Abstract
In The Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision, Lance Olsen attacks what he calls ‘neorealism’ — which for him includes fiction published over the last decade or so by such writers as Bobbie Ann Mason, Raymond Carver, and Jayne Anne Phillips — labeling it, following Richard Kostelanetz, ‘the death of intelligent writing.’ He argues, further, that the ‘narrative strategy’ of realist fiction is ‘conservative’ (he attributes its revitalization in the 1980s to the long reigns of Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl) and that ‘such a conservative narrative strategy indicates a conservative metaphysical strategy’ (1990: 28):
It believes in a world out there, an empirical world that the reader can smell, see and touch. It believes in logic, chronology and plot. It believes in a stable identity, in a sense of self, in depth psychology. It believes in a universe of communal reality and common sense, where content is privileged over form, language is transparent, style is secondary, and, it is assumed, the word mirrors the world.
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Note
See, for example, Charles Crittenden, Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (1991: 133–8). ‘Suppose,’ Crittenden suggests, that Conan Doyle had written that Gladstone has tea with Holmes (to use John Woods’s example). Does the real Gladstone appear in the stories: does the name ‘Gladstone’ in the text of the story refer to the actual, historical person? Considerations about background are pertinent here. Conan Doyle has taken nineteenth-century England as his setting and has created a character based on an individual, the historical Gladstone, who existed in this setting. Particular characters taken over from real life, or story locations taken over from the general background, are to be explained in terms of the principle that fiction takes place in a setting. Such figures or places appearing in a story are created by an author using the circumstances history provides to supply details. References in a literary text are governed by the ‘in the story’ operator and do no purport to be about the actual man but only about his conceptual counterpart. A biography of Gladstone would not mention his having tea with Holmes; at most it might note that a fictionalized Gladstone appeared in a work by Conan Doyle and was said there to have tea. On the other, a biography of Holmes, having to rely solely on the contents of stories and not reality, would include the Gladstone meeting. (133–4)
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© 1997 M. J. Devaney
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Devaney, M.J. (1997). Metaphysically Underdetermined Beliefs. In: ‘Since at least Plato …’ and Other Postmodernist Myths. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375796_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375796_6
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