Introduction: A Story So Far?

Abstract

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognise. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parcelled out by men. Thus was born the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world. To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic. To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage.¹ If the novel can tentatively be described as ‘image and model’ of a world hurtling first towards, then through, and now beyond modernity, then one of its essential and defining preconditions must be a continuing and evolving attempt to ‘get at’, in one way or another, to a lesser or greater degree, the reality of the unique era in which it finds itself. If this can be agreed, then it follows that all novels are essentially realistic (in the broadest sense of that term), for all novels must surely engage with, comment on or attempt to reflect, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree, that elusive entity: the real world. In the manner of the two previous overly modified sentences, they aim, often erroneously, towards what Henry James famously called ‘solidity of specification’: One can speak from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel — the merit on which all its other merits … helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life.²