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Chapter 3: Chapter 3 has also been introduced above. I posit the emergence of iden-tical constituent epistemological and ontological formations across individual and community consciousness, and historical experience proper. The key connective tis-sue in this knowing consciousness is narrative, and the conception of narrative con-sciousness will be examined in extensive detail. This overall experience and appre-hension is in expansive ways then presented and represented in historical narrative, as I will examine.
Chapter 4: Chapter 4 has been introduced above. In it I will analyze the aesthetic conceptions listed above in relation to historical writings and other ideas in my the-sis, including consciousness. My aim will be to link these factors across a (con-scious) human “aesthetic gaze” taking in and interpreting experience, and up into composed historical narrative. Chapter 4 contains by far the bulk of the examples of historiography and fiction I will use in support of my arguments.
Chapter 5: I have referred only briefly to the content of chapter 5 . In this chapter I will analyze concepts of truth, as they are applied in fictional and non-fictional his-torical writings. The study of truth is far too broad for a genuinely comprehensive analysis, and I will necessarily limit my choices to a few key theorists, including John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Nelson Goodman, and Marie-Laure Ryan. I will incorporate the ideas of these analysts into my own for what I hope is a unique ferment, and we will see how various conceptions and approaches to truth become something like the manifold techne discussed above. I conclude the chapter with an independent analysis and theory of truth, which I hope strengthens the ideas and contexts examined.
Chapter 6: I will briefly conclude and summarize the work and reflect on its sig-nificance.
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With all of the above said, I trust readers have an overview of my approach, and ultimately hope that I have defended, at least here at the beginning, the incredible power and ubiquity of historical narrative, which courses from the very foundation of lived experience, and from this source conditions and shapes the human communica-tive practices out of which emerge our stories and our histories. Humorist Ashleigh Brilliant has written that, “Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story,”
and his droll words reminds us that life itself—our true history—stems from the fun-daments of story—fiction we may say—such that given narrative elements structure lived experience. Strange as it may sound, I believe that in light of these connections, we may find that at times truth becomes fiction, and back again, with their varied con-stituents and tissues modulating, inflecting and metamorphosing within the alembic of lived and narrated experience in all of their copious glory.
In light of some of these main ideas, theorists and thinkers in years past have, I think, for the most part focused on nudging fiction a bit closer to history. To be sure they have been remarkably successful in this enterprise. My aim in this study, though part and parcel with this idea, may nevertheless be its reverse, and I will try to push history deeper into the fictive. At a high level, I think that descriptions and analyses to date have given less than adequate attention to several key areas—aesthetics in lived experience (and, for that matter, in narrative), consciousness and human sensibilities, ethics and associated morality in historical experience and narrative, intersubjectivity, and the modality of existence (and narrative). In a word, the true extent of how a net-work of narration in history extends well beyond historiography, proper, and com-mixes into diverse other areas of endeavor and communication, has not been effec-tively and pragmatically described. It is almost as if these prior commentators in some
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ways failed to view the entire scope of this topic, and largely remained inside given narrative universes, with the joists of these structures consistently shaping final analy-ses. Of course in many ways this is a credible approach—those very members do pro-vide useful and sound support—but there is also the possibility that these trusses are at times limiting us, impeding our view outside the strictly narrative edifice, compel-ling explanatory structures that a bit too often refer back on themselves, to their own premises or terms. Ultimately, I hope to venture further afield, for I believe that the very narrative essences and stays supporting the structures before us extend farther out than has thus far been known, and that as we trace these indices into more varied areas of experience, communication and interaction, we will apprehend in more accu-rate and integaccu-rated ways aggregate formations of history and narrative. Simply put, and in conclusion, I will try to show in this analysis new contours, highlights, depth and detail of the intricate, heartfelt enterprise of historical exposition, and even expe-rience.
