The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Suicide as a Sort of Present

I don't run in these circles, so I wonder how Marxists on the street contemplated the (recent) death of the author (Jameson, in this case). This text seems meant as a gift to them. Here the author promises to decommission the Semiotic square, which, we hear, was once quite naughty in the way it functioned as non plus ultra of a closed literary analysis (albeit, one wonders whether these reports of misbehavior haven't been exaggerated. . .) To open up this square as if it were a kind of present seems to be the objective here.

The author spells it out in the case study of Conrad's Nostromo (1904): Construed as a bourgeois novel with the central problem of humanist self-development, the vertices of the Greimas show more square become The Ideal (S1), The Self (S2), Selflessness (-S2), and Cynicism (-S1). We don't like the paucity of this square and its determinate enclosure (resulting from (the author's) reading of this novel as a limited bourgeois project). The author's upbuilding solution here is to add to this figure (above) four additional vertices implied by the acknowledgement of the Political-Unconscious: i.e. Marriage (between Ideal and Selflessness), The Act (between Ideal and Self), History (Between Self and Cynicism (anti-Ideal)), and The Witness (between Selflessness and Cynicism).

The subsequent figure (below) appears to satisfy our Marxist-Freudian needs, though only 'til one looks it aslant (askance). It takes tilting the head tilted forty-five degrees to recognize this new figure is also one of those (notorious) geometrical Squares with the addition, intolerable even to Marxists, that now one's analysis must always move between the vertices of History (Marx) and Marriage (Freud). So we haven't made it out of the old box after all; our author appears to be re-gifting it in new wrapping paper. In our generosity we are prepared to forgive much from family and fellow travelers, though the gift of this text (i.e. the new-found ability to convict various literary works of unconscious Historical-Materialist impieties) is severe (for which we forgive it) and yet (unforgivably) not very funny. (Aside: this appears to be the persistent Differance between this author and Slavoj Žižek . . .)

So, to circle back, one wonders whether Marxists greeted Jameson's passing the same way feminists greeted the death of Beauvoir: The sense was, "well, now we can (finally) get to work." (Though, in this case, among much mourning, one wonders when (and if) the next wave of Marxism is coming . . .) It's notable that Jameson's life came to an end when the modern maxim of Biopower has become, "make live or let die." This is a recognition that, with the technological resources of an intensive care setting, there is no theoretical limit to the prolongation of a vegetative life on-vent. In such circumstances, we might count every death a suicide (in the good sense; a tactful withdrawal). David Foster Wallace would call this act of departing the scene at the right time, "Suicide as a sort of Present." show less

On one level, I like Jameson a lot. I agree with him about a lot of important stuff: yes, most art contains hefty doses of ideology (lies we tell ourselves so we feel better about living in a crappy world) and utopian hope (desire to live in a better world than ours). Yes, to understand this you need to pay attention to history and not just the book/movie/painting/building/symphony. Yes, it's a nice idea to read stories as attempts to solve real world problems.
But there's plenty not to like about this book. Primarily, Jameson treats the authors he writes about as naughty schoolboys who *never* tell the truth. Young Conrad, you keep telling me you're writing about the late-Victorian culture of honor, but I know better. Present thy show more buttocks for a class-war** caning! Whack! 'Lord Jim' is a proto-existentialist philosophy of the act, and you know it! Whack! This philosophy of the act demoralizes the capitalists and reveals to us, your reader, the omnipresence of class war! Whack!
Why not say that Conrad had some frigging clue about what he was doing? Why not see that Lord Jim just is about the late-Victorian culture of honor, that it criticizes that culture, and then ask how that critique might fit in to an historical understanding of the time? Well, doing that wouldn't let Jameson spend endless pages constructing Greimasian structural-quadrilaterals that eliminate any sense that a plot moves. That wouldn't let him make pointless, ignorant arguments about the Bourgeois Subject. That wouldn't enable him to take random pot-shots at Henry James for believing that people think stuff sometimes. In short, he might have to admit that he's no cleverer than the authors he's reading.
Let's do a Jamesonian reading of Jameson. The ideology is his insistence that structuralism and anti-humanism are somehow emancipatory, when experience (not to mention his reading of Adorno) should have taught him that they are deeply oppressive.*** Jameson's utopia, on the other hand, is his belief that literature matters to us, that it isn't just an autonomous formal jewel floating somewhere in the empyrean. Nice.


** His insistence on 'class war' as *the* structure of all history just seems silly in contrast to the ideology stuff, but it's important to note why: the only definition of class that can hold this kind of weight is Marx's. His definition is: the bourgeoisie owns the means of production, everyone else is a proletariat. The problem should be clear. Lawyers, for instance, don't own the means of production; nor do plastic surgeons. By contrast, the owners of small bookstores do. Now class obviously hasn't been eliminated. But in a post-industrial society, the bourgeois/proletariat model no longer makes any sense in political terms. So, the only model of class conflict that can be a prime-mover of history no longer makes sense in political terms. We need to re-think any reliance on 'class' as said prime-mover.

*** By which I mean, capital itself is structuralist and anti-humanist; the unreflective use of structuralism and anti-humanism as 'radical' theories is just bowing down before the thing you're trying to undermine. show less

"Monumental...Its learning and range of references are exceeded only be the imperial embrace of its complex argument, whose elaboration never imposes a sacrifice of clarity...Indispensable for all university and college libraries."―Choice

Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today.

Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that show more we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative.

Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.

The Political Unconscious is a masterly introduction to both the method and the practice of Marxist criticism. Defining a mode of criticism and applying it successfully to individual works, it bridges the gap between theoretical speculation and textual analysis. show less