Third-person figural narration can impersonalize intimacy to reveal systemic forces.

Evidence

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life tells a story of intimacy in institutions—of a young, poor, queer Black man’s new and tumultuous sexual relationship with a PhD cohort-mate turned lover—but it does not tell this story intimately. Rather, it uses third-person perspective to impersonalize vivid yens and acute pain, it uses narrative ellipsis to abstract away from crescendos of interpersonal conflict or personal suffering, and it evokes a scientist’s study of particulate matter and sensuous data, an objective microscopy of smells and birds, weather, and wasps. The novel also constructs a staggeringly lyrical, metaphorical, figurative linguistic texture, an intricacy that beautifully confounds expressivism and refuses prosaic immersion. Sentence by sentence, the reader is not asked to identify one to one with the emanating individual on the page, but to conceptualize the interlocking social forces that contour the story and systematize individuals. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the precise formal moves of mediation — third person, ellipsis, figuration, refusing identification — useful as a naming tool for the reader.
• XREF: This is precisely the ‘the detour’ the reader names as part of immediacy’s loss — Real Life is a counterexample to autofiction and first-person expressivism.