Form-Problems in Fredric Jameson

The Predicament of Contemporaneity

I began reading Inventions of a Present while celebrations for Fredric Jameson’s 90th birthday, organized by his British publisher Verso and former students and colleagues, were underway across the English-speaking world. Five months later, Jameson had died and I was still reading. This, I hope, says something about the complexity and substantiality of the essays that make up this book, which span a fifty-year period in Jameson’s career. At one of the birthday seminars, held online, Xudong Zhang of New York University remarked that a distinguishing feature of Jameson’s scholarship is that it is not possible to make a separation between his major and minor works. To illustrate, Zhang said that Jameson’s occasional review essays for the London Review of Books might be counted among his major writings.1

Inventions of a Present collects these reviews, which appeared between 1996 and 2022, together with related pieces from other journals and collections, almost all of which directly discuss novelistic works. Certainly, there is nothing ephemeral or journalistic about these essays. What distinguishes them in Jameson’s prodigious body of work and justifies their collection in a single volume is that, with a few exceptions, they are primarily concerned with “contemporary” American works—with, as he puts it, “the literature of our own country and our own time” (5). Not only, therefore, do these essays depart from Jameson’s predominant concern with the realist novel, they also invite being read as a reflection on the contemporary period and the predicament of contemporaneity itself.

“All great realist novels are . . . historical ones,” Jameson said in his earlier Antinomies of Realism (2013, 146). The claim is indebted to Georg Lukács. Following the pioneering analysis in Lukács’s The Historical Novel, “historical” does not mean simply “novels with historical themes” but a certain representativity or legibility in the relation between novelistic elements and their historical moment. Lukács offers a tight formulation: “derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age” (1981, 15). In a short, three-page introduction to Inventions of a Present, Jameson repeats his claim about the historicality of the novel, but with a difference, one he attributes partly to the role of reviewer (as opposed to scholar) and partly to an apparent collapse of the genre’s conventions. Whereas the greatness of Walter Scott’s heroes, for Lukács, lay in their capacity to give “living human embodiment to historical-social types” (1981, 34), this representativity is no longer viable for Jameson. The last fifty years are a period in which the “hypothetical mainland” presupposed in the realist literary project “began to break up into any number of verifiable archipelagos and free-standing islands” (1). With this development, “protagonicity” begins to be replaced by the “crisis of the individual attempting to [write the collective]” (2).

The crisis, then, is historical. However, it is also an effect of contemporaneity and of the new positionality of the critic with respect to his or her object. For the context of contemporary works, we read in the book’s opening essay, “is simply the American scene itself, which we share with them” (5). Our preoccupations as readers, critics, are also those of the writers who are contemporary with us. Both we and they are condemned to exist “permanently” in that state of preoccupation, “whether we know it or not” (5).

Realism, Jameson had observed in Antinomies, “requires a conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as such” (2013, 145). Jameson’s point was that a “personal conservatism” in the most famous realist practitioners (say, Honoré de Balzac, Theodor Dreiser, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope) is reflected in their works as an aesthetic resistance to “deep structural social change” and to “the deeper currents and contradictory tendencies within the social order” (145), even when such change is depicted as imminent or inevitable. Inventions of a Present begins in a very different spirit, with an epigraph from Stéphane Mallarmé that provides the book’s title: “Il n’est pas de Présent, non—un présent n’existe pas” (v). A present does not exist except by “invention,” as nonrealist writers and thinkers from Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-François Lyotard have known very well. Among the pleasurable surprises of Inventions are the moments when, without relaxing his analytical grip on the material, Jameson detaches his interest from the work’s narrative or developmental elements in order to celebrate the “nontemporal structures” of which the novel is capable: a supernatural capacity for concentration, approaching “bewitchment,” that he finds in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (176); an indulgence of gossip and anecdote that underlies and transcends the logic of plot and resolution in the novels of Henry James (59); or the “idle dream” of labor leader Frank Sobotka to rebuild and restore the port of Baltimore in the second season of David Simon’s The Wire (90). In the last case, Frank Sobotka’s fantasy project is important for Jameson not despite its impracticality and improbability at the level of the plot, but because of it (90). Such details—which Jameson sometimes calls Utopian—introduce a “crack or rift” into the otherwise seamless realism of the works in which they appear (91).

