State as the instrument of class oppression as seen in Ngugi wa Thiong`o`s Weep Not, Child and Matigari : a comparative study - USD Repository
STATE AS THE INSTRUMENT OF CLASS OPPRESSION AS
SEEN IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S WEEP NOT, CHILD AND
MATIGARI: A COMPARATIVE STUDY
AN UNDERGRADUATE THESIS
Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Sarjana Sastra in English Letters
By
ALBERTUS BUDI PRASETYO
Student Number: 064214083
ENGLISH LETTERS STUDY PROGRAMME
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LETTERS
FACULTY OF LETTERS
“…literature cannot escape from the class power structures that shape
our everyday life. Here a writer has no choice. Whether or not he is
aware of it, his works reflect one or more aspects of the intense
economic, political, cultural and ideological struggles in a society.
What he can choose is one or the other side in the battle field: the side
of the people, or the side of those social forces and classes that try to
keep the people down. What he or she cannot do is to remain neutral.”
(Ngugi wa Thiong’o, preface on Writers in Politics)! "
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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A. Background of the Study The departure of European colonizing power from colonies historically
marked the birth of post-colonial era which put racial oppression and domination into an end. However, it has left complicated problems to the indigenous peoples to deal with. One major problem is that the post-colonial countries are forced to struggle with the capitalistic political economic structure inherited from colonial period which, in most part, result in negative ways. The problems under this system including unequal wealth distribution, extreme economic gap between citizens, extreme poverty, underdevelopment, and relentless conflicts between economic classes resulting from class oppression and domination become some of the haunting faces. In other words, while the post-independence period has left racial oppression as colonial artifact, class oppression stands still.
One could trace back these undesirable faces to the moment when European colonizing power invaded the life of indigenous people. Amongst most of European colonies, Africa must be one precise example. As European colonizing power set foot on their lands, most of Africans had not known capitalist economic system as most European states did. In other words, capitalism is not indigenous for Africans.
Colonialism and capitalism became mutual systems which the colonizing and the new sources of raw materials for capitalist production and goods embattled in European markets motivated imperial journey overseas, land discoveries, and settlement which began the long history of colonialism. The needs to satisfy economic demands of the capitalist production in the empires meant that it was necessary to run economic acceleration in the peripheries. In consequence, the European power need to impose revolutionary changes in mode of production in the colonies including changes in ownership mode of the means of production, class distinction, class relation, and production relation, which supported the very nature of capitalist system deployment. In this regards, as a researcher on African Governance and Development, Ludeki Chweya suggested, colonialism was therefore more of an economic enterprise that involved capitalist exploitation and accumulation based on hitherto untapped natural resources of the colonies than merely a political undertaking that targeted European territorial annexation and political domination of foreign lands (2006:9).
The scheme of the capitalist exploitation and accumulation was evidently demonstrated in terms of change in ownership mode of primary means of production such as land ownership which became destructive force toward the pre-colonial system of the indigenous peoples. Massive European settlement and land territorialization intended to seize indigenous lands from the indigenous hands to the few European’s became one most significant change. In the context of most colonies in Africa, land grabbing has devastated the pre-colonial African ownership mode of primary means of production was replaced by more private, exclusive, and centralized one regulated in the interests of the privileged ruling group.
The ruling group was only few (mostly European, Asian, and in smaller amount African capitalists) who had access to own and control primary means of production, while the rest (mostly Africans) was denied, alienated from the means of production. In Marxist explanation on classes of capitalist production relation, the former is called bourgeoisie, those having access to own, control the means of production, and have power over capital while the latter is proletariat, those deprived of means of production and compelled to sell their labor-power to the former in order to survive.
Since revolutionary change in ownership mode of primary means of production was imposed, the class division as such was inevitable. The proletarization of the indigenous peoples was compulsory in the scheme of capitalistic accumulation and production as it necessitated the use of plentiful and, above all, cheap native-wage labor. The proletarization was compulsory as land alienation was stretched in order to restrict the land and associated resources in reserves. It consequently created socioeconomic hardship, and ultimately compelled native men, women and children to seek wage employment—to become proletariat (Chweya, 2006:12).
