Rien n’est beau que le vrai: le vrai seul est aimable;
Il doit régner partout, et même dans la fable.
Nicolas Boileau

Everything is writing, that is to say, a fable. But what good can we get from the truth that pacifies an honest property owner? Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures.Julio Cortázar

Nothing facilitates the communion with truth as much as a new convention does.Kazimierz Brandys

1These three statements—coming from the codifier of classicism and from two contemporary writers—present truth as a component of literature; all of them on their own terms treat truth as an element of the utterance. The seventeenth-century classicist takes the position of an honest property owner: although he has little doubt about truth—he knows its reign encompasses all (including the fable)—he does not define it; in his situation a definition is redundant—everybody around him knows that truth in a work of art is what reflects common convictions as well as formulates and confirms them.

2For Cortázar and Brandys truth does not lie within the realm of the obvious anymore; both writers are aware that truth does not belong to a preconfigured order but, instead, is a matter of the language (“scripture”, “convention”) the writer uses and of the culture he lives in. Rather than brush off the question, such an approach defines truth differently than other periods did. The question of truth has inevitably accompanied all developments in literature and appeared even in the earliest reflections about literary production. In each period it was addressed in a different manner. Not only that: certain convictions concerning the truths expressed by literature are an inevitable component of the reception process (which is especially evident in the case of the most widely received genres—such as the novel since the 18th and 19th centuries). In commonplace perception a novel might be deemed true or untrue in its entirety, or might be claimed to contain a true or untrue component: a character, a sequence of plot, or certain situations. Naturally, such an approach can be seen as a symptom of the naiveté of those who believe that everything that is written must be true—of those who do not know the rules of literary truth and are likely to treat every utterance as an “account about life”. Even if such an attitude were indeed a proof of the simplistic spirit of the readers unaware of profound literary culture, it would still be worthy of something more than just pity or a shrug of shoulders. An attitude of this sort, though unacceptable in the practice of literary criticism, demands scrutiny as it clearly indicates that a genre can be read naively; in other words, the specific attitude reveals some characteristics of the genre and of the social situation the genre is in. Reflection concerning truth accompanies reception processes among readers who are perfectly aware that utterances like “There came a certain Thursday of cold wind and rain; all through the evening the Prince heard carriages rattling over the pavement of the piazza outside the Palace, on their way to Signora Sanseverina’s” (trans. M.R.B. Shaw) create literary fiction and can by no means be verified. The problem demands analysis; it seems that convictions concerning the trueness or untrueness of the literary material continuously influence the operations of a literary work (especially the novel).

3 The issue cannot be fully analysed if one stick to Ingarden’s theory of quasi-judgements.1 Not because the theory is incorrect or inconsistent, but because it concerns the most general features of sentences that the literary work is composed of, and it analyses the features from the point of view of a discourse that can be subjected to logical verification. The scholar assumes the understanding of truth and falsehood that is valid in the discipline of logic; in this light, statements such as “The hounds ran into the woods”2 are indeed examples of quasi-judgements. The theory allows us to notice that a distinction needs to be maintained between the language of the literary work of art, whose capacities are by no means limited to the issues Ingarden describes, and the language of utterances that belong to the actual domain of logical analysis.

4 Stanisław Lem addressed this issue in a very apt way:

[...] the language that literary works are written in is not the language that science uses. […] The concept of fictional sentences as non-predicates resembles a surgical procedure that saves logic by throwing literature as prey to the mysterious state of something between “nonsense”, “truthlessness”, and “falselessness”, as non-predicates are neither true nor false. While the logician might perhaps be ready to accept that pereat ars, fiat logica, I do not personally subscribe to such “conservative” measures. (Lem 1968, 83-84)

5 If one accepts the existence of “quasi-judgements” in the literary work, the same prefix “quasi-” should be applied to other components. The literary work essentially contains the same components that can be found in other types of utterances; still, despite certain similarities, the components operate in accordance with completely different rules. One can therefore speak of “quasi-truth” in a work of literature, which would signal that whereas the work contains some phenomena that are to a certain extent similar to those components that can be logically verified, these phenomena are not subjected to any definition of truth that logic accepts as binding. Such an understanding of “quasi-truth” would contain all the ways of understanding literary truth that Ingarden analysed in such an outstanding manner (Ingarden 1957).3 When seen as a derivative of the relationship between the literary work and its receiver, the question of truth in literature appears to be by all means less distant from what Ingarden presented in the following way:

One needs to distinguish a special case in which a striking similarity can be noticed not between the represented and the objective reality, but between the represented and the subjective, so to say, “image” which we possess of reality when imagining it in a certain manner or when perceiving it this way or another. Such a subjective “image of reality” can be either strictly individual, characteristic of just one psychic subject (especially of the perceiver of the work or of the creator of it) or in a way “general”, average—that is, not only characteristically common in a given society, but also what we call “widespread” as a result of similar reactions that the society members have developed towards the surrounding reality as a result of similar predilections or aversions and of mutual communication that they have engaged in. (Ingarden 1957, 377-378)

6 What interests us in Ingarden’s formulation is the relation to the general “image of reality”, to the imaginations of the world, views, judgements, prejudices, and myths that are binding at a given time in given social groups. They constitute the correct context for the literary work. The work itself appeals, to an extent, to the “image of reality”; it recalls it and subjects it to certain modifications—which is one of the conditions for reception and—consequently—for the understanding of a given work by its contemporaries.

