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Fredric Jameson’s Never-ending Story

Remembering the great Marxist critic Fronteiras do Pensamento/The Baffler

Fredric Jameson, the literary scholar who died on September 22 at the age of ninety, was a Marxist. The tidal wave of grief and appreciative anecdote that rattled the virtual foundations of the internet at his departure was therefore a bit of a mystery. It could not have come from fellow Marxists alone: there aren’t enough of them. No political party holding Marxism as its official doctrine has stepped forward to orchestrate how Jameson is to be remembered, and none is expected to. For all the Republican propaganda about the institutions of American higher education falling into the hands of Marxists, no one employed by those institutions believes that has happened. So who are all these ardent mourners, and what is it they are honoring and mourning??

One possible answer comes from the title of Jameson’s most recent (but probably not his last) book, The Years of Theory, out from Verso this month. The Years of Theoryis the record of a seminar Jameson gave at Duke in 2021; it spends a lot of time on Jean-Paul Sartre, on whom Jameson wrote his dissertation, and the idea you get from the table of contents is that “theory” meant a chance to ask, like Sartre, the biggest possible questions about the responsibilities of being in the world right now, asking them at the highest philosophical level, and yet asking them in a language that didn’t require a PhD to follow. Sartre’s analysis of antisemitism was a huge influence on Frantz Fanon’s thinking about race, and he helped inspire the feminism of Judith Butler. As a very public supporter of the Algerian independence struggle, Sartre survived multiple assassination attempts. His heterodox Marxism, like Jameson’s, was integral to that larger movement of thought and feeling for which the word theoryremains an irritating but indispensable placeholder. It’s a movement that took off in the 1960s and has shaped a great deal of educated common sense since then. In a moment of mourning, it’s worth adding that more than a half century later, theory still seems vigorous enough to outlast future announcements of its demise.

What is being mourned is certainly not the Sartrean role of the public intellectual. Unlike Sartre, Jameson was never interested in assuming that role. He could certainly do the job if called upon; I saw him do it in 1996, under difficult circumstances, while attending a series of conferences discussing the fraught intersection of critical theories in China and the West. In the 1980s, his critique of postmodernism—roughly speaking, as a surrender to a history-blind consumerism—had made him something of a celebrity among Chinese intellectuals disillusioned with the government’s pro-capitalist turn. But the situation of those intellectuals was delicate, as even our little delegation could see (a Chinese Marxist member of our group was suddenly forbidden from speaking). Loud universalist pieties would have sounded provincial, and they would not have done our hosts any favors. Speaking on our behalf, Jameson had his work cut out for him. I wish I remembered exactly what he said.

Within American theory’s greatest generation, the obvious contrast is with Edward Said, who was born in 1935, a year after Jameson, and died in 2003. Said was a public intellectual in the strong sense; he was an activist. Like Jameson, he first made his reputation through conventionally respectable scholarship. But after the publication of Orientalismin 1978, a book written in the aftermath of the Six Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Said spoke out as a public figure. That meant doing the extra work of keeping up every morning with the horrifying news so as to be able to offer immediate commentary, mobilizing his fury and articulateness in the moment. He did it well, and by doing so, he opened up a space in which other voices that had been suppressed by bipartisan American support for Israel and American militarism generally could make their indignation heard. As they have been doing, despite resistance from the usual suspects, ever since.

Jameson’s Marxism did not lead him to become that sort of public figure. Nor did it entail making a loud call to man the barricades. Of course, as Perry Anderson has observed, the same holds for most of what counts as “Western Marxist” theory since 1919. Its question has not been “engagement” but what to make of revolutions that did not happen. The system proved quite resilient. Was it indeed a system? The obscurity of the causes behind the status quo’s persistence encouraged analysis but discouraged activism. Said’s choice to intervene in the public sphere was consistent with his disinclination to think in terms of system. In his eyes, too much system-thinking meant too little action. Jameson, on the other hand, swore by the notion of an all-encompassing global capitalist system, but he described that system as sublimely inaccessible to our usual cognitive categories. It was a critique, but not a finger pointed at anything that urgently needed to be done or that, once done, would make a significant difference. Jameson’s personal impulses ran more toward the nurturing of small alternative spaces, like community-supported agriculture. In one of my few conversations with him, he perked up at the mention of goats. He and his wife raised them.

Another reason for the gut reaction of broad and deep solidarity that followed Jameson’s passing is his extraordinary magnanimity. That magnanimity was not just a matter of his personal character, though his students have testified gratefully to that. It was also methodological. His Marxist view of history of course gave pride of place to class antagonism, but antagonism was alien to his intellectual practice. His refusal to indulge in political labeling was legendary. As an interpreter, his signature move was dialectical. He would rarely if ever fail to appreciate the argument that his interlocutor was making, whether theoretical or literary. And then, preserving that argument, he would raise it up, repurpose it, absorb it into a bigger historical vision. That vision had room in it for a seemingly infinite array of other visions, in all of which Jameson seemed to find some virtue, if only because they were visionary, transcending the meanness of the self-interested individual and drawing humanity as a whole toward some version of not-yet-existing enlightenment and emancipation. The higher authority he ascribed to the Marxist meta-narrative (which he more often assumed than defended) derived from its capacity to perform a friendly assimilation of other viewpoints rather than feeling obliged to try to refute and negate them.

