Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives
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Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives

Jan Alber, Alice Bell, Jan Alber, Alice Bell

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Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives

Jan Alber, Alice Bell, Jan Alber, Alice Bell

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About This Book

This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century.

Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000388503

The return of the ‘real’ in Ali Smith’s Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014)

Yvonne Liebermann
ABSTRACT
This article will analyse two of Ali Smith’s latest books, Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014), through the lenses of metamodernism and the return of the ‘real’ to fiction. It analyses the narrative strategies that are used to reintroduce the real into fiction, such as the purposeful and ambiguous blurring of generic boundaries and metamodern uses of intertextuality, ekphrasis and intermedi-ality. Moreover, this article will engage with the contrast between the ‘real’ in fiction and the ‘real’ as constituted by the World Wide Web. Ultimately, this article will claim that literature’s access to the ‘real’ does not reside in its attempts at mimetic representation but in its capacity to make ‘possible the imagining of possibilities’.

Introduction: Metamodernism and the tension of the both-neither

Yes, I use bits of what is real,
in the sense of being really there and really
happening, in the world, as most people see it,
and I transform it into something
that is really there and really happening, in my story.
Alice Munro (2002: 120) - ‘What is Real?’
In his much-acclaimed book, Reality Hunger, David Shields (2010:26) examines the frames that make us evaluate something as ‘real’ or not. With regard to the lyric essay, he remarks the following: ‘in fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it’s apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know’. What Shields claims initially seems to be a contradiction: introducing the symbolic into essay writing, which is allegedly more ‘real’ than ‘fiction’, because it is a factually based form of writing, enhances the perception of ‘The Real’. Lyricism, poetic language, seems to be more connected to our perception of what is ‘real’ than one might think at first. Contrary to postmodernism’s paradigms, Shields initially argues that a highlighting of the artificiality of the signifier connects us back to ‘the real’ instead of alienating us from it. Self-reflexive narrative strategies do not only put centre stage the constructedness of representation but can also enhance a feeling for the world outside of literature. While Shields keeps literary boundaries intact - by claiming that lyricism is acceptable in the essay but not in ‘fiction’ - this article sets out to investigate some-self-reflexive narrative techniques that try to reconnect the reader to the ‘real’ and analyse the potential of breaking with such genre differentiations.
If one of the main paradigms of postmodernism is the departure from realism and the highlighting of the gap between reality and its depiction through language, Ali Smith’s novels playfully reintroduce the ‘real’ into postmodern techniques. I will argue that she does so mostly through a specific use of poetic language, playful handlings with genre conventions and a negotiation of politics of visuality through poetic concepts such as ekphrasis and the physical integration of images into the textual body. By doing so, her texts do not attempt to be ‘realistic’ representations that forget their status as literary constructions: her texts adhere to the goal of postmodernism to destabilise the idea of ultimate ‘truth’ and also, of course, generally problematise the relationship between language and reality and the possibility of objective knowledge. However, I will claim that her texts are ultimately metamodern as they do not share postmodernism’s pessimistic outlook on the potential of representation. Although