Despite of the fact that majority of the colonial bourgeoisie in colonies indigenous capitalists in smaller quantity was also undeniable. The latter consisted of indigenous middle-up class who owned and controlled primary means of production, and ran capitalistic production relation. According to Nicola Swainson, the embryo of the African bourgeoisie emerged from the 1920s onwards, based on new forms of commodity production founded on the direct employment of wage labour... This new class of local capitalists had its basis links between trade, commodity production in the reserves and salaried places within the state apparatus (1980:173-174).
In this regards, capitalism injected to the colonies brought about entrenched capitalistic economic classes which had not existed in the pre-colonial era, and thereby generates “the emergence of dominant classes that have oppressed the subordinate categories resulting in authoritarian rule and economic exclusion of the latter” (Chweya, 2006:7). As the result of such entrenched economic classes, capitalism, geared inherently by its exploiting production relation, had its own special share in the economic inequality and poverty in the colonies as it promoted rural-urban, regional and class differences, class domination and oppression. The contradictions in the production relations between the international and domestic bourgeoisie, between the peasantries and the bourgeoisie, and between capital and labour become fundamental in generating such problems (Ndege, 2009:7).
On behalf of such exploiting production relation, stand (colonial) state, the pre-capitalist communities into the colonial and international economic systems” which was obviously capitalistic (Ndege, 2009:5) Authorized to conduct economic policy, it was this privileged political power which handed the role of accelerating economic system in colonies with the imperial centre. Therefore, it was not beyond the bound of possibility that (colonial) state acted on behalf of the ruling class in this colonial capitalistic system. Not only did it back the European bourgeoisie, it also supported non-European bourgeoisie including the indigenous capitalists who benefitted from collaborating with the colonialists.
The Independence Day and its aftermath marked the departure of European colonizing power and began the indigenous government. However, it meant nothing more than the nativization of the European personnel controlled the former political economic systems which left its exploiting nature untouched.
Capitalist production relation along with its class structure, class exploitation, and class antagonism introduced during colonial period continues to exist because the attempt to break away from the colonial economic system is doubtless insignificant. The nativization led to the massive growth of new indigenous bourgeoisie who took control over primary economy sector (land ownership, commerce, and industry) and had its basis in the large scale employment of wage- laborer in agriculture and industry. In other words, this indigenous bourgeoisie turned to be the new dominant ruling class who lives by exploiting the class of wage laborer. investment in large-scale agriculture and manufacturing, ensuring civil order, and repressing labour movement (Swainson, 1980:16). As already operated during colonial period, the function of post-colonial state power therefore becomes nothing but the nativized instrument of the colonial capitalist system which was distinguished by its racial-based nature. “The old role of colonial settlers as a means of transporting economic compulsions,” as Wood described it, “has been taken over by local nation states, which act as transmission belts for capitalist imperatives” (2002:156).
Ngugi wa Thingo’s, one prominent Kenyan writer, shares the same judgment on such nature of post-colonial political economic structure. As he observes, capitalism becomes the European most expansive economic system which affects massively the life of indigenous peoples from the time of European colonizing power set foot on their lands to the moment when national liberation has been already achieved. He regards that this exploitative system would produce society where a few groups, no matter what race that operate it is, “live on the blood of others” (Thiong’o, 1972:vii). He clearly admitted the bitter truth that the Independence era means only deracializing or nativizing the ownership of European settlers over varied vital means of production, but not ending such system:
There is no area of our lives which has not been affected by the social, political and expansionist needs of European capitalism…Yet the sad truth is that instead of breaking from an economic system whose life-blood is the wholesale exploitation of our continent and the murder of our people, acres of land is replaced by a single African owning the same 600 acres. There has been no change in the structure and nature of ownership… (1972:xv-xvi).
As a post-colonial African writer, the ideological commitment of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s toward the proletariat, which means primarily wage-peasants and industrial workers, exists distinctively compared to the other post-colonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka. His Marxist ideological tendency in the way he represents the reality of colonialism and its aftermath through both literary and non-literary works is undeniably dense. In his writing entitled Ngugi: A Marxist Dialogues with the Past m=201004&paged=241) Gbenga Adeniji asserts that most of Ngugi’s creative works, particularly his late novels and plays, reveal much of his “Marxist creed”.
