Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (5, and final)

I WAS WITHIN about twenty pages of finishing this last August...then the semester began and I forgot all about it. I finished it yesterday.

The last chapter had detailed discussions of two contemporary novels I particularly like, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Jameson here brings the book's argument around to postmodernity (his wheelhouse, famously), noting that postmodernity will be found in its cultural productions not in a mimetic or representational way but "in the forms themselves and their slow mutation, emergence, or decay, a process in which their approach to the Real or retreat from it requires us to come to terms with representation as reality and to adjust such unwieldy apparatuses as the one proposed here here to detect the significance of its inevitable failures." 

When Jameson writes of "its inevitable failures," is the antecedent of "it" the work of art's "approach to the Real" or "the one [i.e., the 'unwieldy apparatus"] proposed here"? Is it the approach or the apparatus that is bound to fail?

Does anyone at Verso actually edit this? Or do they just assume anyone willing to work through to the last chapter of a book by Jameson will manage somehow?

I guess the main point is that Mitchell's and McCarthy's novels do not reflect our postmodern circumstances like Stendhal's mirror ambling down the road but instead embody them structurally, reproduce them in their form. Okay, fair enough. Sounds right.

I am ten months from retirement, so I ask myself. am I still going to want to read this sort of thing once I retire? I've been trying to keep up with Jameson's arguments since I was a graduate student, and I have to admit I have learned a great deal from him, but how much am I going to want to wrestle with this sort of writing when I don't...you know...have to?

Have to say, though, it was gratifying to see Jameson found Remainder and Cloud Atlas worth writing about.