Ordinary continuous life lacks events substantial enough for historical narration

Evidence

Thus the scandal of the revolutionary event for academic historiography lies in the radically new type of event which it offers to historical narration. In ordinary continuous life, the life of custom and tradition, nothing really changes or happens, there is basically nothing to tell in the narrative sense: there are only “institutions” on the one hand, and the random stories of individual life on the other, which therefore lose even what existential density they possess and become mere examples of the former (the life of a peasant in the Middle Ages, the daily routine of a seventeenth-century burgher’s wife, and so forth). — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Prefigures the now-common observation (epitomized in Hayden White’s narrativist historiography) that narrative form itself is a theory of what counts as historical event. Jameson is doing proto-narrativist work from within a Marxist frame. — connects to: Narration is historically possible only in concrete dramatic moments — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401; Real history lacks tidy dramatic arcs and tidy causation. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1173; Leibniz and Bergson treated temporality as mere immanent continuity

Broader Connections

• Narration is historically possible only in concrete dramatic moments #corroborates (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401
• Real history lacks tidy dramatic arcs and tidy causation. #corroborates (0.75) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1173
• Leibniz and Bergson treated temporality as mere immanent continuity #exemplifies (0.72)