Televisual Realism: The Truman Show

This essay begins with a discussion of the paradoxical desire for realistic fiction, then, an analysis of Truman Show, suggests how that desire, which first comes into historical prominence with the emergence of the novel, always seeks out new means of satisfying itself, ultimately coming to its maximal, self-undoing satisfaction with the advent of television technology. history of realism--by which I mean stories about people living in our material world--as a major presence in storytelling is relatively brief in relation to the history of story in general. As Eric Auerbach writes in Mimesis, this notion of realism, dealing seriously with everyday occupations and social classes [...] customs and institutions, was completely impossible in antiquity, and only became acceptable in modern literature (31). Until the emergence of the novel, the impossibly ideal, the fantastic, the supernatural, the plainly not-everyday real, were the normal content for the great mass of storytelling. And such content remains immensely successful, as a look at any of the recent blockbuster superhero films will show. But, beginning especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has been a continuing large audience for stories that strive to imitate life only as humans in general might plausibly be expected to live: without supernatural powers or events, without perfect or ideal characters, without impossibilities in general. Scholars have studied novelistic for some time. With respect specifically to the appeal of novelistic realism, we have one line of scholars--including earlier writers such as Auerbach, Ian Watt, and Harry Levin, and more recent writers such as Lennard Davis, George Levine, Harry Shaw, and Peter Brooks--who one way or the other follow after Aristotle's explanation of the appeal of verisimilitude. In his Poetics, Aristotle explains that we naturally take delight in seeing the real reproduced with minute fidelity because it is through that we are instructed in our earliest lessons about life (51). To choose only one more recent version of this understanding, we read in Harry Shaw's Narrating Reality that provides a model of how we might go about processing historical and social realities, of the sorts of things we'd need to take into account and the sorts of connections we might usefully draw in order to live a better, more critically aware life (20). We take delight in novelistic because it gives us a kind of instruction for living. other major consideration of the appeal of novelistic occurs in the work of Marxist scholars such as Pierre Macherey and Louis Althusser as well as in the work of what I will call deconstructive scholars such as Roland Barthes, J. Hillis Miller, and Michel Foucault. Their explanations hold one way or another that realism is an ideological function of a certain kind of discourse. Barthes may have given the most concise explanation of this in The Reality Effect. Because of the nature of linguistic signification itself, realistic fiction can only give a reality effect, rather than what readers feel they are getting: a simple imitation of the solidly pre-existing real (148). Realistic fiction appeals because it unconsciously produces and secures a certain kind of psychological subjectivity (a false consciousness), one that takes itself and the real as self-consistent essences, independent of representation. In this understanding, then, appeals not as instruction, but as construction. I want to acknowledge these critical traditions because to use the term tends automatically to raise critical hackles. But having made the acknowledgment, I need take no position here on the ontological nature of the real or the epistemological nature of realistic representation. In a related way, I need take no position on why novelistic became so successful when it did and where it did (i. …