Balzac’s totality of characters replaced external reality only as a detotalized series

Evidence

Only in Balzac perhaps is some ultimate version of the novel of abstract idealism possible; and even here, in the henceforth secularized world, it is based on a formal tour de force. On the one hand, we find the familiar obsessed hero, the man of an idée fixe, inventor, poet, businessman, aristocrat. Yet the second term of the opposition, that outside reality without which no tension is possible, is now nothing more than the sum total of all the other obsessed characters of La Comédie humaine, or in other words, of society itself. Thus once more a genuine totality comes into being in which the other works of the series provide a density of external reality, a massive resisting outside world, for use in the individual conflict within any given story. Yet obviously this tension is bought at great cost: La Comédie humaine is what Sartre would call a detotalized totality; it is never completely present in any individual work, only the fragments of the whole are fully realized before us. With Balzac the novel of abstract idealism is exhausted as a form; the reality of the modern world no longer offers adequate materials for its construction. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly back to Sartre’s concept of the detotalized totality and forward to Lukács’s theory of the novel which Jameson is expounding here — core to the reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage tracing. — connects to: Reality is grasped only as a series of further representations
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘detotalized totality’ — a key dialectical concept for this chapter.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Reality is grasped only as a series of further representations

Broader Connections

• Reality is grasped only as a series of further representations #expands (0.85)