In this, what is Jameson’s best work of straight-up literary criticism since The Political Unconscious (1981), we have a sustained encounter with the realist novel in its nineteenth-century (but also twentieth- and twenty-first-century) variants. Zola, Tolstoy, and Eliot in particular are subjected to deep, and close, readings, with massive block quotations that kick James Wood to the curb and a focus on canonical authors that offers a tart retort to Franco Moretti’s recently influential Digital Humanities—or “distant reading”—methodologies.

Or, perhaps, not quite. The Antinomies of Realism is dedicated to science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, so even before it begins, we have an indication that Jameson may wander away from the canon. Furthermore, in the first half of the book, which bears its title again, there is also a chapter (besides those on the authors noted above) on Benito Pérez Galdós, the Spanish writer who Jameson claims is the nineteenth century’s Shakespeare (“or at least the Shakespeare of the late comedies and romances”). For all this shaking up of the European canon, what makes Jameson’s argument truly radical is, first, that in his readings of such writers as Zola the description (of mounds of cheese, say, in Les Halles) works at two allegorical levels (the sensory and the social), which are in turn “drowned out by the new sensibility (Zola’s prophetic vision of addictive consumerism, with strong sexual overtones and undertones)” (65). That is to say that Jameson here rescues the waning affect theory via literary-history.

To be more specific: after citing Sianne Ngai and Eve Sedgwick, among others, in chapters II and III, Jameson first argues for the role of affect in a historical process that recognizes the overly general form of previous catalogues of emotions—thus in the mid-nineteenth century, affect emerges in the realist novel as it attempts to figure the new bourgeois body. For, as he argues, affect has an object, the “phenomenological body” (32), from which it will immediately attempt to achieve autonomization, with its own temporality. This temporality, Jameson continues, drawing on music (Wagner’s freeing of melody from the aria), culminates in a reading of affect in Zola as “the organ of perception of the world itself, the vehicle of my being-in-the world” (43). Thus Zola’s “codification of affect” offers a kind of “invisible figuration,” where the visual autonomy of description (cheese, fish, displays of linen) creates the space for affect that are immediately under threat of dissolution. What we have here is a materialist account of affect via the literary that flies the flag of dialectical critique and unfolds with a historical inevitability.

And so dialectics are everywhere apparent, from Jameson’s interest in the “dissolution of genre” and “waning of protagonicity” to “realism after realism” (all chapter headings) in which he argues, after discussing Faulkner, that “realism was founded on an ineradicable tension between… two temporal realities [past and present], a tension that begins to dissolve into a facile practice of narrative mind-reading when free indirect discourse becomes the dominant sentence structure of the novel” (177).

But Jameson has not given up on contemporary culture, on which he offers startling readings of key texts in the second half of the book. After moving through questions of “providence and realism” (and a survey of “war and representation” that offers chilling takes on the Thirty Year’s War courtesy Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus), and readings of fiction (Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, 1992; Cloud Atlas, 2004) and film (Inception, 2010; Cloud Atlas, 2012), Jameson claims, “however outrageously, that the historical novel of the future (which is to say of our own present), will necessarily be Science-Fictional inasmuch as it will have to include questions about the fate of our social system, which has become a second nature” (298). Reprising a motif from his postmodern meditations on the Hotel Bonaventure a few pages later, he adds that the historical novel “must be seen as an immense elevator that moves us up and down in time, its sickening lifts and dips corresponding to the euphoric or dystopian mood in which we wait for the doors to open” (301).

This novelistic allegory itself returns us to a warning Jameson offers at the start of this book: “If it is social truth or knowledge we want from realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology; if it is beauty or aesthetic satisfaction we are looking for, we will quickly find that we have to do with outdated styles or mere decoration (if not distraction)” (6). So in the end, what Jameson has very clearly accomplished in The Antinomies of Realism is to demonstrate the necessity of reading the novel precisely to bring it to the limits of those limits.