The Modernist Papers (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Modernist Papers Will Norman The Modernist Papers. Fredric Jameson. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Pp. xxi + 426. $34.95 (cloth). Although Fredric Jameson is most commonly associated with the analysis of postmodernism in its relationship to global capitalism, he has more recently returned to modernist studies, and revisited critical territory first approached through his earlier work on authors such as Joseph Conrad and Wyndham Lewis. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002) [End Page 639] and The Modernist Papers are intended to be read in complementary ways, as Jameson’s introduction to the latter makes clear. A Singular Modernity picks up on recurrent themes in his work, such as the impulse towards aesthetic autonomy and the attempt at an encompassing “absolute” or “totalising” aesthetic reach within modernism, in constructing an elegant Marxist-theoretical account of its development (and disappearance). The Modernist Papers, Jameson tells us, should be understood “as a kind of source-book” for this former project (x), and consists of twenty essays on particular modernist texts and writers, the majority of them recognisably canonical. If A Singular Modernity gives us the conceptual framework, The Modernist Papers present us with something we have grown less likely to expect from this formidable theorist—close reading. It is a distinct feature of Jameson’s academic career that he has written chapters and articles for a bewildering range of publications, some of which are not easy to obtain. As such, a collected volume is welcome, and about half of The Modernist Papers has appeared elsewhere. There are also, however, a number of new essays which subject major figures of the modernist canon to detailed readings. These include pieces on Joyce, Proust, Mallarmé, Stein and Carlos Williams, as well as a three-chapter section on the German modernism of Mann and Kafka. In contrast to the inevitably generalizing sweep of the theoretical monographs for which Jameson is well known, we are here offered a more intimate, if no less demanding, series of dialectical commentaries on the intricate problematics of form as manifested in individual texts and authors. There is a stronger sense of the critic’s pleasure in reading these novels, essays, and poems, and even a personal commitment to them, than might have been anticipated (the playful digression on the apparently numerous appearances of dogs in Williams’s Paterson being one example). This feeds into a significant feature of the methodology, for there is a suspicion that the ideological analyses Jameson performs are in part directed at himself and his own as-yet-untheorized aesthetic tastes. This means that there is none of the hostility towards the modernist project once familiar in previous generations of Marxist literary criticism, but something more like the self-interrogating ambivalence of the late Adorno. One of the recurrent questions which Jameson repeatedly formulates in these essays is why aesthetic modernism should continue to seduce, intrigue, and energize its readers from the historical moment of postmodernism. Indeed, if there can be said to be a unifying factor in an otherwise fragmentary volume, it is precisely this necessity of returning critically to our own persistent desires to imbue modernist texts with some sort of value. A number of literary scholars may be indignant, if not surprised, to learn from Jameson that “no one is now interested in the madeleine or “involuntary memory”; no one cares about the father-son relationships in Ulysses or the Odyssey parallels” (170). The (purported) demise of humanist critical concerns about canonical modernist texts is a constant source of relief in The Modernist Papers, but also that which compels the entire project—now that’s out of the way, what are we going to do with these beguiling texts? The response comes from Jameson’s characteristic tightrope walk between commentary and critique. Some of the most difficult texts of modernism, such as Mallarmé’s Divagations and Stein’s Lectures in America, are here subjected to an immanent exegesis designed to coerce them into yielding up their own contradictions and impossibilities. At the heart of each essay lies an attempt to uncover what Jameson calls in his introduction “the content of the form,” which is discerned with...