On Politics and Literature

Author(s): FREDRIC JAMESON

Source: Salmagundi, Vol. 2, No. 3 (7) (SPRING-SUMMER, 1968), pp. 17-26
Published by: Skidmore College
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Salmagundi

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On Politics and Literature*

BY FREDRIC JAMESON

Td like to raise two points in the general area of this subject:

the first being the relationship between political ideology and
literary form in general, and the second being the more concrete
problem of political literature or the political novel in the U. S.
When I say political ideology, it should be clear that more is
meant by that than simple opinion, the taking of an abstract
position on issues, the preference for one kind of political doc-
trine rather than another. Ideology, political ideology, is first
of all a certain attitude towards Being itself or towards Reality,
if you prefer - (the word Being has certain advantages over the
word Reality - you might say, for example, that to you a belief
in the future is a passionate reality; but if you are obliged to use
the terminology of Being it becomes clear that the future is not
there in Being, is not there yet.).
So political ideologies are principally attitudes towards Be-
ing, towards the Being of objects and the world, of social institu-
tions, of people and of their positions in the world. And the two
great over-all political attitudes or ideologies we can have, the
conservative and the radical, are basically positions taken with
respect to Being. The radical wishes to alter Being, to change,
reshape, destroy it, to leave it different from what it is; the
conservative wishes to associate himself with the permanence of
Being, its massive quality; to live in it and feel its stability and
continuity around himself.
What does this distinction mean from a literary vantage point?
In other words, what are the advantages and disadvantages of
*These remarks were originally delivered at a symposium on Politics &
Literature sponsored by Salmagundi magazine, and held in New York City in
December, 1966.

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lg FREDRIC JAMESON
these two points of view for the production of works of art?
Note that the radical, insofar as he is out to change things, insofar
as the ideal or the abstract or the future absorb him more than
the present, is not really interested in Being as it is. He looks
through it, or beyond it; searches for its flaws; perhaps he ex-
amines it only with a view towards measuring it for destruction,
as an engineer might examine a building slated for demolition.
But the very source of literature's intensity lies precisely in
its contact with Being. To work at all, to have any kind of
effect, the literary world has to have a kind of density to it,
a kind of solidity and massive quality; whatever else a novel
j' sets out to do^it-has-to-evoke-a: feelkig uf permanence^ and con-
tinuity, of place^ nf stability ÍQ its objects. So in this respect,
ithe^conšervative evidently has the advantage over the radical,
for it is precisely his specialty to linger, lo vmgly_ over- things as
they are, to delight in^their individuality L in even those flaws
i and blemishesihatTend them a certain character and distinctive-
! ness. The conservative, [Link] likely to sacrifice ap existent thing,
is not likely to ignore Being itself as imperfect -as-iLmayJbe, for
a hiere abstract idea. His orientation is not towards the future,
but towards the present, and particularly towards that kind of
cyclical, repetitive^present, that kind of recurrence of habit and
cüstömp^o^wliicH~the~päst lends a supplementary depth. And
yet that kind of time is in many ways the privileged time of the
novel itself.

In other words, the conservative's attitude towards Being is

already an esthetic one; whereas the radical's is of a more prac-
tical, possibly utilitarian, character. And this is evident in the
conservative's political views as well; he sees the progress of
modern times as a lowering of standards, as an equalization on
the lowest common denominator; as far as he is concerned,
universal education is no adequate recompense for the loss of
the old-fashioned, intensely cultivated elites. Indeed, sometimes
he goes so far as to defend present inequalities and injustices
on the grounds that they lend a kind of spice to the present, give
it character and a kind of individuality which the bland egali-
tarian conflict-less society of the future will no longer know.
So his very political arguments are of an esthetic nature.
I might put all this in another way by saying that the very

