Whitehead’s third-person historical novels deliberately reject immediacy’s presentism

Evidence

Whitehead’s entire outstanding oeuvre to date consists of eight novels, not one of which is told in the first person. … At stake in these novels is the importance of long narrative as such, which must be deliberately composed. Experience is neither immanent to itself nor evident to itself, and its determinants can only be conceptualized in weaving connections rather than presuming evanescence. … A present tense of generalizing observations links the stylized past settings to the all-too-burning contemporary of reading; as Harlem Shuffle puts it explicitly, of the 1960s and so also of 2020: “With the riots, what was the point? Everything keeps on the way it is, so all the protests were for nothing.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 340

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that experience ‘is neither immanent to itself nor evident to itself’ directly echoes the book’s definition of immediacy as self-evidence contra mediation, and connects to Jameson’s critique of presentism.