We Have Never Been Critical:

Toward the Novel as Critique

ANNA KORNBLUH

The president of the Modern Language Association, higher education policy

wonks, and the governor of Wisconsin all readily agree that our current present
represents a crisis for the humanities. Cosigning that consensus would seem an
obligatory opening for any stock-taking essay like this one, assessing fifty years of
Marxist literary theory. Yet the struggle to justify the humanities, however vitiating
at this moment, is not readily periodizable: as Friedrich Nietzsche and Matthew
Arnold already argued, education in arts and ideas inherently clashes with the
roiling wheels of modern democratic capitalism. Even though critical thinking
and cultural difference are so frequently brandished as banners for the unceasing
expansion of the world market, aesthetic-philosophical inquiry into the allusive
values of the beautiful and the good can never be wholly assimilated to the regime
of surplus value; reveling in uselessness can never be wholly incorporated in the
reign of instrumental reason; heralding the singular and the universal can never be
wholly squared with institutionalized pluralism. Within this long arc, the present
moment can only appear new qua the quantitative intensification of the crisis after
the 2008 financial meltdown and qua the internalization of crisis into an engine of
methodological innovation and strife. Indeed, the very latest trends in the academic
humanities—big data, thin description, positivist historicism, and the critique of
critique—enjoy the veneer of the cool and roll deep as the funded, but must all be
grasped as so much soul-searching and epistemic capitulation inevitably conse-
quent upon crisis. This is of course not how these movements see themselves, but
that is in no small part because they do not see the humanities’ permanent war for
legitimacy (nor even that war’s contemporary front).
In this essay, I argue that Marxist theories of the novel, embedded within
broader Marxian approaches to crisis and to the aesthetic, continue to frame urgent
questions for the study of the novel and continue to illuminate avenues for future
study that confronts contradictions in the social life of literature. Arguing this
persistent importance requires tackling the contemporary repudiation of Marxist
literary theory in the movement known as “postcritique.” While numerous schools
of recent literary criticism have resigned both the aesthetic and the political pur-
views of Marxism, the utopian dimensions of Marx’s own work and of the finest
Marxist literary readers still remain promising arcs for tracing the unique values of
literary production, literary reading, and literary critique today.
The most prominent platform of postcritique is Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique
(2015), poised as ex post facto manifesto for the past decade of method wars and

I am grateful to Nancy Armstrong for the invitation to be polemical and to Kasia Bartoszynska,
Nathan Hensely, Robert Ryan, Zach Samalin, Scott Selisker, and Davis Smith-Brecheisen for
sparring.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50:3 DOI 10.1215/00295132-4195016 ! 2017 by Novel, Inc.

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prized at 28 million kroner by the government of Denmark, which argues that lit-
erary and arts scholars have fallen into a rote posture of detachment that ought to be
replaced with inquiries into “attachments . . . affection and hope.” Felski dissects
what she calls “the mood of critique”—the attitude of suspicion, the insinuation of
expertise, the spatial logic of “digging down and standing back” that she associates
with a dominance of Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches in the humanities,
which all, in her analysis, hinder greater access to what matters about literary texts:
their capacity to inspire attachments in the reader. Thoroughly inspired by the
theologian and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, whose books We Have Never Been
Modern and Reassembling the Social dismantle secularist conceits of science and pre-
tenses of abstraction, Felski trains her sights on the unacknowledged theologies of
critical distance in the humanities. Where critique is negative, Felski seeks the affir-
mative; where critique asks what a work does in the world, postcritique asks what a
work means in the reading chair, and the diminished scope of the question ostensibly
harkens its greater legitimacy—since, according to Latour, society does not exist,
and epistemic pretensions must be leavened with microscopic focus on individual
agents and the local networks that directly enmesh them. Felski, like others who cite
the mood of critique as the cause of assailed humanities, ignores the boring necessity
that disaffection and stagnation among humanists stem surely as much from the
precarity of their labor and the contraction of their industry as from the negativity of
their theories. In place of the Marxist technique of following the money and deter-
mination by the base, Felski offers determinism by Marxism: too much critique, too
influenced by Marx and Freud, has made the humanities too negative, too hollow.
It should be underscored that Felski’s work is absolutely refreshing in its quest
for more commanding studies of literature’s agency—for less emphasis on lit-
erature as ideology, as technology of domination, as chained to context—and for
more comprehensive accounts of what is affirmative and affirmable in the
humanities. But sourcing the crisis in method to our exhausted feelings about the
mood of critique and proposing chipper feelings as the answer to crisis are both
unfortunate psychologisms. Where most Marxists have thus greeted the book
with—surprise!—critique, critique of psychologism, of raking strawmen, of mis-
construing as hermeneutics the very antihermeneutic materialisms of Marxism and
psychoanalysis, we can also embrace that Felski has the wrong answer (affect) to the
right question: how can literary critics and humanists generally be more affirmative?
There are heartier things to be affirmed about literature than the affects it arouses
in individuals. Literary form is more social than that.
Far beyond endorphin boosting and empathogenesis, literature offers precisely
the counterhegemony that has fueled the perennial crisis of the humanities. With a
long and political-economic view of crisis, we can best conceptualize that the arts
and literature contravene modern democratic capitalism through their constitu-
tively speculative, generative utopianism—their deliberate building of something
other than what already exists, their formalization of other, different, better ideas
and relations than what is already here. In departing from the merely made world
and proposing other worlds, literature operates both the negative and affirmative
poles of critique, positing imaginative, alluring alternatives to our raging, dysto-
pian hellscape of capitalist contradiction, climate catastrophe, and insurgent global

