Chapter 5: Reading and the division of Labour
Conducting Bodies
This chapter is structured around a discussion of the novelist Claude Simon and the nouveau roman (or "The New Novel"). Nouveau roman is one of those literary movements that I'm only sort of vaguely aware of, but generally it's talked about in terms of its unique preoccupation with space and (usually women's) bodies. Here's I guess a fairly representative little chunk from Simon's Conducting Bodies, a novel that Jameson returns to throughout this chapter.
She is a young woman with blond hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, dressed in a blouse with the ends tied in a knot below her breasts, her hips, buttocks, and thighs imprisoned in a pair of tightfitting Bermuda shorts in an apple-green and lemon-yellow flower print. A leather bag dangles from a long strap slung over her shoulder. Between the knotted blouse-ends and the waistband of the Bermuda shorts a patch of bare skin is visible, tanned a tawny gold. Situated beneath the diaphragm and weighing between 1500 and 2000 grams, the liver is approximately 28 centimeters wide, 16 centimeters thick, and 8 centimeters high. It occupies all of the right hypochondrium, and extends a short distance over into the left hypochondrium. It is reddish brown in color; its consistency is firm but friable. It is marked with the imprint of contiguous organs. The hepatic artery (carrying oxygenated blood) and the portal vein (carrying blood from the digestive tract and nutritive elements which the liver chemically converts) feed into the pedicle located on its lower surface, from which the hepatic veins arise, carrying off bile to the choledoch and then to the intestine. The tall silhouettes of the skyscrapers are all of a uniform color, a dark, almost solid brown.
You get it. It's mid-century French guy stuff. And the whole book is like this. Just a single unbroken paragraph very flatly describing people and things. Note in particular here the transition between the description of the woman's body and the liver. There isn't a direct relationship between those two things but we sort of naturally want to infer that what's being described might be this woman and then her organs, and then maybe some buildings that she's walking past.
For Jameson, Conducting Bodies is notable first and foremost because of the "historical curiosity" that the necessity of this inference poses, or what he characterizes as a reading experience in which "we strain to identify what is happening beneath our eyes...while nervously anticipating the next shift without warning to an unrelated plot string" (132).
Part of what makes this novel difficult to follow is its resistance to good old fashion proper nouns: We get descriptions of a man on the phone with a woman, a man in a doctor's office, and a man travelling to South America for a writer's conference, and we're left to infer that this is all the same man, and then perhaps that the objects and people being described are all things that he's encountered.
But none of this is ever confirmed to us. And so the novel operates in this funny in-between zone of the personal (i.e., maybe this is all one guy, and we're getting this annoyingly stylized depiction of what he does and sees) and the highly impersonal (i.e., maybe this is all just random objects and occurrences with no governing logic or central "protagonist" around which we can orient ourselves).
What we're describing here is ultimately a breakdown of language as such, or the failure of words to meaningfully correspond to things. Of course, this breakdown is eventually theorized by our old pals Derrida and the poststructuralists as a feature of language in general. There is always going to be slippage between words and things, there's always going to be a gap between the signification of a thing and the actual thing itself.
But the innovation of the nouveau roman here being identified is that it forces a perpetual awareness of this breakdown. As Jameson describes, "it opens up a provisional space in which this breakdown is reexperienced over and over again as a process, a temporary runoff between the habitual onset of linguistic belief and the inevitable degradation of the signified into its material signifier or the sign itself into a mere image" (139). So where most usages of language (literary or otherwise) tend to paper over this slippage, the nouveau roman wants to keep it at the foreground.
the train in motion
The upshot here is that the nouveau roman really forces you to pay attention to what you're reading, not just for its narrative content but also the actual slipperiness of the language through which that narrative content is articulated.
This latter operation is something that "traditional" novels do for us most obviously just by naming characters and more clearly articulating the relationships between objects and plot points as their introduced, effectively labelling the components out of which the narrative will be assembled. The potential for slippage is still there (because there still isn't some fundamental ontic tethering between words and things) but generally novelists don't actively work against their readers in making sense of what is going on.
