Adaptation Poetics: A Kaleidoscopic Study of Victorian Fiction in Films https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10795602

Adaptation Poetics: A Kaleidoscopic Study of Victorian Fiction in Films

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10795602

Author(s): Dr. Atiya Noor

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10794764

PDF: Download Full Text

Volume 15 | Issue 1 | Feb 2024

Pages: 173-191

AboutUs: https://www.the-criterion.com/about/

Archive: https://www.the-criterion.com/archive/

ContactUs: https://www.the-criterion.com/contact/

EditorialBoard: https://www.the-criterion.com/editorial-board/

Submission: https://www.the-criterion.com/submission/

FAQ: https://www.the-criterion.com/fa/

ISSN 2278-9529
Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal
www.galaxyimrj.com

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona
(Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How Ideological Affiliation
Motivates Critical Response
Dr. Samik Sen
Department of English,
Naba Barrackpur Prafulla Chandra Mahavidyalaya,
West Bengal State University,
West Bengal, India.
Article History: Submitted-30/01/2024, Revised-22/02/2024, Accepted-23/02/2024, Published-29/02/2024.
Abstract:
The present essay examines Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s
Societal Consciousness) an important experiment in reading Shakespeare from Marxist
viewpoint and ventures to investigate into the ideological motivations behind such readings.
Special attention has been paid to the political upheavals that took place in Bengal at their time
and which triggered a shift of focus from an appreciation of Shakespeare’s transcendental
humanism or the speculative treatment of the influence of Renaissance scepticism upon
Shakespeare’s plays to considerations of the socio-economic factors that Shakespeare’s plays
were implicated in. Dutta proceeds to argue that Shakespeare actually articulated anti-
bourgeois sentiments and manifested a sympathetic feeling for the underdogs.
Keywords: Marxist literary criticism, Soviet Social Realism, European Marxism, British
Cultural Materialism, Renaissance England.
Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearean exegesis entitled Shakespearer Samaj Chetona
(Shakespeare’s societal consciousness) was published in the politically turbulent 1970s. It was
evidently intended to be a radical riposte to the traditional bourgeoisie criticism of Shakespeare
which by deifying Shakespeare as the immortal sovereign of the arcadia of art purposefully
and indefatigably invested Shakespeare’s creations with a transcendental glory and timeless
significance. Such bourgeoisie criticism effectively ignored the social reality that manifested
directly or indirectly in Shakespeare’s works and gave them a political cast. Dutta does not
spare even the orthodox Marxists like Alexander Smirnov, who succumb to the temptation of
081
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10794744

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
projecting Shakespeare as the mouthpiece of the progressive bourgeoisie, on the assumption
that Renaissance humanism which Shakespeare incarnated and endorsed was the cultural
representation of the innate character of the bourgeois ideology. By citing with approbation
Wyndham Lewis’ observation that “Far from being a feudal poet, the Shakespeare that Troilus
and Cressida, The Tempest, or even Coriolanus shows us is much more Bolshevik (using this
little word popularly) than a figure of conservative romance” (qt. in Dutta, Shakespearer
Samajchetona 9), Dutta proceeds to show that Shakespeare far from advocating and
disseminating the values of the elite section of contemporary English society, actually
articulated anti-bourgeois sentiments and ventilated sympathetic feelings for the underdogs.
Thus Utpal Dutta in establishing Shakespeare as a socially conscious artist in a polemical
introductory chapter in his book launches a dual attack upon the bourgeois commentators and
such ‘Marxist’ critics as Alexander Smirnov, Lunacharsky and Anisimov. Utpal Dutta’s leftist
affiliation obviously accounts for his anathema to the bourgeoisie critics. But what is
significant and suggestive of the critic’s ideological motivation is his reaction against the
evaluation of Shakespeare by those Soviet critics who evidently espoused a materialist
perspective. The reason for this has to be sought not only in the complex and conflict-ridden
history of the Communist movement in India of Dutta’s contemporary times, but also in the
evolution of Utpal Dutta’s political faith and opinion. It will be dealt with later in detail after
Dutta’s views on the materialist criticism of Shakespeare is considered closely.
In the first chapter of his work, Utpal Dutta seeks the answer to a question which he
considers as fundamental to any materialist interpretation of Shakespeare. If the class conflict
between a moribund feudalism and an ascendant bourgeoisie was the locomotive of the British
history of Shakespeare’s times, which of the warring parties did the dramatist stand for?
Obviously such a formulation of a fundamental question and then the orientation of a whole
critical discussion to answer that question are fallacious and reductive and this critical
methodology will be scrutinized later. But what needs to be examined now is the answer that
Marxist critics like Alexander Smirnov, Lunacharsky, Anisimov et al offer to such a question
and Utpal Dutta’s observations on their response. A. Smirnov, whom Dutta labels as the
greatest Shakespearean scholar of Soviet Union has declared that:
The conclusion that Shakespeare was the ideologist of the bourgeoisie is inescapable.
It is impossible, however, to designate him as such without reservations. The rapacity, greed,
cruelty, egoism, and philistinism so typical of the English bourgeoisie—embodied in Shylock,
Malvolio, and Iago are no less scathingly denounced. Shakespeare was the humanist ideologist
082

