[In the following review, Abel provides a summary of Jameson's analysis in The Political Unconscious.]

In The Political Unconscious, subtitled ‘Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act’, Frederick Jameson provides a comprehensive introduction to the method and practice of Marxist literary criticism. Where all intellectual activity is viewed as historically situated and class-based, literary analysis is essentially a social science, drawing much of its terminology from the other social sciences, sometimes directly but more often by analogy. Thus, the classical Freudian model of the unconscious mind is the exemplar for Dr. Jameson’s proposal of a ‘political unconscious’: no neo-Freudian clinical suggestion is implied in which a moment of ‘cure’ might be possible, a moment when the dynamics of the unconscious would be brought to the surface and integrated in an ‘active lucidity’ about ourselves, our desires and behaviour. As psychoanalysts distinguish between their theoretical map of the mind and their therapeutic procedures, so the Marxian critic differentiates literary analysis from literary prescription. A writer and his readers share insights into aspects of their present, historically-determined experience, and can do no other if the continuity of human communication is to be sustained.

To propose narrow and schematic concepts of literary realism is no part of the enterprise: indeed, the abandonment of ‘genre’ criticism is foreseen as the natural result of reading novels and other texts in the light of wider, cross-disciplinary cultural debate. Some recently popular critical methods such as structuralism and its successors ‘have known the re-emergence of meditation on hitherto marginalised types of discourse: legal language, the fragment, the anecdote, autobiography, Utopian discourse, the fantastic, novelistic description …, the preface, the scientific treatise, which are increasingly conceived as so many distinct generic modes.’

But the systematic undermining, from sheer exuberance, by modern writers of traditional literary forms does not lessen the central significance of narrative, and particularly of the fully developed novel. For it is through his readings of Conrad’s, Balzac’s and George Gissing’s novels that Dr. Jameson most clearly brings out his theme of literature as a socially symbolic act. In interpreting their plots, devices and ideologies he looks at the nature of interpretation in general, assessing the importance and limitations of American, German and French aesthetic traditions. His textual analysis is close, detailed and at the same time broadly based. Its foundation is that history is a single, collective narrative linking past and present: that our comprehension of literature is determined by the concepts and categories we inherit from our cultural traditions: and that Marxist criticism alone reveals the unity of that continuous narrative. It reveals it, of course, in Marxist terms, presupposing the upward progress of collective society. But suppose that, having outgrown the ethics, ideologies and Utopias of former generations, we also outgrow this? Perhaps the dialectical process easily accommodates such a possibility.