Old Memetic Realism by Fredric Jameson

The purpose of theory being not to invent solutions but to produce problems in the first place. . . .the notes that follow should be taken as a sampling of exhibits rather than a unified and systematic theory . . .  ruminations. And it is justified to find oneself always talking about the emergence or the breakdown of Realism and never about the thing itself, since we will always find ourselves describing a potential emergence or a potential breakdown.

On the one hand, historically, there is an increasing fatigue with plot and with the standard narrative paradigms, not merely with the chronicles of world-historical figures, but also with the destinies of protagonists generally in whatever form. At the same time, another tendency is at work in bourgeois society, and that is social equality. It would be remarkable if this trend, whose other face is what called individualism, did not leave its traces on the form of the novel.

In melodrama there is binary opposition between good and evil, about which one might well claim that it is the fundamental opposition as such, the one that generates all those other innumerable oppositions at work in life and thought, from masculine/feminine to black and white, from intellect versus emotion to the one and the many, from nature and culture to master and slave. By the same token any number of ideologies claim in their turn to interpret and to derive the good/evil binary from one of of these secondary oppositions taken as its deeper underlying cause.

In Tolstoy’s novels there is a  sense  that  the categories Good and Evil are survivals of those melodramatic forms and stereotypes that realism must necessarily try to overcome. The Tolstoyan character is not created as an organic unity, but as a heterogeneity, a mosaic of fragments and differences held together by a body and a name ( that is to say a past, a unique destiny, a specific story ) but with the sense that there are no villains.

It is certain that no reader of George Eliot can escape the feeling that her pages are obsessively devoted to an intricate moralizing of the most minute psychological reactions and perturbations. It will therefore seem perverse to argue, as I will, that the moralizing style with which she renders and represents inner movements and reactions can in fact be identified as a strategy for weakening the hold of ethical systems and values as such, and ultimately as a move consistent with the modern denunciations of the ethical binary very much in the spirit of Nietzsche or Sartre. . .namely, her intent to persuade us that there are no villains and that evil does not exist.

 Middlemarch was written, not so much to celebrate or to elegize the characters  otherwise resting in  un-visited tombs as it was to describe the process whereby their protagonicity was slowly dissolved in the name of a different, non-binary conception of the social totality, thereby also allowing this last to be represented in one final form before it becomes so vast as to demand a different kind of evocation – as the presence of an enormous and omnipresent absence, rather than an empirical entity we can still barely glimpse.

The mission of the realist novel is the very weakening of the melodramatic structure, the gradual effacement of the villain and the systematic dismantling of its rhetoric, its specific address to the audience and the demands it makes on their reactions- terror, pity fear and sympathy, breathless anticipation, and the like.


Realism can accommodate images of social  decadence and social disintegration, as already in Balzac; but not this quite different sense of the ontology of the present as a swiftly running stream. I have argued elsewhere at some length that the structural bias is visible in the satiric portraits of all the great realists of intellectuals as such, a discrediting of all  radical commitments to history, to change and to social reform.

 The personal conservatism  of most of the great realist novelists can be demonstrated biographically . . . To posit the imminence of some thorough-going revolution in the social order itself is at once to disqualify those materials of the  present which are the building blocks of narrative realism, for from the revolutionary perspective they become mere appearances or epiphenomena , transitory moments of history, a sham calm before the storm, habits which are merely those of an ephemeral social class and which are about to be swept away forever.

Thackeray’s characterization of old Osborne in Vanity Fair gets close to the realist impulse in fiction:

“He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way – and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, are these not the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?”

Realism does not mean the utter effacement of that manifestation of destiny and its recits which is the melodramatic mode; but only its weakening and tendential attenuation in the face of its opposite number, the scene, affect, the eternal present, consciousness or whatever form indeed that incompatible impulse might take. Zola’s cataclysms, Balzac’s frantic denouements, all testify to the persistence of this temporal structure and its indispensability to a form which would be sorely challenged without some such device, some signal of closure and completion.

But the Realist novel  maintains a fragile equilibrium which precisely takes affect, and the unnamable, as its fundamental object. It is attempted figuration of the waves  of generalized sensation, these which, for want of a better word, I will here call affect… replacing the vague word ‘feeling,’ [a reconsideration of the old problem which has become the un-examined sedimentation of common sense thought.] Affect in Tolstoy and the kind of narrative texture it develops,  consciousness as an impersonal field which challenges subjectivity as an objective identity, thus escapes the ‘tyranny of point of view.’

 A ceaseless variability affect too, against a single affective tonality like a single note or or pedal point held without variation, a density of affects which secures an impersonal existence, above and beyond the individual subjects which were once the protagonists of realism. A stronger ‘modernist’  example of such changeability is found in the music of Gustave Mahler : temporality is agitation, it cannot remain in a state of tranquility for long.

The historical novel as a genre cannot exist without this dimension of collectivity, which marks the drama of the incorporation of individuals into a greater totality, and can alone certify the presence of History as such. Without this collective dimension, history, one is temped to say, is again reduced to mere conspiracy, the form that it takes in novels which have aimed for historical content without historical consciousness  and which remain merely political in some more specialized sense.

