Postmodern fabulation substitutes invented history for real historical praxis

Evidence

Fabulation — or if you prefer, mythomania and outright tall tales — is no doubt the symptom of social and historical impotence, of the blocking of possibilities that leaves little option but the imaginary. Yet its very invention and inventiveness endorses a creative freedom with respect to events it cannot control, by the sheer act of multiplying them; agency here steps out of the historical record itself into the process of devising it; and new multiple or alternate strings of events rattle the bars of the national tradition and the history manuals whose very constraints and necessities their parodic force indicts. Narrative invention here thus by way of its very implausibility becomes the figure of a larger possibility of praxis, its compensation but also its affirmation in the form of projection and mimetic reenactment. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 786

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines postmodern fabulation/mythomania as the symptom of blocked historical agency and the imaginary compensation for it — key for the reader’s parody-pastiche distinction.
• XREF: This inverts the common reading of fabulation as pure play; connects to Jameson’s larger claim that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, where history itself is commodified.