ABSTRACT
In his early essay The Evolution of Modern Drama (1909), the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács writes that ‘the truly social element in literature is the form’. This is not the kind of comment which has come to be expected of Marxist criticism. For one thing, Marxist criticism has traditionally opposed all kinds of literary formalism, attacking that inbred attention to sheerly technical properties which robs literature of historical significance and reduces it to an aesthetic game. It has, indeed, noted the relationship between such critical technocracy and the behaviour of advanced capitalist societies.[1] For another thing, a good deal of Marxist criticism has in practice paid scant attention to questions of artistic form, shelving the issue in its dogged pursuit of political content. Marx himself believed that literature should reveal a unity of form and content, and burnt some of his own early lyric poems on the grounds that their rhapsodic feelings were dangerously unrestrained; but he was also suspicious of excessively formalistic writing. In an early newspaper article on Silesian weavers’ songs, he claimed that mere stylistic exercises led to ‘perverted content’, which in turn impresses the stamp of ‘vulgarity’ on literary form. He shows, in other words, a dialectical grasp of the relations in question: form is the product of content, but reacts back upon it in a double-edged relationship. Marx’s early comment about oppressively formalistic law in the Rheinische Zeitung-‘form is of no value unless it is the form of its content’—could equally be applied to his aesthetic views.
