How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson

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You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Frederick Jameson, who died in 2024 at the age of 90, was a towering figure in the fields of literary and critical theory. Reviewing the antinomies of realism in the LRB in 2014, Michael Wood observed that Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think, but almost no 1 does. As Perry Anderson has written, Jameson's account of postmodernism develops for the 1st time a theory of the cultural logic of capital that simultaneously offers a portrait of the transformations of this social form as a whole.

Here in the passage from the sectoral to the general, the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation. In praising the spacious rhythms of his complex yet subtle syntax and sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity, Anderson called Jameson a great writer. And he was also, as Torrelois has written recently in the LRB, a great reader. Torrelois' books include sexual slash textual politics, Simone de Beauvoir, the making of an intellectual woman, and revolution of the ordinary literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austen, and Cavell. She was a colleague of Jameson's at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina for nearly 40 years.

And her piece in the latest issue of the LRB based on a talk she gave at Duke earlier this year is a reconsideration of Jameson's earlier work up to and including the political unconscious, which was published in 1981. So the piece retraces or or maps out how Jameson arrived at that milestone, how Frederick Jameson became Frederick Jameson. And she joins me now from North Carolina. So hello Torrell, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Well, you for having me. It's always a pleasure. Thank you.

To begin with the personal, when and where did you 1st meet Fred Jameson?

Around 1982. And it was definitely at the then famous Sociology of Literature Conference at the University of Essex. I think '19... I mean, I know I was there in 1982 because I gave a talk called Sexual Textual Politics that became the sort of matrix for the book I went on to write. But I know I went there several years running and I know I heard Jameson speak, was it that year, the year before, year after?

Not sure, but I'll go for '82. So it's a long time.

You also describe a meeting, which you say could be the subject for a play. I think is it in Cambridge where you were with Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton and Frederick Jameson?

Yes, that was, I'll never forget the occasion. I remember walking in that walkway into Jesus College Cambridge. At the time my partner was Terry Eagleton. But I had never really met Fred much before and I'd barely set eyes on Raymond Williams. As far as I remember, this was the 1 and only time that these 3 luminaries of Marxists thought had been together in the same room.

And I was there just because I was the girlfriend. And of course a feminist and not really a Marxist. So you had this vie cloze set up, this closed room. And I do think it could be a great play, not written by me, where the 3 male Marxists said eloquent things, no doubt of deep importance. And I said nothing, but I also somehow have blanked out.

I can't remember a word. I should of course have taken notes on this historical occasion, but all I remember is the occasion and nothing else. So I'm not a good historical source, but the occasion did happen.

Fred Jamieson, he began putting together the literature program at Duke University and invited you to be part of that? Or how did how did that come about?

Well, that was also quite a story. And I I should say Fred had been hired by Duke at the same time as Stanley Fish was. And Stanley Fish was hired to be chair of the English department, and Fred of the new founded literature programme, that was a new programme. But of course, was also a member of the literature program, so the 2 connived a lot. And have to mention Stanley here because what happened was, I was invited to be a visiting professor at Duke for a semester.

And this was in the autumn of 19 87, after I'd published my 1st book and The Christopher Reader and so on. And I was doing... So I thought that was great because at the time I was working in a job I didn't particularly like at the University of Bergen. So to go off to spend a semester in America sounded great to me. So I said, Of course, yes.

And I get there and I teach, I don't know, French feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, I think, because I was working on that book then. And what happens is Stanley and Fred put together this enormous theory conference, because this is the moment when Duke explodes onto the American intellectual scene. It's the moment of high theory really hitting academia. So they had this conference and there were hundreds of people coming from everywhere. The conference was called, I'll never forget that, Convergence in Crisis.

And I'm not quite sure which crisis we were talking about in 1987, but you know, they're ongoing. We need convergence in crisis non stop and permanently. But, so then I give a talk at the conference and a few weeks later, we're way into October now, Fred comes into my office and as I thought, he was talking to me about, would I be interested in 1 day possibly coming to work at Duke? And I said, well, don't quite know about that, but maybe. You know, Duke was in Durham, North Carolina.

I had never planned to move to America. And Durham, North Carolina was then in its absolute nadir. It was an empty downtown and pretty much nothing else. So what happens is I said, Well, maybe, maybe not. I thought he was just chatting, you know, having a conversation.

