History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction

Abstract

Nothing escapes history, but literary modernism is often discussed as if it did.' Depending on their political-aesthetic stance, such discussions either rejoice in modernism's flight from a debased social reality to a realm of rich meaning, aesthetic joy, and pure freedom, or they regret modernism's retreat from accessibility into bristling difficulty, its isolation from the life of society on a rarefied, elitist aesthetic pinnacle.2 Such discussions assume the absence or marginalization of explicit historical reference in most modernist fiction. But in fact, a good deal of modernist fiction generally considered to have escaped (repudiated, denied) history has instead suppressed it, thereby using one of the few feasible strategies, given the modernist disgust with history, for writing about it at all. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson discovers in Nostromo what he considers a unique metamorphosis of historical content into pure form: