Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware

 

As reading matter, contemporary Marxist criticism is pretty heavy going. First and most obviously because it inherits a long, rich and adventurous tradition not only of political and sociological but also of philosophical argument–the breadth of Marx’s own interests insured that: he aimed, and so have all Marxisms after him, to synthesize all sciences, to make Marxism the key to all mythologies, or (in Fredric Jameson’s now-famous phrase) the “untranscendable horizon” of all cultural, political, and social inquiry. (Marxism obliges itself to reckon with, say, deconstruction; whereas deconstruction regards dealing with Marxism as discretionary.) But Marxism takes on other difficulties, other burdens besides the intellectual ones; it carries the torch of a moral tradition as well, of concern, even anguish about the plight of the oppressed. And its burdens are “moral” in another sense, too, the sense that connects less with “morality” than with “morale”; for it is the very rare Marxist text that is without some sort of hortatory subtext–though usually, it is true, expressed polemically (often most fiercely against other Marxists). And here, too, Marx himself is the great original: he asks to be read as a scientist, not a moralist, but we do not readily credit any Marxism that is deaf to the moralist (and ironist) in Marx’s potent rhetoric.

 

So “doing Marxism” is not easy. To join in the Marxist conversation, even just as a reader, requires an askesis that cannot be casual, an experience of initiation that involves extraordinary “difficulty” of every possible kind: difficult texts, difficult issues, difficult problems, a (very) difficult history, difficult political conditions. Yet the initiation into Marxism is not without its pleasures, too: pleasures, indeed, not punctually marked off from, but rather continuous with, the satisfactions of the adept–and even more conflictedly, pleasures somehow deriving from, even constituted precisely by, the very “difficulties,” both moral and intellectual, that Marxism obliges its initiates to shoulder.

 

I want in this essay to consider Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the two leading Marxists writing in English, with an eye to the contrasting ways each negotiates the contradictions of this mix of intellectual pleasure with intellectual-moral difficulty. (A salient topos will be “Left puritanism,” with some sidelights from Roland Barthes.) The eminence of Jameson and Eagleton makes them the obvious choices for such an essay in contrasts. Their substantive differences are as well known as the warmth with which they avow common cause, but in what follows I want to shift the emphasis from their “positions” to the ground where the contrasts between them are the sharpest, namely to their prose styles. That a subculture so devout as the academic about splitting fine ideological hairs nevertheless seems agreed on accepting as indispensable two writers so different–Jameson with his aloof hauteur warmed occasionally by erudite despair, Eagleton with his impetuous, energetic hope–attests that their manifest differences as stylists, and in their stances as writers, make them virtually polar terms, “representative,” between them, of the limits, the possibilities and the predicaments, of the rhetorical or libidinal resources available to Marxist criticism in our historical moment. It should go without saying that my focus on “textual” effects intends no renunciation of more substantively “thetic” interests: rather, I hope to stage the contrasts between these two very different prose styles to see how each writer handles “pleasure” as an issue, a problem, desire, or object of critique–to see how (or whether) what each says about “pleasure” squares with the pleasures (or whatever else we are to name the satisfactions) of their writing.

 

A convenient place to begin, as it happens, is with Eagleton’s essay, “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), in which Eagleton avows the “profound pleasure” he experiences reading Jameson. Tactically, consider what a very strange move Eagleton makes in speaking this way. Though I no longer find Jameson as vexing to read as I once did, “pleasure” seems a calculatedly provocative word for whatever it is that keeps me reading him–and lest we miss the point, Eagleton even takes care to remind us that “‘pleasure’ is not the kind of word we are accustomed to encountering in Jameson’s texts” Against the Grain 66). Indeed, not. Quite apart from its notorious difficulty, Jameson’s writing is fastidiously pained, “stoic,” even “tragic,” in its evocation of the ordeals Utopian desire must suffer through what he calls “the nightmare of history as blood guilt.”¹ Most readers sense from the tone and sound of Jameson’s work, long before they get a grip on the complexities of its content, that the best motto it supplies for itself is the famous “History is what hurts” passage, the often quoted peroration to the opening chapter of The Political Unconscious. The passage begins in reflection on the genre of “dialectical” analysis to which Jameson obviously aspires to contribute:

 

the most powerful realizations of Marxist historiography . . . remain visions of historical Necessity . . . [and of] the inexorable logic involved in the determinate failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history . . . [they adopt] the perspective in which the failure or the blockage, the contradictory reversal or functional inversion, of this or that local revolutionary process is grasped as "inevitable," and as the operation of objective limits.(The Political Unconscious 101-102)

 

As visions go (and “visions” is Jameson’s own word here), this one–the failure of all revolutionary action as “inevitable” after the fact–is about as bleak as any vision (Marxist or otherwise) could possibly be. (In other Marxist writers, Jameson warns, such a vision risks “post-Marxism,” and this is obviously an anxiety close to the quick for Jameson himself.²) This bleak vision bears a patent family resemblance to many other critically powerful pessimisms–Michel Foucault’s “total system,” Paul de Man’s “aporia,” and Harold Bloom’s “Gnosticism,” to name three whose “defeatism” Eagleton has particularly vilified.