And then this is where, this is not in the piece at all, but this is where Stanley Fish comes into it. Because a couple of weeks later Stanley Fish comes into my office and said to me, Torrell, you don't understand. We voted on you. And I said, Voted? And he said, Your talk at the conference was a job talk, which in hindsight explains why after my talk, when there was a break, Stanley had come out of the auditorium, a huge auditorium, quite full, and said very full of energy and pleasure, he said to me, That's right, take no prisoners!

Which apparently is what he thought I had been doing or whatever. So then he says to me, Why don't you want to move to Durham or to come to Duke? And I said, Well, Stanley, it just isn't a city. And then he looked at me and typical Stanley leant forward and said, Torrell, we're gonna build you a city. And then he explained that I had to take this seriously and that had been the job talk and so on.

And after much ado, I hummed in hard. Cause I didn't really realise how lucky I'd been. I mean, I had been unemployed or part time employed in England and finally got a job in Norway that was running a feminist centre, but it was much more bureaucracy than academia. So I had loved teaching at Duke, but I was used to being freelance and doing various things, so it didn't sink in quite. But after summer do, finally I turned up at Duke 0.5 time for a couple of years.

Began in 'eighty 9. And over time I realised how lucky I had been. I'm working in a place created by Fred Jamieson, where you can essentially do whatever you want to do that you think is intellectually serious. I mean, aren't very many other places you can do that.

Presumably before you, I mean, I guess met him at the conference in Essex and before you went to Duke, you were familiar with his work?

I wouldn't say that I was a great reader of Jameson before I met him. I obviously had read some, in 'eighty 2, I had certainly read some famous essays by him. And of course I knew how well known he was, and I had read Marxism and Form, but it wasn't like Fred Jameson for me was a luminary. For me at that time, the luminaries were people like, I don't know, Christopher. And that's not quite Jameson.

And of course I was deeply into Simone de Beauvoir and it piqued my curiosity that I knew that Fred's 1st book was on Sartre, but I didn't read it then. So I wasn't super familiar with him. But if you had asked me back then, I'd say, Oh yeah, he wrote a book on Sartre, then he wrote on Marxism and form and the prison house of language. Now that 1 I had read some of.

I mean, you make clear in the piece, and as you've also made clear talking now, is that he wasn't trying to build a programme or a department of acolytes. I mean, was something that he had seemed to have no interest in at all. You say in the piece that what he wanted was not to educate specialists, but to train intellectuals, he wanted to bring people into the programme who wanted, as you say, pursue their own ideas wherever they took them.

That is very true. But also think that Fred wanted to build a left wing programme. I mean, they hired feminists. You didn't have to be I don't know that there are any Jamesonian feminists come to think of it. I mean, that's not a thing, is it?

It could presume, I don't know. He hired people who were broadly consonant with a project of critique, history, theory, and a solid foundation in some field, literature, culture, film. So you could say there was a leftist flavour to the people he wanted to work with, but he never did the thing like, oh, they don't work on what I work on, and therefore it's bad. I never saw that.

And as you've mentioned that you've written Beauvoir and he was interested in Sartre and his 1st book on Sartre, which as you say not many people have read, probably it's the least read of his books and you hadn't read it when you you went to Tuuku when you met him, but you have read it now and write about it quite a lot in the piece. Why is Satra so important to Jameson?

1st of all, you need to... I follow Fred's advice about always historicize. Although I don't take it up in quite the correct dialectical Marxist horizon, but nevertheless, Fred wrote this dissertation as it was 1st at Yale in the 1950s. He was in comparative literature and his languages were French and German. Now, who was the leading intellectual in the Western world on the left in the 50s?

Sartre! I mean, there's just... So he obviously picked a super important person who was at once a literary author AND a philosopher. Perfect for Fred actually. I often think that 1st projects tell you a lot about just the inclinations of a person, what they want to think about.

