Conflicting critical verdicts on one author are variations on a single structural model

Evidence

Such a chart is however worse than misleading unless it is clearly understood that under the right circumstances, the same cultural fact may be seen as occupying any of these positions, or, indeed, as accomplishing a rotation through all of the available positions in succession. Thus the novels of Balzac, normally understood as a “realism” in the sense indicated above, may be seen as reflecting the reactionary ideology of a dying class, as evolving what are essentially personal and formal wish-fulfillments out of his own personal situation, or as anticipating, through the complex interpersonal structure of La Comédie humaine, some new postindividualistic collective formal organization. In much the same way, I believe that it would not be difficult to articulate Lenin’s various assessments of Tolstoy—reactionary and progressive alike, both a religious ideologue and a revolutionary prophet—according to some such combinational scheme. What this implies is that such apparent contradictions in judgment are in reality to be seen as variations on a common model, rather than as “opinions” which we are called upon to adopt or to repudiate. History is indeed precisely this obligation to multiply the horizons in which the object is maintained, to multiply the perspectives from which it is seen; and I believe that to see differing judgments or evaluations in this fashion is not to speak out for some theoretical objectivity or neutrality, but rather to replace us at the very source of value itself and of such structural permutation, and to translate apparently literary disagreements back into the ultimate reality of conflicting groups in the historical world. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 748

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core Jamesonian method of mediation — showing apparent contradictions as permutations of a common model. Connects to Adorno’s insistence that the same cultural object can be read as both ideology and utopia, and Lukács on the standpoint of totality. — connects to: Structural interpretation reads the gaps rather than the unified whole — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1394
• DEFINE: Clarifies how Jameson’s combinational scheme (‘mediating’ between reflection, wish-fulfillment, and anticipation) dissolves the need to choose among interpretations — a signature dialectical move.

Broader Connections

• Structural interpretation reads the gaps rather than the unified whole #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1394