 

Contempt for “defeatism” is a constant in Eagleton’s work, a gesture (symptomatically) much against the grain not only of Marxist “critique” but of culture criticism generally. So in testifying to the “profound pleasure” of reading Jameson, Eagleton is playing a deep game, seeming to praise Jameson but also, with typically British (not to say Marxist British) puritanism, subtly indicting Jameson in terms that echo Eagleton’s repudiation of the “frivolous” counter-culture (and French!) hedonism of Barthes and the Tel Quel group. Eagleton means it as a sign in Jameson’s favor when he specifies that he derives “pleasure” from Jameson’s work, but not “jouissance.”³ Evidently, “pleasure” may be tolerable in contexts of righteous revolutionary effort, but “jouissance” would be going too far. (Insofar as Eagleton’s own pugilistic wit invites us to pleasures that feel distinctly masculine, his aversion to Barthesian “jouissance” might seem almost a residual, unwitting homophobia: the revolutionary band of brothers, apparently, is to enjoy collective pleasures, but not collective ecstasies.)

 

Perhaps Eagleton’s double-edged praises of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson express the embarrassments of meeting so potent a version of the “defeatist” vision under the Marxist banner. But my point is that Jameson’s peculiar eloquence has been of that ascetic, despairing, facing-the- worst type familiar, and according to some (Leo Bersani and Richard Rorty, as well as Eagleton, and Barthes), over- familiar, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture- criticism. It is a rhetoric that cuts across the ideological spectrum: beside Foucault, de Man, and Bloom, whom I have already named, one might place Adorno, one of Jameson’s particular culture-heroes, and T.S. Eliot, one of his particular betes noirs. But what Jameson especially admires in a writer like Adorno, he has said repeatedly, is a “dialectical” quality in the writing: a power to render unflinchingly the awfulness of our present condition, but also to sustain some impulse toward utopian hope.

 

But this utopian impulse must not offer any solace; to do so would make it liable to a post-Althusserian, Levi-Straussian definition of “ideology”: “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” i.e., a kind of “false consciousness”–and the more so in that it here appears as a textual effect, an achievement of style. Yet just this, but (ironically?) as “praise” rather than indictment, is the implication of Eagleton’s judgment that “Style in Jameson . . . both compensates for and adumbrates pleasures historically postponed” Against the Grain 69). Such “compensation,” such “adumbration” of how things will be after the revolution, is for Jameson sheer “ideological” indulgence in “the Imaginary,” and as such a particular pitfall or temptation that Marxist writing must avoid.

 

On the contrary, what Jameson calls “the dialectic of ideology [the capitalist present] and utopia [the socialist future]” should aggravate, rather than soothe, our discontent with the way we live now.⁴ Jameson is trying for a rhetoric, a tone, that will not be a profanation of its subject matter, an eloquence appropriate to the plight of capitalism’s victims, and to Marxism’s hour on the cross. In a time (ours) of near-total “commodification” or “reification,” this task gets harder and harder, as you can hear in Jameson’s grim joke that Adorno’s question about whether you can write poetry after Auschwitz “has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno . . . next to the pool” Late Marxism 248). The point of such a joke is not “pleasure,” but laceration; you might even call it a moral-intellectual masochism.⁵

 

And this seems a model for Jameson’s effect generally. As a writer, as a stylist, Jameson is committed to a bleak “vision” of near-total desperation, and to praise the effects of his prose, as Eagleton does, in terms of “profound pleasure” seems a shrewdly pointed missing of the point. True, Jameson himself earlier commended the “purely formal pleasures” of Adorno’s prose, but Jameson’s language sounds sober–even “purely formal”?–whereas Eagleton’s praise of the “intense libidinal charge” of Jameson’s prose sounds like transport, not to say (the word Eagleton specifically rules out) jouissance.⁶ And Eagleton’s “defense” (or mock-defense?) of Jameson’s style is couched not only in terms of pleasure, but of Jameson’s own pleasure: “weighed down” as he is with the “grave burdens” and “historical responsibilities” he has assumed, writes Eagleton,

 

[Jameson] must be allowed a little for himself, and that precisely, is style. Style in Jameson is the excess or self-delight which escapes even his own most strenuously analytical habits. . . . (Against the Grain 66)

 

I lack the space here to rehearse Jameson’s aversion to all discussion of literary, cultural, social, political, or even psychological issues in terms of “self”; any reader of Jameson will have noticed that after his 1961 book on Sartre, hostility to the category of “the subject” is the most consistent of his presuppositions. So Eagleton’s reinscription of “pleasure” here in terms of a stylistic self-consciousness, and a “self-delight” that is Jameson’s due as a sort of allowance or indulgence (like Lenin’s penchant for Beethoven, or Freud’s cigars) compounds Eagleton’s sly “mis-taking” of Jameson’s point.⁷ Eagleton is raising issues as ancient as Aristotle on tragedy: how do we derive pleasure (if it is pleasure) from works that visit unpleasure upon us? Eagleton seems “materialist” in the British tradition of Hobbes and Bentham rather than Marx when he unmasks the “pleasure” of reading Jameson in this way.

