If it goes against a quick intuitive reading of the letter, the above interpretation does at least have the advantage of complete congruence with the assumption of so much seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory: the more you take the spectacle for reality, the greater its effect on you. Burke, in a notorious passage of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), claims that no matter how good the show, people will always leave a play for a public execution next door.25 Contemporary attitudes toward capital punishment aside, the comment speaks volumes about how thinkers of the time rationalized the effect of the artwork.26 The artwork is not fictional in the sense that it is an alternate or hypothetical reality; it is rather a substitute for reality, a simulation that is, unfortunately but necessarily, always a bit off. This explains, then, why Richardson would say that he wished Warburton’s preface hadn’t given the game away, even though he had no intent to fool people: his readers would have believed him more than they now do. “The nearer [the spectacle] approaches the reality,” writes Burke, “the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect its power.”27 Never perfect, but more perfect—this indeed is the gist of Richardson’s apparently paradoxical wish. And Burke’s words also remind us that when Richardson says fiction, his use of the term does not substantially diverge from its common meaning—a lie.28 With the proper presentation, we almost believe lies are true. Now the fact that Clarissa was on its way to being a huge success despite Warburton’s indiscretion might of course have led Richardson to conclude that illusion—or this type of illusion, anyway—had nothing to do with the power of his book; but when summoned to express how he thought his novel worked, he took the path traveled by most of the period’s thinkers: he indexed it to a literal reality.
Fiction’s Reality, Realist Fiction
Richardson’s comments on Clarissa are representative of a mode of reference I will be calling, with Barbara Foley, the pseudofactual: novelists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely assert—though ambiguously, half-heartedly, or ironically—the literal reality of their books. Understanding the amplitude of the phenomenon will require more coordinates than just this one letter, and I will give some shortly. Let’s look first, however, at a mode of reference that is startlingly different and much more familiar—the reference that Frege says is not reference at all, and that occurs when it does not matter to readers whether a writer’s characters ever existed.
Following the dramatic rout of the French army, Europe’s largest, in the Franco-Prussian war, a British officer named George Tomkyns Chesney feared for his country’s own military preparation. And so he published, in Blackwood’s Magazine of May 1871, a novella entitled “The Battle of Dorking,” in which he recounted an imaginary invasion of Britain, some time in the future, by an unnamed (though German-speaking) aggressor. The story was republished many times, and its hold on the British imagination was considerable. “So powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever in panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such day of humiliation for England is at least possible.”29 Thus wrote one critic, and the thought of the possibility of an invasion was enough to accomplish what Chesney wanted, which was to beef up British military peacetime maneuvers. (Inadvertently, Chesney also became the father of a novelistic subgenre, that of invasion fiction.)
Chesney’s text, the critic’s words, and even the real-world political effects of the tale are from one point of view perfectly unremarkable: novels (and by extension films) can exercise a hold over readers’ imaginations and be effective propaganda. Yet from another point of view—Richardson’s—this episode would seem remarkable indeed, as we can readily see if we try to apply his standard of “historical faith.” Chesney didn’t pretend that his story was real, obviously; and how could contemporary readers read it “as” true, in Richardson’s sense of historical truthfulness, since it was clearly set in the future? Note the vocabulary of the critic quoted above: “The Battle of Dorking” produces an intense impression of reality, and that impression of reality persuades the reader that what is recounted is possible. No faith is necessary, and the effect of the novel does not vary in proportion to the reader’s belief in its literal reality. This type of “as if” can work its uncanny magic on the “coolest disbeliever.” Chesney’s novella in essence advances a proposition about reality via the construction of a particularly vivid world—a vividness that is generated by internal means (presumably character, plot, and detail) and not through the manipulation of a frame (there are no real letters, no discovered manuscripts).
Any reader of Balzac is familiar with his insistence on his novels’ engagement with reality. “All is true,” he writes at the opening of Le Père Goriot (1835), with the bold assertion standing out all the more because Balzac, borrowing from Shakespeare, makes it in English.30 And one can hardly miss his aspiration to be the historian of his time—“to write the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners.”31 Truth, history: little seems to have changed since Richardson. No wonder the pseudofactual novel can be easily cast, as we will see many doing, as a forerunner of later realist works: it points away from the ideal and to the real, and by the nineteenth century the victory of the real will be complete. If the terms all come from a common pool, however, there has plainly been a revolution in what they designate. For example, Richardson refrained from asserting truth—“I want not the letters to be thought genuine”—whereas Balzac actually goes ahead and asserts it. If truth meant the same thing in both cases, we would have to conclude that Balzac represents something of a regression, and that we have slipped from a time when writers didn’t want to pull a fast one to one when they did. But this is obviously not the correct conclusion. Balzac asserts truthfulness where Richardson cannot because his claim is in fact not hard (i.e., literal) but soft: “I am about to tell you how the world really is, as opposed to something that really happened.” For Richardson, by contrast, reading with “historical faith” means pretending that the novel’s collection of people, actions, and events are in fact a subset of the larger collection of such discrete facts that make up history; to the extent that Clarissa talks about “the way things are,” it does so because we are to pretend that it is one of those things. With Balzac, belonging to the world of Scott and Hegel, history is no longer an aggregate of facts, but something like a system underlying the epiphenomenal particulars of a given age. Because its real subject is less individuals than the society that explains individuals, to write history is to seek “the hidden meaning of this huge assembly of figures, passions, and events.”32 And this helps explain, at least in part, why writers of the fictional regime show no compunction about inventing their characters. Old Goriot is just as good as any real human being, for the novel’s human inhabitants, real or invented, are only the observable surface of the novel’s deeper subject. Frege was right to say that it (now) makes no difference whether literary characters exist, but wrong to suggest that this was because (modern) literature did not refer. The novel does, of course, refer—not to real people, but to abstractions we call “the world,” “society,” or “reality.”
In the closing decades of the twentieth century, it became axiomatic that realism claimed to be true.
For eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers