Remarks on Jameson and Narrative

Under any house is a basement of psychological dimensions, a surplus affective space. And as I read The Political Unconscious into the night, a sump pump in the basement would go on and off, shunting gallons of water out of its perpetual flood. An editor asked me for a theory of such drainage in the form of a critical review, which I refused as not entirely serious. —”Foxes,” Bad History, 60

The year is 1981. Carla Harryman and I are living in a working-class bungalow on Hampshire Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, competing with raccoon families and occasional gunshots to establish a relationship in an indeterminate time. Ronald Reagan has been elected, while the alternative arts are forging ahead on multiple agendas. Poets Theater is in full swing, with a character called “Jameson” in Kit Robinson’s play, as I discussed previously. Jameson has entered the Language and New Narrative debates and given his talk at 80 Langton Street, siding with Narrative while symptomatizing Language, but also has now published The Political Unconscious, a watershed work that would have long-term impact on questions of narrative and form. Jameson’s “questions of interpretation,” bringing together form and history, would anchor a more expansive, contextual methodology not confined to surface language—bypassing precisely the critique of Language’s dissociation of sensibility in the postmodern. The “turn to history” via poetic form begins right here.

At the crux of this productive questioning of form and interpretation is a contradiction that close reading of Jameson’s text would disclose—once past the troubling over “expressive causality” in Althusser, one of his signature obscurantist moves to draw the reader in to a carefully prepared web. In his introduction, Jameson makes a frontal declaration of the political stakes of his reading practice: to unveil “the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic form, [it is] seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” (20). Jameson cites no less an authority than Marx, and goes on: “It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and necessity” (21). This is a key moment in literary theory that redefined its project from the 1980s on, one that the so-called school of Surface Reading sought to overturn at a later moment of revision (as itself “symptomatizing”).

But if history needs interpretation to disclose its “single great collective story,” how is this to be done? Here Jameson turns to Lacan and his reliance on structuralist devices such as binary opposition and the Greimas rectangle to argue, over the remainder of the work, for interpretation as a fundamental political necessity. However, at the core of the interpretative act is something resistant and intractable—the core of historical necessity itself, which cannot be identical to its narrative figuration. The external reality of this necessity does not express itself directly in the form of politics or ideology or Repressive State Apparatuses, after Althusser, but “must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact. The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to to do so, it cannot simply allow ‘reality’ to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at a distance” (81). The way “history hurts” then must be in the recovered forms of its figuration, but this leads Jameson to the fundamental crux: that the underlying history “is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational . . . history is inaccessible to us except in textual form [and] can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization” (82). The use of the term “non-narrative” here is key; not yet a word, but merely a negation of the understood concept (“narrative”), the term itself will lie dormant until picked up by poets and put into play to describe forms of nonnarrative that do in fact address “what hurts” as an inaccessible subtext.

In retrospect, Jameson’s contribution at this moment cannot be clearer. But the present moment was forward looking: What is to be done? To get with Jameson’s analysis meant, at first, to work through his brand of discourse and integrate it with one’s historical understanding and prospects. In the late 1970s, the turn to a Marxist critique was motivated after Vietnam; its grounding in the lifeworld of capitalist disappointment, lack of jobs, and “stagflation” was painfully clear. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s triumphalist call to domination and trickle-down economics was felt as direct political and economic oppression. There was a sense of an underlying “realm of necessity” that needed liberation into a “realm of freedom”—however at odds with the diminished prospects of the socialist world to deliver that goal. The radical forms of nonnarrative art we variously practiced were thus motivated to disclose the kernel of the Real that “hurts”; this was the rubric only a few years later of “Non/Narrative,” the 1985 issue of Poetics Journal. In asking artists and writers “What is the status of narrative in your work,” the editors sought to measure the theoretical question Jameson raised. In that issue, and later, the term nonnarrative would reach the status of definition: not just a negation of narrative but another way of making meaning on a timeline. This usage has entered the culture at large and is often encountered; it would not be too much to locate its point of origin between Jameson’s tentative non-narrative and our adoption of nonnarrative as a positive act.

I am trying to establish the moment of Jameson’s Political Unconscious in 1981. On the one hand: material necessity, understood as the attack on the lifeworld leading to the consolidation of neoliberalism—this was lived experience, held in common, a kind of bond. On the other hand: forms of art, across genres, in public spaces, as a politics to restore a broken symbolic order. This was the form of material production that corresponds to nonnarrative: the articulation of artistic forms across time. While working to organize such a series at New Langton Arts from 1982 on, I believed I was creating an alternative response to a badly figured narrative (of what? American triumph? normalizing class?) in the public sphere. That attempt was noticed and drew immediate attacks from the New Right, as I discuss (here). One result of this crux was my nonnarrative long poem Progress (written 1982–83; published 1985), which constructs an alternative to “one great story” where every element is open to continual interpretation—history as it may really be lived, albeit as an open-ended crisis. At the end of the triumphal decade, with the fall of the Eastern bloc, and with an alternative form in mind, I tried to square the discontinuity of Jameson’s “one great story” with the forms of nonnarrative developed in those disparate zones. This led to an artist’s talk, “Nonnarrative and Construction of History” (1991) that became a key chapter of The Constructivist Moment (2003), and then a second nonnarrative poem “including history,” Under Erasure (1991). It also led to a ferocious reaction from the New Historicism at Berkeley; for them, the negation of narrative was simply a logical impossibility, an attack on liberal polity and subjectivity without which we cannot function. In retrospect, however, nonnarrative triumphed—but more on that to come.