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.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives by Jan Alber, Alice Bell, Jan Alber, Alice Bell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Langues et linguistique & Linguistique. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The return of the ârealâ in Ali Smithâs Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014)
Yvonne Liebermann
ABSTRACT
This article will analyse two of Ali Smithâs latest books, Artful (2012) and How to Be Both (2014), through the lenses of metamodernism and the return of the ârealâ 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 ârealâ in fiction and the ârealâ as constituted by the World Wide Web. Ultimately, this article will claim that literatureâs access to the ârealâ does not reside in its attempts at mimetic representation but in its capacity to make âpossible the imagining of possibilitiesâ.
Introduction: Metamodernism and the tension of the both-neither
In his much-acclaimed book, Reality Hunger, David Shields (2010:26) examines the frames that make us evaluate something as ârealâ or not. With regard to the lyric essay, he remarks the following: âin fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, itâs apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you knowâ. What Shields claims initially seems to be a contradiction: introducing the symbolic into essay writing, which is allegedly more ârealâ than âfictionâ, because it is a factually based form of writing, enhances the perception of âThe Realâ. Lyricism, poetic language, seems to be more connected to our perception of what is ârealâ than one might think at first. Contrary to postmodernismâs paradigms, Shields initially argues that a highlighting of the artificiality of the signifier connects us back to âthe realâ 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 âfictionâ - this article sets out to investigate some-self-reflexive narrative techniques that try to reconnect the reader to the ârealâ 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 Smithâs novels playfully reintroduce the ârealâ 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 ârealisticâ representations that forget their status as literary constructions: her texts adhere to the goal of postmodernism to destabilise the idea of ultimate âtruthâ 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 postmodernismâs pessimistic outlook on the potential of representation. Although Smithâs 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, Smithâs 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 âreally happening, in the world, as most people see itâ, something can equally be âreally there and really happeningâ in a story. Alongside Munro, I also want to attribute the potential to mould our perception of âthe realâ to the literary realm once more.
Ali Smithâs fiction is very much tied to current political questions and her âethical and political preoccupations offer insightful critiques of the contemporary conditionâ (GermanĂ /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 Smithâs 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 Smithâs narrative strategies are âintrinsically bound to desireâ (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.
Smithâs literary techniques, which, as I will show, are to be positioned âbetween modern enthusiasm and a post-modern ironyâ (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 âstructure of feelingâ which responds to the pull by material reality like âclimate change, financial crises, terror attacks, and digital revolutionsâ (2). Metamodern strategies involve the engagement with âeveryday life, the commonplace, and the mundaneâ (10) in order to negotiate the nature/culture divide as well as other binaries and imposed orders. Smithâs oscillation between the binaries that postmodernism constantly sets out to deconstruct is precisely one of a âboth-neitherâ rather than a âpostmodern in-betweenâ (9-10). Although the boundaries are of course fluid, and metamodernism still lacks clear-cut differentiations to postmodernism, I want to argue that Ali Smithâs 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 ârealâ 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 ârealâ? 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 âanything goesâ 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 ârealâ and the âsymbolicâ in Artful
Ali Smithâs book Artful refuses to be contained by normative categories of the ârealâ and the âsymbolicâ. 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 partnerâsun 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: âthis book began life as four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St Anneâs College, Oxford, in January and February 2012. The lectures are published here pretty much as they were deliveredâ. The truthfulness of this initial information can easily be proven by visiting the St Anneâs Collegeâs website.2 However, the first few pages of Artful seem expressly designed to leave the reader confused regarding Artfulâs âdisciplinary allegiancesâ (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 partnerâs notes on literature and the arts. The initial generic framing seems to set out to create what John Frow (1986: 220) calls the ârealâ and the âsymbolicâ ontological spaces between which the text will operate. Within a collection of lectures on literature, the reader expects the âsymbolicâ realm to be constantly framed in the form of quotations within the realm of the ârealâ, that is the non-fictional elaborations on the âsymbolicâ 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 âautobiographical or memoiristic kind of narrative about the loss of a loved oneâ (Elkins, 2017: 204). This slippery edge between two different forms of writing has important consequences. According to Remigius Bunia (2015: 129), once we âidentifyâ fiction as fiction, âthis identification changes [our] attitude towards the representation in questionâ. He claims that â[w]henever we realize (from whatever signals) that we are dealing with fiction, we no longer treat the fictional perception as âtrustworthyââ (129). To be sure, Buniaâs 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 âfictionâ and more âfactualâ 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 âtrustworthyâ 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), Smithâs use of âthe conventions of the academic sphere that shaped her intellectually, in order to break with those conventionsâ emphasises that âthe coherent literary criticism we expect from academia may have an oppressive qualityâ (62). Smithâs ontological metalepsis - constantly blurring narrative levels - leads to what Marie-Laure Ryan (2006: 207) calls âmutual contaminationâ and thus blurs the readerâs expectation of the âtextâ and the outside of the textâ, thereby staging the slippery boundary between what we expect to be ârealâ and what we expect to be âfictionâ.
The textâs 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 partnerâs 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 âOn formâ, 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 realâ thing - the allegedly real talk that the protagonist reads, or even the realâ 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 Transformationâ does not start off directly with the talk but with the protagonistâs thoughts on the talk: âThese 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 thatâ (Smith, 2013a: 74-75). Only after a few pages does the actual, realâ talk start as the protagonistâs voice slowly seems to disappear.
While the subheadings should frame a âstoryâ within a âstoryâ - 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 partnerâs talks, the protagonist blurs the boundary between âwriterâ and âreaderâ:
What was left of On Edge was a poem youâd typed out and printed up: One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop ... I read...