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.
The body of the chapter enacts this practice. Deliverance, in which four Atlanta businessmen set out on a wilderness kayaking trip and meet with the hostility of the locals, is read as a ‘fantasy about class struggle’, in which the ‘frightened men of the modern American suburb’ manage to beat off the hillbilly figures whom they see as a threat to their existence. For Jameson, the encounter represents a confrontation with the great American radical tradition of the 1930s, ‘ghosts from an older past, from the Dust Bowl and Tobacco Road’; but they are also a disguise and ‘displacement’ for contemporary threats—from the Third World, Blacks, disaffected youth. Significantly, by evoking the 1930s, the novel can stage the political fantasy of the businessmen’s triumph over their class enemies as one ‘confirmed by the very outcome of history itself’. The problem with Dickey’s novel, then, is not that his ‘bad politics’ make it bad literature, but rather that he is unaware of the social fears that are shaping his story. His narrative is not an instrument of ideological demystification but a piece of wish fulfilment, reinforcing ‘the very tendencies which it is the function of genuine art to expose.’
In Why Are We in Vietnam? by contrast—where Jameson judges the wealthy Texans on a bear-hunt in Alaska to be stereotypes just as hackneyed as those of Deliverance—the degree of authorial self-consciousness results in a qualitative difference. Mailer’s imaginative sympathy with the American violence he was attempting to dramatize prevented him from achieving any perspective on it, Jameson writes. But what Mailer provided instead, both in his work and in the combativeness of his lifestyle, was some sort of ‘hypostasis of competition itself as a social and historical mode of being’—as though he had chosen not to repudiate the dominant value of America’s competitive society, but rather to adopt it ‘with the fanatical exaggeration of the newly converted’, to live it ‘to extremes of intensity no ordinary businessman has ever known’. Mailer’s is the immemorial gesture of the artist who takes society’s sickness upon himself symbolically, albeit at a psychological and artistic price. What his ‘odour-laden perceptual universe’ offers is a vivid evocation of American bodies ‘sick and poisoned with all the industrial waste of the market civilization’, the encounter of the ageing individual with that ‘specifically capitalist phenomenon which is the devastation of nature and the systematic adulteration of the human environment.’ Great writers, Jameson concludes, tend to thematize their ideological raw material in this way, allowing us to examine these otherwise implicit unconscious attitudes that govern our actions ‘spread out and drying in the light of day’, where we are free to evaluate them consciously.
In the essays that follow, ‘deep structures’ are found at many different levels in any given novel, from the smallest unit—the word, the sentence—to the architecture of plot construction, the representation of daily life and world-historical events. The ‘secret presence of French’ in Henry James’s late style lends to the colloquial language of his novels ‘a density (as cornstarch does to sauce)’. Knausgaard’s writing is defined by its ‘itemization’ of objects, people and emotions, the only thing left to do once the tools of estrangement and the search for new languages have been abandoned as ineffective within postmodernity. In The Wire, plot construction iswhere the Utopian is to be glimpsed, namely in the corrupt union leader Frank Sobotka’s dream to revitalize the Baltimore port—‘if the plot of The Wire were to show its success, the representation would imply the Utopian (or revolutionary) transformation and reconstruction of all of society itself.’ Plot also plays a central role in the cluster of novels from Eastern Europe. In the ‘double plots’ twinning the protagonist Fonty with Theodor Fontane in A Wide Field, Grass’s stated political project is ‘to replay the current [1990] process of German unification against the background of the first [1871]’. In other words, as Jameson approvingly comments, ‘to discredit the new reunification, which passes itself off as a novel historical event, by identifying it with the older one, itself estranged and retroactively compromised by this latest annexation.’
But for Jameson, the more momentous project of Grass’s novel is its acknowledgement of ‘a properly East German daily life’, the very conception of which has been obliterated by the West. Meanwhile the ‘everyday socialism’ of Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm, which is ‘saturated’ by the daily life of the gdr, has the further authenticity of lived experience. Such representations are not necessarily comforting. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is a symptom of decay that every historical break slowly becomes assimilated into ‘the continuity of everyday life in Macondo’. World-historical events prove to be more elusive, as we see in Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, where ‘we are in what, by analogy to the fog of war, may be called the fog of history: only gradually do world-historical events and the institutions they leave behind them begin slowly to emerge, in shadowy outline.’