In such moments, Inventions of a Present might be read (with Antinomies of Realism and The Modernist Papers) as the final volume of a trilogy on literary history, in which the novel form finally casts off the normative or teleological elements that “disfigure” it (59, 62) and embraces a sort of inner “weirdness” (as Jameson more than once calls it) that is essential to the novel and defies critical explication. Speaking of moments of conversational intimacy in Don DeLillo’s novels, Jameson says, “Maybe this is where invention goes when the plots of modernism become familiar, conventional, and boring” (201).

Critical Positionality

In this same spirit of contemporaneity, these essays refuse one of the central features of the book review genre: a judgment or verdict on the work in question. Late in the collection a review of the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series of novels finds Jameson in a playful mood. The piece begins with a series of hypothetical questions: “Is this fiction or autobiography?” “Is it anything like Proust?” etc. When the imagined reader asks, “Do I have to read this, is it any good?” Jameson substitutes another question, that of Knausgaard’s captivation of a global audience, which is “what a proper reviewer would have to analyze.” More significant than any individual assessment, he continues, is that “people do seem to be reading it and that it has been translated into more than thirty languages around the world and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and become a literary sensation” (199). Clearly, Jameson subjectively experiences the same fascination with Knausgaard’s project that he is here taking as his object. This transformed analytical relation, in which the critical subject replaces, or merges with, the object, reappears at different moments throughout Inventions of a Present.

As Colin MacCabe famously wrote of Jameson, “It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him” (ix). This line, which originally appeared in a preface to Jameson’s 1992 The Geopolitical Aesthetic,2 has been repeatedly recycled by Verso as a cover blurb, but it captures a central truth about Jameson’s project, and about his Marxism too. For Jameson, the role of the critic is not to “denounce” (or indeed celebrate) works of art and literature on ideological grounds. In a commodity society, literary works reproduce “commodified” and “pseudopsychological” categories, as Jameson puts it in a 1993 essay, “Limits of the Gringo Novel,” included in this volume (30). As an example, Jameson offers the “relationship,” an “objectified and depersonalized” form whose concepts have penetrated so far into the North American psyche that it can no longer be thematized outside the logic of “commodification and packaging” that, in the late-twentieth and twenty-first century, determines and conditions all subjective experience. In the same essay, Jameson names other pseudopsychological categories such as courage and “renunciation”—“one of the great ideologemes of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie” (61)—and the structures of national loyalty and “heroism” endemic to the Cold War novel. To condemn a work for its treatment of such themes, Jameson insists, is to discount the conditions of novelistic production itself and thus jettison literature’s capacity to show us ideology as it is lived.

There are two closely related implications, both of which play out across the volume’s nineteen essays. First, whatever one’s estimation of individual works (and Jameson occasionally identifies “bad,” even “repellent” novels), the real assessment is never made on the basis of ideological positions that are represented within the work. Ideology is present in great works only as “raw material,” which is “always . . . thematize[d]” and thus “raised to consciousness . . . as an object in its own right” (25). This has been known from the earliest days of novel theory. “The speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes,” says Mikhail Bakhtin in 1934 (333). Jameson expresses the other side of this observation when he writes of the artistic quality of a work as “ideologically neutral” and wholly separable from the author’s political convictions (24). The phrase “ideologically neutral” should not be taken as a universalizing move but as the very basis of political interpretation, as Jameson conceives it. It is precisely by detaching itself from ideological material that the novel is able to raise that material to consciousness and make it “available to us as an object in its own right” (25). Nine years after writing these words, Jameson will coin the phrase “political unconscious” to denote this quality of detachment, calling it “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (1981, 17).

The second, more provocative implication follows directly from this: political novels are “impossible” except generically, as a matter of political “content.” Jameson makes versions of this claim repeatedly in Inventions of a Present. The claim is influenced by Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics, in particular Adorno’s rejection of the “committed” literature of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht on the grounds that they take the linguistic basis of the work as the key to its meaning (Adorno 1980). In place of the political novel, Jameson suggests that we pay attention to the “prepolitical” novel, which is the closest literature can approach to militancy in a bourgeois epoch. This term enables Jameson to engage productively with a number of ideologically ambiguous or politically quiescent writers, including Norman Mailer, Henry James, Kenzaburo Oe, Joseph Conrad, Henrik Pontoppidan, the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, and even Ezra Pound, whose fascist sympathies Jameson finds less bothersome than Henry James’s “Anglophilia” (51). Once ideology has been made present as “raw material,” the work takes the same distance from that material as its readers, even when, as an individual, the author happens not to.

If these implications seem surprising in the work of a Marxist critic, for Jameson the surprise, too, is ideological. As he writes in the opening essay of Inventions, the artist under capitalism finds himself or herself “increasingly compromised by the materials with which he is called upon to deal” (23). What is brought into focus in a great literary work is not truth, or right thinking, but the traces of “genuinely concrete social and historical experience” (25). To ask of a novelistic work that it transcend historicity in order to speak its truth directly is to ignore both the conditions of novelistic representation and the circumstances in which those conditions make the novel an indispensable form for our time. Merely by existing, the novel is able to do what dialectical thinking can achieve only in the course of a painstaking critical operation: engage with things and concepts not in their false existence—as “positive entities, . . . free-standing autonomous substances, with their own properties or accidents and their own isolated definitions, substances only later inserted into relationships and larger networks and structures” (2009, 17)—but in their true, historical being, as formed by those very relationships and structures.

For Jameson, experience itself under capitalism is “allegorical,” but Jameson gives this term a distinctive inflection. Allegory is not a dualistic system of one-to-one meanings but a system of “multiple meanings” that are unresolvable at the level of critical interpretation (2019, 10). It is novels themselves, and not critics—Marxist or otherwise—that are able to grasp this multiplicity, and to grasp it in its very unresolvability. A parenthetical utterance in Jameson’s late work Allegory and Ideology reverberates through Inventions of a Present: “historical failure is valuable because it is historical, not because it is a failure” (2019, 15). It’s an awkward phrase, but what Jameson is getting at is that even failures of thought are truthful, illuminating, when looked at through the lens of historicity. In these different ways, the essays in Inventions of a Present show us how indispensable Jameson’s engagement with the formal complexities of the novel has been to the evolution of his project over the past fifty years, and how far beyond a traditional Marxist commitment to realism his work on the novel extends.

Form-Problems

The oldest piece in the collection, by a large margin, and the longest, is “Allegories of the Hunter,” which opens the book. This essay, from 1972, compares two “wilderness” novels, recent instances of “a very old American genre”: James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970)—the basis of John Boorman’s grueling 1972 movie of the same name—and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). The ideological function of the wilderness novel, says Jameson, is to show how “violence is a necessary component of existence” (6). The distinction between the two works turns on a difference in their relation to the “ideologeme” (as Jameson calls it, using Bakhtin’s term) of Nature itself. Dickey is “possessed” by the same fantasies of class struggle and its overcoming that his work depicts, and “as unaware, as profoundly unconscious, of their shaping presence” as his readers (12). This means that Dickey’s novel leaves in place the power of the authoritarian state, which alone can hold “the anarchy of individual violence and of human nature in general in check” (6). Mailer’s work, by contrast, is characterized by an “instinctive anti-idealism” that establishes the macho and misogynistic Mailer as nevertheless a genuine “artist.” Mailer’s greatness resides in “the degree to which he has actualized everything which in and around us is only potential,” making perceptible the “low-grade element” that organizes our public and private lives (22). Mailer’s “raw material,” then, is the gender-ideology that seeps out of his prose; this gender-ideology is also a nature-ideology. Without ideology there is no art, but nor is there art without the work’s detachment from it. It is on this basis that Jameson opines that Mailer’s treatment of violence “has an explicit ethical and political dimension which was almost wholly lacking in Deliverance” (15).

However, given the structure of the novel form, which necessarily excludes positive markers of its own ideological commitments, one is drawn to ask on what basis Jameson can differentiate the ethical self-consciousness of Mailer’s work from the ethical obliviousness of Dickey’s. Half-way through the essay, Jameson draws an extraordinary analogy. For Mailer, says Jameson, writing “is the very first arena in which you prove your manhood, in which you show whether you are really capable of appropriating the social totality itself, in the way a businessman appropriates it when, by making his million, he shows that he knows the facts of life of that otherwise ‘untotalizable totality’ which is America today” (19). If the difference between Mailer’s and Dickey’s novels is located outside form and is thus not quite pin-downable, except through the intuitions of the critic, the same goes, presumably, for the similarities between Mailer’s writing and the activities of the businessman. Behind the “false resolution” in Mailer remains “the absurdity and contingency of life itself” (16); the same must apply, therefore, to the false resolution represented by the businessman’s “million.” Both gestures, in Jameson’s terms, represent a kind of “stylistic superstition,” an aesthetic resolution that has no necessary complement at the subjective level. But this leaves a few questions hanging. For example, what is the ideological significance of the phrase “absurdity and contingency of life”? Does it mean the same thing in Mailer’s case and that of the millionaire businessman? Is there is any political distinction to be made between the two “stylistic” resolutions, or between the situations of “absurdity” they attempt to resolve? And if not, what is valuable about the role of the artist under capitalism?

