The Modernist Papers
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THE MODERNIST PAPERS ----------------♦ ---------------- FREDRIC JAMESON V VERSO Firsr published by Verso 2007 Copyright © Fredric Jameson 2007 All rights reserved The moral right of che author has been asserted 13579 10 8642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-096-3 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Garamond by WestKey Ltd, Falmouth, Cornwall Printed by Quebecor World/Fairfield, USA In memory of Claudio Guillen Contents Introduction ix PART O NE 1 The Poetics of Totality 3 2 Celine and Innocence 45 PART T W O 3 Form Production in The Magic Mountain 55 4 Kafka’s Dialectic 96 5 Allegory and History: On Rereading Doktor Faustus 113 PART THREE 6 Ulysses in History 137 7 Modernism and Imperialism 152 8 Joyce or Proust? 170 PART FOUR 9 Exoticism and Structuralism in Wallace Stevens 207 10 Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist 223 11 Rimbaud and the Spatial Text 238 12 Towards a Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters 255 13 A Note on A Vision 269 PART FIVE 14 In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities 281 15 S6seki and Western Modernism 294 PART SIX 16 Mallarme Materialist 313 17 Gertrude Stein and Parts of Speech 342 PART SEVEN 18 “Madmen like Kings” 361 19 Euphorias of Substitution 371 20 “A Monument to Radical Instants” 380 Acknowledgments 420 Index of Names 422 Introduction The coherence of any serious and extended engagement with cultural expe rience depends on a productive coordination between contingency and theory; between chance encounters and an intellectual project. It is true that we always try to resolve this tension one way or the other, by philosophically confirming the aleatory nature of the experience, or subsuming the personal under a theoretical meaning. But the vitality of the engagement depends on keeping the tension alive. In practice, this probably means the construction of a Gestalt which can be read either way; as a comment on the text or as the illustration of a theory; and despite the desirability of performing both these operations at once and together, either will ultimately lead us back to history itself, to the history of the text fully as much as to the history of the theory. This makes for a good deal of heterogeneity, both in the literary texts examined here, and in the variety of theoretical contexts tried out over a thirty-year period. I like to think that, faced with an alternation of written and spoken materials, some of them overwritten and others rhetorically amplified, this very unevenness will prove to be a relief for the reader. As for the repetitions, I would be more disturbed by their absence than the reader might be; for good or ill, the dialectic requires you to say everything simul taneously whether you think you can or not; and that inevitably means that you cannot avoid certain topics just because you have dealt with them else where. One has never definitively dealt with them; but be reassured—the situations from which such topics emerge have modified their appearance dramatically from the Eisenhower era to the age of globalization. But it is not only the theoretical reference points (Sartre, Hegel, Deleuze, Greimas, Lukdcs, Althusser, Adorno, etc.) that may seem eclectic or, even worse, to obey the more suspicious laws of intellectual fashion. The literary texts might also be taken to form some personal canon, if not indeed a con stellation of more universal validity. But that is to reckon without absences and omissions which are themselves accidental, however much I regret them. Only Japan seemed called upon to stand for the non-Western— x THE MODERNIST PAPERS indeed, I might even say, the non-European—world; which scarcely docu ments my own personal debts to Latin America, to North Africa, or to China. As far as my private formation is concerned, indeed, I would have to be puzzled by the absence of Pound or Faulkner, or indeed of virtually the entirety of the French modern tradition with which I have been affiliated. To be sure, there are sometimes professional explanations for such gaps: some of the texts discussed in this collection are here because I taught them in classes and seminars; but just as often works and writers equally impor tant to me are missing precisely because I taught them so often. Still, these assurances and apologies will do little to assuage the doubts of readers who assume that these analyses, particularly since they are meant to accompany my A Singular Modernity as a kind of source-book, were all designed to illustrate this or that component of a theory of the modern. But A Singular Modernity was thought through later than most of the essays in this book, and its theorization of modernism was reluctant and provisional, and organized around Luhmann’s notion of an intensifying differentiation of the elements and levels of the social world. An earlier version, or Platonic myth, told the story in terms of the cultural consequences of the spread of reification around the globe.1 (Inasmuch as I understand Lukics’s notion of reification as including Weberian rationalization within itself, this figure to be sure is itself closely related to Luhmann’s.) The essays collected in the present volume, however, also deploy other interpretive codes: the fragmen tation of the reading public, the incompatibility between Third and First World perspectives, the loss of a Utopian language (or the attempt to rein vent one), the internal limits on the representability of a specific historical content, the pressure of a new sense of space on linguistic and narrative structures, the tension between private languages and classification schemes, that between the revolutionary instant and the construction of narrative time, the emergence of a non-universalizable sensory or bodily datum, and so forth. These codes or interpretive frames are no doubt all interrelated, but their conceptual languages send us in different directions, which are far from converging. Yet even if these essays are read, much against my own philosophical and stylistic convictions, as examples of such theories, even if they somehow dra matize “historicism”—a word I have never wanted to repudiate, and which Joan Copjec usefully encapsulates as “the reduction of society [and presum ably also of its cultural products] to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge” —that was never the way I saw it. I don’t even mind the implication that these discussions perpetuate that old opposition of base and superstructure which now so long ago Raymond Williams (along with many others) told us to abandon. I will say some more about oppositions in a moment, but I want to insist at this point that, even if base and super structure were still relevant, my conception of their relationship or even INTRODUCTION xl their interrelationship would not all be one of reflexion or replication. It is rather one of situation and response, and of the creativity of the various superstructures with respect to a national and socio-economic, infra structural situation which is “not of their own making.” To be sure, the nature of that infrastructural situation can be reconstructed from the response, from the attempt to resolve its contradictions or to escape its death grip, as well as from the constraints imposed on that “socially sym bolic act” in virtue of its reference to that specific historical situation and not some other one. There is, however, another argument that might be made in support of “historicist reductionism,” if that is what you still want to call it. It is this: that in the pre-theoretical atmosphere of the Anglo-American 1950s and early 1960s, in the context of the subjectivism and psychologism of the then United States (leaving Britain out of it), in a society in which everything is “reduced” in advance to the private and the personal,3 any insistence on the public, the economic, the political, any injunction to “include history,” has the value of an expansion of the meaning of cultural texts and not their reduction, and of an enlargement of their resonance, an increase of their complexity and the number of their symbolic levels, an enrichment in the contexts in which a given act or symbolic gesture or expression is situated and understood. It is worth insisting further on the philosophical originality of the idea of the situation which is at stake here. If indeed, as theory argues, we process the data of reality through a certain number of conceptual categories—an epistemological model pioneered by Kant, as we shall see—then we should add the familiar reminder, not only that such categories are historical, and subject to modification, but also that one of the signal historical modifica tions they have undergone in modern times is the shift from a substantive or thing-organized categorical system—through which the outside world is grasped as so many items or static substances—to a new set of process- organized categories whose multiple versions can be identified throughout contemporary philosophy. What is less often observed is the central role— under whatever terminology—of the category of the “situation”,4 as a way of constructing the dynamic of human activity: it is because we organize the data of a given present into a situation to which we are compelled to respond in some way, even if the response is inaction or the passive recep tion of affect, that we can reconstruct and reinterpret such interactions in terms of acts and of praxis.