It doesn't mean they go on to do the same thing later. So that on the 1 hand, he picks a very, very central and important intellectual. Not a narrow specialist again, there's always this scope with Fred. And then he writes a book that certainly in the 1st 3rd is, it's a fantastic bravura performance of what you could call close reading if we hear by close reading don't think immediately Oh, the American New Critics or Empson or something like that. But he studies the punctuation in Sartre's novel The Age of Reason and figures out what the intellectual and existential vision is that gets expressed among other things through semicolons and commas.

I thought it was totally brilliant. But essentially, I think it shows to pick Sartre and to pick not just some novels, but the mixture of novels and philosophy. I think it goes to show how intellectually ambitious and capacious Fred was back then. And it's already written in a style that we could say young Jameson. It's Jameson's sentences.

And he will develop them even more into these rolling dialectically capacious phrases that go on and on and pick up everything, and yet are clear.

And 1 of the things that you say is remarkable about that Sartre book is the complete absence of scholarly apparatus.

Yes, I picked the book up again. I read it at some point when I was working on Simone de Beauvoir in my early years at Duke, but I'd forgotten most of it. Because then I was just looking to see is there anything of relevance to Bourbois here? And I thought, No. So that was that.

But then I read it again and I open it and I see, What? Is this the bibliography? It's 2 pages! And most of that is taken up with works by Sartre, which you pretty much have to list. So I went to the trouble of getting a copy of the original dissertation from Yale, because I thought, Surely, could you really do I mean, this was the fifties, 1 would have thought scholarship, footnotes and so on for an austere PhD?

But no, it's the same thing. I was really stunned by that. Because I wouldn't today advise any PhD student to do that. Yeah, that is a very unusual move now, I would say.

You make a distinction, or maybe a distinction that Jameson makes, between a critic and a scholar.

Yeah, well, back then, historicising it again. So in the immediate post war period, in America, literary criticism is sort of taken over by the new and rising new critics. So, Clarence Brooks, Wimsut, I forget all the names. But essentially the new critics are of course still famous for their concept of, although they don't exactly always call it that, but we call it close reading. And they were the young Turks profiling themselves against an older generation that they dismissively referred to as the scholars.

Those were the old fashioned philologists or people who did editions, edited letters and correspondences and checked the sources and really had footnotes. I mean, and also wrote intellectual biographies. So instead of that, the new critic preached attention to the text itself. They were declared that to ask for an author's intention was a fallacy, the famous intentional fallacy. And they were very textually and formally oriented.

And in their work, footnotes didn't have to be as copious as in the work of the so called scholars. And it's quite clear if you look at Jameson's 1st book that he considers himself a critic, not a scholar. Because he doesn't do the apparatus or ask about different editions or errors in the 1st manuscript of something. So to that extent this is in the air in the post war period, but he is not oriented towards America and American New Criticism. His inspiration is the Geneva School, which was around the late 50s early 60s.

Fred particularly mentions Jean Pierre Richard, but you had famous names like Georges Poulet, for example. And the Geneva School were a kind of close readers, but they worked on with a concept they called the literary universe, l'univers l'universite rere of an author. So they read all the works of an author, didn't care about genre, just everything to find the, should we say that author's imaginary landscape. It can be actually super illuminating. And you can see very strong traces of that in Fred Sartel's book, because in 1 paragraph he will say, Join an observation from a novel with an observation from a philosophical text.

And often Fred doesn't even tell us which text is which, and that's very typical of that literary universe way of reading. It's not typical of the new critics who tended to believe that each work was like an object and therefore actually with rather strong boundaries, which is not to be found in Fred Sartre book. And he was also inspired by Leo Spitzer's Stylistics, which again Spitzer, Jewish refugee, and Auerbach of course, who uses close reading in his famous book Mimesis. Auerbach close reads short snippets from the Odyssey onwards to Virginia Woolf, and finds a whole vision of the world and reality in it. And that's the sort of thing that would appeal to Fred, because in the early book close reading gives rise to insights that are much more wide ranging than just an observation about a metaphor or something.

We'll be back after this short break.

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You make the point that he's... In his close reading, he's the very antithesis of an empty theorizer because there is a perhaps a false dichotomy set up as sort of a caricature of a a literary theorist who thinks in large theoretical scales and a sort of a close reading critic. And Jameson is 1 of those who says that actually you could do both, and actually close reading and theory go together.

