The "Fictional" and the "Real" in Marius

THE "FICTIONAL" AND THE "REAL" IN MARIUS By Ian Small (University of Birmingham) A notable feature of English literary history in the last two decades has been a series of attempts to redefine literary modernism not in terms of periodicity or chronology but in formal or ontological terms. In particular the fiction of modernism has been defined by its relation to concepts like self-consciousness, reflexivity and metafiction: concepts, that is, which allege the novel's ability to incorporate within it an ontological critique of itself or to use the consequences and features of mimesis to question the whole concept of mimesis itself. This process of redefinition has had a singular consequence for authors like Pater and Wilde, generally considered until the mid-1960s, to re-work the title of Graham Hough's famous essay, as late or last romantics, exemplary embodiments of the very practices against which modernism reacted. But recently literary historians have shown much more willingness to see the works of the English decadence and of Aestheticism as the avant-garde of the modernist revolution. Wilde—particularly Wilde the critic—has received most attention In this respect, but Pater too has been seen as a writer whose interest in both the formal processes of writing fiction and in the creation of a "fictional self" marks him off as a writer anticipating the full-blown modernist tradition of self-conscious fiction . In a sense, however, the figure of Pater the Victorian has been all but obliterated by the new apparition of Pater the proto-modernist, Pater the key transitional figure. My intention in this paper is to redress that balance slightly and argue that the admittedly paradoxical and elusive nature of Pater's novel has as much to do with his unique refusal to exploit the simple notions of representation found in the novels of his contemporaries as it is to do with his alleged anticipation of modernist techniques. I shall attempt to do so first by analysing and discriminating Pater's use of the categories "fictional" and "real" (or "serious"), particularly with regard to the characters in Marius the Epicurean. If "fictional" and "real" characters do indeed constitute different sorts of literary entities, it might well be that their discrimination can be used to throw light on the larger question in Marius, that of the relationship between the fictional and the serious in the book generally. (During the course of this essay I use the terms "fictional " and "serious" in a special way and in so doing follow the usage of the philosopher John Searle. As the applicability of the terms and their derivation has been questioned, I limit the term "fictional" to denote characters that are non-entities; and "serious" to denote statements that are subject to tests of falsiflability.) Finally I should like to make a stronger claim for the uniqueness of Pater's fiction than that which is implicit in the descriptions "early-modernist" or "last romantic," both of which unfortunately suggest that Pater's importance lies in his being, as it were, a signpost on the route to, or from, works other than his own. My own suggestion will be that Pater's resolution of the dilemmas presented by the use of "real" and "fictional" characters, or fictional and serious utterances (in the sense offered above), is only partly Victorian and partly modernist; but wholly peculiar to Pater. It would be as well to acknowledge at the outset that I am aware that my enquiry might be called an enquiry into a non-problem; that, in fact, there is a strong case that a work of fiction is entirely that; that there are no "real" characters in works of fiction. This line of argument runs that Marcus 140 141 Aurelius in Marius is "Marcus Aurelius," a creature of fiction, an exemplary non-entity, bearing a minimal, that is a purely nominal, relationship to the real, historically existent Roman emperor. I disregard this objection for the moment, although I am aware that the terms real and fictional stand in need of close definition. Ian Fletcher has pointed out how generically anomalous most of Pater's oeuvre is. It lies, he suggests, upon the poorly...