"Why," asks James Draney at the beginning of his review of Fredric Jameson's latest book, Allegory and Ideology, "does Fredric Jameson’s interpretive method — his insistence that the political interpretation of texts constitutes the 'absolute horizon' of all meaning — still call for defense in today's academic scene?" I'm not sure it does require defense in the current "academic scene": It seems to me that Jameson's notion that political ideology "subsumes everything else in culture" has pretty much won the day. While a few academics periodically question the totalizing influence of this orientation to literary study (everything is politics), those challenges are unlikely to remove it from its position as the authoritative assumption of academic criticism any time soon. (It is itself the pervasive "ideology" among literary scholars against which no effective resistance can really be made.)
However, for those of us who are not obligated to defer to this critical doctrine (no tenure decision looms ahead), the answer to Draney's question actually seems pretty simple: the idea that there is no escape from the conceptual shackles imposed by "late capitalism," no alternative in our approach to reading works of literature to the exactions of "ideology critique," takes all the gratification out of reading, converts it into a dreary exercise in rhetorical self-congratulation for seeing through it all. If this is all we are to get from our engagement with imaginative literature, why bother? I already know what I'm going to find, so spending time with a literary work of any complexity or inventiveness seems pretty stupid.
Many of us, of course, think that the complexity and inventiveness are themselves the payoff, valuable for their own sake. According to Draney, though, to believe this is to succumb to the foolishness that that "there are areas of life and culture that somehow fall outside politics and ideology," something we are not to do with "a straight face."
But it is possible to find this sort of gratification in reading literature, nevertheless. To do so, we don't have to believe "there is such a thing as an unmediated relationship to art, culture, Being." We can assume that of course no one can encounter a literary text in a state of radical innocence, freed of all previous exposure to the cultural presuppositions our life in the world in which we have been thrown has pressed upon us. How could we be? Why would we want to be? It is possible to find the act of reading works of the literary imagination to be itself an act of resisting the control of all ideologies, even if finally it can never be quite complete.
A fundamental problem with the ideological critique is that it often fails to say something revealing about a particular work of literature. I was just recently reading Jameson's work on Raymond Chandler, and while Jameson has a great deal to say about detective novels and mass culture, he has almost nothing interesting to say about Chandler's writing. He's just not that interested in it, except as a symptom. I suppose that is the dead end of the ideological critique. If literature doesn't deserve our attention for its own sake, but only as a symptom of something else (e.g. economic reality, capitalist ideology, etc.) then why concern ourselves with it? Perhaps some writers allow us to glimpse outside of the prison of our ideology, but then, they don't have to be artists, do they? Why not read pamphlets or tracts instead?
Posted by: Maria | 08/30/2019 at 08:35 PM