Fredric Jameson died on Sunday, September 22nd, a few weeks after the piece below was written. His death will be mourned, especially but not only on the left, by readers and critics far and near. For generations old and young, he was the old master, great artificer. Except for changed tenses and some few words, the piece below is unaltered from when it was first written.
Mal informé celui qui se crierait son propre contemporain (Mallarmé). ‘Poorly advised, those who would declare themselves their own contemporaries.’ Born on April 14th, 1934, Fredric Jameson turned ninety this year. Verso marked the occasion by publishing two new Jameson books, The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought and Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization. The latter volume, briefly considered here, collects nineteen essays, mostly on later twentieth and twenty-first century novelists from North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and East Asia.
The collection opens with a chapter first published in 1972 on James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) and closes with a reflection on Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (2014), a review piece earlier published in 2022. Between these bookends, there are remarkable essays, most dating from 2000 to the present, on works by Robert Stone and Joan Didion, Henry James, The Wire, Ben Pastor, Günter Grass, Uwe Tellkamp, Vasily Grossman, Francis Spufford, Kenzaburō Ōe, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Karl Ove Knausgård, Andrzej Wajda on Joseph Conrad, Bołeslaw Prus, and Henrik Pontopiddan.
At ninety, Jameson had been around so long, and been so persistently and prodigiously productive, that his career’s astonishing nature risks being taken for granted. He published some thirty books and managed to produce almost every decade, sometimes right on the decade, a magisterial new work that kept him to his discipline’s forefront. His first book in 1961 was Sartre: The Origins of a Style, but it was a decade later with Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), which introduced with lucid aplomb some of the classic thinkers of Western Marxism to the Anglophone world, that he made his name. Ten years later again The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) followed. It was a tour de force in which Jameson demonstrated not only that he had assimilated Western Marxist, Russian Formalist and poststructuralist theory but that he was determined to build on them to produce his own composite Marxian methodology, sometimes now described, not quite adequately, as symptomatic reading.
In 1991, he astonished again with Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a work that put his definitive stamp on conceptions of postmodernism, and roved beyond literature to discuss cinema, architecture, the visual arts, theory and economics. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, the second, with Signatures of the Visible (1990), of two volumes on film followed in 1992. In 1985, Jameson had spent a semester at Peking University, and in 2004 a four-volume Selected Works of Jameson appeared in Chinese. Since then, late Jameson had maintained a lively interest in the late capitalist ‘non-Western world’, though after Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), another influential study, his later books mostly revisited earlier career concerns with romance and realism, modernism and critical theory.
Jameson’s exceptional achievements made him not only one of the preeminent American literary theorists of his time, but a Marxian cultural critic of high calibre, one taking his place alongside Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, and Stuart Hall. Jameson was fortunate in his longevity – of those listed above only Bloch reached his nineties, dying at ninety-two, and Lukács, the figure to whom Jameson owes th egreatest debt, died aged eighty-six. (Gramsci and Benjamin died early, at the ages of forty-six and forty-eight respectively; Adorno and Williams at sixty-five and sixty-six respectively; Sartre at seventy-four and Beauvoir at seventy-eight; Hall ateighty-two. Eagleton is still publishing.)
However, Jameson belongs, too, to a remarkable generation of Anglo-American Marxist intellectuals. His longtime association with the New Left Review and Verso has meant that his oeuvre developed over decades alongside those of David Harvey (1935), Perry Anderson (1938), a close friend, Peter Wollen (1938), Robin Blackburn (1940), Laura Mulvey (1941), TJ Clark (1943), Robert Brenner (1943), Francis Mulhern (1952), Michael Denning (1954), and of course Hall, Williams and Eagleton. These Anglo-American oeuvres, as well as those of Italians Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) and Franco Moretti (1950) – the work of each also published with Verso and New Left Review – have cross-fertilised each other such that it is difficult to tell where influence begins and ends. Inventions of a Present’s Mallarmé-borrowed epigraph – Mal informé celui qui se crierait son propre contemporain – may be read in many ways, but it surely signals Jameson’s acknowledgment that his work, like the novels he reads, is never simply of or to the moment. Rather, it stands on the shoulders of the works of many earlier generations and addresses itself to a largely fathomless future.