The Marxist tendency in the creative works is certainly connected to his acceptance of Marxist world frame which he demonstrates while analyzing economic structure and class formation in society. As his following suggestion demonstrates, Marxist notions on individual relation to the means of production as the determining factor on class distinction, antagonism between classes, and on state’s function as the instrument of the ruling class are evidently present:
The economic structure is at the same time a class structure so that at every level of a community's being, that society is characterized by opposing classes with the dominant class, usually a minority, owning and controlling the means of production, and hence having greater access to the social product, social because it is the product of the combined efforts of men. It is the dominant class which wields political power, and whose interests are
Some of Ngugi's novels which represent dense Marxist perspective on societal interaction, particularly in the context of colonial and post-colonial society, are Weep Not, Child and Matigari. The former represents the condition of colonial Kenya in which racial distinction and relation largely determines social interaction in various life aspects. However, besides narrating such picture which are quite common in most colonies, the writer notices that the novel further depicts how capitalistic formation of economic classes exists and how individual membership in particular class also determine the social interaction.
The later, set in post-colonial Kenya, describes much how post- independence era becomes the continuation of colonial economic structure inheriting its class distinction, class relation, and class antagonism. Post-colonial period which becomes the highest achievement of national liberation and marks the beginning of native control upon their own life in fact does not abolish class distinction and class relation which have already operated since capitalism was introduced in colonial epoch. The former freedom fighters, who struggled to fight the European colonization, turn to be the new ruling class that utilize state power to serve their class interests.
This thesis is a comparative study which concerns with a number of shared features presented in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels Weep Not, Child and Matigari The thesis will focus on figuring out the continuity which connects both novels in terms of class distinction and class relation, despite of their being set in different both societies run capitalist production relation from which class oppression, the bourgeoisie’s oppression over the proletariat, is generated. Subsequently, by looking at the capitalist production relation in both societies, the writer moves on achieving the ultimate objective of the present thesis, i.e. to demonstrate the parallelism in terms of how colonial and post-colonial states in the novels run the continuous function, i.e. the instrument of class oppression.
How do colonial society and post-colonial society in the novels, differentiated boldly by the existence of and the abolition of racial oppression and domination, share continuity in terms of class distinction and class relation? How do states during these different historical stages tend to run its similar function as the instrument of class oppression? These are the problems this thesis aims to answer.
B. Problem Formulation
In order to focus the analysis, two problems are formulated as follow: 1.
In terms of class distinction and class relation, how are societies in the novels (colonial society in Weep Not, Child and post-colonial society in
Matigari ) similarly depicted through setting and characters?
2. How do both colonial and post-colonial societies in the novels depict state as the instrument of class oppression?
C. Objectives of the Study
In relation to the problem formulation, this thesis will firstly describe, compare, and expose the similarity between colonial and post-colonial society in the novels, in terms of class distinction and class relation. Secondly, based on such intrinsic findings, the thesis will then examine how both novels depict state as the instrument of class oppression.
The fundamental objective of this thesis is not to refute the fact that there exists significant difference in terms of racial relations between colonial and post- colonial period, not to negate that in colonies race largely determines relations in various life aspects, and not to deny that colonial state becomes the instrument of racial oppression (which ends at the onset of native independence). Instead, while regarding them as common facts, this thesis is concerned more on analyzing to what extent that class (rather than race) continuously determines individual and class relations both in colonial and post-colonial societies, on demonstrating how in both colonial and post-colonial societies class distinction significantly takes role to generate oppression and antagonism when racial distinction no longer does, that state both in colonial and post-colonial period tends to demonstrate its similar, and continuous function: the instrument of class oppression.
The impetus and the rationale of such focus is that the difference between colonial and post-colonial society in terms of racial distinction and relation (the existence of racial oppression and domination during colonial period which ends colonial society will offer no new and challenging task except affirming the difference which has been clearly reflected in the term colonial and post-colonial.
