Toril Moi: Fredric Jameson as Reader

Toril Moi

Ifirst met Fredric Jameson more than forty years ago, at one of the sociology of literature conferences at Essex University in the early 1980s. I can’t remember which one, but I know that in July 1982 I gave a talk called ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’. Was Fred there that year? I had recently completed a PhD at Bergen, a university few in England had heard of, and was trying to earn a living by translating novels into Norwegian and giving tutorials in French literature at Oxford. I don’t think Fred noticed me at all, and I don’t think he had any reason to, except that my partner at the time was Terry Eagleton. His teacher was Raymond Williams and I remember being present at what was in some small way a historic event: the only time (I think) Terry, Fred and Raymond Williams were in the same room together. It was at Jesus College, Cambridge, where Williams was a fellow. But that’s as much as I can recall. What did the great men say to one another? I have no idea. All I remember is a scenario worthy of a play: three eloquent male Marxists and a silent feminist together in a room in a Cambridge college.

Time moved on, and so did I. I published some books and finally got a job, at my alma mater. Then Fred intervened in my life: he invited me to come to Duke as a visiting professor in the autumn of 1987. I accepted, and made my first trip to a Southern tobacco town I had never heard of. Although downtown Durham was then in its doldrum years, intellectual life at Duke was exhilarating. Fred was busy setting up the Literature Programme, founded just two years earlier, and Stanley Fish was transforming the English department. Neither of them would have been there if it hadn’t been for Frank Lentricchia, who somehow persuaded Duke to hire both at the same time. Theory was flourishing, and Duke was on the verge of becoming the hottest destination in the humanities. That autumn, Fred and Stanley organised an enormous theory conference called ‘Convergence in Crisis’, which should be the title of every radical conference in the humanities.

Not long after that, Fred came into my office and asked if I wanted to work at Duke. I thought he was just talking generally; it took several more weeks before I understood that the Literature Programme had been searching for a feminist theorist, that my visit had been a trial run, my talk at the conference a job talk, and that there had been a vote to hire me. I began properly in the autumn of 1989, and here I still am. Looking back on those days, I realise that very few people have shaped my life, have affected its material and structural foundations, as profoundly for the good as Fred Jameson.

Fred and I were colleagues for 35 years. The last time I examined with him, on Zoom, was in July 2024, a few months before his death. Fred and I were never close. We didn’t work together on anything and we didn’t really socialise, except that I remember going to huge parties out at his farmhouse. We were cordial colleagues, but not friends. Intellectually, I felt both close to and distant from him. He was trained in French and comparative literature, as was I. He wrote on Sartre; I wrote on Beauvoir. He wrote on Balzac; I wrote on Ibsen. He wrote about Lacan and Freud, and so did I. But our differences were just as striking. I am a feminist, not a Marxist. I have my doubts about dialectical thinking. I immersed myself in Wittgenstein, the only major European philosopher Fred couldn’t relate to. Quite unlike Fred, I also take a great deal of interest in certain kinds of moral philosophy. But quite like him, I have remained faithful to the philosophical vision of a French existentialist. In his case Sartre, in my case Beauvoir.

There is nothing special about this. The striking feature of Duke’s Literature Programme, then and now, is that no faculty member tried to emulate Fred. Fred was Fred, sui generis, and his capacious, dialectical vision of intellectual life inspired him to create a programme that could sublate, without chafing contradictions, an exceptionally wide range of intellectual interests. He arrived at Duke in 1985, four years after publishing The Political Unconscious, his great book on interpretation. The programme he created was made in that book’s image. It was not, Fred decided, going to educate specialists. Its mission would be to train intellectuals.

