The realist novel Casting the contradictions A large proportion of modern African works of fiction can be defined as realist novels. Though what, precisely, is a realist novel? And what of the notion of Realism itself? As Stephen Heathhas lucidly expressed it, the 'realistic' is a process of significant fictions (that is, not substantial but formal) and it may bedescribed as the vraisemblable of a particular society, the "generally received picture of what may be regarded as 'realistic'".1Heath, I think rightly, points out that this vraisemblable is founded partly by the novel itself. In terms of the connection betweenthe novel and reality, then, there is a dialectical process at work. Within this process it seems important to say that there is nodirect, spontaneous relation between a literary text and history. Incorporating the mediating role of ideological formations, thetext "takes as its object, not the real, but certain significations by which the real lives itself" as Terry Eagleton puts it.2 Realism istherefore a convention of discourse, a range of different patternings that gives rise to an impression of reality, a range ofreality-effects.Granted that realism is a conventional, formal concept, what of the formal realism of the novel? Ian Watt and Lucien Goldmannhave suggested answers to that question. The formal realism of the novel would appear to allow "a more immediate imitation ofindividual experience set in its temporal and spatial environment"3 than do other literary forms. And not only individualexperience, surely, but areas beyond that limit: where a 'world' can be created "whose structure is analogous to the essentialstructure of the social reality in which the work has been written."4 Given, then, the possibility of an imitative rendition of bothindividual and collective exper...
