When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind by Elaine Auyoung

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind by Elaine Auyoung Elizabeth Brogden AUYOUNG, ELAINE. When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 176 pages. $74.00 hardcover. Elaine Auyoung's first book, When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind, is one of the latest stars in a constellation of work on fictional ontology and character studies that has been glowing steadily brighter since the early aughts. Her contribution to novel theory and to the epistemology of nineteenth-century realism is both generous and timely, as literary scholars have become increasingly engaged with problems as complex as they are fundamental: what techniques do novels use to interpellate their readers or to construct interiority on the page? How do they negotiate between various scales of representation and temporality, privileging both the grandiose and the minute, the historical event and the private sentiment? To what ends does realism harness other genres, and what can the experience of reading it tell us about the architecture of our minds (or vice versa)? Auyoung's commitment to parsing the apparent effortlessness of novelistic realism is vital as we enter the third decade of a millennium in which the popular consumption of reality-adjacent content is more likely to take place online, onscreen, or in the virtual realm than on the printed page. Projects like hers are an essential reminder that we cannot take the novel for granted, even as we need not be defeated by the specter of its obsolescence. Auyoung begins by venturing beyond the boundaries of Victorianism to look closely at realism's invitation to behold what is otherwise defined by empirical absence. Through lavish description, realist novels place entire worlds "at [readers'] fingertips" (23), and it is precisely their quasi-touchability, Auyoung argues, that makes them so vivid. Writers such as Tolstoy enlist our "embodied knowledge" (32) to situate readers within immaterial ambits, and Auyoung scrutinizes instances of handling in Anna Karenina—struggling with a shirt button or seizing a "small physical object" (24)—to demonstrate the extent to which our insight into realist phenomenology is impoverished by ignoring its haptic quality. Such scenes of manual dexterity or frustration might be easily overlooked, but in Auyoung's account they have the highest stakes: when prompted to "retrieve rudimentary forms of motor memory" (33), readers are rewarded with an "experience of fluency" and "mastery" that constitutes realism's principal "aesthetic payoff" (33). In her second chapter, Auyoung continues to examine the "fluency" (32) that realism cultivates, shifting her focus to character, whose importance and validity as an object of serious study is currently being recovered after decades of critical dismissal. How do readers come to "know" imaginary beings? How does an assemblage of inert [End Page 215] glyphs on paper come "alive"? In fine close readings of passages from Jane Austen's oeuvre, Auyoung shows us that repetition and typological consistency (flatness, in other words) underpins the impression of roundness: predictability and regularity facilitate the emergence of a "situation model" (5) rooted in a few behavioral tics and core personality traits, with which the reader develops a sense of intimacy. Roundness thus resides in flatness, and the most fleshed out characters are often the most elusive. Protagonists, despite being generally thought to possess greater solidity and depth than their satellites, are actually more evanescent than minor or stock characters, who—precisely because their behavior is anticipable—are endowed with proleptic potential. In her third chapter, Auyoung discusses the role that hyponymy—defined by linguists as "the basic semantic relationship between a general category" (64) and its subordinate parts—plays in realist aesthetics. In Bleak House, she argues, Dickens utilizes excessive detail in a deliberate attempt to overwhelm the natural limitations of the reader's memory. Rather than bearing a metonymic significance greater than themselves, things are made to proliferate in a deliberate effort to surpass the reader's powers of recall and prevent her from adopting an interpretive stance toward them. Auyoung makes a persuasive case for the ways in which realism promotes surface reading over hermeneutics: far from cultivating (hyper-)attunement to the potential meanings of any individual object, it forces...