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1、Narrative as a Socially Symbolic ActFredric JamesonThis book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today-the psychoanaly
2、tic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural-but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.This is evidently a much more extreme position than the modest claim, surely acceptable to everyone, that certain texts have social and historical-sometimes e
3、ven political-resonance. Traditional literary history has, of course, never prohibited the investigation of such topics as the Florentine political background in Dante, Miltons relationship to the schismatics, or Irish historical allusions in Joyce. I would argue, however, that such information-even
4、 where it is not recontained, as it is in most instances, by an idealistic conception of the history of ideas-does not yield interpretation as such, but rather at best its (indispensable) preconditions. Today this properly antiquarian relationship to the cultural past has a dialectical counterpart w
5、hich is ultimately no more satisfactory; I mean the tendency of much contemporary theory to rewrite selected texts from the past in terms of its own aesthetic and, in particular, in terms of a modernist (or more properly postmodernist) conception of language.This unacceptable option, or ideological
6、double bind, between antiquarianism and modernizing “relevance” or projection demonstrates that the old dilemmas of historicism-and in particular, the question of the claims of monuments from distant and even archaic moments of the cultural past on a culturally different present-do not go away just
7、because we choose to ignore them. Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms
8、, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day.My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism evoked above. Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of
9、 the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus-and not t
10、hrough the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists-can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis of
11、the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth-century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in howev
12、er disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme-for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot: “The history of all hitherto existing society
13、 is the history of class struggles freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman-in a word, oppressor and oppressed-stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
14、revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unc
15、onscious finds its function and its necessity.From this perspective the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of cont
16、emporary life To imagine that, sheltered from the omnipresence of history and the implacable influence of the social, there already exists a realm of freedom-whether it be that of the microscopic experience of words in a text or the ecstasies and intensities of the various private religions-is only
17、to strengthen the grip of Necessity over all such blind zones in which the individual subject seeks refuge, in pursuit of a purely individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation. The only effective liberation from such constraint begins with the recognition that there is nothing that is no
18、t social and historical-indeed, that everything is “in the last analysis” political.The assertion of a political unconscious proposes that we undertake just such a final analysis and explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts. It projects a
19、rival hermeneutic to those already enumerated; but it does so, as we shall see, not so much by repudiating their findings as by arguing its ultimate philosophical and methodological priority over more specialized interpretive codes whose insights are strategically limited as much by their own situat
20、ional origins as by the narrow or local ways in which they construe or construct their objects of study.Still, to describe the readings and analyses contained in the present work as so many interpretations, to present them as so many exhibits in the construction of a new hermeneutic, is already to a
21、nnounce a whole polemic program, which must necessarily come to terms with a critical and theoretical climate variously hostile to these slogans. It is, for instance, increasingly clear that hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic targets of contemporary post-structu
22、ralism in France, which-powerfully buttressed by the authority of Nietzsche-has tended to identify such operations with historicism, and in particular with the dialectic and its valorization of absence and the negative, its assertion of the necessity and priority of totalizing thought. I will agree
23、with this identification, with this description of the ideological affinities and implications of the ideal of the interpretive or hermeneutic act; but I will argue that the critique is misplaced.Leaving aside for the moment the possibility of any genuinely immanent criticism, we will assume that a
24、criticism which asks the question “What does it mean?” constitutes something like an allegorical operation in which a text is systematically rewritten in terms of some fundamental master code or “ultimately determining instance.” On this view, then, all “interpretation” in the narrower sense demands
25、 the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its particular code or “transcendental signified”: the discredit into which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself. Yet to see interpretation this way is to acquire the i
26、nstruments by which we can force a given interpretive practice to stand and yield up its name, to blurt out its master code and thereby reveal its metaphysical and ideological underpinnings. It should not, in the present intellectual atmosphere, be necessary laboriously to argue the position that ev
27、ery form of practice, including the literary-critical kind, implies and presupposes a form of theory; that empiricism, the mirage of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms; that even the most formalizing kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a theoretical charge whose
28、denial unmasks it as ideologicalI will here go much further than this, and argue that even the most innocently formalizing readings of the New Criticism have as their essential and ultimate function the propagation of this particular view of what history is. Indeed, no working model of the functioni
29、ng of language, the nature of communication or the speech act, and the dynamics of formal and stylistic change is conceivable which does not imply a whole philosophy of history.Interpretation proper-what we have called “strong” rewriting, in distinction from the weak rewriting of ethical codes, whic
30、h all in one way or another project various notions of the unity and the coherence of consciousness-always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism ofmystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a ma
31、nifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code. This is perhaps the place to answer the objection of the ordinary reader, when confronted with elaborate and ingenious interpretations, that the text means just what it says.
32、Unfortunately, no society has ever been quite so mystified in quite so many ways as our own, saturated as it is with message and information, the very vehicles of mystification (language, as Talleyrand put it, having been given us in order to conceal our thoughts). If everything were transparent, th
33、en no ideology would be possible, and no domination either: evidently that is not our case. But above and beyond the sheer fact of mystification, we must point to the supplementary problem involved in the study of cultural or literary texts, or in other words, essentially, of narratives: for even if
34、 discursive language were to be taken literally, there is always, and constitutively, a problem about the “meaning” of narrative as such; and the problem about the assessment and subsequent formulation of the “meaning” of this or that narrative is the hermeneutic question, which leaves us as deeply
35、involved in our present inquiry as we were when the objection was raised.The type of interpretation here proposed is more satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the later may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideologi
36、cal subtext, it being always understood that the “subtext” is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality, nor even the conventional narrative of history manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact. The literary or aesthetic act therefore alwa
37、ys entertains some active relationship with the Real: yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow “reality” to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture, and the ultimate paradoxes and false problems of linguistics, and
38、most notably of semantics, are to be traced back to this process, whereby language manages to carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext. Insofar, in other words, as symbolic action-what Burke will map as “dream” “prayer” or “chart” -is a way of doing something to the worl
39、d, to that degree what we are calling “world” must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the transformation of form. The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back
40、from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation. The whole paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be summed up in this, that the literary work or culture object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at
41、 one and the same time, a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it, thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it, that there is noting but a text, that there never was any extra- or con-textual reality before the text itself
42、 generated it in the form of a mirage. One does not have to argue the reality of history: necessity, like Dr. Johnsons stone, does that for us. That history-Althussers “absent cause,” Lacans “Real”-is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be added, howev
43、er, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization. Thus, to insist on either of the two inseparable yet incommensurable dimensions of the symbolic act without the other: to overemphasize
44、the active way in which the text reorganizes its subtext (in order, presumably, to reach the triumphant conclusion that the “referent” does not exist); or on the other hand to stress the imaginary status of the symbolic act so completely as to reify its social ground, now no longer understood as a s
45、ubtext but merely as some inert given that the text passively or fantasmatically “reflects” -to overstress either of these functions of the symbolic act at the expense of the other is surely to produce sheer ideology, whether it be, as in the first alternative, the ideology of structuralism, or, in
46、the second, that of vulgar materialism.History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather
47、the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious which has been argued here, a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or “vision,” some new content, but as the
48、formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.” Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intent
49、ion. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.
