Realism, Marxism and the Canon
Balzac, of all writers, has a privileged and symbolic position in the traditional debates of Marxist aesthetics: so that to propose a new reading of Balzac is to modify those debates.… So one type of political consequence that emerges from work like this can be located within Marxism.…
On another level, however, such studies of “classical” texts are to be taken … as an intervention in the standard university teaching of what is called the “canon.” So at this point the question opens up into the more general problem of Marxist pedagogy. [5, p. 72]
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson limits his political intent, deferring “that exploratory projection of what a vital and emergent political culture should be and do which Raymond Williams has rightly proposed as the most urgent task of a Marxist cultural criticism” [6, p. 10]. The response to Eagleton, however, reinforces the political valences of Jameson’s literary interpretations, along with the importance of realism to the Marxist theory that he inherits. He also emphasises the significance of the canon to his engagement with a wider field of literary studies. While the academic landscape has altered significantly throughout his career, it often seems that his view of the nineteenth century in particular has remained attached to “what [was] called the ‘canon’” during his early training. This training, predominantly within French and comparative departments in the 1950s, leaves him with a different set of interest than that of more recent literary theory. In this manner, Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century literature reflects his contradictory position within contemporary scholarship. The work influenced by The Political Unconscious greatly restructured a sense of what the canon might include. Jameson’s portrayals of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, focus on a more restricted group of realist novels, in particular a French lineage that connects Honoré de Balzac with Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola.
This sense of nineteenth-century literature is especially evident in Jameson’s earliest texts. As later chapters will discuss, his modernist and postmodernist interests remain in flux throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, he firmly establishes his realist interests from Marxism and Form (1971) onwards. Throughout the text, he regularly mentions Balzac, Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy. At this early stage of his career, Jameson predominantly aligns himself with Lukács’ sense of the historical development of the novel, and realism’s ability to map class structure or social totalities. He maintains a mediatory position throughout, however, and he complicates Lukács’ attribution of worth within the realist canon. For example, Jameson places Zola—along with high modernism—amidst a larger context of historical development: “It was Balzac’s historical luck to have witnessed, not the later, fully evolved and finished capitalism of Flaubert and Zola, but the very beginnings of capitalism in France; to have been contemporary with a social transformation … to have been able to apprehend social change as a network of individual stories” [7, p. 203]. While Jameson often refers to specific realist authors in these early texts, his primary focus is on theory and interpretation. In Marxism and Form, his discussions of realism take place predominantly in the context of Western Marxist theory. For example, he positions varying realist forms in parallel with Adorno’s readings of compositional music. In this fashion, Jameson compares Tolstoy’s historical position with that of Beethoven’s, and the formal qualities of the violin concerto with those of the bildungsroman. While the book provides a number of close readings, particularly of Ernest Hemingway, Jameson’s primary goal is to argue for the importance of figures such as Adorno and Lukács. In this manner, these theorists’ interests and their notions of literary aesthetics heavily influence Jameson’s early discussions of literature.
Law depends in some sense upon synchrony; and we have seen how short stories or folk-tales have a kind of atemporal and object-like unity.… This is to say that where we can easily identify the non-story, that which fails to correspond to the intrinsic laws of the story as a form … the novel has no opposite in this sense, for it is not a genre like tragedy or comedy, like lyric or epic … and the novels which do exist in the world are not exemplars of some universal, but are related to each other according to a historical rather than a logical and analytical mode. [8, pp. 73–74]
The novelists that commonly appear throughout The Prison-House of Language remain figures such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, although an extended discussion of Dickens provides a rare early insight into Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century English literature. As I will discuss in further detail below, Jameson reads Dickens’ Hard Times “not only because it is familiar and relatively short, but also and primarily because, as Dickens’ only didactic or ‘thesis’ novel, it involves an idea which has already been formulated for us by the author in terms of a binary opposition” [8, p. 167]. In this manner, Jameson’s discussion of Dickens places the author within a structuralist and synchronic framework of interpretation, one that limits Dickens’ novels in comparison with those of the French realists.
Coming almost a decade after The Prison-House of Language, The Political Unconscious marks the culmination of Jameson’s early interest in realism. The book would provide his most intensive engagement with the nineteenth-century novel up to that point. Four chapters concentrate respectively on the romance novel of the nineteenth century, Balzac’s early high realism, George Gissing’s English naturalism, and Joseph Conrad—who, for Jameson, straddles late nineteenth-century forms and early modernist ones. As in his previous texts, Jameson’s discussion here is more theoretical in its intention. He poses his extended readings of the three literary figures as testing grounds for the interpretive method that he formulates in the opening chapter. In this manner, he argues against analysis looking primarily at modes of production that “tend toward a purely typological or classificatory operation, in which we are called upon to ‘decide’ such issues as whether Milton is to be read within a ‘precapitalist’ or a nascent capitalist context, and so forth” [6, p. 93]. In relation to his readings on Conrad, he argues that it would “be possible to posit some static homology … between the three levels of social reification, stylistic invention, and narrative or diegetic categories; but it seems more interesting to grasp the mutual relationships between these three dimensions of the text and its social subtext in the more active terms of production, projection … displacement and the like” [6, p. 44]. In this manner, Jameson argues for a less synchronic understanding of historical development, one that sees varying tensions in cultural material as reflective of a complex and fraught interaction between dominant, persistent and emergent historical tendencies. He argues for a heterogeneous model of history that acknowledges poststructuralist problems with metanarratives, and he works throughout the text to mediate between larger historical movements and the more specific and complex readings he performs in regard to specific novels. Nevertheless, in the reception of The Political Unconscious, certain prevailing criticisms of Jameson’s project begin to take form. Questions surrounding the totalising and periodising aspects of the book, in particular, arose in regard to the larger historical frameworks Jameson denotes [see 9, 10, 11].
After publishing The Political Unconscious, Jameson focused heavily on postmodernity for well over a decade. In this time, he would continue to produce essays on modernist literature and science fiction, amongst other literary forms, but he produced very little material focused on classical realism. Nevertheless, the French figures of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola would remain common reference points for Jameson throughout the period. Over three decades after The Political Unconscious, The Antinomies of Realism (2013) stands as a late return to the nineteenth-century realist novel for Jameson. Furthermore, the book is perhaps his most committed theoretical investigation of a literary genre—with wider notions of class, politics and reification relegated to the background. Jameson splits the work into two parts, the first constituting a sustained argument over the course of several chapters, and the second comprised of three longer chapters, which are predominantly self-contained. The overarching argument of the opening section sees classical or high realism as a tension between two narrative modes. The first narrative mode is one of an earlier storytelling tradition: folk tales, myth or the novel of the eighteenth century. Throughout, he uses the term “récit” to describe this kind of narrative, which primarily focuses on plot and whose emotional content remains the larger categories of love, hate, happiness and so on. The second narrative mode is one more closely aligned with scene and description, and it is here that “affect” enters the literary for Jameson. Although he does not discuss modernism in detail in the book, the period can be seen as the moment where this narrative tendency has thoroughly replaced plot in terms of importance, as seen in his preferred example of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson discusses high realism as a tension between these two types of modes and reads the form as containing elements of both. For Jameson, this is why high realism is never a fixed form and has proven difficult to categorise. He sees varying kinds of realist novel as providing a series of formal solutions that are able to incorporate this kind of tension. He describes a situation in the nineteenth century where “the repertory of récits … is no longer so attractive in the longer … narrative forms, where the experience of the everyday has begun to assert its claims on … our attentions. The nineteenth century, indeed, may be characterised as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over … ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109]. It is in this context that affect emerges in literature and begins to alter the narrative temporality that Jameson calls “irrevocable time, of the event that has happened once and for all”, which is found in the récit [12, p. 21].
In the opening chapters of The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson again returns to discussing his preferred French realists, along with Tolstoy, but introduces a series of new major concerns. In this manner, George Eliot occupies a central position within the text, despite Jameson rarely mentioning her in his previous work. Eliot is the focus of issues relating to style indirect libre, providence and temporality, as well as serving as a problematic for his concepts relating to melodrama and nineteenth-century morality. Jameson sees Eliot’s invention of characters that function within the plot as villains—but are relatable and somewhat sympathetic figures—as one of the major developments in high realism’s move away from an earlier storytelling tradition. The second part of The Antinomies of Realism focuses on three varied topics. Jameson discusses representations of war in relation to generic forms of war narratives. He uses examples dating from the seventeenth century up until Alexander Kluge’s Chronik der Gefuhle (2004). Jameson also investigates the notion of providence in the realist novel across one of these chapters. George Eliot serves as the focus once again, with Jameson reading her novels in terms of inherited literary forms and their transformation in new historical contexts. In concentrating on The Antinomies of Realism and the essays that surround it, we can see an emergence late in Jameson’s career of a more nuanced depiction of realism. For instance, the text often provides literary readings that are more observant of the sense of heterogeneity and contradiction that he describes in The Political Unconscious, in comparison with some of his earlier material. At the same time, he also moves away from the symptomatic or paranoid reading practices that scholars have more recently criticised. The wider sense of the realist literature discussed within the text also demonstrates the extent to which his notions of nineteenth-century realism have moved away from mediating between differing Marxist and poststructuralist positions and begun to embrace a more varied sense of the formal qualities of the nineteenth-century novel. In his introduction to the book, Jameson surveys a series of engagements with the realist novel, notably discussing Mikhail Bakhtin, Lukács, and Ian Watt, amongst others. He goes on to claim: “Realism … is a hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal.… If it is social truth … we want from realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology.… If it is history we are looking for then we are at once confronted with questions about the uses of the past and even access to it” [12, pp. 5–6]. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson’s dialectical reading practice comes to the fore, concentrating on the novel as a form situated within a complex host of cultural contexts. His work moves beyond the more structured accounts of realism found in Lukács in particular and remains more sceptical of realism’s ability to map the social in general.