7 This concept means that truth in literary communication is a relative phenomenon that is subject to historical changes and that transforms in conjunction with the transformations of particular types of poetics as well as of social circumstances. What at a given time might seem true, at another will be seen as merely conventional and will not be treated as an account about the extratextual world but as a product of a given culture. Whereas the 17th-century pastoral romance sounded true to its contem|porary audiences, subsequent generations perceived it as a game of conventions alone. Literary truth should not therefore be identified with any particular kind of historical poetics: a given style has always existed only on condition that it proposed to its audiences what they were likely to accept as truth. Despite certain powerful temptations, truth in literature should also not be identified with the poetics of realism. It should not, although it was realism that aimed at the formulation of an image of the empirical world and that directly appealed to the experience of readers. Advocates of the poetics of realism believed that their work presented direct truth about their contemporary world. The concept of truth—and of nature—was an important factor for 17th-century classicists. Their truths were altogether different, though. Theoreticians of classicism claimed that truth is not what is, but what might be; they believed that the truth of a literary work refers to a refined reality that can be approved of by the addressees of the work.4 Realists understood truth—or they thought so—in accordance with the classic definition, that is, they believed the literary utterance to be adequate to the extra-textual world and to be verifiable with the principles of logic. Such an assumption was on numerous occasions expressed in 19th-century criticism (especially that related to the novel) and is still replicated in commonplace opinions about literature. When one approaches various understandings of literary truth from a historical and non-normative perspective, none of these understandings should be deemed more correct than others; instead, they need to be analysed against the social consciousness and the literary situation they were shaped in. Truth is a component of the structure of the work of literature and—simultaneously—an element of the relationship of the work with the reader, his consciousness, convictions, and faith. Thus the study of truth in a literary work of art falls within the competences of poetics as well as of the sociology of literature.

8When the question of truth in a literary work is defined along these lines, it seems essential to observe the relationship between the work and its receivers – what can be accepted as truth results from the tensions that appear between the two parties of the communicative process. Emil Hennequin declared decades ago in Études de critique scientifique: “Each and every work of art touches with one end the one who created it, and with the other—the group of people it makes an impression on” (Hennequin 1892, 91). In order to touch the people, it needs to in a certain way refer to one sort of imaginations they entertain or another. The imaginations concern literature itself, its status and characteristics, as well as everything literature is about—that is, the world whose image it creates. It has been noted that whereas while listening to music one hardly has to go beyond the sounds it is composed of, in the act of reading the reader inevitably has to go beyond the words towards what is non-verbal and non-literary.5 It seems that in order to be accepted by the reader, this movement—the movement beyond the words of a work of literature towards a non-verbal reality—needs to respect, at least partly, the reader’s knowledge about the reality.6 In his reflection on methodology, Jerzy Topolski used the concept of extra-textual knowledge; in literary theory the same question was addressed by Kazimierz Bartoszyński (see Topolski 1968, XVI and XVII; Bartoszyński 1971, 127–148). All readers beginning the act of reading are equipped with this type of knowledge—the knowledge that comes from outside the utterance that they are acquainting themselves with; they cannot leave such knowledge completely aside as it influences the very process of perceiving the text. The knowledge can be suspended in certain very special cases—when the work of literature as a rule comes into conflict with it (I will return to this crucial point later). The text not only assumes the existence of such knowledge as a prior phenomenon—as a point of support—but also treats it as a dynamic component. Furthermore, the text can influence the way the knowledge makes itself known and perhaps the way it is shaped. Michel Butor seems to be right when he claims: “The language of the author is the found language of the reader and everything that is contained in the book, is a kind of myth, a fairy-tale about everything that is external to the book, everything that is continuously lost” (Charbonnier 1967, 24). The work of literature not only appeals to extra-textual knowledge, then, but it is also conducive to the formulation of it. The text’s character and its specific structure—rather than only the features of the external world it refers to – influence the way the knowledge is activated and the selection of elements that become important. The strictly literary presentation—rather than what is presented—is the ultimate criterion here.

