The Materialist Conception of Fiction

Abstract

In contributing to an overall discussion on the tension between empirical reality, fiction, and the self, this chapter invites readers into a discussion of why literary scholars interest themselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction—these unreal stories about unreal individuals—as the second decade of the twenty-first century draws to an end. Completed the same year the US Supreme Court ruled Civil Rights as unconstitutional (1883), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn actively criticizes the failures of Reconstruction by posing the question: how do you free a “free slave”? Huck Finn’s response to the sociopolitical climate of the American South, where he emerges as a representation of the African American experience during the rise and fall of Reconstruction, provokes the question: was Huckleberry Finn ever white?

Even if the eye were to train itself on the flash, and were able to predict the exact moment and place of its occurrence, it would remain unseeing, for it would be blinded by the force of the light, so that it is not lightning itself that we wish to see but what its flash reveals, the inner configuration of the surrounding landscape and the forces at play within.

— Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight (Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Introduction by Wlad Godzich, Theory and History of Literature 7, University of Minnesota Press (1983), xx)