The British press’s enthusiastic celebration of a ninth-century copy of Caedmon’s Hymn found in Rome highlights the supposed ‘earliest English poem,’ heralded as the “birth of English literature’ and the “first voice of the nation.’ However, these assertions are not just surface-level claims; they are rooted in ideological perspectives. They tend to conceal the underlying material conditions of cultural creation, the class dynamics of early medieval England, and the international networks that facilitated manuscript circulation long before the rise of modern nation-states.
This article challenges that mythology by arguing that Caedmon’s Hymn should be seen not as a national origin story, but as a result of labour, church authority, and global exchange. Rooted in Marxist materialist historiography, it warrants a more comprehensive examination.
Caedmon and the Social Relations of Early Northumbria
Bede’s narrative situates Caedmon firmly within the labouring classes. He is described as “an agricultural labourer – a cowherd” who lacked the courtly skill of poetic recitation and withdrew from the feast in shame. This detail is not incidental. It reveals the class stratification of seventh‑century Northumbria, where poetic performance was an aristocratic cultural practice, inaccessible to those outside elite circles.
The miracle story—Caedmon’s dream-vision where he receives the divine gift of song—is a well-known example of ideological mystification. It turns a social marginalisation, such as a labourer being excluded from elite culture, into a religious story of divine intervention. However, behind this pious appearance lies a crucial material reality: the oldest surviving Old English poem was created by a worker.
This does not make the Hymn “proletarian literature.” As the document notes, its content reflects “the ideological dominance of the Church in early feudal England.” The Church monopolised literacy, manuscript production, and cultural transmission. The poem survives only because it is embedded within Latin ecclesiastical texts — “the vernacular breaks through, but only within the framework of ecclesiastical Latin.”
This is an important point. In early medieval Europe, the rise of vernacular literature was not a spontaneous expression of national identity but a controlled, clerically overseen process. The Church decided what was written, copied, and kept. Caedmon’s Hymn is therefore the result of effort, but it is also influenced by an ideological framework that shaped its form and content.
Manuscripts as Material Objects Under Capitalism
The manuscript’s history provides a condensed overview of cultural property amidst the evolution of capitalism. It traces its journey from a Benedictine abbey to private collectors and ultimately to the Italian state, with each transfer signifying a change in the social relations surrounding cultural artefacts.
Monastic Production: The manuscript was produced at the Benedictine abbey of Nonantola, a feudal religious community where scribes created manuscripts as part of monastic work. These texts were not viewed as commodities but as instruments of church authority. Post-Dissolution Dispersal: After monastic institutions dissolved, the manuscripts entered private collections via collectors.
It is worth noting that Thomas Phillipps’s vast collection was “a form of nineteenth‑century cultural commodification.” Phillipps illustrates the bourgeois tendency to turn cultural heritage into private property. The manuscript from Phillipps travelled through various hands—first to Martin Bodmer, then to H.P. Kraus, a New York rare-books dealer. During this period, it became a commodity in the international art market, subject to capitalist speculation. Eventually, the manuscript was acquired by the Italian state. However, it remained “virtually unstudied” for fifty years afterwards. Its neglect reflects the austerity conditions of modern cultural institutions, where archival work depends on precarious labour and inconsistent funding.
The digitisation project that eventually made the manuscript accessible is part of a broader, uneven process of democratising archival access. But as the document notes, this process remains “contingent on the funding priorities of state institutions and the unpaid or precariously funded labour of scholars like Magnanti.” Even the most progressive developments in cultural access occur within the constraints of capitalist austerity.
International Cooperation vs Nationalist Mythology
The final section of the document exposes the irony of nationalist uses of Caedmon. The Hymn is routinely invoked as “the beginning of English poetry,” yet the earliest integrated copy was found in Rome, produced in an Italian scriptorium, and identified through collaboration between Irish and Italian scholars.
This fact alone challenges the nationalist story. The manuscript highlights the significance of the English vernacular in the ninth century. Still, it does so via the global networks of the medieval Church, rather than through isolated national growth. The Church was a transnational entity, with its scribes sharing texts across languages and regions.
The material history of culture has always been international, whatever nationalist mythologies later generations construct around it. This is a profoundly Marxist insight. Culture is not the property of nations but the product of human labour operating within global systems of exchange, power, and communication.
Historiographical Context
This argument aligns with a long-standing Marxist historiography tradition emphasising the material basis of cultural production. Scholars like Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and Christopher Hill have shown that cultural forms are inseparable from class relations and institutional structures. In early medieval England, this involves viewing the Church as both an ideological and an economic entity, monastic scriptoria as sites of labour, manuscripts as objects whose circulation indicates shifting property regimes, and vernacular literature as a product of clerical mediation rather than a sign of national awakening. The rediscovery of the Nonantola manuscript offers an opportunity to challenge nationalist narratives and reinforce a materialist view of cultural history.