The following sections of this chapter will look at this development in Jameson’s career, using four distinct frameworks. Firstly, I will concentrate on the various canonising gestures Jameson performs in his engagement with nineteenth-century literature. His concentration on developments in the French realist novel frames the work of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola as paradigmatic examples, which, when placed in relation to each other, chart larger mutations in the novel form. In this work, Jameson diminishes the importance of the English novel in the nineteenth century in particular, often positioning the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing as followers of a more advanced French lineage. Secondly, and following on from this work, I will consider Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century genre. While he commonly discusses a fluid notion of genre as an “ad hoc” construct—particularly in The Political Unconscious—his early work often seeks to demarcate strict boundaries in relation to realism. He frequently works to contrast realist formal qualities with that of the romance or melodrama, and in doing so constructs a number of generic boundaries. Within this discussion of genre, notions of gender will become prominent, particularly in regard to his work on the domestic novel. Jameson’s ambivalence towards the nineteenth-century English novel—and texts that are closer in form to the romance—result in a view of the period very much at odds with contemporary scholarship. For example, Jameson often concentrates on Flaubert in any discussion of the representation of women in nineteenth-century literature [see 12, pp. 147–148]. The Antinomies of Realism provides a corrective to some of these tendencies, although Jameson’s aversion to notions of identity politics produces a continuing tension in his discussions of novels focused on women’s experience. Thirdly, I will concentrate on notions of historical development. For Jameson, the Marxist symptomatic reading should discuss the complex developments of cultural tendencies and modes of production. Nevertheless, his larger historical narratives of the nineteenth century and its literature are often interested in far more linear and sweeping senses of development. While theorists have often attacked the concept of totality on poststructuralist terms, Jameson’s treatment of the nineteenth century suggests an incongruity inherent in his own rubric of interpretation. The chapter will explore how Jameson’s readings, which pay attention to multifaceted historical tensions and contradictions, are to be reconciled with the more straightforward historical narratives that he discusses at other moments. Finally, I will discuss The Antinomies of Realism in relation to affect theory. While we might see Jameson’s appropriation of the term as opportunistically timed, in a manner similar to his other major critical interventions, this chapter will conclude with an extended consideration of his history of using the term, particularly in relation to realism. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the discussion of realism and affect found in The Antinomies of Realism contributes to continued modifications to Jameson’s sense of cultural forms and their relationship to the political. Despite working to distance his text from other contemporary examples of affect theory, it remains that Jameson’s newer material has certain affinities with critics such as Jonathan Flatley and Sianne Ngai, particularly in relation to theories of collectivity and the everyday. In this regard, Jameson’s work on realism has the potential to take on new political valences, in a fashion that might provide a more visible answer to Eagleton’s early queries.
Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon: French Realism and Its Others
In his early career, Jameson often discusses the vast transformation of the Western world throughout the nineteenth century. He commonly depicts major alterations to the function of economics, subjectivity and culture across the period. For Jameson, the primary witness to this historical change is the novel, and he often works to relate its formal developments to wider historical or cultural contexts. He describes a process in The Political Unconscious, whereby broader readings of genre can ultimately “be transformed into the detection of a host of generic messages—some of them objectified survivals from older modes of cultural production, some anticipatory, but all together projecting a formal conjuncture through which the ‘conjuncture’ of coexisting modes of production at a given historical moment can be detected and allegorically articulated” [6, p. 99]. Within this rubric, texts perform a variety of functions. For example, Balzac’s novels express political desire, whereas Flaubert’s work describes the appearance of a bourgeois “affect” in reified domestic space. Yet, despite Jameson’s immense and varied proclamations for the period, his sense of its literature is noticeably restricted. The realist novel is commonly the only kind of nineteenth-century literature that he engages with at length, and his sense of the genre is decidedly limited. In particular, we can trace specific boundaries in his work in relation to both generic categorisation and national variations.
Western Marxist theory influences Jameson’s engagement with the realist canon, along with his early training in French and comparative literature departments. While he references a small variety of realists, such as Tolstoy or Dickens, his focus inarguably remains on certain French authors. Beyond the strict focus on French realism, Jameson has consistently criticised the English tradition and has seldom worked on nineteenth-century American authors. He rarely mentions certain pivotal nineteenth-century figures, despite the proliferation of stray references across Jameson’s body of work. For example, his early texts do not comment on widely discussed authors such as Jane Austen, Herman Melville or George Eliot. Jameson predominantly excludes texts that we might conventionally define as romances or melodramas in particular. He has also seldom engaged with more specific generic forms found in the nineteenth century, such as the gothic tale or adventure novel. It should be noted that across Jameson’s career the category of realism is an important, overarching concept. Drawn from his engagement with Western Marxism, the notion of realism impacts on his understanding of cultural forms across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As many commentators have noted, Jameson’s work is remarkable in its consistency, its elaboration on key themes, and the recurring sense that—despite the breadth of material he covers—all aspects of his theoretical project are connected. Nevertheless, two major elements of Jameson’s theory actively work against the strict categorisation of the realist novel often found in his texts—as well as a sense that Jameson’s notion of realism has remained a constant, well-defined concept in his oeuvre. Firstly, he positions the realist novel as a hybrid literary mode. For Jameson, the realist novel borrows from a number of earlier narrative forms and these forms remain latent in the novel’s generic makeup. He repeats this notion on a number of occasions, particularly in The Political Unconscious and The Antinomies of Realism. As both texts demonstrate, the novel as a form and realism as a genre are in constant flux throughout the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Jameson attempts to see his paradigmatic French writers in closed realist terms, in a manner that contradicts his descriptions of generic boundaries as fluid or “ad hoc”. Secondly, Jameson has consistently attacked what he calls ethical criticism across his career. He has often symptomatically read the ethical and ideological motives behind theoretical frameworks, whereby “even the most innocently formalizing readings of the New Criticism have as their essential and ultimate function the propagation of [a] particular view of what history is” [6, p. 59]. Throughout this work, Jameson has also repeatedly denounced criticism that seeks to assign value to texts. While he has remained open about his own ideological imperatives—“to transcend the ‘ethical’ in the direction of the political and the collective”, for example—he has been less self-reflexive or transparent about the formation of his own canon, and the boundaries created by his specific focuses [6, p. 60]. Therefore, while often making bold proclamations about the period, or seeking to envisage historical totality, he has taken less time to consider what his specific view of the nineteenth century actively leaves out, or discounts.
In Balzac, factories do not exist as such: we watch not the end products but the efforts of the great capitalists and inventors to construct them.… But the only factory in the works of Flaubert is that pottery works which is but a passing stage in Arnoux’s checkered career.… When Zola, impatient with this massive lifelessness, tries to breathe vitality into it, he can only do so by recourse to myth and melodramatic violence. [7, p. 204]
This narrative will be repeated on a number of occasions, notably in essays such as “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” (1977) and “The Realist Floor-Plan” (1985), as well as The Political Unconscious. For Jameson, Balzac stands as the essential early instance of high realism: his fiction is partly immersed in older storytelling modes, but his literature predicts a more developed moment, which Jameson occasionally aligns with Dickens’ London novels.
Balzac’s depictions of French history are an inherent component of Jameson’s interest in the author. In a reinterpretation of Lukács’ sense of the historical novel, Jameson argues, “Lukács is right about Balzac, but for the wrong reasons: not Balzac’s deeper sense of political and historical realities, but rather his incorrigible fantasy demands ultimately raise History itself over against him, as absent cause, as that on which desire comes to grief” [6, p. 183]. In this manner, Jameson positions a notion of historical, social and political mapping within a theory of the political unconscious. This manoeuvre allows for certain aspects of Lukács’ theory to remain relevant in an age of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic criticism that would otherwise question realism’s truth claims [see 13, pp. 141–148; 14, pp. 64–65]. Jameson is interested in Balzac’s realism, not just because of it produces a cohesive representation of social terrain, but because this mapping procedure “may be associated with [the] initial stockpiling of social and anecdotal raw material for processing and ultimate transformation into marketable, that is to say narratable, shapes and forms” [7, p. 10]. In a similar fashion, Jameson reframes Engels’ sense of Balzac giving us “a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘society,’ describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year … the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles” [15, p. 115]. For Jameson, the extended form of La Comédie humaine allows Balzac’s work to become “the model that now helps us to read the bewildering and massive substance of the real of which it began by being the projection” [7, p. 11]. These discussions accentuate Jameson’s varying interests in realism: Balzac is of significance because his realist aesthetics provide a wider purview of social formations, his lengthy career offers a particular historical perspective on capitalist developments in the nineteenth century, and the formal qualities and alterations of his novels align with the larger transformations in French society at the time.