Fred had three overarching ideas as to how to achieve this. First, there was his slogan, the first words of The Political Unconscious: ‘Always historicise!’ The second idea could be summarised as ‘Always theorise!’, or perhaps ‘Always engage in metacommentary!’ – which means something like, ‘Always explicitly reflect on the moves you make in your efforts to think about your subject.’ Finally, the third injunction: ‘Know your archive!’ Fred believed, firmly, that students had to have an archive, that is, some cultural form or historical period which they knew intimately. A few classic works would never do. Fred included three cultural forms from the start: literature, film, and the objects and phenomena studied under the label ‘cultural studies’ – the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, for example.

Fred’s own archive was extensive. It included history, theory, literature, film, philosophy, politics. He seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. Why focus on Fred as a reader? My sense is that his influential theorising about modernism and postmodernism, his insights into the dialectics of ideology and utopia and the nature of neoliberal global culture, may have obscured not just his originality as a theorist of interpretation and as a reader, but the way his work in that field allowed him to write all the books that came after. Fred made his way to cultural theory through a long engagement with literary works. Literature, and above all the novel, remained central to his thinking, from his first brilliant pages on Sartre’s Age of Reason in 1961 to the novels discussed in Inventions of a Present in 2024. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.

Fred’s first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, is probably now among his least read. It was based on his PhD dissertation, which he defended at Yale in 1959. Even if it wasn’t always apparent, Sartre remained a touchstone for Fred. In The Years of Theory (2024), he writes:

I indulge myself by remembering my intellectual excitement at unpacking that first shipment from France of the big fresh uncut volumes of Saint Genet and L’Être et le néant in the living room of my family home in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in the early 1950s. But it was the reading of Sartre’s novel L’Âge de raison which first struck me like a thunderbolt and revealed to me the truth of an existentialism to which, since then, I have always tried to be faithful.

He stresses the same point in Inventions of a Present, noting that he shares with Perry Anderson ‘the formative impact of Sartrean existentialism and a passion for the historical novel and its problems’.

The first thing that struck me when I picked up the Sartre book was the almost complete absence of scholarly apparatus. There is no bibliography, and only a handful of notes referring to other scholars. Most of the notes just give the original French of the Sartre citations. For a first book based on a dissertation, this is quite unusual. I wondered whether the dissertation itself was more scholarly, but no: the complete bibliography of the dissertation is almost exactly the same.

Although Fred read widely, he didn’t define himself as a ‘scholar’ in the sense of someone who values the dutiful analysis of secondary sources. To understand the implications of this observation, we need to historicise it. In the period from the mid-1930s to around 1960, the New Critics launched an attack on the kind of old-fashioned academic who worked on philology, wrote biographies and literary histories and edited correspondence. Against the ‘scholars’, they set the ‘critics’. The idea was that academic literary study should be ‘criticism’ as opposed to scholarship, and should rely on a close, formalist reading of ‘the text itself’, as opposed to getting lost in a positivistic accumulation of learning. Extensive footnotes and long lists of sources came to signify a commitment to ‘extrinsic’ authority. The New Critics flourished in the 1950s, not least at Yale, where Cleanth Brooks was a professor of English.

Fred positions himself squarely as a ‘critic’ in his Sartre book. But his mode of criticism has very little to do with close reading as pioneered by the New Critics. First, unlike the New Critics, Fred does not turn to poetry, but to philosophy and novels. Second, he takes his bearings from European thinking, channelled not through the English department, but through French and comparative literature. His greatest influences at Yale were French and German: his dissertation supervisor, Henri Peyre, and Erich Auerbach. In his obituary of Fred, published in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson emphasises their shared admiration for Peyre. When Anderson was studying French and Russian literature at Oxford, he writes, one of his ‘favourite books was The Contemporary French Novel by Henri Peyre, with its chapters on Malraux, Camus, Sartre and others’. One of the few secondary sources Jameson cites in his dissertation is Peyre’s chapter on Sartre.

