Point of view as a category cannot apply to pre-modern narrative forms

Evidence

This is the point at which the tautological paradox intervenes: for surely it is paradoxical to speak of point of view as a historical phenomenon when all stories and anecdotes, from earliest times, have of necessity involved the choice of a narrative viewpoint of one kind or another? This is, however, precisely the point. To the degree that point of view as a category reflects the historical situation of the middle classes in modern times, it is an unsuitable concept for dealing with historically different forms, and cannot without a contradiction in terms be applied to such works as medieval narrative or folk epic. I will go even further and say that in the same way the solution to the dilemma described by Booth can itself be conceived only as a result of social and historical change, and would imply the transcendence of individualistic point of view in general by more genuinely collective forms, by new modes of narration which correspond formally to the realities of a postindividual world; and indeed the beginnings of such new forms may be seen everywhere in modern literature. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 703

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Adorno/negative-dialectics habit of turning an apparent universal into the index of its own historical moment — the same move as in ‘Ideology of Modernism’ debates with Lukács. — connects to: Narrative categories like character and plot are the form of content, not content itself — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6030; Contemporary fiction evicts third-person narration through privatized perspective — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 167
• QUESTION: Where exactly does Jameson see the beginnings of ‘genuinely collective’ postindividual narration in modern literature? Worth chasing his examples in the next pages.

Broader Connections

• Narrative categories like character and plot are the form of content, not content itself #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6030
• Contemporary fiction evicts third-person narration through privatized perspective #corroborates (0.70) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 167