Imagination is the queen of truth: The realist text as a sensory narrative image

Abstract

This article focuses the realist text as a sensory narrative image. I propose that realist fiction, or abstracted realism, is an attempt to capture the incompleteness of human experience through carefully crafted narrative detail – interwoven narrative images. The central premise of this article is that productive engagement with our own writing and the work of fellow writers involves paying close attention to the relationship between sensory narrative detail and a focalising consciousness, as a representation of the ideas that lurk beneath the surface of the text. This analysis occurs within the more specific context of dark subject matter in realist writing. Ideasthesia (from neuroscience) and the unthought known (from psychoanalysis) provide a theoretical frame for a broader examination of the relationship between a focalising consciousness and the transposition of narrative detail. Through this frame, and in relation to examples from long- and short-form fiction, including my own practice, and with reference to William Maxwell, Marcel Proust, Luke Davies, Arnold Zable, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, as well as Francis Bacon, Charles Baudelaire and Victoria Walsh, this article contemplates the realist text as a sensory narrative image. I track the relationship between form and feeling, both within the narrative world as well as with reference to authorial intention, more broadly.