Bourgeois Redemptions: the Fictions of Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson

Abstract

In Literature and Revolution Trotsky envisaged the relationship of literary form to ideology in a way intended to nudge the connection beyond simplified notions of reflection or embodiment. While this intervention is perhaps best seen as a series of primary speculations, Trotsky’s model nevertheless remains useful in that it allows form to be envisaged as occupying an intersection of three interrelated elements: the ideological stimuli resulting from a new or developing class, the pre-existent ‘old forms’ available to the writer for transformation or development and, finally, the transformative effect of the form on those ideologies which it simultaneously expresses. In this way, as Trotsky develops his argument, literary form is seen as being inherently dualistic as it is implicated in ‘heightening (or lowering) the general level of craftsmanship’, while ‘in its concrete historic form, it expresses definite demands which, in the final analysis, have a class character’.² For this reason, then, literature takes its place as part of the superstructural relations of production just as, concomitantly, it functions in the context of these relations. Indeed, to take the argument one step further, while it can be seen that these relations produce the ideological formations which legitimate the values of the class in power, because these superstructural legitimations of the productive forces of society operate ideologically, they are always riven with tensions and contradictions.

New artistic needs or demands for new literary and artistic points of view are stimulated by economics, through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the position of the class, under the influence of the growth of its wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden.¹

Leon Trotsky