 

Eagleton’s remarks originally appeared in a 1982 issue of Diacritics devoted to Jameson. It was in the following year (1983) that Jameson published an essay that not only mentioned the word “pleasure,” but took it as its title, “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” I do not argue that Eagleton’s remarks prompted Jameson’s essay, but reading it “as if” it did makes its centerpiece, Jameson’s elaboration of Barthes’s plaisir–jouissance distinction, seem a kind of defense against, correction of, or better, a dialectical out-leaping of, Eagleton’s implied strictures, as well as a tacit program or apologia for Jameson’s own writing as far as its literary “effects” are concerned.

 

“Pleasure: A Political Issue” argues against what Jameson calls “Left puritanism” of just the sort that I have identified with Eagleton IT2 66-7); and its vehicle is a reconsideration of Barthes, a much more positive one than Jameson had offered, for example, in “The Ideology of the Text” (1976). The treatment of Barthes is, as usual in Jameson, quite unstable; he passes over, for example, Barthes’s wobble over the relation of “jouissance” to “significance” (“bliss” as liberation from the tyranny of “meaning,” versus “bliss” as restoration of a “meaning” utopia); and one of the most simply pleasurable parts of the essay, the opening jeremiad against the commodification of “pleasure” in our mass culture, ascribes this theme to The Pleasure of the Text, where it nowhere appears. (Jameson is conflating plaisir/jouissance with S/Z‘s lisible/scriptible.)⁸ Eagleton took care to absolve Jameson of any taint of Barthes’s “perversity”; but Jameson mounts a defense of the Barthesian “perverse” that resonates with his homage to Lacan.⁹ And where Eagleton reviles Barthesian jouissance as a flight from politics into a cerebral-sensual wet dream, Jameson avers that

 

the immense merit of Barthes's essay The Pleasure of the Text] is to restore a certain politically symbolic value to the experience of jouissance, making it impossible to read the latter except as a response to a political and historical dilemma. . . . (IT2 69)

 

“Impossible”? As usual when Jameson offers a judgment for or against a writer’s politics, this seems an eye-of- the-beholder situation, Jameson’s construction of a “political” Barthes attesting Jameson’s ingenuity more than Barthes’s politics; but I want to pass to the next, most interesting phase of Jameson’s argument, in which Jameson reads Barthes’s binary of “pleasure” and “jouissance” as a contemporary avatar of Edmund Burke’s “beautiful” and “sublime.” It seems a master stroke, until you reread Barthes. Jameson invokes Barthes’s epigraph from Hobbes about “fear,” and quotes Barthes quoting Hobbes in the section of The Pleasure of the Text called “Fear.” My own reading of Barthes is that by “fear” he means something like “shame”:

 

Proximity (identity?) of bliss and fear. What is repugnant in such nearness is obviously not the notion that fear is a disagreeable feeling--a banal notion-- but that it is not a very worthy feeling. . . .(Barthes's emphasis; Pleasure of the Text 48)

 

This unworthiness is a particular in which “fear” resembles “pleasure”; only two pages earlier Barthes protests the “political alienation” enforced by

 

the foreclosure of pleasure (and even more of bliss) in a society ridden by two moralities: the prevailing one, of platitude; the minority one, of rigor (political and/or scientific). As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. Our society appears to be both staid and violent: in any event: frigid.¹⁰

 

But Jameson tilts Barthes’s invocation of “fear” away from the disquiets of prudery and the miseries of a closeted Eros in a very different direction: towards a Burkean sublime of terror, an effect that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” IT2 72). Jameson initially treats this as an effect merely aesthetic, and therefore “ideological,” a mystification (Burke, he notes, makes the end-term of the sublime God Himself), and he jeers the hunger for such an effect–“choose what crushes you!” IT2 72)–but the valence changes when he goes on to posit an end-term of his own, namely that “unfigurable and unimaginable thing, the multinational apparatus” of late capitalism itself. Jameson alludes to the work of “the capital-logicians,” who invert Hegel’s providential world-historical metanarrative so that “what Hegel called ‘Absolute Spirit’ was simply to be read as the transpersonal, unifying, supreme force of emergent Capitalism itself”; it is “beyond any question,” he continues, that some such apprehension attaches to “the Barthesian sublime” IT2 72-73). Granted Barthes’s good-leftish politics, an ecriture(“sublime” or not) that “threatens, diminishes, rebukes individual human life” is not only very un-Barthes-like, but actually valorizes Barthes in terms of that very “Left puritanism” Jameson affects to defend Barthes against.