Overall, however, the world-historical event is not, in the end, what these ‘historical novels’ are about nor what they are primarily interested in. In this regard, Jameson follows Lukács’s insistence that the genre does not read history through the world-historical figure but rather through the mediocre hero, exemplified by Scott’s Waverley or Stendhal’s Fabrice. As he underscores, in The Books of Jacob ‘world history is itself imaginary: it is the distant horizon of legendary events unfolding beyond the immemorial daily life and rounds of peasants whose time is incompatible with it. It is a distant frieze of events with a time of its own, some distant privileged time that flows uninterrupted on and on’. Similarly, in Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora novels, which are at once detective stories and historical novels, the eponymous detective, although not exactly mediocre, ‘never interacts with world-historical figures directly—never sees Mussolini in the flesh in Salò, for example—but only registers his presence in a mediated way’, as when reading about the unnerving infighting among fascist leaders. If there is a ‘certain contingency’ to Bora being present at so many key historical moments (Katyn, Stalingrad, the Ardeatine Caves), it is the sort that haunts all representations of history, Jameson argues.
These articulations of the contemporary novel’s historicity push the boundaries of genre. In Inventions, Jameson’s ‘method’ often begins with or touches on a particular generic categorization for the work at hand that is then undercut or expanded upon as the singular nature of its narrative logic and texture is gradually uncovered. The question is frequently answered in the negative: Jameson will count off the modes or genres that might be assumed to characterize a text, but negate each in turn before arriving at a more proper classification. This method thereby replicates the process of inquiry through which a reader moves when considering a novel’s generic form. In ‘Temporalities of the Sea’, for example, he asks, ‘Conrad as modernist? Not exactly.’ In ‘Faith and Conspiracy in Japan’, he writes of Kenzaburo Ōe, ‘If he is not exactly a realist, he is not really a modernist either’:
His work avoids standard modernist devices such as autoreferentiality; and, although it is often a question of art in Ōe—the great Jonah triptych here, the Tantric Buddhist painting of hell in The Silent Cry—my sense is that, as in Hegel, the aesthetic centre of gravity has shifted imperceptibly towards ritual rather than in the direction of the autonomous work of art. Yet Somersault is scarcely postmodern either, save perhaps for that interest in small groups which parallels a Western ethnic or identity politics.
And indeed, the central theme brought to the surface in Somersault turns out to be group formation, although the new movement draws its members from a multiplicity of social backgrounds, recapitulating the cycle of revolt which, for Jameson, resonates throughout Ōe’s work. Similarly, in the chapter, ‘A Businessman in Love’, Bolesław Prus’s The Doll (1890) ‘is no bedroom farce, nor it is to be ranged under the category of that novel of adultery that is virtually the central genre of Western European, nineteenth-century literature’. But neither is it ‘to be assimilated to the Russian tradition’, and Jameson will refrain from enlisting the protagonist’s ‘encounter with History’ in the failed Polish uprising of 1863 into any characterization of The Doll as national allegory (‘though I believe it to be one’)—and though that political defeat is the absent centre of the novel, somehow figured in Wokulski’s fathomless passion.
Likewise, ‘magical realism’ is a misnomer for One Hundred Years of Solitude, and if it is permissible to call it a family novel, this is only in a non-Western sense. ‘Not “magic”, then, but something else must be evoked to account for the undeniable singularity of García Márquez’s narrative invention and the form that allows it to come into being.’ Far from a generic category, the key to the novel’s episodic character lies in the writer’s ‘uncanny, rapt concentration on his immediate narrative object’, a process of association that requires the utmost discipline and operates through exclusion and selectivity, rather than epic ‘inclusion’. As Jameson emphasizes, ‘we have no ready-made literary-technical terms with which to approach the strange mode of active contemplation that lies at the heart of this compositional process (and of reading too).’ As an aside, he also appeals to us to consign the generic term magical realism to ‘the bin in which we keep such worn-out epithets as “surrealistic” and “Kafkaesque”.’ Alejo Carpentier’s original version, invoking the raw material of Latin American reality as itself maravilloso—owing, in Jameson’s view, to the coexistence there of so many layers of history, ‘so many discontinuous modes of production’—is given more credence.
