The modern novel shifts the hero’s dominant relation to reality from space to time

Evidence

Yet at this point Lukács makes one of his most remarkable observations (and it has often been pointed out that in this he anticipates the whole direction of the modern novel at a time—1914—when it was only just coming into being). For whereas the external world of the earlier novel form was primarily spatial, whereas the hero’s experience of such a world took the form of a series of adventures and wandering through geographical space, now, in the novel of romantic disillusionment, the dominant mode of being of external reality will be time itself. It is this shift in metaphysical emphasis which will save the most illustrious examples of the new form, such as Flaubert’s Education sentimentale, from mere static poetry, which will once more justify and permit a kind of genuine narration in them. Now once again the passive-contemplative hero can act, his life can be told as a story: yet these acts are now acts in time, are hope and memory. Now once again the novel can express a kind of unity of meaning and life, but it is a unity thrust into the past, a unity remembered only. For in the present the world always defeats the hero, frustrates his longing for reconciliation: yet when he remembers his failure, paradoxically he is at one with it. The process of memory has therefore drawn the resistant outside world into subjectivity, there, in the past, reinstating a kind of unity with it. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Proust’s involuntary memory and the entire modernist inward turn; also to Benjamin’s philosophy of time and Adorno’s critique of the lyric’s spatial stasis — the Frankfurt lineage this reader is tracing. — connects to: The novel relocates real event from human action to natural and bodily change — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 21; Modern reified time forces novels to carve out fictional elbowroom — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 347; Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 218 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that memory reconciles the hero with the very world that defeats him — memory as a dialectical operation drawing externality into subjectivity — is a dense, generative insight about the form of the modernist novel.

Broader Connections

• The novel relocates real event from human action to natural and bodily change #expands (0.85) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 21
• Fiction is the construction of foreshortened temporalities substituted for real time. #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 218
• The disillusionment novel’s inward turn replaces adventure with the risk of solipsism #corroborates (0.80)
• Twentieth-century serious fiction turned inward toward the psychological #corroborates (0.80)
• Modern reified time forces novels to carve out fictional elbowroom #complicates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 347
• The modern novel’s simultaneous narration distinguishes it from all earlier literature #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 146
• Dramatic conflict overcomes time by condensing past and future into the present instant #responds-to (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118
• Doubt operates as the central heroic value in the novel #qualifies (0.72)