To use a phrase that appears many times in this book, we are in the grip of a “form-problem.” Jameson never quite explains this term, but we can attempt a circumstantial definition. To call the difference between Dickey and Mailer, or the analogy between Mailer and the businessman, a “form-problem” is to say that such relations signal and dramatize the ways in which form is not a vehicle or transmitter of thought, as it might have been in previous literary epochs, including realism and modernism, but a limit or constraint on it. In Jameson’s historical conception, form-problems become evident as early as the work of Henry James, the writer who discovers the existence of “a whole layer of human relations that are not unconscious but which the literary apparatus had hitherto been too primitive to register” (59). This discovery is James’s “most enduring claim to greatness,” one that is far more important than the doctrine of “point of view” that Percy Lubbock attributes to him. But form-problems create an insuperable challenge for the critic. It is as a form-problem that a work such as James’s The Bostonians—which treats feminism (and by extension all political activism) “venomously”—requires that we applaud its “novelistic triumphs” even as we “take our distance” from them. Jameson experiences the Jamesian form-problem as a series of paradoxes: for example, the “grudging admiration” we must feel for the writer, confronted by his satiric mastery, while sensing that his politics can be accepted only as an “anti-political politics,” or the fact that James’s great moments of resolution, as in The Ambassadors or The Portrait of a Lady, are also vacuous, lacking “content” (59–60). Faced with these “mixed feelings” (62), Jameson does not try to access the ideological substance of James’s novels—say, by attempting to transcribe the imperceptible “subconversation” perpetually going on among his characters. What the novelist’s withholding enables him to do, according to Jameson, is elude “the naming of un-nameable things” and thus the logic of “reification” itself in the modernist period (58–59).

The world of the contemporary novel, for Jameson, is a world of such form-problems. Reading the first few essays in the collection in chronological rather than sequential order helps illuminate the evolution of this notion in Jameson’s thinking. Thus, in “Language and Conspiracy in DeLillo and Yurick,” from 1984, Jameson writes that both DeLillo in The Names (1982) and Sol Yurick in Richard A. (1981) are writing for a world, that of multinational capitalism, in which “the principle of structural intelligibility is for the first time virtually completely invisible to the individual subjects whose lives it organizes” (66). This, too, is a form-problem, and DeLillo and Yurick adopt “antithetical” solutions to it: experiential fragmentation and “totalization by fiat” respectively. The resolutions in these works, that is to say, are partial. On one side is private experience, on the other the total explanation. In each case the writer’s “epistemological” inclinations are preserved but also undercut. As in the essays on James, García Márquez, and The Wire, Jameson is interested in something that neither DeLillo’s nor Yurick’s work can name: a nonnarrative essence that endures beyond any merely thematic or narrative resolution. The Names is “a delicious reading experience,” admits Jameson (71), but what excites him is not the infrastructure of the novel—its plot, characters, and attempts at closure, which he finds “formalistic” and “meaningless”—but its incidental representations of American social life: experiences of space, perceptions of alterity, instances of conversation in and for itself. Notably, especially in the light of “Allegories of the Hunter,” Jameson makes no differentiation between DeLillo and Yurick on the basis of “political” criteria that Jameson now evidently believes to be alien to or unaccommodatable by the novel.

In the next piece, “Limits of the Gringo Novel,” Jameson states that the political novel is so “problematical” a genre that the critical onus should be not on explaining the lack of politics in a particular work, but on accounting for its presence—on those “rare and miraculous” occasions, that is, when a political novel comes into existence (31). Examples of such “political novels” are few, if not altogether absent, in Inventions of a Present. Glimpses are afforded by the works of Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, for such works are able to imagine a world in which politics is effortlessly present in “everything hitherto considered to be nonpolitical”—personal narratives and experiences, everyday chores and behaviors, perceptions and emotions. What Jameson is imagining here, I think, is something like the “minor literature” theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the basis of an innovative reading of Kafka: a singular literature in which politics is “neither imaginary nor symbolic,” where everything is “immediately” political (1986, 7, 17).