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
of the bourgeoisie, the exponent of the program advanced by them when, in the name of
humanity, they first challenged the feudal order, but which they later disavowed (qt. in Dutta,
Shakespearer Samajchetona 3).
Utpal Dutta wonders how such a perceptive critic as Smirnov can represent
Shakespeare as the propagator of bourgeoisie ideology, an interpreter of their agenda when the
latter had created an array of villains like Iago, Claudius or Shylock to denigrate the
bourgeoisie. Dutta contends that while many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries cried up the
new developments in trade and commerce, and celebrated the unprecedented geographical
discoveries and expansion in the Western world during the Renaissance, Shakespeare seems to
have been not at all impressed by what the new age was claimed to have achieved. What he
could discern behind these much- trumpeted adventures and enterprises was the reckless
plundering and insatiable rapacity of the rising bourgeoisie and he has painted the merchants,
representatives and champions of the new age in colours of deepest black. The desperate
attempt on the part of some Marxist critics to project Shakespeare as the mouthpiece of the
rising bourgeoisie deliberately ignoring and overlooking all textual evidences, Dutta argues,
was inspired by a scandalous misinterpretation of Marxism. As Marx had asserted that the
economic base is the main determining factor, and that ideas and thoughts are merely
reflections of the relations of production and the forces of production, these immature and
sometimes misleading scholars had concluded that the human mind has no role to play in
human history, and that religion, philosophy, customs and literature are all ineffectual and
subservient to economics. The Soviet critics’ like Smirnov’s or Anisimov’s perception is that
as in the economic sphere the bourgeoisie was a progressive force in his times, Shakespeare
enthusiastically aligned himself with this progressive section of the people. But in such a
reductive economistic interpretation of Shakespeare Dutta finds a misreading of Marx, who in
his oeuvre indicated that the economic factor may be the ultimate determinant, but never the
sole determining element in human history. He refers to one of Engles’ letters in order to
establish his point. Engels in a letter to J. Bloch written in 1890 was quite emphatic about this
point:
According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history
is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I
have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic
element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd
phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—
083

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the
victorious class after a successful battle etc— forms of law— and then even the reflexes of all
these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants… political, legal, philosophical theories,
religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma also exercise their
influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in
determining their form (qt. in Fox, The Novel and the People 44).
Engels here denies any mechanical one-to-one correspondence between base and
superstructure for elements of the superstructure constantly react back upon and influence the
economic base. By alluding to such statements made by the founders of Marxism, Utpal Dutta
emphasizes the mutual interaction between base and superstructure as the fundamental tenet of
dialectical materialism and asseverates that though in the formation of man, economics acts as
the final determinant, human mind too has the power of influencing economics and that for this
reason the importance of the human mind is undeniable in dialectical materialism. Dutta further
adds that the creativity of the human mind, the conscious endeavor and enterprise of man is the
theoretical basis of the workers’ party. Immediately after such a glorification of the human
element in the class struggle, Utpal Dutta refers to the necessity of Cultural Revolution in the
socialist countries, and thus it becomes clear what ideological motivation has tied together all
these arguments like an invisible thread. Mao Ze Dong, the pioneer of the Cultural Revolution
in China, in his On Contradiction has similarly argued:
True, the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal
and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in
certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in
turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the
productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production, then the change
in the relations of production plays the principal and decisive role (Mao, On Contradiction 92).
In his criticism of Stalin’s book Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Mao wrote:
From the beginning to the end of this book Stalin does not say a word about the superstructure.
He gives no thought to man, he sees things, but not people…The Soviets are concerned only
with the relations of production, they do not pay attention to the superstructure, they do not pay
attention to the politics, they do not pay attention to the role of the people. Without a
Communist movement, it is impossible to reach Communism (qt. in Mclellan, Marxism 253).
084

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Mao considered that a revolution in the sphere of ideas brought about by an intense
indoctrination of socialist attitudes could accelerate and facilitate economic development.
Developments in the superstructure, in other words, could not only proceed parallel to, but they
could also themselves condition, the development of the base.
The influence of Mao’s views on art and literature upon the critical practice of Utpal
Dutta is also quite evident in Dutta’s interpretation of Shakespeare. Dutta has alluded with
approbation to the dialectical critical methodology that Mao has recommended for a Marxist
reinterpretation and reappraisal of the literature of the past. For Mao the standard of evaluation
of the literary productions of the past is the attitude towards the mass that is embodied in such
productions and history. Mao writes:
The proletariat should… distinguish among the literary and art works of past ages and
determine its attitude towards them only after determining their attitude to the people and
whether or not they had any progressive significance historically (Mao, Talks at the Yenan
Forum 252).
Utpal Dutta’s reading of Shakespeare and his creations applies the principles of literary
interpretation that Mao has formulated according to the theory of dialectical and historical
materialism. The question that Dutta deemed as fundamental to the evaluation and
interpretation of Shakespeare is which side Shakespeare took in the class struggle of his times.
In the first chapter of his book Dutta poses this question:
Now the question arises, whom did Shakespeare support? The central conflict in his
society was between moribund and decadent feudalism and rising capitalism. What was
Shakespeare’s ideological position in this conflict? (Dutta, Shakespearer Samajchetona 2)
Dutta’s answer to this question is that Shakespeare was neither inclined towards the
decadent feudalism, nor did he endorse the acquisitiveness of the exploitative bourgeois, he
rather embraced the cause of common people, the plebeians and has given powerful expression
to the sufferings of the people and registered in his plays his protests and revulsion against the
existing socio-political order. The question as well as the answer is formulated in terms of
Mao’s views on art and literature.
On recognizing in Dutta’s critical opinion such resonance of Mao’s voice and on further
noticing Dutta directly accusing critics like the Anisimovs of changing their class, it is
reasonable to assume that in the ideological clash between the Soviet bloc and China under the
085

