Though trained in literature, Fredric Jameson cast the net of his criticism famously wide, hauling in New York Pop Art and Californian architecture, First, Second and Third World cinemas, Utopia, cultural theorists, structuralism, Russian formalism and social philosophy. With Inventions of the Present, published just before his death last year, he returned to his starting point, gathering a selection of his literary criticism over the past fifty years into an intelligibly structured whole. Opening with five essays on American subjects—among them Norman Mailer, Henry James, Don DeLillo and The Wire—Inventions provides landmark readings of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grossman’s Life and Fate, Günter Grass’s A Wide Field, Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, along with a host of lesser-known works from Poland, Germany, Denmark and Japan.
Such a collection immediately raises a question that has animated Jameson’s entire critical oeuvre: what is the relationship of this volume’s parts to the whole? In 1971, a year before he wrote the first essay in Inventions, Jameson’s preface to Marxism and Form had counterposed the French and German strands of his own ‘relatively Hegelian’ Marxism to a third national tradition—‘that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy.’ The anti-speculative bias of that tradition, ‘its emphasis on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationships in which it may be embedded’, continued to encourage ‘submission to what is, by preventing its followers from making connections’. In response to the questions raised by monopoly capitalism, he concluded, ‘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 of subject and object—are once again the order of the day.’
These dialectical oppositions play a central role in the individual readings of Inventions and in how we read the collection. On the one hand, Jameson’s title identifies the broad contours that define these essays, twinning the epistemological challenge of ‘inventing a present’ with the problem of the cultural-historical moment—the novel’s ‘crisis of globalization’—that provokes it. This linking of the aesthetic and the social, the cultural and the economic, is signature Jameson, an echo of his most celebrated title, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The essays themselves have also been re-titled, to indicate the broader themes and formal issues of the book as a whole. Thus the exploration of mid-century American ideology in the wilderness novels of Mailer and James Dickey becomes the opening ‘Allegories of the Hunter’, the Knausgaard chapter is ‘The Novel and the Supermarket’, while the discussion of Henrik Pontoppidan’s ‘properly Nietzschean hatred of Christianity’ in Lucky Per (1898) is now ‘The Failure of Success’.
On the other hand, we also get to see Jameson working out these relations in new and fascinating ways, thanks to the sheer range of novels he discusses and perhaps also to the ‘occasional’ nature of many of these essays, over half of which are extended novel reviews, eight for the London Review of Books and four for nlr. As a reviewer, Jameson offers the reader what feels like a passenger-seat perspective on his thinking, its active movement and development. Here, the questions which lead to those dialectical sentences come to the fore, beginning with, ‘what is this novel?’. Closely tied to the puzzle of naming and classification, of genre and form, is another question: ‘how does this particular narrative work and to what effect?’. This may involve ‘form-problems’, or issues of style, or of a characteristic and dominant activity within a novel—such as gossip and voyeurism in Jameson’s iconoclastic account of Henry James, for example, who emerges here as essentially a short-story writer; or ‘name-dropping’ (of luxury brands) in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. The approach recalls the opening scene in Brecht’s Life of Galileo, one of Jameson’s favourites, where Galileo shows the young Andrea a model of the Ptolemaic system. ‘What is it?’, Andrea asks. Galileo responds: ‘It shows how, according to the ancients, the stars move round the earth.’ ‘How?’ asks Andrea, to which Galileo says ‘Let’s examine it. Begin at the beginning: description.’ For Jameson, too, description—identifying the constituent parts of a narrative and its multiple registers—entails discovery and wonder, for him and for us as readers; something akin to Andrea’s cry: ‘O early morning of beginnings / O breath of wind that / Cometh from new shores!’
In the introduction to Inventions, Jameson identifies what he sees as ‘the secret’ of the contemporary novel. In contrast to ‘the private lives of currently fashionable autofiction’, he writes, ‘what is historically unique about the emergent situation of the works discussed here, is that they try to write the collective or at least register the crisis of the individual attempting to do so.’ Does that make them historical novels, not necessarily in being concerned with the past, but in the sense that they ‘foreground a public dimension of life which has become problematic’? In his expansive broadening of the category, Jameson tests and amends Lukács’s theory of the historical novel, identifying and envisaging new forms and articulations of ‘historicality’ in our present moment—a challenge he famously described in the introduction to Postmodernism as the ‘attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.’
In doing so, he differentiates literature from the ‘abstract disciplines’, philosophy, psychology or sociology, which aim to replace concrete experience or historical data with a model. Literature instead offers ‘an immediate vision of the coherence and significance of the concrete, one unmediated by abstractions, in which meaning becomes visible within the things themselves, and is articulated, rather than illustrated, by the organization of the narrative.’ At the same time, Jameson insists, to read these symptoms with any accuracy demands a kind of formalism, ‘provided it is a social or, better still, a materialist formalism’, capable of ‘detecting the profound historicality of which these works are an archaeological transcription.’ Together, these essays attest both to the capaciousness of Jameson’s outlook and to his incomparable inventiveness as a literary critic.
In the opening chapter, on Dickey’s Deliverance (later filmed by John Boorman) and Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, Jameson frames his bravura readings of the two novels with reflections on the role of the Marxist critic. He acknowledges that ‘vulgar Marxism’ has left its scars on what Americans perceive this to be—a reductionist view of the work of art as a mere function of its social and economic context, downgrading its formal aspects and subordinating aesthetic judgements to political ones. In a classically wry aside, Jameson notes that the upshot of such an approach would be to make us ‘stop reading a lot of writers and works we now admire, on the grounds that they are politically suspect’—and ‘since so much of modern American culture is politically suspect, such an eventuality would not leave us with very much to read’. Against this caricature, Jameson sets as the task of the Marxist critic not the imposition of extraneous concerns but rather a thoroughgoing exploration of the ‘deep political and ideological structures’ of literary works.