Fredric Jameson's dense and illuminating new work has an idiosyncratic shape. It is divided into two parts of unequal length, the first an essay (a long one, it has to be said) called “The Antinomies of Realism” and the second a series of three short “monographs” (11) called “The Logic of the Material.” Taken together, the book is the third part of his The Poetics of Social Forms. Already widely reviewed, his work makes a major contribution to understanding the ways realism developed through the nineteenth century to become the dominant (though not sole) form of the novel until its at least partial dissolution with modernism.

Jameson's objects of study are largely European: chiefly (in Part One) the work of Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy, Benito Péréz Galdós, George Eliot, Alexander Kluge. Its implications for realism in the United States will undoubtedly be a matter of critical interest. But it is the tradition of realism as it emerges and is practised in the work of the European writers already named that is his primary concern. Looking at the index it is easy to spot that, for instance, Leonardo DiCaprio gets more mentions (two) than the single references to Herman Melville or D. W. Griffith, say. One of his central arguments is that the realist novel emerges in “the European 1840s” (43) from a profound “storytelling impulse” (15) which can be traced back to the “tale” (15), his preferred term. In an intricately crafted opening chapter he traces the distinction between the récit and the roman (16), which name ways in which stories have been articulated, ending up with the claim that realism “is a consequence of the tension between these terms; to resolve the opposition either way would destroy it” (26). Once the novel develops into the realism which would dominate it in the nineteenth century, it must manage on the one hand emotion, which he conceives of as being able to be named, “love, hatred, anger, fear, disgust, pleasure, and so forth,” and affect, which, unlike emotion, “somehow eludes language and its naming of things (and feelings)” (29). In the chapters that follow he develops his argument to illustrate the ways in which key European realists (largely male – with the exception of George Eliot – and clearly the figures he sees as the key realists) produce works in which affect and story are developed to make a new kind of novel. In this realism, things that can be named struggle with the things that resist being named.

This somewhat reductive summary of a substantial argument is unable to reproduce one of the great pleasures of reading his work – his use of lengthy examples which revitalize a sense of the pleasure of immersion in the nineteenth-century novels he cites and his engaged readings. After quoting a marvellous description of piles of fish of all kinds from Zola's Le ventre de Paris, he argues,

The point is well made and is amply reinforced and illustrated by the passage he chooses.

Jameson's argument resonates with a much earlier critical essay by a prolific American writer whose novels resist easy categorization. Routinely described as a Romantic realist, a realist with modernist tendencies, even a minimalist modernist, Willa Cather was certainly a novelist who positioned herself within a European legacy extending back to Virgil and an emerging American one that she envisaged herself as helping to shape. She was also, like Jameson, an acute theorist of the novel, well read, thoughtful and intensely serious. In Cather's sensitive and carefully wrought works, farmworkers and opera singers, intellectuals and immigrants, high and low, all come up against each other to form a contrasting mix of ideas and people, reflection and action, out of which she aimed to produce American fiction. They also chart a movement from the settlement of the Mid-west in the mid- to late nineteenth century to the emergence of cosmopolitan modernity in the twentieth.

This temporal span approximates first to the period of the major developments of literary realism, and then to challenges to it, which Jameson traces in his work. Cather's essay “The Novel Démeublé”Footnote ¹ is simultaneously a statement about aesthetics and a manifesto for refashioning the novel which she regards as having been “for a long while … over-furnished.” Published in 1922, it is easy to see her critical intervention as a kind of genteel nostalgia for a conservative idea of art, were it not for the force of her unladylike longing to throw the furniture out of the room, but also for Jameson's analysis of how realism opens up a “space for affect.” His argument allows us to see Cather afresh both as a perceptive interpreter of how realism operates – or has operated, to be more precise – and as a practitioner who tests out its possibilities. For instance, she constantly seeks moments in which an ineffable something transmutes the quotidian into an image or a moment that resists language, much like the one, in My Ántonia (1918), of a plough made into a gigantic silhouette by the setting sun against the backdrop of the Nebraskan prairie. Cather's argument, in turn, is an earlier iteration of Jameson's persuasive claims. The fact that she makes it as late as 1922 reveals that she is trying to resist the inexorable historical shift in realist representation that Jameson's work charts. As his work shows, she was fighting a losing battle.

She distinguishes between different kinds of novel, “the novel as a form of amusement, or as a form of art,” and goes on to make a key claim:

The automatic reply to this question is the name of Balzac.

Balzac's ambition, she argues, is “stupendous,” but it is “unworthy of a true artist.” Instead she turns to Tolstoy as an example of a realist whose profound engagement with materiality was fused with an added element so that the objects he describes “seem to exist, not so much in the author's mind, as in the emotional penumbra of the characters themselves.” Her critical movement here from Balzac to Tolstoy uncannily presages Jameson's own. It is this that the novel must develop still further if it is to sustain itself and not become increasingly anatomized. It is not that the banking system is the wrong subject, rather that the treatment it receives is too literal. This quality is one she sees in other writers too. In a brilliant line she asks rhetorically – and acidly, “Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet rewritten in prose by D. H. Lawrence?”