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On Politics and Literature 19
use of the word politics in our title implies a radical orientation.
The conservative has no need, and indeed no wish, to single out
political activity from the rest of Being, to give it any undue
emphasis, to attract attention to it. His program is already
achieved when he has interested you in Being itself, fascinated
you with what things are, how they are, how good it is that
they are like that. In short, a conservative political literature
is just literature itself; and in the conservative orientation almost
any novel about anything, if it develops a contemplative atti-
tude in you, if it has led you to see things, not as historical and
changing and changeable, but rather as eternal, has served a
useful political purpose. Île doesn't even need to analyze his
works of art in overt political terms; it is the radical who has
to struggle to get a political point out of literature, to annoy
people with his mania, to keep drawing morals and lessons.
All of this accounts, it seems to me, for the scandalous fact
so often observed and commented on, namely that most great
writers of modern times, most great writers since the French
Revolution, since the beginning of the middle class world, have
been conservative, both implicity, in their general attitudes, and
explicity in their political opinions. It is as though the vested
interests of literature itself dictated the choice of that attitude
which would best promote its own development. What indeed
could be more contrary to the nature of literature than an ob-
session with the future, the non-existent, rather than the pres-
ent - with the abstract idea rather than the concrete sensation -
with the faceless collectivity rather than the unique and indi-
vidualized hero?
And when we look at those relatively few modern novels
which are overtly political, we see at once that they concern
themselves almost instinctively with the phenomenon of revolu-
tion and that their bias is distinctly hostile towards it. Think if
you like of Tale of Two Cities , of Flaubert's Sentimental Edu-
cation , of The Possessed of Dostoyevsky, of James's Boston-
iens or The Princess Casamassima , of Wyndham Lewis' The
Revenge for Love , of Conrad's Secret Agent. In these books,
over and over again the same point is made: radicals are ab-
stract, they don't know and don't love life, indeed they resent
it,., they love ideas only, and they tend to do irreparable damage
to those around them, even those they are supposed to care for.

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20 FREDRIC JAMESON
Such is the prevailing bias of the greatest of the modern novel-
ists. But as I have tried to show, this attitude is not of any par-
ticular interest in itself as an idea, or a set of principles; rather
it results from the dictation of the raw material of art itself.
'lt is thejuwet-as-iUion^^ speaks through this antirrevolu-
üonary passion , and: ^hilTTEus^e^resses jts^n^^rance for
itHe^abstract, for the^disembodied^ior Jthe pure idea,., unless it is
[turned to ridicule.
r And no doubt, when we look at the products of a radical
literature, this judgment is a correct one from the esthetic point
of view. The hemes of overtly_^liücaly^hichj.s to say, radical
novels (perhaps a good recent example is The Mandarins^oî
Simone de Beauvoir) - the^ her(^^appear_to noļjiing but
-laik, for talk, abstract, intellectual talk. isJJie only way in which
the a s yet non-ex i sten Infutura cai' be approached and grasped.
Everybody remembers how in those old-fashioned conflicts be-
tween Duty and Desire, between Reason and Passion, it was
always the side of Passion that had our sympathies - the other
side, the side of Reason, was always somehow too dry and logi-
cal, unnatural in its spirit of self-sacrifice - there was always
something a little too reasonable and dreary about it. So from
the point of view of both form and characters, it is here. Even in
their characters, in their heroes ^the Conservative writers empha-
size Being rather than abstraction: they want to feel the human
personality, human reality, as something organic and massive,
something which participates in an unconscious and is bathed in
the physical element of the body; for them the hero is dense
with passions and drives, heredities, traits, possibilities, in-
stincts. His story is that of the development of potèntialities:
it isn't wilful but is rather a kind of destiny, and there is some-
thing reassuring about thinking about human life in those or-
ganic terms. Whereas the radical heroes and characters are al-
ways in danger of getting obliterated: by the ideas they stand
for, by the causes they are involved in, by their own conscious
self-discipline. Where conservative man prefers the richness of
the subjective, radical man is embarrassed by it, isn't interested
in possessing a personality, wishes to be all work, to give him-
self over utterly to the objective situation. But for that very
reason he does not lend himself well as a character to the liter-
ary work of art.

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On Politics and Literature 21
Much the same might be shown about the type of events
favored in the two perspectives. The conservatives, as we have
seen, can write about more or less anything, provided it is an-
chored in Being and manifests it with a certain constancy.
To the radical all events are merely signs and symptoms, sym-
bols and foreshadowings, of the one global eschatological event,
the Revolution itself: or if that terminology sounds a little too
old-fashioned, we might say that rarlir^ļ j,g nęypr interested jn
an event for itself, but always_jtries to read it symbolically, to
see it a5-a~symbolic enactment aLthatlotal destruetien or over-
türmng ofBeing which^is^his-iundamental obsession or -dream.
ln~bifier words, no matter how deeply he is engaged, he seeks
a symbolic satisfatrtioiLJroixueyents^rather^tHan ćTreąfone! This
is to say that the radical's passions are always threatened with
failure, and with failure of two kinds. First of all, on the em-
pirical level, there have been very few successful Revolutions in
history, and even those have remained incomplete or self-
contradictory. go it is^simply a historical untruth^ip present
any historical event a g h^yin^a successful_or triumphant out-
comel "The' revolution is looked to as the end of history: but
after- even a successful minor struggle historical time still
stretches ahead, with all of its tasks and problems unsolved.
And then on a more purely literary level, the symbol never
turns out to be adequate to the meaning: the isolated event
chosen as the subject of the novel never really manages to pass
itself off as the ultimate Revolution itself; we're always too
keenly aware Jiaatoye-4ire seeing a sample, 'example, a fore-
^sliadowing, and not the thing^rEselfT Burát that^poiñrthe^vmrlc
^of^aļļ^as_a__solid presentation oftheP here-and-nowcollapses.
There are, of course, Agréât "radical books! But I'd like to saý
that a basic ambiguity underlies all these books, an ambiguity
in the author's attitude towards his radicalism and towards the
Being which is the stuff of his novels. This is true of Stendhal,
perhaps the greatest of such writers; and it is true of the suc-
cessful communist writers of our century, of Aragon or Brecht.
All of these writers escape the dilemma we have indicated by
leaving out the abstract moment, or by minimizing it: they don't
so much show radical heroes at work discussing and imagining
the future abstractly; rather they insist on the density of the
counter-revolutionary present - they show the intrigues that go

