Surrealism rejects novelistic description as a surrender to reified perception

Evidence

But it is their theory of narration which perhaps most strikingly illustrates the way the Surrealists propose to reawaken the deadened external world around us. It is in appearance a refusal of narration altogether: for Breton hates novels, and holds the obligatory description of physical surroundings to be the basest kind of surrender to the reality principle, since in it that purely perceptual level of things to which our most superficial waking consciousness corresponds is taken for Being itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 199

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the Frankfurt-School critique of reification — Lukács’s ‘reified’ perceptual immediacy and Adorno’s hostility to the realism of mere description. This is precisely the lineage the reader is tracing. — connects to: Surrealism aims to reconstruct the primal continuity of unconscious fantasy; Preconceived theory intervening in art degrades the novel to thesis illustration — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 392

Broader Connections

• Surrealism aims to reconstruct the primal continuity of unconscious fantasy #expands (0.85)
• Preconceived theory intervening in art degrades the novel to thesis illustration #qualifies (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 392