Benjamin Noys with a review at E-Flux of Fredric Jameson's new book Inventions of A Present.
"Jameson argues that our present and our future are saturated
by history and it is this increased historicity that makes the novel, all
novels, historical. At the same time, he can also assert that “all fiction
approaches science fiction,” due to the fact that all our futures “begin to
dissolve into the ever more porous actuality”. The contemporary novel is
both the historical novel and science fiction, as both past and future have
saturated the present. The present is a bloated moment, full of the past that
cannot be integrated and a future that is not being born...."
The review has some gentle jibes at the Great Man - like this backhanded compliment
"We sometimes feel Jameson has read everything"
That does capture the sensation of omniscience that seeps from the prose - the long, winding, (over-)extended sentences... the concatenation of clauses and parentheticals... allusively laden....
Also a dig at the London Review of Books style of review (most of Inventions of A Present consists of these), which Noys characterises as a
"peculiar genre in which the book is not so much assessed as re-presented in a gesture which often replaces reading the book. It is a time-saving device presented in the mode of capacious intellectual engagement"
What's striking as you read the review - mirroring the book itself - is the tangle of temporalities.
"This diagnosis and sense of impasse is surprisingly Nietzschean. The saturation of the present by historicism echoes Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in which the historical overcomes our present.
The notion that the future is dissolved into the present is also close to Nietzsche’s attempts to invent a future and his increasingly violent proclamations of a leap into the future. Jameson’s tone is more measured and, of course, he is trying to remain within Marxism. To be Marxist, we must explain why we cannot integrate history and why we cannot see the present as a dynamic path to the future.
"While obviously wrong—not all contemporary novels are historical and not all contemporary novels are science fiction, and how could all of them be both?—his statements are ones we try to puzzle out."
"Puzzle out" indeed
Something is being called for to get "us" out of this "impasse"
But....
"If the function of the master collapses, then the enigmatic statements become so much nonsense and we wonder why we ever cared. Jameson’s statements teeter in this space"
