Allegory and Ideology by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Figure 5.1

Source: Reprinted with permission from

Financial Policy Magazine, March 2, 2016

One could then very easily go on—I have only included a few hints—and turn this into a full-blown family novel, perhaps a dynasty during the transitional passage to modernity and the nuclear family, but still internally cohesive with neighbors and rivals and a more distant geography outside the family compound. I call this allegorical fantasy a proto-narrative to the degree to which each “character” in it is accompanied by its own history and by the fantasy of its own relationship to the protagonist in both past and future and also in the sense in which, given such an initial cast of characters, in any decisive encounter or dramatic crisis there will be an accounting, a lining up of various figures on multiple levels and their assessment in terms of alliances or unreliabilities: who can help us out here, who is deceitful and not to be trusted, and so forth. And I will add that, as in personal identity, the partage d’alterité—the way in which these varied others are taken to map out a combination of dependence and autonomy—will necessarily define or better still construct my own national identity.

I have not yet pointed out the obvious, that the main character has not been dealt with in this enumeration and that the center has been taken for granted, as “my” position, as what does not require characterization, as the inside of which all these friends and foes form the heterogeneous outside, the situation, the terrain, and thus define “selfhood” itself and as such.

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