A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him

Evidence

As for the human environment of Hemingway’s books, expatriation is itself a kind of device or pretext for them. For the immense and complex fabric of American social reality itself is clearly inaccessible to the careful and selective type of sentence which he practices: so it is useful to have to do with a reality thinned out, the reality of foreign cultures and of foreign languages, where the individual beings come before us not in the density of a concrete social situation in which we also are involved, but rather with the cleanness of objects which can be verbally circumscribed. And when at the end of his life the world began to change, and the Cuban Revolution made a retreat back within the borders of the United States in order, it does not seem too farfetched to speculate that it was the resistance of such American reality, which as a writer he had never practiced, that brought him to stylistic impotence and ultimate suicide. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Jameson reverses the direction: style doesn’t merely express a worldview — it actively selects and excludes whole social territories, and being cut off from untrained material can destroy a writer. This is a paradigm worth sitting with.
• XREF: Resonates with Jameson’s later argument about realism and romance forms, and with Adorno’s claim that form is sedimented social content. — connects to: Formal technical problems in drama mirror social problems of isolation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2237; Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741; Scholarly theoretical lenses can actively conceal social reality rather than reveal it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3491 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Class origin and ideology jointly determine what a writer’s fiction excludes. #expands (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 239
• Ritualistic, unconscious devices structure literary form and decay with social fragmentation #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 144
• Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp #complicates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741
• Free indirect discourse can lock a novel into one character’s worldview #exemplifies (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 104
• Scholarly theoretical lenses can actively conceal social reality rather than reveal it #exemplifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3491
• Hegemonic constraints on writers were productive, not merely inhibiting #corroborates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 75