1 Louis Althusser, “On Ideology,” On the Reproduction of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2014, 171–207.
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow: International, 1964, 42. As for the opposite number of the history of ideas, namely the history of technology, a significant note in Capital (London: Pelican Books, 1976, 286n6) complains of its woeful underdevelopment in Marx’s own day, a complaint that must not be taken for an assertion of the autonomy of that “discipline” either.
3 See The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, 29–33.
4 Louis Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses,” The Humanist Controversy and Other Texts, London: Verso, 2003, 49: “We observe that the subject of scientific discourse … is absent in person from scientific discourse, for there is no signifier designating it (it is an evanescent subject which is inscribed in a signifier only on condition it disappear from the signifying chain the moment it appears there—otherwise science slides into ideology).”
5 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Complete Works, vol. IX, London: Hogarth Press, 1959, 152–3.
6 Shifter is a linguistic term for blank words—pronouns, temporal and spatial expressions like “here” or “now”—whose meaning “shifts” according to the situation or context: the “subject”—I—can thus be considered as a personal or existential reference and as a generalized linguistic function. It is also obligatory, today, to recall Nietzsche’s warning: “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, London: Penguin, 1990, 48).
7 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 317: Our distant or past selves “we shall imagine with the animal warmth upon them; to them may possibly cling the aroma, the echo of the thinking taken in the act. And by a natural consequence, we shall assimilate them to each other and to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we think, and separate them as a collection from whatever selves have not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle let loose for the winter on some wide Western prairies the owner picks out and sorts together, when the time for the round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he finds his own particular brand.”
8 See Appendix A for a discussion of the functioning of the Greimas “semiotic square” and the way in which it generates seemingly distinct terms or ideas from the multiple meanings of their logical or semiotic starting points. For stimulating new experiments with the square, see also Phillip Wegner, Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014, and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia, Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2014.
9 See Haim Nahman Bialik, “Haggadah and Halakhah,” Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000.
10 I have relied on Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964), 4 vols., which usefully documents the distinction between three- and four-level allegories; and also on Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality, London: Bloomsbury, 1960.
11 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
12 Ibid., 97–8.
13 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970, 32.
14 On Guattari’s work in general, see Janell Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze, New York: Continuum, 2011.
15 See Chapter 5A. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986), 65–88.
1 What is called a dream contains (a) the literal level or dream protocol; (b) the raw material of the previous day and its surface “wish”; (c) an infantile desire from the earliest years; and (d) desire as such, “the immortal wish,” as Freud calls it on the final page of his dream book.
2 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
4 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1979, 152–57.
5 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 117.
6 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, London: Verso, 2016.
7 On the early work of Camus, see Alice Kaplan, Looking for the Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
8 Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, New York: Routledge, 2016.
9 Homer, The Iliad, 183.
10 Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
11 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. See Appendix B for a fuller discussion of Dennett’s thesis.
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl,” Situations I, Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
13 Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame, New York: Basic Books, 2000.
14 This was essentially Max Weber’s argument in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, Eastford, CT: Martino Press, 2010.
15 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, Thesis XIV, 395.
17 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso, 1998, 159–601. Still, it is permitted to speculate that this diatribe may be a preemptive strike against critics of his early endorsement of a kind of language mysticism: why else would the Frankfurt group later press him so insistently to write a stern anti-Jungian critique?
18 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014; Groupe Rhétorique générale, Paris: Seuil, 1970.
19 See, for example, Gregg Lambert, On the (New) Baroque, Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2009.
20 See Steven Shaviro’s argument in The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
21 Silberer was a sometime disciple of Freud whose experiments described the degradation of abstract ideas into images under conditions of lowered mental niveau: see, for example, Herbert Silberer, “Bericht über eine Methode,” Jahrbuch für die Psychoanalyse 1, 1909, 413–525.
