SOCIETAL MEMBER? OR-- SOCIAL DISEASE?

If I'd never read Fredric Jameson's POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS (completed this week), I could probably have deduced most of his critiques of Northrop Frye specifically or myth-criticism generally, just from the fact of his being a Marxist. In contrast with most Marxist critics of popular culture, who toss around terms like "commodity fetish" the way a sexual fetishist brandishes his toys-of-choice, Jameson's critique of Frye seems to meet one of the criteria I mentioned earlier: that any successful critic of Frye would have to be at least as well read as the founder of myth-criticism. However, given that the "political unconscious" resultant from Marxist analyses is the ground of all of Jameson's criticisms, his litany of complaints against myth-criticism will sound pretty familiar with all those who have struggled through COMICS JOURNAL's dominant Frankfurterisms.

You gotcher your attempted refutation of any "positive hermeneutics" that sound too religious (Frye, Ricoeur), though a'course Marxist "negative hermeneutics" are OK even when they incorporate religious motifs? CHECK, p. 285: "any comparison of Marxism with religion is a two-way street, in which the former is not necessarily discredited by its association with the latter."

You gotcher your stigmatization of the narrative opposition of good and evil found in the romance-adventure genre, though naturally when fairy tales or comedies do the same thing it's conveniently overlooked because they're not upper-class? CHECK, pages 115 for the first ("the concept of good and evil is a positional one that coincides with categories of Otherness") and pages 141-42 for the second, ("The materials of comedy, however, are not the ethical oppositions... of its generic opposite.") [Yeah, tell it to Malvolio.]

And finally, you gotcher your usual assertion that adventure-heroes are all violent stooges for a repressive upper class, but ALSO a Harvey Kurtzman-like attempt to make said heroes seem bereft of any forceful characterization? CHECK, page 118 ("Romance... may be understood as an imaginary 'solution' to... the perplexing question of how my enemy can be thought of as being evil") and then page 113 for the second, where we're told heroes like Yvain and Parzival reap "the rewards of cosmic victory without ever having quite been aware of what was at stake in the first place."

Faced with all these commonplace Marxist maunderings, I'm tempted to cite again Frye's distinctions between primary and secondary concerns, which ideologues never deal with, but actually, the most important question that arises from the myth vs. ideology debate could be phrased to the naive reader thusly:

Are you, reader, totally defined by what society made of you, making you a cell in the body politic (and thus easy to eject when diseased), or are you defined also by elements not reducible to the sociological matrix?

Since I've championed the four functions of Joseph Campbell as my own "positive hermeneutic," I certainly cleave toward the latter self-definition. It's clear to me that even if all aspects of my being are formed by contingent factors, the idea that all of those factors culminate in an "unconscious" that has class politics at its root is a laugh riot.

Perhaps Jameson could have mounted a better critique of Frye and other myth-critics if he had dedicated the book only to that: as it is, his critique fails because he only picks seemingly-random elements of Frye's works to refute, apparently concerned more with apppropriating the concept of "the unconscious" from Freud and Jung in order to give it a Marxist makeover. But I do like the way he reveals the barrenness of his own "negative hermeneutic" when he takes issue with Frye's use of the term "epiphany:"

"...it suggests that in the secularized and reified world of modern capitalism, epiphany is possible as a positive event, as the revelation of presence. But if epiphany itself is a mirage" [Note: Frye never says this] "then the most authentic vocation of romance in our time would be... its capacity, by absence and silence of the form itself, to express that ideology of desacralization by which modern thinkers from Weber to the Frankfurt School have sought to convey their sense of the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life." (p. 135)

It's certainly amusing to see yet another example of Jameson's Janus-faced turnings: first romance as romance is stigmatized as a means to trod down The Other, but turn around and it can be semantically re-interpreted as "absence" rather than "presence" so that it seems to express the "desacralization" which is certainly the fault of the Ruling Class, looming above us like the Giant on the Beanstalk looming over downtrodden Jack.

In other words, Marxist class-consciousness was not made for man; man was made for Marxist class-consciousness. And the feeling of meaning-- which is what Joycean epiphany is, apart from whether God's behind it or not-- cannot be in itself a "positive event," but can only serve The Will of the Sociopolitical Unconscious.