In addition to Peyre and Auerbach, Fred’s other early sources of inspiration were the critics of the Geneva School, above all Jean-Pierre Richard, but also Georges Poulet and Jean Starobinski, whose attempts to grasp the inner logic of a writer’s ‘literary universe’ were at the cutting edge of literary criticism in the 1960s. It’s not hard to detect traces of their way of reading in Sartre: The Origins of a Style. But perhaps the most important influence on the Sartre book, signalled by the word ‘style’ in its title, was another European émigré, Leo Spitzer, whose theory of stylistics was based on solid philological foundations. Spitzer wrote that to do stylistics was to make ‘the trip from language or style to the soul’. In an afterword to a later edition of Sartre, Fred adds that he was also inspired by early Barthes and by Adorno’s work on music, though I don’t see many traces of either of them in his book.

Sartre is in its way a kind of close reading: Fred parses sentences and spends the first third of the book analysing the existential and phenomenological meaning of Sartre’s punctuation. But he didn’t read for organic unity, and he certainly didn’t read as a formalist. He read for the way philosophy – understood as a vision of human existence – expresses itself through literary form. The subtitle, ‘Origins of a Style’, indicates the main idea: that Sartre’s style, both in his literary and his philosophical works, is the subjective expression of experience in the world. Fred himself called the book a ‘study of a literature of consciousness’. This project is much more a response to existentialism, phenomenology, the Geneva School and Spitzer than it is to New Criticism.

It is not a straightforward book. Several reviewers at the time noted the ‘obscurity’ of the style. Fred writes as if we all know all of Sartre; often he doesn’t even tell us which book he is quoting (this is probably a trace of the Geneva School’s commitment to treating an author’s oeuvre as one literary universe). In my view, the first third is the best, with its wonderful analyses of the way rhythm and punctuation reveal the philosophy in Sartre’s literary expression. There are also some signs of a difficulty that Fred would keep returning to: the question of the new. What counts as innovation, as change, in literary history?

The experimenters of the early 20th century had discovered new kinds of content: new structures of lived human time which they were obliged to invent a new organisation in order to express, new complications of consciousness in which they discovered hidden forces that had to be registered with a new language, even new relationships between human beings appearing against the background of the collapse of apparently permanent social patterns.

Here, I think, we can see the beginning of Fred’s lifelong investigations of cultural history as a history of transformations.

At the edges of this first book – functioning as its horizon, as it were – is modernism, only explicitly mentioned in its last pages, where Fred shows that Sartre comes up against the problem confronted by all modernists: how to make language say the unsayable. In the very last sentence, Fred observes that when Sartre realises this, he realises that he can write in any mode:

For when all forms are impossible, no single one is any more impossible than any other, and suddenly they all come into being, all possible, criticism and plays, philosophy, novels, and political and historical and biographical analyses, bringing us face to face with the image of a consciousness for which everything can be understood, and of an unintimidated language for which there is nothing that cannot be said.

Here already, in Fred’s mid-twenties, is the Jamesonian sentence in full bloom: sinuous, capacious and strikingly self-assured. If we are to believe Fred, he remained faithful to Sartre his whole life. When he moves on to Marxism, he doesn’t abandon the insights into style, expression and consciousness developed in his first book. Instead, he eventually integrates them into his dialectical vision of literary form.

‘Metacommentary’, from 1971, is one of Fred’s best-known essays on reading, or rather on interpretation. It was written around the time of his second book, Marxism and Form, also published in 1971. In the ten years since the Sartre book, he had fully absorbed the Marxist intellectual tradition. In ‘Metacommentary’, he began to draw on that heritage to shape a new understanding of reading. The question of interpretation was still at that time dominated by Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966). Fred begins with Sontag, but quickly moves on to other formalist modes of reading. By ‘interpretation’, he tells us, he means the question of meaning. If we ask of a text, ‘What does it mean?’ we are asking for an interpretation. Against interpretation, he sets ‘description’. Corresponding to this binary is the opposition between content and form:

