Reality and the Novel: Latour and the Uses of Fiction

Ever since the earliest novels of the 17th and 18th century, writers and critics have claimed that new novel achieved a cogent engagement with reality that was unavailable to the old romance. Many of the novels of the 18th century can be read as experiments in the exploration of reality. The belated mid-19th century doctrine of literary realism, by absorbing the novel into an aestheticized understanding of literature, had the effect of virtualizing the reality of novels. Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry Concerning the Mode of Existence offers conceptual tools to reverse the reduction of the reality of novels. Latour begins by suggesting that we avoid the rejection of fiction as lie, as sequestered in the work of art, as a fantasy-like effect of psychology. Instead fiction should be understood as an invention that cannot be reduced to a summary; as a thing capable of securing vigorous social associations, and as active in other modes of existence, such as law, religion, politics. With this understanding of fiction, we can return to the novel to ask how fiction, rather than being either to the opposite or a simulation of reality, is one of the main ways to probe reality.