Fiction, Genre, and the Epistemology of “Real”

“Of course it’s happening in your head… but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” - Dumbledore

Justice argues that side-stepping the question of belief in studying medieval miracle narratives results in the construction of medieval subjects as caricatured idiots or sinister charlatans who “speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (11). After taking apart this claim that modern medievalist scholarship imputes either delusion or sociopathy onto medieval writers, we asked ourselves why Justice’s scoldings seemed both to ring a bit true and to miss the mark. On the one hand, he makes important points about the dangers of projecting modern ideas about “truth” onto medieval writers, while at the same time he appears to do exactly that when he imagines only two possible implications of modern scholars’ choice not to take up questions of belief on his terms. We easily identified a third possibility, which is that acknowledging the “imaginariness” of hagiographical narrative need not necessarily constitute an accusation of either fraud or idiocy. In fact, only if we impute to medieval writers our own epistemology of “real”--which posits a line between “empirical” and “imaginary” and privileges the material over the imaginary as “real”--does it follow that they must either be deluded or attempting to delude others. Considering the possibility of an epistemological conception of truth with different boundaries from our own seems to offer a resolution.

We suspect that it is the limitations of our own modern taxonomies of truth and “reality” which make it difficult for us to imagine a writer of miracle narratives who is neither maliciously lying nor naively credulous. Using such rigid categories of “real” and “not real” privileges one interpretation of the texts over other interpretations. This is problematic for us as scholars and teachers of literature, because assuming that medieval visionaries could only have been either delusional or fraudulent can color how modern readers approach and interpret their writing. Miracles are not “real” in a material sense and therefore not real by our modern “material-trumps-imaginary” test of realness, but the same test and hierarchical binary between material and imagination did not necessarily burden medieval writers. We wonder if perhaps it’s just our post-Enlightenment bias that makes us (or rather, Justice) think of it as an insult to point out that something is “only” imaginary.

Recognizing that this bias is problematic raises questions about how we taxonomize literature based on its adherence to a particular conception of the “real.” Fantasy, realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, memoir, history: all of these terms are freighted with assumptions about the nature of truth and what is or is not “real.” And so we found ourselves focused on the implications of Justice’s argument for genre. And we were pretty excited.

Silas Marner

George Eliot’s work often walks the line between realism and romanticism, and Silas Marner is no exception.  On one hand, Kathryn Hughes can write that the book “is actually intent on showing a particular patch of the Warwickshire countryside at a precise historical moment.  And from remarks made both by the narrator and Squire Cass, it is clear that the historical moment occurs during the French Wars of 1793-1815” (185).  On the other hand,  Jonathan Quick is able to argue that in Silas Marner, Eliot “is making a deliberate effort to modify, even to abandon, the insistent work-a-day realism that obtained in her previous work” (288).

Both critics are right.  The town of Raveloe is small, provincial, and gritty, and the people who live there have complex characters and motivations.  Yet unlikely things happen there: an orphaned girl wanders into Silas’s home and saves him from despair, the gold that was stolen from Silas reappears when it will do him the most good.  Characters generally get their happily-ever-afters, and they attribute their happiness to God.  For some reason, however, critics do not want to acknowledge that Silas Marner can do both things, be in both places at once; the wealth of articles focused on determining “the genre of Silas Marner” attests to that.

Declaring that Silas Marner is either realism or romanticism, however, is limiting.  Choosing a side in the debate means pitting the aspects of the novel against each other, choosing one set to focus on (that is worth focusing on).  Even introducing the question of whether Silas Marner is realism or romanticism is akin to asking whether the story is realistic and is potentially a road to dismissing the elements that are not.  Yet the point of the novel may be that all its aspects are real, just in different ways, because choosing to believe the child you found on the road is a gift from God to give your life purpose does give your life purpose—whether or not a God was involved.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is referenced in a myriad of different genres. It is considered by some to be a memoir, although the author, Katherine Anne Porter, declared it not a memoir, despite the obvious parallels to her own life. Because of its modest length, it is frequently referred to as a novella. Porter detested the word ‘novella’, calling it a "slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything." Commonly, the title “historical novel” accompanies descriptions of the text because of its setting in the late WWI era, specifically 1918, during the last wave of influenza pandemic that swept the world. Porter preferred “short novel” when readers insisted on placing her book in a pigeonhole.