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22 FREDRIC JAMESON
on underneath the surface, they show the power structure be-
hind the scenes and the way capitalism operates. But it seems
to me that if we were called upon to pass judgment on the revo-
luionary quality of these writers, we should tend to be just a
little suspicious of them. They describe capitalism with too much
gusto; the process of making money fascinates them even more
than it disgusts them; and instead of showing the alienation of
the human being beneath the capitalist, they tend to lay empha-
sis on his energy, on his slyness and cunning, his ability to sur-
vive and to cut his neighbor's throat. In short, taking their point
of departure in the abstract revolutionary ideal, they seem to
have become a little too mesmerized by the existing order, by
Being itself. And this fundamental ambiguity is the price - this
visceral fascination with what they hold intellectually loathe-
some - this is the price they pay for creating a solid and not a
merely abstract political literature.
But now I'd like to turn to a country without a political liter-
ature, namely our own, and see whether even this kind of ambig-
uous political literature is possible here; and if not, what might
be.

It seems to me that the first task of a political literature in

the United States is the same task that has always faced Ameri-
can literature in general: namely, to say what America is, to
define what an American is, to invent a picture of reality by
which Americans can orient themselves, in terms of which they
can evaluate and give meaning to their own individual experi-
ences, experiences to which inherited European categories do
not apply, about which an imported European literature does
not tell us much.
The American political writer therefore has to make up some-
thing like a map; he has to coordinate two different zones of
experience and bring them into a coherent relationship to each
other. On the one hand he has to do justice to his own lived
experience, to the truth of the individual life, of the monad, to
the domain if you like of psychology and of the psychological
problem. But that isn't enough: then he has to situate that
subjective dimension with respect to the objective, he has to
bring the point in relation to the coordinates of the map, he has
to give a picture of the objective structure of society as a whole
and deal with matters that ordinarily have nothing to do with

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On Politics and Literature 23
my own subjective experience, my own psychology, but which
are rather ordinarily dealt with in political science textbooks,
sociological or economic studies - all those basic questions about
how the country is organized, what makes it do what it does,
who runs it, and so forth - things I may know about intellectually
but which I can't translate into the terms of my personal experi-
ence. The opposition is between subjective and objective, be-
tween mere abstract knowledge and lived experience; and the
problem for the political writer - perhaps wellnigh impossible
to solve - is to find some kind of real experience in which these
two zones of reality do intersect, even momentarily. But such
experiences are very rare: and generally they are only abstract,
or allegorical, or somehow symbolic. They're what I would call
pseudo-experiences. Think for example of the illusion of per-
sonal contact with politics that television fosters. Basically,
the only way we can think our own individual lives in relation-
ship to the collectivity is by making a picture of the relationship.
The notion of a map was such an image, or picture, or the image
of an airplane from which you can look down and see masses
of life, of houses and cities, disposed out below you like a map.
But that's an abstract experience, and doesn't offer any genuine
material for the work of art.
The causes of this dilemma fall into three general categories,
at least insofar as the United States is concerned. First of all,
political control in this country is no longer external but intern-
alized. This has been said so often that I don't need to talk
about it at any great length - techniques of psychological manipu-
lation, all those well-known phenomena of political apathy, of
general alienation. But I'd like to bring those phenomena into
a purely literary focus, and it seems to me that I can best do
this by suggesting three general stages that political literature
has undergone. First, in a novelist like Balzac, the manipulator
and the public at large are still two well-defined human be-
ings: we see the one at work influencing or crushing the other -
the story is still a story of individual characters. Later, in a
novelist like Aragon, one of_thos^--two-4łumanJtennsJi^, Recome
fącfile^^jii^-collectiyiząd. We still see the individual capitalist
making his decisions, manipulating stocks or armaments pro-
duction or prices, but this time his decision affects not a single
human being, but a whole class of people, the country at large,