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 KORNBLUH WE HAVE NEVER BEEN CRITICAL 399

fascism. This conception of literature as critique must be studied and elaborated

as a more robust ontology, as the basis of championing the humanities in end-
less crisis, and it must drive the next fifty years of Marxist literary theory. Until we
do this theorizing and conduct our reading, writing, and teaching by its light, we
cannot be postcritical, for we have never been critical.
To be critical, to fully exercise critique in literary criticism, would mean in this
domain several things simultaneously. It would mean to pursue the full Kantian
complement, the full Hegelian dialectic, the full Marxian normativity—activating
within the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” the necessary correlative
utopian striving for what does not exist. It would mean to take sufficient stock
within criticism of the position of the critic, to become, in Edward Said’s notion,
“secular”—querying the trite aggrandizement of the critic above readers, writers,
and novels themselves. It would mean a dialectical critique that attuned itself to the
dialectics in the world and the dialectics in the work—according the work of art
dialecticity of its own.1 It would mean addressing the specific techniques of cri-
tique proper to and figured in aesthetic presentation, which necessarily operates
through an entirely different grammar than critique in Karl Marx’s Critique of Political
Economy or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, the way in
which aesthetic mediation necessarily works figuratively, obliquely, syncretically.
Literature deserves a dialectical theory of its own dialecticity.
The year Novel: A Forum on Fiction was founded, the French Marxist Pierre
Macherey staked out a new path for literary theory: to “define literature as the
critique of ideologies” (130). Fifty subsequent years of literary theory of the
novel can be described unglibly as stubborn errancy from this path. Rather than
define literature as critique, critics have found ever new ways to define literature
as ideology. The novel is a socially contingent illusion of transcendent value,
the novel is the imaginary resolution of real contradictions, the novel strate-
gizes containment, the novel misapprehends reality, the novel is hopelessly
partial, the novel secures consent. The novel is positioned by postcritique—
surface reading, distant reading, scientized reading—as an object of knowledge
open at the best to calculation and accurate description, including computations
of adverb quantities and magnetic resonance imaging of how readers feel. This
to a large degree extends the canonical sense in which the novel is regarded as
the handbook of modernity and specimen of low culture, portal onto nascent
social and economic formations that contributes to making them the object of
knowledge for accumulationist positivist historicism. Yet what we need now,
and what we have always needed in the humanities, as both defense and offense,
is not this object-of-knowledge approach but rather to position the novel as a mode
of knowing (knowing language, knowing possibility, knowing sociality), pre-
cisely in the tradition of critique.
One obstacle to a comprehensive theory of the novel as critique is certainly
an umbrella perception that the novel is somehow untheorizable. Our methods

1
The genealogically inclined will no doubt find relevant Nicholas Brown’s insight that the idea of
literature co-emerges with the dialectic as such, in the same time and place, with the Jena school
romantics.