In Jameson’s discussions of Flaubert, his second example of realism, this work continues. For example, Jameson argues against Roland Barthes’ reading of “A Simple Soul” in “L’effet de réel” (1968). In the essay, Barthes claims, “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism” [13, p. 148]. For Jameson, however, critics should place these problems of language and realism’s truth claims within particular historical frameworks. He claims, “what is significant for us, even if the reference is to be taken to be a mirage, lies in the ‘reality of the appearance’ and the way in which belief in reference governs the practices of nineteenth-century daily life and of the nineteenth-century ‘realistic’ aesthetic” [16, p. 375]. As with Balzac, Jameson is less interested in Flaubert’s depiction of reality, but rather the further emergence of the bourgeois individual subject, as it has developed throughout capitalism up to that point. For Jameson, style indirect libre, and other elements of Flaubert’s impersonal style, will come to be associated with the reification of middle-class space, the older traditions’ subsequent emptying of content, and the appearance of affect as a major category in the realist novel. Jameson states that, “in Flaubert, Balzacian fantasy is effaced, its place taken by the … phenomena of bovarysme, that ‘desire to desire’ whose objects have become illusory images” [6, p. 184]. In “The Realist Floor-Plan”, the appearance of a musty smell in “A Simple Soul” signifies the emergence of affect. Affect, in this iteration at least, becomes a more ancient sensory perception that resists the reification of middle-class culture found elsewhere, actively reading against Barthes’ sense that realism is merely a self-conscious attempt to convey plausibility or detail. In Marxism and Form, Jameson will describe a similar narrative, “of an absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and which began around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical literature that preceded it” [7, p. 199]. While this narrative is qualified and complicated even as Jameson suggests it, the alienation of individual subjectivity in Flaubert’s writing is of major importance to Jameson’s sense of the development of realism.
Here we have … naturalism, in concentrated essence and in sharp opposition to the traditions of the old realism.… The tension of the old-type story, the co-operation and clashing of human beings who are both individuals and at the same time representatives of important class tendencies—all these are eliminated and their place is taken by “average” characters whose individual traits are accidents from the artistic point of view. [17, pp. 90–91]
In Marxism and Form’s placement of the French authors in a context of narrative possibility, Jameson begins his ongoing work to historicise Lukács’ theory of realism, particularly in relation to Zola: “For [Zola] the basic raw material [is] already established in advance … he has succumbed … to the mirage of some static, objective knowledge of society.… From Lukács’ point of view … this means that the novel … has ceased to become the privileged instrument of the analysis of reality and has been degraded to a mere illustration of a thesis” [7, pp. 194–195]. Lukács sees Zola’s aesthetic choices as preventing him from writing a productively Marxist literature and sees realism as continuing well into the twentieth century with the work of Thomas Mann. Jameson sees naturalism in terms of historical possibility, however, and he claims that Zola’s novels must negotiate and represent a moment of increased social reification. For Jameson, the increasing administered world of late nineteenth-century France provides a number of formal challenges, but he is also interested in placing Zola’s literature in relation to the coming divergence between high modernism and a degraded popular literature. In this capacity, the constrained formal strategies of naturalism have both an aesthetic and literary importance, but also a social one.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will continue in this vein, again writing against the sense that naturalism resides somewhat outside the realist canon. For Jameson, Zola’s “unrequited claim to stand amongst Lukács’ ‘great realists’ should not be shaken by his political opinions nor by his enthusiastic practice of melodrama … nor is the naturalism debate … relevant for our own purposes here, except insofar as it plays its part in contemporary literary tug-of-war” [12, p. 45]. Jameson devotes an entire chapter to describing the historical importance of Zola’s extensive descriptive passages within the context of affect in the nineteenth-century novel. The work to reinstate Zola into another stricter version of the canon, and the interest in these novelists in general, reinforces realism’s importance to Jameson as “traditionally in one form or another the central model of Marxist aesthetics as a narrative discourse which unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh ‘scientific’ perspective” [6, p. 104]. As in the work of “The Realist Floor-Plan” to move past Barthes’ problematising of realism, Jameson seeks to maintain the traditional aspects of Marxist criticism, but remains aware of its difficult relationship with poststructuralist thought. Jameson, in his early career at least, is rarely interested in determining how realism operates as a kind of mirage, but rather in how that mirage reflects or even creates the subject’s experience of nineteenth-century consciousness and daily life. At the same time, while he often pays attention to these representational problems, it is usually in the service of moving beyond them. This commonly results in Jameson merely reinstating realism’s “nigh-scientific” ability to map the world around it, as seen in earlier Marxist theory.
In Marxism and Form, Jameson will casually align his French lineage with the development of “Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne in the English novel” [7, p. 314]. There are a number of parallels between these examples—particularly their relationships to the French and Glorious Revolutions and the subsequent evolution of capitalism—but Jameson does not discuss the English authors any further. Indeed, he is less interested in the progression of the English novel throughout either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. For example, he casually refers to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) on a number of occasions, but he has never seriously engaged with the text. Raymond Williams is a perhaps more intriguing example, given that he appears regularly in Jameson’s work, most often as a figure in which to borrow specific conceptual ideas and terminology from, such as “structure of feeling” [see 18, p. xiv]. Jameson cites Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) on several occasions in The Political Unconscious, but only briefly does Jameson discuss a sense of British history. At one point, he considers Conrad’s Lord Jim in terms of “the British empire, the heroic bureaucracy of imperial capitalism which takes that lesser, but sometimes even more heroic, bureaucracy of the officers of the merchant fleet as a figure for itself” [6, p. 265]. The discussion is cut short, however, and Jameson does not integrate notions of British imperialism into in his wider notions of capitalist development. Instead, he provides a lengthy citation of Williams in a footnote [see 6, p. 265n].
Dickens’s creation of a new kind of novel … can be directly related to what we must see as [a] double condition: the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured, which is the true significance of the city, and especially at this period of the capital city, as a dominant social form.
Dickens’s ultimate vision of London is then not to be illustrated by topography or local instance. It lies in the form of his novels: in their kind of narrative, in their method of characterisation, in their genius for typification. [19, p. 154]
In Hard Times we witness the confrontation of what amount to two antagonistic intellectual systems: Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarianism (“Facts! Facts!”) and that world of anti-facts symbolized by Sissy Jupe and the circus, or in other words, imagination. The novel is primarily the education of the educator, the conversion of Mr. Gradgrind from his inhuman system to the opposing one. It is thus a series of lessons administered to Mr. Gradgrind, and we may sort these lessons into two groups and see them as the symbolic answers to two kinds of questions.… What happens when you negate or deny imagination? What would happen if, on the contrary, you negated facts? … The plot is nothing but an attempt … to work through the faulty solutions and unacceptable hypotheses until an adequate embodiment has been realized in terms of the narrative material. [8, p. 167]
Elsewhere, Dickens’ literary aesthetic or sense of narrative is seen in terms of the development of commercial style: “the ‘style’ of Dickens is if anything a form of packaging, a mannerism, an annoying or delightful ‘supplement’ to those novel-products which it was his social role to furnish. But in modern times, it is clearly ‘style’ itself, or ‘world,’ or world-view, which the novelist supplies” [8, pp. 132–133]. For Jameson, Dickens anticipates the degraded popular fiction emerges in the early twentieth century. He further accentuates this notion in the essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse”. Here, he sees the English author within the lineage of Balzac and Flaubert, in a discussion of Balzac’s character Philippe: “We can measure the transformation of the Balzacian figure into a stock villain by recalling the classic engravings that illustrate Dickens and Eugene Sue.… In the later writers—who may be considered … as an intermediate generation between Balzac and … Flaubert—such a character is … an ahistorical Other, a … caricatural representation of Evil” [20, pp. 63–64]. This reading treats Dickens as a figure who inherits the formal inventions of Balzac, but also as one whose characterisation of various social types returns to an older, ethical storytelling mode. The essay, atypical in a number of ways for Jameson, would appear in heavily modified form as the third chapter in The Political Unconscious, with Jameson removing the commentary on Dickens.1 He does not develop the connection between Dickens, Sue and other English realists and the French lineage further elsewhere. Furthermore, Jameson does not see Dickens in relation to a more crowded field of English authors, such as William Thackeray or George Eliot, or less central examples, such as Charlotte Brontë or Elizabeth Gaskell. The English canon perhaps does not have as clear a relationship to economic and stylistic development, and Jameson does little work to consider its lineage.
Jameson’s short chapter on George Gissing in The Political Unconscious will be one of few moments where he places English authors in a wider historical context. Once again, however, he portrays Gissing and others as followers of a stronger French canon, which also doubles as a stronger narrative of development. The passage above from “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” is perhaps indicative of Jameson’s restricted use of Dickens, and many other English authors: the use of the term “ahistorical” is often a clear sign that these novels are not as productive for his Marxist analyses. In the essay, he describes how the “introduction of ethics into novelistic efforts to represent the disorders of early industrial society may … be understood as a repression of the historical … and one of the major strategies of bourgeois ideology in its effort to reconceptualize the social order … hence the profound affinity between Victorian ideology and the melodrama” [20, p. 64]. This treatment of Dickens obviously differs to Jameson’s reading of the French figures of Flaubert or Zola, whose particular voices are more often seen in terms of a refiguring of realist style and how it functions in relation to its subject matter, as well as the way in which they inherit a particular set of conventions from their predecessor. Jameson goes as far as to dismiss any sense of progression in English realism when he notes “the gestures and signals of the storyteller [are] perpetuated in the English novel well beyond 1857, the year Flaubert abolishes them with a single stroke in France” [6, pp. 154–155]. In the chapter on Gissing, Jameson describes the author as being thought of as “the most ‘French’ … of British Naturalists” [6, p. 186]. He sees Gissing predominantly in relation to the representative naturalism of Zola, although Jameson makes a number of concessions to Gissing’s position in an English tradition exemplified by Dickens. Here Jameson’s discussion of Dickensian narrative paradigms reinforces the sentimentality and melodrama of “the angel of the hearth” trope, and the problematics inherent in the Victorian novel’s interest in the lower class. In these moments, Jameson privileges the formal and stylistic developments of the French novel, over that of the English in particular. We might dispute this depiction of realism’s progression throughout the nineteenth century in several ways; however, of more importance to this book is the manner in which Jameson concentrates on texts that are at the forefront of literary or cultural development. While his model of historical change emphasises the persistence of older historical modes, he consistently disregards textual material that he describes as regressive in some fashion. His focus remains on novels that are the flashpoints for change, even as his sense of cultural progression accentuates a slower process of mediation and conflict.