9For truth in literature, as it connects to what Topolski and Bartoszyński would call extra-textual knowledge, two factors are of crucial importance. Both are directly linked to each other—the literary genre and the idea of plausibility that is binding in a given culture and at all stages of the development of the culture.7 What is at stake, therefore, are not only the principles of utterance construction, but also imagination and convictions about the order of the world (the natural as well as the social world). These are connected phenomena—literary plausibility depends not only on the common opinions about world order, but also on the literary genre, that is, a socially acknowledged and stable type of utterance. Plausibility and truth are connected specifically because they both refer to the reader’s imaginations, but activate different areas of his or her consciousness. It might be claimed that plausibility appeals to the convictions the reader has about the construction of the world, the mechanisms of its functioning, as well as the principles regulating the behaviours of people and the processes that take place in the world. Seen in this way, the idea of plausibility stems from the mimetic theory of art: the structure of the presented world is an equivalent—or even an imitation—of the valid order of things. Plausibility is thus related to a specific syntax of elements that the world is filled with—it defines the possibilities of introducing certain elements into the world and, consequently, of organising them into certain logical complexes. Plausibility, by referring to more general and essential imaginations, generates conditions for the appearance of truth in a literary work. Truth understood in this way, without violating the assumed concept of the valid world order, appeals to the knowledge, faith, and convictions of the reader which concern concrete areas—that is, concrete human behaviours in a given situation, concrete occurrences within a historical event, etc. Truth might be related to both the elements of the utterance (such and such a scene tells the truth about the youthful love of characters, that is to say, it does not violate the reader’s conviction about what youthful love looks like or what it should look like “in life”) and to the entire utterance as such; in the latter case one might agree that the utterance as an autonomous structure offers an adequate image of a slice of reality—as long as “adequate” is understood as “compatible to an extent with the prior knowledge and assumptions of the reader” (in this sense one might say that a given novel tells the truth about a given segment of history or of the adolescence period, etc.).

10Both plausibility and truth in a work of literature depend—it needs to be stressed—on the genre they appear in, as well as—it is often the case in the novel—on the specific distinctions that can be made between genre subtypes. Genre is a contract between the author and the reader—a contract entered into in a certain historical-literary situation (see Głowiński 1969, 14–37). The way a work of literature is subjected to the principles of a given genre defines the character of the truth that operates in it: every genre has its truths that result from the principles it is governed by; the reader is therefore aware of what can be expected in a given genre. Thus the reader readily accepts fantastic events in a Romantic ballad, but would immediately refuse to accept them in a realist novel. In the latter case such events would violate the reader’s imaginations about the kind of truth that a novel of the sort should respect. Within European literary culture the division into genres results from the attitude of the reader—of all readers, including those naïve ones who might not have heard of genres at all. It can therefore be quite safely assumed that the more genres, the more truths and kinds of plausibility. Not only that: sometimes the distinctions within a genre can also result in different understandings of truth. The reader of science fiction will willingly accept interplanetary travel, the existence of extraordinary machines that could only be dreamt of even in our technocratic age, etc., but would not accept these in a novel that refers to the reader’s own experiences and imaginations of what is real. This is our contemporary version of the distinction that was made by numerous scholars in aesthetics between the real and plausible on the one hand and the fantastic on the other (see Abrams 1958, 265–268).

11 When truth is analysed as a component of a literary genre, the problems of the novel seem to be the most intriguing. It has been the case at least since the time when the novel became one of the forms of utterance that gained the widest readership (in French classicism truth understood in this way was more related to drama). A variety of factors contributed to such popularity. First of all, the readership is not just the result of the popularity of a given genre in a society, but also stems from the fact that the novel responds to (and has always done so) to the most basic images of the world; the novel encompasses them and makes them become an element of utterance. It is not surprising at all, then, that the novel was at some point assumed to be the domain of truth.

12Furthermore, narration in the novel says a lot about the world which seems verifiable—both when the narration presents contemporary reality that is accessible to the reader through his own experiences, and when it offers insight into a historical reality that can be—at least theoretically—verified on the basis of historical documents or the convictions about the given period that are currently accepted as valid. Narration in such a case does not have to be limited to details but can—as it seemed—present the biography of a man (as well as an image of the historical era) in its entirety—with the context of conditions and consequences shown in a deterministic way, that is, precisely how the curriculum vitae of the character and the life of an individual used to be presented at the time. Such narration can present not only the superficial aspect of facts, but also motives and justifications; it can subject individual actions (which it is predominantly concerned with) to what was accepted as valid general laws.8 Thus equipped, the novel seemed to be a privileged one among popular truths—it was only natural, therefore, to analyse it in direct connection to what was then understood to be reality. Such a mode of operation would be chosen not only by naïve readers of novel instalments published in magazines, but also by a large portion of nineteenth-century literary critics. Reviewers offered a lot of attention to what is true and what is not true in a given novel, wondering whether characters or the developments of plot can be considered true. Paradoxically, they treated the novel as both fiction and non-fiction. The novel, truth, and common sense coexisted in a harmonious manner in one field—the field of social consciousness.