The most important part of her argument comes in her famous invocation of an element of the novel which resists the taxonomizing categorization she identifies with the realism of Balzac, instead drawing more upon the mood-setting she links to The Scarlet Letter (1850 – emphatically not a realist novel). Indeed, in identifying this critical impulse as being a central element of romance rather than realism she opens up an area that Jameson does not pursue but which might profitably be further explored. Cather writes,

Surely what she means here is indeed nothing less than affect, identified by Jameson as emerging not just in the novel but also in a variety of other genres and representational modes and artistic movements: “impressionism and post-impressionism in painting, the Wagnerian revolution in music” (42). Resistant to language but powerfully evocative of feeling, whether created on the page or canvas, in sheet music or performance, affect transforms representation. It is this emergence of affect and its specific temporality and historical moment that Jameson illuminates with such panache.

Cather, though unable to write with the historical knowledge of a critic situated in our present, also understood and was deeply preoccupied by the experiential importance of affect. She captured it in one of her early stories, “A Wagner Matinee” (1904). An exhausted prairie wife, once an accomplished urban music teacher, returns briefly to Boston for the first time in thirty years. Having sat through an afternoon musical performance (the eponymous Wagner matinee) she absolutely refuses to leave the concert hall with the rest of the audience. The music has overwhelmed her, revealing all she has missed and all that she will miss for the rest of her life. She weeps at the thought of ever returning home while realizing, of course, the inevitability of return.

The Antinomies of Realism may not be the most sociable of titles. But during the course of his new book, Fredric Jameson unexpectedly invites his readers to lunch. To lots of lunches, in fact: “I will treat you to yet another lunch later on” (25). These welcome events come to seem like multi-menued midday and mid-chapter pauses between the invigorating and appetite-building arguments that surround them.

The first of Jameson's literary lunches consists of no fewer than seven courses, but only a single protracted sentence: “Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses was left in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be peeled and sliced as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal.” Having quoted this, Jameson abundantly continues,

From this fabulous cosmopolitan and transhistorical smorgasbord he then proceeds, via the contrasting features of the seven-course lunch, to bring on one of those striking binary oppositions which have always provided the generative force of his arguments: “all of those are inserted into one or another kind of narrative time; the anonymous lunch in which one course is peeled off after another [the metaphor from the quotation he has just given] is not” (25). One of the curious things about this initial lunch at the beginning of the book is that it's deliberately unsourced. Named (or unnamed) an “anonymous lunch,” it is described by way of its courses, not its consuming characters; it is also, at this point of first mention, without an author. Later on, Jameson will retrospectively tell us it comes from Virginia Woolf. His footnote refers to what he calls – by mistake, I think – The Long Voyage Out. But the slip or extension (the brief words for the long lunch can be found all right in The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel) has the effect of adding to the vagueness and personlessness of this highlighted event. It becomes one more indication of a realist problematic that the book sets out to tackle from the very beginning.

The long sentence that opens the Introduction goes like this:

It is an arresting image of (appearance and) disappearance. Or rather, distraction: for in Jameson's formulation it is not that realism vanishes, so much as that “attention” birfurcates or polarizes, and “the thing itself” is either not yet or no more. The Antinomies of Realism will then proceed to explore just such instabilities of vision and object, of the momentary (and larger historical) movements and mutations of bodily or writerly registration. But it situates them always within an overarching divide and dynamic between two opposing tendencies or forces, of which the separation of the lunch-types is just one instance. At some point – and sometimes it's quite a precise point, the 1840s – as “realism” comes into being, so (older) protocols of character, (named) emotion and identifiable temporal development contend with (newer) suggestions of bodily affect, of moment-by-moment mood. The miniature episode at the start is like a capsule notation of the sort of indeterminate state that Jameson will go on to describe his authors describing.

In this beginning, the “I” soon turns into “we,” yet I wonder how how many of “us” in these frequently realism-indifferent days have tried to get hold of the thing in the first place, let alone found it swaying in and out of an unsteady view in this fashion. Jameson – or his imagined reader, or his authorial persona – has. But when he leaves on one side the suspended moment of (objectless, subjectless) searching, then his realism is more straightforward and more readily recognizable. It had its beginning and its going hence in the middle of the nineteenth century: in the fold between Balzac and Flaubert, and alongside the arrival of an entity or experience called the bourgeois body. This was also the period when the word itself became widespread and international – though Jameson seems to downplay this with an oddly swift parenthesis, cued to an equally fast and francocentric footnote: “(the word only really enjoys a brief literary currency around the mid-point of the nineteenth century)”; “With Duranty and the supporters of painters like Courbet” (143). Duranty isn't glossed, nor does he appear in the patchy index, and you have to know already – or be prepared to look it up – that he was the instigator of the short-lived journal Réalisme, which ran for just a few months in late 1856 and early 1857: just when Madame Bovary was appearing in serial form. But this sort of shorthand is typical of Jameson's distinctive modus operandi. He never hands you the knowledge you need to get the argument; he respects his readers as either having it to begin with or being willing to seek it out for themselves.