It's hard for me to say if Fred continued. I mean, have never read anything later by Fred that is that detailed about punctuation. I mean, think that was an intense moment and his 1st. It's the beginning of the book. It's where he comes into being as an intellectual.

To answer your question, my argument in the piece is that so many people nowadays consider Jameson the great theorist of late capitalism, globalization and not least post modernity. And a lot of those people who are inspired by Jameson might sometimes fall for the temptation to say something grand about their current age or something, but they don't have Jameson's archive. You know, Jameson gave me the impression that not only had he read everything, had seen every movie, and apparently traveled everywhere, and just had stores of serious knowledge about so many things. And I think that Jameson would never have become that amazing theorist of larger configurations if he hadn't begun as a reader of literature and philosophy. I mean, this is where he learns to respect the archive, which he always talked about.

The archive is the stuff you know, the stuff you read. Say, your archive, when he was talking to our graduate students, was always saying, What is your archive? What is it you want to use as foundations of your thinking? And so I suppose by empty theorizer I mean people whose only archive is theory. That wouldn't be Jameson.

Of course he had that, he had read so much theory. But he was amazing in his attention to detail to start with and then building up to these wider dialectical sweeps. So I'm saying 1st 0.5 of Jameson is Jameson becoming Jameson, and he starts as a reader and as a critic of, should we say, literature and theory, literature and philosophy, and builds from there. Obviously his encounter with Marxism is only seriously on the table after the Sartre book. Then he writes Marxism in form.

And that's of course a crucial impulse that helps him to take that next step.

The subtitle of the Sartre book is The Origins of a Style. So what does style mean in that context?

Well, as far as I can tell, both from the book and from things he noted in later publications, he takes the concept of style from Leo Spitzer, who was then German Jewish refugee teaching in New York. He came to New York, I think, before World War II in the 30s. And for Leo Spitzer, style or stylistics was essentially, I think I have a quote about that which I've now forgotten, but it is really the expression of a soul, he says. Which sounds so unJamesonian, doesn't it? It's like, how could Jameson be inspired by something to do with souls?

But the point is that Jameson was amazing and he could get inspired by anything and later in life make it part of a fantastic dialectical structure. You can see this idea that he begins with a very fine analysis of Sartre's style to figure out Sartre's view on existence in modernity and in an age of modernism. That's sort of Spitzer like, although Spitzer was a philologist really.

I mean, question of his archive again and the wideness of his interest, when you say that he was more interested in novels than poems, which I think is inarguable, but he didn't restrict himself to the... I mean it's such a quite narrow genre of what gets called literary fiction that he wrote about crime fiction and science fiction and what he calls adventure fiction. I mean, his archive was very capacious in that sense as well, wasn't it?

Oh, absolutely. And not just that, but he wrote so much on film. I mean, and on cultural objects, like the famous Bonaventure Hotel and so on. It's amazing what a range he had. I would say it's true that he doesn't write much about poetry.

I don't even know I mean, I haven't read every sentence he wrote, so for all I know, there is something. The other thing I don't think he wrote about even in the Sartre book, does quote some of Sartre's play, but drama isn't his thing really, I think. For example, question to the real experts out there: Did Fred ever write much about, say, Becket? He could have, but I mean, I'm too ignorant to say anything, yes or no, but I wonder.

So you've mentioned already his 2nd book, Marxism in Form, which published like in 1971, so sort of a decade after the Sartre book. So I mean, what had he been reading over that decade?

I think he immersed himself in Marxist theory fully. But that was also, he says much later, he says that in the Sartre book, he had already begun, when he wrote that, to read Roland Barthes and Theodore Adorno. But there isn't much trace of that reading in the book, but obviously it was percolating under the surface. And I think he spent the next decade educating himself in particularly Western Marxism, because that book Marxism in Form is steeped in a somewhat different intellectual universe. But as always with Fred, it's not a separate thing.

Sartre, after all, was a remarkable Western Marxist, among other things. And Critique of Dialectical Reason was published in 1960, which explains why it couldn't have been present in a dissertation defended in 1959. But obviously Sartre had written in Leton Modern and other things of recent. This question of method did not come 1st. In any case, that is, if you like, the hinge between the Sartre book and the Marxism book is of course that Sartre was also a Marxist.

