Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (3)

 CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 were a long haul--98 pages--and wandered off into the weeds a bit, I thought.

Chapter 4 switches things up, as it is devoted Mahler's 6th Symphony. But since allegories (as we usually think of them) are pictorial or narrative, can music, neither pictorial nor narrative, be allegorical? Jameson spends a fair amount of space on this before actually getting to Mahler. The answer--if I followed the argument correctly--is that narratives occur in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, and that music also occurs in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, so there is "narrative" in music even when it is not strictly speaking programmatic. Fair enough. 

So the allegories within the narrative of Mahler's Sixth have to do with its looking back to the European art music tradition but also looking ahead to modernism ("the end of sonata form and of tonality"), with the story of the Mahlers' marriage, and with the coming of the crisis of the First World War. All of which sounds persuasive to me. All art aspires to the condition of allegory, I suppose.

Chapter 5 reprints an article Jameson published in 1986 and adds a detailed commentary. The article, which appeared in Social Text, argues that in many Third World texts the main character allegorically represents the situation of the nation, as a kind of Everyman; key examples are Lu Xun's Tale of Ah Q and Ousmane Sembène's Xala. 

We don't say "Third World" these days--it was a way of referring to those places on the earth that were neither the USA and its close allies (First World) nor the Soviet Union and its close allies (Second World), i.e., most of the globe.

The commentary responds to a variety of the critiques the article received over the next several years (there were quite a few), but for me the most interesting development was Jameson using the figure of "multidimensional chess" to describe how levels of allegory co-exist. In multi-dimensional chess, "a number of distinct chessboards coexist simultaneously with distinct configurations of forces on each, so that a move on any one of these boards has distinct but unforeseeable consequences for the configuration and relative power-relations on the others" (191). So, we might say, the Lacanian reading is its own game, and the Marxist reading is also its own game, but they also affect each other with "distinct but unforeseeable consequences."

That's what I thought the point was, at least. He goes on to talk quite a bit about professional soccer, the outbreak of World War I, and contemporary China's foreign relations.