The proud red glow was gone and for a terrible moment Henry thought the gateway to the west had been wiped out in the night. Then he reached for his field glasses, sighted along his secret tunnel off 95th Street, out over the river, over the folded layers of laminated shale (known to the dumber guys as the Palisades) and closed his eyes. In his head he filled in the space above the water. When he was good and ready, he drove his eyelids apart and stared with all the stored-up power of history, geography and manifest destiny. WHEW. The old combo had worked again; against the new day the dim, spidery grayness hung limp but unmistakable: ALCOA. WHEW. You never knew what you would wake up and not find these days. Satisfied, he slid his glasses into the case, threaded his way over Ezzard (still smiling over his latest hook shot) and slipped into the bathroom. As he brushed and flossed his teeth, he could see out the window, near the gateway, another corner of the western plain, where brave young Hamilton, bright as ALCOA at midnight, had been lured to that fatal shootout. Poor sonuvabitch. If only a guy like Henry had been around to clue Ham, Aaron the Burro would have got his shit kicked out all the way from Weekend to Princeton Township. A mouthful of toothpaste-water finished old Aaron and spun him down the drain like a nothing cockroach. Henry walked back to his room and whipped into his A.M. Assembly clothes: white shirt, red tie and navy bluejacket. As he wound up the double Windsor knot, he previewed the day, bigger than any damn Assembly with its General Electric crap or dumb-ass trampolines. Finishing with a quick cuff of each shoe against his trousers, he walked into the kitchen and sat down before the piled up books. The all-important permission slip lay in his history, next to the page about the stupid-ass Hessian. He drew it out and curled it up just a little, figuring on a quick shove and pull away between toast and coffee and a play It dumb request. Not that he anticipated trouble, but with the old Spray gun, you never knew. Today could be his day; then again, lo Spray might wanna preach. Maybe the slope of the curve, which hadn’t been preached since he got 82 in first quarter arithmetic. (“Why you a 98, son. God dam that curve got to slope up.”) He unfolded the slip and focused on the Princeton part, which was the real slope, up the hill from the Delaware, out past the ALCOA gate and laminated shale, far beyond any god dam 98 in arithmetic.
Suggested Reading
Making of a Poem: Emily Osborne on “Cruel Loss of Sons”
By Emily Osborne“Translating someone else’s suffering should feel like heavy labor, even across centuries and cultures.”
The Daily
Making of a Poem
The Art of Criticism No. 5
By Fredric Jameson
Teaching at Duke, 1988. Courtesy of Duke University.
The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade. This past March saw the publication of Mimesis, Expression, Construction, an edited transcript of a semester-long seminar on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory that Jameson gave at Duke, where for nearly forty years he taught classes on literature, Continental thought, and film. In May came Inventions of a Present, a collection of essays on the contemporary novel, from Norman Mailer in the sixties to Olga Tokarczuk just the other day. And in October, not three weeks after the disparition of this committed Francophile, Verso brought out The Years of Theory, a sort of retrospective introduction to the postwar French thinkers—structuralists and poststructuralists, Marxists and psychoanalysts—whose ideas Jameson had done so much to bring to several generations of students.
Among his more than two dozen books of literary and cultural criticism on matters as disparate as international cinema and universal military conscription, the titles Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981) might be nominated as the most important. The first of these rehearsed the ideas of a cohort of Western Marxists—Sartre, Adorno, and others—to argue for a “dialectical criticism” that could uncover the otherwise occluded reality of capitalist social relations through a formal analysis of literature. And the second went further, to insist on Marxism as the sole means of thought adequate to grasping all cultural artifacts and periods “as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot,” namely that of class society from the first agricultural settlements down to global capitalism.
Jameson was a reluctant interviewee, no doubt for reasons he explained in a 2006 essay, “On Not Giving Interviews”: the form tended to transform universal concepts into mere personal opinions, and encouraged an overall laxity of expression. But reluctance didn’t mean refusal. In our conversations over Skype, he spoke at generous length, in soft and musing tones, while his round face and thick glasses added to an impression of basic gentleness. This amiable disposition did not, however, make him complaisant or deferential. Owing perhaps to his skepticism of the interview form, he asked me to send written questions in advance of our sessions—and then usually rejected or severely revised the terms in which I’d formulated them.
