As I sat on the toilet
of a Boeing 727,
somewhere over Ohio
riding United tourist,
I imagined my last moments
of life
falling bare-assed through the sky,
trying to reach down
to pull up my pants,
then, tumbling,
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Making of a Poem
The Art of Criticism No. 5
By Fredric Jameson
Teaching at Duke, 1988. Courtesy of Duke University.
The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade. This past March saw the publication of Mimesis, Expression, Construction, an edited transcript of a semester-long seminar on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory that Jameson gave at Duke, where for nearly forty years he taught classes on literature, Continental thought, and film. In May came Inventions of a Present, a collection of essays on the contemporary novel, from Norman Mailer in the sixties to Olga Tokarczuk just the other day. And in October, not three weeks after the disparition of this committed Francophile, Verso brought out The Years of Theory, a sort of retrospective introduction to the postwar French thinkers—structuralists and poststructuralists, Marxists and psychoanalysts—whose ideas Jameson had done so much to bring to several generations of students.
Among his more than two dozen books of literary and cultural criticism on matters as disparate as international cinema and universal military conscription, the titles Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981) might be nominated as the most important. The first of these rehearsed the ideas of a cohort of Western Marxists—Sartre, Adorno, and others—to argue for a “dialectical criticism” that could uncover the otherwise occluded reality of capitalist social relations through a formal analysis of literature. And the second went further, to insist on Marxism as the sole means of thought adequate to grasping all cultural artifacts and periods “as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot,” namely that of class society from the first agricultural settlements down to global capitalism.
Jameson was a reluctant interviewee, no doubt for reasons he explained in a 2006 essay, “On Not Giving Interviews”: the form tended to transform universal concepts into mere personal opinions, and encouraged an overall laxity of expression. But reluctance didn’t mean refusal. In our conversations over Skype, he spoke at generous length, in soft and musing tones, while his round face and thick glasses added to an impression of basic gentleness. This amiable disposition did not, however, make him complaisant or deferential. Owing perhaps to his skepticism of the interview form, he asked me to send written questions in advance of our sessions—and then usually rejected or severely revised the terms in which I’d formulated them.
At this point in the introduction, it’s almost customary for the interviewer to evoke the physical setting of the interview: the subject’s comfortable or austere office or living room, any plants or pets, the light, beverages, weather … But the long-distance nature of my and Jameson’s conversations prevents me from observing the custom. Though we discussed meeting in person, my only visit, as it were, to his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, occurred when, with the unselfconscious pride of a child delighted with a new possession, or so it seemed to me, he emailed photos and a video of his recently acquired “library house”: a modest wooden dwelling not far from the home he shared with his wife, Susan Willis, with autumn trees in the background, meant as catchment for the overflow of his books.
Jameson begins our interview (which he didn’t live to review or edit) with allusions to my first two written questions, so it’s worth saying what these were. Number one attempted not very successfully to “go at things in a brass-tacks way that’s uncharacteristic of your resolutely theoretical work” and elicit some biographical facts: When and where were you born? Where did you grow up? and so on. And number two sought to apply to Jameson’s particular case the general question put by Sartre, the writer most important to Jameson, in Search for a Method: How to reconcile a psychoanalytic understanding of the individual person, as a unique product of a specific family system, with a Marxist understanding of the same person, as a representative specimen of his or her social class during a given moment of history? Jameson suggests that that question had really been posed first by Simone de Beauvoir, and then, friendly as could be, more or less ducks it.
FREDRIC JAMESON
Well, you want to know facts, and as I don’t believe in facts—that is to say, their constructions—I want to make this first question more theoretical. This will be an illustration of what is, for me, a basic philosophical position on the constructedness of so-called facts, as well as a dramatization of the meaning of the word theory, about which I am so often asked and whose differentiation from philosophy has been so important for me, but which I seem unable to get anyone to understand, unless I have recourse to a word which sounds more familiar and intelligible to them, namely the dialectic.
We can retheorize the first question’s empirical formulation by preceding it with a brief discussion of question number two, on the Sartrean view of the family—pioneered, rather, I believe, by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoirs. For both, the family is the crucial mediatory between class society and the individual—the latter learns class through the family and in particular through the parents. But one must add that this is a complex mediation that resembles the double helix of DNA. The infant is, in the parents, confronted with two complete sets of social or class genes. He or she forms a subjectivity out of their combination—that is, the choice between them and the restructuration of a new and novel being.
My father’s family was Scotch Irish—that is, a part of the Protestant emigration from Scotland to Belfast and the North of Ireland, which came to the United States by ship in the nineteenth century. His father was a landowner who went on to become a banker and a local “notable.” I say this in order to underscore the distance from anything immediately working class on this side of my “background.” My mother came from a German family, not without some genuine or Catholic Irish elements, who settled in Michigan and were involved in the nascent auto industry. Her father was an inventor in the great age of Ford and Edison, and founded his own automobile business in Detroit. Here there is an even more obvious distance from the working class. I mean, there’s Irish on both sides of my family, so there were elements of identity resistance, but that really hasn’t touched me in any way. I never experienced that directly. We’re talking about somebody who has no working-class or proletarian background.
So, what kind of theoretical problem does this pose? Put crudely, I suppose it is the question about my Marxism. How—and I’m going to criticize this way of speaking, but I’ll put it this way—can I “be a Marxist,” or better still, in the language of my student friends abroad, How can you be a Marxist? You’re an American!
And so that’s the way I would rewrite those first and second questions.
Haverford College yearbook photo, ca. 1954. Courtesy of Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.
INTERVIEWER
You said you’d criticize the idea of “being a Marxist.” Why is that?
JAMESON
The phrase attributes a kind of being to subjectivity, which I feel to be wholly unphilosophical. The roots of ideology are deep indeed, but in this case I would suggest that so-called Marxists are people for whom the world itself is Marxist, a position from which I have never wavered. As for what I am, it is an intellectual, an unpopular category in the American situation but one that has been central in my life and teaching. Yes, then, no doubt one can be a Marxist intellectual, but there are many ways of being that and of drawing practical conclusions from it. As you point out in question number three, one has here other qualifications to deal with—that of a literary intellectual, for example, and other determinants to add in, which do not contradict the ones I have drawn already, namely those of a political intellectual whose notion of politics is French rather than American.
My identification is French, in a sense. I’m a French teacher, I have a French degree. The idea of politics—for me, that’s a French idea.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by having a French idea of politics?
JAMESON
I think France is the place where politics was invented. The French Revolution, the history of modern France—everything in France turns on politics, or it used to, until what I call de-Marxification, the entry of France into the common market. When France ceased to be a nation-state and became a member state, that was the end of the autonomous political culture of all these European countries. Maybe there’s a lot that’s good about that. Certainly we foreigners like it because of the single visa, or whatever we have to get. I guess we don’t even have to get a visa.
From the Archive, Issue 250
Interview
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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