Antinomies is not a monograph but a theoretical exercise or essay; and I’m rather proud of the way in which my exhibits touch in turn on all the major national languages in the Western realist tradition, from Russia to the U.S. (Dickens is implicitly touched on in the discussion of first-person narrative, inasmuch as he was a kind of actor who essentially wrote scripts for his own performances.) But other exclusions … had a more practical point to them: The entire English tradition was omitted … as a pointed reminder that there are other languages and literatures … in the world and in history. I began with Zola in order to restore his always ambiguous reputation and his extraordinary achievement (it is after all the naturalist novel which was the great world-wide influence and not Balzac or Jane Austin or Goethe, however dear they may be to some of us); and I placed Galdós at the very center in order to deprovincialize our standard canon and to win a little more interest in this immense figure.… At any rate, the theoretical sketch I offered was not without its polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes. [22, pp. 102–103]
Jameson rarely acknowledges a sense of purpose in his textual focuses, or of “polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes”. Elsewhere, he has consistently sought to diminish the importance or considered nature of his literary interests. While he does discuss George Eliot at some length in The Antinomies of Realism, the text does provide an expansive sense of Western realist literature outside of the English tradition also. In this regard, it would seem that notions of genre, rather than nation, impinge more directly in Jameson’s sense of the realist canon.
Realism and the Problem of Genre: Melodrama, the Romance and Women’s Writing
As the survey of French and English figures denotes, the more developed sense of historical and social mapping that Jameson finds in the works of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola privileges a more highbrow sense of realism and the nineteenth century in general. Jameson does not extend his focus to include literature that we might place in more populist generic boundaries, particularly that of the romance, or even the bildungsroman. Dickens seems to delineate a certain boundary for Jameson: the author represents a more melodramatic English tradition, but aspires to social realism in later works. Jameson rarely discusses romantic novels by figures such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, even as they denote certain developments in the novel form. Jameson repeatedly sees the realist tradition in France as a lineage that clearly connects “the mature and original possibilities in the nineteenth century” with older narrative forms, as well as the high modernism of the early twentieth century [6, p. 151]. This sense of older cultural forms, and particularly an engagement with the eighteenth century, remains sporadic across his career. His discussions of earlier, more synchronic forms of literature are less developed, given that their relationship to historical change is less visible. In this manner, he has only briefly considered how English romances of the nineteenth century might differ to a more traditional iteration of this particular literary form. Often the earlier storytelling modes appear as simply “raw material”: less complex, pure narrative forms that are both indicative of a time before capitalist alienation, but also of little concern for Jameson’s sense of developing reification.
Jameson does, however, have a recurring interest in Miguel de Cervantes. His positioning of Don Quixote (1605) in relation to other important precursors of the realist novel, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), allows us some insight into how Jameson’s delineation between realism and romance functions. We can align his treatment of Don Quixote with his perennial continental focus and privileging of certain genres. While also seen in terms of its relationship to Lukács’ concept of abstract idealism, Jameson predominantly discusses the texts as an important stage for the novel’s development into high art. He claims, “reality is of course interiorized in the novel in the form of the romances and dreams of chivalry, so that the novel as a whole becomes not the unquestioned and degraded storytelling of these popular adventure stories, but a reflection on the very possibility of storytelling itself, a coming to self-consciousness of narration” [6, pp. 174–175]. This conceptual component attributed to Don Quixote reinforces a sense of realism’s self-reflexivity, at the same time as discounting forms of the romance that persist throughout the nineteenth century. Jameson further develops a sense of the realist novel as in opposition to the romance in The Political Unconscious, whereby, as various theories “of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing operation … called … realistic representation has as its historic function the systematic undermining and demystification, the secular ‘decoding’, of those preexisting … narrative paradigms which are its initial givens” [6, p. 152]. In this fashion, Jameson sees realism as a reworking earlier narrative forms and therefore can be differentiated from novels that remain committed to earlier generic modes. We can see his relative lack of interest in Robinson Crusoe as a starting point for the novel in terms of its more traditional appropriation of the romance narrative. In the rare instances he has discussed Robinson Crusoe, the conceptual valences allowed it are not comparable with Don Quixote. In “‘If I Can Find One Good City I Will Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy”, Jameson will contrast the science fiction novels with Robinson Crusoe. He finds Defoe’s work lacking a comparative ability to separate “the elements of human labor from the underlying conditions of Being itself”, limiting its possibility in Marxist terms [23, p. 402.] In these moments, despite maintaining that generic boundaries are fluid and “interminable”, Jameson privileges realist examples that have developed away from the romantic mode as much as possible.
Is not … Manzoni’s great work, far from being a romance, rather one of the supreme embodiments of what we call the historical novel? … And are not Stendhal’s novels far more easily ranged under the more traditional notion of the Bildungsroman? All these uncertainties … are evidently generated by a “form”—the novel—which is not assimilable to either of the critical options of mode or of narrative structure. [6, p. 143]
We should note that, while Wuthering Heights (1847) appears as one of Jameson’s most visible examples of the romance in the nineteenth century in this chapter, the texts discussed remain predominantly continental. Jameson returns to Stendhal’s two major novels on several occasions, and he makes recurring references to Alessandro Manzoni, Joseph von Eichendorff, Alain Fournier, and Julien Gracq, amongst others. Brontë is the predominant example of the English tradition in the chapter, with Jameson making passing mentions of Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Outside of this chapter, Stendhal is the only figure who Jameson will return to with any regularity across his various references to nineteenth-century literature. Even as he points out the incompatibility of strict generic categorisation, his nineteenth-century canon privileges realism in terms of aesthetics, political agency and its relationship with the historical. Through this focus, he manages to discuss nineteenth-century literature in terms of complex formal and generic terms—in a way that speaks to poststructuralist notions of heterogeneity—but also maintains the strict sense of realist aesthetics found in Lukács. For Jameson, the French lineage is the strongest break from the ideologies of earlier storytelling modes. Curiously, it is within a framework of ethics that he will argue against the attribution of worth to cultural material, but also criticise certain literary forms.
Jameson is notoriously averse to moral thought, and vents his hostility to it at one point in this book. Ethics, in his opinion, is a simplistic opposition of good and evil, one which stands in for historical and political investigation.… Again and again in his work, he has set up this tattered straw man of ethical thought, partly to have the pleasure of bowling it over with a materialist flourish. He does not seem to grasp that moral language includes terms that this book uses in plenty, such as “beautiful,” “catastrophe,” “terrible” and “repellent.” It is hard to know why an anti-moralist should object to poverty or unemployment, or how he can explain in non-moral language why he finds the utopian impulse so precious. Does Jameson imagine that notions such as justice, freedom, solidarity and emancipation are non-moral? [24]
Even as Eagleton’s broad enquiry into Jameson’s sense of morality raises a number of problems for Marxist theory, traditional Marxist readings have repeatedly seen genres that reinforce this kind of value system as of dubious value. Jameson continues that kind of work here, once again following Lukács’ critical mode in particular. For example, Jameson instates a hierarchy of genre when he claims, “when, in something that looks like a tragedy, we encounter judgments of a more properly ethical type … the text in question is rather to be considered a melodrama, that is, a degraded form of romance” [6, p. 116]. We can further glimpse this sense of melodrama in a passage on Balzac: “Balzac … is pre-melodramatic, for at his particular stage in social history as well as in that of the development of the form, such ethical side-taking has not yet made its appearance, and we still have to do with something like an energy model, in which characters are ultimately weighed against each other in terms of their dynamism, whether for good or evil” [20, p. 64]. In this regard, Jameson’s categorisation of melodrama is idiosyncratically literary, and almost wholly concentrated on novels of the nineteenth century—despite melodrama’s historical ties to stage, musical performance and eighteenth-century forms. At the same time, it becomes apparent that within his various appeals to move away from ethical systems of thought, and particularly criticism that masks its deeper ethical tendencies, his criticism of particular genres has its own ideological or ethical imperative.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will encounter another set of difficulties related to melodrama in his treatment of George Eliot. Jameson once again engages with a notion of ethics in relation to melodrama, positioning Middlemarch as an illustrative example of how a “serious novel” is able to produce a villain. He poses this formal problem in terms of evil’s innate otherness: “the philosophical question par excellence, namely how my ‘good’ could ever be evil” [12, p. 116]. For the realist novel’s description of subjective interiority, this creates a difficulty in producing an antagonist in a more traditional sense. Jameson sees Eliot as developing from a writer of melodrama to one of high realism and he reads Romola’s antagonist Tito as a defining moment in this transition. Jameson discusses Tito’s complex motivations within the rubric of Sartre’s “mauvaise foi”, or bad faith: “The technical expression is borrowed from daily life and in particular from those disputes in which one of the interlocutors … produces one after the other reasons and demonstrations palpably in contradiction with one another for the sole purpose of winning the argument.… In Sartrean bad faith, this argument in interiorized” [12, p. 129]. The “crucial experiment” of Tito then reaches a more sophisticated level of characterisation in Middlemarch, whereby Casaubon and Bulstrode are seen as “former villains: and what they do and do not do for the plot in that status forms the supreme proof and example of that dissolution of melodrama I am arguing for, with all its results for the classic form of novelistic realism which it fulfils and undermines at one and the same time” [12, p. 130]. The manner in which Jameson sees Bulstrode’s motivations in particular as “moral laziness” allows for a manoeuvre away from the binary of good and evil. In this fashion, Eliot’s work is able to rise to the position of “serious novel”. Jameson argues that the conceptual nuances afforded the villains in Eliot’s Romola and Middlemarch free the realist novel from an older narrative concern of ethics—now the territory of a more degraded literary melodrama. He claims, “mauvaise foi exists in order to undermine the ethical binary and to discredit the metaphysical and moral ideologies of evil at the same time that the latter’s uses in plot formation and construction are replaced with at least some rough equivalent” [12, p. 137]. This discussion of a singular author, extrapolated in such a way as to represent a vast development in the nature of realism, may raise any number of questions, particularly in relation to notions of periodisation, literary production and history as a narrative construct. This particular narrative, however, seems predominantly essential only to the generic boundaries Jameson denotes between melodrama and high realism.