Fre dri c J a meso n
YEARS AGO, IN HISThe Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym-bolic Act, Fredric Jameson famously urged literary scholars to “Always historicize!”
and his exhortation seemed to jolt awake an entire generation. After decades of for-malisms that had focused on interesting-but-essentially-dry internal features of litera-ture—poetic embellishment, linguistic husbandry, compositional contours, design ni-ceties—or, alternatively and more recently at the time, admirably insurgent but in so many ways contrived deconstructionist and postmodern paradigms—the reminder for readers and scholars to seriously address the hard-bitten experience of social and po-litical history—the very pith of which comprises the manifold incipience, incident and
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actualization of human endeavor and communication—was a breath of fresh air and a battle cry. Jameson was spot-on correct when he emphasized the “omnipresence of history and the implacable influence of the social” (20) in cultural and literary studies, and the monumental impact these conditions had on how humans go about present-ing/arguing and representing/narrating experiences and ideas.
Yet further, Jameson, William A. Lane Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University, stated in no uncertain terms that “‘interpretation’ […] demands the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its par-ticular master code or ‘transcendental signified’” (58). This master code and accom-panying transcendental signified could be understood as constituting lived historical experience in both the general and the specific, and also the intricately woven meta-narratives that humans construct to convey and interpret this experience.17 In sum,
“History is an interpretive code that includes and transcends all the others” (100), and
“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, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day” (18).18 We get the gist, but what will fill the wings of this theory, and how will what will no doubt be a complex operation get off the ground? The answer to this question, in a word, is by way of “the all-informing process of narrative” (13, emphasis in original), which is no less than “the central function or instance of the human mind” (13, emphasis in original), and a structural, ideological, ontological, distinctly physical and epistemological embodiment in which the evaluation and communication of historical process and development “can be apprehended and read as the deeper and more permanent constitutive structure in which the empirical textual objects know intelligibility” (97). Jameson astutely notes that narrative works in
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junction with a given rhetorical thrust in language and life—the darstel-lung/vorstellung axis—and from this platform/approach, we are off to the races. After reviews in his book of Althusserianism and Freudian/Lacanian psycho-semantics, Jameson introduces a broadened perspective by way of Northrop Frye, and draws at-tention to the idea of narrative as a central historico-hermeneutic conception. From here Jameson moves into more concrete elements of his analysis, including the intro-duction of three “concentric frameworks” that will, appealingly, “widen[] out […] the sense of the social ground of a text” (both 75). These frameworks, the necessary “se-mantic horizons” in literature (75), are the “political,” the “social,” and finally be-come “history […] conceived in its vastest sense” (75). These perspectives transform into or comprise new forms and constituents in the milieu of history itself, and this history, as we all now well know, “is inaccessible to us except in textual form [and]
can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization” (82). This was and contin-ues to be bold, erudite analysis, and we further learn—we may have gcontin-uessed it in ad-vance—that the form of this “(re)textualization” is narrative symbolization, which is no less than an environment wherein “the historical origins of the things themselves and that more intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we at-tempt to understand those things” meet up and mingle “in the same place” (both 9).
This “deeper narrative structure” is first and foremost one of the tools to “direct[] our attention to those determinate changes in the historical situation” (both 146).
Up to this point Jameson has largely hit the nail on the head, framing an en-compassing, coherent, bountiful and decidedly functional hermeneutic framework. At the highest level, I follow this approach, and I hope that in my own analysis I cam employ Jameson’s ideas, if obliquely, in sound and fruitful ways. And yet, for me, in spite of their importance, Jameson’s ideas are insufficient in important ways. First and
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foremost, no one can doubt that ideology is virtually the centrifuge that defines, dis-criminates and distributes Jameson’s ideas in The Political Unconscious.19 One would hardly doubt that ideology is indeed important to historical experience both lived and narrated—views of the past are tied in countless ways to visions of the present and future, which is to say they are, in a broad sense, ideological. But over-dependence on this approach ultimately becomes one-dimensional. In a word, for me Jameson’s ap-proach is too ideological (more specifically, too Marxist), which inevitably binds his analysis to highly politicized, tendentious interpretation and evaluation, which distorts findings.20 To be sure Jameson extends, modernizes and diversifies his Marxist direc-tives in various ways. But nevertheless, his analysis for me in some ways goes too far, misfires, is too often remote and unsuitable in terms of present-day hermeneutics and historical understanding, and is ultimately doomed by certain outmoded fundaments.
