Truth to Tell

* * *

That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.–Mark Twain

"All is true," the narrator declares at the opening of Le Père Goriot before launching into the description of the Vauquer boardinghouse and its inhabitants in 1819. The phrase makes an immediate impact on readers through both its appearance in a foreign language and its typographical presentation in italics. It functions as a prefatory frame to the "drama" about to be narrated. In explicitly emphasizing that "ce drame n'est ni une fiction ni un roman" (2:848; "this drama is neither a fiction nor a novel"), Balzac is subscribing to the categories of "the true" and "the fictitious" instituted in the eighteenth century. What is more, he is very firmly placing his own novel under the former heading. In his preface to La Comédie humaine he repeatedly underscores the need for rigorous adherence to the truth if the writer aspires to become "un peintre plus ou moins fidèle" (1:7; "a more or less faithful painter") of humanity. Yet at the same time he distinguishes between history, which is or should be exactly as it was, and the novel, which tends toward "le monde meilleur" and "le beau idéal" (1:11; "the better world" and "ideal beauty"). Indeed, he goes so far as to refer to the novel as "cet auguste mensonge" (1:11; "this august lie") that would be as nought were it not "vrai dans les détails" (1:11; "true in its details").

Openly to confront and to take into account this paradox between the sonorous proclamation "All is true" and the hushed admission that it is an illusion suggests a new approach to realist fiction: that its strength lies precisely in its readiness to use contradiction as its pivot instead of denying and bypassing it, as critics have tended to do by envisaging the realist novel either as a faithful portrayal of a social situation at a particular time in a particular place or as a textual web of discourse. Both these conceptions are valid, but each is partial in more than one sense, not least because of its exclusion of the other. Taken together, Balzac's statements offer a basis for a binary reading that does not eliminate or minimize the dissonances in favor of one or the other alternative. On the contrary, it is in the very precariousness of its endeavor that the ultimate attraction of the realist novel resides: in its risky attempt to create truth and/in illusion.

This duality is already implicit in that "All is true." On the one hand, it represents an aggressive effort to program readers to take the narrative as an authentic transcription of actuality: "[I]l est si véritable," the narrating voice argues, "que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi" (2:849; "It is so true to life that everyone can recognize its elements in their own surroundings"). This injunction to gauge the events of the fiction against the matrix of personal experience is an open exhortation to a referential reading. But many readers will see Old Goriot as an archetypal figure too, strongly reminiscent of King Lear. This second, intertextual source of Balzac's novel is also, albeit indirectly, hinted at in "All is true," for it carries an allusion to Shakespeare. Henry VIII, on its first production, was subtitled All Is True, a fact revealed in the Revue de Paris of 10 August 1831 in an important article by Philarète Chasles, a leading literary figure of the day. Some contemporary readers of Le Père Goriot would have caught the covert signal alongside the overt message. Certainly to readers in our age of suspicion, the crosscurrents are apparent and have been underscored by Brombert: "The extreme signal of realism (all is true) thus places the elaborate opening disclaimer of literarity under the sign of literature" (21). Brombert puts forward the provocative suggestion "In the particular case of Balzac, the analysis lends support to the hypothesis that so-called 'realistic' texts call for an ironic reading of the message of realism" (22). "Ironic" is not the most appropriate word in this context, because it normally denotes a certain intentionality of reversal. A more neutral term such as "binary" or "dialogic" (with its echoes of Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination) would be preferable. The double import of "All is true" points to the urgency of questioning and reassessing such dicta in order to understand the underlying complexities of the realist enterprise, that daring interface of referentiality and illusion, to which only a dualistic reading can hope to do fuller justice.

The claim "All is true" is a good starting point for a reconsideration of realist fiction, because it implicitly raises the essential critical issues. Are readers still willing to accept the postulate that the realist novel gives a true and faithful account of a preexistent, stable, knowable reality? If truth to life is to be the predominant criterion, what sort of truth or life is it to be? Is the literalism of Tristram Shandy or of Arno Holz's Papa Hamlet in their minute recording of sensory impressions to be taken as the consummate form of realism? If such literalism is not to be equated with realism, what is the nature of the relationship between the aesthetic artifact and the world in which it is embedded? Can the objects of that world be translated into and conveyed by words, and if so, by what means? What is the role and function of readers in such a process? Because these questions resist conclusive answers, the debate about realism will continue as long as there are readers and critics. To prepare the ground for renewed discussion, we need to recall how the realists themselves and their successors have envisioned the problem.

Pronouncements about the realist novel's truthfulness are legion and invariably raise more difficulties than they allay. Most of the major realists have expressed their views on this issue, which was a basic tenet of their program, yet the statements all have the same curious tendency to limit or undercut their own contentions, as Balzac's assertion does. "All is true" is paradigmatic both in its boldness and its self-subversiveness.

No one wrestles the problem with as much searching honesty as George Eliot at the opening of chapter 17 of Adam Bede. Rejecting the idealism of "things as they never have been and never will be" and avoiding any "arbitrary picture," the narrator sets out to "give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind." More directly than Balzac, George Eliot avows the obstacles and flaws inherent in her creed, even while ardently continuing to defend its intrinsic integrity:

The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I...