Modern reified time forces novels to carve out fictional elbowroom

Evidence

The same loss of immediate comprehensibility takes place on other levels as well: in the time of the work, in the institutions that form its background, in the objects among which the characters move. For the unquestioned, ritualistic time of village life no longer exists; there is henceforth a separation between public and private, between work and leisure, and the story must find its elbowroom in a world in which men’s lives are divided between routine drudgery and sleep. So the novelist arranges his plot to take place on weekends (Camus’ Stranger), during vacations (Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain), during great crises in which the routine breaks down (war literature). If the hero’s profession leaves him enough free time for his private life (Joyce’s Ulysses), then somehow the very choice of the profession must be justified in its turn (advertising as work with language). — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 347

Categorization

• XREF: This is the dialectical analysis of how reification (the separation of public/private, work/leisure) structurally conditions narrative form — connects directly to Lukács’s theory of the novel and to Adorno’s critique of the administered world. — connects to: The modern novel shifts the hero’s dominant relation to reality from space to time — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 364; Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 218; Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 408
• DEFINE: Shows concretely what ‘loss of immediate comprehensibility’ means as a structural condition of narrative, not just an abstract concept.

Broader Connections

• Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time. #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 218
• Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 408