Culture, Labour, and the World SystemCaedmon’s Hymn is more than just an old story; it exemplifies the Marxist view that culture is a social construct. A cowherd’s poem persists because ecclesiastical authorities protect it; a manuscript copied by monks becomes a commodity for bourgeois collectors; and a key text in English national mythology is only preserved through global cooperation. Challenging the illusions of heritage narratives, the manuscript’s history shows that culture belongs to humanity, not to nations or markets. Its preservation relies on often unseen labour — sometimes exploited — and its meaning can only be appreciated through a materialist analysis of the world that create
The past month has marked a decisive turning point in the website’s development. What began as a modest personal archive of historical writing and political commentary has now reached a scale that demands reflection. The website has crossed a symbolic threshold: “over one million hits” since its inception. More striking still, last month alone it received “70,000 hits”, a figure that would have been unimaginable in its early years. These numbers are not simply metrics; they testify to a growing audience seeking rigorous historical analysis and socialist commentary at a moment of deepening political crisis.
This surge in readership coincides with a period of intense intellectual activity. The long‑standing 2003 BA dissertation on Cromwell and the Putney Debates—once a youthful academic exercise—has been “completely rewritten”. The revision is not cosmetic. It represents a fundamental re-engagement with the revolutionary ferment of the 1640s, informed by two decades of subsequent study, political experience, and historiographical development. Alongside this, further work has been undertaken on the Raphael Samuel book, extending the exploration of memory, class, and radical historiography that Samuel himself championed. These projects, dormant at times, have now re-emerged with renewed urgency.
The website’s content growth mirrors this intellectual momentum, marked by a “significant increase in articles,” partly due to the emergence of the World Socialist Website’s Socialism AI. This tool has sped up research, improved cross-referencing, and created new opportunities for combining historical sources with current political analysis. The diary reflects this period of rapid development: it feels like the archive is not just expanding but transforming.
This intellectual renewal is closely linked to the current political climate. The diary notes an upcoming meeting entitled “Your Party’s Collapse – Time to Build the Socialist Equality Party,” set for Sunday, July 12, at Hargrave Hall Community Centre in Archway. The clear directions—“3-minute walk from Archway tube station on the Northern Line”—add a sense of practicality. The meeting’s title highlights the ongoing crisis in political representation and emphasises the need to develop a principled socialist alternative. This event is not an isolated gathering but is part of a larger political shift.
Yet the narrative is not confined to politics alone. It also gestures toward cultural engagement, noting the Japan Society Book Club’s July 13 discussion of Izumi Suzuki’s Set My Heart on Fire. The book’s “stark, fragmented narratives” and its portrayal of women navigating emotional isolation in postwar Japan introduce a different register—one of literary introspection and social alienation. The juxtaposition of this event with the Archway meeting underscores the diary’s breadth: political mobilisation on one day, avant‑garde Japanese literature the next.
This entry concludes with a brief catalogue of recent book purchases—The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Red Card by Jules Boykoff, and Stealing Horses to Great Applause by Paul W. Schroder. These acquisitions are part of the ongoing expansion of the intellectual resources that underpin the website. They hint at future reading, future writing, and future analysis.
Taken together, the diary documents a moment of convergence: rising readership, renewed scholarly work, intensified political engagement, and continued literary exploration. It marks a phase in which the website is not only growing but clarifying its purpose—serving as a space where history, politics, and culture intersect in the pursuit of understanding and transformation.
Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury’s 1991 book, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, remains a staple in American university course lists, where it is regarded as an authoritative overview of American literary history. However, its longevity reflects more the ideological preferences of the modern academic world than rigorous scholarship. The book presents a sanitised, depoliticised account of American literature, one that neglects the class struggle, suppresses the Marxist perspective, and concludes with a celebration of postmodernism. This ideological stance represents a social order in decline.
Marxist criticism’s role is not merely to annotate distortions politely but to reveal their social purpose. Trotsky emphasised that, like science, art does not seek orders and inherently cannot accept them.”¹ The bourgeois academy, however, requires this kind of obedience: a literary history that normalises capitalist growth and hides the revolutionary contribution of the working class.
Teleology as Ideology: “From Puritanism to Postmodernism”
The book’s title presents its ideological stance. It suggests that American literature evolved from Puritanism to postmodernism, implying that the latter is the inevitable result of a three-century progression. This notion of teleology is significant because it subtly endorses the reactionary view that postmodernism—characterised by its dismissal of objective truth, rejection of historical causality, and emphasis on subjectivity—is the rightful conclusion of American literary evolution.
As David North has shown, postmodernism did not originate from a true philosophical breakthrough. Instead, it resulted from the political disintegration of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia after Stalinism’s betrayals, the setbacks faced by the working class in the 1970s and 1980s, and the collapse of the USSR.² Its central dogmas—the “incredulity toward metanarratives,” fragmentation, pastiche—are the ideological rationalisations of a social layer that has abandoned any connection to the revolutionary struggle of the working class. To present this retreat as the “culmination” of American literary history is to falsify history itself.
