Reducing typical characters to class allegories is itself an idealist move

Evidence

Of course this category has been mishandled in the vulgar Marxist practice of reducing characters to mere allegories of social forces, of turning “typical” characters into mere symbols of class, such as the petit bourgeois, the counterrevolutionary, the landed nobleman, the Utopian socialist intellectual, and so forth. Sartre has pointed out that such categories are themselves idealistic, in that they presuppose immutable forms, eternal Platonic ideas, of the various social classes: what they leave out is precisely history itself, and the notion of the unique historical situation, to which Lukács himself has always been faithful in his criticism. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 390

Categorization

• XREF: Sartre’s critique of static class essences connects to the reader’s other Frankfurt-School texts; Sartre listed in the reading purpose as part of the dialectical lineage. — connects to: Universals function as normative ideals, not logical class concepts — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 790; Postmodern allegory is horizontal and relational rather than vertical and fixed — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392; Audience sympathy for a character is a structural effect of genre and class ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 703
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘typical’ category by distinguishing Lukács’s historical faithfulness from vulgar Marxist allegorization on one side and Platonic essentialism on the other.

Broader Connections

• Universals function as normative ideals, not logical class concepts #qualifies (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 790
• Postmodern allegory is horizontal and relational rather than vertical and fixed #complicates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392