310
FRANCES C. FERGUSON
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE: A CRITICAL ACCOUNT
OF STRUCTURALISM AND RUSSIAN FORMALISM.
By
Fredric
Jameson.
Princeton University
Press. $9.00.
Fredric Jameson's recent book,
The Prison-House of Lan–
guage: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism,
is an
ambitious and sophisticated analysis of Structuralism and its forebears.
While many critics have responded with a certain Thel-like hysteria to
the now massive collection of Structuralist writings which have de–
scended upon America from France, Jameson has calmly tried to deter–
mine the nature of the beast before launching any attack. And he thus
helps us to deal with many of our nagging, primitive questions about
Structuralism: does it represent a perverse delight in unnecessary com–
plication? Is it merely the bureaucrat's dream -- a system of interpreta–
tion in which every unruly element of a literary work can be fitted to the
Procrustean beds of structures like bipolarities, rectangles, and equa–
tions? Or is it a higher form of truth than most of us can attain?
Jameson himself does not answer those questions with anything like
dogmatism or even finality. Indeed, the most obvious and impressive
feature of his book is the care he takes to suggest his own answers only
in conjunction with closely reasoned explications of some of the major
Structuralist writings. And because he feels no need to pass an absolute
judgment on all of Structuralism, Jameson constructs his theoretical
discourse like a man at liberty, with the world all before him. For him,
an analysis of Structuralism is simply part of the process of self-educa–
tion - - a stage on the way to a critical theory which will reveal the
presence of a reflective reader while it renews "our fascination with the
seeds of time." As he very practically and winningly says in his preface,
. .. to "refuse" Structuralism on ideological grounds amounts to
declining the task of integrating present-day linguistic discoveries
into our philosophical systems; my own feeling is that a general
critique of Structuralism commits us to working our way through it
so as to emerge, on the other side, into some wholely different and
theoretically more satisfying philosophical perspective.
Jameson is thus writing in what he might call a "dialectical" m'ode when
he takes on the burden of interpreting language-oriented methodologies
through which he hopes to emerge with something "wholely different."
Yet Jameson never completely provides the "wholely different and
theoretically more satisfying philosophical perspective" which is his aim,