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24 FREDRIC JAMESON
the relatively faceless collectivity. Yet still a kind of story
can be told. Finally, in our own time, the capitalist has him-
self become collectivized: he no longer exists as an individual
either; he has become himself a general drift or tendency of
the economy, a general trend or autonomy of institutions, a name-
less force. This is what C. Wright Mills meant when he said that
the power elite couldn't yet be considered a class exactly, had
not yet really arrived at a self-conscious awareness of its own
I powers, acted more by reflex than by decision. But how -can
you make a story out of the action of two faceless groups of
forces upon each other, of trends upon passive 'áñofíymoüs re-
ceivers of infļuei^ That, it seems to me, is the literary aspect
i ¿FthïîTïïFst perhaps not entirely American phenomenon.
In the second place, and this is perhaps a little more typical
of the United States in the historical accident of its nature -
American social reality is spread out geographically, separated
into compartments, which don't come visibly into contact with
each other. The most striking illustration of an old-fashioned
literature of classes I can think of is a novel of Zola about a
typical Parisian apartment house at the end of the 19th century:
there's a shop on the ground floor, a rich lawyer lives on the
next floor, a businessman above him; as you go on up higher,
you begin to run into lower middle-class families; finally in
the garret there are rooms for working men and for the maids
and servants. Every personal experience in that apartment
building is also a visible experience of classes, of the social
structure: the subjective is at once the objective, and everybody
in the book feels it. But in the United States of today, nothing
visible links the various types of social experiences with each
other. There are wealthy suburbs on the one hand; so-called
pockets of poverty, or racial ghettos on the other, and they don't
come into visible contact, they only know about each other
abstractly. How can a novel make you feel connections that
aren't present in real life itself?
And finally, a development which is perhaps an extension of
the one just considered. The basic element of literature is the
nation, or if that sounds a little dated, a little too redolent of
the problems of the nation-states and so forth, then the society
itself. To put it another way, the national language limits the
subjects you can treat to the people who share that language

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On Politics and Literature 25
and all of its presuppositions, who have some kind of common
background and shared culture. You can't really treat foreigners
very well in a given language, and everybody knows how thin
the psychological presentation gets when a writer tries to intro-
duce people from another culture. (Think, for a kind of ele-
mentary illustration of this, of Hemingway's pidgin-Spanish:
the life-blood of literature is language, is conversation - how can
you really deal with people whose lives are conducted in a dif-
ferent language ? )
But, this basic limitation of literature to the nation, or to the
given society, no longer corresponds to the objective realities of
the world today. A nation used to be a microcosm: all of the
classes were represented in it - if the artist dealt fully with it he
had a complete world. Now somehow the classes are parcelled
out among the countries of the world: and there isn't, for ex-
ample, an old-fashioned working class proletariat, or a class of
exploited people, within the United States itself. Or rather,
the Whole United States functions as a wealthy class with re-
spect to the poverty of Latin-American countries, or perhaps
to the petty bourgeoisie of Europe. Each country has become
a single class in what is now a world-wide system. Any presenta-
tion of life within a single country is only partial, doesn't tell
the whole truth - because it can't give a complete truth. Yet
literature as we know it is simply not equipped to give a concrete
pigtUrejifjffiat~irü^^ and maybe, account of
the very limitations of language, it will never be equipped to
do so.
There are plenty of good examples of this ultimate dilemma,1
of this dialectic between the inside and the outside, between the
domestic and the foreign, but the most striking are always those
revealed by moments of crisis2_^__vrarfor example. The truth j
of a prosperous peaceful inSIvidual life athome7 the truth of the
American one-family home, with its untroubled continuity, its
richness of products and gadgets, its high living standard, the
easy succession of its generations, is harm to other people abroad,
is misery, destruction, violence and death in the lives of foreign-
ers from Latin- America to Southeast Asia. But how can that
truth find its expression in the work of art? What literary tech-
niques are available to show the invisible reality behind the
placid domestic appearance? to turn our private lives inside out

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26 FREDRIC JAMESON
and show the threatening foreign policy face they wear? and
with which their prosperity is bought? Think once again if you
like of the airplane as a pseudo-experience: and then consider
this image at present so characteristic of us - typical wholesome
American boys in bombers, friendly, full of good will, generous
to children, dropping fire bombs on villages they can't see. The
experience seen from two angles: how it feels from the inside,
how the individual evaluates it, the pilot chewing his gum in-
side the plane, carrying out his orders with typical American
know-how - and how it looks from the outside, the objective
meaning of the subjective act, the villagers burning to death.
I don't give this illustration in a polemic spirit, but merely to
show at its most acute this basic contradiction in American
reality with which the political novelist has to deal, if there is
to be any political literature at all.

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