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
strong and able leadership of Mao, Dutta obviously was inclined to the latter and that even in
his criticism of Shakespeare he did not spare his ideological adversaries, whose politics to him
was repugnantly “revisionist”. Utpal Dutta repeatedly and stubbornly maintained that the
revolutionary and progressive role played by the rising bourgeoisie in combating the feudal
elements had been unjustly over-emphasized by certain Marxist critics. It would not be too far-
fetched to speculate that Utpal Dutta’s indignation at those ‘Marxists’ whom he castigates for
having ‘declassed’ themselves and for having forgotten the lessons of Marx’s Capital,
originates from the heated political climate of the time, more specifically from the ideological
infighting in which the Indian communists were embroiled in the sixth and seventh decades of
the last century. The Communist Party of India finally split in 1964, with one faction
representing the earlier ‘right’ and ‘centrist’ trends coming to be known as the CPI and the
other group, representing the earlier ‘left’ trend, being known after sometime as the Communist
Party (Marxist) or CPM. Apart from personal and functional differences, the split also took a
largely doctrinal form. Bipan Chandra in his India since Independence has offered a succinct
historical account of the ideological conflict between the two factions of Indian Communists:
According to the CPM, the Indian state was ‘the organ of class rule of the bourgeoisie
and landlords, led by the big bourgeoisie, who are increasingly collaborating with foreign
finance capital’… In its International outlook, the CPM continued to regard Stalin as a great
Marxist who was basically correct in his policies… it claimed to take an independent stand on
Soviet-Chinese differences, but was closer to the Chinese in demanding an attack on Soviet
‘Revisionism’. The CPI too wanted to ‘complete the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution’,
but it would do so by forming a national democratic front which would include progressive
sections of Congress. Moreover, this front need not be led by the working class or the CPI.’
What is evident from this account is that the CPI was keen on class-collaboration with the
progressive national bourgeoisie, while the CPM was much more radical in their approach and
did not believe that its goal of establishing a people’s democratic state could be established
through peaceful parliamentary means forming strategic alliance with the progressive section
of the bourgeoisie (Chandra 261,262).
Utpal Dutta’s political position was akin to that of CPM and his ideological allegiance
to CPM, accounts for his strong disapproval of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie in human
history, a role allegedly magnified and exaggerated by the CPI in India and the ‘revisionist’
Soviet leadership in the International context. A careful reading of the first chapter of Dutta’s
treatise will convince a close reader that here Shakespeare and his creations have been used by
086

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Dutta as a space of an ideological tussle with his opponents. By referring to the authority of
Marx and Engels and by using their meta-narrative upon the historical account of primitive
accumulation by the rising bourgeoisie, the critic has interpreted Shakespeare in that light. In
a way he has incorporated the empirical reality of Shakespeare’s production into the theoretical
framework of a Marxist discourse of human history. But the theoretical apparatus that the critic
here has made use of is a particular version of Marxism, for by this time Marxism itself had
come to be recognized as a text, an empirical reality available through many mutually
antagonistic critical interpretations. Utpal Dutta critiqued certain interpretations of the grand
discourse of Marxism, and by espousing some other interpretation of the same, approached
Shakespeare and his creation. But both in his reading of Marx and Shakespeare, Dutta seems
to have been inspired by what Althusser has called ‘religious myth of reading’ (Althusser,
Reading Capital, 17) according to which the world is a Holy Scripture, a text that speaks truly
to us. To look at a thing according to this theory of knowledge is to ‘read’ its essence and thus
truly to know it. The logic of this reading as Althusser describes it in Reading Capital is as
follows:
[It is] the logic of conception of knowledge in which all work of knowledge is reduced in
principle to the recognition of the mere relation of vision; in which the whole nature of its
object is reduced to the mere condition of given (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital 19).
Thus, in the kind of reading that Utpal Dutta practices in his book, one discovers a
presupposition that the objects of literary analysis are simply given, are out there, in the world
of Shakespeare’s productions or in Marx’s oeuvre and those critics who cannot see them may
be, can be and are charged of ‘oversight’.
Althusser’s disciple, Pierre Macherey, in his Theory of Literary Production, applies the
Althusserian epistemology to critical inquiry. Interpretative criticism, which assumes that the
task of the critic is to deliver the text from its own silences by extracting a hidden, latent
meaning from it, Macherey argues, is inherently contradictory. Tony Bennet in his Formalism
and Marxism has offered a lucid commentary on the limitations and paradoxes of interpretative
criticism. Bennet rightly observes that the more interpretative criticism:
seeks to enable the text to speak with its own voice, the more the voice of the critic obtrudes
as the text is referred to an ideal or substitute text, elaborated by the critic in relation to which
the ‘original’ text is to be corrected, revised and in general terms, tailored for consumption.
Such a criticism, then, effects a certain productive activity. It so ‘works’ the text, usually by
087

