For the Marxist Literary Critic Fredric Jameson, Reading Was the Path to Revolution

At the time of his death, at 90, on Sept. 22, Fredric Jameson was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure: well-known — revered, it’s fair to say — within a specialized sector of an increasingly marginal discipline. I don’t say that to diminish his importance, but rather to make a case for it.

Jameson, hired by Duke with much fanfare in 1985 after teaching at Harvard, Yale and U.C. Santa Cruz, was an academic celebrity, a charismatic scholar in an era of professorial superstardom. Even so, he never sought to become a public intellectual in the manner of some of his American colleagues and French counterparts. You did not expect to see his face on television or find his byline on a newspaper opinion page. While his work was informed by a disciplined and steadfast political point of view — according to the essayist and Stanford professor Mark Greif, he was a Marxist literary critic “in a conspicuously uncompromising way” — it was not pious, dogmatic or ostentatiously topical.

Marxism was, for Jameson, both a mode of analysis and an ethical program. The novels, films and philosophical texts he wrote about — and by implication his own work too — could only be understood within the social and economic structures that produced them. The point of studying them was to figure out how those structures could be dismantled and what might replace them.

In many ways, though, Jameson was as much a traditionalist as a radical. His prose is dense and demanding, studded with references that testify to a lifetime of deep, omnivorous reading. For all his eclecticism he was, to a perhaps unfashionable degree, a literary critic, most at home in the old-growth forests of 19th- and 20th-century European literature, tapping at the trunks of the tallest timbers: Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Thomas Mann.

His considerations of Balzac and Philip K. Dick, of Sartre and cyberpunk, of Proust and pop art are animated by enthusiasm and skepticism, by an engagement no less passionate for being unremittingly cerebral. He was never sentimental about the writers and artists he studied, but there is no question that he loved them. Why else would he deliver a thrilling reading of “the two most boring chapters in ‘Ulysses’”? Or write a whole book about the odious Wyndham Lewis? What I mean is that he was, above all, a critic.

I’d like to say something about why, as a critic, Jameson mattered to me. And maybe, more generally, to the nonacademic, not necessarily Marxist brand of criticism that I and some of my comrades try to practice in the throes of late capitalism, a phrase he helped popularize.