Besides, by analyzing the similarity or continuity between the novels which connects to the reality of post-colonial societies along with their colonial antecedents, this thesis intends to figure out fundamental aspects which can explain complicated socio-economic problems existing in post-colonial countries nowadays. To observe how colonial capitalism is inherited to post-colonial society through its relatively unchanged class distinction, class relation, and state’s function is the main motif of this thesis.
D. Definition of Terms
1. State
State is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the class conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'. This power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, alienates itself more and more from it. The existence of public power detached from the society becomes its essential characteristic. It consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds (Engels, 2004:157-158).
2. Class Oppression
Class oppression is the oppression which arises from the appropriation of preceded by the rise of private ownership of means of production and, split of labour, and the condition in which production develops to such an extent that force human labour to produce more than was required for the bare subsistence of workers. The existence of exploitation by the owners of the means of production over masses of working class is the essence of Marxist definition of class oppression (Dutt, 1963:127-128).
3. Colonial society In Latin and Greek the literal meaning of the word ‘colonia’ is settlement.
Settlement is widely known as one of the most important characteristics of colonialism, meaning essentially the movement of people to a peripheral region or a ‘new world’ from metropolitan state. Colonial society is, therefore, region which is invaded by non-indigenous population, either smaller or larger than indigenous inhabitants, and is controlled to serve the interests of the metropolitan state (Ryan and Mullen:221).
4. Post-colonial society
This thesis uses the more conventional hyphenated term post-colonial, which historically marks the end of colonial occupation or refers to life during the
post-independence day (more generally means term designating post-Second
World War Era). The term should be differentiated with the unbroken term
postcolonial which more complicatedly refers to the long history of colonial
consequences (Gandhi, 1998:3).5. Capitalist society
A society is capitalist if the production of material goods is dominated by the use of wage labor, that is, the use of labor power sold, to make a living, by people controlling no significant means of production and bought by other people who do have significant control over means of production and mostly gain their income from profits on the sale of the results of combining bought labor power with those productive means (Miller in Carver, 1991:55)
6. The bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie is the class of the owners of the basic means of production, which lives by exploiting the hired labour of the workers; it is the ruling class of capitalist society (Dutt, 1963:154). The class does not always mean owners of the means of production in modern or industrial economic sector but also rural one which includes the independent farmers (usually wealthy peasantry) whose farm-ownership is larger than they are able to cultivate with the aid of the members of their family alone, and thereby whose existence is necessarily dependent on wage agricultural laborers (Lenin, 1966:18)
7. The proletariat The term derived from Latin Proles which means “lots of mouths to feed”.
The proletariat is the creator of colossal wealth appropriated by the bourgeoisie, the chief productive force of capitalist society. It is a class deprived of ownership of the means of production, and therefore compels to sell its labour-power to the definition. In 1848 they wrote of “a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital” (Marx and Engels, 2008:14). Thus there exists also rural proletariat, which is a class of wage laborers domesticated usually in agricultural sectors. This comprises poor peasantry possessing allotments such as insignificant dimension of the farm on a small patch of land, farm in a state of ruin, a rented farm, or those completely deprived of land. Yet the general feature of the class is their inability to exist without selling labour-power (Lenin, 1966:19)
8. Capital
Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labor, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are employed in producing new raw materials, new instruments, and new means of subsistence (Marx, 1933:28). Unlike more liberal economics who asserts that every means of production, raw materials, instruments of labor, and means of subsistence, are capital, Marxist theorists argue that these become capital only when transformed into a means of exploiting workers, a means of surplus-value extraction. Capital is not merely things but more essentially a social relationship between the basic classes of capitalist society—a relationship of the exploitation of wage-workers by the owners of the means of production. (Dutt, 1963:220)
9. Production relation
Production relation is the relationships that people enter into the course of
CHAPTER II THEORETICAL REVIEW This chapter is divided into three parts. The first is a review on related studies
which provides two literary criticisms on Weep Not, Child and Matigari. The second is theoretical review in which the theories employed to analyze the novel are elaborated. The third is theoretical framework which draws on how the theories are systematically utilized in the analysis.