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
smoothing out the contradictions within it, as to subject it to a particular ideologically coded
reading. But, at the same time, it effaces its own productive activity in presenting that reading
as but the ‘truth’ of the text itself (Bennet 86-87).
Bennet further clarifies:
that it is ultimately with the ‘empiricist presuppositions of this form of criticism that Macherey
and Eagleton take issue. The distinguishing feature of empiricism, Colin MacCabe has argued,
consists ‘in its characterization of the knowledge to be obtained as defined by the object of
which it is knowledge’. Empiricism, that is, consists in the belief that the object of knowledge
is supposed to be somehow ‘given’ as a state of affair, existing outside and independently of
thought, which constitutes ‘that which is to be known’. The process of knowledge is thus
viewed as one through which, by a mixture of conceptual and empirical procedures, the ‘is to
be known’ comes to be known, becomes the ‘is known’. Interpretative criticism thus constructs
the text as if it had a pre-given hidden or true meaning which it is the business of criticism to
‘come to know’, ‘to mirror in thought’ (Bennet 87).
What Bennet emphasizes here is a fallacy that interpretive criticism based on an
empiricist methodology involves. In claiming to extract the latent meaning from the text, it
actually ‘works on’ the text, smoothing out the contradictions and reconstructing the text in its
own terms as a coherent and unified whole.
Utpal Dutta in Shakespearer Samajchetona clearly practiced this kind of interpretative
criticism, claiming to have understood the true import and significance of Shakespearean texts
by applying the theoretical apparatus of Marxism. He tried vigorously and assiduously to
impress this fact upon his readers that it has consistently remained his effort to throw light on
what Shakespeare consciously intended to communicate. For him Shakespearean texts do
contain a fixed meaning waiting to be discovered by an objective and dispassionate seeker. The
text of Dutta’s essay does not contain any critical self-reflection on the critic’s part and does
not carry any hint of an understanding that this kind of reading too produces the text from a
particular ideological perspective.
When the idea that a literary work is an expression of an intention (whether individual
or collective) which then serves as the meaning to be discovered in it, the essence of the work,
is rejected, our very sense of the text is transformed. Pierre Macherey in his A Theory of
Literary Production has critiqued the assumption that a literary work reflects the authorial
intention. Terry Eagleton has summed up Macherey’s radical interrogation of this kind of
088

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
empiricist criticism which assumes that the object of criticism is given, fixed and intended by
the author:
Criticism and its object – the literary text— are to be radically distinguished: science is
not the reduplication of an object but a form of knowledge of it which displaces it outside of
itself, knows it as it cannot know itself. Criticism is not merely the elaboration of the text’s
self-knowledge; it establishes a decisive rupture between itself and the object, distancing itself
from that object in order to produce a new knowledge of it. To know the text is not to listen to,
and translate, a pre-existent discourse: it is to produce a new discourse which ‘makes speak’
the text’s silences. Such an operation however is not to be misconceived as the hermeneutical
recovery of a sense or structure hidden in the work, a sense which it possesses but conceals; it
is rather to establish a new knowledge discontinuous with the work itself, disjunct from it as
science is disjunct from ideology. Scientific criticism is in this sense the antagonist of
empiricist critical ‘knowledge’, which ends effectively by abolishing itself, allowing itself to
be reabsorbed into a literary object which it has left essentially unchanged. Criticism is not an
‘instrument’ or ‘passage’ to the truth of a text, but a transformative labour which makes its
objects appear other than it is. Scientific criticism, then, produces a new object refusing the
empiricist illusion of the text as a ‘given’ which offers itself spontaneously to the inspecting
glance. Such empiricism merely redoubles the artefact: it succeeds in saying less in saying
more (Eagleton, Against the Grain 10).
Macherey in Theory of Literary Production distinguished between the traditional
conception of literary criticism as an art and a more radical representation of literary criticism
as a science. Macherey’s formulation deserves to be quoted at length:
either literary criticism is an art, completely determined by the pre-existence of a domain, the
literary works and finally reunited with them in the discovery of their truth, and as such it has
no autonomous existence; or, it is a certain form of knowledge, and has an object, which is not
a given but a product of literary criticism. To this object literary criticism applies a certain
effort of transformation. Literary criticism is neither the imitation, nor the facsimile of the
object; it maintains a certain separation or distance between knowledge and its object. If
knowledge is expressed in discourse, and is applied to discourse, this discourse must by its
nature be different from the object, which it animated in order to talk about it. This distance or
gap, large enough to accommodate an authentic discursiveness is the determining characteristic
of the relationship between literature and criticism. What can be said of the work can never be
089