 

Jameson has remade Barthes’s jouissance, in short, in the image of his own “sublime,” a passion of “fear” prompted by “History,” by “what hurts”: it is not Barthes who has chosen what crushes him; Barthes is willing to confess (or boast) that at least parts of him are not crushed; it is Jameson who insists on being crushed, by a “sublime” villain, late capitalism. The measure of that “crush” is of course the effect of the prose in which Jameson projects his “vision of Necessity” and its inverted Hegelian-Marxist metanarrative in which “the subject of History” proves to be not the proletariat but capitalism. “Pleasure: A Political Issue” invites a redescription of what Eagleton named the “pleasure” of Jameson’s prose as, on the contrary, a type of “the sublime.”

 

“The sublime” is a theme that has much preoccupied Jameson in the ’80s, a decade in which, it seems to me, his prose has undergone a change. It is as allusive and inward as ever, but its emotional charge is much larger and more accessible than before. Eagleton in 1982 chided Jameson’s “regular, curiously unimpassioned style” Against the Grain 74), and here his judgment is avowedly adverse: he is calling in fact for a more “impassioned” Jameson. But the formula of 1982 no longer fits the Jameson of 1992, as even a cursory reading of, for example, the short meditations on diverse topics gathered as the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism will show. Moreover, “the sublime” is a frequent theme in this writing, and Jameson unfailingly characterizes it (as in the passage quoted above) in terms of unrepresentability, unfigurability, unsymbolizability. To evoke the nightmare of history as beyond the intellect’s grasp is to present a vision of “fear.” But another frequent theme in Jameson is the ambition to write a “dialectical prose,” like Adorno’s, that resists or escapes what Jameson calls “thematization.” Jameson nowhere speaks of this condition “beyond thematization” as a “jouissance,” but insofar as it, too, involves a transit beyond a linguistic-semantic entrapment, this ambition of Jameson’s rewrites the fear of the sublime as a kind of desire, and thus projects the terror of the sublime as a kind of utopia.

 

I want to mention one more portent in the later Jameson’s evocation of “the sublime”: if “the sublime” is the unfigurable, it must necessarily defeat any project of interpretation. From long before his 1971 essay “Metacommentary,” through The Political Unconscious (1981), with its programmatic opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” Jameson presented his effort as a hermeneutic project, opposed to that of “anti-hermeneuts” from Susan Sontag to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. In his work since then, “postmodernism” itself figures as the unfigurable, insofar as it is (to use a paleoMarxist shorthand whose terms Jameson disapproves) the “superstructural” concomitant of changes in the “base” wrought by a “late” or (in Ernest Mandel’s terms) “third-stage” capitalism whose modes of production have undergone a decisive world-historical alteration since, roughly, the ’60s. Hence Jameson’s more recent rhetoric in which, ominously, the center does not hold: as if, to use the terms of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, our impotence to “change” the world must be expressed as an impotence also to “understand” it, in accordance with (“Left puritanism” indeed) the “vision of Necessity” in which the “failure” of revolution appears as “inevitable after the fact”–and must further entail the “vision” of the “inevitable failure” of “dialectical historiography” itself, along with any hermeneutic labor tributary to it. Hence the agitation of Jameson’s recent prose, particularly the later pieces in Postmodernism, in which “the sublime” is not only a prominent theme, but also a frequent effect.¹¹

 

I have suggested that “Pleasure: A Political Issue” be read “as if” it responds directly to Eagleton’s ambiguous praise of the “pleasure” of reading Jameson, “as if” it aims to propose another ethos, a literary “effect” (“the sublime”) more creditable than “pleasure” for culture-criticism generally, and for Jameson’s own work in particular. I want now to turn to Eagleton’s writing, which, beyond ideological affinities, seems diametrically opposed to Jameson’s rhetorically, in its effects as writing. Where Jameson enlarges every problem, problematizes every solution, insists on “inevitable failure,” and proposes both for his prose and for his readers an askesis of facing the worst (what Geoffrey Galt Harpham has called “the ascetic imperative”), Eagleton writes a prose full of jokes and irreverences, Bronx cheers and razzberries, polemical piss and ideological vinegar, every clause lighting a ladyfinger of wit, almost as if under the compulsion of a kind of high-theory Tourette’s syndrome. It is a style with affinities to “counter-culture” journalism, as if James Wolcott had gone to graduate school instead of to The Village Voice. With obvious and naughty relish, Eagleton transgresses the decorums of academic prose, setting (for example) a clever bit of baby-talk on Derrida’s name (labelled “Oedipal Fragment”) as epigraph to a chapter on “Marxism and Deconstruction,” or concluding a book of essays with a doggerel busker-ballad in the broadside style (“Chaucer was a class traitor,/ Shakespeare hated the mob,” etc., to be sung to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory”), or launching his essay on Jameson’s style with a parody of Jameson, or indulging a parody of Empson in his essay on Empson, “The Critic as Clown,” or sending up everything academic-critical in a parody of the academic handbook manner in “The Revolt of the Reader.” (Equally un- or anti-academic, but in the other direction, is the poem at the end of Eagleton’s book on Benjamin; compare the poem dedicating Criticism and Ideology [1976] to his father.¹²)