22 See Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought.
23 See Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.
24 For a more general view of Badiou, see my “Badiou and the French Tradition,” New Left Review 102, 2016. I should add that I do not philosophically endorse Badiou’s concept of the four procedures, which are here deployed simply as an illustration of the uses of allegory in philosophy (although I have no objections to them, either).
25 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391, 395.
26 For new and unusual speculations on the matter, see Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
1 I have mainly relied in what follows, on Jan Plamper’s History of Emotions: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, which contains a useful bibliography of individual studies. The classic work on the subject is Harry Norman Gardiner, Ruth Clark Metcalf, and John Gilbert Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories, Knoxville, TN: American Book Company, 1937.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl,” Situations I, Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
3 See Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, New York: Basic Books, 2000.
4 See the Foreword to Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, New York: Dover, 1969.
5 See, for example, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
6 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” Écrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
7 Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, Paris: Cluny, 1940, Ch. 7, 153: “là, ou pendant le voyage, le hasard peut amener un mot qui donnera un nom à ce qu’ils sentent l’un pour l’autre; et après, en un instant, toutes les conséquences.”
8 Augustine, Confessions, London: Penguin, 1961, Book I, paragraph 7, 28.
9 For Sartre, see the chapter titled “The Look” in Being and Nothingness, New York: Gallimard, 1943; for Lacan see the discussion of the gaze as an object of drive in Seminar XI, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
10 An isotopie can perhaps best be described as the uniformity of a given code within a more complex discourse, in which to be sure any number of isotopies interact or interrupt each other: a narrative isotopie might, for example, emerge briefly within an essentially cognitive discourse.
11 What follows is the standard list of the traditional “seven emotions” of Chinese medicine.
12 V. K. Chari, Sanskrit Criticism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
13 Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011.
14 See Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.
15 See Plamper, History of Emotions, 147–72.
16 See Hegel’s thoughts on this allegorical pseudoscience in the phrenology chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, with its celebrated concluding sentence; “Spirit is a bone.”
17 I rely here principally on Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins, East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952.
18 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1990.
19 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1957, Pt. 1, Ch. 5, 138.
20 Prudentius, Psychomachia, vol. I, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1949, 288–91: “Wrath is beside herself and casts away the luckless ivory that has been false to her, the token of honor turned to shame. Afar she flings that unwelcome reminder, and wild passion fires her to slay herself. One of the many missiles that she had scattered without effect she picks up from the dust of the field, for an un-natural use. The smooth shaft she fixes in the ground and with the upturned point stabs herself.”
21 Glenn Most, “Anger and Pity in Homer’s Iliad” in Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Home to Galen, eds Susanna Braun and Glenn W. Most, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
22 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, New York: Dover, 1954, Book II, 2, 1380.
23 Ibid., 1385.
24 David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Greek Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
25 Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
26 See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, New York: Verso, 2013.
27 The term is that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 2014.
28 See Appendix A.
29 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, 324–39.
30 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 53–54.
1 The fundamental discussion of Hamlet is to be found in Jacques Lacan, Seminar VI, Le désir et son interprétation (1958–1959), March 18 and April 8, 1959.
2 Bertolt Brecht, Collected Poems, 1913–1956, London: Liveright, 2019.
3 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, London: Routledge, 1962.
4 René Girard, “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge: Vengeance,” A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
5 Jules Henry, Jungle People, New York: Vintage, 1964; and see also, more notoriously, Napoleon Chagnon, The Yanomamö, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997.
6 Lacan’s mirror stage explicitly includes aggressivity: see “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
7 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, n. 281, 323.
8 Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba, Düsseldorf: Klett-Cotta, 1956.
9 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 395.
10 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso, 1998, 65–74.
11 Margaret de Grazia thoroughly explores the archaic, unmodern sociopolitical background of the play in Hamlet without Hamlet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. We will come back to regression in a different context at the end of this chapter.
12 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, New York: New Directions, 1947, 46–47.
13 Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, Volume II, Part 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 237.