13The marriage of the novel with common sense resulted from a number of factors. In the 19th century the novel was (and perhaps is still today) a genre that did not require readers to assume a historical attitude—which was needed, in turn, in the act of reading of those texts that, like the epic or the ancient tragedy, referred to the forms of social consciousness that no longer existed; while reading The Iliad I have to admit that godly interventions in the Trojan War are the actual truth, because they were true to Homer and to his contemporary addressees. In other words, when embarking on the act of reading of an epic, one needs to assume as true all that one is not normally ready to believe in. The reading of the novel did not require such a historical attitude as the author and the reader belonged to the same cultural formation and, despite certain differences and deviations, perceived the world with the help of the same concepts. Additionally, the author and the reader of the novel used the same language. In the case of the novel it was especially important, because the words of the novel were supposed to be transparent—that is, on the one hand, directly connected to the everyday speech of the reader and, on the other, adequately representing the order of things.

14The novel therefore seems to be a genre that appeals to—and in a large degree respects—the extra-textual knowledge the reader possesses. It might be claimed that in the reading of novels this special suspension of reality plays a rather minor role—both because of some structural features of the genre, and of its the historical position. It is symptomatic that some authors discussing the suspension of reality do not list novels among their magisterial examples: “To read The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and even King Lear properly, we have to suspend some of our criteria of ‘reality.’ This is why some critics wish to insist that all literature is, in some sense, ‘dream’” (Casey 1966, 155). The texts listed here do not pose a dilemma—they all belong to more distant epochs in the history of literature; moreover, as long as masterpieces of the past are concerned, the suspension of certain criteria allows us to notice the most profound senses—those, which are not limited to the knowledge that might appear false because it no longer complies to the convictions of our time. How can this issue be approached in the domain of the novel? We certainly do not have to suspend our criteria of reality in the same manner as we do while reading The Divine Comedy; still, it does not mean that the suspension does not operate at all. It is a commonplace that whenever reading a work of literature one needs to accept, at least partly, the rules that are binding for it; the novel is no exception in this respect. These “rules”, in turn, are undoubtedly different to what we normally perceive as the “rules” of reality. It seems that the very commencement of the act of reading means, to an extent, our acceptance of the conventions that organise a given text. The acceptance of a convention or the process of adapting to it is parallel to a certain withdrawal from everyday criteria of reality. The novel, in this respect, is no exception—even for those who naively believe that the novel expresses direct statements about the world. The character and the modus operandi of the suspension process depends on the methods that a narrative utterance applies in its construction of literary fiction. Let us observe this issue in detail.

15It is known that large sections of a novel might in no way differ from popular oral storytelling. Sentences like “Bouvard got a stomach ache, and Pécuchet fearful headaches” could obviously belong to any type of non-literary account—a chronicle, a reportage, or a kind of correspondence. Such statements are—let’s pick up Ingarden’s terms again—quasi-judgements equipped with specific detail that allows them to be seen as judgements. All this results from the characteristic way in which the novel (especially the classic novel) constructs literary fiction. There are, it seems, three basic modes of constructing fiction in a literary work. The first one ascribes the presented world the status of a complete being and forces the reader to treat it as objective reality. The second one treats the presented world as expression, and the third—approaches it as an element of the domain of the possible. Although all three modes might be applied in the novel, it hardly needs to be repeated that the most crucial one—especially for the realist and naturalist novel—is the second mode. It assumes the full being of entities that the narration is concerned with. The ontology of the presented world is to be as indubitable to the reader as the existence of the surrounding things known from everyday experience. Sentences from the novel should be as true to the reader as a statement like “This is a chair” uttered in a situation in which it is perfectly easy to check if the indicated object is a chair or not. In the novel nothing can be easily checked – certainty is based on faith and trust. These are not the result of good will only, though; they stem from the assumptions that the reader has to accept if she wants to be in readerly contact with a classical novel. These assumptions are a crucial component of the culture within which the novel was written and continued to function. Such a sort of literary ontology is the most correct domain for the operations of literary truth; it is here—as the novel appeals to our most elementary convictions about the world—that the suspension of reality criteria takes its most minimal form. I will return to this issue later.

