Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (4)

 THE MAIN REASON I picked this up was to see how Jameson worked with more historical, more canonical writers—I think of him as a critic focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, and I don’t think I had til now read him on anybody who dated earlier than Balzac. So chapters 6, 7, and 8 on Spenser, Dante, and Goethe I read with particular interest.

    As with the chapter on Hamlet, I was impressed and a little in awe of how well Jameson knows this terrain. Taste this from the first paragraph of the Spenser chapter:

The two great traditions of medieval literature had both emerged in the twelfth century; on the one hand, in a mystico-erotic lyric that culminates in Dante’s unique epic; the second, in the more properly narrative “romans” of the epoch’s greatest “novelist,” Chrétien de Troyes. Intricate legends are spun from this last, which are dutifully developed for centuries (and fine true literary achievement in Italian “epic”) until they sink under their own weight in Spenser’s megallegory, thereafter only fitly remembered by the Romantics in Novalis […] and Wagner’s Parsifal (to which I suppose we need to add Tolkien and the effervescence of contemporary commercial fantasy literature).

God help me, does that not sound like Harold Bloom? The bravura sweep over centuries of Western Lit, the confidence about what counts as “true literary achievement,” the authoritative summing up? This sentence started me wondering: could Jameson do a Bloom, or something like Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve or Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, get a contract with Penguin and write one of those books that gets embraced by the Intelligent General Reader? I mean…why not? He has the prestige, he’s read everything, he can, as this passage shows, go big.

      Then again—near the beginning of the next chapter, on Dante, Jameson decides he has to clear some ground to talk about Dante and allegory by addressing Erich Auerbach’s famous argument that Dante found a way forward from the stiff symbolism of medieval literature, breaking out of allegory into a precursor of realism. Jameson writes:

At any rate, what I want to argue in the following pages is that Auerbach’s figura is a mediatory concept rather than a structural one, and this authority is not to be invoked against the revivals of allegory such as this one unless it is restaged in a contemporary semiotic arena in which questions of meaning and reference are measured against the philosophical problems of immanence and of representation in general.

Whew. Jameson’s gotta be Jameson, I guess. Penguin will have to keep looking for the next crossover literary critic. In that contemporary semiotic arena, the Intelligent General Reader would just be a Christian to Jameson’s lion.

Nonetheless, all three chapters are loaded with startlingly fresh ideas about these canonical figures. When Jameson talks about “Goethe’s Nietzschean side, the discovery of the life-giving powers of strong forgetting as a way of consigning guilt, the past, one’s own crimes and failures, to oblivion” and then a page later connects this capacity “to capitalism itself,” I thought, damn, he’s right.