JEHLEN, Myra, Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, 182 p.
ISBN 978-0-691-13612-7
RÉSUMÉ
Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent onfinding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world asobjectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth,Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert,James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memoryas the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever itsmaterials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors,James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while inLolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass.
In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for takinghold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological asthey are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. Theaesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments forexploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm thevalidity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, abeautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokovwrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once theorigin and the confirmation of a work's truth.
In Five Fictions in Search of Truth,Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about theworld but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through thisform, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that isequally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover anincarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basicconcurrence between literature and science.
BIOGRAPHIE
Myra Jehlen is the Board of Governors Professor of Literature at Rutgers University. Her books include American Incarnation and Readings at the Edge of Literature.