By TERRY EAGLETON*
Fredric Jameson was without doubt the greatest cultural critic of his time.
I first met Fred Jameson in 1976, when he invited me to teach his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. Before that, I had only known of his existence because of the astonishing Marxism and form,[I] published five years earlier, a set of brilliant essays on thinkers such as György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, among others.
The book's very title directly challenged a dull line of vulgar Marxist criticism. It also dealt with a series of German works, some of them bristling with difficulties, that had not yet been translated into English.
At the time, I was convinced that the name Fredric Jameson was probably a pseudonym for Hans-Georg Kaufmann or Karl Gluckstein, some refugee from Mittleuropa holed up in Southern California. The man I met, however, who greeted me with an abruptness that I later understood to be shyness, was as American as Tim Walz—though I suspect Walz is not in the habit of sneaking off to read the latest Czech fiction with a glass of wine.
He used expressions like look it e holy shit, wore denim jeans, liked to eat surf n' turf and was clearly uncomfortable in the presence of patrician French intellectuals, much preferring the company of the cordial, outgoing Umberto Eco.
All this was authentic enough; but he was also an intellectual in a civilization in which such creatures are advised to appear in disguise. Something similar could be said of the rhetoric of his literary style, which operates as both a mask and a mode of communication.
Fredric Jameson was in some ways a private man thrust into the public sphere, traveling the world (we later crossed paths in China and Australia) while living in a remote cottage in rural North Carolina surrounded by goats and chickens and filled with the sounds of children. The children were particularly precious to him, and he left behind a veritable army of grandsons and granddaughters.
Fredric Jameson was arguably the greatest cultural critic of his time—although the term “cultural critic” here refers to a type of intellectual work that encompasses aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political theory, and the like, for which we do not yet have a proper name. There was nothing in the humanities that did not appeal to him—from film to architecture to painting to science fiction—and he seems to have read more books than anyone else on the planet.
He was able to talk about both Parmenides and postmodernism, and when he debuted Barry Lyndon (1975), a Stanley Kubrick film based on an obscure Thackeray novel that no one had heard of, one of his students confidently remarked, “Fred must have read it” (and he was probably right). He had a voracious American energy combined with a high European sensibility.
He maintained that no Marxist critique was worth much if it could not account for the form of sentences; and he could detect an entire ideological strategy in a narrative turn or a change of poetic tone. At the same time, he also took the pulse of an entire civilization, as in his classic essay on postmodern culture.[ii]
Literary critics don’t have much of a social function these days. Part of Fredric Jameson’s achievement was to show the rest of us how such modest academic figures can once again become public intellectuals, men and women whose influence extends far beyond the conventional confines of literary scholarship. That’s what the amorphous word “theory” has come to mean, and Fredric Jameson was the finest theorist of them all.
*Terry Eagleton, philosopher and literary critic, is professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Oxford. Author, among other books, of The event of literature (unesp).
Translation: Artur Renzo.
Originally published on Verso Publishing House blog.
Translator's notes
[I] Fredric Jameson, Marxism and form: dialectical theories of literature in the twentieth century. Translation: Iumna Maria Simon, Ismail Xavier and Fernando Oliboni. New York, Hucitec Publishing, 1985.
[ii] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism.Translation: Maria Elisa Cevasco. New York, 1996.
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