Marx
Comunist Manifesto is one of those books that make me think about the strength of ideas and texts. I don’t mean that “the text” actually is the responsible about something, buy his reader do.
The idea that opens the text is the one that declares the philosophical perspective of the world: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. That means, in philosophical terms, taking dialectic as the main position. But, in oppose to Hegel’s dialectic, the main issue will not be the ideas, but the materialism. Or in other words, the work force. In the middle of the XIX Century, Marx is thinking about the next revolution: the proletarian revolution. This one, will put end to the modern State reigned by the bourgeoisie and will be the first step to reach the communism.
It is very interesting the idea that Marx propose about the elimination of national borders. Especially, if we consider that the author is speaking in the middle of the process of nation-building. In this way, seems to be that one of the elements that stop the communist revolution is precisely the national borders. That’s why Marx thinks that the first step to finally reach the revolution is the union of the working class all over the world.
I would like to think now about between the relation of this text and literature. For me is a little bit hard to find an strong connection between them. Even when I know that there is a long tradition of literary studies related to Marxism. I think that at least we have two ways to find a connection. The first one, is related to the content of the text. We can try to read any text in a dialectic reading of characters, means of production, society critic, etc. I think this kind of reading will support the idea that dialectic is the way the world and literature works. Other perspective, and that is more related to what have been doing in the last years what is called “The new historicism”, is to link the text to it’s material conditions of production. In this way, we can understand literature as a cultural product insert in determined context.
Freud
The main thesis of Freud is that someone (him, in this case) is able to make the “right” interpretation of dreams. For him, dreams reveal the existence of something called unconscious where lies our deepest fears and secrets.
His first step in this process of interpretation is to create the category of Dream-thoughts and Dream-content. Both of them occurred during the process of the Dream-work. The first one is related to the first interpretation. To everything that shows up in a dream (people, location, smell, etc). In his words: [they] are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. On the other hand, Dream-content: “is expressed as it where in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts”. After this, follows the process of “condensation”, where all the element mentioned before became together in one brief dream.
Is very interesting the way that Freud shows how this procedure works analyzing different dreams. First, he starts with the narration of the dream, identifying the main objects and characters that appears in the scene, and of course, the scene it self. Then, he says how the interviews with his patients and the information they were giving to him helped him to interpretate every dream.
I would like to stop a little bit around the relation of these kind of work and literary studies. I think than in some way we can try to apply Freud´s methods to literary texts. That means, try to get to the author and his unconscious through the text. This would be a very interesting approach, and I’m sure that many people have try it. However, we have to keep in mind that if we try to follow this kind of proposition we are against other kind of ideas, like Barthe`s, that there is no way to reach the author. For Freud, there is a final meaning that must be found in order to get the right interpretation.
Finally, I think that is very interesting the relation between psychology and literature. After all the crimes agains mankind of the last century, literature had become an important object of psychological analysis. May be now we are not worried about the “final interpretation” of a dream, but does matter all the links that we can establish between the author and his text (or work to use Barthe´s concept).
I find interesting when you compare the interpretation of a dream to one of a text by the necessity in both cases to use the ‘author”s subconscious.
I do have a problem when interpretations are stretched such that the content itself (what’s on the page) is distorted or even lost. At least, when we refer to the author, his intentions and reality, interpretations can be more defendable.
I found interesting our discussion in class on how Marx’s text can be applied to the study of literature. I like your idea of understanding literature as a cultural product inserted into a determined context. Like Marx shows the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the proletariat being subjected to the power of the bourgeoisie, literature can equally create an unbalanced relationship of power. The idea that literature is inherently bourgeois is interesting. Only those of the dominant class have access to it and even when accessing the literature, this relationship of power is reiterated. One clear example of this is the media and how it projects a socially constructed image of a plethora of topics, forming in a sense a body of literature considered to be the truth whereas everything not part of this established discourse is not considered valid. Literature can often times function in this way, making available only the dominant discourse and rejecting all others.