Smith’s texts do not by any means try to realistically depict the extra-literary world and thus do not proclaim that an unproblematic representation of reality is possible, they do go beyond postmodern aesthetics and offer a glimpse of the real. Representation is always a construction, Smith’s texts make clear, but that does not mean that artistic representations cannot connect us to the real in one form or another. As the Canadian author Alice Munro makes clear (2002: 120, my emphasis), just as something might be ‘really happening, in the world, as most people see it’, something can equally be ‘really there and really happening’ in a story. Alongside Munro, I also want to attribute the potential to mould our perception of ‘the real’ to the literary realm once more.
Ali Smith’s fiction is very much tied to current political questions and her ‘ethical and political preoccupations offer insightful critiques of the contemporary condition’ (Germanà/Horton, 2013: 1). Although Smith tackles serious current issues in her fiction, her novels, as I will show, can be said to be all about desire and hope. While many of her novels deal with death, the afterlife and the ghostly return of dead loved ones (Hotel World, How to Be Both, Artful, Autumn), they never treat the subject with melancholy or despair. Rather, Ali Smith’s fiction is oddly hopeful, suggesting that the border between life and death is not as firm as we might think. However, her narratives also tie the subject of death to techniques such as humour and irony. In this essay, I want to claim that Ali Smith’s narrative strategies are ‘intrinsically bound to desire’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 2010: 9). This desire is not only connected to the hope to mentally overcome death and destabilise the dichotomy between life and death, but also to overcome other, more general binary conceptions - such as the binary between fact and authenticity on the one hand and fiction and imagination on the other.
Smith’s literary techniques, which, as I will show, are to be positioned ‘between modern enthusiasm and a post-modern irony’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 2010: 1) relate her to the newly re-vitalised concept of metamodernism. According to Vermeulen and van den Akker (2), metamodernism is a ‘structure of feeling’ which responds to the pull by material reality like ‘climate change, financial crises, terror attacks, and digital revolutions’ (2). Metamodern strategies involve the engagement with ‘everyday life, the commonplace, and the mundane’ (10) in order to negotiate the nature/culture divide as well as other binaries and imposed orders. Smith’s oscillation between the binaries that postmodernism constantly sets out to deconstruct is precisely one of a ‘both-neither’ rather than a ‘postmodern in-between’ (9-10). Although the boundaries are of course fluid, and metamodernism still lacks clear-cut differentiations to postmodernism, I want to argue that Ali Smith’s works are to be positioned as something else than postmodern deconstruction, as they heavily contest the paradigmatic end of History and re-introduce a sense of the past as the backbone for an understanding of the present. They are constantly negotiating the ‘real’ instead of negating the possibility of artistic representation of it; they are looking for truth, but without expecting to find it.
While modernism and postmodernism differed in their relation to history, they did share their means of access to it: books with mostly well-ordered beginnings, middles and ends. In our present time, however, we are more and more gaining our knowledge from elsewhere: the world-wide network of the Internet. How does the digital age influence how and what we perceive to be ‘real’? Does the advance of the digital age lead to a desire for the return of the real in literature? Another argument that will be developed in this article is that the purposeful self-reflexivity of fiction can negotiate these questions. Especially since ‘anything goes’ with the Internet, as both books by Ali Smith hint at, there seems to be a need to locate the real in different realms.

