INTRODUCTION

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The Unknown Masterpiece

In February 1867, shortly before delivering the first volume of Das Kapital to the printers, Karl Marx urged Friedrich Engels to read The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The story was itself a little masterpiece, he said, ‘full of the most delightful irony’.

We don’t know whether Engels heeded the advice. If he did, he would certainly have spotted the irony but might have been surprised that his old friend could take any delight in it. The Unknown Masterpiece is the tale of Frenhofer, a great painter who spends ten years working and reworking a portrait which will revolutionize art by providing ‘the most complete representation of reality’. When at last his fellow artists Poussin and Porbus are allowed to inspect the finished canvas, they are horrified to see a blizzard of random forms and colours piled one upon another in confusion. ‘Ah!’ Frenhofer cries, misinterpreting their wide-eyed amazement. ‘You did not anticipate such perfection!’ But then he overhears Poussin telling Porbus that eventually Frenhofer must discover the truth – the portrait has been overpainted so many times that nothing remains.

‘Nothing on my canvas!’ exclaimed Frenhofer, glancing alternately at the two painters and his picture.

‘What have you done?’ said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin.

The old man seized the young man’s arm roughly, and said to him: ‘You see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought you here, then? – My good Porbus,’ he continued, turning to the older painter, ‘can it be that you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?’

Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the anxiety depicted on the old man’s white face was so heart-rending that he pointed to the canvas saying: ‘Look!’

Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered.

‘Nothing! Nothing! And I have worked ten years!’

He fell upon a chair and wept.

After banishing the two men from his studio, Frenhofer burns all his paintings and kills himself.

According to Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Balzac’s tale ‘made a great impression on him because it was in part a description of his own feelings’. Marx had toiled for many years on his own unseen masterpiece, and throughout this long gestation his customary reply to those who asked for a glimpse of the work-in-progress was identical to that of Frenhofer: ‘No, no! I have still to put some finishing touches to it. Yesterday, towards evening, I thought that it was done… This morning, by daylight, I realized my error.’ As early as 1846, when the book was already overdue, Marx wrote to his German publisher: ‘I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish word for word what he wrote six months earlier.’ Twelve years later, still no nearer completion, he explained that ‘the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further.’ An obsessive perfectionist, he was forever seeking out new hues for his palette – studying mathematics, learning about the movement of celestial spheres, teaching himself Russian so he could read books on the country’s land system. Or, to quote Frenhofer again: ‘Alas! I thought for a moment that my work was finished; but I have certainly gone wrong in some details, and my mind will not be at rest until I have cleared away my doubts. I have decided to travel, and visit Turkey, Greece and Asia in search of models, in order to compare my picture with Nature in different forms.’

Why did Marx recall Balzac’s tale at the very moment when he was preparing to unveil his greatest work to public scrutiny? Did he fear that he too might have laboured in vain, that his ‘complete representation of reality’ would prove unintelligible? He certainly had some such apprehensions – Marx’s character was a curious hybrid of ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt – and he tried to forestall criticism by warning in the preface that ‘I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.’ But what ought to strike us most forcibly about his identification with the creator of the unknown masterpiece is that Frenhofer is an artist – not a political economist, nor yet a philosopher or historian or polemicist. The most ‘delightful irony’ of all in The Unknown Masterpiece, noted by the American writer Marshall Berman, is that Balzac’s account of the picture is a perfect description of a twentieth-century abstract painting – and the fact that he couldn’t have known this merely deepens the resonance. ‘The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty,’ Berman writes. ‘Thus the very open-endedness of Marx’s later work can make contact with our time in ways that more “finished” nineteenth-century work cannot: Das Kapital reaches beyond the well-made works of Marx’s century into the discontinuous modernism of our own.’ Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous account of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto – ‘all that is solid melts into air’ – prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city depicted by T. S. Eliot, or Yeats’s ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage – juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land. Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as nightmarish as Kafka.

Karl Marx saw himself as a creative artist, a poet of dialectic. ‘Now, regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it,’ he wrote to Engels in July 1865. ‘Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole.’ It was to poets and novelists, far more than to philosophers or political essayists, that he looked for insights into people’s material motives and interests: in a letter of December 1868 he copied out a passage from another work by Balzac, The Village Priest, and asked if Engels could confirm the picture from his own knowledge of practical economics. (The conservative, royalist Balzac may seem an unlikely hero, but Marx always held that great writers have insights into social reality that transcend their personal prejudices.) Had he wished to write a conventional economic treatise he would have done so, but his ambition was far more audacious. Berman describes the author of Das Kapital as ‘one of the great tormented giants of the nineteenth century – alongside Beethoven, Goya, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Van Gogh – who drive us crazy, as they drove themselves, but whose agony generated so much of the spiritual capital on which we still live’.

Yet how many people would think of including Karl Marx in a list of great writers and artists? Even in our post-modern era, the fractured narrative and radical discontinuity of Das Kapital are mistaken by many potential readers for formlessness and incomprehensibility. The main purpose of my own book is to persuade at least some of these readers to look again: anyone willing to grapple with Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to ‘learn something new’ from a reading of Das Kapital – not least because its subject still governs our lives. As Marshall Berman asks: how can Das Kapital end while capital lives on?

It is deeply fitting that Marx never finished his masterpiece. The first volume was the only one to appear in his lifetime, and the subsequent volumes were assembled by others after his death, based on notes and drafts found in his study. Marx’s work is as open-ended – and thus as resilient – as the capitalist system itself. He was indeed one of the great tormented giants. Before approaching his masterpiece we must seek out the sources of Marx’s torment, and of his inspiration.