Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another Origin of the Novel

Abstract

I was recently watching the evening news on a local network affiliate in South Florida and was forced to enjoy one of those moments that are like the mental equivalent of a hard eye-blink. The female news anchor was going on in that routine half-emphatic style about some episode of domestic violence that had been suppressed by timely police intervention following a call to 911. I was not listening very attentively, but suddenly I was watching: watching a man and a woman, muffled shouting that I couldn’t hear very well, she retreating, he pushing, my view seemed from somewhere behind them in a smallish living room where the color had oddly drained out of their world as well as the sound, and the picture lurched like amateur camcorder productions, then the police came in at what had to be the front door, and I just had time to wonder, what am I seeing? how can I be seeing this? when the word “simulation” appeared on the screen for a second or two, and my confusion yielded to that increasingly common mixture compounded of ‘dupe’ and ‘jaded’ in equal parts. This happens a lot currently: a news story with enough human interest to broadcast but no visuals, and TV newscast and feature journalism producers, abhorring the unrelieved talking head, edge closer to the resources of fiction—from archival stock footage, through gradations of verisimilitude over to docudrama, reenactment, or so-called simulation—in the Florida instance, the crudeness of the hastily contrived footage being a positive advantage.