A. Review of Related Studies
This part consists of two studies conducted by two different writers. The first study connects to this study in terms of its comparative approach and one of its similar object of the study, Weep Not, Child. However, it differs essentially in its comparative focuses from this study. The second study connects to this thesis in terms of similar object of study, Matigari, but differs in its analysis focuses.
The first study is a comparative study conducted by Apollo Obonyo Amoko, which is concerned on juxtaposing two Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels
Weep Not, Child and The River Between. By the title Early Fictions of School
Culture: The River Between and Weep Not, Child , the study presents a number of
literary comparisons covering from juxtaposition of main characters, of discourse of prophecy, up to conflict which both novels display.
Between . Njoroge, a central character in Weep Not, Child, is regarded as “a thinly
veiled reincarnation of Waiyaki”, the protagonist of The River Between. “The image of Njoroge-as-savior depicted in Weep Not, Child harks back to the image of Waiyaki-as-savior in The River Between” (Amoko, 2010:49).
Besides, the two characters are similarly constructed as ridiculous fools rather than innocent heroes. Njoroge’s desires to the extreme absurdity are to prepare the ground for his pathetic fall. Whereas Waiyaki’s fall at the conclusion of The River Between elicits a measure of empathy and moral authority even in tragic defeat, Njoroge’s fall at the end of Weep Not, Child seems to be a pathetic affair that effectively deflates all his claims of his hopes of prophecy. The novel ridicules and rejects the messianism he so passionately embraces (Amoko, 2010:63).
In terms of discourse on prophecy, yet still in relation to the main characters, like The River Between, Mahoko asserts that Weep Not, Child hinges on the prophecy placed onto the ill-suited body of a child character. Njoroge demonstrates exactly the same hubris that motivates Waiyaki. He displays the same neutralism that tragically destroys Waiyaki. He attempts to “graft a Gikuyu sacral ontology seamlessly onto Christian dogma”, yet without considering the extreme differences between the two, especially in the context of violent colonialism. However, the difference between the novels is that, unlike in The
River Between , the discourse of prophecy is contested in Weep Not, Child
In terms of conflict, Weep Not, Child occupies the same imaginative space as The River Between. They share identical main conflict including the way to overcome the colonial conquest and dispossession, and the role of the colonial school in anti-colonial politics. However, Amoko notes there is a critical difference between the two texts. The question of colonial education is addressed by Weep Not, Child in the context of the Mau Mau Rebellion and a state of emergency, which set up a new frame including the role of the colonial school during an age of violent anti-colonial struggle, the role of the school during a generalized state of terror, and the significance to imagine the colonial school as a protected enclave for individual improvement when the wider society is being torn apart by the violence of anti-colonial struggle and the colonial state’s terroristic response (Amoko, 2010:52-53). Furthermore, Amoko adds that if in
The River Between the central conflict took the form of an internal contest in the
shadow of encroaching colonial power, in Weep Not, Child the conflict is directly between white people and black people (2010:55).
The second related study is that of Simon Gikandi’s entitled The Work of
Art in Exile: Matigari . Unlike the first study which focuses on some thematic in
both novels, in the study Gikandi seeks to scrutinize the profound link between the return to Gikuyu oral sources and the trope of exile, where focus on narrative voice of the novel is set in. In other words, the study seeks to figure out the connection between the objective text and the external fact that it is written during exile the author is capable of “freeing himself from the anxieties of the European novel and its conventions.” He overcomes “the pressure of representing the historical realities of the postcolonial state in Kenya” (2000:227).
Gikandi brilliantly finds out that Matigari is distinguished from Ngugi's prior novels by its “complete evacuation of the authoritative narrative voice”.
Gikandi figures out that through features of its contingency and irony, and in its celebration of alienation, the narrative voice “exists both inside and outside the politics it seeks to represent”. The narrative voice’s ability to observe both from inside and outside signals special feature of Matigari as being identically the author’s creative results in exile in which he needs to “acknowledge his own estrangement from the people he had chosen as the subject of his work of art”.
