Fredric Jameson’s "The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act"

 

Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act is a landmark in Marxist literary criticism, offering a dense theoretical framework that explores the relationship between literature, ideology, and history. The central premise of Jameson’s argument is that all cultural productions, including narratives, must be understood within their historical and material contexts. He asserts that literature is a socially symbolic act, encoding within it the contradictions and tensions of the political and ideological structures of the time. This approach departs from viewing literature merely as an autonomous or purely aesthetic object and instead positions it as a critical space where the political unconscious—deep-seated ideological forces—comes to the surface.

One of Jameson’s guiding principles is the famous imperative to “Always historicize!” This directive emphasizes that any critical interpretation of a text must be grounded in the historical context in which the text was produced. For Jameson, literature cannot be separated from the material conditions of its creation. Every narrative, consciously or unconsciously, engages with the socio-political tensions of its era. Rather than seeing literary works as isolated artistic expressions, Jameson interprets them as reflections of larger social, economic, and historical structures. This historicist approach informs his central argument that narratives reveal latent ideological and political conflicts, serving as repositories for class struggle and cultural contradictions.

To understand how narratives function as socially symbolic acts, Jameson draws heavily from Marxist theory, particularly the notion of dialectical materialism. He insists that literature, like all forms of cultural production, is shaped by the base and superstructure model, in which the economic base (the modes of production and relations of production) determines the ideological superstructure (law, culture, religion, and politics). However, Jameson expands this classical Marxist framework by emphasizing the complexities of mediation between base and superstructure. While literature may reflect the economic and class structures of its time, it does so in ways that are often indirect, contradictory, or unconscious. Hence, narratives contain multiple layers of meaning, some of which remain hidden or repressed. These repressed meanings, the “political unconscious,” surface through a close reading of the text’s formal and symbolic elements.

One of the key contributions of The Political Unconscious is Jameson’s concept of “narrative as a socially symbolic act.” For Jameson, narratives are not merely stories told for entertainment or aesthetic pleasure but are instead symbolic resolutions to real historical contradictions. A novel, for example, might present an individual’s struggle, but this individual drama is, in fact, a manifestation of broader social conflicts. These conflicts may be ideological (related to dominant political ideas) or economic (related to class struggle). The narrative’s symbolic resolution of these conflicts does not solve them in reality but allows the reader or society to momentarily imagine a resolution to otherwise intractable social problems. This is the narrative’s ideological function: it offers a symbolic escape or resolution, even as the real contradictions remain unresolved.

Jameson incorporates a wide range of theoretical frameworks into his analysis, including psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism. He is particularly influenced by the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose theory of the unconscious Jameson adapts to the political realm. In the same way that Lacan describes the unconscious as structured like a language, Jameson argues that the political unconscious operates through narrative structures that symbolically encode social and political realities. However, unlike traditional psychoanalysis, which focuses on the individual unconscious, Jameson’s political unconscious is collective, rooted in the shared ideological and material conditions of society. The unconscious elements of a text—what is repressed or unspoken—are not merely personal anxieties but reflect larger historical and class dynamics.

In addition to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jameson also engages with structuralism, particularly the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jameson adopts Lévi-Strauss’s idea that myths serve as symbolic resolutions to cultural contradictions and extends this idea to literature. Just as myths function to resolve contradictions within primitive societies, literature serves a similar purpose within capitalist societies. For Jameson, narratives function as modern myths, providing symbolic resolutions to the contradictions inherent in capitalist societies. However, unlike Lévi-Strauss, who treats myths as timeless structures, Jameson insists on the historical specificity of literary narratives. Each narrative must be understood within the unique historical and social context that produced it, which gives the narrative its particular ideological charge.

One of the central arguments of The Political Unconscious is the three interpretive horizons Jameson outlines for analyzing narratives. These horizons represent different levels of historical and ideological analysis. The first horizon focuses on the individual text and its relationship to the author’s immediate social and political context. At this level, Jameson emphasizes the role of ideology in shaping the author’s perspective and the ways in which the text reflects the dominant ideologies of its time. The second horizon moves beyond the individual text to consider the genre to which it belongs. Jameson argues that genres themselves are historically determined and that each genre represents a different mode of symbolic resolution to historical contradictions. For example, the realist novel, the romance, or the epic each represent different ideological responses to different historical conditions. The third and final horizon expands the analysis to the level of history itself, which Jameson defines as the ultimate horizon of interpretation. At this level, the narrative is understood as a response to the broadest historical forces—those of class struggle, imperialism, and capitalism. The narrative’s ideological work is to provide a symbolic resolution to these global contradictions.

Jameson’s approach allows for a richly layered interpretation of literature, in which texts are seen as mediating between different levels of historical and ideological conflict. For instance, a 19th-century realist novel might be read as a reflection of its author’s class position, as a representative of the realist genre, and as a symbolic act that attempts to resolve the larger contradictions of capitalism. By incorporating multiple interpretive frameworks, Jameson demonstrates how literary texts operate on different ideological levels simultaneously, revealing the complexity of the relationship between narrative and history.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson also engages with the ideas of other critical theorists, particularly those from the Frankfurt School. He draws on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of culture and commodity fetishism to explore how literature can both critique and reinforce capitalist ideology. Jameson acknowledges the potential for literature to subvert dominant ideologies, but he remains skeptical of purely aesthetic or formalist readings that overlook the ways in which literature is always implicated in ideological struggles. For Jameson, even the most seemingly apolitical or escapist texts are politically charged, as they either reproduce or resist the ideological assumptions of their time.