A few decades later (continuing Jameson's account), Zola's writing encapsulates the tension between the two contrasting drives of (Balzacian) plot and individuality, and (Flaubertian) affect and description:

One last moment: now you see it, now you don't. For Jameson, it is out of that conflict – those antinomies – that realism momentarily came (or comes) into view, and it is here that the simpler, quasi-chronological story of realism rejoins the nebulous vanishing point of origin and disidentification with which the book begins.

Lunches apart, you would have no inkling from the summary I have just given, or from Jameson's conceptual title, that this is a book full of samples and extracts from many places and times and languages. The move to mood – what Jameson, following a trend in recent criticism, is happy to call the affective turn – is at once a development within mid-nineteenth-century realist narrative, and a change of focus in the angle from which we may now understand the preoccupations of writers from the later part of that century. In illustration of all this, we are treated to copious extracts and passing mentions from numerous writers, of multiple provenance, including (though none in detail) sixteen American ones. (I did count, in fact: not just because I knew what journal I would be writing this for, but also because I thought that one at least of us respondents ought to confirm Jameson's characterization of a certain academic type. Writing about metaphors of web and network in Middlemarch, he says, “I leave it to the Mr Casaubons of the English Departments to take the inventory of these recurrent figures” (224).) There are lengthy sections not just on French writers (Zola), but also on Tolstoy, Galdós, George Eliot (a remarkable reading that takes away the ground from all those easy dismissals or celebrations of her as a “moralist”).

That evocative there/gone situation of realism in Jameson's opening declaration appears to find an odd kind of echo when he comes to talk about Erich Auerbach's Mimesis Footnote ¹ – certainly the single most influential book ever on (the history of) realism. Auerbach's account of what his subtitle calls “the representation of reality in western literature” moves chronologically, in a series of symptomatic close readings, from Homer through to Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), a very recent production when Auerbach was writing the book in the early 1940s. At the centre, as for Jameson, are the French nineteenth-century realists (although Auerbach also has a second story of emergence and decline that is set in the Middle Ages, and whose protagonist is Dante). And at the origin of the whole Mimesis project was an article Auerbach wrote in the late 1930s that analysed a passage in Madame Bovary. In its attention to the directionless minutiae of an ordinary mealtime, this passage also fits perfectly with Jameson's focus on the unspecifiable moods of affect – just as, for Auerbach, it showed a literary interest in the details of a woman's ordinary domestic unhappiness that was unprecedented in (Western) literature.

Jameson says that the Flaubert section, foundational as it was for Auerbach's work, was mysteriously missed out of the book Mimesis, “save for a passing comment” (141). Yet it is there, as far as I can see, in the English translation, except for what Auerbach calls “slight changes and abridgements.”Footnote ² So it hasn't really vanished after all, but is a solidly continuing presence, just at the point when the long book begins to arrive at its culminating chapters.

But perhaps this disappearance of Charles and Emma's unenjoyed lunch from Jameson's sightline,Footnote ³ if not from Auerbach's actual book, may tell us something about the fleetingly visible phenomenon of realism “itself.” For most writers on the subject, whether broadly historical or theoretical, whether they treat it substantially or merely make use of it as a rhetorical tool, or whether – to put it most simply – they like the thing or not, realism appears above all as a solid object, in all its concrete or gritty glory. For its detractors (and they are many), its weighty thereness and laboured length is part of what's wrong with it. Rhetorically, realism is often cast in the role of the lumbering precursor of the lighter, more experimental forms of modernism and postmodernism. While Jameson does not make a meal of this – he does not spell it out as such – not the least of his ongoing interventions is to cut out (by ignoring them) the widespread negative ratings of realism as not worth much serious attention. Those of us of another persuasion can only be grateful for the incomparably Jamesonian theoretical and historical boost. And of course, for the wonderful lunches.

Who can forget Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots, juxtaposed, in the opening pages of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, with Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes? How was it possible to prefer Warhol's depthless and deathly simulacra to the Van Gogh's realism, its painterly aesthetic of the concrete, the particular, the indubitably real? In his latest book, however, realism receives Jameson's “ideological indictment” (203 n. 12). With its “premium on comfort and inwardness, on individualism, on the acceptance of money as an ultimate reality,” realism, he argues, has played a key role in the “construction of the bourgeois subjectivity” and the “coming into being of bourgeois daily life” (5, 4). The locus classicus here is Balzac's description of Madame Vacquer's decrepit, petit bourgeois boarding house in Le Père Goriot, whose welter of topographic and physiognomic detail seems to give us, in the words of Jameson's early mentor, Eric Auerbach, “the concrete individual figure with its own physique and its own history, sprung from the immanence of the historical, social, physical … situation.”Footnote ¹ But for Jameson, this very immanence means that there is something irreducibly suspect about realism, which has “a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality” (5). Realism served to further the key ideological goals of the bourgeoisie once the bourgeoisie had established itself as the ruling class: to insist on the ineluctable rightness of the world it had created, and to preserve that world from the threat of historical change.

