|
a totalitarian
view of history
|
Like Hegel and Lukacs, Jameson
historicizes literary productions and holds a totalitarian view of history.
But Jameson takes into consideration not only the historical conditions
of the literary works but also those of the literary critics. To him, moreover,
literature disguises but not reflects, and the "absent cause" for the modes
of literary production and criticism is ideology, instead of spirit or
essence.
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ideologies
& meta-
commentary
|
All ideologies, to Jameson,
are "strategies of containment" through which society provides an explanation
of itself and suppresses the underlying contradictions of History. Literature
as well as literary criticism is necessarily ideological. Whereas literature
seeks to disguise ideological conflicts beneath its language or through
its mechanism of censorship, a genuine criticism reveals the traces of
censorship in literature, and also recognizes the historical origins of
its own interpretive concepts or categories. This kind of criticism is
what Jameson calls metacommentary,
or dialectical criticism.
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interpretation
|
All interpretation is a
rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code
(or chosen categories), and a dialectical critic is conscious of the historicity
of his master code and tries to find out its historical origins. Marxism's
master code, to Jameson, is the "mode of production," which projects
a total synchronic structure that transcends and demystifies the other
critical methods.
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The Marxist dialectical
criticism also demystifies literary "great works." Instead of giving an
immanent analysis of literary texts, it puts the texts into their historical
context and tries to find out how and why they are symptomatic of the suppression
of History. Dialectical criticism, in this sense, dissolves the reification
of a literary text (or trend) back into its original praxis.
|
modern-
ism
|
Jameson himself dereifies modernism and finds out its interrelations
with the consumer society. On the one hand, modernist works are aestheticized
reactions to the sordid reality of the consumer society: they
are ways for the writers to manage their fears of the society, to disguise
them, and drive them underground. On the other hand, modernism supports
the economics of the consumer society (rapid production
and consumption) by producing new shapes and patterns and by offering itself
as a commodity. What Jameson does to modernism is, to borrow
Gertrude Stein's words, to "recover its ugliness" under its aesthetic surface. |
Modernism/
Realism
debate
|
In the Modernism/Realism debate, then, Jameson is on the
side of realism. He denies the Frankfurt School's belief in the negativity
and subversive effect of modern works of art. Also, he is against centralizing
modernism and placing the traditional literary forms (e.g. realism) in
periphery. His method, instead, is that of Marxist historicism, which juxtaposes
the limits and potentialities of our own socioeconomic moment with those
of the past and allows the past to "judge" us. Modernism, therefore, is
in no way superior to realism, both being a historical product of their
times. There is, moreover, a dialectical relation between them, corresponding
to that between classical capitalism and monopoly capitalism. Modernism
denies, transcends, but also maintains realism; it is, in other words,
a "canceled realism." Realism thus maintains a persistent validity in so
far as 'classical' capitalism continues to subsist as the fundation of
consumer capitalism.
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|
critique
|
Jameson's metacommentary, for me, both enpowering
and problematic. Since every mode of literature as well as interpretation
is necessarily ideological, metacommentary cautions us against the illusions
a literary work may provide and reminds us to be aware of our own ideological
position. As Jameson points out, "ideologies can...never be evaluated independently
of their function in a given historical situation." The totality of life
that realism presents through its interlocking structure, therefore, is
not to be critiqued single-mindedly as some metafictionists do. The "plotlessness"
of metafictions or their exposure of the artificiality of literary construction,
on the other hand, may disguise their own sense of failure to deal with
the postmodern world. (This is only a hypothesis.)
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|
My question about Jameson's metacommentary is
that, since every interpretation is historically conditioned, how could
a Marxist criticism "transcend" the other interpretive methods and be free
from its own ideological limitations? How could a totalitarian view of
history be possible for a historically situated individual?
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|
Although Jameson is right in adding a third term, postmodernism, to
the Modernism/Realism debate, the correspondence he works out between classical
capitalism, monopoly capitalism and a "multinational" capitalism on the
one hand and realism, modernism and postmodernism on the other hand is
to me too simplifying. And despite his claim to remove the ethical content
from the opposition between realism and modernism, he himself does not
refrain from evaluating modernism. It is true that both realism and modernism
necessarily reflect the ideology they seek to disguise, but they can also
be critical and subversive of their ideology (for example, Joyce's Dubliners)--just
as a Marxist can be critical of the others' ideologies.
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|
To Jameson, Marxism in the post-industrial world of monopoly capitalism
should explore the "great themes of Hegel's philosophy--the relationship
of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and abstract, the concept
of totality, the dialectic of appearance and essence, the interaction between
subject and object." |
[Bibliography]
[Relevant
Link] [Other
Theories][Marxism]
Kate
Liu