Being in line with the author’s assertion, Gikandi suggests further that there exists conjunction between notions of home and return, and those of alienation and exile. The novel’s being produced in exile, which means being furthest removed from its subject, enables itself to be interpreted to “reflect its author’s self- consciousness about his distance from his cultural sources, his language, and his intended audience” (2000:226-228).
Focused on the narrative voice, Gikandi asserts that Matigari is best read as a novel generated by uncertainties about personal and collective identity, the authority of temporality, and the reader's ability to recuperate meanings from the narrative of postcolonial history:
Furthermore, As if this abrogation of narrative authority were not enough, Matigari's narrative is represented as allegorical (thus endowed with specific ecumenical meanings and intentions), and as contingent (surrounded by doubts about its identity and materiality) (2000:229).
Matigari, the protagonist in the novel, is presented to readers as the representation of multiple and often contradictory fictions and functions. It is in this presentation of his ambivalence and complicated relation to the postcolonial world which creatively connects to the author’s self-alienation in exile as viewing ambivalently his own unstable identity and the post-colonial reality of his nation (Gikandi, 2000:229-231).
Thus the novel is frustrating to those who seek a definitive identity and meaning for Matigari and for the history which the author represents. The author wants to make the important point that in order to understand postcolonial culture in which neo-colonial oppression occurs, those who have lived the nightmare of colonialism must dig up its repressed histories and subjects.
In this respect, doubts and questions about Matigari's identity only reinforce the urgent need to establish his elusive character and the tortured history that produced it. Indeed, toward the end, the tone of the novel suggests that the question of Matigari's identity has become so central to understanding the betrayal of nationalism that the narrator is being begged to solve this puzzle and provide answers to the historical riddle before it is too late (Gikandi, 2000:235). In the end of the study, Gikandi concluded that it is the mysteriousness of
Matigari’s identity and actions that function as “a sign of resistance and identity.” Without a certain knowledge of who he is and the forces he represents, the oppressing postcolonial state cannot imprison him; and because he has no
B. Review of Related Theories
This part consists of four theories employed primarily in the analysis
chapter including theory on comparative study, theory on setting, theory on characters, and Marxist theories that consists of theory on class and Marxist theory on state.
1. Theory on Comparative Study
Since the objects of the study selected to compare in this study is two literary texts written by single author, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and originating from single national literary tradition, Kenyan Literature, the focus will be on comparing thematic parallelism on both literary texts, i.e. similarity in societal features including class distinction and class relation, and function of state, Comparative theory used in this thesis is the conventional and general one which defines comparative literature as a study of “literary continuity of motifs or of influences” between texts, whose scope covers “a comparison of particular cases”, and whose concerns to figure out “parallelism” (Weber in Koelb and Noakes, 1988:58). This general and conventional definition of comparative literature should be differentiated with the more contemporary one which regards the international and multi-lingual nature of the field (across national boundary) as the basic point which this thesis does not belong to. placing it among other novels of its time, or its national literature, or other texts written the same author”. In essence, the first task for the comparativist studying novels must be to “define a foundation of comparability on which to build”, or to “explicitly articulate the assumptions and norms that underpin comparisons”, which theme, metaphor, detail, structural problem might serve. Thus the specific types of comparative analysis will depend on the kind of comparability that interests the critic including if “the novels share similar themes, structural features, or respond to the same cultural phenomena” (Komar in Logan, 2011:208).
In The Theory of Comparative Literature Dr. J. Parthasarathi also supports the needs of such comparability while analyzing literary texts under comparative perspective. The comparability of the objects of the study is fundamentally necessary as in the absence of a governing motivation or a frame-work, comparisons are not meaningful. Therefore comparative literary studies are organized around certain categories that can provide motivation for inter-literature analyses and function in the manner of frameworks for critical observation. Amongst others, these categories are literary themes, types or genres tendencies or influences, movements, styles of expression and literary theories
2. Theory on Setting
a work is the particular physical location in which it takes place” (1999:284). Harvey suggests that setting also includes the social environment of the novel where “a complex web of individual relationship” operates (1965:56). Within this social environment, Langland suggests further that there exist subsequent constructing elements of a particular society including the people, their classes, customs, conventions, beliefs and values (1984:4).