This chapter, ‘History as a Family Novel’, is also where Jameson provides the fullest unfolding and application of Lukács’s conception of the novel—understood in contrast to the older, now exhausted narrative paradigms of traditional societies—as the new ‘anti-form’, proper to modernity itself (‘which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life’). This presents the novel with a constant ‘form-problem’, in that narrative paradigms aren’t easy to replace: each radical attempt—the Bildungsroman was an example—tends to turn into a new paradigm itself and must be overthrown in turn. But equally, for Jameson, the form-problem positions the contemporary novel as an active solver of formal challenges, generating a rich and variegated set of ‘solutions’. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, temporality figures as a form-problem: historical ruptures and external shocks, such as the arrival of the American banana company, must be assimilated into Macondo’s fabric, in order to ensure the collective’s continuing autonomy. The final section of the novel, with its ‘interminable repetition of tale-spinning’ along with increasing signs of capitalist penetration in Macondo’s world, signals the ‘gradual exhaustion’ of the chronicle as formal solution.
Generic or modal terms are likewise tested only to be rejected for Grossman’s Life and Fate: ‘notions of realism and modernism are not particularly useful here; nor does Lukács’s account of the historical novel and its “average” hero and witness seem relevant.’ And on Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, a series of questions result in one of the most surprising responses to the question of generic definition, as Jameson moves from asking whether the religion in the novel is ‘not itself ideology’, to whether the novel is feminist or ecological, before landing on a category without which Atwood cannot fully be understood: the fact that ‘she is a Canadian, and no little of her imaginative power comes from her privileged position above the border of the lower 48’. As a result, ‘The Fall’ in the dystopian near-future of the novel needs to be grasped as ‘a fall into Americanism’, the evils of which were delineated in Atwood’s earlier novel, Surfacing,as a kind of virus that gradually takes over one’s being. Reprising his opening question in the essay—‘Who will recount the pleasures of dystopia?’—Jameson concludes of Atwood’s fallen world, with its bunny suits and fluffy fabrics, its cartoon-like physical violence, that by contrast ‘the end of the world has some of the cleansing, bracing effect of sand and waste landscape, of the seashore’.
Unlike Lukács’s attempt at typology in TheTheory of the Novel, this form of naming does not produce fillable categories; Jameson’s use of the category ‘Canadian’ for Atwood is not an argument for the Canadian novel as a typological form. Rather, the upshot is closer to what Jameson proposed in his critique of the early Lukács in Marxism and Form, where in place of an all-encompassing theory of novelistic ‘types’, he called for a ‘series of concrete historical monographs’—for apprehending a writer’s work as a unique historical phenomenon, an ungeneralizable combination of circumstances. For Jameson, the singularity of these novelistic responses to the crisis of globalization is fuelled by different kinds of formal exhaustion, reflective in turn of the changed nature of our late-capitalist, post-postmodern world.
Within the detective genre and beyond, for example, an increasingly one-dimensional society involves a loss of raw material supplying motives for crimes, shrinking them to narratives of greed, terrorism or serial killers—‘supremely boring as the universal source of action’—and thus creating problems for plot construction; one reason why Jameson welcomed the glimpse of a failed utopian storyline in The Wire. What marks these novels and defines the work they are doing is a series of permutations in response to exhausted forms, subject matter and narrative paradigms—equivalents to the ‘unique and unrepeatable solution’ that Jameson saw in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
As he notes about Lucky Per, which tracks the protagonist’s coming of age in relation to the vagaries of luck, success and happiness, ‘the originality of the novel lies in its tripartite permutation of these themes, as momentous for the form of the novel as such as it is for the existential fate of individuals themselves in this modernizing late nineteenth century.’ If all successes grow to be alike, ‘only the failures offer genuine literary raw material, both in their variety and in the quality of their experience.’ When Per loses interest in his great engineering project—to drain Jutland’s marshes and open up a waterway between the North Sea and the Baltic—on the verge of its realization, the novel upends the very opposition between success and failure. Per’s motivation is something new—as Jameson puts it: one of those unnamed psychic discoveries for which the novelists of the period, from Dostoevsky to James, desperately searched, with the exhaustion of traditional narratives. If, the novel concludes, that despite all his good fortune, Per wasn’t happy, it was ‘because he hadn’t wanted to be happy, in the general sense of the word’. And this, Jameson declares, turns out to be the novel’s project: to suggest a mode of life beyond success or failure; to modify our sense of what luck or happiness means.