For those coming new to Jameson, Inventions of a Present is as useful an introduction as any to his criticism. Many of its essays were originally written for wider publics in the London Review of Books or New Left Review and are reasonably accessible; they showcase that mix of warm appreciativeness and toughness of mind that characterises Jameson’s writing at its best. The collection’s subtitle is notable. While many have tried to say what a ‘global novel’ is, or have devised rosters of so-called ‘global novelists’ – as Adam Kirsch does in The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century (2016) for instance – Jameson skirts this pitfall. He offers not a ‘global novel’ but instead ‘a crisis of globalization’ in which all contemporary art is ontologically implicated. For Jameson, moreover, ‘the present’ is never an already established datum ready to be described or formally captured. Rather, ‘a present’, one of many possible, is always in dynamic process of ongoing creation and the novel as form is an agential attempt to articulate ‘a present’ and summon it into being. When we say, then, that we live in a ‘global world’, interconnected by multinational capitalism, the internet, migratory flows, tourism and so on, we nevertheless live this globalisation not as a solid given but as quandary, something vaguely comprehended or disturbingly incomprehensible. And novel writing and reading are efforts to grasp and register that crisis of meaning.
For Jameson, novels ‘try to write the collective or at least register the crisis of the individual attempting to do so. Not even the nation-state functions any longer to frame our innumerable destinies although it is still there to mark its failure to do so; still national-historical in their singularities, other forms of collectivity, residual or emergent, offer to heal a breach its subjects may not have been aware of until registered in the works examined here.’ Read properly, this does not imply the death of the nation-state or some readymade transnationalism. If the nation-state, thanks to globalisation, survives as a kind of wreckage of some imagined community, other articulations of collectivity still inhabit the fracked nation-state and have yet to discover adequate alternative institutional forms. One function of novelistic form is to bring this social need for a more fully humanised collectivity to consciousness.
Like the greatest Marxian cultural critics, Jameson never worked from liberal identity politics or the personal morality of the writer, believing rather that:
The great writer always tends to thematize their ideological raw material, not because they aspire to the condition of philosophy or abstract knowledge and formulations, but, rather, because this is the privileged way in which such ideological material can be lifted to consciousness and made available to us as an object in its own right. Art thus allows us to walk all around these otherwise latent and implicit unconscious attitudes which govern our actions; to see them isolated as in a laboratory experiment for the first time, spread out and drying in the light of day where we are free to evaluate them consciously. This explains why the writer’s personal attitude toward that ideological material is not so important, why it ultimately does not matter so much whether Balzac was a reactionary, or whether Mailer is a sexist, a dupe of the myths of American business, and so forth. For his essential task as a writer, faced with such ideological values within and without himself, is, through his own prereflexive lucidity about himself and through the articulations of his fantasy life and the evocative ingenuity of his language, to bring such materials to artistic thematization and thus to make them an object of aesthetic consciousness.
Jameson is not at all indifferent to Mailer’s sexism, about which he has interesting things to say, any more than he is indifferent to Ezra Pound’s fascism. However, he refuses to make these things the standpoint from which to assess their works, this being an evaluative circularity leading nowhere. In the Henry James essay, he remarks that James and Pound shared a certain kind of anti-Americanism, observing that Pound’s view was:
if you are going to rule the world, he seemed to be telling us, then at least do it right and inherit world culture, indeed construct a world culture in which your best moments (Jefferson!) take their place modestly enough alongside China, Greece, the Renaissance, and modern revolution (although I would have preferred the place of honor for Lenin rather than for Mussolini, who after all began life as a socialist). The epic as a poem that includes history, indeed, that includes economics: there was Pound’s lesson, and, in an age of world literature and world political upheaval, it still seems to me to have its uses.
One wishes Jameson had written more on Pound. But perhaps his own career might be read in part as Poundianism contra Pound. In other words, he shared Pound’s hunger for world culture, but for one informed by a collectivist and humane socialist vision that was neither American nor Poundian.
