The version of this magnificent, awful essay collected in The Modernist Papers (2007) omits the

The version of this magnificent, awful essay collected in The Modernist Papers (2007) omits the dedication. I wonder why. In general, I find Jameson both loathsome and impressive, loathsomely impressive, impressively loathsome. How both? Because of the inimitable frisson he creates by casually endorsing not just a civil rights movement but what was in effect a terrorist paramilitary campaign, which he conflates in true Leninist style with the will of “the people”—this in an essay about a quasi-pacifist skeptical of nationalism no less—before calmly assuming his customary perch on the peak of absolute knowledge from which all culture can be surveyed and measured. 

Anyway, my main interest in the essay is his assessment of Ulysses’s class character:

Now for a certain conservative thought, and for that heroic fascism of the 1920s for which the so-called ‘masses’ and their standardised city life had become the very symbol of every­thing degraded about modern life, gossip— Heidegger will call it ‘das Gerede’—is stigmatised as the very language of inauthenticity, of that empty and stereotypical talking pour rien dire to which these ideologues oppose the supremely private and individual speech of the death anxiety or the heroic choice. But Joyce—a radical neither in the left-wing nor the reactionary sense—was at least a populist and a plebeian. ‘I don’t know why the communists don’t like me,’ he complained once, ‘I’ve never written about anything but common people.’ Indeed, from the class perspective, Joyce had no more talent for or interest in the representation of aristocrats than Dickens; and no more experience with working-class people or with peasants than Balzac (Beckett is indeed a far sounder guide to the Irish countryside or rural slum than the essen­tially urban Joyce). In class terms, then, Joyce’s characters are all resolutely petty-bourgeois: what gives this apparent limitation its representative value and its strength is the colonial situation itself. Whatever his hostility to Irish cultural nationalism, Joyce’s is the epic of the metropolis under imperialism, in which the development of bourgeoisie and proletariat alike is stunted to the benefit of a national petty-bourgeoisie: indeed, precisely these rigid constraints imposed by imperialism on the development of human energies account for the symbolic displacement and flowering of the latter in eloquence, rhetoric and oratorical language of all kinds; symbolic practices not particularly essential either to businessmen or to working classes, but highly prized in precapitalist societies and preserved, as in a time capsule, in Ulysses itself. And this is the moment to rectify our previous account of the city and to observe that if Ulysses is also for us the classical, the supreme representation of something like the Platonic idea of city life, this is also partly due to the fact that Dublin is not exactly the full-blown capitalist metropolis, but like the Paris of Flaubert, still regressive, still distantly akin to the village, still un- or under-developed enough to be representable, thanks to the domination of its foreign masters.

This is clever, very, but then if colonialism plays the role he here attributes to it, what was Dickens’s excuse for also creating petit-bourgeois utopias in the heart of Victorian London (Orwell on Dickens: “the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie…a dream of complete idleness”)? What, for that matter, is the class character of The Waste Land, with its clerks, typists, and (Phoenician) merchants? I mostly got this from my own dissertation advisor, and she mostly got it from Rita Felski, but I want to run with it to the end of the line: modern literature is the paradise of the lower middle class.