14 Lionel Abel, Metatheater, New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. “Hamlet is … a man with a playwright’s consciousness who has just been told to be an actor … he is the first stage figure with an acute awareness of what it means to be staged … After Hamlet it would be difficult for any playwright to make us respect any character lacking dramatic consciousness.” (47, 57–58).
15 This is a version of the debate about the “sincerity” of the actor, which rages from Diderot and Brecht to Stanislavski and method acting.
16 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
17 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. I argue in Chapter 7 that Auerbach’s fundamental subject was the relationship of the development of syntax to what he called realism (“earthly realism,” the realism of the “creature” or the created).
18 William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Lexington, KY: Create Space, 2011; page references in text.
19 See note 1; page references to the 2000 noncommercial edition issued by L’Association freudienne internationale.
20 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (erste Ausgabe von 1900), reprinted in Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1999, 183.
21 Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
22 Écrits, March 18, 1959, my translation.
23 Gilles Deleuze, “Postulats de Ia linguistique,” Mille Plateaux, Paris: Minuit, 1980. “C’est toute conversation qui est schizophrénie, c’est la conversation qui est le modèle de Ia schizophrénie, et non pas l’inverse” (Cinema II, Paris: Minuit, 1985, 299).
24 The theory of the four discourses, in Seminar XVII, trans. Russell Grigg, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
25 William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 105–7.
26 Alexander Welsh, Freud’s Wishful Dream Book, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
27 “Dream of the Smoked Salmon,” Standard Edition IV, 147; Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, 622.
28 See Seminar VI, November 12 and 19, 1958; and also “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir” in Écrits, which is a kind of summary of the Seminar itself.
29 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 174.
30 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” Selected Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.
31 If we push a little further here, following distorted unconscious anxieties, not only with succession, but also with the generations and the very continuity of history itself, the uncle becomes a figure of matriarchy, of which anthropologists today tell us behind its Utopia of a feminine non-power lies the authority of the mother’s brother. In that cases, and on this level of the allegorical primal fantasy the adulterous union of Claudius and the queen dissolves into a matriarchal power structure, a kind of regression into that earlier mode of production which preceded the patriarchy of the murdered king—a fantasy in which Utopian desire mingles disturbingly with Oedipal loyalties and sexual confusion becomes the very element of political doubt and ideological hesitation.
32 Slavoj Žižek projects a suggestive permutation scheme for the Lacanian orders (“The Imaginary with a Symbolic emphasis, the Real from the vantagepoint of the Imaginary,” etc.): see Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Oxford: Routledge, 2004, 102–3.
33 The Lacanian interpretation finds some confirmation in Walter Benjamin’s reading of Hamlet as Trauerspiel: “The death of Hamlet, which has no more in common with tragic death than the Prince himself has with Ajax, is in its drastic externality characteristic of the Trauerspiel; and for this reason alone it is worthy of its creator: Hamlet, as is clear from his conversation with Osric, wants to breathe in the suffocating air of fate in one deep breath. He wants to die by some accident, and as the fateful stage-properties gather around him, as around their lord and master, the drama of fate flares up in the conclusion of this Trauerspiel, as something that is contained, but of course overcome, in it. Whereas tragedy ends with a decision—however uncertain this may be—there resides in the essence of the Trauerspiel, and especially in the death-scene, an appeal of the kind which martyrs utter.” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London: Verso, 1998, 136–37.)
The reading suggests an interesting kinship of Benjamin’s foundational opposition (Tragedy/mourning play) with the Lacanian distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
34 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954.
35 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 2007, 126.
36 Ella Sharpe, Dream Analysis, New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978.
37 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 39.
38 Ibid.
39 Alexander Mitscherlich, Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1963.
40 Gramsci’s famous diagnosis is often quoted: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers, 1971, 275–76).
1 Charles Youmans, Mahler and Strauss in Dialogue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
2 Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Leipzig: Elibron, 2005, my translation.
