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

  • The Desire Called Modernism1
  • Steven Helmling (bio)

In 2005, Fredric Jameson published a career-spanning collection of essays on science fiction (implicitly, on popular culture), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions; the new volume under review here, The Modernist Papers, collects essays on the giants of highbrow, high-modernist literature (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Mann, Joyce, Proust, Williams, Stevens, Stein . . .). So Jameson has reached that retrospective career-moment of retrieving uncollected essays for preservation in hardcover?—but these books don’t merely gather “old” work: the first half (and more) of Archaeologies of the Future is a brand new essay (233 pages) setting the stage for the twelve previously published pieces collected in the second half. Of The Modernist Papers, well over half is “new” in the sense of previously unpublished, though many of the pieces have been in the making for a long time. (One of the most stunning, “Mallarmé Materialist,” is dated “1963–2006.”) Neither Archaeologies nor The Modernist Papers offers any oeuvre-shaping hints,2 beyond the adviso that The Modernist Papers “are meant to accompany my A Singular Modernity as a kind of source-book” (x). But clearly Jameson is here laying a career capstone (a massive cantilevered lintel) in place, even as new production continues with as much energy and brio as ever. [End Page 273]

Jameson is, by common consensus, the most wide-ranging critic presently (or in memory) at work; his conspectus is global, in a way that’s our best hope of answering to globalization itself. For those coming to Jameson by way of modern literature, this book is a feast: not only for old faves like “Ulysses in History,” or “Modernism and Imperialism,” or the piece here retitled “Exoticism and Structuralism in Wallace Stevens,” but for the big new essays on “The Poetics of Totality” (on Williams’ Paterson), “Joyce or Proust?”, “Kafka’s Dialectic,” two essays on Mann (one each on The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus), Yeats’ A Vision, Mallarmé, and Stein. A few essays introduce figures, texts, and problems most readers won’t know (the Québecois Hubert Aquin; Peter Weiss’ historical novel, The Aesthetics of Resistance; the Japanese Natsume Soseki: Jameson explains that Japan is the book’s stand-in for the non-Western; and a brief but suggestive piece makes a “historical trope” of Kenzaburo Oe and the Aum Shin Rikyo cult). But the book’s center of gravity is canonical, Western, modernist. The twenty essays are gathered into seven groups, each a little constellation (Mann paired with Kafka, Joyce with Proust, Mallarmé with Stein); other voltages throw longer arcs—for example, two-hundred pages separate the Williams essay from the Stevens, but both address that old Romantic to modernist chestnut, “the concrete particular” in cognitive and affective agon with the familiarizing abstractions of the universal—an arc that then leaps another hundred pages to the Mallarmé essay.

Jameson’s introduction to The Modernist Papers is sufficiently dazzling (and concise: only twelve pages) that I’ll be recommending it to students who ask where to start. I’ve named the writers the book treats; let’s read Jameson’s own evocation of some of the larger problems with which he puts them in tension:

the fragmentation of the reading public, the incompatibility between Third and First World perspectives, the loss of a Utopian language (or the effort to reinvent one), the internal limits on the representability of a specific historical content, the pressure of a new sense of space on linguistic and narrative structures, the tension between private languages and classification schemes, that between the revolutionary instant and the construction of narrative time, the emergence of a non-universalizable sensory or bodily datum, and so forth. These codes or interpretive frames are no doubt all interrelated, but their conceptual languages send us in different directions, which are far from converging.

(x)

That’s an impressive list of what most of us would call (something like) “problems” or “contexts”—but observe what Jameson calls them: “codes or interpretive frames,” a move that incites, rather than stabilizes [End Page 274] critical effort, insofar as in Jameson it is never a question of...

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