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readily situate the novel as ideology or as evidence, but when questions of its
ontology are broached, disruption reigns—the antigenre genre, the formless form,
the evasively innovative relentlessly high-low, unabstractable I-know-it-when-I-
see-“a novel”-on-the-cover. Within literary study, it is indeed common from a
variety of methodological and political standpoints to refuse a theory of literature
more broadly—championing instead literature as the singular, the resistance to
theory, the anti-abstraction. Moreover, as Caroline Levine has observed, most of our
discipline has argued itself out of the very possibility of theory through its sys-
tematic dismissal of generalization and the general, its dismantling of universals,
its prizing of the situated and the particular (xii). But the novel, with its constitutive
admixture of the general and the singular—the exceptional and the typical, the
adventuresome and the quotidian, romance and realism—seems to demand the-
ory, demand that the general be kept in play.
These nontheoretical tendencies are part and parcel of the scientizing trends in
humanist methods for the past three decades and more, another obstacle. Felski
correctly diagnoses the moribund state of literary criticism’s turgid historicism, yet
for her the difficulty is that contextualism fails to explain how works attach to
readers in the future—where for a strong literary ontology, one should also wonder
after how literature detaches itself from its own present. Literary study has been
dominated by methods that peg literature to causes, and by unaspirational cata-
loging of the facts and artifacts of the past. Ceding our knowledge paradigms
almost entirely to science, we humanists have failed to champion literature as more
than evidence, more than information, more than data. Positivist historicism has
inoculated us against literature’s critical capacity by correlating every word to a
referent, every work to a cause, so comprehensively reducing literature’s concep-
tuality and creativity that its otherworldliness, its making of something new or else,
falls completely out of sight. If literature is not thought but index, not creation but
document, then there can be no possibility of its functioning as critique. Without
independent ideas, it cannot promote alternatives.
Additionally, and most vexingly, there is a marked tendency, precisely within
those traditions that do value theory—and that caution against the new historicist/
Latourian Actor Network Theory replacement of capitalism with “power,” of exploi-
tation with “discourse,” of causality with multilateral agency—to nonetheless
operate in nondialectical fashion, subtracting the imaginative quotient from liter-
ature to emphasize truth telling. Thus it becomes almost thinkable that a novel of
critique would exist as something like a genre variant—the social problem novel,
the novel of purpose, reformist fiction, Dickens on a mission. From Friedrich Engels
and Georg Lukács (post–Theory of the Novel) to Lucien Goldman and Fredric Jame-
son, on to Franco Moretti, Alberto Toscano, and Annie McClanahan, Marxist criti-
cism has rather often followed this nondialectical path, embracing in the novel the
limited operation of reporting the truths and reflecting the facts of the made world.
Allotting the novel a certain diagnostic privilege, such theories have nonetheless
reduced the novel’s ability to contemplate possible conditions (material and epistemic
limits, phenomenal and noumenal problems, contradictions and their real movement)
to a lesser ability to documentarily depict pre-existing conditions. In these cases, the
novel is resolved into a position paper or dissolved into an imprint of a putatively

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precedent truth, both options occasioning the reduction of literature to the univocity
of discourse. Here, literature is critical to the extent that it resembles a nonliterary
presentation of a critical stance; its ontology as literature is abrogated. And then there
is the matter of the forgone utopianism, since the diagnostic arc commonly lacks a
prognosticative complement. Where the dialectical conceit of the novel as critique
encompasses both that the novel makes thinkable the conditions of social relations
and that a utopian element is consequent upon this thinking, prevailing methods
of literary Marxists have often fallen short on both of these counts.
By contrast, a theory that attends to the novel’s immanent critique would nec-
essarily focus on the gap between literary language and discourse, locating the
possibility of critique not in a form that most approximates ordinary discourse but
in a form of its own, the dynamic plurivocity of aesthetic thought in motion. The
novel’s conceptuality is neither linear nor logical but contrastive and accretive;
when novels think they do not iterate evaluative judgments (child labor is bad,
patriarchy sucks) but mobilize ideas in sensuous, plastic synthesis (the problem of
child labor is inseparable from first-person narration and bildungsroman plotting).
This special mode of conceptuality inheres in the novel’s assembly of sometimes
complementary, sometimes contrastive strata of representation; the novel idea is
the multifaceted problem talking out of both sides of the mouth. Not univocal, not
propositional, not thetic, the novel as critique is essentially thought on the move, the
restless, spastic generativity of conceptuality riven by negation of dialecticity itself.

