The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

The familiar mechanisms and characteristic rhetoric of Balzacian description are here reappropriated by a less characteristic function, or, to use a term which will be further developed in this chapter, are projected through a rather different register than the metonymic and connotative one of normal Balzacian exposition. The Cormon townhouse, along with its unwed heiress, is indeed the prize on which the narrative struggle or agon of La Vieille Fille turns. It is therefore quintessentially an object of desire; but we will not have begun to grasp its historical specificity until we sense the structural difference between this object and all those equally desirable goals, aims, or ends around which classical récits or quest narratives of the type studied by Propp are organized. The content, indifferently substitutable, of these last—gold, princess, crown or palace—suggests that the signifying value of such objects is determined by their narrative position: a narrative element becomes desirable whenever a character is observed to desire it.

In Balzac, as the heavily persuasive nature of the passage in question testifies, it has for whatever historical reason become necessary to secure the reader’s consent, and to validate or accredit the object as desirable, before the narrative process can function properly. The priorities are therefore here reversed, and this narrative apparatus depends on the “desirability” of an object whose narrative function would have been a relatively automatic and unproblematical secondary effect of a more traditional narrative structure.

But the historical originality of the Balzacian object needs to be specified, not merely against the mechanisms of classical storytelling, but against the psychological and interpretive habits of our own period as well. For us, wishes and desires have become the traits or psychological properties of human monads; but more is at stake in this description than the simple “identification” with a plausible desire that we do not ourselves share, as when our films or bestsellers offer the proxy spectacles of a whole range of commodified passions. For one thing, we cannot attribute this particular desire (for the Cormon townhouse) to any individual subject. Biographical Balzac, Implied Author, this or that desiring protagonist: none of these unities are (yet) present, and desire here comes before us in a peculiarly anonymous state which makes a strangely absolute claim on us.

Such an evocation—in which the desire for a particular object is at one and the same time allegorical of all desire in general and of Desire as such, in which the pretext or theme of such desire has not yet been relativized and privatized by the ego-barriers that jealously confirm the personal and purely subjective experience of the monadized subjects they thus separate—may be said to reenact the Utopian impulse in the sense in which Ernst Bloch has redefined this term.5 It solicits the reader not merely to reconstruct this building and grounds in some inner eye, but to reinvent it as Idea and as heart’s desire. To juxtapose the depersonalized and retextualized provincial houses of Flaubert with this one is to become perhaps uncomfortably aware

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