 

As for the pained, mournful, obligatory pessimism of “the ascetic imperative,” Eagleton consistently jeers it as a kind of false consciousness. Here, for example, he is setting the stage for a recuperation of Walter Benjamin (whose “melancholy” he readily concedes) under the sign of “carnival”; and with characteristic brass, he makes the very implausibility of such a move his opening gambit:

 

the suffering, Saturnine aspects of Benjamin, the wreckage of ironic debacles and disasters that was his life, have been seized upon with suspicious alacrity by those commentators anxious to detach him from the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope. Since political pessimism is a sign of spiritual maturity . . . Benjamin offers a consolingly familiar image to disinherited intellectuals everywhere, downcast as they are by the cultural dreariness of a bourgeoisie whose property rights they would doubtless defend to the death.(Walter Benjamin 143)

 

Two pages later, enter Bakhtin, and the theme of “carnival,” which the prose not only describes but enacts:

 

In a riot of semiosis, carnival unhinges all transcendental signifiers and submits them to ridicule and relativism . . . power structures are estranged through grotesque parody, 'necessity' thrown into satirical question and objects displaced or negated into their opposites. A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane) rampages throughout social life, deconstructing images, misreading texts and collapsing binary oppositions into a mounting groundswell of ambiguity into which all discourse finally stutters and slides. Birth and death, high and low, destruction and renewal are sent packing with their tails in each other's mouths . . . A vulgar, shameless, materialism of the body--belly, buttocks, anus, genitals--rides rampant over ruling-class civilities; and the return of discourse to this sensuous root is nowhere more evident than in laughter itself, an enunciation that springs straight from the body's libidinal depths.(Walter Benjamin 145, 150)

 

These passages are from the chapter of Walter Benjamin called “Carnival and Comedy: Bakhtin and Brecht,” and I want to consider this essay at length here: it provides the program projected in the book’s subtitle (“Towards a Revolutionary Criticism”), and the place of “pleasure” in this program is large and important–both as an aim proposed by the argument and, more immediately, as an effect of the writing. The energy of these passages is not the only kind of energy to be found in Eagleton–space forbids sampling the rabble-rousing wisecracks, the downright, matey metaphors, the sheer gusto for combat and polemical hurly-burly, the insouciantly highbrow laying about amid Heidegger, Althusser, Hegel, or whomever. But the fluency of Eagleton’s rant makes a sharp contrast with Jameson: while Jameson’s notoriously “difficult” prose enacts the difficult (indeed impossible) position of Marxism today, the sheer brio of Eagleton’s prose in all its guises, its “riot of semiosis,” seems to address a political situation whose solution ought to be as simple as getting everyone to admit what they already know, if only by springing jokes so cunningly as to enable us to catch them laughing despite themselves. “A vulgar, shameless materialism of the body– belly, buttocks, anus, genitals–rides rampant over ruling-class civilities”: is there a straight face to be seen? The transgressions seem a test to see who will laugh and who will scowl–good fun, and pointed, of course, at the latter.

 

Surely this is Eagleton’s dominant effect: it is why graduate students idolize him, and part of why he is recommended for anyone wanting an introduction to “theory.” He can, quite simply, be fun to read, and in that regard, more than any other contemporary highbrow Marxist, he can remind you of some passages in Marx himself. You can, indeed, almost imagine a coal miner or a factory worker reading him, as, in labor movement myth, some of them used to read Marx. I highlight this effect of Eagleton’s prose because it is an effect of pleasure. Even Eagleton’s darker notes, the moments of righteous anger, generally assume or imply (indeed, they aspire to create) a political situation in which righteous anger can readily find its proper effectivity–a situation, to put it another way, in which righteous political anger is felt as a pleasure in its own right. Eagleton’s prose means to yield such pleasure as an effect, as well as proposing it as a theme or program.

 

Over the course of Eagleton’s career, indeed, the effect of pleasure is far more consistent than the theme; about the theme, Eagleton has often, especially when younger, expressed doubts–as in the caveat above about Jameson, for example: “pleasure,” yes; “jouissance,” no. Jouissance is a Barthesian word, and although Eagleton does on occasion resort to it as a positive term, his reservations about Barthes remain everywhere in force. Pace Jameson, Eagleton regards Barthes’s plaisir and jouissance as privatistic, apolitical, and corrupted with the (to Eagleton) irredeemably contemptible bourgeois pathology of guilt-as-added-thrill; Barthesian pleasure is “guilty pleasure,” enacted behind closed doors in controlled environments, whereas Eagleton’s rabble-rousing implies gleeful sacrilege in public places, and not with guilt, but with whoops of righteous laughter.

