Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity.

Evidence

Zola predicted the end of his own genre, as well as that of a self-contained peasantry in France, in La Terre when he has the school teacher articulate the idea that the import of cheap American wheat that then appeared imminent was bound to bury locality (its parochial politics and culture) within a flood of internationalist influences. Frank Norris, on the other side of the Atlantic, sensed the same problem in The octopus - the wheat farmers of California had to recognize that they were ‘merely a part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the world around, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant.’ How was it possible, using the narrative structures of realism, to write anything other than a parochialist and hence to some degree ‘unrealistic’ novel in the face of all this spatial simul­ taneity? Realist narrative structures assumed, after all, that a story could be told as if it was unfolding coherently, event after event, in time. Such structures were inconsistent with a reality in which two events in quite different spaces occurring at the same time could so intersect as to change how the world worked. Flaubert, the modernist, pioneered a path that Zola, the realist, found it impossible to emulate. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1678

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core thesis: economic change (global wheat trade) makes a narrative form (realism) structurally obsolete, and modernist form is what replaces it — the economic-causes-aesthetic mechanism at the heart of Harvey’s whole book.
• SEED: Angle: how today’s algorithmic feed simultaneity mirrors — or differs from — the spatial simultaneity that killed the realist novel.
• XREF: connects to: The turn against space in economics preceded and enabled realist fiction’s crisis. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1678; Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60; Online platforms collapse the institutional framing that once distinguished cultural forms from capital flows. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Online platforms collapse the institutional framing that once distinguished cultural forms from capital flows. #expands (0.78)
• Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism. #expands (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60