Literature, Language and Reality: An Introduction

Abstract

Much hostility towards realism in fiction is, consciously or unconsciously, rooted in fundamental doubts about the relationship between language and reality and the true status of apparently referential discourse. These doubts may crystallise into one of two theses: either that referential discourse is impossible because extra-linguistic reality lies beyond the reach of language; or that it seems possible only because apparently extra-linguistic realities are in fact the product of language, that is to say intra-linguistic. The two theses are, of course, complementary but different writers tend to highlight one or other of them in attacking realism.

Every general statement about language worth making invites a counter-statement or antithesis.¹

There seem to be two complementary strategies for dissolving the connexion between literature and the real world. One ... is to exorcise the other-than-literary presence of the real world by reducing everything to text. The other is to emphasise the nature of the literary text as a collocation of arbitrary linguistic signs that can be joined together only on the basis of internal principles of coherence even as they pretend to be determined by objects outside themselves to which they supposedly refer. In this view, reality, whatever it may be, is inaccessible to the literary text because of the text’s very constitution.²