Fredric Jameson on the Unnamed and Naming in Fictions

Abstract

Fredric Jameson on the Unnamed and Naming in Fictions Frances Ferguson (bio) Someone once described a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.” George Saunders Late in The Antinomies of Realism Fredric Jameson speaks of a problem, and then recalls that a problem is something we used to call a problematic, or even the problematic. This gesture of synonymization, immediately followed by a suggested desynonymization, is emblematic of the way Jameson’s critical work moves. In The Antinomies of Realism Jameson takes up tales and novels (along with films and, occasionally, music) written over three centuries and thousands of miles. He first mentions a restrictive account. One might see the “something wrong” in novelistic narrative as the absence of good Proppian narratology. One might urge “something wrong” as a reliable opening ploy for would-be writers, part of the commodification of intellectual goods and services that prevails in the world of writing workshops. While Jameson is alert to such associations, he continues to have much to say about the uses of form in exploding the restrictions that narrative has generated. Novels might always begin with something wrong, but their greatest contribution is in ending less with solutions and satisfactions than with new problems and unresolved dissatisfactions. The constraints that come with fairy-tale happy endings and the evil characters of melodrama drive narrative realism to change. Jameson has developed a formalism that tracks transformations at a variety of scales: in changing metaphors and names, characterizations and collectives, scenes and economic systems. [End Page 97] One of the strongest animating drives of The Antinomies of Realism is Jameson’s commitment to honoring what he calls Georg Lukács’s warning that “the ‘novel’ as a form is never a successful solution to any of its problems” (210). And it is precisely in the limitations on the success of novelistic solutions that Jameson finds the realist novel as a literary form to be historical—or in history, in the sense of being open to a present in which it changes shape. Many literary historians would chronicle the rise of the novel, in modernity, in Western Europe (“It starts with Defoe”; “We must qualify the story of the rise of the novel in Britain; it must start with Cervantes, or with ancient examples”). Many literary historians of the novel, or of realism, would provide something that looks like an orals list for various subgenres, complete with an exhaustive catalog of the traits associated with each and a list of novels that exemplify them. Jameson, however, notes how easy it is to be diverted in trying to talk about “the phenomenon of realism”: “It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and the attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself but about its dissolution” (1). Another critic would produce such a sentence as part of a diatribe against the very idea of tracking realism’s emergence or dissolution. Jameson instead produces a history of realism that will not speak merely of the datable events of world history or the hard facts of the material world, but will also register “a transformation of the sensorium” around the middle of the nineteenth century, “literary representation furnishing the most comprehensive evidence as to a momentous yet impossibly hypothetical historical transformation of this kind” (32). Literary realism takes a number of different forms in his discussion, sometimes pushing a character who has the requisite blandness for a supporting role into a principal part, sometimes revealing how a scene can include a sweeping array of characters. But Jameson’s presentation of various things that have counted (and ought to count) as realisms looks at “the thing itself” partly in order to reaffirm the emergence and decline of realist narrative. Jameson’s is, in short, a history that works differently from both the processional histories of monarchs and heroes, and from the Annales approach of marshalling abundant information about the activities of daily life among persons whose names have not been preserved. His [End...