A Literary History Without History
Ruland and Bradbury’s approach exemplifies standard academic idealism: viewing literature as a self-contained domain driven by the internal development of aesthetic forms. The role of class struggle—the driving force of American history—is practically missing. It’s possible to read hundreds of pages without encountering the Civil War as a conflict over the expansion of slavery production³. The transformation of literary production by industrial capitalism⁴ and the impact of the Great Depression and the class battles of the 1930s⁵the cultural devastation wrought by the Cold War anti‑communist purge⁶Instead, literature appears as a polite conversation among authors, floating serenely above the social convulsions that shaped their work. This is not history but embalming.
The Erasure of the Working Class
The most noticeable oversight is the absence of the working class. American literature features a strong tradition of authors who directly addressed class conflict—such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and others. However, in Ruland and Bradbury’s portrayal, these figures are merely seen as “protest literature” or “naturalism,” with their political beliefs reduced to stylistic labels.
Their depoliticisation reaches its lowest point in the way they handle Theodore Dreiser. ‘An American Tragedy’ (1925), arguably the most impactful American novel of the 20th century, is not just a naturalist story but a harsh critique of the American class system—the “American dream” revealed as a tool that destroys human lives. As David Walsh pointed out, Dreiser achieved “perhaps the most acute and all-sided alignment of the individual and national tragedy” because he understood how social forces shape personal destinies. Ruland and Bradbury can’t recognise this because their framework fails to see class as a significant historical factor.
Why Dreiser Matters
Any Marxist reinterpretation of American literary history must prioritise Theodore Dreiser. No other American novelist of the twentieth century directly addressed the harsh realities of capitalism with such honesty. Dreiser’s major works—especially Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925)—stand as the most detailed effort in American literature to explore how social factors shape individual destinies. As David Walsh has noted, Dreiser achieved “perhaps the most keen and comprehensive alignment of personal and national tragedy” within the American canon.
Dreiser is often dismissed, depoliticised, or overlooked by bourgeois literary historians. For example, Ruland and Bradbury, in From Puritanism to Postmodernism, portray him as merely a “naturalist” and a writer focused on “social conditions,” viewing him as a precursor to protest literature. This view erases his political commitments, his involvement in class struggle, and his sharp critique of American capitalism.
Restoring Dreiser’s proper position involves seeing him not just as a naturalist portraying social suffering, but as the leading figure of American realism from a Marxist perspective—an artist who understands the dialectical connection between individual psychology and social totality.
Dreiser’s Realism and the Materialist Conception of History
Dreiser’s realism is closely linked to a materialist view of history. He instinctively and increasingly consciously recognised that social forces, beyond individual control, shape human behaviour. This perspective aligns him with the major European realists—Balzac, Tolstoy, Zola—who Engels praised for illustrating “the social relations of their time”, even if they held conservative political views.³ Dreiser’s novels reveal: the commodification of human relationships, the fierce competition of capitalist society, the ideological deception of the “American dream,” and the oppressive influence of class status.
In Sister Carrie, the protagonist’s ascent reflects the influence of impersonal economic forces rather than personal determination. Similarly, in An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths’ downfall is driven by the systemic flaws of American capitalism rather than moral failings. Dreiser’s realism emphasises historical and social contexts rather than psychological or moral interpretations; it is rooted in materialism rather than idealism.
An American Tragedy: The Novel of the American Century
An American Tragedy is considered the most significant American novel of the twentieth century. It uniquely tackles the core paradox of its time: the hope of endless opportunity in a society divided by class inequality.
Clyde Griffiths exemplifies a common outcome of a society that encourages youth to pursue wealth but restricts their access to it. His story illustrates problems inherent in American capitalism. Dreiser’s success is in demonstrating how: Clyde’s desires are moulded by consumer culture; his social class limits his opportunities; economic pressures influence his moral decisions; and the legal system acts as a tool for maintaining class dominance. This embodies Marxist realism, exposing social realities through the individual’s fate.
Dreiser and the Class Struggle
Dreiser’s political journey was inconsistent and influenced by the turbulent events of the early 20th century. He expressed sympathy for the working class, backed the Russian Revolution, and criticised the abuses of American capitalism. However, he also, unfortunately, fell under the Popular Front’s ideological pressures. Like many artists of his time, he confused Stalinism with socialism and sacrificed his artistic independence to serve the diplomatic interests of the Soviet bureaucracy.
A Marxist evaluation must recognize both aspects: Dreiser’s realism as a pinnacle of American literature and his political surrender as a sign of Stalinism’s harmful effect on the American left. This duality is crucial for understanding twentieth-century cultural history.