Conditions of Marxist Analysis

Since Jameson’s death, a frequent theme in people’s stories about their engagements with his work is an impression that he had read everything. But what is surprising is how few references there are in Jameson’s work to minoritarian writers in the United States, in whom Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conception of political literature might most directly apply: novelists like Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, or filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Spike Lee. The Jamesonian critic, we read in “Allegories of the Hunter,” is limited to “dealing with a prepolitical literature in political terms” (26–27); however, this principle is stretched in the essay on The Wire, the closest Jameson gets to discussing black American literature in Inventions of a Present, where the question of the work’s politics is revealed as incidental to its status as a “black series,” and having to do precisely with those minoritarian elements: psychological fixations, subjective idiosyncrasies, and secret schemes and operations (89–91).

“Allegories of the Hunter” and the essays that immediately follow it make for fascinating reading, especially as an assessment of the sustainable conditions of Marxist analysis in a globalized or globalizing epoch. The first words of “Allegories of the Hunter” (which are also, then, the first words of Inventions of a Present) read as follows: “Vulgar Marxism has left its scars, particularly on what American intellectuals feel a Marxist interpretation of literary works sets out to do” (4). These essays are in part an attempt to settle the question of how a central principle of Marxist critique, the legibility of the relation between “individual experience” and “structural meaning,” can be maintained in the context of a world system in which any adequacy or balance in the relation breaks down and the relation becomes characterized, rather, by an internal “incompatibility” or “incommensurability” (65).

Four decades later, Jameson’s reading of a very different work, Knausgaard’s art-novel My Struggle, represents a remarkable continuation and enlargement of these concerns. The sixth volume of Knausgaard’s work differs from earlier volumes, says Jameson, in taking place “on a higher, more self-conscious level” (197). This statement seems to distinguish the final volume of Knausgaard’s project in the same way as Jameson earlier distinguished Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? from Dickey’s Deliverance. Again, the terms of the distinction are formally unmarked in Knausgaard’s text, which means that it is impossible to identify some new order of reflectiveness in the narrator. The difference is rather in the mise en scène. As volume six opens, Karl Ove is a renowned, even notorious writer; his attention is therefore newly on his own work and its reception. Those biographical facts are not the occasion for a new quality of meta-reflection in Knausgaard’s work, but simply the appearance of new “raw material.”

Jameson runs through various hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the sensational global appeal of My Struggle: “A greater hunger and thirst for reality? An increasing disgust or impatience with the fictional? An appetite, not for realism . . . but for the Real itself wherever we can still find it?” (202). In contesting all three accounts, Jameson is again rejecting the suggestion that the novel ever comes close to breaking through its “form” to touch the real, or that the historical significance of readerly fascination can ever be discounted on “ideological” grounds. To repeat a principle of Jameson’s criticism alluded to earlier, ideological distance is internal to the novel, not outside it. And notwithstanding the “experimental” quality of Knausgaard’s project, Jameson is under no doubt that the terrain on which Knausgaard is to be read and evaluated is that of the novel.

As with the representation of ideological viewpoints in the novels of an earlier period, the events of Karl Ove’s life and mind are neither “true” nor indicative of anything other than the historicality of the moment in which they have been recorded. In Marxism and Form (1971)—in one of many important methodological statements that appear throughout Jameson’s oeuvre—Jameson called such elements “mere hypostases”: primary conditions of novelistic representation that do not rise to the level of “independent analysis” (1971, 397–98). For Jameson, this is to say, it is simply a condition of the novel that characters hold and express views, that such views are multiple and in tension with each other, and that none of them aligns with the subjective principle of the work. To organize one’s reading around such elements of the diegesis is to limit criticism to extracting from the work only what was “put into it in the first place” (1971, 398).

Jameson registers the presence of “hypostatic” elements in Knausgaard’s project with a term specifically coined for it: “itemization.” But in the case of Knausgaard, it is precisely because the contents of Karl Ove’s narrative closely track Knausgaard’s own views, actions, and experiences that their loss of ideological impletion when they are transposed to Knausgaard’s text is so significant. This hollowing out applies to Karl Ove’s expressions of irritation at his wife or children, to his reflections on the collapse of faith in literature and in fiction, to the many transposed conversations with friends and fellow-writers, and even to the 130-page essayistic reflection on Adolf Hitler in the sixth volume. The range and variety of such material, which the author treats identically as if on a single narrative plane, further dramatizes its hypostatic quality. As Jameson puts it:

