Economic prosperity erases irrevocability, and with it the very possibility of plot
Evidence
There can be no doubt that this opposition corresponds to a historical experience: the older tale, indeed the classical nineteenth-century novel as well, expressed a social life in which the individual was presented with single-shot, irreparable choices and opportunities, in which he had to play everything on a single roll of the dice, in which his life did therefore properly tend to take on the appearance of fate or destiny, of a story that can be told. Whereas in the modern world (which is to say, in Western Europe and the United States), economic prosperity is such that nothing is ever really irrevocable in this sense: hence the philosophy of freedom, hence the modernistic literature of consciousness of which Sartre is here a theorist; hence also the decay of plot, for where nothing is irrevocable (in the absence of death in Benjamin’s sense) there is no story to tell either, there is only a series of experiences of equal weight whose order is indiscriminately reversible. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 168
Categorization
- XREF: Direct line to Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and the death of epic totality under capitalism; also anticipates Jameson’s later work on postmodern ‘schizophrenia’ and pastiche. — connects to: Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1678; The turn against space in economics preceded and enabled realist fiction’s crisis. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1678
- DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dialectical hinge: an economic condition (prosperity/irrevocability) is shown to be the material precondition for an aesthetic transformation (freedom-as-consciousness, decay of plot). This is the mediation method in miniature.
Broader Connections
- Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity.
#expands(0.78) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1678 - The turn against space in economics preceded and enabled realist fiction’s crisis.
#expands(0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1678