Fredric Jameson, the United States’s leading cultural critic and Marxist intellectual, died on September 22nd, 2024 aged 90.
For many students of literature and criticism over the past 50 years, the titles (and subtitles!) of some of Jameson’s best-known books promised tremendous intellectual adventure and political edge: Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971); The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981); Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
In the 1970s, Jameson showed how the work of western Marxist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno shed light on the politics of modernist writers including Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound and Franz Kafka. For this left-wing European tradition, no text or cultural phenomenon could be grasped in isolation. Rather, interpretation had to take account of the complex and still-unfolding story of the transformation of the material world and human consciousness by capitalism.
Working to develop a dialectical criticism capable of locating the literary work in its historical moment while fully respecting its aesthetic specificity, Jameson drew on western Marxism to ask whether fictional narrative could be said to possess a “political unconscious”? After all, the novel was an art form which in the hands of a Virginia Woolf or Henry James was seemingly devoted above all else to the nuances of the private, individual self. Jameson’s answer both absorbed and transcended the insights of Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a complex mode of allegorical or “symptomatic” reading.
And at the so-called “end of history” in the 1990s, did a triumphant global capitalist order exhibit a “cultural logic”? Jameson discovered one in Hollywood movies, swanky Los Angeles hotels, airports, Andy Warhol and Philip K Dick.
By now, Jameson may be somewhat sidelined on university syllabuses in Ireland and elsewhere to make room for gender theorists, ecocritics or later left-wing thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek or Mark Fisher. In most English departments, the study of literature and critical theory has itself steadily yielded ground to creative writing.
However, Jameson has exercised considerable influence on critics of Irish writing and film and may continue to do so for a new generation radicalised by the housing crisis and impending environmental catastrophe. Jameson gave keynote lectures at a 1996 conference on the Centenary of Cinema at the IFI in Dublin and at a University of Limerick conference on utopian Studies in 2004. Perhaps his best known contribution to Irish Studies was a Field Day pamphlet from 1988, Modernism and Imperialism, which appeared alongside essays by Edward Said and Terry Eagleton. Later, this formed part of a key sequence of three essays on Joyce in his book The Modernist Papers (2007).
It is no surprise that Joyce became a focus for Jameson. At the time of the latter’s first essay on the writer, Ulysses and History (1981), Joyce was almost universally assumed to be a non-political “humanist”. Readings of this type suggested that Joyce was a writer who taught us how to appreciate the richness of “everyday life”. Ulysses, the argument ran, showed readers a way past the reactionary repudiation of the messy modern world to be discovered in his contemporaries, including Yeats. Jameson was having none of this.
In accounts of episodes from Ulysses that have not lost their power to startle and intrigue, Jameson dismisses readings of Joyce based on parallels with Homer’s Odyssey or on whether the Blooms will succeed or not in sorting out their marriage. Instead, Jameson puts forward such claims as that Joyce “invented the single day as a new category of lived experience”, in response to the loss of earlier ways of experiencing temporality, In a mythically-infused chapter such as Cyclops, he refuses any simple dualism between history and the contemporary moment. Rather the “unconscious” of this part of Ulysses is “a kind of cauldron of stereotypes in which a host of ideological languages float and ferment ... released from all the layers of the Irish past”.
Jameson argues that Ulysses, set in an outpost the of British Empire, displays an interpenetration of metropolitan and colonial space. Crucially, Dublin has preserved older social forms – unavailable to writers from a more “advanced” English society – in its oral culture of chat and gossip in the streets and pubs. Yet the supposed emotional climax of the book, the conversation between Stephen and Bloom in the house on Eccles Street, takes place in an alienating, commodified city.
The system of pipes that bring water to Bloom’s kitchen tap – for instance – is given as much attention by Joyce as anything either character actually says. Nevertheless, according to Jameson, the Ithaca chapter is an important document not only in Joyce’s work but for modernism more generally. Why does an urban world, entirely produced by human labour, no longer represent home for women and men? And Jameson risks scandalising all kinds of readers of Ulysses, from feminists to Bloomsday fancy-dressers, in dismissing Molly’s final monologue as “vitalist ideology”.
Saying “yes” to life, he hints, as we currently “enjoy” it, risks closing ourselves off to the creation of any alternative, generally more satisfactory one. Yet Jameson is not simply a naysayer either. He finds – sometimes in the most unexpected places and forms – the traces and possibilities of collective agency and hence images of potentially utopian futures as well.
Provocative yet affable, generously enthusiastic about a huge swathe of global cultural artefacts and texts although unfailingly tough-minded in their analysis, Jameson brought the unfamiliar into our ken and estranged the familiar.
Readers sometimes complain that Jameson is showily erudite and writes unfathomably complex sentences. The same complaint was made of Joyce but braver readers have persisted anyway and maybe Ulysses now appears somewhat less forbidding than it did a century ago. One can only hope that critics will display the same tenacity with Jameson’s works. Richard Ellmann remarked of Joyce that we are only learning to be his contemporaries. True, and we may have some catching up to do with Jameson also.
Prof Emer Nolan lectures in the Department of English at Maynooth University
