May-June 1975

Francis Mulhern

Comment on ‘Ideology and Literary Form’—a comment

Terry Eagleton’s essay presents two closely related lines of argument, which can be summarized, very roughly, as follows. His main thesis is historical: he outlines what he takes to be the major ideological weakness of Victorian capitalism, and describes the various attempts that were made to recast the ideological instruments of British bourgeois rule, paying emphatic attention to the strategically important role that literature was assigned in this long and difficult effort. In his own words: ‘In the English literary culture of the past century, the ideological basis of organic form is peculiarly visible, as a progressively impoverished bourgeois liberalism attempts to integrate more ambitious, affective ideological modes, thereby entering into conflicts which its artistic forms betray in the act of attempted resolution.’ However, as the title of his essay indicates, Eagleton’s ultimate concern lies elsewhere. His historical arguments serve to illustrate a theoretical point about the relationship between ideology and literary form, about the ‘nexus between history and literary production’. This thesis is not formulaically stated at any point in the essay, but seems to entail the following: 1. One of the distinctive features of bourgeois literature is ‘organic form’, which is designed to suppress the contradictions of bourgeois ideology by producing ‘aesthetic formations with the supposedly spontaneous unity of natural life-forms’; 2. Like the corporate political and ideological formations to which they correspond, these ‘organic’ productions, and the critical ideologies parasitic upon them, must be combated by revolutionary theory—‘the destruction of such ideologies in the aesthetic region is essential not only for a scientific knowledge of the literary past, but for laying the foundation on which the Marxist aesthetics and artistic practice of the future can be built’.

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