Make Literary Criticism Marxist Again

For all his literary productivity, Jameson has always been and remains a teacher, and so much of his work — both in the classroom (where I first encountered him as a student in 1989) and in his writings — has a profoundly pedagogical aspect to it. In Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), he introduced English-speaking readers to the rich tradition of Western Marxist theory, examining the work of Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jameson marshaled these thinkers in the service of a sophisticated theory of dialectical criticism. At that time, not only were these thinkers little known, but Marxist or socially oriented criticism itself was little practiced in the United States. When Jameson began his career, academic criticism was dominated by narrowly formalist approaches. These focused on “close readings” of the text but largely excluded any discussion of social or historical context. Some critics did endorse more historical models, but these often went too far in the other direction, ignoring the linguistic or formal features of literature entirely, in favor of seeing literature as merely “reflecting” its historical moment.

For Jameson, neither of these approaches were satisfactory. Each imposed limits to form or to content, whereas Jameson showed how form and content, careful examination of the text and investigations of sociohistorical content, strictly linguistic and expansively political readings could also be related in a comprehensive Marxian approach. Jameson persuasively argued for a social, political, and historical approach; he also remained deeply committed to formal analysis. Striding these two positions — an Anglophone obsession with form, a continental-inflected concern for the social — Jameson laid the foundation for his part in the debates over literary studies and critical theory in the coming years.

By the 1970s and ’80s, “theory” was all the rage. Influenced largely by the work of postwar French philosophers, literary critics sought to apply psychoanalytic ideas, as well as notions developed in linguistics, to the study of culture. Jameson, however, insisted on the relevance of Marxism as an indispensable framework.

Jameson has never held sympathy for leftist dismissals of supposedly arcane critical practices like “deconstruction” for their lack of social relevance. Marxism, he has consistently maintained, is capable of embracing these other, more limited practices, assigning them their “sectoral validity” as means of analyzing certain linguistic, psychological, ethical, or historical aspects of our existence while maintaining a commitment to totality. By this, he meant a view of our individual and collective subjectivity as part of a vaster social, political, and historical system — the capitalist mode of production.

Marxism is, in Jameson’s view, the only critical approach capable of making sense of human experience as a historical phenomenon. Borrowing a phrase from Sartre, Jameson has affirmed Marxism as the “untranscendable horizon.” It, more so than any other outlook, is capable of detecting the multiple meanings, a term Jameson uses in a broad and flexible sense, of a given text.

This is the argument made in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), arguably Jameson’s most famous and influential work. Here Jameson connects the entire history of narrative forms — from the Homeric epic and medieval romance, and into the history of the novel through the great stages of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and beyond (i.e., archaeologies of the future) — to the changing modes of production in the history of capitalism.

Following a Hegelian Marxist tradition, Jameson sees the human story as a single, if sometimes discontinuous, narrative linking various modes of production. Both hunter-gatherer societies as well as feudalism have shaped our cultural imagination, producing mythic tales related through epic narrative, the rise of allegorical romance, and the development of the modern novel. Such narrative forms in themselves, as genres or through their distinctive figures and tropes, disclose the “political unconscious” of the given society in which they are produced.

The dramatis personae of his narrative are Honoré de Balzac, George Gissing, and Joseph Conrad. Emerging in high points of capitalism and imperialism, their novels should, Jameson argues, be understood as engagements with the seismic shifts that were their backdrop.

Among other things, Jameson’s reading reveals the ideological “strategies of containment” that tend to isolate individual experience and thus downplay the social and political content, which become increasingly relegated to an unseen (or “unconscious”) dimension.

Dispersing Clouds

Notoriously complex, Jameson’s writing is a product of his vast and eclectic range of cultural references and theoretical traditions involved in his thinking. His sentences, which he has called “dialectical,” tend to be long, and what often appear to be tangents or digressions are characteristic features of his essays, which work by gathering a cloud of ideas that sharpen suddenly in a moment of insight like a bolt of lightning in a storm.