Realism, for Jameson, is committed to “the solid ontology of what exists right now” – it requires “a conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as such, and an aesthetic need to avoid recognition of deep structural change” (213, 145). He points out that realists have consistently resisted suggestions of “a radically different future,” pre-eminent among them Henry James, who holds feminism up to ridicule in The Bostonians, and satirizes the hapless anarchists of The Princess Casamassima (213). Since realism's focus is unremittingly on the “existential individual,” its necessary blind spot or limit is the “impossible collective totality” (257). When realists have engaged with collective life in the form of the historical novel, they have produced only “fantasy gratification in images of hierarchical social relations,” as in the fabricated Britishness of Sir Walter Scott, or William Faulkner's “nostalgia for the South,” both authors displaying a “deep ontological investment in old ways of life in the process of being destroyed by the new order” (260, 266).

In the postmodern era, Jameson goes on, realism has lost its epistemological raison d’être. Where “the original no longer exists and everything is an image, there can no longer be any question either of accuracy or truth of representation, or of any aesthetic of mimesis either” (293). We live in the society of the spectacle, “invested at all points with images and the Imaginary, with daydreams, wish-fulfilments and other quasi-fetishistic intensities” (168). A novel like E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime – a reference point for Jameson's initial cultural diagnosis of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism – presents us with history as a series of pastiche replays of the past, “protagonists in whom we no longer believe, and masses who are at best imaginary” (263). Jameson now detects not just the waning of affect, but the dissolution of the fictive impulse itself, replaced by a narcissistic attention to “minute segments of the everyday” (190). Realism, a project for the stabilization of the life world of the bourgeois subject, might be said to have found its ultimate empirical elaboration and historical terminus in the “radically meaningless anecdotes” of Facebook (192).

While realism bogs us down in false immanence, Jameson longs for a revolutionary transcendence, “the space of otherness from what is, a dimension freed from the weight of being and the inertia of the present social order” (213). He hails the emergence of a new sense of the providential in the ante-penultimate chapter of Dickens's Bleak House, where the crowd carries off the long-disputed legal papers in a “truly sublime” moment of “salvationality,” and detects in George Eliot's Middlemarch “the narrative of collective necessity” rather than that of the favoured (and implicitly bourgeois) individual protagonist (221, 226). Realism might have helped to create “an intensifying feeling for the interrelatedness of the social totality” – explored in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and Altman's Short Cuts (1993), with their multiple protagonists and intersecting plot lines – but the historical novel of the future “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). Jameson finds harbingers of this critical and providential form in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2012), works that present a “collective Imaginary” made up of alternative or counterfactual histories and a range of possible futures (305). But is it really the end of the line for realism, and was it always fated to be a form dedicated to the support of the status quo?

As I argue elsewhere, the origins of American realism can be traced to a structure of feeling that arises in the 1830s, a period in which the US economy was going through a long economic boom based on land speculation and an expansion of credit. Americans were increasingly bewildered by the abstract nature of a new credit economy based on paper money and bills of exchange: paper promises that were not backed by anything solid or enduring.Footnote ² The financial panic of 1837 provoked a kind of rupture of the real, which is registered in Anna Bartlett Warner's novel Dollars and Cents (1852), in which the material comforts of the middle-class home disappear as a result of the father's business failure, producing a dreamlike, or enchanted atmosphere, a dissolving reality. An antidote to the unreal world of financial capitalism could be found in the thick descriptions of rural life produced by New England writers like Eliza Buckminster Lee, whose Sketches of a New England Village, in the Last Century (1838) immerses the reader in accumulative detail: the roof of a parsonage sloping to the ground; the moss-covered bucket of a well, a granite doorstep, worn hollow by repeated treading. The tenor of these descriptions is fully Balzacian, but in a critical rather than a conservative or reactionary tenor. Realism involved an attempt to restore a sense of the concrete, the particular, and the stable to the placeless abstractions of the marketplace. As a literary form, it therefore reflects a contradiction in bourgeois ideology: the dynamism of the bourgeoisie's economic system, capitalism, constantly upends and transforms the world, creating a longing for a stable reality on the part of the bourgeois revolutionaries themselves.

Jameson qualifies his judgement of realism's innate conservatism as a form by examining a range of subgenres including the naturalist novel, which, in its fascination with the lumpenproletariat and its typical narrative of decline, registers “the threat of collective déclassement,” the bourgeoisie's “doubts of its own hegemony and its fears of a rising working class” (147, 148, 149). According to Jameson, “the public no longer shares” the fin de siècle terror of “slipping down the painfully climbed slope of class position” (150). But fears of falling, or of failing to keep up with “impatient capital,” inform the episodic narratives and panicky affective structures of realist novels from neoliberalism's boom period such as A. M. Homes's Music for Torching (1999) and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001), while a properly naturalist preoccupation with economic failure and personal crisis links a range of novels that use realism to plot the rising and falling trajectories of their upwardly and downwardly mobile protagonists: Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, Jonathan Dee's The Privileges, Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, and Paul Auster's Sunset Park (all published in 2010).Footnote ³ Under the latest speed-up ordered by the new capitalism, with its insistence on “flexibility” and “restructuring,” the experience of “long-term, narrative time in fixed channels” has become, in Richard Sennett's words, “dysfunctional.”Footnote ⁴ In a society “composed of episodes and fragments,” realism has a critical role to play in sustaining narrative time and personal coherence, preserving those “qualities of character” which “bind human beings to one another and furnish each with a sense of a sustainable self.”Footnote ⁵ With its ability to locate subjectivity in contemporary history and to offer resistance to the inequities and upheavals of late capitalism, it could be that realism still has a future.

