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Metacommentary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract

Although instinctively formalistic, modern criticism has avoided the basic problem of interpretation: not what a universally valid method should be, but why there should have to be any interpretation in the first place. Whence the first principle of metacommentary: each interpretation must account for the necessity of its own existence. Russian Formalism is the model of a criticism which refuses to interpret: it is unable, however, to deal with diachrony, and in particular with the novel as a form. The second principle of metacommentary: the fact that a work needs no interpretation (as in the novel of plot) is itself something to be explained. Thus, the possibility of plot reveals a wholeness in the society that produces it. To the evolution of the plotless novel corresponds the structuralist hermeneutic, with its reading of the work as a single sentence or as a system of binary oppositions. Structuralism can be transcended by the realization that its abstract mental categories are in reality historical moments. The ultimate model of metacommentary is one which, distinguishing the manifest and latent contents of the work, then seeks to account for this distinction (or repression). Since the latent content is an experience, the elaboration of the work corresponds to a question about the possibilities of Experience itself, and the disguises of the content to an attempt to conceal the causes of the limitation of experience in the social situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 1 , January 1971 , pp. 9 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Note 1 in page 18 I regret to say that this holds true even for so strong a recent study of the problem as E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn. : Yale Univ. Press, 1967), which strikes me as a victim of its own Anglo-American, “analytic” method: the most interesting idea in the book, indeed—that of a “generic” dimension to every reading, a preconception as to the type and nature of the text or Whole which conditions our apprehension of the various parts—is on the contrary a speculative and dialectical one.

Note 2 in page 18 Théorie de la littérature, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1965). Compare Shklovsky on the predominance of a particular authorial mode of being-in-the-world such as sentimentality: “Sentimentality cannot serve as the content of art, if only because art has no separate contents in the first place. The presentation of things ‘from a sentimental point of view’ is a special method of presentation, like the presentation of them from the point of view of a horse (as in Tolstoy's Kholstomer) or of a giant (as in Swift's Gulliver's Travels). Art is essentially trans-emotional . . . unsympathetic—or beyond sympathy—except where the feeling of compassion is evoked as material for the artistic structure” (Lee T. Lemon and Marian J. Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965, translation modified).

Note 3 in page 18 In Forme et signification (Paris: Corti, 1965).

Note 4 in page 18 The model derives from the Cours de linguistique générale of Ferdinand de Saussure, its wider relevance having been suggested by Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don, where various behavior patterns are analyzed in terms of prestation or exchange, thus making them easily assimilable to the exchange of information in the linguistic circuit.

Note 5 in page 18 Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Pion, 1958), “La Structure des mythes,” esp. pp. 235^12.

Note 6 in page 18 See A. G. Wilden, The Language of the Self (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), particularly pp. 30–31: “Ellipse and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition—these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasis, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche—these are the semantic condensations in which Freud teaches us to read the intentions—ostentatious or demonstrative, dissimulating or persuasive, retaliatory or seductive—out of which the subject modulates his oneiric discourse.”

Note 7 in page 18 Anthropologie structurale, p. 239.

Note 8 in page 18 Le Cru et le cuit (Paris : Pion, 1964), p. 346.

Note 9 in page 18 Validity in Interpretation, pp. 8, 211. Cf. Barthes' analogous distinction between literary science and literary criticism in Critique et vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 56.

Note 10 in page 18 Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, 1966), p. 220.