Notwithstanding the significant leaning of even Marxist aesthetic and cultural

theory away from the dialectical itinerary for criticism and away from the dialec-
ticity of art, it remains the case that the Marxian project should power the future
theory of the novel, because Marx and Engels established the original procedure of
immanent critique.2 That is to say, since at least the 1844 manifesto for materialist
method in The German Ideology, Marxism announces the rootedness of thought in
the material problems of human production and reproduction, while it simulta-
neously elaborates the condition of possibility for uprooting thought: for revolutionary
transformations that would entail revolutions in thought and for ideas as pivotal
agents of such transformations. Marxism is the theory and practice of critique of this
given sociality of capitalism, critique that this sociality itself generates, critique that
must of necessity be immanent to what exists even while it works for the inexistent,
setting out toward “a space adequate for human beings,” as Ernst Bloch defined
utopia (198). On these grounds of immanence, we might come to think of Marxism
less as a possible theory of the novel than as sister to the novel, that elementary
production of a world other than what already exists. In this kinship, Marxism then
offers literature not the diagnosis of its determination, not the sociology of its

2
The Marxist historian Moishe Postone elaborated a Hegelian philosophy of critique that he saw
Marx nascently practicing and that can be usefully extended to our discussion of aesthetics:
“The existing, in other words, must be grasped in its own terms in a way that encompasses the
possibility of its own critique: the critique must be able to show that the nature of its social
context is such that this context generates the possibility of a critical stance towards itself. It
follows, then, that an immanent social critique must show that its object, the social whole of
which it is a part, is not a unitary whole” (87–88).

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production, not the archive of its failures to referentially register the extant world, but
the mirroring of literature’s own critique, the full dialectic of keen departure from
context and supple utopian pursuits. Marxism shares the novel’s own practice of
critique, the novel’s own utopian impulses, the novel’s own project to reimagine
the social spaces of lived reality, and it is this commonality that forever justifies
Jameson’s claim for Marxism as “the untranscendable horizon” (Political Uncon-
scious 20) of novel reading.
To connect the Marxist practice of immanent critique to a theory or practice of
the aesthetic, let us remark the indispensable importance of form to Marxism’s own
methods of analysis and, indeed, the formalism of Marx’s critical procedure, which
commends formalism in our literary criticism too. What distinguished Marx’s
critique of political economy from the erudite discipline that was its object was
intense focus on form. Labor theory predates Marx; formalist analysis of value,
of commodities, of capital does not. Empirical analysis of exploitation and con-
tradiction predates Marx; formalist analysis of capitalism’s drive to sublate the
contradictions it precipitates does not. Quasi-philosophical discernment of the
intellective paradoxes of credit predates Marx; the theory of capitalism as a spe-
cific metaphysic, engendering pervasive new topoi of belief, newly ungrounded
rationality, and newly reversing cause-and-effect does not. Each of these Marxian
conceptual innovations is facilitated by thinking in terms of form; of representation
of, against, and in matter; of structure, agency, and interlocking composites; of
ideations innate in arrangement and order; of Platonic registers and their lapsarian
instantiation. This formalism by which critique sets to work in the world might
provide a portal to the novel as critique, for it suggests that readers might effectively
behold the novel’s immanent critique when the novel is regarded formalistically
and that novels might be working at critique when they are contriving the con-
sistency of their own form and theorizing the consistency of social forms.
Formalist regard is pivotal in Macherey, for whom the formal effect of the novel,
strictly speaking, is the staging of a dynamic confrontation among literary ele-
ments (plot, point of view, imagery, setting) always producing the effect of con-
flict, imbalance, partiality, incompletion; in turn, this effect reveals the inherently
ideological perception of reality (136). Distinguishing between “knowledge” and
“a certain kind of knowing,” he emphasizes that the work is “not an instrument of
knowledge . . . it is an indispensable revelation, a revealer, and it is criticism which
helps us decipher these images in the mirror” (136). In disarticulating the novel
from univocal speech, Macherey heightens the work of criticism; instead of reit-
erating the novel’s iterations, the critic receives the novel’s revelations, above all its
“certain way of knowing” the truth of inevitable mediation. Novels reveal medi-
ation as social fact, reveal the partiality of every given social formation materially,
not just in the ideality of its representation. This ubiquity and ineluctability of
mediation is suppressed by all those projects, left and right, that would seek
coherent amplitude of the social field, a unity and groundedness and naturalness
of relations. In this way, underscoring the mediated quality of sociality as such and
acceding to this truth is the ultimate gesture of building a different kind of world,
for it reaches toward what would be possible when the world’s architectures and
infrastructures and founding laws cease comporting as grounded.

