A Deeper Vein of Truth
Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology
Verso, 410pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781788730259
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The allegorical tradition in literary history has been an inexhaustibly rich source of speculation through the ages, and over the past century in particular. This is owing, at least in part, to the indeterminate status of allegory itself. Is it a genre in its own right? Is it a technique? Is it a literary temperament inherited from the performing arts, such as antique theatre and the medieval play of lamentation (Trauerspiel) of which Walter Benjamin wrote, or even from theology? How do its processes of signification work, and what demands do they solicit or assume of their audiences, given that these have been subject to marked historical variation, all the way to an arguable state of desuetude in the mass media era?
Fredric Jameson's latest opus engages, with the author's customary theoretical vigour, with all these questions and more, in an attempt to isolate the operations of the allegorical method from their entanglement in prevailing ideologies and structures of consciousness. Its opening chapter traces the development of a fourfold structure that will inform the readings of classic and non-canonical texts throughout the book. A dualistic system of allegory – some aspect of reality is reflected through an extended imaginative scheme – won't do, not least because it fails to elevate a work beyond a static point-for-point arrangement of symbols and their referents. There is more to allegory than that, as was incipiently perceived in classic times by Stoic commentators on Homer, who gradually established that beneath the narrative elements of the heroic tales and the particular human qualities they signify, there is a deeper vein of truth, wisdom, universal meaning, that generates the epic work.
The fourfold scheme that Jameson prefers, itself traceable as far back as the third-century Christian theologian Origen, proposes successive layers of meaning that open out to progressively larger and wider fields of reference. In the theological example Jameson offers, a literal narrative event such as the Hebrew exodus from Egypt corresponds in Christological allegorical understanding to the resurrection of Jesus. Above that, at a moral level, the suffering and exile in Egypt and the subsequent escape represent the soul's enmeshment in corporeal sinfulness and its eventual salvation, and then overtopping the whole structure, what Jameson calls the anagogical level references the fate of the whole human race, the wholesale spiritual awakening or confessional revolution that forms the teleology of human history.
This quadrilateral schema can then be applied, as here, to any number of works traditionally considered allegorical in structure and intent. Jameson undertakes productive readings of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the Divina Commedia of Dante and the second part of Goethe's Faust, as well as juxtaposing the long-established psychological readings of Hamlet with its psychoanalytic treatment by Jacques Lacan, and even ventures out on to the thin ice of an allegorical interpretation of a musical work, Mahler's Sixth Symphony. These readings are replete with tentative but strikingly suggestive observations as to how they mean what they (often only apparently) say. If allegory, as Jameson acknowledges, means in different ways to different ages, we have nonetheless learned from materialist aesthetic theory that the past survives in artistic form itself, which, as Adorno put it, represents the sedimentation of what was once explicit content.
One of the ways in which Allegory and Ideology is particularly attentive to the historical movements of the allegorical capacity is precisely in those transitional phases when one form of representation begins to lose its semantic potency under the diluent impact of newer cultural modes. The Romantic moment in the evolution of bourgeois modernity very likely hastened the demise of traditional allegory by overwhelming it with mere symbolism. Allegory, Jameson insists very early, is not be confused with simple metaphor and its techniques of displacement. One of the literary and dramatic strategies that disappears with early modernism is personification, already in crisis as early as Spenser's epic poem, where the discursive techniques are stretched to their uttermost by a social context in which the national collective is being opened up to an emergent, and bracingly belligerent, maritime imperialism.
Allegory is not, however, to be confined to explicitly imaginative works, where its structuring principles are more or less consciously applied by the writer, but also arises within western philosophical thought, most notably where, as in Hegel, Nietzsche, Spengler and Heidegger, it entertains aspirations to a philosophy of history. In one of three Appendices to the book, Jameson chances a provisional, but characteristically dazzling, allegorical reading of Daniel Dennett's now classic work of brain science, Consciousness Explained (1991), finding in it a host of normative political metaphors that, far from leaving the definition of consciousness in a state of agile fluidity, effectively enclose it within the precincts of a profoundly conservative political arena. The materialist tradition has taught that developments in social and cultural consciousness are attendant on scientific advance, but what if, Jameson postulates, exactly the opposite is the case, and that what science chooses to investigate, what operating metaphors it elects to deploy, are themselves deeply conditioned by the present social dispensation in each era?
