Narrative form registers objective crises in its own social raw material

Evidence

What must first be observed about the populism of The Nether World is that it representS the solution (or attempted solution) to a specifically formal and narrative problem, what the younger Lukacs would have called the crisis of narrative totality. The prodigious, ever-widening agons of Balzacian narrative do not seem to meet this dilemma in their path; nor does the immense spatial network of late Dickens, which weaves a bewildering host of characters and their itineraries into the “untotaliz­ able totality” of a sprawling London, ever seem to approach the limit at which its own organizational device might become dangerously con­ scious of itself, and thereby register some objective crisis in its own raw material or “sotjal equivalent. ” In Gissing, however, the Dickensian city is little by little drained of its vitality and reduced to the empty grid of calls by one character to another, visits to oppressive rooms and apartments, and intervals of random strolls through the poorer quar­ ters. The city therefore no longer functions as the molar unity of these narratives, as -their outer emblem of “totality,” as the external sign of the meaningful unity of their social content. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 4616

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the methodological core of Jameson’s project — form as the register of social totality — the ‘always historicize’ imperative applied to narrative structure itself.
• XREF: Connects to Lukacs’s theory of the novel and to Jameson’s own discussion of Balzac the mythologist in later chapters; also to the reader’s interest in modes of production as interpretive horizon. — connects to: Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 200; Fiction writers can develop genuine nausea and crisis over the artificiality of made-up narrative; Trauma’s fragmented memory demanded a nonlinear narrative form — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 374 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Narrative knowledge transmits the pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond #expands (0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 200
• Trauma’s fragmented memory demanded a nonlinear narrative form #exemplifies (0.85) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 374
• Fiction writers can develop genuine nausea and crisis over the artificiality of made-up narrative #exemplifies (0.80)