By not doing this work for us, the nouveau roman produces this very particular aesthetic experience, that Jamson describes (in my view, kind of amazingly) as "the first moments in which we feel the train in motion." Here's Jameson:
we are occupied with our various tasks— identifying this or that fragment of a gesture, making some preliminary inventory of the various plot strings as they appear one after the other— when suddenly we also become aware that something is happening, that time has begun to move, that the objects, even as imperfectly identified as they are, have begun to change under our very eyes; the book is actually getting on with it, getting written, getting finished (143).
Now that's nice.
Non-Alienated Labour
So what does all of this have to do with Postmodernism. Well. As we've been working to describe here, the nouveau roman forces us to pay attention to language on this really granular level. And as Jameson notes, this is an uncomfortable way to read: "We have to read these sentences word for word, and that is something already fairly unusual (and painfully unfamiliar) in an information society in which a premium is placed on briefing and instant recognition, so that sentences are either skimmed or preprepared for rapid assimilation as so many signs" (146). And here I'll just pause to thank you so much for subscribing to my "Jameson Summaries" newsletter.
But Jameson asks, "is it possible, then, that the reading of so specialized and highly technical an elite literary artifact as Les corps conducteurs might offer a figure or analogon for nonalienated labour and for the Utopian experience of a radically different, alternate society?" (146). As it turns out, it is possible. Kind of.
Importantly, what he's getting at here is not just a soft romantic point about how, like, taking the time to slow down and just really read a novel is itself a kind of ~radical praxis~ through which one might resist and subvert the unrelenting pace of life under late capitalism or whatever.
In fact, the idea of "unalienated labour" itself is really tricky to pin down in our contemporary moment. As he notes, "the very experience of art itself today is alienated and made 'other' and inaccessible to too many people to serve as a useful vehicle for their imaginative experience" (147), noting in particular that the production of both "high art" and "mass culture" are both rendered inaccessible by way of "special training, collective division of labour, unique technologies, a guild or professional mentality, along with the simple indifference that accompanies activities from which we are excluded" (147). I can't just wander onto the set of Bosch and unalienatedly experience participating in its production.
But surely the set of Bosch is not the only place art is being produced. I've got hobbies, for instance. My time spent dicking around in Garageband isn't "alienated labour." But here too Jameson finds alienation: "In our own (postmodern) period...in which the socialization and institutionalization of individual life have intensified beyond any equivalents in an earlier twentieth-century capitalism, we will not be surprised by the paradoxical discovery that the hobby has itself been organized and institutionalized" (148). What's being produced, even in the DIY confines of one's apartment, is always already figured within these institutional bodies and is thus potentially alienated.
Realism
All of this is to say, it's really tricky for art to thematize production and activity in a way that isn't immediately refigured as a kind of alienation. But Simon's foregrounding of the failure of correspondence between words and things might also be read as a kind of failed labour. As Jameson describes, "the palpable struggle to get sense data into sentences leaves a residue in its failure, lets you sense the presence of the referent outside to closed door" (150). The "labour" here then isn't so much the alienable labour of the (postmodern) subject, but rather the failed labour of language itself.
So then: what Simon offers us is a model for handling this failure of correspondance as a kind of unalienated labour. Conducting Bodies demonstrates how one can use language to index its own failure to do basically the one thing we need it to do, which is to refer to things in the world.
And while Simon is writing before the proper onset of "postmodernism," you can probably already see how this might correspond to the broader character of postmodernism that Jameson has been working to describe, where there has been a more generalized breakdown between signs and the things they're meant to signify, leaving behind only surfaces, logos, images, etc. etc. etc.
In this way, Simon might anticipate what we could describe as a kind of postmodern realism. As Jameson argues, "For us today, it is generally the case that what looks like realism turns out at best to offer unmediated access only to what we think about reality, to our images and ideological stereotypes about it...That is, of course, also a part of the Real, and very much so indeed! But it is also characteristic of our period that we are very disinclined to think so, and that nothing chills us more, or is more calculated to break contact, than the discovery that this or that view of things is in reality 'merely' someone else's projection" (150).
While the signs and stereotypes that characterize the postmodern cultural landscape aren't quite the "realism" of like, Henry James, they do now effectively constitute a growing portion of the Real. And just as Simon's attentiveness to the more generalized failures of language leaves a kind of residual trace of its referent, so too might an attentiveness to the images and signs that populate the postmodern cultural landscape yield a fleeting glimpse of whatever world exists just beyond its borders.