Aesthetically naive, culturally stagnant, and politically myopic – in short, irredeemably bourgeois – the reputation of nineteenth-century literary realism took a severe beating at the hands of some twentieth-century critics. Not that it didn't have its own self-deprecating moments: George Gissing's great novel about the Victorian publishing scene, New Grub Street (1891), includes the dour Harold Biffen's tortuous efforts to finish his novel Mr Bailey, Grocer; it's Gissing's high-cultural skit on realism's logical extent, of course, the unwritable novel of pure, merciless ordinariness. As a paradoxical result, realism's critical redemption has usually been found in its ability to unravel itself, a canon of texts apparently self-aware enough to admit to the genre's limits and conventions via a critical distance from social reality or via an acknowledgement of reality's subjective contingency. The nineteenth-century realism we still read and teach is often that which knowingly (even exuberantly) questions – rather than innocently pursues – the project of mimesis. Mr Bailey, Grocer was also unreadable, after all.

Fredric Jameson's new book doesn't really seek to upset the realist canon, instead focussing mainly (though, much to the better, not entirely) on a cluster of familiar names: Zola, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, with cameos from Balzac, Flaubert, and Goethe and, perhaps more unusually, a brilliant chapter on Pérez Galdós. In offering a significant reconsideration of literary realism, then, Jameson draws less on the unmapped expanses of the realist archive (à la Franco Moretti) and instead seeks to reanimate those writers who seem all but ossified within critical discourse. Characteristically expansive and idiosyncratic, the book moves from a series of more closely focussed chapters on individual writers (although they can hardly be described as discrete case studies, bursting at the seams with insight as they are) to an expansive final section – on the submerged theological structuring of realist narrative, the “reality” or otherwise of war representation, and the historical novel in general – that pushes into territory where realism in its more specific sense seems only dimly still in view. The book's riches can hardly be summarized here, but suffice it to say that the picture of realism that emerges from its tight, dense, allusive pages is both recognizable from more conventional standpoints and, at times, uncannily original. It's unlikely that anyone else would – or, for that matter, could – call on both Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) and Christopher Nolan's Inception with equal aplomb.

There is much to be built on the ground that this book breaks, but as befits the context of this discussion I want to pay attention, however briefly, to the place of American writers in Jameson's story. Anyone familiar with his work will feel at home in the dialectical manoeuvres of his argument, made explicit here by the presence of some governing “antinomies”: affect versus emotion, the “waning of protagonicity” versus a melodramatic inscription of heroes and villains, an innate conservatism versus a demystification of social class, and so on. One of these in particular, perhaps the fundamental opposition of narrative organization – roman versus récit, or scene versus plot – finds, according to Jameson, its “American” articulation in the emphasis on “showing” rather than “telling” exemplified by that most technically astute and least American of great American writers, Henry James.

Jameson is right to point to James's New York prefaces as the purest and most eloquent theorization of this matter, acting as they do to retrospectively codify what we usually now think of as a Jamesian point of view. But the fact that here, as very often elsewhere, James seems to be ensconced as American realism's default representative and theoretician points to a problem that this provocative study might breathe some new life into, namely whether “American realism” exists at all. Despite the monumental efforts of recent years to dissolve the nation as an organizing concept for literary study, is it possible, or for that matter desirable, to identify something particularly American at work in the genre when produced in an American context? Such an admittedly old-fashioned question arises partly out of the paradox it seems to pose for a history of American literary studies that before the various turns of the last few decades it spent much of its time demonstrating the unique (the word is, of course, “exceptional”) resistance of American fiction to Europe's grubby historicity. The institutionalized American studies conceived in the Cold War saw in the “best” American literature a Romantic refusal to fall into social reality and undifferentiated collectivity; to maintain, as Richard Chase, amongst others, argued, a certain freedom from the real. Such characterizations of literary history now seem odd, even sinisterly regressive, but even realism in its more specifically nineteenth-century generic sense was often tacitly set aside as a curious aberration between the Civil War years and, at its furthest stretch, the emergence of modernism around World War I. Synoptic literary histories, anthologies, and university courses still for the most part maintain these chronological fence posts, even whilst acknowledging realism's afterlife as the generic undead of postwar fiction, coming to dominate, as it does, the mainstream novel up to and including the tutored realism of the Program Era.

