Detachment

Abstract

The need to stabilise the position both author and reader take up towards the events described in a novel was felt earlier in Europe, particularly in France, than it was in this country. There is nothing surprising about this. Speaking of fiction, if the English are a nation of shopkeepers, it is the French who supply the account books — and it is the characters who are brought to account. Equally unsurprising is the rapidity with which a new and scientific vocabulary emerged to ensure that every method had a name. As usually happens in these circumstances, writers and critics disagreed about what they meant by the names they had invented, and a large part of the critical debate over fiction in France from mid-century onwards took the form of a sterile bickering over whether novelist A was or was not a realist in the ‘real’ sense of the word, and if he were, what was to be made of novelist B, who claimed that his realism was more real. From 1856 to 1857 Edmond Duranty edited a periodical called Réalisme which failed to resolve the linguistic problem, and had little to say about any actual novels. After 1880, with the publication of Zola’s Le Roman expérimental, and Les Romanciers naturalistes the following year, further discriminations were made between realism and naturalism.

‘When you tell about life, everything changes.’ Roquentin, in Sartre’s La Nausée