Another recent death of another quietly thoughtful person, with two essays in his memory this week:

• "For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love" by A. O. Scott in the New York Times
• "Fredric Jameson Was a Generous Intellectual Giant" by Jacob Brogan in the Washington Post

A O Scott notes:

The characteristic Jamesonian sentence is stubbornly resistant to quotation — a long, intricate play of subordinate clauses and rhetorical reversals, sweeping generalizations and granular examples, embedded in a paragraph of baroque complexity, romantic grandeur and classical coherence — but there is one, just two words long, that I’ve always thought would make a great inspirational forearm tattoo.

“Always historicize!” Those are the opening words of “The Political Unconscious,” Jameson’s 1981 book on “narrative as a socially symbolic act.” He identifies “this slogan” as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”

The first page of the preface, and we’re already deep in the weeds! ...

Jacob Brogan shares:

... “The history of thought is the history of its models,” he wrote in the opening sentence of The Prison-House of Language (1972).

Yet the pithy precision of such phrases often belied the real difficulty of his work, which asked his readers to follow him through the bramble thickets of the whole history of thought without catching yourself on the thorns of one model or another. ...

Brogan ends his encomium with:

... Jameson argues, “To be influenced by somebody is not to write like him or her; rather, someone’s work suddenly opens up new possibilities that you never thought of before.” He’s speaking there about Faulkner and Sartre, but he could have just as easily been bragging about himself. Jameson affected others by showing them that more was possible in theory and criticism. He told no one what to think. He merely showed us what thinking is, how vital and vibratory it can be.

_{(for a dense sample of Jameson's writing about detective novelist Raymond Chandler see "Real Qualities of the Microcosm: Raymond Chandler in Los Angeles, USA") - ^z - 2024-09-28}