| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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In this way of looking at the matter of significant utterance, the very act of comprehending and valuing what is near at hand depends upon eliding direct knowledge of a past association.
Polanyi’s theory applied generally to narrative offers an intriguing possibility for explaining the universal veneration given to certain writers of realist fiction.
Conceivably, de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Tolstoy all retain their appeal across cultures and over time because they have the knack of choosing arrangements of detail and plot which invite the projection of a tacit experience which human beings everywhere frequently experience.
It follows that the reality-constructs of such writers need not be true in the sense of presenting accurately the world as it is. They need only be felt to be true in the sense of seeming natural to a significant number of readers. And they would seem so because the projection of a subsidiary or proximal level of awareness tacitly onto the distal, or near-at-hand, is suppressed. If an experience of the eternal verities in literature does depend upon the unconscious projection of a significance to which one has become habituated, “realistic” might be nothing more than a way of naming an undemonstrable consensus. In such a case, what is given as story seems axiomatic, not because in it a reality is laid bare, but for precisely the opposite reason that an apparent meaning is substantiated by a source which cannot be disclosed.
It may be that what is often taken in realist fiction as the broadening of a perception about the world is, instead, a formulaic narrowing of possibility. In such a case, a significant minority of influential readers whose subsidiary or “proximal” experiences happen to coincide with a similar “distal” sequence as presented in a text would be sufficient to guarantee that book its canonical place.