Later in The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will discuss Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in terms of this narrative: “The figure of Grandcourt … belongs unmistakably in the cast of characters of archetypal melodrama. Yet what can account for this remarkable formal regression on George Eliot’s part, in a work which otherwise in formal and stylistic energy and intelligence is in no way inferior to Middlemarch? Surprisingly enough, I believe the reasons are political” [12, p. 157]. With some difficulty, Jameson will frame Grandcourt within the context of Eliot’s own politics, an Enlightenment critique of the upper class, and the category of the gothic. The reader is ultimately to understand that the novel’s use of melodramatic tropes operates within a more complicated conceptual framework than Eliot’s earlier work. For Jameson, the novel is not a regression but an appropriation of an older melodramatic mode, becoming “a conjecture between the melodramatic denunciation of the persistence of the English ancien régime and the Utopian vision of another kind of organic community now set, not in the English past, but in some unfamiliar future landscape” [12, p. 159]. Jameson makes this argument in order to retain his earlier narrative of development in Eliot and the realist novel, but then abruptly returns to his own sense of genre as intrinsically fluid, seeing the majority of his examples—including his three paradigmatic French authors—in terms of persistent romantic or melodramatic elements built into the novel form itself. This is qualified in some sense, with Jameson claiming his argument has not been that realism means “the utter effacement of that manifestation of destiny and its récits which is the melodramatic mode: but only its weakening and tendential attenuation in the face of its opposite number, the scene, affect, the eternal present” [12, p. 160]. This remains in stark contrast to his strict treatment of the melodrama, along with the romance, across his career.
Implicit in this treatment of romance and melodrama is a lack of interest in even more “degraded” genres. Jameson does not often discuss supernatural and gothic tales, along with the sensation novel. He casually remarks that science fiction is “conventionally assigned an inaugural date of 1895—Wells’ Time Machine—if not 1818—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, but has never investigated the genre’s development over the nineteenth century [23, p. 57]. Considering Jameson’s ongoing work on the science fiction of the twentieth century, it is somewhat curious that he has rarely commented on earlier examples of the genre, or the antecedents found in gothic works like Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), for example. This uncharacteristic lack of writing on the science fiction of the period reinforces Jameson’s strict focus on realism. While he privileges twentieth- and twenty-first-century science fiction and often theorises why it possesses Utopian and critical possibility, he has not often commented on whether earlier examples of the genre attain these kinds of qualities. For Jameson, the realist novel is at the pinnacle of cultural production at the time, and this situation ensures his predominant interest in the form. In reviews of The Antinomies of Realism, critics have claimed that there are opportunities for productive extensions of Jameson’s most suggestive ideas. For Robert Brazeau “when read for the coherence of its argument, [The Antinomies of Realism] sometimes seems unconvincing, overly strident, or, worse yet, polemical for the sake of being polemical; however, it offers an enviably broad range of references and models expert critical-reading strategies that scholars can redeploy in the context of their own work” [25, p. 876]. In discussing how other literary genres, such as the gothic novel, would fit into The Antinomies of Realism’s narrative of realism and affect, scholarly production may find further uses for Jameson’s text. Ironically, any effort to see a larger group of texts within this model of the novel’s construction must move beyond his own restrictive delineation of the canon.
The question of gender in Jameson’s work becomes prominent in this consideration of genre. While not as regularly mentioned as some other critiques, feminist theorists have remained sceptical of Jameson’s treatment of gender. Elaine Showalter claims Jameson’s “political conscious, like his political unconscious, has been unabashedly phallocentric” [26, p. 118]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai and Kathleen Martindale have also criticised Jameson’s reading practice as inherently male [see 27, pp. 123–151; 28, pp. 298–331; 3]. For example, Sianne Ngai compares Jameson’s paranoid readings with the Cold War espionage films he has discussed, along with the positions of their typically male heroes. Nevertheless, these feminist enquiries have not extended to a discussion of Jameson’s treatment of women writers and genres that are more interested in female experience and space. While prominent figures such as Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison are interesting exclusions from Jameson’s canon, the absence of women authors in his view of nineteenth-century literature is especially noticeable, given their prominence in the period and the importance of feminine domestic space to many kinds of nineteenth-century novel. As evidenced in the proceeding discussion, Jameson’s French focus denotes a decreased interest in the English novel of the nineteenth century. His strict categorisation of realism also precludes any extended engagement with novels more aligned with the romance. In this fashion, his depiction of nineteenth-century literature seriously limits an inclusion of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell or Mary Shelley, to name some prominent examples.
Through these categorising operations, Jameson also restricts the importance of the “domestic” to notions of nineteenth-century experience, and nineteenth-century literature. As the blurb for the most recent edition of The Ideologies of Realism claims, Jameson’s work over the last forty years denotes “a shift from ideological analysis to the phenomenology of everyday life” [29]. His discussions of realism, however, continue to concentrate on the public and social spaces of the nineteenth-century everyday. When he does concentrate on the domestic, his primary example is that of Flaubert. Ngai claims that Jameson’s postmodern textual examples emphasise a particularly male understanding of contemporary social contexts, and his reading practice exemplifies a certain privileged and gendered kind of interpretive operation. Similarly, his insistence on a predominantly male group of novelists, ones who often aspire to an all-encompassing representation of Western capitalist society, and who concentrate on the external world of economics, law and trade, denotes another highly gendered understanding of nineteenth-century cultural material. Meanwhile, even as The Antinomies of Realism details a larger sense of the realist novel as containing its generic predecessors and rivals, and go some way to discussing at least one major nineteenth-century woman writer, some absences remain intriguing. For example, there is a conspicuous lack of interest in Jane Austen within an ongoing discussion about style indirect libre.2 Once again, when considering this eschewal of gender, we might refer to his academic training at a point in time when the canon was much more restricted. We might also point, however, to a wider reluctance to include issues of identity in his theoretical project. This is in spite of the rise of fields such as postcolonial, queer and gender studies, all of which concentrate on issues of identity to some degree. Jameson has never directly responded to criticism of his treatment of gender by several highly prominent theorists. This aversion to politics of identity aligns with his muted response to the controversy surrounding his essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, and the accusations of an empiricist and othering ideology levelled at him, particularly by Aijaz Ahmad. Despite an interest in class as it has spread in a global context, this has not stretched to any discussion of the particularities of identity marked by different kinds of postcolonial history. This extends to an almost complete aversion to questions of race across his career. In his treatment of nineteenth-century literature, we might position the lack of discussion of racial identity in relation to his aversion to American literature, although he also avoids this question in his chapter on Conrad in The Political Unconscious.
While the extremely limited discussion of race allows for only rudimentary commentary on its exclusion, Jameson has made a number of statements that belie a more obviously problematic approach to feminist discourse and to the notion of gender in nineteenth-century literature in particular. In The Political Unconscious, he claims, “The affirmation of radical feminism … that to annul the patriarchal is the most radical political act—insofar as it … subsumes more partial demands, such as the liberation from the commodity form—is thus perfectly consistent with an expanded Marxian framework, for which the transformation of our own dominant mode of production must be accompanied” [6, p. 100]. While Jameson aligns his model of the superstructure with feminist discourse, he rapidly folds a notion of class struggle based on gender into his own theory, and he rarely discusses this problematic again. In The Antinomies of Realism, he claims that “it is paradoxical and even a great contradiction that women figures … become the great stars of the nineteenth century novel … a situation in which the role of the adulteress becomes the negative or privative one of showing that there is no place for them in that bourgeois society whose representation was to have been the object of the novel in the first place!” [12, p. 148]. Yet, the book will remain uninterested in categories such as domestic fiction, or even female writers of the nineteenth century at large. Indeed, the two examples Jameson uses at this point are Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Jameson often mentions Madame Bovary in his work; however, he usually discusses the novel in terms of Flaubert’s style, not in his depiction of the middle-class female. In “The Realist Floor-Plan”, when he does bring up the notion of female experience in the novel, Jameson is quick to return the discussion to more generalised notions of class. In this manner, he claims “a more ambitious study of the social investments of Flaubert’s libido—the privileged relationship between women’s experience, as in Madame Bovary itself, and the construction of narrative—would probably explain this affinity less in terms of sexuality than in terms of social marginalization” [16, p. 378]. Jameson’s treatment of Ursula Le Guin in his larger discussions of science fiction foreground an interest in feminist notions of utopia, and he persistently makes brief acknowledgement of gender issues. Nevertheless, Jameson’s comments elsewhere commonly work in a different direction. Even if we do not criticise his work in these specifically feminist terms, this discussion of gender points to ways in which the totalising, impersonal and distant elements of his practice do not acknowledge what texts, forms and tropes are left out because of subjective or contextual choices, or what is privileged in their place.