Fred said, I always remained faithful to Sartre in a way. Obviously in his fashion, but still you can see the connection and you can see the incredible expansion of scope and insight when he turns to the Marxist tradition.

In the same year that that book came out in 1971, he wrote an essay called Meta Commentary, which is an essay, as you say, on interpretation.

I've read essays talking about meta commentary as the 1 piece to read, if you want to learn how to read with Fred Jameson. I don't necessarily want to say imitate him, but it is a theory of interpretation. Personally, I see it as a crucial essay that it's almost as if Fred works in 10 year bulks, because he works on Sartre, who then Sartre, as soon as he finishes his Sartre book, Sartre publishes a big book on Marxism. And Fred spends 10 years working on Marxism, say. And then he writes meta commentary and the Marxism Inform book.

And then the meta commentary is an essay on interpretation of literature, essentially. And that lays the foundations for the next 10 years, which takes us up to the political unconscious, which is his big book on interpretation. After which he takes off into the very much wider, more global postmodern concerns. The big book on postmodernism in 1991. I'm simplifying, but you get the idea.

So find that there's a kind of... Each decade Fred adds a whole new repertoire and expands himself, and that's very impressive.

Going back to 1971, so in meta commentary, I mean, his thinking by now seems to be thoroughly dialectical, if you can be thoroughly dialectical. And he has... There's this brilliant sentence in it that, Formanism as a method stops short at the point where the novel as a problem begins. It's just like you think it's sort of it so you think that must be true. But then he also argues, doesn't he, that the problems or difficulties in art are not something that need to be solved.

And if you think that a work of art is a problem that you have to solve, then you're going about it all wrong and that you need to take a step back and think about why you see it as a problem.

Exactly. I think, 1st of all, meta commentary is a complex essay and anything I say quickly now is definitely simplifying. But essentially he's saying that interpretation for Fred, and this is around the time that Stanley Fish writes books on interpretation. Interpretation was then the going term for something that today has morphed into the term, the vaguer term reading. We talk today, I think a lot about, Oh, his reading of this or that, whereas then interpretation was the term.

And for him, the question of interpretation, he begins by saying it raises the question of meaning. So you want to ask simply, what does the text mean? But then of course, you immediately run into the question of form. Any text has a form. And then he says, well, what we do with a form is description.

We describe the form, we try to interpret the meaning. So you have these binaries that, I mean, I'm not saying he stays with them, but beginning with something that seems quite intuitively right. There's interpretation on the 1 hand, description on the other. Then there's content and form, meaning and formalism or whatever. And then once you've said that, Jameson now starts swirling this around in a dialectical way and ends up by suggesting, you see, he doesn't want to be a formalist.

He doesn't want to be someone who's merely preoccupied with form. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to be someone who just talks about plots and characters, and wasn't that a good story? We still have prejudices against that in literary studies, actually on excessive prejudices, but nevermind. He sets it up like, you want to talk about form, but you can't be a formalist. And you certainly want to know what the story or the novel means, but you can't reduce it to just a plot or a good story or something.

So what do you do? Well, if you're Fred, you end up by showing that also the problem with formalism is that it's ahistorical. So you need to get into meaning and history. And what he does is that this question of decision has to do with this problem. Because you might be tempted to say, well, I'm going to have to cut through this.

Either I talk about form or I talk about content. And of course you cash that out with specific questions to specific texts. And Fred says, don't do that, pause and look at what it is that makes you think that you have to decide. Why is this a choice? And why do you think that decision is the desirable solution?

And then he says, what we need, and here I'm quoting him, What is wanted is a kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle 1 floor higher, and turns the very problem itself into its own solution. Isn't that lovely? So what that means is that there you are struggling with the contrast between form and contents, but now you've met a commentary your way through that, and now you see that it's the sense that you couldn't solve that conflict that tells you what this text is about and what it does. That is to my mind typically Fred. You can sort of incorporate both aspects and end up on a higher floor, which is that of meta commentary.

You comment on your earlier commentary and that helps you to see what your problem actually was.

You say in the piece after discussing this passage that it reminds you of Wittgenstein, who you described as the only major European philosopher Fred couldn't relate to. So why was he so resistant to Wittgenstein, when they appear to have these similarities?