3 Michael Puri, “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” 19th Century Music 25:2–3, 2002, 228.
4 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948, 133.
5 In Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, 4.
6 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115:2, 1990, 240–57.
7 James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; Bryan Almén, A Theory of Musical Narrative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008; Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
8 Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
9 Immanuel Kant, “Antinomies: The First Conflict,” Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 470–75; and see also, famously, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, New York: New Directions, 2013, 37–40.
10 See also David B. Greene, Mahler, Consciousness, and Temporality, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984.
11 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
12 Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 101.
13 Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and eds. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958.
14 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 151–52.
15 Figures reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear from Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 103, 114.
16 See “Transcendence and Movie Music in Mahler,” in The Ancients and the Postmoderns, London: Verso, 2015.
17 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 80–81.
18 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: The Guermantes Way, New York: Vintage 1982, 686–87.
19 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
20 Charles Rosen has, for example, read Haydn’s sonata form in terms of eighteenth-century theater (The Classical Style, New York: Norton, 1998).
21 Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, 26–27.
22 James Buhler, “‘Breakthrough’ as a Critique of Form,” Nineteenth-Century Music, 20: 2, 1996, 126–43.
23 Ibid., 127.
24 Tony Duggan, “The Mahler Symphonies,” May 2007, musicweb-international. com.
25 Ibid.
26 Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, 133–34.
27 See note 6 above.
1 The whole matter of nationalism should perhaps be rethought, as Benedict Anderson’s interesting essay Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983, and Tom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain, London: New Left Books, 1977, invite us to do.
2 I have argued elsewhere for the importance of mass culture and science fiction. See “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (1979).
3 The essay was written for an immediate occasion—the third memorial lecture in honor of my late colleague and friend Robert C. Elliot at the University of California, San Diego. It is essentially reprinted as given.
4 William Bennett, “To Reclaim a Legacy,” text of a report on the humanities, Chronicle of Higher Education, XXIX, 14, Nov. 28, 1984.
5 The classic texts are Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), London: Penguin, 1972, and the earlier, but only more recently published section of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, often called Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: NLB/Penguin, 1973, 471–514. See also Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and “Primitive” Societies, trans. Mary Klopper, New York: Monthly Review, 1972; Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975; and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men,” Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 139–271.
Besides mode-of-production theory, whose validity is in any case widely debated, there have also appeared in recent years a number of important synthesizing works on third-world history as a unified field. Three works in particular deserve mention: L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William Morrow, 1981; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; and Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Such works suggest a more general methodological consequence implicit in the present essay but which should be stated explicitly here: first, that the kind of comparative work demanded by this concept of third-world literature involves comparison, not of the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from one another, but of the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses; and second, that such an approach suggests the possibility of a literary and cultural comparatism of a new type, distantly modeled on the new comparative history of Barrington Moore and exemplified in books like Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, or Eric Wolf’s Peasant Revolutions of the Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. Such a new cultural comparatism would juxtapose the study of the differences and similarities of specific literary and cultural texts with a more typological analysis of the various socio-cultural situations from which they spring, an analysis whose variables would necessarily include such features as the inter-relationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the configuration of traditional forms, the relationship to Western influences, the development of urban experience and money, and so forth. Such comparatism, however, need not be restricted to third-world literature.
6 See, for example, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: New Left Books, 1974, 435–549.
7 Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth, 1958, Volume XII, 457.
8 See for example Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, trans. E. W. Dickes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 105: “When we hear of alchemy, or read books about it we should always keep in mind that many of these books can also be read as books of sex; in a similar way, books on the art of war, too, can be read as books on sexual relations.”
9 Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972, 1–6.
10 Ibid., 2–3.
11 Ibid., 40.
12 Ibid., 72.
13 Ibid. I am indebted to Peter Rushton for some of these observations.
14 Ibid., 5.
15 Socialism will become a reality, Lenin observes, “when the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of human intercourse” has “become a habit” (State and Revolution, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973, 122).