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These formal insights echo and anticipate others in Marxist literary theory.
Before Macherey, Lukács tendered a theory of the novel whose formalism has often
remained latent in the reception of his work. Although frequently cited in autho-
rizing the demand that the novel depict social totality, Lukács had rather more
precisely defined the novel as “thinking in terms of” or “operating a sense of”
totality.3 This “sense” directly contrasts any phenomenal experience, in which
totality is not available as a referent. The novel is a kind of thinking concerned with
a problem, both of which exceed the parameters of experience.4 Across Lukács’s
long career, his prescriptions and judgments of the novel indicate the formal con-
stituents of this thinking, from the “architectural self-consciousness” he invokes
in Theory of the Novel to the integral, “paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and
discrete components into an organic whole which is abolished again and again,”
the “mutual determination” of narration, reportage and portrayal, character and
plot, detail and meaning that he ordains in Essays on Realism and Writer and Critic.
In missing Lukács’s emphasis on the novel as a specific “abstraction,” we miss the
affinities he educes between the novel and theoretical perspicacity, we miss the
theory proper to the novel.5 And in missing the novel as theory, we miss its faculty
for mediating conceptual and social problems, problems of totalization, of world
making and world projecting, of social consistency, and in turn its utopian faculty
for shaping worlds in general. We miss the novel as critique.
Lukács’s Theory of the Novel finds its late twentieth-century refiguration in Jame-
son’s The Political Unconscious, which remains the unsurpassed program for reading
procedures that would, through their basis in Marxism as a “genuine philosophy of
history,” discern what he crucially called “the solidarity” of the “social and cultural
past,” “its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles,
with those of the present day” (18). This allusive notion of solidarity is not really
developed in the book but could be a beautiful alternative to the positivist reification of
difference and quarantining of the past, since it would seem to involve both a temporal
surpassing of narrow historicism and a formal appreciation of the novel’s specific
illumination of the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics. Temporally, the longue durée
history of the novel so decisively accompanies the history of capitalism that a mutual
past and mutual present unite the novels of old with the lives of new. Formally, the
kinds of social cohesion and world projecting undertaken by the novel directly
analogize the predicaments, antagonisms, and ungroundedness of politics such that
the novel of the past retains affinities with the socialities of the present, retains the
possibility of aligning in solidarity with the utopian horizon of today’s fights.
However promising this notion of solidarity, the actual readings of novels in
The Political Unconscious tend to show novels preoccupied by the pressing prob-
lems (determination, freedom, ressentiments, etc.) but dogged by their own forms

3
“The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly
given . . . yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (Lukács 56). (Der Roman ist die Epopöe
eines Zeitalters, für das die extensive Totalität des Lebens nicht mehr sinnfällig gegeben ist . . .
und das dennoch die Gesinnung zur Totalität hat.)
4
On the novel as the working out of a problem, see Wasser.
5
For more on this, see Bewes.

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(resolutions, suspensions, displacements) and, furthermore, inadequate to their

own historicity, requiring criticism for “restoring to the surface of the text the
repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history,” that is, universal class
antagonism (20). The solidarity fell out of the picture. In its stead, engaged criticism
substitutes for solidarity; what was hailed at the outset as the necessity of the
novel’s internal dialectic and dialectical location in history, its formal aegis for
solidarity out of context, its structures of worlding and of sustaining antagonism, is
transmuted in the book’s final chapter into the necessity for “dialectical criticism”
(281). In place of a reading of novels as critique, Jameson conceives the ultimate
criticism: reading that incorporates within itself consideration of the position from
which a work is being read; dialectical criticism of works from the past would then
always contain gestures or moments of presentism, which might itself become a
platform for critique. Novels fail but criticism succeeds.
Thus Jameson’s bar of dialectical criticism did not yet actualize the novel’s
immanent critique of the very problematics of totality and contemporaneity. But in
the same year that The Political Unconscious was published, he made a decisive
critical turn of his own, one that leads closer toward the possibility of a formal
theory of the novel as critique. Also in 1981 he published his original essay on
postmodernism (that would later become his most influential book), launching
Jameson’s fascination with the aesthetics of space and the endeavor of cognitive
mapping—fascinations that continue to indicate directions for a Marxist and for-
malist theory of the novel as the immanently critical projection of social space.
Complementing Marxism’s theory of history is its tacit theory of space, whispered
in Engel’s urban writings, shouted in The Manifesto of the Communist Party’s con-
juring of more just orders, animating its affirmative utopian projects. Spatial figu-
rations must be, I would argue, central to any stronger future theory of the novel, for
they operate the novel’s formal specificity, and they open on to the ultimate ques-
tion of a space adequate for human beings, utopia. It is the novel’s formal aegis to
produce social space, and this project is inherently utopian, inherently actualizing
an affirmative work of critique. The novel’s formal spatiality should center any
theory of the novel as critique.6

