Fredric Jameson’s Inventions of a Present compiles nineteen essays into a book of literary criticism. Each essay relates a novel or set of novels to its national history, cultural relevance, and contribution to the globalisation of literature — that is, to the transportation of literature from the author’s home country to other countries or, more often, from other countries to the author’s home country. Inventions of a Present includes criticism that spans work from different centuries. The book’s discussion of globalised literature ranges from the 1880s of Henry James’s The Bostonians to the 2010s of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Therefore, Jameson’s title refers less to the more widely accepted notion of ‘present’ as a real, concrete moment of time — right now — and more to the abstract, epistemological sense of ‘present’ — how today’s world is understood in a cultural, social, and political context. Jameson’s essays aim to help readers understand what ‘contemporary literature’ means and grasp the invisible strings that tie together notions of literature in the present.
All nineteen chapters contend with how transnational storytelling shapes and conveys the present. However, Jameson’s discussion of globalised literature highlights some of the flaws of globalisation as a broader political and economic process. Globalisation rose after the Cold War in an effort to promote capitalistic trade between countries. Such trade often featured exploitative practices due to extractive colonisation, forced foreign borrowing, and heightening world power imbalances. Jameson knowingly and unknowingly depicts the dangers of these exchanges in relation to literature, storytelling, and understanding the ‘Other’ or the foreigner through narrative.
What defines the ‘present’? As Benjamin Noys writes in his review of the book, Jameson’s ‘contemporary novel is both the historical novel and science fiction, as both past and future have saturated the present. The present is a bloated moment, full of the past that cannot be integrated and a future that is not being born.’ For Jameson, novels that deconstruct and reconstruct this present are not relegated to a certain hemisphere or part of the globe. His work covers Japan, Norway, Germany, Poland, Colombia, America, and Canada. Notably, however, Jameson varies in which countries he puts in dialogue with a ‘bloated’ past — countries heaving with their history of war, colonialism, censorship, socialism, etc. — and those bursting with their futures of capitalism, religion, or political tensions.
Perhaps this notion of “forwards-facing” and “backwards-facing” countries has to do in part with Jameson’s analysis of the political novel: who is allowed or forced into the political novel, and where are political novels likely to be written? What are the circumstances that give rise to the political novel, and how does that affect the form of the novel?
The literature of small or non-First World powers is more likely to be political than that of the hegemonic countries because politics is for their citizens unavoidable and History necessarily intersects existential experience in them, whereas the mark of the First World affiliation is our individual capacity of avoiding history altogether and of retreating into private lives.
This quote comes from the book’s essay ‘A Businessman in Love’, where Jameson suggests the Polish Boleslaw Prus’s novel Lalka (The Doll) might serve as a national allegory. This essay was published in 2010, over two decades after his controversial essay argued that literature from non-First World — specifically Third World — countries might be understood by the First World first and foremost as a national allegory for the country it comes from.
The Pakistani writer Aijaz Ahmad wrote a fiery critique of this theory in 2011, arguing that it is unfair to homogenise other nations in this way. As a Pakistani writer, Ahmad charts his own unsavoury realisation that Jameson looks down upon his country of origin and forces him and his writing into the bounds of national spokesman. Yet Jameson’s recent ‘A Businessman in Love’ essay suggests his opinion remains unchanged by Ahmad. In them, Jameson doubles down on his 1986 notion that, ‘All third-world texts are necessarily… allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories.’ Beyond flattening people into their countries, which are flattened into their modes of production (capitalism or socialism), Jameson insists that the First World is the maker of history and that the Third World may only respond to this history.
