The great Fredric Jameson died in September 2024 and it is shocking to realize that he will no longer be writing outstanding pieces of literary criticism.
Sean Sheehan
”Inventions of a present”, various essays he wrote mostly for New Left Review and London Review of Books, is a timely collection of pieces about the historical novel and reading them brings home his tremendous power of analysis.
The first essay begins with what he calls the ‘scars’ left by vulgar Marxism on American intellectuals.
It reduces a work of literature to a mere reflex of the socio-economic order and aesthetic judgements are barely disguised ethical ones. Marxism proper, the kind Jameson put into effect, considers conscious and unconscious ideology at work in a text.
In Limits of the gringo novel, he looks at Robert Stone’s novel, “A flag for sunrise” (1981), set in an imaginary Central American State.
In some ways it is a Vietnam story and the age-old imperial problem, common to British and American imperialism, of ‘literature that is forced by the nature of things to exclude those Others that, in many respects, constitutively define it’. His incisive analysis will leave many readers searching for a copy of the book.
In Immortal Stalingrad, he praises Vasily Grossman’s “Life and fate” and pinpoints a pervasive presence in the novel ‘of the mysterious new power of the state; which is ‘the secret of Grossman’s view of some convergence of Stalin and Hitler’. Grossman writes as an anarchist – he is not a dissident – and cannot be enlisted for ‘free-world’ anti-communism.
Questions that need to be asked are ones about the form of “Life and fate” and why Western writers are unable to write like this.
In the novel there is a totality of vision that makes believable “one single experience, sublime or sickening, a doom or a chance liberation, life and fate”.
Is this vision related, perhaps, to the explosion of emancipatory thought that came with October?
Another breathtaking review in this collection is Jameson’s review of “One hundred years of solitude”. Western modernity brings what Gabriel Garcia Márquez calls ‘miserable solitude’ and the truth that José Arcadio Segundo glimpses when he finds the workers’ massacre has been wiped clean from collective memory.
Equally penetrating is the review of William Gibson’s “Pattern recognition” and the travails of Cayce’s uncanny business which is to ‘hunt cool’ and follow her prescient awareness of new fashions. Her track record is impressive, after all she did identify the first person in the world to wear a baseball cap backwards. She is able to sift through the ‘itemization’ that defines Karl Ove Knausgaard ‘s kind of writing, the subject of Jameson review of the Norwegian author in ‘The Novel and the Supermarket.
His his novels, where everything is a commodity, he just lists them all.
One almost waits for a note of vulgar Marxism but Jameson is too polite to use a word like ‘risible’; as he admits, some readers enjoy this kind of book.
“Inventions of a present”, by Fredric Jameson, is published by Verso.
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