ABSTRACT
Terry Eagleton has saluted what he terms Macherey's break with 'Neo-Hegelian Marxist criticism'. Macherey's method was intended also as a rejoinder to structuralism, the latter being seen by him as a new form of Platonic idealism, denying the complexity of the text by 'reducing it to the level of a mere resemblance of the structure which is thus said to be contained within it'. Macherey accordingly sees in Balzac's work 'two different movements which are opposed rather than complementary, mutually conflicting rather than converging. Macherey takes Les Paysans as an exemplary instance of a 'disparate', internally dissonant, and unfinished text. The task Macherey therefore sets himself is to produce an appropriately 'double reading' of Les Paysans. Les Paysans is a novel in the style of Fenimore Cooper, because it describes the same 'primitive' violence. Macherey's starting-point is his contention that literature is essentially a mechanism for distancing ideology.