interpretation/descriptioncontent/formmeaning/formalism

In the right-hand column, Fred places the new or newly rediscovered formalisms then enjoying a surge of interest: Russian and Czech Formalism, and French structuralism. What follows is a brilliant dialectical reading, which ends with a great paradox: ‘Formalism is thus, as we have suggested, the basic mode of interpretation of those who refuse interpretation.’ He adds that formalism is generally practised on smaller (shorter) forms, and that it is condemned to synchrony, incapable of thinking historically. Or, in other words, ‘Formalism as a method stops short at the point where the novel as a problem begins.’ Here he prepares the ground for The Political Unconscious, the slogan ‘Always historicise!’ and the question of how to historicise that most amorphous of genres, the novel.

In matters of art, Fred argues in ‘Metacommentary’, we shouldn’t

want to decide … want to resolve a difficulty… Instead, what is wanted is a kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher, and turns the very problem itself … into its own solution … by widening its frame in such a way that it now takes in its own mental processes as well as the object of those processes.

Instead of pinning down the problem, we need to look at ourselves, to ‘observe our own struggles and patiently set about characterising them’. If we do that, we will discover that the ‘urge to interpret results from an optical illusion’.

This reminds me of Wittgenstein’s idea that when we get stuck intellectually, when we have failed to find a solution to a problem because ‘a picture held us captive,’ the only way out is to try to understand what the picture is. Here ‘picture’ means our idea of the way the thing at stake must be, a set of conditions of possibility that we take for granted and that govern our thinking. To get past our blockage we need to reach the point where we can find and describe those preconditions. That is the work of philosophy. Wittgenstein calls this getting to ‘eine übersichtliche Darstellung’ – a clear overview, usually translated as ‘perspicuous representation’ – and Wittgenstein’s ‘overview’ is almost literally Fred’s ‘one floor higher’. Wittgenstein isn’t talking about art, of course, but about philosophy. His goal is to teach us to think, or rather, to rethink whatever we thought we knew about language, concepts, logic and reason.

As Fred knew from experience, it takes extreme mental agility to find the words to describe the conditions of possibility for our original wrongheaded impulse. We have to grasp what we originally thought and turn that thought into an object of analysis. I thought I had to choose between form and content, description and interpretation. I thought I had to come up with a fundamental commitment to one or the other. But no! That idea was itself the problem. We can’t resolve the problem of form/content by taking sides, by choosing.

Let me add here, in what may be a Wittgensteinian aside, that the very idea we could overcome the problem by declaring something ‘undecidable’ accepts the idea that it makes sense to talk about decision-making in the first place. The commitment to finding the undecidable is the flipside of the commitment to wanting to decide. The alternative is, Wittgenstein-like, to realise that this is the wrong register, to shift one’s perspective and find different terms. Or, Fred-like, to elevate the problem, see that the wish to decide (or to refuse to decide) must itself become an object of reflection. This is the first and most fundamental principle of metacommentary.

There is an important difference here between the two positions. Wittgenstein thinks that we only need to do this work if we genuinely feel we have a problem we can’t solve. If we have no problem, we have no question to pursue, so there isn’t anything to understand. We might still have a problem, but if we remain blind to it, we can’t know that we need to do anything. By contrast, Fred seems to think that his method is required in general and in all contexts. A Wittgensteinian thinker would keep her distance both from Fred’s injunction never to decide, and from deconstruction’s injunction always to find the points of undecidability. ‘Keeping her distance’ doesn’t mean rejecting every case. It means avoiding theorising in general, asking instead how we can find the right place for decisions, or indeed for undecidability, which again means giving a description of cases where such concepts do genuine work, as opposed to where they don’t.