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
confused with what the work itself is saying, because two distinct kinds of discourse which
differ in both form and content are being superimposed. Thus, between the writer and the critic,
an irreducible difference must be posited right from the beginning: not the difference between
two points of view on the same object, but the exclusion separating two forms of discourse that
have nothing in common. The work that the author wrote is not precisely the work that is
explicated by the critic. Let us say, provisionally, that the critic employing a new language
brings out a difference within the work by demonstrating that it is other than it is (Macherey
7).
If Utpal Dutta’s Shakespeare criticism is considered and evaluated in the light of such
a radical conceptualization of criticism as a science, it becomes apparent that the critic instead
of positing an irreducible distance between the writer and himself pretends to bridge such a
distance or to reproduce what the writer himself has tried to communicate. The critic here tries
to, or pretends to install himself on the site of the literary work in order to display the meanings
there. At the very outset of his critical work, Utpal Dutta makes it clear that the fundamental
premise upon which he has based his thesis is that Shakespeare had his own views and opinions
about the contemporary social and political reality and through his plays he had expressed his
views. Using this presupposition as his point of departure, he strives to establish and
substantiate his argument throughout his book, with adequate reference to Shakespearean texts,
interpreting and evaluating these textual references from a Marxist perspective. Criticism by
this act labours to justify a foregone conclusion, rather than moving towards it. Criticism here
pretends to find a passage to the heart of the text and hence implicitly admits to work as a
supplement to the text. Two major implications of such a critical practice are, first that the text
is a reflection of its author’s intention and it has a unified meaning which may sometimes
remain hidden and second that the task of the critic is to reproduce this meaning and so enable
the reader to grasp the true significance of the text. The overarching figure of the author which
is a product of bourgeoisie individualism is not only present in Utpal Dutta’s Marxist criticism
of Shakespeare, but it also works as a fundamental proposition of the thesis, even as the critical
enterprise here proceeds to consolidate the myth of the author as creator. Moreover the critic’s
insistence on the greatness of Shakespeare in depicting the social realities of his time is an
indirect reaffirmation of the Romantic glorification of the genius of Shakespeare. What is
evident from Dutta’s handling of Shakespeare is that he has not been able to purge his critical
perspective of the illusion of the sovereignty and autonomy of the authorial subject that the
bourgeois aesthetic ideology strives to perpetuate. While Marxist discourse emphasizes the
090

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
social construction of subjectivity, Utpal Dutta’s Shakespeare criticism relies on a conception
of individual consciousness and agency that directly contradicts Marxist discourse. Therefore,
to put it in simple terms, while Utpal Dutta challenges the content of the bourgeoisie criticism
of Shakespeare, he uses the forms, conventions and methodology of bourgeoisie criticism, for
in order to establish the validity of his interpretation, he refers to the authority of Shakespeare,
professing to discover the authentic meaning of the Shakespearean oeuvre, and subtly hides the
transformative operation that his critical intervention performs on the Shakespearean texts.
Literary criticism in the approach of Dutta, in spite of its materialist orientation does not admit
its relative position, but claims to be a disinterested, objective reproduction of what the literary
texts actually mean.
The figure of the author looms large in the critical observations made by Dutta on
Shakespeare’s works. In spite of subscribing to the Marxist view of literature as a reflection of
the social reality or the class struggle in history, Dutta cannot rid himself of the bourgeoisie
notions of a transcendent genius, of an author as the creator who though not autonomous or
isolated from the community, is an active subject and consciously endorses the interests of one
party in the class struggle of his time and denounces the other, and his work reflects such a
choice, acquiring unity and coherence of meaning and form from such an authorial choice or
intention. So the work is finally determined by the author’s conscious choice or intention and
not by the socio-political conflicts of the times. The class conflicts of the age find an aesthetic
resolution in the author’s creative consciousness or in his social conscience which cannot
endorse what he evidently discovers as unjust or unfair and sympathizes with the poor and
exploited. Dutta does not explore the roots of Shakespeare’s social consciousness or account
for his inclination towards the underprivileged section of the society. Nor does he allow himself
to think that a literary work instead of representing two parties involved in the class-warfare of
the times as white and black, good and evil, may embody the conflict of interests in its form
and instead of containing a single meaning, may become a site for the clash of multiple
meanings and ideologies. Lenin in his essay on Tolstoy characterizes Tolstoy’s writings as
representative of the Russian aristocracy through a noble individual with literary genius.
Eagleton criticizes such a view for it relies too much on the definition of Tolstoy as a great
individual genius, and this according to him, is a gap in Lenin’s materialism. Similar objections
may be raised against Utpal Dutta’s representation of Shakespeare as a literary genius, a great
poet who mirrored the class conflicts of his time and expressed his position through his plays.
Such a glorification of Shakespeare as a socially conscious, great playwright and poet is the
091