But, to return to Jameson's own account, what of American realists? Which American might sit at realism's high table and contribute to (not to mention develop, or even upset) the book's series of philosophical, historical, and formal antinomies? Does American realism fall into line with the version that Jameson outlines, or does his conscription of American writers almost impossible to account for in realist terms – primarily, later in the book, Twain and Faulkner – in fact point to a conclusion we might feel quite uneasy about: that, despite a concerted effort to integrate American literature into a deterritorialized literary historiography (to do away with its Americanness, as it were), it is not, after all, quite assimilable into the taxonomies of genre that originate in the social matrix of Europe?

Henry James would seem a tricky candidate for inclusion, partly because he occupies a peculiar place in the American canon to start with (witness his frequent impressment into “English” literature syllabi) and partly because he refused to fully identify with the more prescriptive realism being practised by his contemporaries – and was, anyway, barely classifiable as a realist by the time he wrote What Maisie Knew (1897). The other obvious name is William Dean Howells, not just the editorial gatekeeper of American realism through the late nineteenth century but also its chief practitioner. It would have been interesting to see Jameson account for Howells, whose best novels – The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) – would seem to both reinforce some of the claims being made and offer a socially and aesthetically committed version of realism in its American context. There are other names that usually float around these discussions, but none who ever much figure in discussions of realism outside the United States. And this is before we get to the question of naturalism, realism's Mr. Hyde; it's usually considered something formally and thematically distinct from realism (the tenement rather than townhouse, as it were), not least by the writers who saw themselves as practising one or the other. Frank Norris's withering put-down of realism as “the drama of a broken teacup” has never been bettered.

The point of this speculation is not so much to draw up a shortlist of Americans who are worthy of entry to realism's elite club, but to ponder whether our exhaustive project of globalizing American studies has fully seeped into the more abstract reaches of literary theory. Can we read theory – or, a different thing, theorize – transcontinentally? What happens to theory, even and especially at its most technical outer reaches, if we insist on passing it through the geographical prism of non-European literary traditions? And, more to the point, is it only a result of navel-gazing American literary criticism that American realism has often been treated as a separate stream, or is it also something to do with the Eurocentrism of literary theory's source material? The relative absence of American realists from Jameson's study asks whether American realism is part of, parallel to, or simply a less interesting version of its European cousin (not to mention realism in all its other national contexts, across the world, occupying very different historical and social places than the nineteenth-century heyday that dominates here). Is a global theory of realism possible, and if not what does this say about the limits of the transnational project, even of genre theory itself? The Antinomies of Realism doesn't attempt to answer these questions, but it provides such a provocative and suggestive account of realism that it surely provides a starting place for doing so.

The antinomies of realism. Picking up Fredric Jameson's new book I was reminded of a fine and evocative passage from the prologue to The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller's classic account of New York literary culture in the 1840s. Miller lays out the problem that Herman Melville faced as a writer coming to terms with his own success:

Miller and Jameson both use “antinomies” in its Kantian sense – an intellectual contradiction or paradox – but the similarities end there. For Miller the object of attention is the cultural compact of American writer and American society; for Jameson, the “antinomies of realism” are a representational impasse at the heart of a nineteenth-century literary genre whose story – apart from brief references to Twain, James, and Dreiser – he tells without American writers across a comparative study of British, French, Spanish and Russian literature. For Miller, a writer and the nation; for Jameson, writers and their forms. Miller's book is old, yes, and the national project already established by his earlier book, Errand into the Wilderness (1956). But what Jameson's majestic crossing of literary borders provokes is the thought that the writing of American literary history has long put its own arm behind its back and forced itself down a side alley by too strenuously attending to the American-ness of American literature.

The problem is not Jameson's exclusion of American writers but the way Americanist critics – mea culpa – continue to exclude themselves from literary crosscurrents. It is a problem that goes back at least as far as the New York world Miller brings to life. Young Americans not so enamoured of English literary traditions as their forebears, and dissatisfied with a diet of cheap transatlantic reprints swamping the American market, called for a native upsurge. Cornelius Mathews, one of their leading spokesmen, took up the challenge and produced a series of novels, all clodhopping disasters, of the kind that follow from writing by manifesto. The debunking of Cold War narratives, in whose shadow American literary studies flowered from the 1930s through the 1960s, could not break the trend. Criticism had a sharper ideological edge after the 1970s but the result was only to bind American writers more tightly in local, regional and national contexts, however politicized; revisionism seemed able only to imagine that the ideological forces shaping writers and their literature were, in the end, specifically national ones. Even the much-vaunted transnational turn – though how old and redundant this phrase is beginning to sound – keeps national contexts close to its heart: either by inventing the nation in a new guise to serve presentist ends, or by imagining a world whose globalization occurs in America's image. From within the same institutional structures that created earlier Americanist paradigms a new generation of overspecialized academics picks up the baton. The study of American literature is full of fluencies and innovations, great books and great writers, but the virtuosity of Jameson's book should prompt some self-reflection. Through unsympathetic eyes, instead of looking like a fellow branch on the tree of literary study, American literary criticism still too often looks like one of evolution's misfits: the duck-billed platypus stranded on its own continent.

