Obituary/ October 3, 2024
The late literary critic renewed Marxism to review our postmodern and globalized truth.
Fredric Jameson in São Paulo.(Creative Commons)
Being a Marxist in America is a typically overwelming fate, as the imposing literary critic Fredric Jameson, who passed away last month at the age of 90, found in 1991. That’s when he discovered that, almost twenty years previously, he and his good friends had actually been knocked to the FBI by an author he treasured and promoted, Philip K. Dick.
In the early 1970s, Dick was far from the mostly posthumous popularity he would amass through Hollywood adjustments (beginning with Blade Runnerlaunched in 1982 soon after his death). Much more far-off was the ultimate canonization of Dick by the literary facility that would see his sci-fi books preserved in sophisticated volumes by the Library of America.
Penis in the 1970s had actually suffered all the indignities of being a working-class pulp author: His books were generally drawn out as schlock paperbacks by an infamously sleazy publisher, Ace Books, that consistently ripped him off. To survive, he needed to compose at a crazy, amphetamine-fueled pitch, producing 5 books in 1964 alone. This feverish writing and drug abuse poisoned Dick’s individual life (a string of stopped working marital relationships and short-term relationships) and his psychological health. By 1974, he was seeing visions from a pink light he called VALIS, which he thought may be God, the CIA– or possibly area aliens.
With his life in crisis and having just the most limited of literary track records, Dick may have invited the stirrings of important appreciation he was beginning to get from a group of extreme scholars clustered around the brand-new journal Sci-fi Studiesestablished in 1973. These scholars, led by Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, maintained Dick as visionary whose present for loopy world-building (alternative histories and envisioned futures that didn’t shine and shine in the way of a Star Trek episode, however were as compulsively destabilizing and logic-challenging as a headache or a bad drug journey) embodied the brand-new world of customer commercialism, media adjustment, mental breakdown, and psychedelic experimentation. The criticism of the Sci-fi Studies group, in addition to more journalistic advocacy by Paul Williams in Wandererlaid the structure for Dick’s acquiring acknowledgment as a significant author.
In 1974, Jameson and a group of other Dick admirers (consisting of the sci-fi author Norman Spinrad, the literary critic Peter Fitting, and the critic and artist Richard Pinhas, who was accompanied by his partner, Agenta) checked out the author in the house in Fullerton, California. It was a genial day, with much beer was downed amidst friendly conflicts about the significance of Dick’s work. Penis flirted with Agenta Pinhas, as her hubby searched, gamely attempting to speak with her in primitive pidgin German. Penis believed that she, as a Swede, must have the ability to capture his significance.