Reality

An Element of Fiction

Few topics have been so pondered and debated over the millennia as reality. What is it, really? At times, I’m sure that there are as many opinions on that subject as there are human beings; and definitely, as many views as there are (past and present) philosophers.

And when I say philosopher, I must, by necessity and observation include the writer, a fact that Flannery O’Connor endorses when she says, “All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.”

Then she adds, “I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

Eudora Welty offers this wonderful observation: “It may be going too far to say that the exactness and concreteness and solidity of the real world achieved in a story corresponds to the intensity of feeling in the author’s mind and to the very turn of his heart, but there lies the secret of our confidence in him.”

She goes on to say, “Making reality is art’s responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving its impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader’s illusion.”

The laconic John Fowles observes, “All novels are really metaphors for reality.”

E.M. Forster, an early literary icon, views reality thus: “And now we can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows — many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.”

When it comes to magic realism, what some consider Salman Rushdie’s forte, here is what Mr. Rushdie himself says, “I don’t even really like the word fantasy as a description of that kind of non-naturalistic material in my books, because fantasy seems to contain that idea of whimsy and randomness, whereas I now think of it as a method of producing intensified images of reality — images which have their roots in the observable, verifiable fact.

“I do think that one thing that is valuable in fiction is to find techniques for making actuality more intense, so that you experience it more intensely in the writing than you do outside the writing.”

Henri Alain-Fournier agrees, “I like the marvelous only when it is strictly enveloped in reality.”

John Gardner offers another sage view, “He [the writer] cares about seeing things clearly and getting them down effectively. Partly he cares because he knows that careless seeing can undermine his project. Imagining the fictional scene imprecisely the writer may be tricked into developing his situation in some way that is unconvincing. This is perhaps the chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would not really do… When the novelist’s imaginary world is too carelessly constructed to test conditions in the real world, even the novelist’s ideas suffer.”

Oscar Wilde notes, “Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.”

And as William Faulkner so brilliantly puts it, “Your character should breathe, stand up and cast a shadow.”

I’ll let Yvor Winters, the American poet, have the last, amazing word on this subject: “For the poet, poetry is his finest mode of thinking and perceiving, of being, of discovering reality and participating in reality.”

© Wolfstuff

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