 

“Carnival and Comedy” proposes such effects, such styles of revolutionary laughter and humor, not only in its practice (in the style of its prose), but also as a program for a “Marxist theory of comedy” Walter Benjamin, 159), which Eagleton sketches out, with Brecht’s help, as properly answering to something like the movement of history itself. For Brecht, the Marxist “dialectic of history” is “comic in principle”: “a source”–quoting Brecht now–“of enjoyment” heightening “both our capacity for life and our pleasure in it.”¹³ Hence, explains Eagleton, the redemptive move from pessimism to “the vulgar cheerfulness of social hope”: “What for Walter Benjamin is potentially tragic . . . is for Brecht the stuff of comedy.” But what of history’s horrors? Eagleton seemingly bids defiance to all obligatory handwringing on that score: “Hitler as housepainter yesterday and Chancellor today is thus a sign of the comic, because that resistible rise foreshadows the unstable process whereby he may be dead in a bunker tomorrow” Walter Benjamin 161). (Note the verb tenses, and especially the “may” in that last clause: even in this “comic” moment, Eagleton is conjuring with the prospect of future Hitlers, warning that we must not be complacent because the last one was vanquished.)

 

But against Auschwitz, a paragraph later, Eagleton knows that his comic bravura will not stand, and he acknowledges that there is “always something that escapes comic emplotment . . . that is non-dialectizable” Walter Benjamin 162). This last nonce-word seems a little too impromptu; it would be a mistake to hold Eagleton to all its implications against “dialectic” itself. It is better taken as a symptom of how Eagleton’s improvisational afflatus can tread Marxist toes as readily as bourgeois ones. But Eagleton means the word to acknowledge that the “comic” critique he projects here has its limit, comes up against things in history that can not be “emplotted” in a “comic” mode. If “comedy” can mean Dante, or the Easter Passion, it may seem that Eagleton has confused the “comic” with the “funny”; immemorially august Western conceptions of “the comic” have claimed to encompass brutality, suffering, injustice. Perhaps Eagleton regards these as in bad taste, or perhaps he wants to avoid the assimilation once again of Marxism to religion.

 

However that may be, what happens next in “Carnival and Comedy” provides a far more surprising tack away from revolutionary laughter toward something like the “melancholy” the essay began by protesting. And it does so, more remarkably still, by way of a reading of a passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, perhaps the first among Marx’s texts one might have cited as exhibiting just the sort of “carnivalesque” angers and “comic” pleasures (ridicule and mockery) Eagleton had seemed to project. But Jeffrey Mehlman reads the passage this way, and it is as a refutation of Mehlman’s reading that Eagleton stages his own Revolution and Repetition). What apparently prompts Eagleton’s ire is Mehlman’s reference to the “anarchism” of Marx’s prose, which Eagleton finds complicit with “those ruling ideologies that have an interest in abolishing dialectics and rewriting Marxism as textual productivity” Walter Benjamin 162). Mehlman argues that Marx’s rhetorical excesses overflow his supposed thesis; Eagleton scorns such a notion, but goes on to make an argument not much different.

 

Eagleton’s fulcrum is the first-time-as-tragedy- second-time-as-farce motif, for Marx specifies “Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre . . . the Nephew for the Uncle,” quite as if the Revolution’s giants were first-timers, and did not themselves dress up in Roman togas (conveniently requiring little restyling when the signified changed from “Republic” to “Empire”). Yet precisely this revolutionary repetition–both heroic and farcical– quickly becomes Marx’s main theme. Eagleton interrogates the resulting “semiotic disturbance” (inconsistent metaphors, etc.) over several pages of “close reading,” much too lengthily to quote here; but its surprising premise is that “Marx’s text is symptomatically incoherent” Walter Benjamin 163). But where Mehlman found this carnivalesque, and thus a strength and an interest, Eagleton, avowedly promoting “carnival and comedy,” is pained at Marx’s “unwitting” loss of control over his language, and finds himself talking back to Marx, correcting him, unmixing his metaphors for him. He recovers himself at last by the threadbare critical move of transferring the “symptomatic incoherence” from Marx to his object (bourgeois revolution), thus at the final bell transforming what had been Marx’s unwitting “symptom” into his masterful critical “negation.” But the passage ends weakly, and the essay moves to a coda lamenting Western Marxism’s loss of Marx’s comic strength (as if forgetting Brecht, Eagleton’s initial sponsor). There is irony here, insofar as Eagleton has just (by imposing a monologic of his own on Marx’s figurally dialogic text) sapped the very strength he now professes to mourn; and there is pathos in this wistful statement of irrecoverable loss, since recovering a comic possibility for Marxist critique had been, just a few pages earlier, Eagleton’s boldly stated ambition. The essay ends this way:

 

Benjamin, like Gramsci, admired the slogan "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," and in what Brecht called "the new ice age" of fascism one can see its point. But Marxism holds out other strategic slogans too. Having taken the point of the first, it might then be possible to say, without voluntarist or Kautskyist triumphalism: "Given the strength of the masses, how can we be defeated?"(Walter Benjamin 172)

 

Tentative (“it might then be possible to say”), and with the taunts of the shibboleth-meisters (“Voluntarist!” “Kautskyist!”) rising in his inner ear, Eagleton’s final flourish cannot, for once, deliver the pleasurable Eagletonian “triumphalism” that is his usual stock in trade. The final “slogan,” indeed, ending on a question mark, sounds more like a real question than a rhetorical one. Here the “optimism of the will” is too willful to convince, the “pessimism of the intellect” too much more than merely intellectual not to. For once, “pessimism of the intellect” really seems to win the agon in the arena of Eagleton’s prose.