Those already familiar with the work of this prodigiously resourceful thinker will find him still on exhilarating point in his mid-eighties. Jameson has long pursued a preference for writing as though he were thinking aloud, carrying the reader through a set of thought processes that might turn out to be conclusive in original, game-changing ways, and yet at the same time manage to avoid recourse to the kind of coy colloquialism in which too much Anglophone speculative theory is couched. The Marxist optic through which much of his early work was trained has thinned into one more schematic strand among others, axiomatic enough where it still arises, but no longer appealed to for the decisive word. In a touching moment, the writer vouchsafes that his longevity 'owed as much to late capitalist pharmacology as to Shavian will power and the life force’, and has brought with it no panoptical retrospective view, but only a deeper understanding of Althusser's dictum that 'the lonely moment of the last instance never comes’.
There are moments when an unargued, or only glancingly parenthetical, judgment cries to heaven for polemical sustenance. His monitory assessment of Günter Grass's 1959 debut novel, The Tin Drum, as a structural and tonal 'monstrosity' will be sure to re-ruffle feathers that are only barely unruffled from the late revelations of Grass's youthful embroilment with the Nazi state. As it stands, it feels like an argument started and not finished. The early assertion that, while simile redoubles the power of narrative, metaphor contrastively arrests it, seems readily susceptible to any number of countervailing instances that give its surreptitious tidiness the lie. Has the love that resembles a red, red rose dispensed with the moment of mediation any more obviously than the rose of love that is sick?
Notwithstanding these fleeting antagonisms, which are in any case as provocative of insight in their way as the dense theoretical cadenzas, this is another hugely important and interesting work. It is so not least because Fredric Jameson, like the most rewarding theoreticians of the generations since he made his debut, in a world that had barely heard of the structuralism that he has gone on repeatedly to reconfigure, has an instinctual grasp of the limitless fluidity of intellectual development. Something like this, as he has brilliantly shown, is learned from the Hegel of the Phenomenology, and his appropriation by Marx, but much of it derives from the obstinate contingency of critical currents, together with their ever-shifting terms of engagement. He twice here misattributes Arnold Toynbee's summation of the haphazardist view of history, as 'one damned thing after another', to Henry Ford, the perennial epigrammatist of a history he scorned on behalf of capitalist pragmatics (history was 'myth' or 'bunk', according to the great motor manufacturer). What narrative does, including historiographical narrative, is impose an order on the fissile chaos of events, an order that will, to be sure, find its edges sheared by the abrasion of further events. Allegory, and its protocols of interpretation, are the ways in which we try to fix these orders momentarily in place. Jameson's lifelong project, continued here with unmistakable gusto, has been to hold these momentary fixings up to the light.
Fredric Jameson's latest opus engages, with the author's customary theoretical vigour, with all these questions and more, in an attempt to isolate the operations of the allegorical method from their entanglement in prevailing ideologies and structures of consciousness. Its opening chapter traces the development of a fourfold structure that will inform the readings of classic and non-canonical texts throughout the book. A dualistic system of allegory – some aspect of reality is reflected through an extended imaginative scheme – won't do, not least because it fails to elevate a work beyond a static point-for-point arrangement of symbols and their referents. There is more to allegory than that, as was incipiently perceived in classic times by Stoic commentators on Homer, who gradually established that beneath the narrative elements of the heroic tales and the particular human qualities they signify, there is a deeper vein of truth, wisdom, universal meaning, that generates the epic work.
The fourfold scheme that Jameson prefers, itself traceable as far back as the third-century Christian theologian Origen, proposes successive layers of meaning that open out to progressively larger and wider fields of reference. In the theological example Jameson offers, a literal narrative event such as the Hebrew exodus from Egypt corresponds in Christological allegorical understanding to the resurrection of Jesus. Above that, at a moral level, the suffering and exile in Egypt and the subsequent escape represent the soul's enmeshment in corporeal sinfulness and its eventual salvation, and then overtopping the whole structure, what Jameson calls the anagogical level references the fate of the whole human race, the wholesale spiritual awakening or confessional revolution that forms the teleology of human history.
This quadrilateral schema can then be applied, as here, to any number of works traditionally considered allegorical in structure and intent. Jameson undertakes productive readings of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the Divina Commedia of Dante and the second part of Goethe's Faust, as well as juxtaposing the long-established psychological readings of Hamlet with its psychoanalytic treatment by Jacques Lacan, and even ventures out on to the thin ice of an allegorical interpretation of a musical work, Mahler's Sixth Symphony. These readings are replete with tentative but strikingly suggestive observations as to how they mean what they (often only apparently) say. If allegory, as Jameson acknowledges, means in different ways to different ages, we have nonetheless learned from materialist aesthetic theory that the past survives in artistic form itself, which, as Adorno put it, represents the sedimentation of what was once explicit content.