It is not only the objects Karl Ove buys and uses that are itemized here: it is the people, the emotions and feelings, the thoughts, that are itemized as well. . . . Knausgaard’s accounts of his own opinions are not the narrative of someone thinking, arguing, discovering plausible or pernicious ideas; they are simply a collection of his own personal thoughts, which he might better have projected in a truly rhetorical and literary form, i.e., the essay. . . . We already know what Knausgaard is doing and where the flaw lies: he is itemizing them. He has already discovered and thought them through; now he is listing them for us, no matter how elaborate the entries. (203, 205)

This is not a judgment on Knausgaard’s work, nor a (negative or positive) recommendation, but a recognition of how far beyond the level of represented sentiment we must go if we are to grasp the meaning of Knausgaard’s project—and of how little critical inroad we make into it if we accept the terms of immediacy in which it presents itself to us.3 We could go further if we were to infer that itemization names the ideological distance that separates novelistic representation from novelistic thinking. Such inferences are not quite Jamesonian; Jameson does not generalize the term “itemization” to the novel, nor does he conceptualize the radical ideological-critical work of the novel in terms of thought.

Elsewhere, I have described the ideological distance internal to the novel as its capacity for a mode of thinking that exceeds what we ourselves are incapable of (2022, 174). For how else, if not as thinking, should we understand the novel’s nonverbal, nonlinguistic, and nonideological dimensions? In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson writes about “a new kind of purely aesthetic emotion” to designate a form of knowledge, specific to literature, that “cannot take place in real life” and that is conceivable “only in conjunction with the work of art” (1992, 114). When a work itemizes, it signals both its awareness of this nonverbal dimension and its own formal exclusion from it. For those who think this sounds mystical or metaphysical, Jameson has a further message: “To attribute [this] to God is as grotesque as to imagine God following our innermost thoughts and muttering them out in His own distinctive form of style indirect libre” (1992, 115).

In closing, I will return briefly to the volume’s opening essay, “Allegories of the Hunter.” For that essay concludes with another of those periodic statements of methodology, this one dealing with the question of how critical Marxism might continue to exert an aspirational rather than dogmatic force on our thinking. If I’ve ever read an articulation of the premises of materialist method that so persuasively sidelines the critic’s subjective commitments (other than in Lukács), I don’t remember it:

Not we, but reality itself is Marxist in its structure; and the Marxist is not a member of some peculiar sect, with its own determinate beliefs and terminology, but rather one who tries as best they can to approximate that reality and to come to active terms with it, in literature as elsewhere. (27)

One of the indisputable achievements of Jameson’s criticism over the last fifty years is to have retained the principle of the critical legibility of the work during a period in which the formal possibilities of the novel have evolved quite radically. Inventions of a Present reminds us that it has done so not in opposition to, but through a close engagement with, those developments. The reason Jameson’s penultimate book is a vital resource for anyone interested in what Marxism might bring to the study of the contemporary novel is almost paradoxical. In Jameson’s hands, the thinking entity that is best able to sustain an openness to a reality understood as “Marxist in its structure” is not the critic but the work itself.

Timothy Bewes is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Brown University. His books include Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022); The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011); and Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002). He is Associate Editor of Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

Notes

1. 1. “Jameson at 90: A Celebration of Theory,” Day 4, with Ericka Beckman, Fredric Jameson, Anna Kornbluh, Robert Tally, and Xudong Zhang, April 26, 2024. Vimeo video, posted by Nicholas Brown, July 14, 2024, https://vimeo.com/984057888.

2. 2. MacCabe seems to be riffing on Karl Marx’s supposed “favourite maxim,” as claimed by Marx himself in 1865 when filling in a popular questionnaire in his twenty-year old daughter Jenny’s album: Nihil humani a me alienum puto, or “Nothing human is alien to me.” See Wheen, 388.

3. 3. In Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh approvingly cites Jameson’s essay on Knausgaard, including his use of the term “itemization,” but unlike Jameson she condemns Knausgaard’s project in terms that refuse the possibility that there is anything “withheld” by the narrative, or that the supposed “immediacy” of the work might itself constitute a mediation, or that there is any ideological distance internal to the work (2023, 67). Kornbluh here forgets one of the central lessons of Hegel’s philosophy according to Jameson: its “elaborate refutation of all possible concepts of immediacy” (2010, 13).

Works Cited

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