16When the reader is aware in the act of reading that the world presented in the text is treated as expression, it is less urgently important to ask: what elements of the presented world can be undoubtedly treated as “beings”? Not the relationship of word and thing (or the thing the word creates) but the relationship between the word and the uttering subject is the most crucial. The latter relationship is the most successfully embodied in lyrical poetry, especially since Romanticism. It also bears significant importance for the novel. Such a relationship appears whenever the world is presented from the point of view of the character who does not aim at the so called objectification of the account, but presents the state of affairs, facts and states as they appear to his consciousness. Thus the character leaves an imprint of his individual “I”. The world treated as expression—that is, only partly prone to the criterion of literary truth that is valid in narration and assumes the complete ontological status of the created facts—appears in all forms of internal monologue. Not only there, though: the same applies to reported speech as used by the classic novel—especially in those cases that highlight the individual point of view of the speaker. The presented world treated as expression does not abolish the problem of truth. Not only because the hallucinations of a character in an internal monologue can be subjected to common sense assessment. The other reason is that interior monologue activates a particular understanding of truth. Truth is thus no longer the adequate relationship between a word and a thing (that is, let us reiterate, a thing the words have created), but a summoning of those social imaginations that apply to the psychic life of an individual and to his behaviours. Hence the colloquial concept of “the truth of emotions” or “the truth of experience”. Truth is in this case what complies with social norm.

17In some cases, the world presented is treated neither as an objective being nor as expression of the experiences of a character, but as a complex of possibilities. The reader must be aware that the choice of presented events has been made not because these really took place, but because the storyteller has arbitrarily decided to present them. As a result, the reader must accept that the elements presented are not, in a sense, necessary and could equally well be replaced by other components. What is highlighted is the storyteller and his choices, which determine the shape of the presented world. In some texts from the past—e.g. in Stern as well as in the Romantic digressive poem—such decisions were explicitly communicated to the reader and directly spoken about. Matters complicated in contemporary culture—e.g. in numerous examples of nouveau roman, in Frisch’s novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, as well as in Antonioni’s film Blowup. The developments of plot in each of these texts do not suggest that the elements it is composed of are actual beings: the plot is a possible arrangement—and thus does not exclude other possibilities. What has until now seemed to be the concept of truth, is undermined. Problems of the utterance itself come to the fore: of the utterance that is, so to say, incomplete if it does not configure its elements as exclusively valid and irreversible. Undisputable statements have been replaced with propositions and speculations. Such solutions, though they could gain no acceptance from the authors of the classic realist novel, are the domain of open works.

18The novel, it needs to be stressed, was for a time fascinated with truth. Authors and readers remained unaware that literary conventions largely determined what they were inclined to deem true. Truth, if analysed in relationship to the entire text, was the result of the assumed form of narration; if it related individual episodes, in turn, it depended on the distinctions within the assumed form of storytelling. To be precise, in the latter case truth belonged to the basic distinction in realist novel between the narrative and the reported speech passages. Absolute unquestionable truths were only uttered by the authoritative narrator, the words of characters could never be fully valid—a character could be wrong or under the spell of illusions, and his words, instead of constituting a reliable account, appeared to be expressive in nature. Thus the understanding of truth shifted (Głowiński 1968, 9-34). When one talks about truth in such novels, various meanings of the concept interfere. In the order of things in the novel it is true that Lucien de Rubempré arrived in Paris because the reader of Balzac’s novel cannot doubt such a component of the story material. While reading the entire novel the reader might entertain the conviction that the author of La Comédie humaine tells the truth about the French society of mid-nineteenth century. Truth of the first type depends solely on the mode in which the information about Lucien’s arrival to Paris is presented (thus, if it appeared in the speech of any of the characters and did not bear any significant consequences to the plot that would be presented in an authoritative manner, it would hardly possess any of the trueness value that is assigned to it a priori). Truth of the second type is a resultant of the narration in the entire novel which constructs the presented world in a way that solicits the reader to search for analogies with the actual historical happenings. Each of these two approaches might seem to present the truth—all because of a primary factor: motivation.9 Motivation, as Genette proved in his reading of Balzac—consists in a justification of a specific fact by general laws, in the treatment of singular events as resulting from these laws. In the case of the classic novel such an approach is connected to a dynamically causal image of the world: motivated happenings—those which are considered true—need to fit into the chain of causes and effects; if they do, there is no difficulty in finding rational justifications for them. In the classic novel the arrangements of the plot are an embodiment of rationalist principles and, taken as such, are supposed to be an equivalent (“a reflection”) of the real order of things (this is at least how nineteenth-century criticism would put it).10 Thus within the novel a fact is neither true nor false; approached in isolation it, in a way, does not have meaning. It gains meaning when it becomes motivated, that is, anchored in the cause-effect system. Motivation, in turn, is partly the matter of conventions (sets of literary devices that allow the reader to combine a certain amount of detail about the plot into a whole that would bear a global sense), and partly the matter of social consciousness which the novel appeals to and which it uses as context. In this perspective truth is not the question of the relationship between “utterance” and “extra-textual reality”, but a derivative of convention and of the social consciousness that accompanies it.