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
other side of the coin to the Romantic elevation of the bard to the level of transcendent genius.
Alex Callinicos in his “Marxism and Literary Criticism” writes:
Great works of art (Marx is unabashed in his value-judgments) can provide profound
insights in to specific historical situations; they also because of the relatively unalienated
character of artistic labour, offer intimation of how work will become a means of self-
fulfillment in a classless communist society. That such achievements are possible despite the
overt intentions of the author is indicated by Marx and Engels’ immense admiration for Balzac,
whom the latter called ‘a far greater master of realism than Zola’. Balzac’s greatness lies in
how he ‘was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices’- his
nostalgia for the ancien regime— and portray ‘the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie
upon the society of nobles’. We see here emerging what Frank Kermode has called ‘the
discrepancy theory’, according to which ‘texts can under Marxist analysis reveal a meaning
not intended by the author’. Though… greatly influential on Althusserian criticism, this idea
remained in Marx’s and Engels’ writings merely an intriguing suggestion. One reason why it
is not developed further is perhaps that an obvious strategy for eliciting the discrepancy
between author-intention and meaning is to study the traces it might have left in the formal
construction of the text. But, as S.S.Prawer observes, ‘Marx does not often deal with questions
of form’ ( Callinicos 96).
Such inattention to form that characterizes the classical Marxism’s encounter and
negotiations with literature also accounts for Utpal Dutta’s obsessive preoccupation with the
authorial intent which is allegedly expressed through the content of Shakespearean plays.
Utpal Dutta’s book not only records the critic’s observations on and analyses of
Shakespearean works but it significantly gives us an account of how a Marxist critic has read
Marx. In his reading of Marx too, Utpal Dutta seems to have been inspired by a religious myth
of reading and appears to give us the impression of having read Marx ‘correctly’. Here too the
bourgeoisie myth of the author keeps haunting the critic. In his essay ‘What is an author’,
Foucault argues that we can speak of ‘authors’ of traditions, disciplines and theories. In this
context he mentions the importance of both Marx and Freud as ‘founders of discursivity’.
(Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ 154) For Foucault, what is unique about these types of
“authors” is that they do not just produce particular texts but ‘the possibilities and the rules of
formation of other texts’ ( Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ 154). Yet, to initiate a tradition in
this way does not imply that each founder lays out beforehand the intricacies of a later text
092

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
within that tradition; rather each engenders ‘an endless possibility of discourse’ ( Foucault,
‘What is an Author?’ 154). Thus initiators of discursivity according to Foucault, make ‘possible
not only certain number of analogies’ (Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ 154), but also certain
number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse,
yet something belonging to what they founded. The enactment of such discursivities is then
always at once intimately associated with the originating author (a presence linked to authorial
intention and contextual co-ordinates) but also radically different. Moreover, such differential
enactments within these traditions are initiated via a continuous hermeneutic rearticulation of
the initiator’s originary words and texts. The very ‘return to the origin’ makes possible the
continually open discursive potentialities of later enactments.
Apart from subscribing to the myth of the ‘author’ and authorial intent, Utpal Dutta’s
Shakespeare criticism shows another important concern of traditional bourgeois criticism,
namely the distinction between appearance and reality or between the surface and the depth of
the literary text. Utpal Dutta argues that ‘the great plays of Shakespeare are almost always
pregnant with deeper import and significance. Though these plays are not allegorical they
operate on two levels and in the analysis of the playwright’s societal consciousness, the critic
must reach the second level of meaning. For if one remains confined to the exciting external
events, he will not be able to reach the poet’s message.’ (Dutta, Shakespearer Samajchetona
350).
Here the critic has referred to two levels of meaning and has distinguished between the
surface and the depth, the exterior and interior of Shakespearean plays, indicating the latter as
more important than the former. This kind of reading subscribes to an empiricist ideology for
it presupposes the meaning of a text as pre-given and latent in the text itself and assumes that
the critic’s task is merely to discover the meaning, penetrating deeper into the text. Macherey
has offered a trenchant analysis of this empiricist ideology of interiority. He writes:
If the work encloses the warm intimacy of its secrets, composes its elements into a totality
which is sufficient, completed and centred, then all criticism is immanent (Macherey, A Theory
108).
Machery has further critiqued the antithesis between appearance and reality, surface
and depth of a literary text for according to him it involves an interpretive fallacy positing the
actual meaning of the text as already given, residing deep inside the text, waiting to be
discovered by the critic’s penetrating gaze. Criticism in this view becomes a passive reflection
093