In Inventions of a Present, only certain characters are able to maintain their politics as separate from national politics. For instance, Jameson writes about Ed Gentry, the white American protagonist in James Dickey’s Deliverance. Dickey portrays Gentry’s interactions with violence, including gun violence and sexual assault. However, there is a clear discrepancy between political notions of violence prevailing during the time — the civil rights movement — and Gentry’s conception of violence, which remains apolitical. To achieve an apolitical stance, Dickey has Gentry escape civilization and enter a life of barbarity on a hunting and canoeing expedition. Consequently, this First World story does not retain any regional elements of Georgia or the United States; instead, the novel takes on a less identifiable and almost fantastical conception of wilderness. Jameson writes about how the author tackles the cult of ‘machismo’ or toxic masculinity, but similarly, the trait is not regionalised or Americanised but rather universalised in the same way that Gentry’s proclivity for violence is universalised. An American story does not need to symbolise for an international audience anything about American history or American politics.
Contrast this with Jameson’s depiction of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Instead of arguing the political is apolitical, he argues that the apolitical is political. The novel explicitly depicts a fantastical world, Macondo, yet Jameson reads the story as an allegory for the social conditions in Colombia, Bolívar, and Cuba. To explain this assumption, Jameson evokes the author’s biography — ‘the regional centrality of the Cuban revolution… in García Márquez’s life’ formulates a specifically ‘Latin American version of the war novel.’ Against the context of his earlier theories, this sense of Third World spectatorship — this belief that Márquez’s novels ‘marked the cultural emergence of Latin America onto that new and larger stage we called globalisation’ — justifies Jameson’s desire to examine Latin America in the first place, if only from the role of spectator.
The globalisation of literature merely marks a new type of narrative consumption, where novelists become goods rather than goods-producers. In fairness, Jameson seems somewhat aware of this existing dynamic. As he writes in the essay ‘Limits of the Gringo Novel’, late capitalism ‘needs to borrow from its Others’ because of how the First World relies on other countries for its raw materials or source of goods. In this case, the good at stake is the ability for primarily First World readers to consume primarily Third World narratives and to do so with a false familiarity that allows them to displace the binary world of good versus evil into ethnic lives they view as less complicated: ‘evil [is] an optical illusion… fundamentally based on the category of absolute otherness. Evil is otherness, and only the Other is absolutely evil.’
Not only does Jameson divide regions of the world geographically, moving from place to place, he also divides places chronologically. Jameson is interested in post-spaces: postmodernism, post-racism, postcolonialism, and postwar periods.
Similar to how one region defines another — one the spectator and the other the spectacle— the past and future are interlocutors, where the future is always watching the past. Jameson treats these ‘post-’ spaces as if they dissolve any prior signifiers of the past. This tendency is perhaps most apparent in another of Jameson’s overarching themes — that genre definitions and nominal literary devices are rendered useless as parts of contemporary literary vocabulary. Jameson fashions neologisms for thinking about literature today: contemplation and itemization serve as literary techniques, and readers of a self-conscious writer serve as fundamental and intimate characters in the novel.
In some cases, Jameson’s imagined ‘post-’ spaces dissolve very real structural issues and, therefore, risk erasing parts of society. In Jameson’s only essay that centres on a television series and not a novel, ‘The Autonomous Work of Art’, he labels the television series The Wire ‘post-racial’.
You see so many different types of black people… as to utterly dissolve the category… Here there is no longer… black political or social solidarity. These former ‘black people’ are now in the police; they can be criminals or prison inmates, educators, mayors, and politicians.
This alone fails to show that The Wire is post-racial. Take present day New York City. The freshly indicted mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and head of New York public education, David C. Banks, are both black. There are black police officers and a black population overrepresented as defendants in criminal courts. Is New York City, then, post-racial? Certainly not. Jameson’s Inventions of the Present is highly ambitious in scope both thematically and regionally. The novel echoes developments in the field of literary studies, where many university English departments are equally ambitious in expanding curriculums to include new authors, literary methods, and regions of the world. Inventions of a Present does not provide a departure from Jameson’s previous criticism but instead complements his older perspectives on First World/Third World literature and capitalism’s role in the marketplace of ideas and stories. Throughout, the reader cannot help but feel the strong weight of where Jameson sits writing, pulling us to view the world from his perspective in one direction only — imported from the East and exported to the West, imported from Latin America and exported to North America, imported from the violent streets and exported to the safety of a screen.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.