“Let’s Get Real, Real Gone for a Change”: Jameson’s Antinomies

Because this is Victorian Studies, I’ll begin with the use I’ve already made of Fredric Jameson’s new book in teaching and talking about the Victorian novel. I just finished an eight-week summer course on “The English Novel from Dickens to Conrad,” and, given the brevity of the summer session and the length of the Victorian novel, I chose a number of shorter works—Wuthering Heights, Hard Times, Silas Marner, and so on—because I wanted the class to see how the period’s ideas developed over time and the ways in which the novel responded to those developments at the level of style. Short novels were thus both a necessity and a slightly guilty convenience. However, because I was reading The Antinomies of Realism while teaching these novels, I began to see how—because their length forced a confrontation between the novel form and other forms like the short story, the fairy tale, or the fable—these works could be understood as the product of a dialectical encounter between the novel and the tale, realism and romance, and, finally, between concepts at the heart of Jameson’s book: narrative and affect. In Jameson’s account, narrative refers to an experience of time that gets formalized as the récit: that which organizes experience into past, present, and future (or beginning, middle, and end) and makes life meaningful in the same ideologically loaded way that, as the Duchess teaches Alice, morals make stories meaningful: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (Carroll 91). “Affect” is Jameson’s word for a temporal experience almost altogether out of time; it is that sense of experience that occupies the pre- or post- or para-discursive position of an eternal present, of the body’s feeling itself, in the absence of language, to account for or to direct feeling (it is, he says, “the very chromaticism of the body” [42]), or of that which would seem to resist or to undo the subordination of life to the significant comforts of narrative. What characterizes the realist novel is a structural disposition not to choose between either of these temporal possibilities (as Jameson says, “to load one of these dies” [26]), but rather to capture in literary form the movement between narrative and affect, traversing the twin horizons between which life and history happen. Realism is that movement.

And, in fact, such a dialectical contest revealed itself as central to the novels my students and I read. For instance, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights turns explicitly on two radically different conceptions of time as they are routed through affect. Cathy explains this to Nelly Dean in terms that could have come right from Jameson: “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (82). Cathy lays out two forms of love, one that we would, in Jameson’s terms, call a “named emotion” and another that we would call an affect (Jameson 29). Her love for Linton is an emotion because it can be rendered in language and because it is, as they say, always already conditioned by the language of literary romance and literary narration. Its relation to the changing foliage not only aligns it with metaphors familiar and appropriate to love stories (if love can be like a red rose, it can be like a leaf, too), but also brings its temporality in line with the apparently human scale of the seasons. In other words, the temporality of her love for Linton is both ready for and an effect of a tendency to narrate, to align experience with organized and available conceptual designs. It is against the pro-social temporality of that love that she casts her entirely different and even opposite love for Heathcliff. Held against the visible and human rhythms of seasonal change, it is the deep temporality of geological time that best captures what...