The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson

No one who has read any of Fredric Jameson’s books can fail to perceive the sheer power of his style. Whether it is felt by the reader to be compelling in its complexity or frustrating in its density, the stylistic flourishes, startling figurative language and monumental sentence constructions that characterize Jameson’s writings can scarcely be ignored. It is a singular strength of Steven Helmling’s analyses in The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime and the Dialectic of Critique that he takes style as a point of departure for understanding the projects and the interconnections of Jameson’s substantial oeuvre. Style, Helmling argues, is not to be understood as simply ornamentation or authorial idiosyncrasy; it is rather a textual and social symptom, a way into the problems, the impasses and the possibilities mapped out by the writings, and as such, it is the conduit through which the questions his book explores are raised: What specific ambiguities and tensions does Jameson’s prose articulate and negotiate? How, in a time when generic boundaries are blurring, does critique mark its difference from literature? How does Jameson, writing as a pre-eminent left critic, acknowledge (and mourn?) the failure of revolution in the twentieth century without projecting that very failure as an inevitable outcome? These are some of the problematics and issues Helmling undertakes to investigate in his useful and challenging book.

Helmling begins his discussion by situating the antinomies of Jameson’s project in two books of the early 1970s, Marxism and Form, focused on the European tradition of phenomenological Marxism, and The Prison-House of Language, centered on the emergent and increasingly influential structuralist (and poststructuralist) theorists. Taking Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes as exemplary figures for Jameson’s engagement with such crucial European critical practices, Helmling argues that Jameson has “libidinal investments” (24) in these particular writers, and that his readings of them “imply not only the ambitions of Jameson’s early work, but his projection of the prospects, the possibilities of success or failure, of critique generally” (27). According to Helmling, what attracts Jameson to Barthes’s early writings is the practice of style embodied in the notion of the scriptible (the writerly) that constantly pushes at the walls of the prison-house of language with its utopian dream of escape. Here the Barthes who commands Jameson’s attention is the young Barthes of the innovative commentaries on contemporary culture in Mythologies or the uncanny political desires of Writing Degree Zero (one thinks also of the startling descriptions and defamiliarizing obsession with style in Barthes’s 1954 study of the great nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet). In ways that are parallel, but at the same time crucially different, Adorno’s style—the slow and convoluted reflections of Germanic dialectic— exemplifies a patient, yet impassioned, examination of the totally admin-istered universe of late capitalism. To write in such a manner, Helmling suggests, is “to insist, unflinchingly, on our culture’s ideological and material failures, indeed, to assert them so potently that even the most ‘numbed’ or conscienceless reader cannot help feeling their sting” (37). In the dialogue implicitly set up by the essays on these two writers, then, Helmling locates an emergent dialectic which will increasingly gain increasing prominence in Jameson’s own critical practice, that of utopian longing and ideological closure.

As Helmling sees it, the impasse of utopia and ideology generated by Jameson’s conversations with French structuralism and German phenom-enological Marxism takes its most striking form in the seemingly intran-sigent circling of, to borrow Edward Said’s terms, world, text, and critic. If the critic seeks to move inside history, representation, narrative, totality, and so on, the object of analysis will resist figuration, will prove to be unrepresentable, always felt to be “outside.” If, on the other hand, the critic seeks to move outside the text, then he or she will feel trapped by the “prison-house of language,” by...