Fiction and realism

Fiction has always had a problematic relationship with the truth. The reader with only a loose conception of literature may believe the story that from the first days of the novel, fiction has been essentially realist and naturalist and neutral, only waylaid into experimentalism and reader-bamboozlement in the early 20th century by a few foreigners: an alien influence that can easily be driven out (by agencies such as the Betty Trask Prize, awarded each year to work of "a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style").

However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.

Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.

Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.

Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.

For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.

Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.

After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.

Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.