6
Here I would part with Pheng Cheah’s brilliant recent work What Is a World?, which intrigu-
ingly argues for a more robust philosophical concept of “world,” one that would entail the
necessity that literature is a force of worlding, of world imagining, world mapping, and world
making, whose faculty for effecting change in the extant world stems from its normativity.
Literature critiques the world by opening to what ought to be. Cheah draws upon the Marxian
tradition ambivalently: it provides the ur-model of critical normativity (“the proletarian revo-
lution intervenes in the existing world . . . in order to actualize a higher world”) but it also
classically “deprives literature of any worldly normative force” (10) by emphasizing the deter-
mination of the superstructure by the base. Cheah sees the spatial emphases of contemporary
Marxists like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey as problematic reinforcements of the existing
world, since he argues that world conceived spatially can only ever be a descriptive category,
whereas world conceived temporally is the portal to normativity. Cheah’s reduction of spatial
theory to the reification of the extant globe overlooks the specific form of the novel in favor of
the specific phenomenality of reading. In prizing temporality as the only condition of agential
world striving, he dismisses that the proper formal constructions of the novel are integral
spatial constructions.

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Spatiality is intrinsic to utopian genres, which Jameson takes on directly in his

biggest effort at readings of the novel as critique. Archaeologies of the Future is an epic
study of genre in which the contours of the general corpus predominate over
readings of individual texts, with the thoroughgoing claim that science fiction is
almost constitutively utopian in its defamiliarization of its own contemporary
contextual present, its enactment of a “structurally unique method for appre-
hending the present as history” (288), for activating the present as the determinate
past of some indeterminate future. In the practice of his readings, however, this
type of critical consciousness loosens into a wan unknowability of a better future;
most of Jameson’s readings of individual utopian and sci-fi novels conclude not
that the present is inadequate but that the future is—“the true vocation of uto-
pian narratives” being “to confront us with our incapacity to imagine Utopia”
(293). Formal inconsistencies—stray details, irreconcilable events, contradictory
motifs—point up the impossibility of utopian consistency and proffer ideologies
that are “properly liberal, rather than radical” (275), “homeopathy rather than
antidote” (391). No individual novel Jameson treats in this massive work attains the
level of critique, perhaps because the genre’s positivity (its elaborating the terrain of
utopia as place, space, time) eclipses the open horizon of the possible; perhaps
because “the utopian impulse” resists delimitation in “the utopian program” (4);
and surely because even those novels committed to defamiliarization might lack an
affirmation of a new normative commitment to justice. Defamiliarization is all there
is, but it is not enough—not enough as an aesthetic of utopia and not enough as an
activist strategy. How might the novel’s capacity to improvise worlds instruct us in
how to build this world with more commons?
If Jameson’s ideas clear the ground for a theory of the novel as critique while
his readings do not quite bear out the theory, it is also important to observe, to
return to some of the resources from Marx himself, that the particular formalism in
Jameson’s readings shows great potential for illuminating the very formal dynamic
of the novel on which we should focus. He has yet to read the perfect book, but his
method is sound: he seeks critique in the very forms of the novels he engages—in
the effect of interplay between different formal features of the texts. It is this
laminating of plot, style, narrative point of view, imagery, theme to one another in
the interest of working out problems—this extrusion of linguistic elements into
the volume of an idea—that instantiates novel thinking, that localizes novel cri-
tique. Jameson’s method of reading for form tacitly illustrates that formal actuation
in the novel might itself model utopian constructions—its articulated levels, its
resonant cohesion, its structural inclusion. The commons inscribed by free indirect
discourse—the grammar of generality, collective consciousness, general will—is
but one instantiation of a cooperative totality in which every part has a function,
every worker a contribution, and the whole emerges only by way of concerted
interactions.
As some of my itinerary through Jameson’s varying endeavors has likely
shown, the theoretical, abstract possibility of novelistic critique necessarily
introduces the concrete possibility of novelistic failure. Critique is a faculty of the
novel form, a capacity, a potentiality—but not a given. This is a logical corollary of
the theory, and the unwillingness to sift the grounds of how to judge failure