Ruland & Bradbury’s Falsification of Dreiser
Ruland and Bradbury’s analysis of Dreiser exemplifies bourgeois literary mystification. They reduce him to a mere ‘naturalist,’ overlook his critique of capitalism, ignore his involvement with socialism, and fail to place his work within the context of class struggle. Instead, they interpret _An American Tragedy_ as a psychological analysis rather than a social critique. Their chapter on Dreiser is not only lacking but also driven by ideological bias. Recognizing Dreiser’s Marxist relevance would threaten the overall teleological narrative of their book, which ultimately celebrates postmodernism.
Dreiser reveals the social truth often denied by postmodernism: that human life is influenced by objective forces, society has an underlying structure, and capitalism is a historical system with a start and an end.
Dreiser and the Decline of American Literature
The decline of American literature after the 1930s cannot be fully understood without considering Dreiser. He symbolizes the last key figure in a realism tradition that aimed to expose the truths of American society. Following Dreiser, various forces—including Stalinism, anti-communism, the Cold War purges, the commercialization of culture, and the emergence of postmodernism—eroded the conditions necessary for meaningful artistic engagement with social realities. In the postwar period, the novel shifted towards formal experimentation, psychological depth, irony, pastiche, subjectivism, and identity politics. This shift was not driven by artistic innovation but by the ideological demands of a ruling class that prefers to avoid confronting reality.
Dreiser and the Marxist Reconstruction of American Literature
Dreiser is central to any Marxist reinterpretation of American literary history. He is the author who most deeply understood the social conflicts within American capitalism and vividly illustrated their tragic impacts on individual lives. Restoring Dreiser to his deserved position means placing the working class at the heart of American cultural history. It also involves rejecting postmodernist claims denying objective truth and reaffirming the Marxist belief that literature can—and should—expose society’s structural realities. Dreiser’s writings remain vital because the systemic issues he highlighted are still present. His novels speak not only to history but also to today’s crises of American capitalism, serving as tools in the ongoing fight for truth.
The Suppressed Marxist Tradition
Equally absent is the revolutionary Marxist tradition in American literary criticism: V.F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman, and the early Partisan Review before its capitulation to anti‑communism. Calverton insisted that literature must be understood as “a social product, conditioned by the economic and political forces of its time.”⁸ Hicks argued that the task of criticism was to reveal “the relation of literature to the class struggle.”⁹ These insights are incompatible with Ruland and Bradbury’s idealist framework and are therefore ignored.
Nor do the authors examine the catastrophic impact of Stalinism on American cultural life—the Popular Front’s subordination of artistic integrity to the diplomatic needs of the Soviet bureaucracy, the ideological confusion sown by the Communist Party’s zigzags, or the long‑term damage inflicted by the postwar purge. As Trotsky warned, the Stalinist bureaucracy represented “the antithesis of socialist culture.”¹⁰ Its influence on American letters cannot be omitted without falsifying the historical record.
Postmodernism: The Ideology of a Decaying Order
By the time Ruland and Bradbury arrive at postmodernism, their framework disintegrates into the very phenomenon it attempts to analyze. They regard postmodernism as a valid literary evolution, linking it to writers like Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Faulkner. However, this is a distorted misrepresentation. The gap between nineteenth-century realists—who believed literature could reveal social truths—and postmodernists—who deny the existence of truth—is not a progression but a downfall. The fragmentation, irony, and pastiche that postmodern theorists praise are not purely artistic innovations but signs of a ruling class that can no longer confront reality.Postmodernism is the cultural superstructure of a capitalism that has exhausted its progressive historical role.¹¹
Toward a Marxist History of American Literature
A truly Marxist history would start not with Puritan theology but with the material development of American capitalism: including primitive accumulation and the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave South and its destruction during the Civil War, the rise of industrial capitalism and the class conflicts from 1877 to 1934, the betrayals involving the CIO and Stalinists, the Cold War, and the long decline of American imperialism. It would also view major writers—Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wright—not as isolated geniuses but as artists who, to varying degrees, reflected the social realities of life under capitalism.
And it would explain the decline of American literature since the 1930s not as a sequence of aesthetic fashions but as the cultural expression of a ruling class that has nothing left to say.
Conclusion: The Working Class as the Heir of Culture
Trotsky insisted that the working class is the heir of all genuine culture.¹² It does not need a literary history that ends in postmodern cynicism, relativism, and despair. It needs a literary history that arms it with the truth—about capitalism, about its own revolutionary role, and about the profound social forces that shape artistic creation.
Ruland and Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism presents a sanitized, depoliticized, and reactionary view. It should be rejected not just academically but politically as well. Marxist criticism’s role is to free American literature from academic ideological biases and reestablish its connection to the fight for human emancipation.
Footnotes
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991), 182.
David North, In Defence of Leon Trotsky (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2012), 245–60.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 54–60.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27–45.
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: Verso, 1986), 89–120.
Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–40.
