Style, not theme, is a fiction’s deepest concrete subject.

Evidence

Thus it is a mistake to think, for instance, that the books of Hemingway deal essentially with such things as courage, love, and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style. This is indeed the most “concrete” experience in Hemingway, yet to understand its relationship to the other, more dramatic experiences we must reformulate our notion of inner form after the more complex model of a hierarchy of motivations, in which the various elements of the work are ordered at various levels from the surface, and serve so to speak as pretexts each for the existence of a deeper one, so that in the long run everything in the work exists in order to bring to expression that deepest level of the work which is the concrete itself; or, reversing the model after the fashion of the Prague School, to foreground the work’s most essential content. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 779

Categorization

• XREF: Finely parallels Adorno’s insistence that form is the social sediment of content, and Benjamin’s notion of aura in the work’s technical construction; this is the Frankfurt-school mediation avant la lettre Jameson is recovering. — connects to: No higher language could exist without the fiction that dresses abstractions as real — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 398; Idealist aesthetics identify form and content, not technique and plot; Narrative categories like character and plot are the form of content, not content itself — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6030
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘hierarchy of motivations’ model where surface content serves as pretext for deeper levels down to the concrete itself — a key Jameson dialectical concept.
• SEED: Angle: reading an author’s whole corpus through their sentence-practice rather than their themes — a formalist-materialist method article.

Broader Connections

• Narrative categories like character and plot are the form of content, not content itself #contradicts (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6030
• No higher language could exist without the fiction that dresses abstractions as real #complicates (0.75) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 398
• Idealist aesthetics identify form and content, not technique and plot #expands (0.72)