Does it matter how one describes a work when presenting it to a reader? Does a ‘pigeonhole’ affect the mindset with which a reader enters into the text? I suppose that if I referenced Pale Horse as a novella—and the reader channeled Porter and imagined a “slack, boneless, affected” book—I could anticipate a significant negative coloring of the work in the reader’s mind. But if I called it a “historical novel,” I might appeal to a reader hoping for an inventive novel resting firmly on non-fiction bones.  Call it “memoir,” and a different reader altogether would probably show up, someone hoping for an interior glimpse into the author’s world, preferably an author with a stimulating life to relate.

The words in the book stay the same; the title of the work and the author of the work remain the same. The only thing that changes is the lens through which we ask the reader to frame the story. But in specifying a certain lens, perhaps we do to Pale Horse what Justice says interpreters of medieval miracle stories do: we subtly influence what we want the reader to see in the text. Now, in 2014, centuries after the Middle Ages and decades after the 1918 pandemic, we must use caution in focusing our spectacles on either era and calling what we see “truth.”

Frankenstein

It’s difficult to map these ideas about genre perfectly onto Frankenstein, but they certainly apply. The novel’s place in the category “Romantic literature” is more firmly fixed than Silas Marner’s, perhaps, but it also stakes a claim on the “realistic fiction” label, and it’s hard to talk about Frankenstein and genre without discussing the unresolved critical question of whether or not the novel is “science fiction.” The controversy lies partly in the complete lack of “science” in Shelley’s fictional narrative. She does not include laboratory scenes or attempt to describe Victor Frankenstein actually doing the science. The appearance of the creature is dependent upon scientific practices that Mary Shelley does not even try to reproduce textually. The absence of science in the narrative means that a reader cannot debunk it action by action but rather can only doubt the probability of the result. Shelley (to borrow Katherine’s phrasing from last week) has not attempted to replicate science in the sense of “what is” but rather as a “what if”. In this sense, despite the novel’s lack of representations of scientific practices (fictional or otherwise), it bears some marks of belonging within the science fiction category.

Today, science fiction and fantasy are both discussed critically under the umbrella term “speculative fiction,” which denotes the un-real-ness of “fiction” (a term that otherwise lumps together literary prose with outright lies) as well as the culturally sanctioned subset of imaginative work known as “speculation.” Literary fiction is an exceptional category carved out as a safe space in which narratives that are not “real” in an empirical sense but which we nonetheless embrace for their potential to represent the real. We also embrace fiction that breaks from a strictly representative mode (realistic fiction) and moves into a mode of imaginary work that does not represent materially-possible scenarios but rather speculates on impossible but interesting alternatives. I wonder if Frankenstein’s contested claim to the title of “first science fiction novel” has more to do with our conceptions of “science” (it’s material, empirically observable, and you do it with tools) and “fiction” (it didn’t happen like this, but what if…) than with Shelley’s motivations. I suspect that a similar explanation applies to Justice’s examples.

Final answer:

Our takeaway from Justice’s article is that we should take care to remove our 21st-century lenses when introducing a text to readers (or when reading about a text ourselves prior to delving into the material) to avoid the epistemological pitfalls he describes. We need to avoid the “durable doublet” with the “curious, asymmetrical relation” that he wraps his thoughts around. We should be neither didactic in our approach (trying to explain away a story by rationalizing ‘why’ the author tells the story) nor put a perceptual spin on a piece (indicating that the author wrote what he wrote because he had no deeper knowledge that might have clarified his piece had he been more educated.) Rather, we should be open to all considerations of a text, view it from multiple points, give the text latitude without forcing it into whichever box we find fitting on a particular day or in a particular era (forgive us--we know we are forcing this article into an ENL 200 box for the sake of this blog post).  When we avoid temporally- or culturally-bound labels, avoid declarations of what is real as if that signifier is fixed, we can read texts from the past with proper respect to a time and place we may never fully understand.

Works Cited

Hughes, Kathryn.  Afterword. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. 184-190. Print.

Quick, Jonathan R. Silas Marner as Romance: The Example of Hawthorne. Nineteenth Century Fiction. Vol. 29, No. 3 (Dec., 1974), pp. 287-298

Briana Wagner, Sally Lochowski Tanaka, Jessica Gray