19This argument will be only more evident if one considers the relevance of some components that, although perhaps not always central to the discussion of the features of the novel, bear significant importance to the genre. The novel appeals to certain socially accepted judgements and at the same time proposes and develops certain symbolic elements. These two issues are strictly related. Judgements do not—at least not always—consist in the formulation of assessments; axiological assumptions saturate the utterance, which itself seems to be a certain axiological proposition. It is a feature of the immanent poetics of literature, that every work, with its structure and developments, approves of certain values and rejects others. This is especially the case with the genres (such as the novel) which enjoy a widespread audience. What seems important here are also the so called signals of relevance (Balcerzan 1965, 296–305)—which ultimately depend on genre poetics and conventions. They also are, in the majority of cases, symbolic in nature—for instance, the proportions (hugely important for the construction of the novel) between what is widely narrated and what is just cursorily mentioned, as well as between the narrated and the omitted.11 The reader will consider a novel to be true on condition that it respects proportions that the reader believes to be compatible both with the scale of values and with the proportions valid in the real world. Nineteenth-century criticism expressed views of this sort; critics claimed that a writer wrote more on this, and less on that; since the latter issue seemed to be less important, the author was believed to have drifted away from truth in the novel. This might, perhaps, sound like a caricature, but I am sure it does not distort the essence of things too much. The plot appeared to be a system whose point of reference lay in social consciousness (within which, in turn, prevailed commonplace opinions about what is significant and valuable). Such opinions constituted the basic context for the novel; without it the plot would have to be treated as a pure phenomenon rather than a genre component saturated with symbolism.

20The novel, it needs to be stressed, is equipped with its own type of symbolism12—one that is connected to its axiological assumptions. The issue is worthy of a separate study and therefore I will only cursorily discuss it. Let be begin with a characteristic example: a renowned critic, when discussing two Polish novels of the 1950s, questioned the way the novels presented the social practices of 1st May. One text showed the event as a vibrant, energetic time in which the youth rejoiced a lot; the other presented a completely different view: gloomy weather, miserable, exhausted, and badly dressed demonstrators. The critic concluded:

I have nothing against truth—even the gloomiest one. Still, I believe pessimism should not be a literary device, and anti-schematism—should not become a new type of schematism. Whoever compares the filthy and wretched description of 1st May that Hłasko uses in the ending section of his “Głupcy…” [“…who Believe in the Morning” / “Głupcy wierzą w poranek”] with the joyful feast that [Kazimierz] Brandys presents towards the end of Citizens [Obywatele], a striking similarity will be evident: both descriptions will seem equally false. (Sandauer 1966, 39–40)

21One should not accuse the critic of naiveté; he does not juxtapose the images of 1st May with “reality”. He considers them as symbols—and claims them to be false as symbols, too. In fact, the scenes in the two novels seem to have been designed as symbolic endings. They appear in final sections of the respective texts—that is, in the most exposed areas which frequently, the traditional assumption goes, are to contain conclusions of the meanings accumulated in the novel. Truth in the novel, as it appeals to common opinions and the valid axiology, is a resultant of both the symbolic proportions and of the areas of text that bear the largest symbolic concentration. In other words, the impression of truthfulness in a narrative text is determined more by the contents of the beginning and the ending (the symbolically privileged sections of the text) than by other episodes. Again, truth turns out to be a resultant of valid conventions and the principles that govern utterance.

22 The problem can be addressed in a more general way at this stage: truth in a work of literature is above all the relationship of an utterance to an utterance—a real or a potential one. Truth, understood in this way, is a continuous appeal to social consciousness and to its norms—to the consciousness which, even if it was not formulated in a set of texts, might be verbalised at any given moment. Truth in literature is not absolute, but evolves in conjunction to the transformation of social consciousness, which means that in certain cases the work seems true (when one assumes the historical approach), and in others appears to be just a mere symptom of a historically defined convention, a sign of participation in a defunct cultural product. Truth viewed in terms of the conventions and assumptions of a stable civilization ceased to be regarded as truth when it became obvious that civilization was losing its stability, when its criteria of value were ceasing to be universal, and when its conventions were coming to be viewed as irrelevant (Daiches 1960, 70). Certain truths in literature might therefore be considered absolute only when they are seen in the context of a relatively small segment of their contemporary history; they become relative when seen in a diachronic perspective. Transformations of conventions lead to transformations of truth.

23 Even if one assumes that truth and convention in literature are directly dependent on each other, two perspectives need to be distinguished. A colloquial one would claim that an element of the novel is true if it is the most conventional—that is, the most submissive to the social consciousness (real or postulated by a given social group) that is valid in a given period. In other words, the reader accepts as true the issues about which he was convinced even before the act of reading; the main objective of a work of literature is to solidify the prior convictions and to fully approve of the reader’s extra-textual knowledge. Such a concept of truth (and of plausibility) is characteristic for popular art of all sorts, as well as for the contemporary mass culture; it is therefore a form of conformism.13 Such a concept contributed (and continues to do so) to the development of the novel—which seems only natural, given the extensive readership the novel acquired. Had this concept dominated the genre, the novel would have suffered from a peculiar case of sclerosis and would never have developed that much. It has never been the case, though.

