The premise is that in order to tell the best, richest, fullest stories, or (what amounts to the same thing) in order to offer the best possible interpretations, you have to lay the object you are interpreting next to human history as a whole, or as much of it as you can manage, and stretch it to see what new shapes it assumes. The best story is the most inclusive of other stories, other histories. This principle has a certain persuasiveness even if you are not totally sure that the most inclusive story deserves to be thought of, by analogy with Freud, as society’s political unconscious.

For Jameson, it is the ability to see big stories hidden away in small ones that is Marxism’s secret selling point. Narrative on the usual small or private scale is temporally provincial, comfortable only in or near its own narrow present. And to many readers those are the only stories that feel real. But reality is larger than that. If humankind is going to understand what it is capable of becoming, it needs a better sense of what it has been. Only Marxism, Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious,

can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus . . . can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.