Literary style flaws reflect their authors’ historical moment, not merely personal failure.

Evidence

The dialectical structure of our negative judgments is even more apparent: think of the grimace and caricature to which we object in Balzac—is it anything more than a too hasty attempt to assimilate the objective social material—characters, furniture, institutions—to the personal enthusiasms of the author himself, imperiously deforming and distorting it for his own purposes? Think, on the other hand, of the rather metallic brittleness of Flaubert, which results from too rigid and surgical a suppression of the subjective dimensions of the work, until the hero becomes as vacuous as a recording eye, in L’Education sentimentale, and the work is finally, in Salammbô, degraded into cinematographic phantasmagoria. Think of the “mannered” quality of Henry James: those great pauses between meaningful half-sentences, the close-ups of small areas of objectivity in an attempt to infuse them with subjective intention, in the way a random word surrounded by a “pregnant” silence becomes ominous with meaning. Think of the precariousness of the synthesis of Joyce, in which matter once again seems momentarily reconciled with spirit, all the objects and detritus of the city luminous and as though informed by subjectivity—except that the seams show; there is something willful and arbitrary about the relationship of the individual chapters to each other, and the new reconciliation is paid for as dearly as that of Schoenberg in music. The novel is always an attempt to reconcile the consciousness of writer and reader with the objective world at large; so it is that the judgments we make on the great novelists fall not on them, but on the moment of history which they reflect and on which their structures pass sentence. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 98

Categorization

• XREF: The Balzac/Flaubert/James/Joyce anatomy of style-failure as historical mediation echoes nothing directly, but the notion that judgments on novels fall on history itself is pure Lukácsian ‘great realist’ criticism — connects forward to Jameson’s own later Marxism and Form thesis on reification. — connects to: The historical novel reveals contradictions of content becoming contradictions of form — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 695; Literary judgments require historical knowledge to separate the personal from the representative — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1665; Literary criticism’s relevance varies with the historical and ideological moment — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 790 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the dialectical critic reading the whole canon through the mediation of objective history — each novelist’s signature flaw is a window onto a specific historical contradiction, and the series itself traces the progressive withdrawal of subjectivity from the objective world.

Broader Connections

• Literary judgments require historical knowledge to separate the personal from the representative #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1665
• Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735
• Literary criticism’s relevance varies with the historical and ideological moment #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 790