24 Literature encompasses yet another understanding of truth. One might call it “avant-garde” because of the symptomatic attitude that seems to define it (rather than because of any of the concrete movements that believed themselves to be avant-garde). In the latter case the status of truth is assigned to what managed to somehow transgress the conventions valid for the given period; truth is thus shaped by those elements of the text which establish new ways of telling and which are not limited to what is known and validated. Truth understood in this way does not flatter the reader; on the contrary, it is in a way against him. Such truth does not bend for the reader, but attempts to bend him for the requirements it has created for him. “Nothing facilitates the communion with truth as much as a new convention does”, Brandys claimed. Opinions of this sort predominate among numerous contemporary writers who are not satisfied with the existing repertoire of literary forms. A “new convention” demolishes the existing order and thus allows writers to say something that has not been said before—something the reader may perceive as unconventional—especially if convention is understood as a set of stable and socially accepted kinds of utterances. What seems to be at stake here is not mere wordplay. In literature everything is—or, since one should perhaps see it as a process rather than a state—everything becomes a convention. In a given segment of history certain approaches are perceived as conventions in a twofold sense: the first refers to convention as a customary way of speaking which best fits the convictions and tastes valid for the time and hence constitutes an unspoken agreement between the writer and the audience. The second one is concerned with everything that is perceived as the negation of all conventions, as madness or a challenge to common sense and to the entire history of art. For truth in the novel these variously understood conventions and non-conventions are very significant.

25 Their large significance results from the fact that they appear in conjunction—at least in certain cases. There are, needless to say, numerous novels whose only raison d'être is to allow the reader to see his own banality—such texts do not infringe the reader’s views but confirm all myths he believes in and satisfy all his needs and aspirations. There is another type of novel, too—one which continuously proposes new conventions (which, in the eyes of their contemporary readers, are not conventions at all). In the 19th century such novels were written by, for instance, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Still, a literary utterance which would use only new ways of telling—without referring to tradition, to stable forms of utterance, and to currently valid convictions—is simply impossible. It would, on the one hand, require the author to isolate herself completely from the culture surrounding her, and, on the other, would not create conditions that would be conducive for the communication between the work and its receiver. Herman Broch seems to have had this in mind when he claimed that even the greatest masterpieces contain a grain of kitsch—that there is no art without kitsch, in fact. He understood kitsch as any reference to convictions, opinions, forms of expression that are valid for a given period (that is, widely accepted and banalised).14 Seen as such, kitsch—which to some would appear as pure truth, and to others as pure convention—has a double function: it at the same time delays the crystallization of literary truth and allows it happen in the first place. As the word “truth” appears in numerous meanings in these formulations, they only appear to be paradoxical. The impression of paradox might seem overwhelming, but —whenever truth in literature is discussed—all these meanings overlap, accumulate and create a whole that must generate suspicion. It is nevertheless the case that they appear in such suspicious form in the public consciousness. Differences between truth understood as convention and the replication of known convictions on the one hand, and truth as non-convention and the formulation of unknown opinions on the other, are fluid. The differences are shaped in various ways depending on historical changes. Boundaries between one type of readers (who require very little of literature and want it to confirm their own banalities) and another (who treat literature as an adventure quest in the search of new values) are not delineated in an unambiguous way. Boundaries are more evident within each of these groups—the most refined reader, as Broch would put it, has to have his own kitsch zone.

26 If one assumes that truth in literature is one of many components of what is widely understood as literary conventions, it is impossible to claim that cognitive capacities of literature are not limited to truth. Such capacities also depend on conventions—and I do not mean that certain conventions at a given time allow the author to make direct claims about reality. The dilemma needs to be formulated differently: transformations of literary conventions—the disappearance of some, and the rise of others—allow literature to address new readerly experiences that have not been acknowledged before. Erich Auerbach proved very well that the breaking of the convention of three styles—high, middle, and low—allowed literature to explore new territories and—at the same time—new values (Auerbach 1953). A change of convention is a change of the language that is used to describe the world accessible to the author and to readers—of the language that expresses the convictions of both parties and actively influences the way these convictions are formulated—of the language that communicates common experience. An element of the utterance, truth in literature refers to other utterances rather than directly to reality; truth—understood as a combination of the colloquial of the avant-garde—is a derivative of the language that literature uses. This is the case with the novel as much as with any other literary genre, despite the fact that the novel, at least in some periods, created the illusion of expressing direct knowledge about the world.15

27I presented this paper three times in the first half of 1969 to audiences in Poznań (as part of what used to be called “Literary Thursdays”) and in Warsaw (at the meeting of the Polish Institute Student Society at the University of Warsaw as well as in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences). On each occasion a heated debate ensued—sometimes powerfully critical of what I had had to say. All of these debates helped me a lot. I would like to express my gratitude to all interlocutors for their comments, which I considered carefully when preparing the final version of the above text.