I never had that conversation with Fred. As I say in the piece, I was not... We weren't friends in the sense of hanging out a lot. We were cordial colleagues. But obviously that meant we went to all kinds of events and examined and sometimes, you know, with lots of faculty meetings and so on.

What I heard in exams because some of my students would read Wittgenstein they might have Fred on their committee too and what I heard in exams is, 1st of all, that Fred honestly hadn't read much Wittgenstein. And I think that he was overly influenced by Markus's horrible critique of Wittgenstein in 1 Dimensional Man, which is wrong on every point. I hear just refer to chapter 7 in my own book, Revolution of the Ordinary. So that I think he had this problem that A, he thought Wittgenstein possibly was an analytic philosopher of a kind that he couldn't deal with, and B, that he thought maybe Wittgenstein was fodder for conservative thinking. In the 50s and 60s, those arguments were 1st made by Ernst Gellner, the sociologist, and then by Marcuse in 1 Dimensional Man.

Now, I'm not saying I know that's where he got it from, but I have noticed that when he very few times mentions Wittgenstein, that's the 1 place where I feel my total admiration for his learning breaks down a little. That wasn't his philosopher. And you know, that's not an unusual position on the left in the 2nd 0.5 of the 20th century.

And 1 of the conclusions, if you can use that word, of metacometry, you disagree with in the piece, is that language hides what it displays beneath its own reality as language.

Yeah, doesn't that sound good? But what does it mean?

Yeah, and also why do you find it problematic?

The problem with that is that it assumes that language, just by being language, is a theorizable, that you can say something meaningful about language as such, in total separation from any specific statement, utterance or literary work for that matter. So language, just by existing, hides something. Now why would that be true? I mean, 1st of all, why is there a strong confidence that you can summarize language as such? It comes from Saussure and the post Saussurean tradition, where language was seen as a closed system of differences and so on.

But I think that's a highly implausible view. Language sometimes reveals something, but that's because people use it to reveal things, right? You can use language for all kinds of purposes. And sometimes it's very clear that speakers or writers don't quite understand what they're saying, or they're not aware of all the implications, or they outright lie, or they try to produce ideology. We've seen all that is true.

But is that a problem for language as such? That's a very structuralist, post structuralist view of language. And since I wrote a whole book trying to counter that, I'm not really very convinced. I think that it's a very plausible view if you're also convinced that the only correct attitude for a reader of a text is suspicion. Because you must uncover the hidden depths.

And the critic therefore must not ever take anything at face value. Now my view of that is simply: I think suspicion, like any other affective stance trust is another, or admiration or whatever there's huge amount of stances you can take to a text but suspicion must be earned. There's gotta be something in the text that makes you think, Ah, something's really strange here. It, for some reason, makes me suspicious of something. If you turn suspicion into the general 1 method, I think you'll miss a lot of interesting things in a text.

For example, this is something 1 of Fred's last pieces for the London Review of Books was his big article on Knausskoye's My Struggle. I'm sure he wrote something after that, but where he gets very intensely into the question of Knausskoye's use of lists, and links that to a certain postmodern move and so on. I actually think that that is maybe because I absolutely love my struggle. And I actually think that Fred's mode of reading that text made him overlook the obvious existential problem in my struggle, which is how to be 100% authentic and how to fail at it. But you can't see that if you're essentially thinking that text always hides something.

If my struggle is about never quite catching up with your own authenticity, it's not because it hides something, it's because it displays it all too clearly as it were. And it's not language as such, it's this book by this writer.

Yeah. No, I mean, I guess it's hard to think of a book on which, or a series of books in which everything is on display in quite the way that it is in in my struggle. I mean, it is... I mean, that question, that list, he's trying to put absolutely everything down on paper. There is sort of shame is put aside, everything else put aside, here is everything on display, yeah.

The attitude of a reader there, I do believe with Stanley Cavell, who said at some point, Let the text teach you how to read it. It doesn't mean you come to it without... You come to it as the intellectual you are, right? So it doesn't mean you are a blank slate, but you have to try to open yourself for the effort of the text to do something. And that effort is sometimes 1 that earns your suspicion, but not always.