Blurring the frame between the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ in Artful

Ali Smith’s book Artful refuses to be contained by normative categories of the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’. Artful is both an assembly of essays on comparative literature and the arts and simultaneously a fictional story of a person mourning the death of their partner who was a literary critic and the author of the essays.1 Within the process of mourning, the homodiegetic narrator reads their dead partner’sun finished talks on literature and the arts, which are interspersed into the narrative and typographically set off by intratextual subheadings. Hence, although the epitext clearly defines Artful as non-fiction, the book constantly betrays this initial categorisation by using a story of mourning, haunting and the love of life as the backdrop for its non-fictional elaborations on the arts - if one can even call them non-fictional at all. In her acknowledgements, Ali Smith (2013a: n. pag., my emphasis) declares the following: ‘this book began life as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in January and February 2012. The lectures are published here pretty much as they were delivered’. The truthfulness of this initial information can easily be proven by visiting the St Anne’s College’s website.2 However, the first few pages of Artful seem expressly designed to leave the reader confused regarding Artful’s ‘disciplinary allegiances’ (Elkins, 2017: 204). It is never quite clear whether one is really reading a lecture or whether the actual lecture only begins when the protagonist devotes herself to her dead partner’s notes on literature and the arts. The initial generic framing seems to set out to create what John Frow (1986: 220) calls the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ ontological spaces between which the text will operate. Within a collection of lectures on literature, the reader expects the ‘symbolic’ realm to be constantly framed in the form of quotations within the realm of the ‘real’, that is the non-fictional elaborations on the ‘symbolic’ realm. These expectations, however, are not met by Artful, which after its acknowledgements and very tidy contents section sets off to tell the story of the homodiegetic narrator who, while rearranging furniture, is surprised to find their dead partner stumble into the apartment. Indeed, although Artful is often treated as an assembly of essays rather than as a novel,3 the book is very much structured around the mourning process of a fictional character, thereby deconstructing the firm boundary between scholarly, academic work and the world of fiction. Interestingly and importantly, the reader is left in the dark about the degree of fictionality of the book so that some critics read it, for instance, more as an ‘autobiographical or memoiristic kind of narrative about the loss of a loved one’ (Elkins, 2017: 204). This slippery edge between two different forms of writing has important consequences. According to Remigius Bunia (2015: 129), once we ‘identify’ fiction as fiction, ‘this identification changes [our] attitude towards the representation in question’. He claims that ‘[w]henever we realize (from whatever signals) that we are dealing with fiction, we no longer treat the fictional perception as “trustworthy”‘ (129). To be sure, Bunia’s understanding of fiction is based on a rather utopian possibility to draw clear lines between different forms of writing. Yet, it seems to be an assumption which unconsciously influences many reading experiences. Artful makes the reader aware of this often implicit and yet too simple premise by constantly blurring the lines between ‘fiction’ and more ‘factual’ forms of writing. Never being entirely sure when and to which degree they are dealing with fiction, the reader is called upon to question their understanding of what ‘trustworthy’ ultimately means. The initial paratextual framing of the book destabilises the boundary between these two realms - the real and the fictional-, bringing to our attention that there is always a part of one in the other: there is no theorising about fiction without simultaneously creating a fiction in the process of writing theory, as there is always a speaking subject and a selection process of embedding and framing involved. Along the same lines, there is no fiction that does not establish theories of the world. As Zoe Kemp underlines (2016: 62), Smith’s use of ‘the conventions of the academic sphere that shaped her intellectually, in order to break with those conventions’ emphasises that ‘the coherent literary criticism we expect from academia may have an oppressive quality’ (62). Smith’s ontological metalepsis - constantly blurring narrative levels - leads to what Marie-Laure Ryan (2006: 207) calls ‘mutual contamination’ and thus blurs the reader’s expectation of the ‘text’ and the outside of the text’, thereby staging the slippery boundary between what we expect to be ‘real’ and what we expect to be ‘fiction’.
The text’s liminal position between fiction and essay writing leads to a playful juxtaposition of a humoristic and simultaneously sad plot with bountiful intertextual references to literary criticism and other fictional works. Not only are the dead partner’s talks integrated into the text, but also the boundary between one subject and the other is intentionally blurred. Although intratextual frames conventionally guide the reading process by distinguishing one voice from the other (see Frow, 1982: 27), they destabilise this conventional expectation throughout Artful. While the first subheading in the section ‘On form’, marked by being underlined, capitalised and numbered (I: Putting The For In Form) directly starts with the alleged talk and thus conveys the impression of being the real’ thing - the allegedly real talk that the protagonist reads, or even the real’ talk as given by Ali Smith herself - the second subheading breaks with this convention and thus introduces ambiguity as to who speaks. Putting The Form In Transformation’ does not start off directly with the talk but with the protagonist’s thoughts on the talk: ‘These headings of yours for the different sections of your talks moved me.... I was reading your On Form talk ... My eye caught on the word heart. It was in a quote: Alas, the heart is not a metaphor - or not only a metaphor. That was good. I liked that’ (Smith, 2013a: 74-75). Only after a few pages does the actual, real’ talk start as the protagonist’s voice slowly seems to disappear.
While the subheadings should frame a ‘story’ within a ‘story’ - or rather an essay within a story? - they destabilise the distinction and make us question the unity of a central speaking subject. Not only commenting on but also adding to, continuing the dead partner’s talks, the protagonist blurs the boundary between ‘writer’ and ‘reader’:
What was left of On Edge was a poem you’d typed out and printed up: One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop ... I read...

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