To put this another way: it was as a storyteller that Jameson became so generally beloved. Not an easy one—his prose could be forbidding and unforgiving, as many have pointed out. But many have also registered an urge to join the club whose high bar of references seemed to put membership out of reach. Jameson’s frosty, inhospitable style could be seen as defensive: an attempt to protect the anxious assumption, which might otherwise seem impossibly fragile, that stories can have legitimate, non-evasive happy endings. Even baby steps in the direction of emancipation and enlightenment will come as a pleasant surprise to most of us, wherever we may have wandered in the terrible history of injustice, violence, and suffering that is humanity’s cultural heritage. There is nothing assured or predictable about what Jameson calls humanity’s “single great collective story.” Nor about the fact that, as Jameson tells it, the story makes space for, and indeed depends on, many smaller stories of distress and achievement, shared and individual. It is of course imperative that any gendered, racial, or sexual collectivity can and should tell its own story, record its own distress and achievement. Yet that imperative need not collide with the imperative to consider humanity in its totality. After all, why should anyone mind that their story, as told by themselves, also fits into and helps compose a larger story? The complaint that Jameson’s totalizing was hostile to all pluralisms, which could be heard with some frequency in theory’s early years, is voiced less often today, when there has been so much enthusiastic cross-fertilization of the various contestatory movements, from Black Lives Matter to Gaza and beyond.

In The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism(1972), Jameson reached back to Russian folk tales to explain why happy endings are worth our attention. Happy endings wouldn’t make us happy if they were just the fulfillment of wishes. Heroes cannot defeat villains alone; they need help. The help, which has to be earned, comes from a figure Vladimir Propp called the donor. The human figure of the donor, or mediator, is “somewhere hidden in the very structure of the story,” and is “somehow responsible for the ‘storiness’ of the story in the first place.” The storiness of story, what makes a sequence of events into something more than itself: this discovery brought the simplest acts of narration into the domain of politics. Nine years later, in The Political Unconscious(1981), mainly an interpretation of the realist literature of the nineteenth century, Jameson made the theoretical case for storytelling as the fundamental critical act.

Jameson got in trouble for proposing, in an essay published in 1986 in Social Text(a journal he cofounded), that in the literature of what was then called the Third World “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” As readers objected, this “always” is an overreach. But the concept of national allegory, applied to a more limited set of objects, was a game-changer. Once you start looking for it, you can see it in a lot of places. Was Jameson wrong to claim that in Lu Xun’s satire, for example, the self-belittling Ah Q is “allegorically, China itself”? The simple act of detecting a public side to apparently private stories, whether in the Global South or the Global North, enriches our perception of the world, which is so often distorted by a focus on what’s up close.

The Political Unconsciouscemented Jameson’s reputation in the academy. Outside the academy, what got his name into ordinary households was his analysis of postmodernism, which he developed in the early 1980s. This was not just literary history; it was naming the present, making sense of an omnipresent culture that was being lived everywhere, in television, music, architecture, and advertising as well as literature and philosophy. Done comprehensively and convincingly, naming the present is one of the most highly rewarded of critical acts. Jameson’s wild and wonderful synthesis has been much imitated, though never with as much success. Tellingly, his portrait of the times didn’t require a commitment to Marxism. Cultural conservatives who were already ranting about postmodern relativism and nihilism could find much to agree with in it, but his was not a rant.

In true dialectical spirit, Jameson showed himself open to many of the aesthetic effects of which he was striving to disapprove, even willing to see another side to what his subtitle called “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” As he put it to work, Marxism looked less absolutist than equitable and commonsensical, even playful. No, for all its pervasiveness, capitalism has not ruined culture once and for all. For Jameson, there was proof in science fiction, a lifelong interest. After all, science fiction is popular and commercially successful, yet it is also a field in which writers and readers collaborate in imagining how society as a whole might be different, where we are not discouraged from rethinking the social totality.

In an essay in Harper’spublished just before Jameson’s death, Mark Greif noted that Jameson’s Marxism is uncompromising.?But Jameson’s insistence that criticism is a narrative act can be seen as, precisely, a compromise—a compromise with postmodernism, and with the arousing premise that to reimagine the world is in some degree to recreate the world. Yes, capitalism is the inescapable rock-solid reality with which everyone struggles, or makes some sort of uneasy peace. And yet somehow it’s also true that our culture is nothing but the telling of stories about other stories, including stories about capitalism. It’s turtles all the way down. Some discomfort with this seeming paradox may be what kept Jameson from finishing, or even figuring out how to name, the first volume in his projected multi-volume masterwork, The Poetics of Social Forms. In Inventions of a Present, which came out earlier this year, that still unpublished opening volume is called Categories of the Narrative-Historical. In The Years of Theory, it is referred to as Parts of Speech. It’s as if Jameson never quite stopped hesitating over what it would mean to think of history as just another act of storytelling.

Jameson once murmured, I don’t know how seriously, that he was a nihilist in his cups. The line could have been an admission that the single great collective story of emancipation and enlightenment is wishful—that however much evidence one accumulates for it, and however worth striving for it is, this vision does not stand on a firm, uncontroversial historical foundation. The remark could also have been a reference to the character of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Bazarov is a would-be revolutionary who calls himself a nihilist. In Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe speaks of Bazarov as a “superfluous” man, meaning one of a line of Russian characters who are dedicated to making a radical transformation in a society that is not ready to be radically transformed and that therefore doesn’t need them or know what to do with them, although it can see that they are somehow special.

Nihilism in this sense does not seem quite right for Jameson, though it registers the darker background shadowing his Marxist commitment—his lack of confidence, perhaps, looking around him, that history was indeed moving in the direction he so passionately wanted for it. From the outset, there existed a constituency for his theorizing. His career was arguably organic to the movements of the 1960s, including the movements of national liberation in the Third World, many of which wanted something much more for themselves than national independence. Today, Jameson’s many mournful admirers around the world may not think of themselves as belonging to a collectivity; however real that international collectivity is in Hegelian terms, it has certainly not yet been realized. But thanks to the long and unfinished career of Jameson’s writing, invitations continue to be delivered.