Our greatest thinker, Fredric Jameson, died on 22 September 2024 at the age of ninety. His example of socially meaningful interpretation—indeed, his commitment to Marxism—is fundamental, now more than ever. With writings spanning some six decades, he built up an immense critical foundation and edifice on every topic, every medium, that matters to the thinking and feeling person. He will remain the base to the superstructure of all criticism to come. With him, we can interpret the world in order to change it.

Any book or selection of essays by Jameson is a consistent expression of his ideas and approach. But it so happens that his paper titled “Metacommentary,” appearing in PMLA in 1971, is one of the most important articles about interpretive method in his entire oeuvre, ranking alongside his well-known essay on postmodernism published in 1984 in the New Left Review with its briefer forays into methodology (“Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”; New Left Review, vol. 146, July-Aug. 1984, pp. 55–56).

Beneath that curious word, “metacommentary,” lies the entire hermeneutic that was to unfold in Jameson’s later works, like The Political Unconscious (1981), with iterations across every single book to follow. I mean not to identify what’s unwavering about his method from his earliest to his latest works but rather to explore what’s incontestable about his approach, recognizing that the names we now have for his interpretive practices, whether “dialectical,” “Jamesonian,” “Always historicize!,” or something else, don’t begin to capture the power and persuasion of his thinking, always in the mode of this thing he dubbed “metacommentary.”

So much is already there in “Metacommentary”: totality, the collective and its “destinies,” synchrony, diachrony, ideology, allegory, science fiction, levels of interpretation, work, and Marx—all of which we recognize in later Jameson. And it’s from this signal essay that I would recommend reading Jameson’s other works. For example, “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” is overtly paired with “Metacommentary,” not only in the way it appears in the very next quarterly issue of PMLA in 1971, but because Jameson’s epigraph in this second installment is drawn from his own words in the previous essay. Granted, everyone cites themselves eventually, but I’ve not seen a scholar do this before. But Jameson gets a pass, if for no other reason than that the epigraph stands as a methodological statement to say that what follows in “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” is itself metacommentary.

It’s worth recalling that what’s missing from “Metacommentary” but present in “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” (243, 244, 251), as well as the other essays he published in PMLA, is that august term, the “dialectic.” That Jameson doesn’t speak of dialectics per se in “Metacommentary” can only mean he’s doing them: “what is wanted is a kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher” (9). Indeed, in “Metacommentary,” he slow-walks us through this (dialectical) method that isn’t named in advance, nor was there a reason for always tagging it in 1971, because “dialectics” was unfamiliar to the English-speaking readers of PMLA, most of whom weren’t following developments in French and German philosophy and theory, at least not both traditions with equal attention.

By Jameson’s own recollection in “Criticism and Categories” (2022) of the process of writing The Political Unconscious back in 1980–81, most literary critics in the United States even then were unaware of what a synthesis of French and German thought could provide. So metacommentary it is, which is the first term Jameson supplied in his essay for understanding not only dialectics sous rature, erased yet no less present, but what he would soon call the “political unconscious” (with intimations already in “Metacommentary” [10, 17]) and even later “cognitive mapping,” each phrase picking out something specific about interpreting culture at different historical moments: in 1981 during the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and in 1991 deep into postmodernity and late capitalism. Put this way, we’re struck by the impression that Jameson analyzed aspects of culture for which neither we nor he had yet any isms and names—that the beauty of his long life is that he could think and write through numerous emergent circumstances where areas of thought and practice were coming into being.

Links to the PMLA archive:

Jameson, Fredric. “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism.” PMLA, vol. 86, no. 2, Mar. 1971, pp. 241–54.

———. “Criticism and Categories.” PMLA, vol. 137, no. 3, May 2022, pp. 563–67.

———. “Metacommentary.” PMLA, vol. 86, no. 1, Jan. 1971, pp. 9–18.

———. “Marxist Criticism and Hegel.” PMLA, vol. 131, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 430–38.

———. “War and Representation.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 5, Oct. 2009, pp. 1532–47.

Andrew Cole is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Princeton University. His next book is Being and Space, the sequel to The Birth of Theory. His guest column in the October 2024 issue of PMLA, “In the Name of Metacommentary: Fredric Jameson,” offers an extended reflection on the work Jameson published in the journal and beyond.