There have been many fine books about American realism: by Werner Berthoff, Donald Pizer, Michael Davitt Bell, Nancy Glazener, Amy Kaplan, and, most recently, Andrew Lawson, with Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (2012). All are unremittingly inward-looking. None takes the occasion of American realism, as Jameson takes the occasion of European realism, to consider the literariness of this genre more broadly or transnationally. Most accounts revisit and revise Richard Chase's argument from the 1950s about the importance of the American romance over the novel; reinforcing that temporal disjuncture between the emergence of European and American realism to reconfirm American realism's specificity, they overturn one national narrative and replace it with another.

Whether or not Lawson is correct that American realism was a response to financial crisis and economic uncertainty, he is surely right to make us think harder about realist impulses in American writing much earlier in the nineteenth century. There may be no American Balzac but there was a restlessness with genre and form. Charles Frederick Briggs, author of The Adventures of Harry Franco (1839) and one of the progenitors of realism name-checked by Lawson, was also an early supporter of the American Art-Union and the genre painting movement developing in the 1820s and 1830s, one of whose remits was verisimilitude: “For my part,” Briggs said, “I should want no better evidence of a man's ability to paint a good head than his having copied a bunch of carrots with fidelity.”Footnote ² Even Miller charts the disenchantment with Romantic forms of Whiggish New Yorkers who were excited by Thackeray's confirmation of what they had long believed: “that the ending of Ivanhoe is absurd” and Walter Scott “was bound by the silly conventions of the romance.”Footnote ³ There was a demand in the US for the realism of Dickens and Thackeray that cannot be accounted for by the culture of reprinting and lack of international copyright; a full investigation of how American writers expressed this realism remains incomplete.

Jameson's recasting of realism is compelling because he provides the means by which such an investigation might proceed. Coming from “the angle of temporality” (10) he imagines realism's antinomous poles: a genealogy in the chronological storytelling of the récit; an eternal present “of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment.” By affect, Jameson means the registering of a sense of phenomenological being in the world, or “the expansion and contraction, the intensification and diminution,” in the life of the body new to the nineteenth century. “Affect,” Jameson suggests in a stunning little phrase, “becomes the very chromaticism of the body itself” (42). Chromaticism is at odds with storytelling; affect “abhors the other temporalities which constitute the force of the tale or récit in the first place.” Set at war with one another from the very beginning, these poles “are never reconciled, never fold back into one another in some ultimate reconciliation.” The “scenic impulse” marks out its enemies: a hierarchy of characters, the structures of melodrama, and the controlling point of view “which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing of a central consciousness” (11). In a stand-off between diachronic and synchronic effects, realism emerges in its own dissolution. Jameson scrutinizes the shapes and sounds of the battle in Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot; his interpretations are proof that the beauty of the best ideas is often found in their detail as well as in their grand claims.

In the light of these ideas, the American novel that most comes to mind is not, however, from the realist canon. Not anything by Howells or Twain or even Dreiser or James, but that great Romantic novel Moby-Dick. Is there a novel anywhere in the nineteenth century where affect and the scenic impulse so restlessly battle récit? Or a novel whose legacy involves the continual hacking and bowdlerization – the translation of Moby-Dick into every non-novelistic form with the boring bits about whaling deleted – to ensure the kind of adventure storytelling that helps turn the book into the national novel? “Call me Ishmael” is an opening – though not, of course, the novel's real opening – so beset with ambiguity that the drifting points of view marking the rest of the novel's lack of central consciousness seem expressed from the very start. And has any named narrator in a novel ever been so nameless? Call me Ishmael if you want to, but anything will do.

The antinomous poles are early established by Melville; their entwinement – Jameson likens the connection of narrative impulse and affect to the helical structure of DNA – is visible as Ishmael tries to explain what drives him to look for adventure and “sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”Footnote ⁴ What it is, exactly, Ishmael cannot quite put into words. He tries as he delays the adventure; feeling becomes affect as Melville registers not emotion or passion but bodily sensation:

No word – boredom, restlessness, alienation, depression – will quite do. As Jameson suggests, affect resists language and naming; here Melville attempts “to seize its fleeting essence and to force its recognition” (31). If the destiny of the adventure narrative ultimately seals the fate of every other member of the Peqoud, Ishmael is saved by the marker of that fate – the coffin – in the eternal present of a sea that “rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”Footnote ⁵

“Moby-Dick: the great American realist novel. Discuss.” Certainly not, according to most accounts of American realism, whose insistence on certain contextual parameters – the post-Civil War city, industrialization, consumer culture – seems better designed to treat realism as an object in a museum cabinet rather than a mode of representation whose history is long and whose reach is broad. Jameson's Antinomies makes these accounts look parochial in comparison. Perry Miller's Americanism did not stop him from recognizing the antinomies in which Melville was caught; it did compel him to put Melville's “befuddlement” – expressed through genre and form in the fiction – to particular uses. Even a brief application of Jameson's ideas to Moby-Dick suggests that there are other uses to which critics might put American literature: into conversation, perhaps, with Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, or George Eliot.

