As Sara Danius describes it, The Poetics of Social Forms attempts to “provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations.” As always with Jameson, it is the form that is historical rather than the content. The Antinomies of Realism reads realism in terms of shifting temporalities, as an evolutionary process in which its positive and negative aspects are inextricably tied together. In a sense Jameson’s realism is akin to Lacan’s objet petit a (1977 [1973]), that paradoxical object cause of desire that we are constantly searching for but can never possess, for as soon as we believe we possess it, it slips from our grasp. The temporality of objet a, therefore, is characterized by a paradoxical sense of anticipation and loss, we can never grasp the thing itself, it is always anticipated in the future or missed in the past. As Jameson puts it in relation to realism: It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and the attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution. (2013, 1) Thus, Jameson’s approach to realism will not follow any of the traditional approaches to the problem. He quickly runs through Auerbach, Bakhtin, Lukács and Sartre (2013, 1-5) only to inform us that he will not follow any of these directions, but will address the issue dialectically.[1] It is in this sense that Jameson will historicize realism, insofar as history and the dialectic are at one with each other, and history “can only be the problem of which it claims to be its own solution” (6). Approaching realism through temporality and what he sees as the twin sources of realism, the narrative impulse and affective investment, Jameson generates a startlingly original reading of realism. As the narrative impulse is clearly older than the realist novel, a modern but not modernist form, Jameson locates this particular impulse in the tale and storytelling, or récit, and this introduces the first complexity into our sense of temporality. Storytelling is based on a notion of irrevocability, or an unheard-of event that becomes memorable and worthy of retelling over and over again and, as Walter Benjamin taught us some time ago, what binds such events together is the experience of death. Storytelling, for Benjamin, is not so much biography as obituary, as the event has always-already happened and is in the past, hence the centrality of death to the novel (1968 [1936]). The temporality of this irrevocable but memorable event is thus redefined in the story as ‘what cannot be changed, what lies beyond the reach of repetition or rectification, which now comes to be seen as the time of everyday life of routine’ (2013, 19). Affect, on the other hand, points us towards not the past but the present; to speak of affect, observes Jameson, is to speak of the body or the postmodern “reduction to the body” and its specific temporality of a “perpetual present.” The discussion of the narrative impulse, death and affective investment in the first two chapters of The Antinomies resonates with Peter Brooks’ Freudian inflected model of narrative in Reading for the Plot (1984), especially with Brooks’ interest in nineteenth century literature, but as we will see below Jameson steers away from the psychoanalytic perspective. In short, Jameson approaches realism as a paradox or aporia, a literary form constantly struggling with its own conditions of possibility to narrate the past and its dissolution in the literary representation of affect in a perpetual present. It is this historically new realm of affect that creates the irreconcilable tension of realism; as Jameson notes, “to resolve the opposition either way would destroy it” (26).
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 12:18:23 +0000
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