Single? Great? Collective?: On Allegory and Ideology

Fredric Jameson’s latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), returns to the provocative proposition that he floated in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981): that humankind’s cultural past is only available to us today if we believe that “the human adventure is one”—a series of efforts to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of necessity. This essay examines the new book for evidence of possible fluctuations in Jameson’s commitment to a “single great collective story,” underlining in particular the subversiveness of the adjective “great” but also his re-affirmation of a particular Jamesonian version of constructivism, the Marxist spin he puts on loose and generalized notions of “X is a construct” and “everything is narrative.” Jameson’s loyalty to the concept of “ideology” is read here as another moment in his long-lasting dialogue with the late Hayden White. And his loyalty to the concept of “allegory” is read as dialectical in an especially courageous sense: a willingness to concede that the ability to affirm a “single great collective story” depends both on allegory, which works by a respectful but not reverential attention to cultural differences, and on the model of imperial power, which provides Jameson with his 1981 model of four-fold interpretation.