 

So a guerilla foray into a “Marxist theory of comedy,” driven by “carnival” energies, loses momentum at the name of the eponymous master. This failure tempts the sort of lit-crit “psychoanalysis” indicated when, say, the word “balls” sends Stephen Dedalus’s chastely passionate villanelle off the rails: a gallant defense of Marx turns into a subtle assault on Marx–“anxiety of influence”?–and suddenly all Eagleton’s fight (and fun) have gone out of him. But of course we had better push in the direction of that transindividual “libidinal apparatus” that assigns the “objective limits” (Jameson’s phrase) determining such failures–and in fact to “allegorize” the trajectory of Eagleton’s essay as enacting the fate of pleasure in our present “conjuncture” is to assimilate Eagleton to Jameson. Jameson, as we have seen, makes a “vision” of “necessary failure” an imperative for Marxist criticism, and Eagleton, despite his bravely avowed aim of rebutting all such “pessimism” here ends by bowing to it. Jameson, inscribing a failure imperative, compels from it his tortured, ambivalent, “difficult” success; Eagleton, in brash defiance of all pessimisms and confident of Marxism’s inevitable, eventual success, here “enacts” the Jamesonian “vision” of “necessary failure” the more movingly for all his “optimism of the will” against it. This may sound like scoring points against both of them, especially against Eagleton–but if pressed to admit that Eagleton’s failure, at least, does seem a “symptom” rather than a “negation,” I would want to add that both writers, by putting their expository “mastery” at risk, challenge the whole ethos of “critique” that gives the “symptom”/”negation” binary its significance. The ensuing gain is that we can see how two writers so different, enacting differing consequences of the same “contradiction,” must probe and come up against different reaches of the same “objective limits.”

 

As for the question how to name the complex satisfaction of reading such writers as Eagleton and Jameson, the very difficulty of calling it “pleasure” raises problems whose force is worth looking into in its own right. What Jameson’s discomfort with “pleasure,” his need to sublimate it into “the sublime,” tells us about the fate of pleasure in our historical moment converges with Eagleton’s seemingly opposed embrace of pleasure (with, nevertheless, his reservations about “bliss” on the one hand and the more obscurely motivated “failure” enacted at the close of “Carnival and Comedy” on the other).

 

Which returns us to the question of “Left puritanism.” Both Eagleton and Jameson seem shadowed by the “minority (political) rigor” whose affinities with the more majoritarian moralisms we saw Barthes uncovering. Each seems to find some sorts of enjoyment (however they differ on which ones) tainted by (Barthes again) “unworthy [bourgeois] feelings.” Neither, of course, wants to be tarred as a “Left puritan”; Jameson’s embrace of Barthes (and Lacan) bespeaks his desire to escape that label, and Bakhtin serves as a similar alibi for Eagleton. As I have argued above, though, Jameson’s construction of Barthes seems motivated by a very un-Barthes-like, and very “Left puritan,” distrust of “plaisir,” and his reinscription of “jouissance” into “the sublime” sublimates it into something very far from enjoyment (in anything other than, say, the Zizekian sense).¹⁴ As for Eagleton’s appropriation of Bakhtin, it is to be read in opposition to, not as a version of, Barthesian “jouissance.” It constructs “carnival” as social, and thus an affair less of Eros than of its collective sublimate, Agape. Sex, in Eagleton’s “carnival,” is comically deflationary–“A ceaseless practice of travesty and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks)” Walter Benjamin 145)–rather than a unique, privileged, grand (or grandiose) access to the transport and exaltation of “the sublime.”

 

Barthes, I suspect, would see in both of these writers more than a few symptoms of that “frigidity” he protests, “As if the notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone” Pleasure of the Text 46-7). Barthes writes as one for whom the “promesse de bonheur” that Marxists so frequently denounce as “ideological” has already been in some measure cashed; his superego has apparently fought free of that “categorical imperative” that would have him deny his own pleasure in the name of the possibly counter-revolutionary effects of corrupt ideas of “pleasure” on others. But insofar as the resistance to “pleasure” involves the worry of “false consciousness,” the fear of being falsely consoled by “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction,” it will doubtless remain a potent source of moral trouble for Marxists and others who would direct the energies of “critique” to the tasks of making a more just society. The example, though, of Eagleton’s “optimism of the will” (and, most of the time, of his optimism of the intellect, too) prompts me at least to the pleasurable speculation whether “false consciousness” might not equally involve the temptation of responding to real contradictions with imaginary aggravations.