This collection of Americanist responses to my book on realism demands what I take to be an autobiographical response, some explanation about the exclusion of American novels, something I'm always reluctant to give. But for literary critics, the basic autobiographical questions turn on opinions, judgement and taste: what do you think of so-and-so? Do you still read what's-his-name? What do you reread? What was the most important writer in your formation? Etc. I could answer some of those quickly – I grew up on Faulkner, Pound and James, for example – but a long detour is preferable.

For these are questions about what is presumed to be a national literature, and they are in that sense vitiated from the outset. America is not a nation-state; it is a former settler colony which it would be best to characterize as a superstate. (There are not many of those – yet? – but this is something distinct from both empire and nation, in my opinion.) This means that we have no national literature, even though we keep trying to have one and the (false) question of “what it means to be an American” recurs historically again and again, at least since Emerson, like an allergy or a predisposition to this or that physical weakness.

Let's come at it another way, since postmodernity has caught up with our more revealing characteristics. Today, only poets read poetry, only women read women's literature, only New Yorkers read New York literature, only ethnics read ethnic literature, only gay people read gay literature, only college students read high-literary literature, and so on and so forth; need I go on? America has quintessentially been the place of regional literature (only regionals read that); and my own particular problem is that I identify with no region at all (although at a pinch I would be willing to identify as a naturalized Californian – but I don't read California literature either). I believe in American exceptionalism; and I read almost nothing but foreign literatures, preferably in as many foreign languages as I can muster (not enough, in my opinion). I am willing to identify in an imaginary way with any number of foreign “national literatures” as come my way, but it is no doubt a fickle and transitory identification; I'm very unreliable, and also, owing to the language matter, fairly Eurocentric (but very much including Latin America).

Now you begin to understand my American formation a little better: Pound was for me the very ideal image of world literature, of internationalism and cosmopolitanism in time as well as in space. His insistence on the epic as a “poem that includes economics” (as I rewrite it) is for me the banner of a Marxist aesthetics. As for James, too Anglophile for my taste, although judiciously balanced with Francophilia and Italophilia, you can see why the intimate relationship between class structure and narrative form which tormented him as a professional exile might strike a chord. As for Faulkner, I consider him not exactly an American writer but rather the epic poet of the experience of defeat of a failed nation-state, the writer of something like what an East German literature might be today. And in America, defeat is always better than success.

But there is an important corollary to all this: namely that whatever American writing is, it is not English literature and ought not to be taught with it or housed in the same museum. I leave it to others to decide whether English literature is a national literature either, but the devolving and seceding voices seem currently to be having their say about that; and the time is long past when Joyce could be included in any “English” curriculum with any sense of decency.

So I propose a different solution: it is to posit our object in a different way, not as a national literature, but as a language problem; not how to write the great American novel, but how to write an American language, one which would not be English but would, on the other hand, inherit all the literatures of the world (a Poundian ambition, or, if you prefer, Malraux's insistence on the “imaginary museum” of all the pasts of history).

But it must not be supposed that any such “language experiments,” as Matthiessen called them, are successful: how could they be, when they attempt to forge a national language in the absence of a nation? The nation-state is an imaginary collective based on fantasies of kinship; we are a population united by shopping. So Melville's bombastic Shakespearean rants are not “great” (according to some academic canonicity), but they do allow us to glimpse that one great common language which, along with the Bible, is consumed by all of us as though it somehow belonged to us, and which we wrongly attribute sometimes to England (our disembodied Shakespeare is no more English than our Bible is Near Eastern).

And as for the rest of them: James was socially sufficiently marginal to be in a position to attempt the syntactical invention of a language of subconversations (as Natalie Sarraute called it much later on), a language of the tropisms between isolated (and, if you like, non-national) individuals (only the villains are “national”). Faulkner thought he could paratactically add up the desperate and unresolvable feelings and people of his little conquered landscape in enormous sentences which utterly fail to achieve the extraordinary syntactical interrelationships of a Proust (or an Adorno, to cite my own particular stylistic models). Pound heard the sonorities of as many of the great monuments of the past as he had access to, and reproduced them, often wondrously; but he had lost their content, and his own moorings in any concrete American reality (James at least remembered the reality of American exile), if indeed there was such a thing to begin with. Stein knew what she was doing, and I have always admired the tortuous language Mailer tried to invent, and Whitman's euphoria. But as for the novel, no, I don't see one; or if you really press me, let's settle on Norris's McTeague as the most quintessentially American narrative achievement (I've written on Dick and Chandler, so I can leave them out of this). Nor do I mind admitting Mark Twain to the gallery of great stylists, provided we don't canonize him: humorists are in any case a dangerous and rather frightening lot.

Perhaps this is enough to explain why (for me) no American novel can pose the interesting, the fundamental, form-problems grappled with by the Europeans and others; and the novelists all said so themselves, complaining about the recalcitrance of American experience to narrative form. But maybe we need to register another “classic” in conclusion, as different from Norris as realism is from naturalism: this can only be Sister Carrie, with its archetypally American combination of success and failure and its tawdry, uniquely tasteless language, so faithfully reflecting that American mass culture which is another of our “exceptional” gifts to a globalizing world.