16 See the interesting discussions in Stephen Gilman, Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867–1887, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
17 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, New York: Academic Press, 1974.
18 For example: “El Delfin habìa entrado, desde los úiltimos dias del 74, en aquel periodo sedante que seguìa infaliblemente a sus desvarìos. En realidad, no era aquello virtud, sino casancio del pecado; no era el sentimiento puro y regular del orden, sino el hastìo de la revolutión. Verificábase en él lo que don Baldomero habìa dicho del pais: que padecìa fiebres alternativas de libertad y de paz” (Fortunata y Jacinta, Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1968, 585, Part III, Ch. 2, section 2).
19 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 274.
20 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960; and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, respectively.
21 Sembene Ousmane, Xala, trans. Clive Wake, Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1976, 69.
22 I am indebted to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga for the suggestion that in the Latin American novel, this ambivalence may be accounted for by the fact that the archetypal Dictator, while oppressing his own people, is also perceived as resisting North American influence.
23 Ousmane, Xala, 66.
24 “Generic Discontinuities in Science Fiction: Brian Aldiss’ Starship,” Science Fiction Studies, no. 2 (1973), 57–68.
25 Xala, 110–11.
26 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977: Section B, Ch. IV, Part A-3; “Lordship and Bondage,” 111–19. The other basic philosophical underpinning of this argument is Lukács’ epistemology in History and Class Consciousness according to which “mapping” or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the dominated rather than the dominating classes. Mapping is a term I have used in “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, #146 (July–August, 1984), 53–92. What is here called “national allegory” is clearly a form of just such mapping of the totality, so that the present essay—which sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature—forms a pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States.
1 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, London: Verso, 2008.
2 “The contemporary world revolution presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the rural areas.” Lin Biao, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War (1965),” The Selected Works of Lin Biao, New York: Prism Key Press, 2011.
3 A thesis defended by Stalin’s latest biographer, Stephen Kotkin, in Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power, New York: Penguin, 2015.
4 See Chapter 1, page 44, note 22.
5 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2016; see especially page 24 on simultaneity.
6 Gilles Deleuze, “Un peuple à venir,” Cinema II: The Time-Image, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985.
7 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
8 Der Spiegel, June 22, 2017, 120; and see his recent work Spheres, much of which turns on space and population.
9 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1, London: Verso, 2004.
11 For further discussion of these dilemmas, see Appendix C.
12 Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal Carcere, 19 December 1926, 14. I am grateful to Alberto Toscano for this reference. To which we might add Walter Benjamin’s contribution, in his essay on Naples: “The well-known list of the seven deadly sins situated pride in Genoa, avarice in Florence (the old Germans were of a different opinion—their term for what is known as Greek love was Florenzen), voluptuousness in Venice, anger in Bologna, greed in Milan, envy in Rome, and indolence in Naples” (Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913–1926, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 418). Proust’s profoundly French yet altogether pan-European aristocracy might also serve as a useful reference: “M. de Charlus went further than merely failing to desire ardently to see France victorious; without admitting it to himself, he wished, if not that Germany should triumph, at least that she should not be crushed, as everybody else was hoping would happen. The reason for this was that in these quarrels the great groupings of individuals called ‘nations’ behave to a certain degree like individuals themselves. The reasoning that guides them is entirely subjective and is being continually modified by their passions, as in the case of people at odds in a lovers’ quarrel or a domestic dispute, such as a son’s disagreement with his father, or that of a cook with her mistress or a wife with her husband. The nation that is in the wrong nevertheless believes that it is in the right—as was the case with Germany—and the nation that is in the right sometimes advances arguments in support of its claims which it considers unanswerable only because they are in accordance with its passions. In quarrels between individuals, in order to be absolutely convinced that one or the other party is in the right, the surest way is to be that party himself; an onlooker will never uphold him as completely. Now, in a nation the individual, if he is really a part of the nation, is only one cell in the larger individual, the nation. Misleading people by propaganda is a meaningless phrase” (The Past Recaptured, Vol VII of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. F. A. Blossom, New York: Random House, 1932, 797–98).