David Walsh, “Theodore Dreiser and the Tragedy of American Life,” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.
V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), 12.
Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 4.
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 112.
North, In Defence of Leon Trotsky, 258.
Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 40.
Bibliography
Calverton, V.F. The Liberation of American Literature. New York: Scribner’s, 1932.
Davis, Mike. Prisoners of the American Dream. London: Verso, 1986.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hicks, Granville. The Great Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
Marx, Karl. The Civil War in the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1937.
North, David. In Defence of Leon Trotsky. Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2012.
Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991.
———. The Revolution Betrayed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972.
Walsh, David. “Theodore Dreiser and the Tragedy of American Life.” World Socialist Web Site. 2001.
Pip: A Yorkshire clergyman's daughter, writing in secret on scraps of recycled paper, produces one of the most socially explosive novels in the English language — and we're still arguing about what it means.
Mara: That's the territory freerein61 maps out across this episode: a new biography of Emily Brontë, the social roots of Wuthering Heights, and what it costs to read the Brontës without a class framework.
Pip: Let's start with the biography itself, and the question it raises about how we understand where great literature actually comes from.
This Dark Night: biography, class, and the Brontës
Mara: The central tension here is methodological: Deborah Lutz's new life of Emily Brontë is richly researched, but does focusing on biography risk reducing a major novel to a reflection of its author's inner world rather than its social conditions?
Pip: The post anchors its argument in Paul Bond's reading of Wuthering Heights, setting it up this way — the novel reveals "an almost organic expression of this devastating personal impact which has definite social roots in property relations."
Mara: That phrase does real work. It means Heathcliff's rage, Catherine's choice, the whole machinery of revenge through mortgage and marriage — none of it is psychological backstory. It is the social structure of mid-nineteenth-century England made flesh.
Pip: And Lutz's earlier scholarship actually gets close to that. Her "Paperwork" essay traces the cost of paper in the 1830s and 1840s, the rag trade, the tax on paper not lifted until 1860 — connecting Brontë's tiny, concealed handwriting to genuine material scarcity. That is not romantic mythologization; that is the economic base showing up on the page.
Mara: The concern is that Lutz's broader framework — thing theory, material culture studies, haptic reading — focuses on objects and their meanings without fully exploring the social relations behind their production. The post notes that collectors and workers gathered raw materials processed at early industrial sites, and that the Brontës' difficulties were not merely personal.
Pip: Charlotte worrying that her Professor manuscript might end up as butter-barrel lining is either a charming period detail or a precise illustration of how intellectual labour sits inside capitalism — and the post is firmly in the second camp.
Mara: The post also takes on Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power, which it calls arguably the most comprehensive Marxist analysis of the Brontës to date. Eagleton reads Heathcliff as a symbol of the contradictions capitalism produces: brutalised as a foundling, he then exploits the logic of property and inheritance to exact revenge on those who degraded him.
Pip: High praise, followed immediately by a precise complaint — Eagleton's Althusserian framework ultimately treats texts as systems of signs and ideological conflicts, pushing the actual historical context, the Chartist movement, the condition of the working class in Yorkshire, to the background.
Mara: The post then turns to the SWP's coverage of the Brontës, described as reducing three of Victorian England's most significant writers to symbols supporting a modern identity-politics agenda. The argument is that reading the sisters primarily as proto-feminist figures misses the broader social and historical forces that give their work its depth and its staying power.
Pip: Emily's concealed poems, written in a script "meant to conceal even as it revealed," get read here not as personal eccentricity but as the direct consequence of what Victorian bourgeois society permitted educated women to be.
Mara: And the post closes by asking whether Lutz's biography meets a specific standard: does it situate Brontë's inner life within the tangible context of Victorian England — class conflict, treatment of women, economic instability among the educated poor — or does it indulge the myth of a solitary genius communing with nature?
Pip: The answer is left open, which is either admirably honest or a very long way to say "read it and find out." Either way, the framework for reading it has been thoroughly constructed.
Mara: That framework extends naturally to the other Brontë sisters — and to Jane Eyre's particular version of independence, which is where the argument about class and women's labour becomes most direct.
Pip: What stays with me is the butter-barrel problem: intellectual work produced under material constraint, circulating in a market that doesn't care about its value.
Mara: That tension hasn't resolved. The Brontës wrote it into their novels, and it's still the right question to bring to any biography that follows.
For someone still at such a tender age, Mieko Kawakami is a stunningly good writer. She is a novelist, poet and essayist whose internationally acclaimed works — notably Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and Paradise — probe gender, class, bodily experience and social alienation in late‑capitalist Japan.
Heaven, an early work on school bullying and the social formation of suffering; then Breasts and Eggs, which raised questions of reproduction, women’s labour, precarity; and Paradise, the moral and existential problems faced by Japanese women. All her previous work has themes of work, family economy, institutional violence, and bodily commodification. These are all acute portrayals of class stratification, gender oppression, marketised bodies and private suffering under neoliberal Japan.