In a similar vein, Jameson concedes that DeLillo’s The Names could be read ‘as a “modernist” major work’—but suggests that this is the least interesting way to consider it: ‘You will be more satisfied if you read it as a determinedly minor work—something like a musical composition—“keyed” to the theme of proper names and their relationship to people and places, in which case it is a delicious experience (I read it twice).’ Comments of this sort—Jameson referring to his personal experience as a reader; or confessing, in a more autobiographical mode than is common for him, that Henry James was ‘one of the only three American writers who meant something to me in my intellectual formation’; or clarifying, in ‘Form-Problems in Henry James’, that his alleged dispute over James with Wayne Booth was just that: ‘Wayne Booth was my freshman English teacher and the best teacher I ever had’—are one of the many treats of Inventions. Jameson’s intellectual appetite is fully on display as well; as he goes on to say about Booth, ‘We had frequent, often heated discussions about Aristotle, Marx, criticism and theory, Henry James, modernism, pedagogy and writing, discussions that were indispensable for me and formative, even when (especially when) we disagreed.’ Notes such as this offer glimpses of Jameson’s unequivocal love of literature and his view of learning as a process that is at once ongoing and always full of surprises. Again, seeing Jameson’s verve as a reader and critic, it’s hard not to think of Brecht’s depiction of Galileo: ‘Give him an old wine or a new idea, and he cannot say no.’
If Jameson sees a series of attempts to write a collective as the hidden link between these novels, to my mind a corollary secret emerges over the course of Inventions, namely, an emphasis on daily life, which comes to define the ‘historical novel’ of the twenty-first century as Jameson understands it. As his readings illustrate, the history of the everyday entails not only the ability to represent or invent a present, but also to give expression, however indirectly, to the missed opportunities of the past that might have led to a different future. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is illustrative in this regard: a counterfactual ‘fairy tale’, in the author’s words, about the Soviet sixties. Though no sci-fi speculation is involved, ‘the point of his wonderful novel is certainly to flex the mind’s long-numb faculty of wondering, what if?, and to restore the freshness of an era in which for a long moment still, everything was possible’, Jameson writes. Echoes of this ‘what if?’ are also to be found in Grass’s rewriting of German reunification, advancing the ‘scandalous solution’ of a Federal Republic unified on a Prussian-socialist basis. More generally, articulations of the everyday—whether the ‘empty everyday’ in Pattern Recognition, the ‘everyday socialism’ of Tellkamp, the East German daily life of Grass or the redeeming of ‘insignificant moments of an insignificant daily life’ in Knausgaard—allow us ‘to hear, however faintly, the voices of contemporaries’: the hint of the collective which would be their signal achievement.
Drawing on Le Corbusier’s notion of a dwelling as a ‘machine for living’ in his discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jameson figures the novel as a ‘machine for living a certain kind of temporality’ and notes how ‘in the multiple differentiations of global or postmodern capitalism, we may expect a far greater variety of these temporal machines than there were in the transitional period we call literary modernism.’ Indeed, Inventions of a Present attests to the variety and scope of these temporal machines and what they can show us about living. Jameson’s writings here carry their own temporal charge. To encounter these reviews after the fact, as it were, and to consider their cumulative effect as a collection, is to register new insights about Jameson as a reader—of fiction, to be sure, but also of the contemporary moment, of the everyday, the representation of which, as he shows throughout, is an elusive and ‘complicated task’, as well as a necessary and consequential one. For as he reflects in the context of A Wide Field, ‘to deprive other humans of the acknowledgement of their lived time as daily life is a fundamental form of alienation too little recognized, and perhaps a more basic form of discrimination than any more commonly named and identified as such.’ To read these essays in this moment of great global tumult, when so much seems imminently at stake, and so soon after Jameson’s death, makes us realize what a powerful voice in critical theory we have lost. But the perspicacity of these readings and the insistent orientation of his thinking to the future also remind us that his work has much to say that will be of great use—to suggest yet another Brechtian virtue—in the years ahead.