‘Always historicise!’ With this resounding imperative, Fredric Jameson opens his third major work of Marxist literary theory, of which the precursors were Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972). No recommendation could be more scandalous to conventional criticism. For though literary studies are awash with ‘historical’ accounts, ‘background’ information and biographical jottings, what resists historical explanation are the very categories of thought which govern this whole enterprise. Absolutely anything may be ‘historicised’ except literary studies themselves: Spenser or Swift may be set against their ‘backgrounds’ (the static, distancing connotations of the term tell its own story), but not, say, orthodox criticism’s belief in something called ‘the imagination’ or ‘the rich textures of immediate experience’. Literary criticism has been nowhere more perversely ingenious, never more cunningly resourceful, than in its flight from history into a whole gallery of celebrated substitutions: the creative mind, the author, the autonomous artefact, the racial unconscious or (more recent candidates, these) ‘deep structures’ and language itself.

The Political Unconscious is not concerned with placing literature against its historical ‘background’, a tediously positivist gesture if ever there was one. Its aim is to grasp history – understood as the struggle against material scarcity, forms of political domination, the warring of antagonistic groups and classes – as, in its own phrase, the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of all analysis, a set of constraints inscribed in the very letter of a literary text and in every act of criticism. Such texts, for Jameson, are to be seen not as objects but as ‘symbolic practices’ – strategies by which real historical contradictions may be momentarily, magically resolved, imaginary solutions to material problems which nevertheless carry within themselves critical, even utopian elements. Literary works are not ‘reflections’ of history but symbolic ways of negotiating it; history is not the outer environs of the work but its very ‘sub-text’, a sub-text which it is the task of criticism to reconstruct. The critical question is not in the first place ‘What does the work mean?’, but ‘What is the historical problem to which it is a proposed solution?’

To one of Jameson’s most familiar, suggestive positions – that ideology in literature is to be discovered not first of all in ‘content’ but in form – this book adds another: that there is one ‘supreme instance’ or central act of the human mind, whose name is narrative. It is in narrative that ‘the problematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of history, and of cultural production’ all ultimately converge. For the North American theoretical avant garde among whom Jameson moves, this is hardly the most popular of positions. Nothing has had a worse press over the past decade than the concept of narrative, which, so we are told, is a closed, hierarchical form inexorably subjecting its various elements to tyrannical order, violently forcing them all towards a preordained goal. Shamelessly unreconstructed Hegelian-Marxist that he is, Jameson refuses this contemporary wisdom: for him ‘the human adventure is one’, and history has ‘the unity of a single great collective story’ whose chapters are the successive modes of social production. All literary works are allegories of this fundamental narrative; and the point of criticism is to ‘rewrite’ them in terms of this ‘master plot’. This, indeed, is what the various chapters of his book get up to, brilliantly mapping the interrelations of unconscious desire, political ideologies and modes of production in Balzac, Gissing, Conrad and traditional romance.

Jameson’s ‘master’ plots and ‘master’ codes have always been a little too virile. In one sense he is the least reductive of Marxists, scornful of any notion of the literary work as mere ‘reflection’, happy to engage with formalist critical methods (semiotics, myth-criticism, structuralism) as long as he can finally press through and beyond them into that untranscendable realm which is material history. In another sense, however, his work betrays a ‘phallic’ urge to rank, order and unify, subsuming differences to the transcendental signifier of a single History. The corrective to this is neither mindless liberalism nor the poststructuralist cult of disunity; it would demand a way of thinking continuity and disruption together, rejecting at once a consecrating of ‘totality’ and a fetishism of the fragment. Jameson’s book is still too tilted towards the former option to resolve this most pressing of theoretical and political problems; but if its dazzling range of intellectual reference suggests some great Californian supermarket of the mind, in which all the various theoretical commodities sit obediently on the shelves awaiting the moment when they will be casually scooped into the Marxist basket, that intellectual ambitiousness is also an implicit rebuke to the bankruptcy of routine ‘literary criticism’. How can Althusser and Aristophanes, Gissing and Gramsci, Weber and Woolf co-exist so unembarrassedly within the same covers? Is this ‘literary criticism’ or not? The answer is ‘probably not’; it is something altogether more urgent and exciting, for which the academy has not yet invented a name.