This short piece cannot do justice to the individual readings in Inventions of a Present, so let me say something of the collection’s shape and of Jameson’s general perceptions of contemporary culture and the novel. One cannot be sure that a knot of nineteen essays is anything more than a loose assemblage, or has a controlling shape, and Jameson is too subtle to be tied to simple extractable theses. Nevertheless, the collection’s opening five pieces are on American writers and cover Mailer and Dickey, Robert Stone and Joan Didion, Henry James, Don DeLillo and Sol Yurick, and The Wire. As always, Jameson is more interested in the ‘form-problems’ constituted by these works than in personal assessments of the writers as such. These opening essays are generously appreciative but appear undergirded by some sense of a deforming deficiency in American fiction and culture generally, a limit intrinsic to superpower supremacy.
The study of machismo in Hemingway, Dickey and Mailer considers the American suburban male urge to self-test and self-purge in the wilderness, to confront degenerate viciousness in the form of rednecks (a stand-in, he proposes, for the working class) or other dangers, and to disavow the imagined emasculations of intellectual life. These are read not as Dickey’s or Mailer’s neuroses only but as cultural symptoms, and in 1972 Jameson already wonders whether in a later stage of capitalism, when an already etiolated bourgeois subjectivity wanes to vanishing point, if these symptoms will not intensify rather than diminish. (Anticipations of Cheney and Bush, Trump and Vance, Thiel and Musk?)
The Stone and Didion essay begins by stating that ‘the culture of late capitalism is not merely an empirically impoverished one, but one doomed structurally and tendentially to enfeeblement, whence its desperate need to revitalize itself with transfusions of the foreign and the exotic, the Other’. Again, this is no indictment of Stone or Didion: Jameson allows that ‘At its very best and most intense the literature of late capitalism needs to borrow from its Others.’ Nor should Euronationalists take comfort in easy anti-Americanism. For Jameson, this cultural anomie extends equally to the superpowers in Japan and Europe, where ‘the vital source of language production is in them sapped, […]; their older indigenous philosophical traditions have been colonized by Anglo-American analytic philosophy to the point where very little of the critical or the transcendent remains, and the content of their finest literary production can be shown, on closer inspection, to be borrowed from what reality persists outside their own national and linguistic borders’. He qualifies this by remarking that there are still ‘spaces of extraordinary elegance’ at Europe’s and Japan’s ‘upper reaches’, but the terms ‘extraordinary elegance’ or ‘upper reaches’ are culpably fuzzy.
After the opening American studies, the following seven essays, starting with Ben Pastor (pseudonym of Maria Verbena Volpi, an Italian detective novelist now living in the US) and rounding off with García Márquez, venture into Europe and South America. Here, Jameson’s appreciativeness appears warmed by his feeling that all of these writers are invested in various modes of collectivity. Pastor’s Martin Bora novels are set against the world-conquering German fascist drive in World War II; Vasily Grossman’s masterworks deal with the Soviet resistance to fascism in the same era. Uwe Tellkamp’s fiction reconstructs the daily life of a now-vanished East Germany; Ōe is fascinated by religion and political organisation; Márquez’s work engages South American and Columbian pre-industrial ‘solitudes’ before an invasive Americanised capitalism disaggregated them. Whether these modes of collectivity are monstrous or marvellous, Jameson is compelled by the enormous difficulties – politically, aesthetically – of remaking community or integrated society after so many earlier or alternative forms of non-capitalist society have now collapsed.