 

Notes

 

1. “Stoic” and “tragic” are terms of praise in Jameson’s essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1 (hereinafter IT1), 98, 112; and it is manifest that part of Lacan’s fascination for Jameson is Lacan’s achievement of an ethos at once (“dialectically”) Hegelian and pessimistic, and to that extent a model for Jameson’s own. For “the nightmare of history as blood guilt,” see “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2 (hereinafter IT2), 43, and “Pleasure: A Political Issue” (1983), ibid, 68.

 

2. See, for example, Jameson’s account of the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” (1985), in IT2, 35-60; the caution about “post-Marxism” is on 38. See also remarks on Tafuri in Postmodernism, 61. Jameson scorns any suggestion of his own putative “post-Marxism” in the opening pages of the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism.

 

3. Against the Grain, 68. Eagleton similarly praises Jameson in “The Idealism of American Criticism,” ibid, 49-64.

 

4. “The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia” is the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious (281-99), but the motif recurs throughout Jameson’s work, from the chapters on Marcuse (83-115) and Ernst Bloch (116-59) in Marxism and Form to the section of the “Conclusion” of Postmodernism called “The Anxiety of Utopia” (331-40).

 

5. Cf. Jameson’s most unequivocal praise for Paul de Man: that no one has been more “self-punishing” in pursuit of a moral-intellectual askesis Postmodernism 239).

 

6. Eagleton quotes Jameson on Adorno (from Marxism and Form xiii) in “The Politics of Style” Against the Grain 66); on the same page he quotes himself, on Jameson’s “intense libidinal charge,” from “The Idealism of American Criticism” Against the Grain 57).

 

7. Compare this move of Eagleton’s with Jameson’s judgment that de Man’s project, despite its avowed ambition to deconstruct “the subject,” is “fatally menaced at every point by a resurgence of some notion of self-consciousness” Postmodernism 245, cf. 258-9).

 

8. “Commodification” is a frequent topos in both Eagleton and Jameson, as well as in many other Marxist (and not-so-Marxist) writers. (Eagleton even images Jameson’s encyclopedic range of reference as a shopping cart wheeling through “some great California supermarket of the mind” collecting Hegel, Deleuze, Croce, et al., like so many designer-products Against the Grain 70].) Indeed, anxiety about the commodification of highbrow “theory” like his own–Barthes, Lukacs, Macherey, and whoever else as status-acquisitions in some flash-card degradation of intellectual life–frequently appear in Jameson himself, and in just such consumerist terms–as, for example, when he deplores hearing figures like Althusser, Gramsci, et al. turned into “brand-names for autonomous philosophical systems” (“Interview” 78).

 

9. For Eagleton’s exempting Jameson from Barthesian “perversity,” see Against the Grain, 66; for Jameson on Barthes and Lacan, compare “Pleasure: A Political Issue” IT2 69) with the closing paragraph of “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” IT1 115).

 

10. Pleasure of the Text, 46-7. One of Jameson’s more dazzling asides is the linkage of Barthes with Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity on the grounds that both associate what they despise with the left–student radicals for Trilling, “Left puritanism,” as in the quoted passage, for Barthes IT2 65).

 

11. This hermeneutic despair, surprisingly, lightens in work Jameson has published since Postmodernism. See the (previously unpublished, and presumably recent) essay, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible, 155-248, where hermeneutic satisfactions again compensate for the reifications accounted for; and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, in which third world cinema’s reinvention of narrative and realism and its sense of “totality as conspiracy” offer a prospect of the world system once again rendered intelligible to the terms of a politically committed (mass) art form. See my review of these two books in Kritikon Litterarum (forthcoming).

 

12. “Oedipal Fragment,” Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, 131; “The Ballad of English Literature,” Against the Grain, 185; the parody of Jameson, ibid, 65; of Empson, ibid, 151; “The Revolt of the Reader, ibid, 181-4. For the homage to Benjamin, see Walter Benjamin, 185. This is also the place to mention Eagleton’s play, Brecht and Company (1979) and his novel, Saints and Scholars (1987).

 

13. Brecht on Theatre, 277; qtd. in Walter Benjamin, 160.

 

14. I am thinking, of course, of Slavoj Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, but readers of Zizek know that they will find this and Zizek’s other central themes rehearsed in virtually any of his books.

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1973. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
• Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Selected Essays. New York and London: Verso, 1986.
• Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. New York and London: Verso, 1981.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana UP/British Film Institute: Verso, 1992.
• —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• —. The Ideologies of Theory, Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• —. “Interview.” Diacritics 12.3 (Fall 1982): 72-91.
• —. Late Marxism, Or, Adorno: The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York and London: Verso, 1990.
• —. Marxism and Form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971.
• —. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.
• —. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. Signatures of the Visible. Routledge: New York and London, 1992.
• Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
• Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.