In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

150 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Thus, in this narrative of man's silence transmuted into poetry Melville uses his art to try to break the speU holding human beings captive in the marble "form" of war, to break the tyranny of the "religion" of war over the minds and acts of potentially creative man. His illumination that a transformation of mankind and of the world is conceivable—may even already be germinating in man's imagination-ris the source of the radiance that suffuses the work from BiUy*s "God bless Captain Vere" on. Billy Buddis Melville's most searching exploration of war, reaching back to the beginning of man and his fall into "Cain's city" and forward to a re-creation of the world by humanity reawakened. So, despite the' fact that Melville in 1891 envisions a world dominated by imperialism, gripped by frenzied militarism so intense that it foreshadows fascism, and ready for the global conflicts of our own century, Joyce Adler leads us to see the relevance of this vision to our own efforts to create the dialectical opposite, a world free from imperialism, fascism, and war. H. Bruce Franklin NOTES 1. Frederick J. Kennedy and Joyce Deveau Kennedy, "Some Naval Officers React to White-Jacket,"Melville Society Quarterly, 41 (February, 1980), p. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981 . 305 pp. $19.50. Fredric Jameson begins with the injunction: "Always historicize!" He presents us with a conceptual field in which everything représentante is historical. On the one side, the unconscious has a political content and operates according to what he calls a "politicohistorical pensée sauvage" (p. 80). On the other, he moves outward in a series of everwidening interpretive categories until he reaches the "untranscendable horizon" (p. 10) or the "space in which History itself becomes the ultimate ground as well as the untranscendable limit of our understanding in general and our textual interpretations in particular" (p. 100). Jamesonleaves thecategory ofthe ahistorical "aesthetic" no place to hide. Something else lurks in this landscape: an absence. Although everything représentante is historical, as readers and writers we repeatedly come up short against infrastructural spaces or depths in which history is no longer available for representation. Jameson appropriates Louis Althusser"s notion of history as the "absent cause" and Jacques Lacan's notion of the Real as that which "resists symboUzation absolutely." We cannot get beyond our various textualizations of history. However, Jameson avoids the deconstructionist conclusion that, because all we have is texts, the referent therefore does not exist. The referent does exist. But functionally it remains an absence. Jameson's revised theory of absence holds that "history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious" (p. 35). Jameson's "political unconscious" is inextricably bound up with the process of creating narratives. In the passage I just cited, he sets in apposition the writerly process or prior textualization with the mental process of "narrativization" in the unconscious. The two stand in metaphorical relation to one another. Jameson's unconscious is something of a buried narrator. At another juncture he describes storytelling as "the supreme function of the human mind" (p. 123). Because narrative enacts the unfolding of desire, narrative can push up against the absent Real, and indirectly expose some of the constraints operating upon us. The unconscious not only digests the world in narrative fashion, but it also operates according to a reality principle that intuitively grants recognition to necessity, and thereby secures its stories as tellable. Jameson's mental apriori is thoroughly historicized. /J/ REVIEWS The historical savvy that Jameson accords to the human mind can be illustrated by his interpretation of Balzac's realism. Jameson reverses the priorities of Georg Lukacs's essays on realism and finds a different Unk between the individual and the social. Rather than beginning with an objective social whole and moving allegorically to the illustrative individual "type," Jameson begins...

pdf

Share