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
of the text’s message, not an active construction of the meaning in its own terms and remains
subservient to the text. Macherey writes:
…this idea of hidden truth or meaning remains unproductive and misleading … to consider the
work in terms of opposition between appearance and reality is to invert the normative fallacy,
only to fall into the interpretive fallacy: to replace the apparent line of the text by a true line
which would find itself placed behind the first … but this new dimension only repeats the
previous one; this depth is the product of a doubling which is ideologically fertile but
theoretically sterile, since it places the work in perspective but tells us nothing of its
determinations (Macherey, Theory 111)
Utpal Dutta in his Shakespeare criticism has fallen into the interpretive fallacy by
postulating a difference between the surface and the depth of the plays and claiming that the
meaning and message that the playwright intended to convey to his audience is latent in the
plays themselves, never seeking to expose the factors that ultimately determine the formation
of the plays. Moreover in claiming to have grasped what Shakespeare originally intended to
communicate, the pre-given facts and secrets of the plays lying beneath the surface of the plays’
actions, Dutta has committed himself to an empiricist methodology which ignores the role of
theory in actively organizing and critically reorganizing the data provided by the experiences
of the empirical reality of the text. Dutta has embraced a reflectionist model of knowledge,
which assumes that the objects of knowledge pre-exist the knower and are independent of the
act of knowing. Such an epistemological position does not take into account the fact that the
theoretical perspective from which an object is approached, moulds and transforms the objects
of knowledge and conditions the act of knowing. Dutta’s reading does not conform to the
Marxist theory of knowledge which maintains that the concepts, statements, and inferences by
which man expresses his knowledge of the external world are not only a reflection of the world
but also the product of our activity; consequently there is something in knowledge that depends
on the subject of knowing. Dutta in his Shakespeare criticism has overlooked the crucial role
that his own theoretical position plays in producing the knowledge of Shakespearean texts and
has claimed such knowledge as an accurate reflection of the texts he has studied, or the objects
of knowledge.
According to Utpal Dutta societal consciousness in Shakespeare’s times was equal to a
religious consciousness and that is why the poet was bound to resort to some theory of religion
094

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
in order to register his disapproval of and reaction against the existing socio-political order. He
writes:
Shakespeare is the most important spokesman for the agony and suffering of the people of his
times and his indignation at such suffering was expressed resorting to certain elements and
ideas of a utopian, pure Christianity. The ideas that Shakespeare resorted to in order to give
expression to his reaction against the avarice, consumerism, commercialism and the tyranny of
the kings, were the idea of renunciation, abhorrence for gold and money, the inferiority and
depravity of the kings and the rich and so on (Dutta, Shakespearer Samajchetona 348).
Dutta has devoted an entire chapter to Jesus and has frequently referred to Christ’s
teachings in analyzing Shakespearean creations. For in Christ’s preaching against the rich, love
for the poor he has recognized a proletarian sympathy which he has associated with the
principles of primitive communism. Dutta rejects the orthodox Marxist’s anathema to religion
and a mechanical application of atheism which is not ready to recognize any form of theism as
progressive. He complains that Marx’s statement, ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’ has
been improperly and unduly highlighted and overemphasized, wrenching it from its context
and not paying adequate attention to what Marx actually intended to convey in the passage
from which the statement is extracted. Dutta quotes the full passage of Marx in order to make
Marx’s views on religion clear to his readers. Marx writes:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of
soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Religion is the general theory of this world,
its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation
and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence
has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the
struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and
the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions. It is the opium of the people (Dutta, Shakespearer Samajchetona 61).
Analyzing this passage Dutta concludes that Marx indeed acknowledged the
revolutionary role that religion played at a certain period in human history by giving vent to
the grievance and anguish of persecuted humanity. Dutta further argues that often protest
against the iniquities and injustices of an exploitative socio-political system assumes the shape
095

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
of a utopian and idealistic doctrine and before the emergence of the philosophy of scientific
socialism, till the seventeenth century Christianity has provided necessary impetus for such
protests and even armed rebellion. In support of his argument Dutta has referred to the
observations made by Marxist thinkers like Engels, Kautsky and Lenin, all of whom have
recognized affinity between the subversive potential that Christianity had at an early phase of
its development and the revolutionary role that Marxism assigns to the Proletariat in modern
times. Engels has observed, ‘There are some remarkable similarities between the history of
early Christianity and the labour movement of the present times’ (qt. in Dutta, Shakespearer
Samajchetona 62). Engels has also recognized that ‘like every great revolutionary movement
Christianity is also the creation of the masses’. Kautsky has identified in the class hatred for
the rich the most important component in the development of Christianity. Dutta further cites
a passage from Lenin where this Marxist thinker has acknowledged it as a historical fact that
at one point of human history religious doctrines fuelled and incited democratic and proletarian
mass movement. Lenin writes:
Whatever may be the cause behind the genesis of the idea of God, there was a time in history
when democratic and proletarian mass movement assumed the form of religion, assumed the
form of a conflict of religious doctrine with another (qt. in Dutta, Shakespearer Samajchetona
62).

