Ideology and literature
Scholes stated in his essay “English Apparatus” that the field of
English is organized by two primary gestures of differentiation, dividing and
re-dividing the field by binary opposition. He divides literature and
non-literature, production and consumption, and real world and academy. Talking
about literature, in his essay, I see that in literature has effect in the
aspect of characterization or setting in some texts for example novel. Besides,
all texts have secret –hidden deeper meanings. Mitchell said that the most
common and naïve intuition about literature is that is “Representation of life”
and representation has always played a central role in the understanding of
literature. In the Resistance of Theory, Paul de Man differentiated literature
and Ideology. He said that;
“Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses
to acknowledge “reality”, but because it is not a priori certain that language
functions according to principles which are those or which are like those, of
the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is
reliable source of information about anything but its own language.”
While ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural
reality of reference with phenomenalism. Althusser, in his influential essay, “Ideology
and ideological state apparatuses,” he included literature among ideological
apparatuses which contribute to the process of reproduction the relations of production. Scholes had said that when
we read the texts is not simply as consumption but as a productive activity and
the making of meaning. So that I argue that in the literature which consists deeper
meaning, there is ideology of the writer in it. Frye also said the first thing
that literary critics has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive
survey of his own field an let his practical
principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field.
For example, in Five Children and
It in chapter 2, Nesbit’s writing influenced by her ideology. She showed that
money is everything, and middle-class people are difficult to have any gold in
that condition in that novel. Her ideology is Fabian. She published that novel
while she joined with Fabian Society.
"They [Fabian Socialists] were going to create a
just society for the British workers - the beginning of a welfare state, cheap
council housing, free medicine and dental treatment, free spectacles, generous
unemployment benefits. …. We did not see until the 1970s that that was the
beginning of big problems contributing to the inevitable decline of the British
economy."
Lee Kuan Yew interview with Lianhe Zaobao
According to Althusser’s reading (re-reading) of marx;
“Ideology is not simply a set of illusions, as the German Ideology seems to argue, but
a system of representations (discourses, images, myths) concerning the real
relations in which people live. But what is represented in Ideology is “not the
system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the
imaginary relation of which they live.” (Althusser 1971, p.155).
From that quote, “ideology is imaginary relation of which they live”
seems that what Nesbit established in Five
Children and It, to be represented Nesbit’s Ideology. As
Mitchell said, that representation is always of something or someone, by
something or someone, to someone.
It is obvious that her writing represented her ideology. Belsey makes it clearer by speaking in Constructing
the Subject: Deconstructing the Text
that ideology is both a real and an imaginary relation to the
world. Real in that it is the way in which people really live their
relationship to the social relations which govern their condition of existence,
but imaginary in that it discourages a full understanding of these conditions
of existence and the ways in which people are socially constituted within them.
Bibliography
Scholes, Robert. 1985. English
Apparatus.
Frye, Northrop. 1949. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
Althusser, Louis (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tr. Ben Brewster
(London:Caper)
Belsey, Catherine. (1940) Constructing the Subject:Deconstructing the Text.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 1995.
Representation.
Michael Barr (March 2000). "Lee Kuan Yew's Fabian Phase". Australian
Journal of Politics & History 46 (1): 110–126.