Realism and the Nineteenth Century: Transformation and Decoding
As seen in the discussion of genre, Jameson’s early work closely connects the realism of the nineteenth century to the period’s economic and cultural development. Jameson often describes postmodern literature as lacking an ability to engage in the historical, while reading high-modernist novels as more aesthetically self-involved reactions to the political and economic. Realism, on the other hand, has a privileged relationship to the world it describes. Jameson’s descriptions of nineteenth-century capitalist growth can often be fragmentary and divergent, appearing in brief expository passages that describe the period as one of rapid and immense change. His treatment of literature, however, offers a more sustained and complex view of the century, one in which smaller historical moments are unpacked in conjunction with a text’s formal qualities. We can also understand the tension between these two facets of his project within the context of two dominant strands of his thought. In The Political Unconscious, he argues for a sense of historical change that is contradictory, which sees modes of production in conflict with each other, and he reads texts as being a witness to moments of “permanent social revolution”. At the same time, his narrative of reification, borrowed from Lukács, describes the spreading of capitalism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this manner, the mode of production emerges as the catalyst for all recent historical development. Within this framework, Jameson describes a linear escalation of capitalist expansion, one that permeates increasing areas of cultural and subjective experience. While in more recent work Jameson makes a self-conscious move away from reification theory, the concept continues to dominate his theories of capitalism and define his periodisation of the nineteenth and twentieth century [see 30, p. 182]. However, when looking at how these two senses of the historical, both contradictory and linear, appear in his discussions of nineteenth-century realism, this element of his project becomes more multifaceted.
the literary equivalent … of what Deleuze and Guattari … called “decoding”: the secularization of the older sacred codes, the systemic dissolution of the remaining traces of the hierarchical structures which very unequally and over many centuries characterized the organization of life and practices under the ancien régime and even more distantly under feudalism itself. The process is evidently at one with the whole philosophical programme of secularization and modernization projected by the Enlightenment philosophes, who thematize it essentially in terms of the defense of nascent science and the elimination of superstition or error, as well as the subversion of the older forms of theological power in the church and the monarchy. [16, p. 373]
Jameson repeats this narrative on several occasions, at a number of points in The Political Unconscious most notably, but also in Marxism and Form and essays such as “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990). In these moments, he characterises nineteenth-century literature in terms of its relationship to a developing capitalism, the reworking of older cultural modes and the retraining of human subjectivity.
Criticism of Jameson’s work has often focused on periodisation and his tendency to generalise. As Evan Watkins asserts, “Jameson generalizes, inveterately and persistently”, and this component is problematic for a number of detractors [11, p. 17]. Haynes Horne describes Jameson’s periodising as remaining “squarely within the modern, the millenarian, manifesting the desire to represent as whole that which can only be known in shards” [31, p. 269]. R. Radhakrishnan claims, “Jameson merely asserts his bias when he argues for the anterior reality of the totality.… He thus negates the very possibility, epistemic, theoretical, and historical, of de-totalized visions of accounting for reality” [32, p. 313]. In The Political Unconscious, however, Jameson asserts “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” [6, p. 34]. Horne argues against this conception of history because it is both nostalgic and involves notions of the meta-narrative disavowed by theorists such as Lyotard. For Jameson, however, narrativisation, generalisation and periodisation are problematic but unavoidable at the same time. He is also highly aware of the poststructuralist stance Horne and others have taken in response to his work. As Sean Homer has discussed, “Jameson’s theoretical wager was to present a version of Marxism which was at once open to the plurality of the new theoretical climate and at the same time able to maintain the priority of Marxist interpretation” [33, p. 38]. Indeed, in The Political Unconscious, he attempts to move outwards from this position, while still incorporating a number of poststructuralist ideas. For Jameson, history is decidedly non-linear, an absent cause and a totality we cannot perceive, yet we are confined within a series of linear narratives that are our only way of accessing history.3
While his sweeping depictions of the modernisation process remain disputed in criticisms of his work, Jameson’s language also works to complicate realism’s position within this narrative. He characteristically qualifies his portrayals of the nineteenth century in “The Realist Floor-Plan” by framing them within a rubric of contingency in the opening sentence: “the hypothesis to be tested in the following essay is a conception of the moment of novelistic ‘realism’ as the literary equivalent … of what Deleuze and Guattari … call ‘decoding’” [16, p. 373]. Even if his assertions about the period, in this essay and elsewhere, appear in the text as unproblematic and somewhat factual, Jameson often warily inserts phrases that limit these claims to provisional sets of terms, point to their theoretical difficulties, or frames them as if they are generally agreed upon notions in a wider discourse about realism. This tendency increases substantially in his later material—particularly in A Singular Modernity, or The Antinomies of Realism—where these types of sub-clauses or qualifying statements achieve a kind of ironic humour. At the same time, this has often led to the sense that critics of Jameson commonly discuss his work in only partial terms, or disregard the more nuanced aspects of his arguments.
moment in which a new systemic dominant gains ascendency is … only the diachronic manifestation of a constant struggle for the perpetuation … of its dominance, a struggle which must continue throughout its life course, accompanied at all moments by the systemic … antagonism of those older and newer modes of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance from it. [6, p. 97]
The readings of Joseph Conrad in The Political Unconscious set out to demonstrate this sense of history, with the author positioned between the two literary modes, and a multitude of historical tendencies. For Jameson, Conrad’s “place is still unstable … and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance.… In Conrad we can sense the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism (itself now become a literary institution), but also, tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture” [6, p. 206]. Here, the romantic or melodramatic elements of Conrad are symptomatic of the movement from realism to modernism but also new mass-cultural forms. At the same time, this larger narrative incorporates several smaller cultural tendencies that complicate Conrad’s position. Jameson sees religion, labour, collectivity and the use of the sea as a strategy of containment as formal solutions to varying elements of Conrad’s narratives, but also as reactions to a variety of social factors. Conrad’s moment in history is one of a number of complexities, in terms of both the novel’s generic makeup and the development of capitalism, as well as the way in which the cultural relates to the economic. In these moments, Jameson accentuates the variability of these interactions.
Philippe, capable of dealing with personal adversaries of his own stamp, is disarmed before the new and impersonal forces of nascent capitalism, and finds himself relieved of his fortune and worldly station … by the turn of events of July 1830, but above all, by the great banker-villains of the financial monarchy of Louis-Philippe: the Restoration will thus have been a transitional age between the personal energies of the Napoleonic era and the new financial power system of the July Monarchy. So it is that in one of those prophetic episodes in which Balzac’s novels are so rich, the former colonel of the Empire ends his life in a new kind of war, at the very frontier of a new kind of empire, during the campaign to seize Algeria from the Bey. [20, p. 65]
Here, Jameson once again avoids discussing the direct impingement of other modes of production on capitalism, as in the example of Tolstoy. Instead, the intensification of reification comes to dominate, and Jameson does not discuss tension between the French Revolution, the Restoration and the July Monarchy—which otherwise would seem to exemplify his notion of historical development as site of conflict and mediation.
At the same time as he characterises the nineteenth century as one of immense change, Jameson instates a sense of “the everyday” as becoming the dominant category of both our literature and our experience of society. In The Antinomies of Realism, he claims, “the nineteenth century, indeed, may be characterized as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over the rarer and more exceptional moments of deeds and ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109]. In this regard, Conrad’s position between two modes of both literature and capitalism allows Jameson to give such a revelatory reading of the author’s historical position. For example, the reading of Gissing in The Political Unconscious does not have the amount of detail and complexity found in the later Conrad section, apparently due to the authors’ respective moments in history and the velocity of their change. As Jameson states at the beginning of his chapter on Conrad, “the paradigm of formal history which must now be presupposed is thus evidently more complex than the framework of a movement from Balzacian realism to high realism with which we have previously worked” [6, p. 207]. Here, the relationship between strong readings and Jameson’s “properly historical” methodology becomes difficult. In this manner, we might relate the fatigue that critics have expressed in regard to symptomatic reading with the possibility for new and engaging readings in this mode. While, for the committed Marxist, academic trends should not exhaust Jameson’s theoretical potential, one wonders how this model can continue to generate work perpetually, as Jameson exhorts when asserting his model for critique as pre-eminent in The Political Unconscious.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will go some way to absolve this problem. The text focuses on a linear narrative of development in the realist novel, across a somewhat limited time frame, and extrapolates one central thesis—that of the increasing dominance of affect in the novel—into a multitude of areas. For Jameson, the introduction of affect influences realism in terms of character systems, the function of description and symbolism, the nature of villains, and the level at which emotion is described and experienced. In focusing largely on formal development, he is able to display an overarching historical tendency, but also the many ways in which novels integrate this change. These considerations of form also allow Jameson to discuss other notions of transformation in the nineteenth century: consciousness, morality, and alienation, amongst others. His focus remains predominantly on development, however, and once he has positioned certain texts as crucial modulations to the novel’s form, he rarely discusses still existing, residual examples of those earlier tendencies. Jameson’s lengthy career has seen the theorist move through two differing historical periods himself. His training takes place in traditional comparative literature departments, while his early work is published in a period dominated by New Criticism. Jameson’s rise to prominence, on the other hand, takes place as another moment is starting to take hold, one highly indebted to poststructuralism, but also defined by a variety of theories of identity. While his readings of postmodern and even modern texts have often remained atypical, his relationship to realism is one more defined by that earlier academic mode and has seen his work retain certain traditional elements. At the same time, his parameters for discussing these texts have remained somewhat fluid. The Antinomies of Realism sees Jameson remain committed to select ideas of genre, subjectivity and reification, but also self-reflexive enough to allow these terms to shift and evolve. While his textual examples only differ in minor ways to his early, inherited sense of the canon, the ways in which these texts fit into a broader sense of the nineteenth century, and a growing sense of its literature, has widened significantly.
