From
Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:
One of the most decisive things that happened to narrative in the 19th century had to do with the problematisation of its formal conclusions, which closed their narrative circuit in earlier and simpler societies either by way of a happy ending (in fairytales, for example, or romances) or a catastrophic defeat. Those older endings had content, as we might put it in philosophical language; in the new world of money and business, the whole social variety of existential outcomes was slowly reduced to a new set of abstract categories: the opposition between success and failure. Winning the girl is success, losing the war is failure: these abstractions do not on the face of it involve earning or losing money, but it is in reality the abstraction of money as such that governs the new system and which begins to impose the new simplified classification in terms of the stark alternatives of winning or losing, success or failure.
The formal result, for the novel, is strange and paradoxical, yet momentous: all successes grow to be alike, they lose their specificity and indeed their interest. Success sinks to the level of emergent mass culture – which is to say, fantasy and wish-fulfilment. Only the failures remain interesting, only the failures offer genuine literary raw material, both in their variety and in the quality of their experience.
