Narrative point of view is a historical symptom of middle-class social atomization

Evidence

The fact is that the implied or reliable narrator described by Booth is possible only in a situation of relative class homogeneity, and indeed reflects a basic community of values shared by a fairly restricted class of readers: and such a situation is not brought back into the world by fiat. Céline’s nihilism, on the other hand, and modern subjectivistic relativism in general, reflect an increasing atomization of middle-class society, a fragmentation and decay of the larger social units and institutions. Indeed, it would not be difficult to show this process at work in the development of the novel as a form from Henry James on. Such a demonstration would bring out the relationship between point of view as a literary technique and monadic isolation as a social fact; it would find confirmation in the creation of artificial totalities (such as Gide’s concept of the roman as a kind of additive sum of the various récits of individual existences) and in the premium placed on epistemology as a theme and on the irony of reality and appearance in a relativistic universe, an irony of which Pirandello is the dramatist, Conrad and Ford the novelists, and Fernando Pessoa, perhaps, the poet laureate. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 702

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the Lukács lineage — reification and the monadic subject — that Jameson is exploring; also anticipates the ‘postindividual’ art-and-alienation argument of the later Jameson (Postmodernism). — connects to: Szondi showed dramatic formal-dialectical problems mirror social problems; Narrative form registers objective crises in its own social raw material — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 4616; Economic class boundaries do not align with psychological character structures — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 565 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines what a genuinely historical notion of point of view would mean: a technique that reflects monadic isolation as a social fact.

Broader Connections

• Narrative form registers objective crises in its own social raw material #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 4616
• Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity. #corroborates (0.78) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1678
• Economic class boundaries do not align with psychological character structures #corroborates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 565