13 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
14 Ibid., 132.
15 Ibid., 131.
16 Ibid., 133.
17 Ibid., 135.
18 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991, New York: Vintage 1996.
19 The Communist Manifesto; I have deliberately omitted the conclusion of this quote, which reads in full: “a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
20 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, New York: New Directions, 2013, 37–40.
21 Basic correctives to this scientific idealism are to be found in classic essays by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossman in Gideon Friedenthal and Peter McLaughlin, eds., The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Berlin: Springer, 2009.
1 The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 335.
3 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Boston: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932, 411: “Dickens’ figures belong to poetry, like figures of Dante or Shakespeare, in that a single phrase, either by them or about them may be enough to set them wholly before us.”
4 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, eds Thomas P. Roche Jr. and C. Patrick O’Donnell Jr., London: Penguin, 1979. All references in the text are to this edition and are made in this format: Book/Canto/Stanza/Page.
5 A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, 293.
6 Harry Berger Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
7 Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 254.
8 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
9 Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Page numbers in the text refer to this edition.
10 James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 78, 93.
11 Page numbers refer to Charles Singleton’s edition of The Divine Comedy, Vol. I: The Inferno, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
12 Richard Lansing, ed., Dante Encyclopedia, London: Taylor & Francis, 2000.
13 Ibid., by Casella, 1865. (Lansing’s summary of the four types of traditional interpretive options oddly resembles the fourfold system itself: first, the theological system of sins; second, the political vices; third, Florence and its intolerable realities for Dante himself; and finally—what looks closest to Casella’s “justification”—an assimilation to the systems of Inferno and Purgatorio: allegorical, anagogical, moral, and textual.)
14 A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in the Faerie Queene, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961, 24, 9–10.
15 Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Imagery, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
16 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
17 Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene,” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
18 Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, 84.
19 Berger, Revisionary Play, 51–52.
20 Ibid., 166–67.
21 Tuve, Allegorical Imagery.
22 See Thomas P. Roche, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, 68–69.
23 Ibid., 70.
24 Ibid., 72–84.
1 The 1938 essay “Figura” has been reprinted in Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
2 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
3 All references in the text are to Charles Singleton’s edition of the Commedia, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, and are expressed in the following format: (Canto/verse/page) where the context identifies the canticle.
4 The minor epic forms are, for Lukács, what survive the breakup of the traditional genres in modernity: see Theory of the Novel, 50–55.
5 See, for example, Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
6 Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
7 Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal Carcere, September 20, 1931 (Rome: Einaudi, 1947), 170–74.
8 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetics, Boston: David R. Godine, 1984; and see for Croce’s oblique and rather plaintive allusion long after the fact, “De Sanctis/Gramsci?” Lo spettatore italiano, V, 1952, 294–96. See also Croce’s comments on the “explanations” of the temporality of Farinata’s circle of hell: “L’autore doveva pagare un debito ai lettori del romanzo teologico-etico, et lo paga alla prima occasione, tutto in una volta, per non averci piú a pensare.” La Poesia de Dante (Bari: 1943), 78; ironically for us, Croce reserves the epithet “allegorical” for just such nonpoetic, nonexpressive, prosaic, expository segments of the Commedia.
9 See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (Seminar VII), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: Norton, 1997.
10 Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2007, 42.
11 Ibid., 55.
12 Ibid., 48 (the quote is from Willamowitz).
13 Ibid., 13.
14 Jeremy Tambling, Dante in Purgatorio, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010.
15 Ibid., 221.
16 Ibid., 210.
17 Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, 158: “We have to play the same game with our characters.”
18 As in the Talmudic distinction between doctrine and illustrative tale, Halakhah and Haggadah (see Preface, note 9).
1 All references to act and page of Insel edition (Köthen, 1956); English translations by David Constantine, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy (London, 2005).
