Thomas J. Millay reviews Inventions of a Present

Fredric Jameson. Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization. London: Verso Books, 2024. 264 pp.

Review by Thomas J. Millay

3 October 2024

In the past, Fredric Jameson has produced writings that are purely theoretical, some of which I find thrilling (“Metacommentary”), others of which I find utterly incomprehensible. The essays collected in Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization are not these types of essays; they are not pure theory. Instead, each essay takes as its theme a specific cultural product: at least one novel, sometimes several. This is Jameson at his most grounded and interesting. One might worry that these essays are more time-bound than his purely theoretical interventions. For example: does an analysis of Sol Yurick’s Richard A (1981)—once fairly popular but now out of print, seemingly forgotten—have relevance any longer? Yet none of the essays collected here are devoid of theory. Instead, each takes concrete elements from the works under investigation and integrates them into cultural analyses so vivid they continue to illuminate our present world, while simultaneously pushing later generations of critics—analyzing our own cultural products—to aspire to the heights of dialectical meaning-making here displayed.

Take Jameson’s essay on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1980), for example. The novel tracks events in Russia in 1942–1943. The body of Jameson’s essay enumerates a number of the persons and relationships that populate Grossman’s gargantuan text. The surprising variety of the characters is noted; here textile laborers bump shoulders with important newspaper editors, and Jameson’s concluding question becomes: How can a novel of such vast heterogeneity possibly hold together? For Life and Fate does not read as a series of disjointed vignettes, but an “enclave-form” of carefully constructed spaces that, knit together, make a compelling, coherent whole (p. 132). Jameson’s answer is that such a novel is only possible because of the unique historical situation which produced it, wherein the “implacable web of socialist economic relations” is “redoubled” and imposed onto “the war effort itself,” resulting in a situation of enfolded constraint best summarized by the term compression (p. 141). Life and Fate is a representation of a society brought together by the specific pressures at play during that one particular moment, in what could be called the forced de-atomization of a modern people-group. In this way, “the content enables the possibility of form” (p. 141). This is a brilliant theoretical insight into the “social preconditions for narrative coherence” that have at least as much to say about war-time Russia as they do about the individual novel, Life and Fate (p. 135).

Or take the essay “Allegories of the Hunter” on James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). This essay continuously shifts between various analytic approaches. Sometimes the hermeneutic is psychoanalytic: Deliverance satisfies the needs of a suburban imagination because it narrates scenes of cathartic violence while simultaneously reinforcing the need for an authoritarian state. Sometimes the investigation is literary, such as Jameson’s remarks on Mailer’s gnostic symbolism of scent. Sometimes these literary and psychoanalytic observations are taken up into theoretical propositions of a striking universality. For example: “the therapeutic function of literature lies in its value as a ‘talking cure,’ as a way of bringing such buried fantasies to expression in the broad daylight of social consciousness, rather than wishing or arguing them away in some facile optimistic manner” (p. 12). Such theoretical claims are all the more convincing because we find Jameson in the midst of demonstrating their capacity to elucidate the particular cultural object under investigation in his essay. Our greater understanding of the novels engaged in the essay thus serves as a kind of scientific verification of the theories being advanced. The point of all this is to increase comprehension of our present world and the history that created it. What Jameson is doing here is critical analysis, to be sure—but I don’t take it to be the kind of criticism Rita Felski would have us put to one side. Jameson is not encouraging us to scorn these cultural products; instead, he is utilizing a multitude of approaches to try to explain why we love these particular things, and what that love has to do with the specific historical period of which we are a part.

These are just two examples in a volume with essays on everything from Kenzaburō Ōe’s Somersault (1999) to the final volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2011). Some of these essays have appeared in previous collections (“Fear and Loathing in Globalization” has appeared in Archaeologies of the Future [2005] and in The Ancients and the Postmoderns [2015]). Others even Jameson aficionados may have never seen before; in fact, they may not have known of their existence (for example, “Limits of the Gringo Novel”). What these known and strange things evince is long investment in a defined set of interpretive questions (such as: How might a “materialist formalism” illuminate history as it manifests itself in a given cultural work [p. 3]?) and a consistent—yet flexible—approach to answering those questions. The holistic criticism both theorized and advanced in Jameson’s late magnum opus, Allegory and Ideology (2019), is shown in this collected volume to have been what Jameson was doing all along, even in the restricted, miniature experimental laboratory of the book review.