One of the ways in which Allegory and Ideology is particularly attentive to the historical movements of the allegorical capacity is precisely in those transitional phases when one form of representation begins to lose its semantic potency under the diluent impact of newer cultural modes. The Romantic moment in the evolution of bourgeois modernity very likely hastened the demise of traditional allegory by overwhelming it with mere symbolism. Allegory, Jameson insists very early, is not be confused with simple metaphor and its techniques of displacement. One of the literary and dramatic strategies that disappears with early modernism is personification, already in crisis as early as Spenser's epic poem, where the discursive techniques are stretched to their uttermost by a social context in which the national collective is being opened up to an emergent, and bracingly belligerent, maritime imperialism.
Allegory is not, however, to be confined to explicitly imaginative works, where its structuring principles are more or less consciously applied by the writer, but also arises within western philosophical thought, most notably where, as in Hegel, Nietzsche, Spengler and Heidegger, it entertains aspirations to a philosophy of history. In one of three Appendices to the book, Jameson chances a provisional, but characteristically dazzling, allegorical reading of Daniel Dennett's now classic work of brain science, Consciousness Explained (1991), finding in it a host of normative political metaphors that, far from leaving the definition of consciousness in a state of agile fluidity, effectively enclose it within the precincts of a profoundly conservative political arena. The materialist tradition has taught that developments in social and cultural consciousness are attendant on scientific advance, but what if, Jameson postulates, exactly the opposite is the case, and that what science chooses to investigate, what operating metaphors it elects to deploy, are themselves deeply conditioned by the present social dispensation in each era?
Those already familiar with the work of this prodigiously resourceful thinker will find him still on exhilarating point in his mid-eighties. Jameson has long pursued a preference for writing as though he were thinking aloud, carrying the reader through a set of thought processes that might turn out to be conclusive in original, game-changing ways, and yet at the same time manage to avoid recourse to the kind of coy colloquialism in which too much Anglophone speculative theory is couched. The Marxist optic through which much of his early work was trained has thinned into one more schematic strand among others, axiomatic enough where it still arises, but no longer appealed to for the decisive word. In a touching moment, the writer vouchsafes that his longevity 'owed as much to late capitalist pharmacology as to Shavian will power and the life force’, and has brought with it no panoptical retrospective view, but only a deeper understanding of Althusser's dictum that 'the lonely moment of the last instance never comes’.
There are moments when an unargued, or only glancingly parenthetical, judgment cries to heaven for polemical sustenance. His monitory assessment of Günter Grass's 1959 debut novel, The Tin Drum, as a structural and tonal 'monstrosity' will be sure to re-ruffle feathers that are only barely unruffled from the late revelations of Grass's youthful embroilment with the Nazi state. As it stands, it feels like an argument started and not finished. The early assertion that, while simile redoubles the power of narrative, metaphor contrastively arrests it, seems readily susceptible to any number of countervailing instances that give its surreptitious tidiness the lie. Has the love that resembles a red, red rose dispensed with the moment of mediation any more obviously than the rose of love that is sick?
Notwithstanding these fleeting antagonisms, which are in any case as provocative of insight in their way as the dense theoretical cadenzas, this is another hugely important and interesting work. It is so not least because Fredric Jameson, like the most rewarding theoreticians of the generations since he made his debut, in a world that had barely heard of the structuralism that he has gone on repeatedly to reconfigure, has an instinctual grasp of the limitless fluidity of intellectual development. Something like this, as he has brilliantly shown, is learned from the Hegel of the Phenomenology, and his appropriation by Marx, but much of it derives from the obstinate contingency of critical currents, together with their ever-shifting terms of engagement. He twice here misattributes Arnold Toynbee's summation of the haphazardist view of history, as 'one damned thing after another', to Henry Ford, the perennial epigrammatist of a history he scorned on behalf of capitalist pragmatics (history was 'myth' or 'bunk', according to the great motor manufacturer). What narrative does, including historiographical narrative, is impose an order on the fissile chaos of events, an order that will, to be sure, find its edges sheared by the abrasion of further events. Allegory, and its protocols of interpretation, are the ways in which we try to fix these orders momentarily in place. Jameson's lifelong project, continued here with unmistakable gusto, has been to hold these momentary fixings up to the light.