Dialectical thinking, Jameson has said, “requires you to say everything simultaneously, whether you think you can or not,” and there is a strong sense of that in his prose. “We will return to this later,” “meanwhile,” “as we have seen,” are common refrains. Remarking on this element of Jameson’s style in his review of Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Benjamin Kunkel observed that it is “as if everything was present in his mind at once, and it was only the unfortunately sequential nature of language that forced him to spell out sentence by sentence and essay by essay an apprehension of the contemporary world that was simultaneous and total.”

Perhaps this is related to Jameson’s view that the social totality, unrepresentable in itself, can somehow be limned through the dialectical interpretation of various discrete forms or texts. In this way, reading a given film or novel or architectural structure can help us to better understand the system of which it, and we, are a part. This system is ultimately the mode of production itself, capitalism, and the various cultural forms or artworks produced within its structural whole in various ways represent that system, while also potentially figuring forth alternatives.

Jameson’s latest offering, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, is a collection of previously published articles, exhibiting an eclectic array of his work over many years, while at the same time providing a sort of overview of this vast body of thinking. As the subtitle indicates, Jameson is here interested in the novel per se, and indeed many of the chapters were originally published as book reviews or review essays, and almost every chapter focuses on a single novel. Thus, although it may not be exactly representative of Jameson’s work as a whole, Inventions of a Present would be a good place for a new reader to begin, for it provides a chance to see the theorist and critic in action — Jameson the reader, as it were, across a wide range of novels.

His opening lines are characteristically striking:

The scholar longs for a tiger’s leap into the past; the book reviewer for flashes of the present. The novel, meanwhile, is time’s relief map, its furrows and spurs marking the intrusion of history into individual lives or else its tell-tale silences.

In this way, Jameson concludes, “[a]ll novels are thus historical,” even if what used to be thought of as “the historical novel” itself seems to be a thing of the past.

The reviewer thus locates each novel in its, and our own, present moment while also situating it within the wider social, political, and historical contexts of its production and reception, along with the far vaster literary and social histories of which the texts and the readers are a part. As ever, Jameson remains hostile to the false choice between formalism and historicism. “To read these records and these symptoms with any accuracy demands a kind of formalism, provided it is a social or better still materialist formalism capable of detecting the profound historicality of which these works are an archaeological transcription.” Jameson’s reviews and essays in Inventions of a Present thus square the circle of close reading and socially or politically oriented criticism in order to show how the novel today registers our historical situation in an age of globalization.

In “The Autonomous Work of Art: Utopian Plot-Formation in The Wire,” he turns to the celebrated, genre-blurring, Baltimore-based television series produced by David Simon. This is the only chapter in Inventions of the Present that does not focus on novels or novelists, yet its inclusion in this collection speaks to the degree to which The Wire, as many critics observed at the time, is a triumph of novelistic realism, more Dickensian than most dramas of its genre.

In his reading of The Wire, the meticulous plot construction of the series’ realism, with its multiple perspectives and collectivities, contributes to a vision of a potentially revolutionary or transformative restructuring of the society. The multiple perspectives and dynamic plots, tracing social flows and energies throughout this complex system, thus form a kind of map, not merely of the literal spaces of the city, but of the social system as a whole, which in turn can be used as a means for imagining alternative forms. The Wire thus features “a plot in which Utopian elements are introduced, without fantasy or wish fulfillment, into the construction of the fictive, yet utterly realistic, events.”

The curious title deserves a word. As with the titles of so many of Jameson’s books, which critic Phillip E. Wegner has rightly called “theoretical novels” themselves. Inventions of a Present is an allusion to a line from Stéphane Mallarmé: “There is no present[. . . .] No — a present does not exist,” and that “those who would declare themselves their own contemporaries” are misinformed. It is in this task of inventing the present that the novel is most indispensable. Novels are a means through which we can undertake the impossible project of historicizing the current moment. Regardless of the political outlook of their author, they synthesize the world, and a Marxist dialectical criticism of the sort to which Jameson has devoted his entire career can help to make sense of the ways artists make sense of the world. “In these novels,” as Jameson puts it, reflecting on the Mallarmé quote, “we can begin to hear, however faintly, the voices of contemporaries.”