The famous ‘average hero’ whose presence Lukac’s posits as a necessary mediation between everyday life and the great historical events is precisely the theatrical spectator, who observes the great episodically and from the afar . . . Yet we must also understand that this “rule” of historical fiction is part and parcel of a whole Lukacian attack  on biography as a form . . Oddly enough, Lukacs does not included the most ancient warning of this kind, in Aristotle’s Poetics, paragraph 8:

The unity of plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things must befall that one man, some which is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made form one action.

Leaving aside the question of whether there have ever been successful revolutions in the first place, we may suggest that an absolute dichotomization, which leaves only two adversaries face to face, leads at once to a kind of allegorical treatment suitable to the novel as a form and presenting impossible obstacles for a genuinely novelistic narration (For one thing, it then becomes impossible for either one of the opposing  sides to avoid taking the role of the villain – a category of melodrama rather than of realism, let alone historical realism . . .

The historical novel can  function as an intervention into the political situation and not merely a representation of the past. This is something we may observe at work in one of the rare successful novelizations of a genuine revolution, namely Hilary Mantel’s Place of Greater Safety. . . she psychologizes and presumably modernizes real historical figures, whose thoughts she makes available to us and this in the form of personal relationships, solidarities, jealousies, envies, and private judgments which might well have been depoliticized and modernized in the form of this or that intimate novel or play staging purely fictional individuals. The great events of the French Revolution here indeed come before us in the form of echoes, rumors, reports from the outside, sounds in the street, documents to be signed or decisions to be made or evaded: as rich as the texture is, there is something of the closet drama about all this and a reduction of the collective dimensions of this unique revolutionary situation, an Event which included many events and truly contained multitudes . .

I propose to grasp these ruminations  as the attempt to solve a properly narratological issue. . .we have chosen from the outset to couple the two unique characteristics of the historical novel: the presence of the ‘world-historical;’, which is to say ‘real’ historical individuals and the concomitant presence, however shadowy, of the collectivity itself – nation, people or multitude - whose history is here in question. But we have linked these two features as opposites, whose tensions makes up the specificity of this form and in whose resolution depends the literary value and distinctiveness of the work in question.

[Let the following stand for Jameson’s view of Realism after affect:

The post-modernity in the movie Inception is to be found in the aesthetic of an absolute present, where, as Adorno warned about late capitalism, all negativity has been tendentially reduced and extirpated – and this is not only in his sense of distances still maintained by critique and the ‘critical theory’, but even in the temporal gaps left by the past and the mirages fitfully generated by the future: an absolute reduction to the present (what Adorno called ‘nominalism’) and a mesmerization by the empirical and sensorially existent. . . a   newly invented environment or constructed world in an Potemkin-like projection which only exists in the general and not in the detail strongly confirms its relationship to stereotypes (and images) rather than to older mimetic realism.

For rather than providence and the providential, the notion of predestination also illustrates the realist here: for even in the realm of theology itself, this notion has been a ‘hard saying’ that often and traditionally ‘sticks in the craw.’ Yet predestination illustrates Kant’ two levels of the empirical and the transcendental almost better than any other attempt at a concept, for it claims to solve this dilemma (which merely names)- namely that of the distinction between the realm of freedom and that of necessity, that of the noumenon and that of the phenomenon, that of the transcendental and that of the empirical – by paradoxically locating the latter in the power of the divine, and the former in that of human subjectivity. What the concept of predestination asserts, in other words, is that an iron necessity governs my empirical acts and my personal destiny – this iron necessity is that of God’s providence and of his determination of that destiny from all eternity, and before time itself. I am, in empirical reality, one of the elect or one of the damned, and I can exercise no freedom in influencing these outcomes. No individual act of mine exerts any kind of causality in their predetermined course. However, on the level of my individual consciousness or soul (Kant’s noumenal realm of freedom), things stand utterly differently, and I can have no subjective sense of my election or damnation: here I am left alone with my existential freedom and must necessarily choose my acts and make my decisions as though I were completely free.]

Brecht’s great poem on dynastic change in traditional societies  also evokes the unseen omnipresence of the collectivity:

When the houses of the great collapse

Many little ones are slain.

Those who had no share in the fortunes of the mighty

Often share in their misfortunes.

The plunging wagons drag

The sweating oxen with it

Into the abyss.

The furthest points our thoughts  can reach, namely, dystopia and regression, world dictatorship and the reversion to savagery, civilization and barbarism. These alternatives are today and for the moment the only ways we can imagine our future, the future of late capitalism: and it is only by shattering their twin dominion  that we might conceivably be able again to think politically and productively, to envisage a condition of genuinely revolutionary difference, to begin once again to think Utopia.

References and further reading

The classic work on the meaning of melodrama is that of Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 1995

Perry Anderson From Progress to Catastrophe, LRB July 2011

Georg Lukacs

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/03/walter-scott-by-georg-lukacs.html

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/03/rollandes-colas-breugnon-by-georg-lukacs.html

Niklas Luhmann

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/search?q=Luhmann

Albert Doblin’s untranslated novel Wallenstein, written during WWI, published in 1920, nine years before his acclaimed Berlin Alexanderplatz

Roy Ladurie’s Carnival of Romans, striking narrative of the ‘world turned upside down’ in an anthropological mode.

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty :  registration of a future history we do not find in history books

George Kubler  The Shape of Time

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-shape-of-time-by-george-kubler.html