‘eBay,’ Jameson remarks acidly in the William Gibson essay that follows these, ‘is certainly the right word for our current collective unconscious’. The essays on Atwood, Canadian-based Gibson, and Spufford, might, if one wanted to read them as such, form a subset, ventures into science fiction, utopia/dystopia, speculative and counterfactual fiction – all longstanding Jameson preoccupations. For him, the early twentieth century and our contemporary eras – the divide, that is, between our parents’ time and ours – are distinguished by the fact that in the former capitalism’s uneven development meant that older forms of pre-capitalist and religious societies still existed, as did the Soviet and Chinese communist worlds, whereas our present condition is defined by a flattened late capitalism cleansed of alternative lifeforms. Because twenty-first century writers, unlike Walter Scott or García Márquez, lack vital non-modern societies to afford them a palpable sense of what a different kind of humanity might look like, science fiction and related forms have by sheer imaginative fiat to summon estranging alternatives into being. Jameson’s fascination has certainly done much to provoke useful interest in sci-fi and related forms. Still, there seems a certain idealist utopianism to the view that alternatives to the present can somehow be imaginatively wrested from the writer’s unconscious, and Jameson has displayed little enough interest in what we might call literatures oa ongoing struggle or praxis of the Palestinian, Kurdish, Cuban or even African American kinds.
The final essays on Knausgård, Andrzej Wajda’s meditation on Conrad, Prus, Pontopiddan and Tokarczuk point us toward northern and eastern Europe, and feature three or four Poles, quipped as ‘the Irish of the East’. The take on Knausgård is possibly the collection’s most sceptical. My Struggle reads for Jameson as something between a supermarket Proust and a post-metaphysical Augustine, a novel one reads, he remarks, not for its style but the conversations ‘which are often unobtrusively witty and entertaining’. The essay on Andrzej Wajda’s documentary adaptation of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line mulls on empty time and doldrum seas, on stalled motionlessness.
The Prus and Pontopiddan studies discuss how the Austenesque marriage comedy and provincial Bildungsroman morph after the mid-1800s into tragedies of adultery or failed careers. Older fairy-tale or romance forms offered happy endings; other forms rehearsed catastrophic defeat. However, in the later nineteenth century the novel struggles with endings and under the influence of an increasingly capitalist society ‘the whole social variety of existential outcomes was slowly reduced to a new set of abstract categories: the opposition between success and failure. Winning the girl is success, losing the war is failure: these abstractions do not on the face of it involve winning or losing money, but it is, in reality, the abstraction of money as such that governs the new system and which begins to impose the new simplified classification in terms of the stark alternatives of winning or losing, success or failure.’ In this situation, tragic narratives come more to the fore; this, he concludes, happens when all ‘successes grow to be alike’ and become equivalent, in the final analysis, to money and, culturally speaking, money means mass culture and mass culture wish fulfilment. In such a world, ‘only the failures remain interesting, only the failures offer genuine literary raw material, both in their variety and the quality of their experience’.
The closing piece on Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is a like reflection, this time on the blurry line between true and false messiahs, between Messianism and charlatanism. Tokarczuk’s novel is a sprawling historical epic centred on an eighteenth century Polish Jew, Jacob Frank, who claims to be the reincarnation of a self-proclaimed seventeenth century messiah, and who founds a transgressive sect incorporating elements of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. This chameleon protagonist goes from cult leader to excommunicated prisoner to eventual German baron and speculator checking his investments on the newly-founded Frankfurt stock exchange. Jameson enumerates the many plausible readings that the novel will accommodate before sidelining them all to conclude: ‘Even the false Messiah glows with that Messianism on which we warm our hands!. Never mind! What is important here is that Olga Tokarczuk has learned to do the impossible: to write the novel of the collective.’ This is because the messiah, true or false, is more than a person and messianism flares only if and where there remains some real conviction that ‘salvation [still] exists’.
In a time when, to use a phrase attributed to him, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’, one can see why Jameson might approve Tokarczuk’s exploration of conviction and collectivism. The nod to Messianism might seem a strangely mystical note on which to end Inventions of a Present, a rogue consolation wrung from a rambling rogue novel! But Jameson’s faith is not of course in Jacob Frank or Messianism but in the human capacity and that of the novel as form, instanced here by Tokarczuk’s epic feat, to sustain even in the teeth of apocalypse, devastation, deception and death, the conviction in collectivity and better worlds. To have kept such conviction candled against the odds of the last nine decades and briefly into his tenth is probably part of the secret of Jameson’s own vast critical creativity, a creativity that lives in the work and that his death will not therefore extinguish.
Joe Cleary
24/9/2024