And Klusko is a fantastic example of a mode of writing that doesn't fit so well with the general, slightly formalist, slightly pro modernist mode of reading that you also find in Fred. What I mean is, Fred was a fantastic intellectual of modernism and post modernism. But modernism is after all, it does always want the reader to be critical, to do the work, not to get engrossed and read fast and turn the pages, but pause and think. And my struggle actually encourages total immersion. You get inside it, you're not going to...

The sentences are sometimes beautiful, the descriptions can be magnificent, but you still turn the pages because you want to know how it goes. That's why I would argue that my struggle signals a break with not a complete, there are no such thing as a complete break. But it is something that is no longer responding fully to the modernist aesthetics that was so much at the heart of Fred's work.

And so if we turn now to the political unconscious, which is the book that you finished with, its subtitle is narrative as a socially symbolic act and its opening sentence, which you've already quoted, is the famous slogan always historicise. So I suppose, I mean, is the force of that slogan? What does it mean? Should we trust it?

Well, I actually am very into that sentence. I like it a lot. And the only thing is, of course, I always have some trouble with the word always. But the thing is though, that even for me in a more Wittgensteinian mode, a literary work is an utterance. And an utterance is always done in a specific situation, at a specific time.

If you want to know what something mean, essentially Wittgenstein tells us, you need to know who says what to whom for what purpose. That's already opening for history, right? You can't even have meanings if you don't know the use, is 1 way of putting it. Now, you translate that back into always historicize, I really believe that Fred wanted us to historicize in a Marxist dialectical Hegelian way, but I don't think that's the only necessary way. But, for example, if you want to write on, say, a certain form in literature, and you say, I don't know, free indirect speech, then people say, Oh, it really is a sign of modernism.

And then some people will say: Well, no, actually hang on, you can find it in Jane Austen. And then someone comes and says: Oh no, no, no, hang on, it's in Chaucer! And then they will say: It's not new. My argument there would be, that we can't understand whether free indirect speech, say, is new and revolutionary unless we understand the background against which it arises. So it may well be that once you have become a modernist and you know the form, then you can find it in Chaucer.

But did it have like a significant effect on medieval writing? Well, I'm not a medievalist, but you know, I doubt it. So the thing is, the idea of always historicising is, I think, essentially telling us don't read texts in a vacuum. Don't read them as if they were like objects enclosed in a glass counter or something. So to that extent, I'm very interested in that.

I think it's a good impulse. It also means that you really need to do your research and know your archive, because how would you even begin to historicize if you say only read 1 novel by Balzac, and you haven't read all the others, or haven't heard of the July Monarchy, or I don't know what, you see?

So I get another know your archive is another important slogan, more than a slogan. I suppose last question, how should readers and critics now follow Jameson? I mean, end your piece with a kind of paradox that the best way or the only way to emulate him is by not emulating him.

I do think, as with Sartre's model of alienation is at work here, the idea is if you take instruction from an external norm, whether that norm is ideological or intellectual, you're going to become deeply inauthentic. What I see in Fred's work is really, back in the 50s, a young intellectual man with huge ambitions, but also the willingness and skill to do the hard work it took to say what he wanted to say. And honestly, you can read the Sartre book and you would never have predicted that this young man would 1 day write the political unconscious and a book on postmodernism or the logic of late capitalism. I mean, how could you have seen that? The 1 thing that points the way is the ambition to do something that makes sense to him.

Because there weren't any other books like that around 1960. It's like independence of mind, a willingness to learn from the best intellectuals around, in his case our Bach Richards, Spitzer and so on. So absolutely not a sense that I don't need to read anyone, but also a wish to just bypass fashions, do your own. The fashion at Yale at that time was New Criticism. Famous professors of New Critics taught there then.

So I liked the fact that he was looking to do something ambitious, something that required wide reading and something that just let him do something he thought was meaningful. And over time, that starts to become important to other people too. As if you begin by taking directions for what others think is the hottest new trend, you're never going to get there.

Thank you very much.

Well, thank you for talking to me.

You can read Toromay's piece in the October 22 issue of the LRB, along with Geoff Mann on prediction markets, Deborah Friedel on Roy Cohn, and Ian Sinclair on JH Prynne. The LRB podcast is produced by Anthony Wilkes and Mayne Robson. I'm Thomas Jones. Thank you for listening.

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