The Antinomies of Realism, Everyday Experience and Narratives of Affect
While we can point to The Antinomies of Realism’s increased nuance in terms of historical development and genre—two large categories throughout Jameson’s career—this book must also consider the emergence of a major new category within his literary engagement: that of affect. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson traces “the two chronological end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale, [and] its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect” [12, p. 10]. In doing so, he provides an overarching narrative for the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century. For Jameson, the novel’s increased focus on representations of affect is intrinsically linked to modifications in the realist form. The novel becomes less interested in notions of plot and begins to concentrate on complex subjective experiences. In The Antinomies of Realism Jameson allows affect to remain fairly slippery, associating the term with “unnamed emotion”, “bodily sensation” or “intensities” [12, p. 44]. Most explicitly, he contrasts the novels of Balzac with those of Zola to delineate his sense of affect in the realist novel. Jameson claims, “In Balzac everything that looks like a physical sensation—a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric—always means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character: decent poverty, squalor … the true nobility of the old aristocracy, and so on. In short, it is not really a sensation, it is already a meaning, an allegory” [12, p. 33]. In comparison, Jameson portrays Zola’s lengthy descriptive sections as representations of affect without any intended allegorical or symbolic intent. For Jameson, Zola’s work generates a “pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is unsettled … by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the sensations that they press on the … observer.… The realm of the visual begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to float away in a new kind of autonomy. Precisely this autonomy will create the space for affect” [12, pp. 54–55]. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson concentrates on this “space for affect” and the modifications to the realist novel that allow for this shift in focus. In one chapter, for example, he discusses the prevalence of the network novel—one that sees a shift towards secondary characters at the expense of central protagonists—and argues that this kind of formal mutation differentiates realism from earlier literary modes. For Jameson, the large casts of minor characters in works by George Eliot, Benito Pérez Galdós and others shift “the reader’s attention from the plotline to the immediacy of the characters’ encounters with each other” [12, p. 98]. In doing so, Jameson characterises the nineteenth-century novel as focused on bourgeois everyday life and moving away from “more exceptional moments of heroic deeds and ‘extreme situations’”.
Jameson’s positioning of “affect” as central to The Antinomies of Realism is timely. Throughout his career, he has commonly pitched his work as an intervention in contemporary debates. The Political Unconscious, for example, engages with the poststructuralist theory that was gaining influence in the United States at the time. In doing so, Jameson made his argument for Marxist analysis more relevant to a broader academic audience. The book would have an enduring influence, particularly on symptomatic readings of literature, in the decades that followed. Similarly, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” works to connect the aesthetics of postmodernism with the historical development of late capitalism, claiming the social and economic changes in the period had a direct impact on is cultural forms. “Postmodernism” continues to influence scholarly discussion of both the late twentieth century and our contemporary moment. Jameson’s appropriation of affect in The Antinomies of Realism appears to be similarly shrewd, given the importance of affect theory in literary studies in the decade leading up to its publication. This sense is complicated, however, by Jameson’s work to distance his text from well-known examples of affect theory. He makes only glancing references to the area of study, describing affect as “a technical term which has been strongly associated with a number of recent theories which alternately appeal to Freud or to Deleuze” [12, p. 28]. Jameson mentions Sedgwick, Ngai and Flatley in a footnote, seeing them as somewhat illustrative of work in the area [see 12, p. 28n4]. He does not engage with them any further, however, instead claiming, “I want to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term ‘affect’ here” [12, pp. 28–29]. Elsewhere he cites Teresa Brennan and Rei Terada, but only briefly. Even as he seeks to distance The Antinomies of Realism from this broader discussion, however, Jameson’s text inevitably reframes our understanding of affect theory as it provides a historical account of nineteenth-century literature that positions representations of affective experience as essential to its development.
a new form of space, whose homogeneity abolishes the old heterogeneities of various forms of sacred space—transforming a whole world of qualities and libidinal intensities into the merely psychological experiences of what Descartes called “secondary sensations,” and setting in their place the grey world of quantity and extension, of the purely measurable—together with the substitution of the older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time by the new physical and measurable temporality of the clock and routine, of the working day. [16, p. 374]
The focus of the piece is Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart” (1877). As discussed above, the story is also the subject of Roland Barthes’ his well-known essay “L’effet de réel”. Jameson allows Barthes’ point regarding the short story’s description of a bourgeois home and its construction of realism: “The house itself is a pretext, and in that sense Barthes was not wrong to isolate a detail from this paragraph as his central illusion for what he calls ‘l’effet de réel,’ a purely connotative function in which a wealth of contingent details—without any symbolic meaning—emit the signal, ‘this is reality,’ or better still, ‘this is realism’” [16, p. 376]. Jameson nevertheless argues against Barthes by characterising the descriptive passages of “A Simple Heart” as engaging directly with the sense of reification as outlined above. Jameson claims that Flaubert’s story is unable to “recentre space, to stem the serial flight of infinite divisibility, to pull back the contents of the room into a genuine centered hierarchy” 16, p. 379]. Within this new sense of reified domestic space, a different kind of subjectivity emerges, one where affect becomes more dominant. Jameson emphasises the conclusion to the paragraph, which notes the room’s mustiness. For Jameson this is “the only concrete practice of perception still feebly surviving in a new odourless and qualityless universe.… This sudden … burst of ‘affect’ announces the fitful emergence of the subject in Flaubert’s text: the ‘musty smell’ inscribing … the place of subjectivity in a henceforth reified universe” [16, p. 380]. This discussion aligns very closely with The Antinomies of Realism, but makes an explicit connection between representations of bourgeois experience and the historical process of reification that overtakes both subjective experience and the domestic spaces we inhabit.
The end of the bourgeois ego … brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of affect.… This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it may be better … following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities”—are now free-floating and impersonal. [18, pp. 15–16]
Influential affect theorists have frequently commented on this phrase, including Lawrence Grossberg and Brian Massumi. In “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), Massumi writes, “there seems to be a growing feeling within … theory that affect is central to an understanding of our … late-capitalist culture.… Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect” [35, p. 88]. Massumi’s essay nevertheless contributes to this issue of vocabulary when he uses affect and intensities interchangeably. For example, in the essay Massumi states “for present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect” [35, p. 88]. He does not, however, acknowledge Jameson’s differing glossing of the terms in this context. Given the emphasis Jameson places on “intensities” in his depiction of postmodernity, Massumi’s comment seems somewhat misleading. Further to this, Massumi mentions the phrase “waning of affect” without engaging with the surrounding context Jameson is working within. Crucially, Jameson uses the term affect in “Postmodernism” in a different fashion to that commonly found in later affect theory. For example, Jameson references Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) to discuss affect. He states that the painting is “a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation … social fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will be here read as an embodiment … of the expression of that kind of affect” [18, p. 11]. Further to this, Jameson makes the argument about a waning of affect in a broader discussion of affective investment in specific texts. He notes how audience engagement differs between a work like The Scream and something like Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. He connects this changing relationship to cultural material to the “emotional ground-tone” of postmodernity.
The brief discussion of affect found in “Postmodernism” also has a very different focus to the more specific conceptualisations found in Sedgwick’s influential essays. Collected in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), Sedgwick’s early work on affect predominantly focuses on intersections of physical experience, cognition and psychology—as well as the complex interplay between subjectivity, performativity and culture. For example, Sedgwick focuses on the affect of shame and engages specifically with affect theorist Silvan Tompkins and psychologist Michael Franz Basch. Sedgwick claims “shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity” [27, p. 38]. She analyses both the fiction and theoretical work of Henry James through this particular lens, aiming to “offer some psychological, phenomenological, thematic density and motivation to what I [describe] … as the ‘torsions’ or aberrances between reference and performativity, or indeed between queerness and other ways of experiencing identity and desire” [27, p. 62]. In this work, Sedgwick mentions Jameson occasionally. Her criticism of “paranoid reading” implicitly includes Jameson’s famous directives for interpretation found in The Political Unconscious. The title of her famous essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” notably references Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. Sedgwick’s essay places several interpretive practices in a broader trend of “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Within this framework, Jameson’s Marxist symptomatic readings of texts stand as definitive examples of this tendency. Sedgwick states that the imperative for a hermeneutics of suspicion had “taken on something of the sacred status as Fredric Jameson’s ‘Always historicize’.… Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal verb ‘always’? … The imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion” [27, p. 125]. In the essay, Sedgwick does not discuss Jameson at length, instead going on to focus on Judith Butler and D. A. Miller. Using Tompkins’ concept of paranoia as a “theory of negative affect”, Sedgwick analyses the well-known interpretive practices of both scholars [27, p. 145]. In doing so, Sedgwick warns against paranoia’s “strong” or contagious qualities in critical work: “As strong theory … paranoia is nothing if not teachable. The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify even as it makes it compelling and near inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done” [27, p. 136]. This critique of hermeneutics of suspicion has had broad impact. For example, in Ugly Feelings, Ngai discusses the affect of paranoia and focuses on Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992). She argues that, in analysing 1970s conspiracy films, the text takes on a similarly paranoid world view, one that is necessarily male: “‘Conspiracy theory’ … becomes safeguarded through the genre of the political thriller as a distinctively male form of knowledge production. As Jameson himself suggests … the male conspiracy theorist seems to have become an exemplary model for the late twentieth-century theorist in general, and conspiracy theory a viable synecdoche for ‘theory’ itself” [28, p. 299]. We might align both Ngai and Sedgwick with a broader move towards “surface reading” within literary studies, which has often positioned itself in contrast to Jameson’s most influential work.
