ABSTRACT
The work of Fredric Jameson exemplifies the eclectic sophistication of post-Althusserian Marxist criticism, in that it seeks to assimilate post-structuralism and psychoanalytical theory to a Marxist methodology. In The Political Unconscious, from which the excerpt is drawn, Jameson transforms the Freudian concept of the (individual) unconscious mind into a social and historical concept which he uses to detect the traces, in literary works, of fundamental but repressed historical realities: class struggle, productive labour and economic relations. Jameson is influenced by Louis Althusser's technique of 'symptomatic reading', which attends to gaps and blind spots in the text, and by Pierre Macherey's idea that literature 'produces' ideology (in the sense of making ideology manifest, rather than in the sense of creating it). This 'production' of ideology makes it available to critical analysis. Jameson's method in this book is what he terms 'metacommentary', in which the object of study is 'less the text itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront [it]' (Jameson, pp. 9-10). So, in this excerpt, he reads the differing modes of the two sections of Conrad's Lord Jim as symptomatic of shifts in the 'cultural spaces' where interpretation takes place (specifically, as symptomatic of the emergence of two spheres, of 'high' art and 'mass' culture). His interpretation of Conrad (and elsewhere in the book, of Balzac and Gissing) serves a wider political and philosophical project. He aims to trace in fiction the construction and disintegration of the bourgeois subject, to demonstrate that Marxism is the 'untranscendable horizon' (Jameson, p. 10) which subsumes without effacing other intepretative models and to make the process of narrative central to questions of history and ideology. These concerns generate rich readings of important aspects of Conrad's work including, here, the significance of the sea and the political ambivalence of the
Joseph Conrad value which Conrad attaches to hard work and to ideas of duty and honour.
