Hyper-focused description in the nouveau roman cancels itself into its opposite

Evidence

What its “description” of things mainly shows is rather the breakdown of description and the failure of language to achieve some of the most obvious things it has been supposed to do. The appearance of an implacable focus on the specific and the particular, for instance — something already present in the more aberrant moderns such as Raymond Roussel, where the effort to describe objects in minute detail is sustained with implacability, at lengths interestingly intolerable for most readers — here at once inverts into its opposite, in a virtually textbook dialectical fashion. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the notion of affects being exhausted or self-cancelling — here linguistic precision exhausts itself; a concrete modernist-to-postmodern dialectic supporting the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the nouveau roman’s fixation on describing things reveals language’s failure to describe — a postmodern ‘waning’ at the level of prose itself.