Macherey and Literary Analysis: Further Reading
I promised in a footnote to “The Replacement-Level Novel” that I would say a few words about Pierre Macherey. He has had a long and multi-faceted career,1 so when I speak of “reading Macherey,” I really mean “reading the first hundred-ish pages of A Theory of Literary Production (Pour une théorie de la production littéraire).” I owe a lot to these pages and highly recommend them to anyone interested in ways of writing about books that go beyond aesthetic judgments or the surface/depth opposition (what I’ve sometimes called “Hidden-Meaning Theory”).
If you’re interested, I would recommend doing the following in this order:
(Optional but recommended) Read Chapter 7 (“Of the Interpretation of Scripture”) of Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Samuel Shirley’s translation in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002) is the one I read, but it is not widely available online. Since I can’t read Latin, I don’t know how good the various translations are. That said, this one looks okay to me. (Here is the original Latin text.)
Read Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser’s introduction to Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022). The introduction is currently available in its entirety on Google Books.
Then, carefully read Part I, “Some Elementary Concepts” (Quelques concepts élémentaires) of A Theory of Literary Production. Refer back to Montag and Wasser as needed.
If you can read French fluently, read it in the original language; if you can read French with the aid of a dictionary, keep a copy of the French text on hand. Here is a link to the digital version of the French text.
During Step Two, keep the following things in mind, especially if (1) you can’t read French or (2) your first introduction to Macherey was by way of critics and scholars who don’t like him:
The French title literally means “For a theory of literary production.” Macherey is not proposing a theory; rather, he’s trying to dislodge some persistent illusions that would prevent us from developing a theory. I am pretty sure Montag and Wasser mention this in the introduction, but it bears repeating.
Macherey’s translator renders the French word illusion as “fallacy.” I don’t agree with this. “Fallacy” implies an error that can be easily corrected; Macherey believe that les illusions (l’illusion normative, etc.) stem from ideology, which is much more difficult to dislodge.
Macherey is a Marxist. Many Marxist critics believe that the critic’s job is to find the hidden meanings below the surface of the text. (One could even call it a “political unconscious.”) Macherey does not.
Some people will tell you that Macherey believes in hidden meanings. They are wrong. Here is the man himself: “[T]he book is not like a form which so simply hides a depth. The book hides nothing, has no secret: it is entirely readable, visible, entrusted.”2
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Most of his writing has been about Hegel and Spinoza. After Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (1966), he didn’t publish another book on literature until 1990.
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan-Paul, 1978), 99.