Furthermore, Holman and Harmon state that the setting is constructed upon these elements: 1) the actual geographical location, 2) the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters, 3) the time or period in which the action takes place, 4) the general environment of the characters, for instance religious, moral, mental, social and emotional conditions through which the people in the narrative move (1986:465).
3. Theory on Character
Theory on characters in this study is utilized complementarily to support the main intrinsic analysis i.e. the setting of the novels. Since it is impossible to analyze elements of the setting i.e. social circumstances, the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters, the general environment of the characters such as their religious, moral, mental, social and emotional conditions, without referring to the individuals (characters) that construct them, the utilization of the theory is inevitably integral. asserts several ways by which the author creates character alive and understood by the reader:
a. Speech
Speech here is used in a way so that the author can give the reader clue of in regards to the character of the person in the literature. Whenever the character speaks about something or about anything at all, the speech is a clue to his or her character.
b. Character as Seen by Author
The author forms the character through the opinions or the views of other character in the novel.
c. Personal Description
Personal description is the physical description of the character itself by the author.
d. Conversation of Other
Using other characters to talk about the character (conversation) in many ways it gives a clue to what the character is like.
e. Past Life
The author lets the reader know about a character and his or her personality by looking at his or her past life.
f. Direct Comment The author uses direct comment to let the reader know about the character.
By using the technique of seeing how the character react to various situations in his or her life, the author make the reader know about the character’s behavior. People talk about other people and the thing that they say gives the reader clue to the character that they talk about.
h. Thoughts
Another way of how the author make the reader know the character of a person through what the character is thinking about. The author give omniscient way of looking at things, a direct knowledge of what the character is thinking about.
i. Mannerism
Through the observation and description of manners and habit, the author lets the reader know what the character is like.
4. Marxist Theories
As Marxism constitutes enormously a wide range of theoretical subjects, in this study the writer only elaborates few which are primarily utilized in the analysis chapter. The following theoretical display covers from a set of Marxist theory of class up to its theory of state.
a. Marxist Theory of Class
1. The Essence of Class Distinction
According to Marxist perspective, people’s consciousness depends on their whether it is the owner of the means of production or whether it is an oppressed exploited class. On this basic aspect, there lies its role in political life, its level of education and its everyday existence.
Marxism postulates that the chief and decisive aspects of social life, material production—the basis of the division of society into classes, must be sought in the place occupied by a particular group of people in the system of social production, in their relation to the means of production. It is clearly stated by the fullest definition of classes suggested in Vladimir Lenin’s work A Great
Beginning :
“Classes are large groups of people which differ from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions and mode of acquiring the share of social wealth of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy” (Lenin in Dutt, 1963:150).
Yet the emergence of class is only possible in the age of private ownership, in which the division of society into antagonistic classes, and hostility between them, become an inseparable feature. To differ it with the mode of communal/social ownership, the major sections of society then are divided into classes one of which is the owner of the basic means of production and exercises power, while the other constitutes the basis mass of the exploited:
The origin of classes is directly connected with private ownership of the means of production, which makes possible the exploitation of man by man, the appropriation of the labour of one group of people by another masses an ever increasing burden of labour for its own personal advantage. (Dutt, 1963:152) Furthermore, classes are divided into basic and non basic classes according to the place they occupy in the society. By the term basic classes, it refers to those without which the mode of production prevailing in society could not exist and which have been brought into being by this very mode of production (Dutt, 1963:153). In the following sub-chapter, it is further described what basic classes in society whose mode of production is capitalism are, what each class characteristics are, how production relation between these basic classes is, and what the result of the production relation between these classes is.
ii. Class Distinction and class relation in Capitalist Society
It needs to consider that class distinction does not only exist in the age of capitalism, but it has existed already in the preceding mode of productions i.e. slave system and feudal system in which private ownership of the means of production had taken place. Yet, it is important to emphasize that, although each system creates class distinction, one differs with the others in terms of the existing basic classes and the production relation between them.