The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

be obvious that no work in the area of narrative analysis can afford to ignore the fundamental contributions of Northrop Frye, the codifica tion by A. J. Greimas of the whole Formalist and semiotic traditions, the heritage of a certain Christian hermeneutics, and above all, the indispensable explorations by Freud of the logic of dreams, and by Claude Levi-Strauss of the logic of "primitive" storytelling and pensee sauvage, not to speak of the flawed yet monumental achievements in this area of the greatest Marxist philosopher of modern times, Georg Lukacs. These divergent and unequal bodies of work are here interro gated and evaluated from the perspective of the specific critical and interpretive task of the present volume, namely to restructure the prob lematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representa tion, of history, and of cultural production, around the all-informing process of narrative, which I take to be (here using the shorthand of philosophical idealism) the central function or instance of the human