Literature formally resolves, in the imaginary, social contradictions that cannot be resolved in reality

Evidence

So it is that for Sartre Flaubert’s work can be said to reflect the social contradictions of his period, but on condition that we understand it to do so on the mode of attempting to resolve, in the imaginary, what is socially irreconcilable. … In the case of Flaubert, however, such affiliation is problematical: the bourgeois is for him the object of a repugnance of very much the same order as self-loathing. … Thus, even the formal level of Flaubert’s work reflects an impossible attempt to combine these two irreconcilables; and the work becomes a kind of emblematic transfer of concrete social phenomena into the characteristic mode of being of literature itself, where they are embodied in that peculiar Flaubertian combination of a religion of art and a corrosive social pessimism, of a formal unction and a kind of revulsion in the content, ennui being so to speak the empty passage of time in an attitude of prayer for someone who does not believe and cannot pray. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 740

Categorization

• XREF: This is the heart of dialectical criticism’s imaginary-resolution thesis; connects to Marx’s famous formulation about religion as imaginary flowers, and to Jameson’s later The Political Unconscious where the same model recurs. — connects to: Epic restoration requires social transformation, not the novelist’s will — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 367; The historical novel reveals contradictions of content becoming contradictions of form — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 695; Art resolves real social contradictions through purely formal means — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1774 (+6 more)
• DEFINE: The passage concretizes Jameson’s key concept of imaginary resolution — the work resolves in the imaginary what is socially irreconcilable — via Sartre’s reading of Flaubert.

Broader Connections

• Art resolves real social contradictions through purely formal means #corroborates (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1774
• Art expresses utopian harmony negatively by embodying contradictions unresolved #corroborates (0.90) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 549
• Art works expose social contradictions through their internal formal tensions #qualifies (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 19
• Formal decorative patterns can encode and dream real social contradictions they cannot consciously grasp #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 741
• Religion functions as a utopia reconciling real historical contradictions in mythological form #expands (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1440