The above said, Jameson certainly lays his cards on the table, from his identi-fication of the ideologeme as “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antago-nistic collective discourses of social classes” (76)—no doubt a brilliant stroke (also employed by Bakhtin), but nevertheless, steeped in combative ideological dogma, and a seemingly reductionist view that could fail to take in a veritable aesthetic tumultus at work in the “collective and class discourses” (76) that emerge up and out of the above-mentioned “cultural objects” (that is, texts; 75). To bracket out or astringe—for this I feel Marxist theoretical models largely do—the contingent and colorful, con-tested and conjunctive, apprehensive and actuated, synthetic and superabundant ele-ments (the substance of which I posit we could even still legitimately and more gen-erously fold into the conception of ideology and ideologemes) of these very cultural objects and texts is, I think, an oversimplification. Further, Jameson states his view of texts as “essentially polemic and strategic ideological confrontation[s] between the
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classes” (85); that his book would no less than “restructure the problematics of ideol-ogy” (13); and that “the working theoretical framework or presuppositions of a given method are in general the ideology which that method seeks to perpetuate” (58).
Fairly heated analysis, if I may say so, but let me say at the outset that I do not dis-agree with, as I interpret them, Jameson’s progressive politics. As far as Marxist phi-losophy and its hermeneutics, however, I believe that large portions of these systems have more and more become museum pieces, that a Kuhnian paradigm shift has taken place, and that the failings of Marxist philosophy and analysis are now well known.
Broadly, Marxism, for all its impressively researched and detailed construction, can often not be credibly applied to modern conditions because of its distorting analyses of immoderately vaunted/despised classes of people and universal revolutionary change, overbaked hero-worship politics and salvation/liberation theology, mystical and mythic strains, and sometimes bleakly cynical, scorched-earth strategy for the fu-ture. Karl Popper (1902-1994), perhaps heatedly, wrote that elements of Marxist doc-trine were “in their logical character […] akin to those of the Old Testament” (277), while Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) sharply dismissed the “tendencious doctrine”
(History as the Story of Liberty 202) of Marxism and its applicability to progressive historical thinking and writing.
For most of the 20th century, Marxism as a political, economic, sociological, aesthetic and overall analytical model mostly survived and “prospered” under the sway of autocrats, dictators, authoritarians and almost laughably stilted theorists—
political and social actors that most nations of the world largely rejected and endeav-ored to root out and eliminate.21 By the end of the 20th century, most Marxist econo-mies and polities had collapsed or were in dire straits because the had failed to pro-vide for citizens, and although conflict between classes is no doubt a vital area of
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concern in human communities, the great predicted economic/political revolutions that would “decide” the issues never came close to taking place, and it does not ap-pear that they will in the foreseeable future. If this point seems too focused on eco-nomics, there is I think no doubt that economics and economic decision-making lie at the very foundation of Marxist philosophical thought, and the framework’s trouble-some determinism (to be examined in more detail below), which works its way into sociological, cultural, humanistic and aesthetic Marxist analyses, is linked to this.