2 Thus, Pound used to say that performance is a more powerful vehicle for interpretation than mere literary criticism; and Stein’s “interpretation” is recorded on ZDF, 2005, as well as memorialized in a volume of essays and notes: Peter Stein, Inszeniert Faust, Koln: Dumont, 2000. I must also thank Franco Moretti for introducing me to the essential critical text, Heinz Schlaffer’s Faust Zweiter Teil, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981.
3 Briefe Goethe-Schiller, Zürich: Artemis, 1949, 371.
4 Richard Alewyn, Probleme und Gestalten: Essays, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983.
5 Alewyn, Probleme und Gestalten, 278.
6 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Schlussszene des Faust,” Noten zu Literature, vol. 2, Frankfurt, 1997.
7 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, Basel: Birkhaüsen, 1945, 475–76, June 6, 1831.
1 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852, vol. I, Paris: Pléiade, 1980, 31.
2 Roland Barthes, “L’Effet du reel,” Communications, no. 11, Paris: Seuil, 1968, 84–89.
3 Quoted in Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, 238.
4 Walter Benjamin on Proust, in Selected Writings, Volume II, 237.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 279–84.
6 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1919–1991, New York: Vintage, 1996, 287.
7 A concept he draws from Marc Augé.
8 See The Modernist Papers, London: Verso, 2016.
9 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
10 See in particular the chapter on “the determinations of reflection” in The Greater Logic.
11 Cloud Atlas, New York: Random House, 2004. I have discussed this work as a historical novel in The Antinomies of Realism, London: Verso, 2015. I should add that one of the peculiarities of the text lies in the differences between the US and the UK editions, the former, on which I have relied here, being an earlier version than the latter.
12 To be sure, and all morality aside, it is true that this motto holds for current evolutionary theory as well (which, having abandoned the old-fashioned telos of vitalism or idealism, has now invented the allegedly materialist goal of “complexity”), where life still feeds on life: “The earliest organisms may have extracted their energy from chemicals below the earth’s surface. They ‘ate’ chemicals. If the earliest organisms were archaebacteria, they probably extracted the energy they needed from chemical vents deep within the seas. But quite early some organisms learned to acquire energy by eating other organisms. In this way, there emerged a clear distinction between primary producers, which extract their energy from the nonliving environment, and organisms higher up the food chain that feed on other living organisms, including the primary producers. If these had been the only ways of extracting energy, then the history of life on Earth would have been limited by the energy supplied from the earth’s molten core and available to organisms living deep within the sea. But by at least 3.5 billion years ago, some organisms were living near the surface of the seas, where they learned to feed on sunlight.” David Christian, Maps of Time, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 109–10.
13 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Matérialisme et révolution,” Situations III, Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
14 Tom McCarthy, Remainder, New York: Vintage, 2007.
1 From the author’s foreword to Algirdas Julien Greimas’s On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970).
2 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. The interested reader will note some modifications of my own position on this classic work since the first publication, in 1976, of “Figural Relativism; or, The Poetics of Historiography,” reprinted as a chapter of The Ideologies of Theory.
3 See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, 165ff. and 253ff.; or “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney,” Science-Fiction Studies 2, March 1975, 31–42.
4 Thus, for example: “Certainly the greatest philosophers … resist reduction to the archetypes provided by Pepper. If anything their thought represents a mediation between two or more of the kinds of doctrinaire positions which Pepper outlines” (Metahistory, 13, note 7); or this: “The dialectical tension which characterizes the work of every master historian usually arises from an effort to wed a mode of employment with a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is inconsonant with it” (Metahistory, 29).
5 Ibid., 29.
1 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown, 1991. Page references in the text refer to this edition of the book.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 179.
1 This appendix is an excerpt from Fredric Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies’,” Ideologies of Theory, London: Verso, 2009, 33–37.