Kawakami exposes how Japanese neoliberal capitalism commodifies bodies, care and intimacy, producing isolation, mental distress and precarious survival strategies. Her work demonstrates how private suffering is socially produced rather than merely individual pathology. She highlights the intersection of gender oppression and class exploitation in everyday life.
While the reader is free to read Kawakami as they like, reading Kawakami through a Marxist lens develops the capacity to see private affliction as a social product and to analyse cultural form as ideology.
Sisters in Yellow is a 2023 novel by Mieko Kawakami, translated into English by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, and was published in March 2026. The title and the bar’s name (“Lemon”) refer to Hana’s obsession with a feng shui belief that the colour yellow attracts wealth and financial security. Kawakami has described the novel as an exploration of a Breaking Bad-style story without the typical “macho drama.”
It’s a crime-infused story about friendship, betrayal, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, following 15-year-old Hana and her older friend Kimiko as they open a bar called Lemon, which becomes a haven but leads them into a world of crime and desperation. The novel explores themes of poverty, female resilience, and the harsh realities of life on the fringes of society, blending social realism with thriller elements.
Kawakami often portrays the pressures of precarious labour, consumerist culture, and gendered norms. Sisters in Yellow registers social vulnerability through small, intimate details that encode larger class relations. Her book shows everyday scenes of work: casual, piecemeal paid work, and precarious hours. They are material signs of neoliberal precarity. Part‑time shifts, temporary cleaning/retail tasks, work that starts or ends at odd hours, or days lost to cancelled gigs. These concrete markers show labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment. It must be understood that fragmented labour time is not accidental but a mode of disciplining labour power — keeping wages low and workers on call so capital can extract more surplus. This corresponds to the global growth of informal and platform work, where “casual labour” and algorithmic scheduling spread precarious conditions. According to the latest statistics, over 2.1 billion workers are in informal work worldwide.
Kawakami is part of a formidable new generation of Japanese writers. Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab-Canning Ship), essays and short stories by proletarian writers, modernists like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and later novelists who grapple with imperialism and postwar capitalism.
A significant section of modern Japanese literature exposes how culture can conceal and reveal class exploitation, how nationalism and militarism are built into cultural forms. The recent resurgence of proletarian texts shows literature’s capacity to rekindle class consciousness in periods of economic crisis—an opening for political work among youth and precarious layers.
Given that Japanese women have borne the brunt of neoliberalisation, it is not surprising that some of the most important modern Japanese writers are women. Female Japanese literature today often grapples with precarity, social withdrawal (hikikomori), ageing, and the collapse of secure employment—issues central to contemporary class struggle. Japan’s casualised labour market, suicides and social isolation show the objective conditions that many recent novels and short stories dramatise.
Readers interested in the class struggle, gender, and Japanese imperialism are encouraged to read Higuchi Ichiyō, Hayashi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Hiratsuka Raichō, and Yosano Akiko. Higuchi Ichiyō — “Takekurabe / Growing Up” (short story). A compassionate, class‑conscious portrayal of poor urban youth and women’s constrained social options under early modern capitalism. A good entry point to Meiji-era class/gender conditions. Hayashi Fumiko — Diary of a Vagabond (Nomad’s Diary) and selected short stories. Hayashi’s work offers vivid, autobiographical glimpses into the itinerant, precarious lives of women in the interwar period and the underside of urban labour markets.
Miyamoto Yuriko — fiction and essays from the 1920s–1940s. Miyamoto was politically engaged with left movements, and her writing expresses proletarian themes and women’s emancipation, and connects with the politics of the day; her work is useful for seeing how committed women writers sought to fuse literary and political struggle. Hiratsuka Raichō — essays and Seitosha (Bluestocking) journal writings. As founder of Japan’s early feminist journal Seito (1911–16), Hiratsuka’s polemics illuminate feminist demands, cultural critique and their tensions with rising national politics—Yosano Akiko — poetry and essays. Yosano’s career illustrates the ambivalence of some feminist-modernist currents that combined emancipation rhetoric with nationalist sentiment; studying her work shows how gender politics can be co‑opted by imperialist ideology.
These writers retain a contemporary resonance and how patriarchy, precarity and imperialist expansion are mutually reinforcing: gender oppression is intensified by capitalist industrialisation and militarism; nationalism and imperialism can co‑opt feminist rhetoric; and working‑class women are often the most exposed to dispossession and colonial violence. Understanding these dynamics strengthens contemporary anti‑imperialist, feminist and socialist practice by identifying the material roots of ideological illusions.
Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers because her work combines rigorous attention to individual subjectivity with an unflinching portrayal of the social forces that shape and deform everyday life. Mieko Kawakami is important not because she offers tidy political answers, but because her art reveals how capitalism structures pain and possibility. Sisters in Yellow is a book I heartily recommend.