Marxism’s deterministic/materialistic approach is at odds not only with the very pith of historical human experience, but also, and just as important to my study, with the essence of narrative literature and historical writing. Jameson states con-cretely that “History is therefore the experience of Necessity” (102), which is in turn the determination of “why what happened […] had to happen the way it did” (101, emphasis added). History in this sense “is what hurts […] and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (102, emphasis added). To turn to Hayden White, analyzing Jameson’s book in “Getting Out of History: Jameson’s Redemption of Narrative,” the Marxian “collective struggle” for Jameson “forms the content of the plot of world history, serves as the subject matter of all of the master narratives avail-able to Western man for making sense of what otherwise has to be viewed as nothing but a blind play of chance and contingency” (150). I am allowing White to summarize Jameson for me here, but as I read these excerpts, the conceptions of “inexorable”
“Necessity,” “what has to happen,” the veritable “content of the plot of world his-tory,” and “the subject matter of all of the master narratives” strike me as uncom-fortably deterministic and totalizing. In his Marxism and Form, Jameson postulates a dialectical theory of narrative, which though admittedly Hegelian, also points toward this selfsame fundamental structure in Marxist determinism. Harking to the above
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“inexorable” contours of historical understanding, this dialectical method, “can be acquired only by a […] sympathetic internal experience of the gradual construction of a system according to its inner necessity (xi, emphasis added), and indeed, “There is no content for dialectical thought but total content” (306, emphasis added). Beyond this questionable determinism, Jameson trains his guns on the very idea of a coherent or fruitful history, and we find in a reductive turn that “It suffices therefore that his-tory be increasingly removed from us in time, or that we be removed from it in thought, for it to cease to be interiorizable, and to lose its intelligibility, which was only an illusion that was attached to a provisory interiority” (263).22 True, Jameson argues in Marxism and Form that his will be a more textured, subjective and phe-nomenological approach, and his method promises to see onto “the shifting of the world’s gears and the unexpected contact between apparently unrelated and distant categories and objects, [and to] find sudden and dramatic formulation (xiii). And again, “For Marxist historiography […], it is permanence and continuity which are the illusion, and struggle the reality. These two modes of understanding the past […] re-flect a kind of Gestalt alternation, in which everything changes depending on whether you see history as a continuum only occasionally broken by upheavals, or as a con-stant working out of the hidden contradictions” (259). But still, over all, Jameson views lived experience as “a peculiar and determinate structure” (307, emphasis added) that yields a “history [that] has acquired a unified or ‘totalized’ meaning”
(263, emphasis added). Jameson even goes so far as to attempt to weaken the vital affiliating conception of temporality in narrative, stating that “the crucial importance of the choice[s made]” in constituting “the frame […] the beginning and ending,” “the points between which narrative is to run”—are “inevitably […] artificial” (266).23 We
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disagree with this flippant dismissal, and will explore manifold contours and reper-cussions of temporality in historical narrative in chapter 4 and elsewhere in this work.
Jameson heads off other possible charges of determinism when he argues that (and I again turn to White’s analysis) “historical epochs are not monolithically inte-grated social formations, but, on the contrary, complex overlays of different modes of production that serve as the bases of different social groups and classes and, conse-quently, of their world-views” (156). Though those suspicious and very-much totaliz-ing “modes of production” and Marx’s failed theory of (by definition false) class con-sciousness (a totalizing move if eve there were one) are still here, I am willing to grant this softening of the theory’s harder edges. But I maintain that Marxist deter-minism has a compelling ability to “come home to roost,” and that this can be de-tected in Jameson’s analysis (Jameson, however, usefully enlarges these views later in his book, and I shall refer below to certain of these enlargements).
Perhaps most questionable and pertinent in terms of my critique is Jameson’s reference and reliance on Marx’s totalizing historical outline, which progresses across and incorporates values of “the Asiatic [despotisms], the ancient [slaveholders], the feudal [landowners], and the modern bourgeois,” and finally toward the hoped-for proletarian society (Marx 44). Marx has been credited, and duly so, for simply grasp-ing that history was a necessary and essentially pragmatic context of human experi-ence and polities. But that does not diminish the weaknesses of his one-size-fits-all model. In sum, in its time Marxist historical theory may have elucidated some
Perhaps most questionable and pertinent in terms of my critique is Jameson’s reference and reliance on Marx’s totalizing historical outline, which progresses across and incorporates values of “the Asiatic [despotisms], the ancient [slaveholders], the feudal [landowners], and the modern bourgeois,” and finally toward the hoped-for proletarian society (Marx 44). Marx has been credited, and duly so, for simply grasp-ing that history was a necessary and essentially pragmatic context of human experi-ence and polities. But that does not diminish the weaknesses of his one-size-fits-all model. In sum, in its time Marxist historical theory may have elucidated some