Notes

• 1 Ingarden’s theory addresses the question of “truth” in a literary work—see Ingarden (1973a). See also Ingarden (1973b).
• 2 The opening sentence of Stefan Żeromski’s novel Ashes [Popioły] (ed.).
• 3 The issues at stake have been addressed by American scholars dealing with aesthetics: Hospers (1946); Hofstadter (1968).
• 4 See the analysis of such assumptions in Abrams (1958, 35–36). Abrams devotes a chapter to the transformations of the idea of truth in English Romantic criticism (263–297). The theoretical background for French classicism is presented by Bray (1926). Boris Reizov, in turn, discusses the concepts of truth in the novel (especially historical novel) in connection to the first generation of French Romantics (Reizov 1958).
• 5 See the formulations of C.S. Lewis (1961, 142).
• 6 Hennequin addressed this issue in his pioneering study: „In order to be accepted as true—and, consequently, to move a given reader—the novel should represent things and people in the same appearance the reader knows them in; thus the novel will make a success not in its recreation of objective truth, but in relationship to the number of people whose subjective truth it expresses, whose concepts it reflects, whose imaginations it does not violate. […] Thus the description of a scene from everyday life [..] will be deemed good not only because of its precision, but also because it appeals to the reader’s ways of seeing” (Hennequin 1892, 95–97).
• 7 The subject was addressed in a special issue of the French Communications (1968, no. 11) titled “Le Vraisemblable”. The following articles contained in it are of special importance to the subjects discussed in here: Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation”, Christian Metz, “Le dire et le dit au cinéma: vers le déclin d’un vraisemblable?”; Gérard Genot, “L’écriture libératrice: Le vraisemblable dans la ‘Jérusalem delivrée’ du Tasse”; Tzvetan Todorov, “Du vraisemblable que l’on ne saurait éviter”. Although the idea for the present article had been ready before I read this excellent monographic issue, the reading of the above encouraged me both to revise my original assumptions and to present them in a different manner. The present article thus owes a lot to the issue of Communications. See also the discussion of plausibility in Burke (1966). Burke claims that truth does not provide a work of literature with its artistic effect—which is only the result of plausibility: one who does not believe in the existence of hell will be moved by Dante’s Inferno because the presentation of it is organised in a plausible way (Burke 1966, 488). Socrates’ dialogues with Phaedrus seem to be related, too: “The orator should keep probability in view, and say good-bye to the truth. And the observance, of this principle throughout a speech furnishes the whole art”.
• 8 René Girard discusses issues of this sort in his philosophically oriented Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Girard 1961). When dealing with „truth in the novel” Girard does not address the problem of common convictions valid for a given era; instead, he focuses on the concept of authenticity—which locates his observations nearby Lukács’ Theory of the Novel.
• 9 The relevance of motivation for plausibility is underlined by the authors of essays published in Communications, especially Gérard Genette in “Vraisemblance et motivation”.
• 10 The novel has played too big a role in the European culture of the last couple of centuries to be seen as mere resultant of social consciousness. The novel certainly shapes social consciousness and influence its propagation.
• 11 By appealing to the reader’s extra-textual knowledge, the novel reveals, so to say, its omissions as it does not satisfy all needs of the reader. Understood in this way, omissions are a structural component of the novel. They can appear in numerous forms; in numerous cases the reader can fill them in in the process of perception, but it frequently happens that the omissions will be seen as egregious violations of the crucial proportion—and, hence, a withdrawal from truth in literature.
• 12 This matter is addressed in the work of English and American critics. See Daiches (1958, 65–79).
• 13 This aspect was stressed by the authors of the issue of Communications I referred to earlier.
• 14 Kitsch is one of the most significant issues in Broch’s essays on aesthetics. I read them in the French translation of Kohn (Broch 1966). Two essays are especially significant here: “La vision du monde donnée par le roman” (215–244) and “Quelques remarques à propos de l’art tape-à-l’œil” (309–325).
• 15 It needs to be stressed that such an understanding of truth in a work of literature does not mean that it is impossible for such a work to contain logical judgements. The work of literature is such a multifaceted, complex construct that it can contain various components. Judgements of a strictly logical kind, if used in a lyrical poem, a novel, or a lyrical confessional poem, appear in a specific context. One needs to be aware of the fact, although, that on the other hand, differences between logical judgements and, as Ingarden would call them, quasi-judgements, are not as significant as they might appear to be. In the act of reading the reader does not have to distinguish between truth understood in the classical way (“Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo”) and the literary kind of truth, which is concerned with the adventures and experiences of, for instance, Stendahl’s Fabrice del Dongo, who took part in the battle. Such dilemmas are discussed by Weitz (1950).