At this point in the introduction, it’s almost customary for the interviewer to evoke the physical setting of the interview: the subject’s comfortable or austere office or living room, any plants or pets, the light, beverages, weather … But the long-distance nature of my and Jameson’s conversations prevents me from observing the custom. Though we discussed meeting in person, my only visit, as it were, to his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, occurred when, with the unselfconscious pride of a child delighted with a new possession, or so it seemed to me, he emailed photos and a video of his recently acquired “library house”: a modest wooden dwelling not far from the home he shared with his wife, Susan Willis, with autumn trees in the background, meant as catchment for the overflow of his books.
Jameson begins our interview (which he didn’t live to review or edit) with allusions to my first two written questions, so it’s worth saying what these were. Number one attempted not very successfully to “go at things in a brass-tacks way that’s uncharacteristic of your resolutely theoretical work” and elicit some biographical facts: When and where were you born? Where did you grow up? and so on. And number two sought to apply to Jameson’s particular case the general question put by Sartre, the writer most important to Jameson, in Search for a Method: How to reconcile a psychoanalytic understanding of the individual person, as a unique product of a specific family system, with a Marxist understanding of the same person, as a representative specimen of his or her social class during a given moment of history? Jameson suggests that that question had really been posed first by Simone de Beauvoir, and then, friendly as could be, more or less ducks it.
FREDRIC JAMESON
Well, you want to know facts, and as I don’t believe in facts—that is to say, their constructions—I want to make this first question more theoretical. This will be an illustration of what is, for me, a basic philosophical position on the constructedness of so-called facts, as well as a dramatization of the meaning of the word theory, about which I am so often asked and whose differentiation from philosophy has been so important for me, but which I seem unable to get anyone to understand, unless I have recourse to a word which sounds more familiar and intelligible to them, namely the dialectic.
We can retheorize the first question’s empirical formulation by preceding it with a brief discussion of question number two, on the Sartrean view of the family—pioneered, rather, I believe, by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoirs. For both, the family is the crucial mediatory between class society and the individual—the latter learns class through the family and in particular through the parents. But one must add that this is a complex mediation that resembles the double helix of DNA. The infant is, in the parents, confronted with two complete sets of social or class genes. He or she forms a subjectivity out of their combination—that is, the choice between them and the restructuration of a new and novel being.
My father’s family was Scotch Irish—that is, a part of the Protestant emigration from Scotland to Belfast and the North of Ireland, which came to the United States by ship in the nineteenth century. His father was a landowner who went on to become a banker and a local “notable.” I say this in order to underscore the distance from anything immediately working class on this side of my “background.” My mother came from a German family, not without some genuine or Catholic Irish elements, who settled in Michigan and were involved in the nascent auto industry. Her father was an inventor in the great age of Ford and Edison, and founded his own automobile business in Detroit. Here there is an even more obvious distance from the working class. I mean, there’s Irish on both sides of my family, so there were elements of identity resistance, but that really hasn’t touched me in any way. I never experienced that directly. We’re talking about somebody who has no working-class or proletarian background.
So, what kind of theoretical problem does this pose? Put crudely, I suppose it is the question about my Marxism. How—and I’m going to criticize this way of speaking, but I’ll put it this way—can I “be a Marxist,” or better still, in the language of my student friends abroad, How can you be a Marxist? You’re an American!
And so that’s the way I would rewrite those first and second questions.
Haverford College yearbook photo, ca. 1954. Courtesy of Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.
INTERVIEWER
You said you’d criticize the idea of “being a Marxist.” Why is that?
JAMESON
The phrase attributes a kind of being to subjectivity, which I feel to be wholly unphilosophical. The roots of ideology are deep indeed, but in this case I would suggest that so-called Marxists are people for whom the world itself is Marxist, a position from which I have never wavered. As for what I am, it is an intellectual, an unpopular category in the American situation but one that has been central in my life and teaching. Yes, then, no doubt one can be a Marxist intellectual, but there are many ways of being that and of drawing practical conclusions from it. As you point out in question number three, one has here other qualifications to deal with—that of a literary intellectual, for example, and other determinants to add in, which do not contradict the ones I have drawn already, namely those of a political intellectual whose notion of politics is French rather than American.
My identification is French, in a sense. I’m a French teacher, I have a French degree. The idea of politics—for me, that’s a French idea.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by having a French idea of politics?
JAMESON
I think France is the place where politics was invented. The French Revolution, the history of modern France—everything in France turns on politics, or it used to, until what I call de-Marxification, the entry of France into the common market. When France ceased to be a nation-state and became a member state, that was the end of the autonomous political culture of all these European countries. Maybe there’s a lot that’s good about that. Certainly we foreigners like it because of the single visa, or whatever we have to get. I guess we don’t even have to get a visa.
From the Archive, Issue 250
Interview
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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