Real Fiction

The term isn’t used much these days, but when I was in elementary school I recall a genre referred to as “realistic fiction,” with entries like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and the Black Stallion books (at one point in my life, I constantly carried a very battered copy of The Black Stallion around at the bottom of my backpack, just in case I ever lacked for another source of reading material).  As it was applied, the term referred to those stories which deal with relatively ordinary circumstances set in the real world in a way that could actually come to pass, but which did not, or not in the precise way in which they are told.  In retrospect, it’s a bit of a silly, redundant descriptor, which is probably why it fell out of favor, with those books which would have been called realistic fiction now shelved under historical fiction, literary fiction, or simply “fiction.”

I’m in the midst of reading The Rhetoric of Fiction, considered one of the definitive “how to write” books; unsurprisingly, reading it is inspiring a multitude of thoughts and associated ideas for articles and essays, of which this is one example.  Booth begins by tackling the endlessly debated notion of “show don’t tell” in a remarkably nuanced and multifaceted manner, which leads him into an extensive discussion of what makes a “good” novel.  Historically, the show-don’t-tell paradigm is part of a larger movement in the literary community away from the didactic, tale-telling style of yesteryear to a “modern” (meaning, in this case, a period starting from roughly the mid-nineteenth century and continuing more or less to the present) style characterized by a drive for “immersivity” and “realism” in storytelling.  It’s a notion I’ve danced about and pondered tangentially or in pieces before, but never engaged with the whole of it as I seek to do now, this idea that fiction should be real.

Real fiction seems an oxymoron.  Fiction, after all, is by definition invented, imagined, dreamt up and spun out, like new cloth from the loom or like a cleaned sheet unfurled over a mattress.  If the subject matter is real, then it is nonfiction.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fiction as “something invented by the imagination or feigned, specifically: an invented story” or “an assumption of a possibility as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth.”  Nonetheless, realism is considered of such paramount importance to the critical quality of fiction that its definition has evolved to include “the theory or practice of fidelity in art and literature to nature or to real life and to accurate representation without idealization.”  It is usually discussed in the context of more “literary” fiction – most of the examples Booth employs in his book are from the “literary” realm – and one can more readily see the relevance of some kind of realism as a quality indicator for literary fiction, with its grounding in the “real” world.  Is there relevance, though, to speculative fiction?

In a word, yes, but that wouldn’t leave me much to write for this post, and it would be a bit of a bait and switch to give you three paragraphs of introduction before simply saying “yes” and ending the post.  Though it would be somewhat amusing, at least for me.  Anyway…yes, realism matters even for the most fantastical of fiction.  Even a sorcerous, secondary world fantasy story must consider realism, and not only in terms of convincing causal relationships between events and character developments. This was not always the case. Phantastes is a fine example of a piece of fiction which does not largely concern itself with realism – its plot, such as it is, has a fever-dream quality in which one event does not necessarily lead to another, and the actions of the protagonist do not necessarily bear on subsequent circumstances.

Realism matters even in writings of the fantastic for two main reasons: consequences and grounding. Today’s reader expects quality fiction of any genre to provide convincing consequences for the actions which take place, related to the notion of convincing sequences of cause and effect. If a character takes an action or makes a decision at one point in the book, that action or decision should impact all subsequent points in the book, not necessarily because something about writing demands it, but because it is reflective of our understanding of the “real” world. Complaints about plot armor are one example of reader (or viewer) malcontent with an apparent lack of consequences, a lack of realism.

If the notion of consequences as a key component of what is meant by realism in fantastical fiction is one, fairly enduring facet, the notion of groundedness is more…situational. Some serious critics would likely complain the entire fantasy genre is too lacking in groundedness; despite its relative success in mainstream markets in recent years, it continues to struggle with critics in the literary community operating under the mistaken impression that stories involving magic and dragons cannot be sufficiently serious to be considered true literature. This despite the fact that modern fantasy stories are arguably more grounded than at any previous point in the genre’s history (Tolkien‘s works being a notable exception in some respects). Even secondary world fantasy today is expected to feature convincingly extrapolated ecologies, deterministic magic systems which can be somehow tied to an in-world physics, and certainly nothing that cannot be explained rationally. There is also an increasing sense that, despite the fantastic elements, speculative stories should avoid the convenient explanations, clean endings, and other elements at odds with the pessimism and angst of the modern zeitgeist. I disagree that speculative fiction need play into such angst, but then, I disagree that fiction in general must, and even with the basis for that general sense in reality.

Stories are stories. Yes, this is so banal and obvious an observation as to fail to qualify even as a tautological argument, but it is worth emphasizing for what stories are not: reflections of reality. The Rhetoric of Fiction addresses the various interpretations of literature as “art” to some degree, and the ways in which it has been compared favorably and unfavorably with other media throughout history and by different critics and authors. There is a school of thought that literature can only approach the “purity” and “aesthetic beauty” of other media insofar as it can approach a meaningful representation of reality. Maybe I’m missing some element in this chain of logic which would lead to such a conclusion, but this seems backwards to me. If reflecting reality were the ultimate goal of art, I should sell all my mirrors at an art auction, make a few hundred million dollars off about fifty dollars in glass and metal foil, and retire as a world-famous artist. Furthermore, photographers should have put every painter out of business decades ago. The value of art, visual or otherwise, lies not in perfectly and faithfully reflecting reality, but in how the unique characteristics of the artform in question interact with reality. By emphasizing, changing, focusing, or concealing, art in any form offers a means by which to encode a degree of significance and meaning to an otherwise objective, chaotic universe.