Literature, Ideology and Imaginary

Abstract

Although Jan Mukařovský had considered aesthetic phenomena as social phenomena, the problematic relation between literature and ideology was not addressed before Althusserian thought. Although their theory was based upon the Lacanian understanding of the imaginary, Althusserians generally reduced literature to a material praxis used for ideological subjection, ignoring the specificity of aesthetic experience, especially in its connection with the imaginary. The notion of a “social imaginary” – developed by Cornelius Castoriadis in the 1970s – seems to be a more useful approach to research into social homogenisation and its relation to literature, since literary works have to be addressed both in their relation to the reader and in relation to the extra-textual world. Reception Theory (Jauss, Iser) provides a firm ground for such an approach, along with some of the theories of Northrop Frye and Paul Ricouer dealing with the “doubling structure” in literary texts. While Janko Kos’s definition of literary structure has also proved useful, it is Wolfgang Iser’s understanding of the fictive and the imaginary that has allowed a re-thinking of the relation between literary structure, its reception, and ideology. Literature cannot be treated merely as material ideological praxis. While ideology is understood as both “the use of signification in which relations of power are sustained” and the radical expression of social imaginary in modern society, it may be manifested only through an ideological function that does not necessarily destroy the aesthetic experience, since it is not able to create its own self-contained “subworld” (or: meaning structure). In the literary structure, elements may be found that enable a stronger identification with the extra-textual world, which is primarily an identification with the significations of the social imaginary, but may also be used as an ideological interpellation. These elements are principally of a material-cognitive nature, combined with ideo-rational elements. Nevertheless, the realisation of the ideological function in the text is always dependent on social, extra-textual codes of interpretation, since ideology may interpellate only as a social-historical force imposed by the reader on the text.