Author
(born 1976) is a celebrated Japanese author, poet, and former singer-songwriter known for her visceral exploration of the female body, economic class, and social ethics. Originally from Osaka, she worked as a factory hand and a bar hostess before gaining national fame as a blogger and eventually a novelist.
There’s a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don’t feel so distant from political reality there. When things happen, they almost seem to unfold on a Shakespearean stage, with the audience so close they can become actors too. This is partly what Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote that small countries have big politics”.
Francisco Goldman
“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”
— Alberto Manguel
“I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible for what I’ve experienced, to what I’ve lived and been in a position to witness. I realise now that, as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don’t know about or wouldn’t be able to tell. Maybe there’s an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.”
Francisco Goldman
The deeper the literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to ‘picture’ life.”
Leon Trotsky
Francisco Goldman is best known as a novelist and reporter whose work centres on Central America and on the moral and human consequences of violence, state terror and corruption. A large part of his work has centred on Guatemala, exile, memory and state violence are common themes of his writing. He is best known for the investigative account The Art of Political Murder, which traces the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan José Gerardi and the political forces that sought to cover it up. Goldman’s writing blends literary narrative, reportage and personal memoir to render victims’ lives visible — a valuable contribution that nonetheless requires political grounding to explain the class and imperialist forces behind the crimes he documents.
Ariana E. Vigil’s Understanding Francisco Goldman is a highly regarded academic examination of the work of this gifted and important writer. It must be said from the start that this book is long overdue. Goldman was born to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish American father. Goldman’s heritage has shaped his unique perspective and significantly influenced his literary themes.
Goldman documents, with clarity, the human costs of imperialism, military repression, and oligarchic rule. He emphasises the victims—peasants, indigenous communities, journalists and dissidents—and helps break through the complacent narratives of Western media. His moral outrage identifies perpetrators and abuses, but he rarely traces those abuses to the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation and imperial rivalry.
What is missing from Goldman’s worldview is an understanding that wars, coups and economic “reforms” are expressions of the fundamental contradiction between social production and private ownership; without that materialist analysis, denunciations risk becoming appeals for better conduct by the same ruling class that profits from repression. Goldman’s solutions tend to expose corruption, strengthen human rights mechanisms, or press for better governance. These remain within the terrain of bourgeois politics and cannot uproot the capitalist interests—both domestic oligarchies and imperial powers—that sustain inequality and violence. While Goldman documents social suffering, he does not generally articulate a strategy centred on independent working-class political organisation.
To Vigil’s credit, she sets Goldman’s work within a broader process: the violent integration of Latin America into global capitalism under structural adjustment, privatisation, and the erosion of state provision. As she explains in this description of her own book: “In Understanding Francisco Goldman, the first book-length study of Goldman’s life and work, I begin with a biographical chapter drawn largely from Goldman’s essays and interviews. The following analytical chapters, one for each of Goldman’s four novels and two works of nonfiction, provide biographical, historical, political, and literary context for each work and explore its major themes. My book examines the influence of literary and political history on the development of Goldman’s characters and themes, as well as his use of multiple literary genres and the role of humour in his work. I underscore that major themes in Goldman’s work—migration, political violence, love, and loss—are explored across nations and time periods, and that they remain significant today. In Understanding Francisco Goldman, I draw connections between the writer’s life and work and demonstrate the appreciation he deserves for his influence, diversity, and breadth. Through his thoughtful, intellectual, transnational writing, Goldman expands the definition of what it means to be American.”[1]
The controversial and radical nature of Goldman’s work is certainly behind the lack of capitalist media coverage of this book. One of the few reviews was by Judith Sierra-Rivera, who perceptively writes: “Ariana E. Vigil has brought us a much-awaited comprehensive study on Francisco Goldman’s writing. Even though critical articles and chapters on specific works or aspects have proliferated in recent years, Understanding Francisco Goldman offers a broad overview of the author’s development, his significance across a variety of literary genres and traditions, and his complex position as a cultural translator in the hemispheric Americas. This is precisely Vigil’s most provocative proposition: “Goldman’s insistence on continuing to publish in and for U.S. venues indicates his commitment to not only translating Latin American issues to a U.S. and global audiences but also underscoring how interconnected these issues are, particularly for U.S. citizens and residents”.
