Jameson and the Order of the Comfy Chair

I have to admit to an appreciation of the reading from "On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act." It had an almost anti-climatic, post- resolution sense of ease after weeks of butting our heads against Truth (big "T", little "t", CAPITALIZED, italicized, bolded, and "quoted "T"). It was like a cool refreshing drink after the parching desert where nihilist "monks" chanted a decentralizing mantra of "Nada, Nada, all is Nada." I found myself reveling in phrases that identified a principle as "the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation" (181). I rejoiced in the resurrection of the author in the forms of Dante, Milton, and Joyce. I, too, believe that "even archaic moments of the cultural past...do not go away just because we choose to ignore them" (182). To grasp this cultural past is to behold a mystery. This mystery not only possesses a center, it requires a unified "human adventure" in order to be truly comprehensible. I stood up and cheered the formula, "Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day. ..." (182). The extreme graciousness of Jameson was impressive in noting that other perspectives, though having merit, are in fact, "more specialized interpretive codes whose insights are strategically limited as much by their own situational origins as by the narrow or local ways in which they construe or construct their objects of study" (183). I almost wept with relief after so much energy has been expended over the futility of words and the ethereal nature of language when I read, "Indeed, no working model of the functioning of language, the nature of communication or of the speech act, and the dynamics of formal and stylistic change is conceivable which does not imply a whole philosophy of history. ..." (184). All is not truly relative; there really is a mysticism implied in language that transcends mere formulas. As Telleyrand is credited with observing: "language ... having been given to us in order to conceal our thoughts" (184). Ahh! This is incredibly warm and comfy. Can I please have some marshmallows with my hot chocolate?