What is thus crucial here is the changeability of the affects, which in turn provides the registering apparatus, the legibility of the various states.… What the chapter … demonstrates is the ceaseless variability from elation to hostility, from sympathy to generosity … finally to disappointment and indifference: there are in principle in Tolstoy no moments of the narrative which lack their dimension of affect … one is tempted to say that these movements and variations are themselves the narrative. [12, pp. 84–85]
While Sedgwick’s discussions of shame focus on specific structures of feeling, Jameson here concentrates on temporal components of affect, as well as the subjective and literary registering of these states. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, he is most interested in the way affect becomes visible in the novel form and bourgeois experience more broadly. From this vantage point, we might view these two differing discussions of affect as more supplementary. Readings more interested in performativity or psychoanalytic frameworks might provide additional nuance to Jameson’s discussions of affect in the nineteenth-century novel. Similarly, Jameson’s notions of representation, subjectivity and the temporal rarely become the focus of work by Sedgwick and those she influenced, but these elements might work together to provide a more holistic picture of affective experience.
This sense of affect’s emergence has particular relevance for work by both Flatley and Ngai. In Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008) and Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, the political possibilities of affect are foregrounded throughout. In Affective Mapping, Flatley analyses polemic political texts. He articulates how both physical and emotional states can have specific political connotations—as well as how collectives can be formed through common feelings of depression or melancholy. For example, Flatley discusses W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the Civil Rights movement, claiming: “The disclosure of the historicity of subjective emotional life always beckons toward a potentially political effect. Through the articulation of a subjective experience of loss with a collective one, the affective map facilitates the transformation of a depressive disengagement into an … interest in … social and political histories” [36, p. 106]. In doing so, Flatley claims that affect has the capacity to be politically productive. Ngai argues similarly for the potential of collective identities to be forged through shared affective experiences. Through discussing envy in the film Single White Female (1992), Ngai argues for the importance of “bad exemplarity”: “the film mobilizes envy to demonstrate the capacity of female subjects to form coalitions based on something other than ‘similar love for the same object,’ to emulate attributes without identifying with them, and to function as examples that do not properly exemplify, actively defining and redefining the category they would seem only to passively reflect” [28, p. 168]. Through reclaiming broad cultural understandings of envy, Ngai is able to provide a new model for collectivity and argues for its potential political effectiveness. For both Flatley and Ngai, collective experiences of affect offer strategies for productivity in a hegemonic and reified contemporary situation.
This work might seem to sit in opposition to Jameson, who has seen affect as symptomatic of these same notions of hegemony and reification as they emerge and develop under capitalism. In certain later examples of his work, however, Jameson also engages with notions of collectivity that we might align with Flatley and Ngai. In “Symptoms of Theory, or Symptoms for Theory?” (2004), for example, Jameson outlines the development of critical theory and forecasts “a fourth moment for theory, as yet on the other side of the horizon. This one has to do with the theorizing of collective subjectivities, although, because it does not yet theoretically exist, all the words I can find for it are still the old-fashioned and discredited ones, such as the project of a social psychology” [37, p. 406]. Jameson has commonly referred to a notion of collectivity in his work on utopian thought. In Archaeologies of the Future, for example, he claims, “insofar as our own society has trained us to believe that true disalienation or authenticity only exists in the private or individual realm, it may well be this revelation of collective solidarity which is the freshest one and the most startlingly and overtly Utopian” [23, p. 230]. Jameson has also frequently concentrated on how cultural forms develop and perpetuate throughout history. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), he notes the “essential portability of all literary language. So what we want to ask ourselves first and foremost is not whether the work of art is or is not autonomous, but rather, how it gets to be autonomous; how language … manages … to organize itself into relatively self-sufficient bodies of words which can then be grasped by groups and individuals” [30, p. 415]. As such, we might align Jameson’s work with Flatley’s notions of affective mapping. Similarly, we could argue that both Flatley and Ngai have begun the work of conceptualising the “collective subjectivities” that Jameson sees as necessary. These overlapping notions of collectivity, autonomy and portability all suggest possibilities for social change and for working against an over-determined sense of reification in late capitalism. If affect within this framework has the capacity to be both productive and limiting, then a more thorough delineation of affective experience and capitalist standardisation seems necessary.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson refrains from discussing broader political contexts in any real depth. He predominantly moves away from symptomatic readings of nineteenth-century novel. This move is similar the slight changes to terminology regarding postmodernity and affect: he makes subtle manoeuvres that better align his work with contemporary discussion, but does not engage with criticism explicitly. He relates his analyses of the nineteenth-century novel with contemporaneous developments in western capitalism, but only in an indirect fashion. The scenes he chooses to reference from Tolstoy, Zola and others are often set in marketplaces or bureaucratic offices. Others take place in the kind of domestic environment that have lost a traditional sense of meaning, as discussed in “The Realist Floor-Plan”. This earlier essay connects the relationships between these differing elements of Jameson’s theoretical framework and The Antinomies of Realism’s focus on affect. As mentioned above, in “The Realist Floor-Plan” he relates Flaubert’s depictions of domestic interiors to the transformation of space under capitalism. Further to this, Jameson claims that novelists provide a key function in this process: “if we pause to interrogate the function of the writers and the artists of this transitional period.… The artists also are to be seen as ideologues … their service to ideology in the vastest sense of daily practices is … the production of a whole new world—on the level of the symbolic and imaginary” [16, pp. 373–374]. While Jameson’s discussion of realism might align with these broader notions of social and political development, he does not discuss these at length in The Antinomies of Realism. The text refrains from thoroughly articulating the relationship between changes to the form of the nineteenth-century novel and modernism’s reification of everyday experience. Jameson also steers away from discussing how the portability of the novel creates affective communities, and how these communities figure in that narrative of reification and standardisation.
because the singers know the songs will be repeated and because they know they will leave their traces in the songs, the songs afford them the ability to see themselves from the point of view of collective remembrance.… The songs … provide a nugget of affective experience for the audience, and then tell the audience how and why that experience is valuable, interesting, historically and politically relevant. This is the moment of what I have been calling affective mapping. [36, p. 153]
This work does not, however, consider a sense of political possibility. Flatley states that “the political potential of the affective map can lie nascent and unrealized in … aesthetic practice, waiting for an audience to take it up. The affective map must be met by the right circumstances for it to have actual galvanizing, transformative, collectively experienced effects” [36, p. 106]. Flatley does not expand further on the changing social, cultural or economic conditions that might allow for these affective communities to move towards collective action and be politically effective. Even if Flatley aims to avoid an account of this movement that is overdetermined, it remains that a thorough account of the historical situation in which the texts operate would add further nuance to his broader discussion. Through such an account, we may arrive at a stronger articulation of the relationship between the reified everyday and politically productive notions of affect.
Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson resists connecting his historical view of affect in literature to a broader sense of cultural development. In doing so, he perhaps aims to avoid criticism that his work is overly dependent on paranoid or symptomatic analysis. If we refer back to “The Realist Floor-Plan”, however, we are provided with a framework for social and cultural change that integrates his sense of affect in the realist form. This framework provides an opportunity to broaden some of the narrow focus of The Antinomies of Realism, as well as some of Jameson’s other brief engagements with the term affect. Similarly, scholarly work that concentrates on the cultural, performative and cognitive aspects of affect could stand to engage with some elements of Jameson’s “local and restricted” sense of affect. He aims to delineate certain temporal aspects of subjectivity and consciousness, as well as underlying structures of perception, which could be complementary to affect theory that instead concentrates on structures of feeling. Work that aims to sketch affective maps in a more detailed and multifaceted fashion might gain from integrating these differing components of subjective experience. Meanwhile, the politically informed aspects of work by Flatley and Ngai would be enhanced by engaging with Jameson’s sense of an emergence of affect in literary history. In The Antinomies of Realism, it can seem that he purposely avoids contemporary critical discussion. Despite his imperative to distance the text from broader discussions in affect theory, however, Jameson’s work might productively engage with these discussions. While alterations to terminology and shifts in interpretive focus over the course of his career might require some unpacking, Jameson’s work provides a framework for understanding how affect emerges alongside capitalist reification of everyday experience—and whether affect has any capacity to combat this ongoing historical situation.
- 1.
The article also contains work on psychoanalysis and Lacan that Jameson will excise in The Political Unconscious. Jameson wrote the article before the English translation of Deleuze and Guitarri’s Anti-Oedipus was published, which has a noticeable influence on Jameson’s book. It is possible that Jameson had read the original French publication by this time, but the text does not figure in this essay. While Jameson has since incorporated a number of psychoanalytic elements across his career, he has often done so in a partial or sceptical manner.
- 2.
We can see Jameson’s insistence on the French terminology over “free indirect discourse” as reflecting his sense that Flaubert’s makes the most important contribution to this development in literature.
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Critics such as Radhakrishnan have remained sceptical of Jameson’s attempts in this vein and of the ability of Marxist and poststructuralist theory to be reconciled in general. We can perhaps see the difference in terms of Jameson’s investment in the worth of macropolitics, while Radhakrishnan remains committed to a micropolitics of difference.