These lines come from Tzvetan Todorov’s introduction to Littérature et réalité (1982), a collection of previously published essays bent on showing that realism is in fact deeply mendacious in its claims to transparency and immediacy.33 One of these was Roland Barthes’s 1968 article “L’Effet de réel,” probably the most succinct and resonant articulation of a thesis prominent in much of the critic’s work: realism pretends to be a transparent window onto the world, and this pretension is bad politics and, more fundamentally, bad semiotics. Realism, writes Barthes, is underwritten by a mystified conception of the sign; instead of consisting of an arbitrary relation between a signifier and a signified, the realist sign is yoked directly and “naturally” to a referent. Realist language hides the fact that language is connotation or signification behind a simple denotation or naming—“the pure meeting of an object and its expression.” And the epitome of the realist sign is the insignificant detail; material objects that have no narrative or symbolic function are present in the realist text only to better declare “We are the real.” In other words, the realist sign connotes as much as any other sign, but its connotation is that the text is denotation, that signs have referents, that language is—Barthes puts the suspicious word, the last of his essay, in quotes—a “‘representation.’”34
Barthes’s argument is susceptible to different interpretations, of which some are clearly further from the author’s meaning than others. If the “reality effect” has slipped into common academic parlance, this must be at least partially because the phrase itself doesn’t necessarily upset the commonsensical idea that realism was, well, realistic. According to this view, gratuitous details make texts seem real in the sense that they allow for the reader’s visualization, or make the fictional world thicker, thus facilitating the proverbial suspension of disbelief.35 Barthes’s interest, however, is more semiotic, and his claims lie elsewhere. First, he suggests that the gratuitous detail does indeed still signify—it signifies “realism” as such, and is thus part of the realist code. This is innocuous enough: there cannot be much quibble with the proposition that genres have specific contracts, and that the intrusive presence of description announces realism just as, say, the in medias res expositional conversation announces neoclassical tragedy. Barthes’s main point, however, is something else entirely—that realism was built on an illusion, “the referential illusion.”36 The detail did not content itself with announcing the genre of the text, it furthermore attempted to pass itself off as reality itself; that is, not only did it signify “realism,” it signified that it didn’t signify, that language was pure copying.
This enormously influential essay—it can be said to have underwritten a slew of “debunkings” of realist pretense—has also been the object of not a few critiques. One called into doubt Barthes’s reading of Saussurean linguistics by pointing out that Saussure never claimed that the fact that languages were differential systems, or that the link between sounds and concepts was arbitrary, meant that language could not refer to things.37 Besides, if reference were impossible, the whole argument would undermine itself by its very articulation.38 But the oddest thing about Barthes’s viewpoint was that it seemed to imply what for understandable reasons the critic could not state explicitly. Christopher Prendergast has put the difficulty as follows:
The implication of “Nous sommes le réel” [We are the real] is that the words of the text try to perform a kind of disappearing act upon themselves; the text plays a trick whereby the reader undergoes the “illusion” of being confronted not with language, but with reality itself; the sign effaces itself before its “referent” in order to create an “effect”: the illusion of the presence of the object itself.39
The slippage, it would seem, occurs in the double sense of “illusion”: when in his (mis)understanding of Saussurean linguistics Barthes speaks of the referential illusion, he means “fallacy”; but he then begins to behave as though what was at issue, on the part of bad readers, was a properly visual illusion, a bona fide hallucination.40 Not without reason does Antoine Compagnon assimilate the denotative directness of the reality effect and the leitmotif of Barthes’s later essay on photography, La Chambre claire: “This has been,” says the photograph, echoing the sirenic “We are the real” of realist objects.41 Indeed, Compagnon lines up examples from Barthes’s oeuvre that to all appearances suggest that the theorist modeled his critique of reference on the dispelling of an actual sensory illusion. Barthes was particularly fond of an anecdote from Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare, recounting an early nineteenth-century performance of Othello in Baltimore; a white soldier in the audience, enraged to see a black man lay his hands on a white woman, pulls his gun and shoots the actor. Only a literature that sought, in Barthes’s words, to “empty the sign and to distance infinitely its object,” could save us from this fate.42
Barthes’s attack on realism and its “totalitarian ideology of the referent” was no doubt unusual in its slippage from a figurative illusion to a literal one.43 Todorov’s apparently more moderate contentions were in fact the routine ones: realism pretends to be “truthful discourse,” “a faithful representation of the real.” But even this realism would seem to be made of straw. Here is a realist statement of principles, from the programmatic seventeenth chapter of Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859): “I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.”44 “Faithful”: Eliot uses Todorov’s word. “Men and things” sounds a lot like “the real.” The novelist even uses the mirror analogy that inevitably arises when conversation turns toward critiquing art’s “copying” function. It’s as if Eliot’s sentence were a concentrate of realism’s bogus promises. Read sympathetically, however, it also restores some balance to the realist claim. It should be obvious, first, that Eliot’s “faithful account” has nothing to do with, say, the “true history” of Oronooko, the royal slave of Surinam, that Behn circulated a century and a half earlier.45 One might point out as well that the mirroring function of fiction suggests neither literal truth nor that the novel is a replica of the material world: “in my mind” clearly entails a transformation, and the mirror metaphor, which was a venerable one, did not typically imply anything like copying.46 A more easily overlooked part of the sentence is simply “men and things,” with its deliberate generality: how can realism be a copy if its object is not actually specific? And Eliot might have written “things and men” without changing too much her meaning: it is well known that like so many realists by this time, she was beating away at divisions between “high” and “low” that had long structured thought about the arts, so that a lowly still life could become indistinguishable from elevated history painting. Doing away with that distinction does not mean only that the lives of carpenters are as worthy of attention as the exploits of generals and statesmen. It also means that, as with Balzac, known human beings are no longer the subject of art. Rather, the world—humans and things, humans as things, sometimes just things staring back at the anonymous procession of human life—is represented.
“A faithful account of men and things,” writes Eliot; Balzac speaks in his preface to the Comédie humaine of “copying all of society.”47 It’s really the object of the account or of the copying here that hides—but hides in plain sight—the complexity, the counterintuitiveness, of the realist operation, and its difference with respect to earlier novels’ assertions of truth. (Those earlier assertions were complex as well, as we will see; but they were complex in their own manner.) Todorov insinuates the crude literalism of declarations like these, but—and this is particularly obvious after a consideration of Richardson’s posture—there is no literalism: one cannot literally copy abstractions like “men” and “society.” No wonder Balzac, Eliot, and others spent so much time thinking about how their novels, full of people who never existed and whose existence was never even asserted, were faithful copies: they weren’t stating something that everyone knew but rather something that, having no precedent, needed to be argued before readers. That something was fiction.
Fiction, then, was real and not real. By this point it should be clear that I do not mean this as a more or less timeless paradox (Fuentes’s “The