Realist narration can analyze global totality through defamiliarized local spaces

Evidence

Acknowledging that the palace itself burned in 1936, but not acknowledging its figurative transposition of “tower” from the original palace towers, demolished in 1941 to remove a landmark for war pilots, to the television transmitter tower that is currently the fourth-tallest structure in London, the narration erects a continuous structuration of intimacy by imperialism, of privacy by the state, of personality by mediation. In so doing, the derealized figure partakes in the great realist tradition of dislocating and defamiliarizing existing spaces—think Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, T. S. Eliot’s provinces, Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire—taking London and anchoring it with an omnivisible tower, a prism for the global totalities concentrated in and determining the local affects. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Shows how mediation/antiphenomenal technique works in a concrete novel — this is exactly the machinery Kornbluh juxtaposes against immediacy throughout the book. — connects to: Deep stories furnish ready-made narrative lenses for interpreting the world. — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 228