While she follows this line of analysis throughout her presentation of Goldman’s production and in dialogue with other critics, she does so in a widely accessible discourse that serves both literary scholars and other readers. Vigil describes Goldman as “a truly American writer,” referring not only to the US but also to the rest of the North American continent and the Caribbean. She traces his racial and cultural heritage, birth and upbringing, education and career, and travels to help readers understand Goldman’s elusive identity. Although Goldman was born and raised in Boston, his mother is Guatemalan and his father is Jewish-American, which meant he always travelled to Guatemala, spoke English and Spanish, and, most importantly, navigated a complicated heritage. Furthermore, his travels and readings led him to move constantly among different countries on the continent and to eagerly embrace literary influences from a wide range of authors and styles, such as Truman Capote’s New Journalism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism”.[2]
Goldman’s investigations teach readers how bourgeois states and imperial powers conceal crimes, how impunity is institutionalised, and how liberal human rights discourse can be recuperated by imperial policy. These lessons are directly relevant to exposing modern wars, occupations and media complicity. However, a serious, disciplined study of a contemporary writer such as Francisco Goldman requires more than literary taste or moral sympathy. It calls for a method that relates aesthetic form to social content, traces ideas to class forces, and connects interpretation to political practice. This is where a Marxist study is necessary. A Marxist understanding is not merely interpretive: it clarifies how culture reproduces or challenges ruling-class interests. When Goldman depicts violence, displacement, or memory, the reader should ask: whose interests are served by particular framings of suffering? Does the narrative naturalise imperialism, or expose its mechanics?
Studying Francisco Goldman’s work should strengthen readers’ historical memory and human empathy while sharpening their class analysis. Francisco Goldman provides indispensable testimony about violence and impunity in Latin America. His work advances conscience and awareness. But to end the cycle he documents, it requires moving beyond humanitarian critique to a revolutionary strategy that uproots the capitalist and imperialist interests that produce repression—building independent working-class political power on an international scale.
Marxism does not reduce art to propaganda, but it insists that art is embedded in social life. As Marx warned against speculative mystification and Trotsky against empty formalism, the aim of any Marxist is a historically concrete, dialectical criticism that strengthens the working class’s understanding and capacity to act. Cultural study—of Goldman or any writer—must therefore be a component of socialist education.
[2] Ariana E. Vigil, Understanding Francisco Goldman (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 141 pp. Reviewed by Judith Sierra-Rivera,
“As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript. These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1. The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator)
5. Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016
About The Author
Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.
“Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.
Miguel Ángel Asturias.
“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …
Men of Maize
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.
Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.
One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.
There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.
While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer’s work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]
On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of “Weekend in Guatemala” by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”
Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]
Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism
Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]
Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.
Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.
It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote
“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class’s position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]
Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.
Notes
Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott
Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365
Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman
Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal
A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao
[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html
[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/
“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience.”
Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer
“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.
Philip Roth
“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”
Philip Roth
“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”
David Walsh
When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement’s vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]
Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers’ “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.
Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.
As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]
Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]
Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.
Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”
It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book’s journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]
There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.
He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.
A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.
He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.
As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.
In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, “The Sexual Witch Hunt,” and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]
It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.
Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.
[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html
[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html
[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said … I’m not going to take this lying down”
“Oh Heaven, could you have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at”.
Charles Dickens
“[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
Karl Marx
“Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official, respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course, enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child, including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.”
David Walsh
“ In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. ”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I would be lying if I said I celebrate Christmas. It is a time to eat and relax and probably write, as this article written on Christmas day, testifies. I tend to observe Christmas, and one of my few traditions is to spend Christmas with Charles Dickens.
Specifically A Christmas Carol. First, I read the book for the first time this Christmas, and second, I listened to this excellent audiobook by Hugh Grant. Grant is a much-underrated actor, and this audiobook is superbly narrated.
Everyone knows the story inside out. First published as a novella by Chapman & Hall on Dec. 19 1843. Dickens was not the only social commentator at the time of writing a Christmas Carol. Karl Marx, a great admirer of Dickens, walked the same London streets for over 20 years. Marx, Engels and Dickens were horrified by and wrote about the squalor produced by the Industrial Revolution. Engel’s famous work captured the poverty and squalor in England.[1]
There is, of course, a world of difference between Marx, Engels and Dickens. However, you would not glean that from numerous radical organisations that want to claim Dickens as a radical socialist and champion of the working class. As the Stalinist Nick Matthews writes, “It would be nice to think, too, that Marx’s use of the metaphor of the spectre that begins The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe…” so soon after those in A Christmas Carol, is more than coincidental.”[2]
This may well be correct, but the writer George Orwell understood Dicken’s class position much better. He wrote, “Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and despite his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed, but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.
It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’ without showing much awareness of who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton, ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England’, and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, dirt, and life upon the straggling streets, and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc., etc.”[3]
While Vladimir Lenin hated Dickens, Marx liked him and wrote “ “[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
To close, as Paul Bond wrote, “ It is In the 154 years since the death of the author, none of the central contradictions of the existing social order have been resolved. The exploitation so vividly portrayed in Dickens’s works continues to be a feature of everyday life over vast swathes of the planet, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Yet, even in those countries where grinding poverty was ameliorated in some measure through the struggles of the working class and the establishment of the welfare state introduced under the shadow of the Russian Revolution, there is a serious risk of a return to the Dickensian nightmare.”[4]
A Trumpet of Sedition 