Pub Date : 2019-10-08DOI: 10.4135/9781412972024.n700
Elaine Freedgood
This chapter analyzes how realism recuperates reference in the realm of the fictional, offering a kind of epistemological safety net for the awkward and awful stuff it regularly represents. It provides an open circuit between fictionality and reference that can never be closed. But only in the age of realism, and in the realistic works that continue to be written in its modernist and postmodernist wake, do critics believe so firmly and earnestly in reference. The chapter also talks about “realism” and reflects the problems of Roland Barthes's “referential illusion” under that generic tarpaulin. But this open circuit provides a denotational metalepsis: a rupture of one level into another—the realm of the factual and the material into the realm of the fictional.
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This chapter explains how realist fiction of the nineteenth century has been treated by critics, and experienced by readers, as an oasis from the zany ruptures of fiction that is not yet or nor longer realistic precisely because of its referentiality. If the madcap metaleptic adventures between history and fiction remain unnoticed, it would create a vertiginous hetero-ontologicality. Every sentence in which a fictional character traverses an actual city or an actual poet, has dinner with a fictional character, or an actual war is observed or fought in by a fictional character is a rupture of enormous existential proportions. That such ruptures do not feel like ruptures may be the most significant thing about them. The chapter also talks about the possibilities of hetero-ontologicality, in which various kinds of being and beings mingle and mix, allowing readers to imagine future worlds and ways of living with themselves and all of the others they have evicted from having and inhabiting “their own world.”
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