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doubtless hinders the development of the theory. If there exists immanent critique
in the novel, then there exist as well, perhaps most of the time, novels that fail at
critique, whether because they lack imagination, lack the minimum norms of
justice, or lack aesthetic consistency. Discerning these lacks must be a different
enterprise from games of gotcha with literature’s complicity; it must risk the
kind of evaluative judgment of the beautiful, the good, the critical, the stuff that
centers literary counterhegemony, and, sadly, the stuff that literary theory too
often forswears and avoids.
To have been critical, theorists of the novel need to resume judgments and
resume the dialectical critical procedure, to read the aesthetic dialectics and
immanent critique in the novel. Since I put no little emphasis on reading spatially
as affording the formalist and utopian dimensions necessary for immanent cri-
tique, on employing reading methods that fathom the spatiality of the dialectic
within criticism but also within literature itself, perhaps in closing I can outline
such a reading: Colson Whitehead’s spatially inventive The Underground Railroad
(2016) demands to be read as immanent critique, despite its embrace by Oprah’s
Book Club and the National Book Award and certainly despite the critical reception
of it as part of an underground-railroad-industrial-complex dedicated to producing
white mythology of white saviors.7 The novel’s core trope of literalizing the his-
torical metaphor of the underground railroad into actual infrastructure—tracks
and trains, locomotives and hand-cranks, hubs and spokes, communication and
ventilation—insistently connects labor and struggle. “Who built it?” the railroad
passengers ask; “Who builds anything in this country?” a railroad agent answers
(67). The black people who dug the tunnels and designed the routes are the black
people who infrastructuralize struggle and survival, are the black people whose
labor is the foundation of the violently accumulated wealth and territory that are
these United States. This trope is laminated into an even bolder idea by the novel’s
temporal logics and temporal confabulations, its frequent dyssynchrony and its
frequent, powerful presentism (present participles, second-person address to an
implied reader, and direct present tense): the labor of struggle, the work to survive
against the work of the nation, is not historical fiction in the past but searingly
ongoing reality in the present. Still yet, the composite presentness of the labor
of struggling and the struggle of laboring is intensified into an extensive social
problem of the nation by the novel’s spatial emphasis (its chapter division of the
narrative by locations, its reservation of imagistic detail for setting, its fictifying
disorientations and dislocations among north and south, its deterritorialization of
“northness”). And this sweeping, implicative gathering of the past into the present,
the South into the North, the fight for survival and the wages of work, attains even
more purchase on the general state of things through the novel’s unflinching third-
person narration, so oblique to the testimonials and multifocal first persons of the
literary tradition the text otherwise engages. With the syncretism of its formal
elements, The Underground Railroad intones that the general history of America is
not just the ongoingness of racial oppression but also the grace of striving. Cru-
cially, there is more to this critical insight than the negative pole of diagnosis; the

7
Schulz makes this argument in strong terms.

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novel infrastructures of the dialectic also furnish the projective synthesis of a utopian
pole. In its refusal to conclude in a promised land, in its relentless destabilization of
place, in its river of time, The Underground Railroad contours a living movement,
destination anywhere, rooted in labor as the path of living, that is the only way to get
from this particular dispensation of social antagonism out to a new deal.
Granting the novel the faculty of critique might dispel the false dichotomy
posited by postcritique between critiquing literature and loving it. It might fully
esteem the special kind of thinking, the special kind of world making and world
interpreting, that novels achieve. It might forge new links between the study of
literature and the study of social existence, building new bridges for imaginative
rebuilding. And wouldn’t that be good?

* * *

anna kornbluh is associate professor and associate head of English at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Realizing Capital (2014) and is currently com-
pleting a manuscript titled “The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space.”
She helped to found two scholarly cooperatives, InterCcECT (the Inter Chicago Circle for
Experimental Critical Theory) and the V21 Collective (Victorian studies for the twenty-first
century).

Works Cited

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Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Cambridge: MIT P, 1989.

Brown, Nicholas. “One, Two, Many Ends of Literature.” Mediations 24.2 (2009) < http://www
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Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. New York: Verso, 2007.

———. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT P, 1974.

Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge Classics, 2006.

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Schulz, Kathyrn. “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad.” New Yorker 22
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