Literary description signals the breakdown of human relation to action

Evidence

Thus description, as a dominant mode of representation, is the sign that some vital relationship to action and to the possibility of action has broken down. Lukács compares the horse race in Zola’s Nana with the similar episode in Anna Karenina. The first is a brilliant set piece observed from the outside, having little to do with the fates of the characters. In the second, the characters are passionately involved: lengthy external descriptions are unnecessary because we feel the intensity of the event, not through visual contemplation, but through the hopes and expectations of the characters themselves. Thus description begins when external things are felt to be alienated from human activity, come to be viewed as static things-in-themselves; but it is fulfilled when even the human beings who inhabit these lifeless settings become themselves dehumanized, become lifeless tokens, mere objects in motion to be rendered from the outside. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Lukács’s category of description vs. narration here echoes his distinction from ‘Narrate or Describe?’ and maps directly onto Jameson’s project of reading narrative form as a symptom of reification — connects to the Adorno/Benjamin lineage the reader is tracking. — connects to: Literary description flourishes precisely when human beings become reified — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 402; Literary works generate the very situations they also react against — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786; Real action modifies man and reality while verbal action only creates puppets — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1132 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines ‘description’ as a diagnostic category in Lukács: a formal sign that human praxis has broken down, culminating in the dehumanization of characters into objects.

Broader Connections

• Literary works generate the very situations they also react against #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786
• Discourse collapses the thought-action divide and shapes how the West behaved toward others #expands (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 569
• Real action modifies man and reality while verbal action only creates puppets #corroborates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1132
• Verbalism results when a word loses its action dimension #complicates (0.78) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 257
• Narration neutralizes subject and object, anticipating utopian reconciliation in its structure #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 384