The Edges of Fiction

Jacques Rancière, Steve Corcoran

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781509530458
  9781509530441
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509530472
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle's Poetics.  The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted.  Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge. 

In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations.  Literature took the opposite path.  Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction.  It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the "random moment" into which an entire life is condensed.   

In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.

Index

• active and passive men 130–1
• Agee, James 104, 137–8
• analytic faculty 73–6, 77, 79
• anti-Romantic programme 41
• appearances/expectations, inversion of see peripeteia
• aristocratic world of feelings and actions 6, 14, 18
• Aristotle 2, 34
  • Poetics 1, 129, 149
  • Politics 149
• art 5
• astrology 121
• Auerbach, Erich 6, 115, 128–9, 131, 133, 150
  • Mimesis 7, 126

• Bachelard, Gaston 3
• Ballanche, Pierre-Simon 149
• Balzac, Honoré de 6, 20, 24, 47, 79
  • At the Sign of the Cat and Racket 25, 79
  • Beatrix 79
  • The Collection of Antiquities 21–2
  • A Daughter of Eve 23
  • Lost Illusions 6, 127
  • Louis Lambert 76–7
  • The Muse of the Department 20
  • Old Man Goriot 128, 131
  • ‘The Purse’ 26–7
  • A Second Home 22–3
  • Ursule Mirouet 20–1, 76–7
  • The Wild Ass’s Skin 27
• Baudelaire, Charles 48, 78
• Benjamin, Walter 107, 136, 151
• Bergen-Belsen 108–9, 111
• Berlin 110
• Bioy Casares, Adolfo 80
  • Morel’s Invention 70
• bon mot 30
• Borges, Jorge Luis 70, 80
• Braudel, Fernand 3
• Browne, Thomas 106, 120

• capacity to invent 165–6
• capitalism
  • commodity exchange 53–6, 58–9, 67
  • experimentation on workers’ bodies 60–5
  • genesis of capital 68–9
  • primitive accumulation 63–4, 68
  • subjugation of nature 120
  • see also commodities
• cartography of time 121
• Casement, Roger 113
• causal chains 1–3, 11, 30, 72, 74–5, 79, 84–5, 87, 105, 115, 127–9, 131, 143
  • inversion of see peripeteia
• causal rationality 3, 10, 73, 79, 130
• Chandler, Raymond 87
• chara...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Doors and Windows
• The Threshold of Science
• The Shores of the Real
• The Edge of the Nothing and the All
• Index
• End User License Agreement