If religion is used by exploiting classes as an ‘opium dose’ to make working people
accept their teachings and the authority of the clergy, then ipso facto, it is inextricably
intertwined with the class struggle. These passages make it clear that the founders of Marxism
did not believe they brought religion into the class struggle; they found it there. They were
convinced, in fact, that the major conflicts in the history of religion were themselves forms of
the class struggle. They saw, for example, in the origins of Christianity the role of the mass
revolts that marked the decay of the Roman world.
A close scrutiny of Dutta’s views on religion reveals two aspects of his materialist
thought. One, he was not ready to reject religion merely as an ideological apparatus of the
ruling class, an instrument that only perpetuates the exploitation of man. He was opposed to
orthodox Marxists’ repudiation of theism as reactionary and actually pleaded for a historical
reinterpretation of the role that religion played in class struggle. For him the question of validity
or truth value of a religious doctrine is less important than the pragmatic question whether it
has helped or hindered the class struggle. Since for Dutta class struggle and end of exploitation
096

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
of the majority by the privileged minority is of paramount importance, he eschews all
theoretical meditations on the tenets of Christianity and glorifies all forms of protests and
movements against exploitative socio-political machinery. From this it is clear that Dutta’s
thinking was oriented towards praxis and the practical application of theory and not towards
abstract intellectual exercises or philosophical reflections. A parallel of Dutta’s pragmatic view
on religion and his insistence on giving priority to class struggle over and above all other
considerations is found in the thought of Lenin. Lenin emphasized the fact that opposition to
religion must always be subordinated to the long-range interests of the Proletariat and he
believed that workers and peasants and intellectuals who are religious and believe in socialism
must not be estranged because of their religious beliefs. For this Marxist revolutionary religious
debates were less important than the class struggle and abolition of class society and therefore
in spite of promoting a scientific outlook he considers role of religion from a pragmatic point
of view. Lenin writes:
Unity in the truly revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a
paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of opinion among the Proletarians about a
paradise in heaven. That is why we do not and must not proclaim our atheism in our
programme; that is why we do not and must not forbid Proletarians who still cherish certain
relics of the old superstitions to approach our party (Lenin, Selected Works, vol.XI 662).
Secondly, Dutta, unlike some Marxist critics like Alexander Anikst, does not seek to
represent Shakespeare as a confirmed atheist, but attempts to study the playwright placing him
in the particular historical context he belonged to and considering the fact that influence of
religion was all pervasive in the sixteenth century, argues that Shakespeare too resorted to some
religious ideas in order to give expression to his radical views. Criticizing Anikst’s view that
‘it is indubitably established that religion has no role in the writings of Shakespeare’, Dutta
asserts that ‘in the age of Shakespeare, religion was so all-pervasive and its authority was so
invincible that every radical view was bound to be expressed in religious guise’ (Dutta,
Shakespearer Samajchetona 60).
An evaluation of Utpal Dutta as a materialist critic of Shakespeare therefore should take
into consideration the elaborate pains that the critic has taken to understand the age of
Shakespeare critically, not anachronistically. He has tried to understand the ideological crises
of Shakespeare and his contemporaries against the historical context they belonged to. Being a
confessed propagandist in his dramatic practice, in his critical exercises too Dutta remained
097

A Critical Reading of Utpal Dutta’s Shakespearer Samajchetona (Shakespeare’s Societal Consciousness): How
Ideological Affiliation Motivates Critical Response
www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
loyal to his objective which was to actively engage and participate in the social, cultural,
intellectual struggle against Capitalism. This perhaps accounts for his relentless effort to
establish the proletarian sympathy of Shakespeare and making his treatise on Shakespeare
revolve around the pivotal question, ‘Which side Shakespeare took in the class struggle of his
times’? The answer as well as the question proves Dutta’s unflinching commitment to the
theory and praxis of historical materialism.
Works Cited:
Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne. Reading Capital, trans. B.Brewster, London and New
York: 1970.Print.
Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. 2nd ed. (2003). London and New York: Routledge.
2005. Print. New Accents.
Callinicos, Alex. “Marxism and Literary Criticism”. The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism. Vol ix.ed.,Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris.2001.Cambridge and New
York:Cambridge UP.2007.Print.
Chandra Bipan. Mukherjee Mridula, Mukherjee Aditya. India since Independence. (2000).
New Delhi: Penguin Books. 2008. Print.
Dutta, Utpal. Shakespearer Samajchetona. (1972). Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar and Sons. 1999.
Print.
Fox, Ralph. The Novel and the People, New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers, 1991.Print.
Lenin, V.I. Selected Works, vol.XI, New York: International Publishers, 1943.Print.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production, Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London and New
York: Routledge. 2006. Print. Routledge Classics.
Arac, Jonathan and Johnson, Barbara. Consequences of Theory: Selected from the English
Institute, 1987-88. Baltimore and London: Press.1991.Print.new series No.14.
Bandopadhyay, Sekhar. From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India 2004.New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan.2012.Print.
Bertens Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London and New York: Routledge: 2003. Print.
098

The Criterion: An International Journal in English Vol. 15, Issue-I, February 2024 ISSN: 0976-8165

www.the-criterion.com
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10448030
Brannigan , John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St.Martin’s Press
1998.Print.Transitions.
Chaudhury, Sarbani. Shakespeare and the Discourse of Protest. Calcutta: Sarat Book
House.1994. Print.
Drakakis, John. Alternative Shakespeares 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
2002.Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Invisible bullets: Renaissance Authority and its subversion”. Political
Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. 2nd
ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994.18-47. Print.
Jackson, Leornard. The Dematerialisation of Karl Marx: Literature and Marxist Theory.
London and New York: Longman. 1994. Print.
Kamps, Ivo. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. London and New York: Verso.1995.Print.
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkley
and Los Angeles: University of California P.1992. Print.

099