Critique

Journal of Socialist Theory

ISSN: 0301-7605 (Print) 1748-8605 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcso20

The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics

Mike Belbin

To cite this article: Mike Belbin (2019) The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics, Critique,
47:2, 377-379, DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2019.1601877

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2019.1601877

Published online: 29 May 2019.

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Critique, 2019
Vol. 47, No. 2, 377–379

Book Review

Daniel Hartley: The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics

Leiden, Brill Academic Publishing, Lam edition, 2016, 280 pages
ISBN: 978-9004287617 (hardcover) €121.00

In English departments when someone spoke of ‘close reading’ and ‘the words on the
page’, no one thought Marxist. Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann and other Marxist
literary critics wrote about history, story and representative characters. Talking
about the ‘words on the page’ was formalist – and later, ‘textualist’ – decadent, a
means of keeping the politics out.
But for Daniel Hartley, it is style we must start with. Using concepts from various
recent critics, his book argues for a linguistic turn in the Marxist approach, a study of
texts which, while remaining imbrued with history, could make literary study a matter
of debate about close reading. The Cold War between Western ‘words on the page’ and
a ‘Communist’ overview of history is over.
Style in this book is another word for voice – of the narrator’s or the characters. Yet,
voice has many dimensions: it embraces instance – the kind of events focussed on;
idiom – the characteristic slang or jargon of the speaker; and interpellation – or
address – the way the reader is positioned with regard to general ideas and the text
itself. Take this for example:
Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mamma in the drawing-
room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for
the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dis-
pensed from joining the group …
This description, even without the last line, suggests a critical relation of the voice to
the happy-seeming family group. The passage is taken from the first page, Chapter 1,
of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It is from the first-person narration by the penniless
orphan Jane. With its choice of sarcastic detail – someone ‘reclined’, like a Roman
noble – and its idiomatic phrases, ‘mamma’, ‘darlings’; as well as the directness of
address, ‘me, she had dispensed from joining …’, it offers the reader an identification
with a character bullied by wealthier relatives.
378 Book Review
For Hartley, style is more important than plot (contra Aristotle), and searching for
concepts to assist his argument, he discusses at length the work of three literary critics,
Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. The successive sections on
this trio are worth anyone’s time. Though not a textbook summary, and the style is at
times dense with the usual academic terms, there are plenty of examples to keep things
clear. I was especially impressed by Hartley’s close reading of the novel Cocaine Nights
by J.G. Ballard.
Prose novels are the main literary form explored, and Hartley agrees with Bahktin
that the novel as such is polyphonic – made up of many voices that contrast and con-
flict, as well as one narrative voice containing various dialects, jargon and cliché. Style
is relational, it responds to lasting genres and current issues, usually those involving
some kind of class power. More broadly, language is an inheritance like other social
forms, with which the writer tussles to present their own vision, not only in a demon-
strative story but in the very tone of their presentation. For example, Hemingway’s
spare prose about the First World War avoids ‘propaganda’ words like ‘glory’,
‘victory’ and ‘liberty’.
Among the trio of critics he considers, Hartley favours Raymond Williams above all.
This is because for Hartley, Marxism is an account of the human world where people
have created the circumstances of their existence but in which others and their descen-
dants find themselves in conflict with given inadequacies. In his study of language and
art Williams emphasised how certain writers struggle with an inheritance of problems,
issues and phrasings, some going on in the process to produce a new structure of
feeling. For example, in the 1920s the thriller writer Dashiell Hammett took the
form and attitude of the English country-house detective story and made them
‘tougher’, that is, aware of a harsh, class-divided, world. A writer may find a form
unsatisfactory and remake it.
To explore how art-forms change and are changed, Hartley further draws on con-
cepts of narrative and representation from Paul Ricoeur and Richard Walsh but dis-
cusses them as the outcome of history not universal categories of art. His technique
here recalls another of his trio Fredric Jameson, whose work has used the terms mod-
ernism (1890 –1960) and postmodernism as names of periods not just art movements.
To finish, Hartley comes up with his own terms to add to the rest. For him, every
writer (certainly every novelist) is making an intervention into a particular linguistic
situation, a set of voices peculiar to a moment in history. A recent study of US litera-
ture in the 1940s shows how Truman Capote used the discourses of anti-fascism and
existentialism to explore homophobia and racism.1 Secondly, every writer is applying
or developing a linguistic ideology – attitudes to description, implicit meaning or
addressing a certain reader. What would the Elizabethans have made of the comic
precision of the late Andrea Levy?

1
Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s, by George Hutchinson (Columbia University
Press, 2018).
 Book Review 379

Of course, if we start with the words on the page, there can be disagreement about
their significance as well as debate about their provenance and effect.
A work can therefore mean something particular, both in the period of its first pub-
lication and also in later moments of reception. Reader studies is one area Hartley
leaves aside. This is no problem, as turning to questions of reception need not
replace a discussion of text. Divergent readings needn’t simply be a matter of differing
inclinations and ‘choice’, i.e. a text can mean anything. In arguing about origins and
interpretations, Marxists can be both open and rigourous. Disagreements over
meaning can always be investigated, given context, and debated.
Hartley’s politics of style goes beyond period reductionism, which is what he accuses
Lukacs and Jameson of. He sees the writer as someone faced with contemporary for-
mulas of narrative and style and grappling with these to have their say and present
their alternative vision. (See Thomas Hardy’s earthier version of the ‘Victorian
novel’.) This is an activist view of writing – thinking about how we describe, talk
and address – to complement an interventionist not an aloof politics. In response to
Hartley though, I think this is still possible within a broad consideration of period
influences as in Jameson and group interests as in Goldmann. It need not be restricted
to a singular author. After all, Williams wrote about the Bloomsbury Group and the
period of drama from Ibsen to Brecht.
In 1957, Northrop Frye declared that ‘[literary] criticism seems to be badly in need
of a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which like the theory of evolution in
biology will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.’ (‘Tentative Con-
clusion’, Anatomy of Criticism.)
The overview of style would seem a good candidate for such a theory and if we start
with the words on the page, Marxists need not only pronounce but strive to convince.

Notes on contributor
Mike Belbin is a freelance writer, also of fiction, poetry and drama. He has written
articles and reviews for New Interventions, the Weekly Worker and online websites,
including Twitter (mikelbelbin@mikebelbin). His particular interests are culture,
media and the arts, racism, right-wing ideas, human evolution.

Mike Belbin
mikebelbin@yahoo.co.uk
© 2019 Mike Belbin
https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2019.1601877