Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. "An Introduction to the Verisimilitude." (1967) Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1977.
We have, in these two writers, to very different takes on realism, so different, in fact, that comparing them might lead us in interesting directions.
Williams is rooted in 'the real,' though he certainly has no illusions that art merely replicates reality. He traces the shifting definition of the term from the 18th century to the present, showing how it reflects first one, then another, then another aspect of the "ordinary, everyday, contemporary reality" (274) in which its readers are situated. Todorov's paper, however, is not about realism alone but the manner in which all texts create the appearance of reality on the page. He calls that appearance 'verisimilitude,' and quotes Corax, an Ancient Greek philosopher, who points out that it is not reality but "what most people believe to be reality" (82), which is to say that discourse doesn't need to be consistent with the external, objective world, but that "discourse must be consistent with another (anonymous, impersonal) discourse" (82).
To look at those same ideas from another perspective, Williams demonstrates that what constitutes 'the real' in literature is, in fact, a selection and interpretation of an external world based on the subject positions of particular people with particular vested interests in the world. Realism in the 18th century was the 'reality' of the middle class, but later became the 'reality' of the destitute and the excluded. Both match the external world, but reflect entirely different parts of it. By the 20th century, the novel is prised for its psychological realism, the construction of believable 'inner lives' for its characters. This point implies, and even anticipates, the application of psychological realism within otherwise fantastic narratives, like Moore's Watchmen, for example, or the updated Battlestar Galactica. Reality, in this construction, is perceived from a particular point of view. As the point of view shifts, from group to group or from era to era. 'reality' shifts with it.
Todorov, on the other hand, replaces realism entirely with verisimilitude, a construction based, not on the unique combination of external reality and one's particular view of it, but mostly by the formal concerns of a medium of expression (he discusses literature exclusively, but the concepts have multiple applications) and the necessities of the reader/writer relationship. Verisimilitude is when generic expectations are rendered invisible; when we no longer recognise that the reality in literature (or, indeed, in television and film) is distinctly different from the reality we physically live in. However, if we ever attempt to institute 'more' or 'better' verisimilitude, we can only ever achieve yet another kind of verisimilitude. To insist on a more realistic crime drama is, actually, to insist on a crime drama that more effectively hides its own construction. In art, more technique and technology can hide the very presence of technique and technology. 'The real,' for Todorov, is a successively more distant set of literary rules. In philosophy, this is a Third Man argument. To judge a narrative 'unrealistic,' we need another set of definitions of reality, which themselves are always the product of utterance and narrativisation, which are themselves unrealistic, and 'round and 'round she goes.
Both of these models demonstrate that reality itself is a construction. Both imply cultural affiliation as a definer of reality, Williams with his 'structure of feeling' and Todorov through "what most people believe." The difference is that while Williams takes the external world as a given, something against which we react, Todorov illustrates a conceptual loop whereby discourse begets discourse, and seems uninterested in whether there is or isn't a thing called 'reality' because we have no access to it. So the question is, how can we know, one way or another, if we have access to reality? And, even more importantly, what would we do differently if we did know one way or the other?
Posted by orion at July 24, 2006 4:48 PM"So the question is, how can we know, one way or another, if we have access to reality?"
In philosophy, a steady decline in interest in this question has begun to make it unfashionable, at least in continental circles.
The basic point to realize is that the existence of the world (reality) is not an epistemic question. For many years it was approached as such, but ultimately it was discovered that pure skepticism and logical analysis actually arrived at the same answer (cf. Wittgenstein’s Logical Investigations and Kripke’s work on these), namely that knowledge of an external world is non-demonstrable. Our understanding depends on the world, so the world itself will obviously determine what can be shown and what cannot, and thus to use these very methods to justify (what is essentially) themselves is circular. Treating this question as epistemic provokes a certain impasse at which there is no "proof" to be given as a solution to this “problem”. Consider why an argument like Moore's (the world exists because here is my hand! It's right here!) makes sense: because we all always already understand what it is to be hand-ed, to be embodied in such a way that things can be on-hand (or ready-to-hand, if you want to draw on good ol' Heidy). (Yes some people are born without hands, but you get my point...)
The existence of the world is something we are all obliged to simply accept. Why must we accept this, you ask? Because your very ability to formulate a question like "how can we know if we have access to reality?" presupposes that you already exist in such a way that things like knowledge can concern you. You always already have such a world. Having a world is a condition of the possibility of intelligibly posing such questions. Concerns like this can only be meaningful if you are part of a meaningful world in which things like language and other people are real. So the very ability to pose this question is actually telling in and of itself: you are part of a reality in which knowledge can be pursued, in which your world is of concern for you.
It’s a commonplace to suggest that this particular question is moral rather than epistemic or metaphysical. It’s interesting to note that it takes a certain kind of disengagement from the world in order to seriously entertain the idea (which I regard as an impossibility) that you might exist while the world around you does not. Technological exploitation of the world is a lot easier to go along with if you have serious doubts as to the world’s existence, or even if you simply regard the world and the beings that populate it as somehow uniform. (For more on this Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy is great…) We might get into a discussion of whether "reality" and "world" mean the same thing, but that is somewhat tangential to my point here.
At any rate, I wouldn’t worry too seriously about this question, since it seems to answer itself. And if you accept that answer, you should live as though the world really were the case. As Angel put it: "We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." Actually that's a very different point, but I just love that quote. But I do think we should just accept that other people impinge on our lives, and that our actions have consequences not only for them but also for the whole chain of being under The Great Magnet.
Posted by: Hector at July 26, 2006 10:05 AM