Three superimposed rhythms structure The Gold Standard and foreground economic causality

Evidence

Three distinct rhythms seem to course unevenly through this book, attention to any one of which backgrounds the others and produces a rather different reading. These are (1) the practice of the homologies as such, or, in other words, that “montage of historical attractions” in which we saw the most distinctive formal principle of New Historicist discourse; (2) the polemics ostensibly waged against liberal or radical interpretations but which also in fact recapitulate the “position” outlined in Against Theory; and (3) a protohistorical narrative in which something is affirmed about the specificity of this particular period, including its waning and its imminent transformation into something else — this narrative is most clearly grasped in economic terms (the ideology of the gold standard, the debates on contracts, the coming into being of the trusts), but can also be reconstructed in terms of literary movements or genres (realism, romance, naturalism), and even in terms of representation as such in the remarkable pages on trompe-l’oeil painting and photography (where the discussions of ecriture probably also belong). Not the least interest of The Gold Standard lies in this unplanned polyphony, which is therefore to be distinguished from some putative New Historicist norm by the presence of other features or levels (in particular, the second or polemic one). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 439