For Fred, the idea of getting up to a higher floor is just the first move in what will quickly become an ever more complex dialectic. As the essay evolves, Fred exhibits an almost dizzying capacity to rethink form as content and content as form, so that in the end, criticism becomes a ‘laying bare’ of the ‘original message, the original experience beneath the distortions of the censor’, which at the same time is an explanation or description of the causes of the distortion. To do criticism is simply to describe ‘the mechanism of censorship itself’. In the end, criticism as metacommentary traces ‘the logic of the censorship itself and of the situation from which it springs: a language that hides what it displays beneath its own reality as language, a glance that designates, through the very process of avoiding, the object forbidden’. This is Barthes’s larvatus prodeo, ‘I advance masked,’ or ‘I advance pointing to my mask,’ which he first used in Writing Degree Zero, from 1953 – the only work by Barthes mentioned in the Sartre book.

At the end of ‘Metacommentary’, Fred has arrived at a position which assumes something very general about language as such, namely that language ‘hides what it displays beneath its own reality as language’. The idea that we must speak about language in terms of hiding/displaying was in the 1980s, and probably still remains, common sense among intellectuals. Yet I must dissent. I don’t doubt that sometimes speakers or writers conceal things, or that they don’t quite know what they are saying, or can’t quite say what they want to say. All this is ripe for interpretation, in Fred’s sense. But I don’t believe that language qua language either hides or reveals anything. Ideas about ‘language as such’ make the mistake of considering language as a closed system, a theorisable entity, rather than what it is: an infinitely open-ended series of actions and expressions. ‘Language as such’ doesn’t make me lie; ‘language as such’ doesn’t make me keep secrets. Meaning arises in use. If there is no use, there is no language. We can’t talk only about language. We also have to talk, like Sartre, about agents, speakers, intentions and responsibility.

Ideas of hiding and disclosing place ‘language as such’ under the sign of epistemology, meaning that questions of truth and falsity – the sceptical optics – will always displace other kinds of question, for example questions of good and evil, or of expression and response, questions arising when we consider the way we succeed or fail in our attempts to understand one another. I find this deeply problematic.

Fred’s fifth book was The Political Unconscious, in which he sets out his understanding of what it means to interpret cultural forms and explains why he thinks that any interesting reading must have Marxism as its ultimate horizon. It is again a book about interpretation, a book about the way we find the answer to the question: ‘What does the text mean?’ Fred’s answer manages to incorporate just about every other mode of reading and subsume formalisms of every kind – style as expressive of consciousness, author’s intentions, readers’ responses and so on – in one magnificent, overarching dialectical architecture. What I love about this is the absence of dogmatic formalism. We can ask about content! But at the same time: content is form! Form is content! We’re all formalists! And then, more contentiously: Marxism is always the horizon of interpretation. The problem here, of course, is that if we decided we should all read like Fred, then our readings would come to sound the same (as happened to deconstructive readings once the novelty of the characteristic moves had worn off).

With The Political Unconscious, Fred had found his method. He had worked out how to interpret cultural forms dialectically, and as his understanding of dialectics was capacious and flexible, he could employ his immense learning to range across cultural forms and across national and global formations. Does Fred teach us how to read? In one sense, the answer must be yes. No one laid out his method, his questions, his structures of thinking more clearly than Fred. But also, he never suggests that future scholars should simply imbibe his work and repeat his methodology. We should learn from him just as he learned from Auerbach and Spitzer and the Geneva School. But we should also follow our own interests, even if we fear that they are far from theoretically or politically correct. Fred may have been a controversial writer, but he was never polemical. He got on with his work.

If we do our work with authenticity, we will experience anxiety, Sartre’s angoisse, for we simply won’t know where the work will take us. Just consider Fred. His book about Sartre’s style expresses his own interests in the late 1950s. There isn’t much in it that points to what was to come. Yet the book has a voice, the voice of someone with the independence of mind to strike out on his own. Sartre – and Fred too – would stress that if we set out to emulate an intellectual model, even if that model is Fred Jameson, we are alienating our freedom. Instead of asking our own questions, we will be asking questions fed to us by an external authority, which is something Fred never did.

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