reality effect

is a reference to the way in which realism, a mode of writing that was created initially in an attempt to move beyond literary conventions towards an accurate representation of the social world, ends by establishing tenacious codes and conventions for the creation of the illusion of reality.

Barthes’s thesis is, however, confirmed in that very definition, since the realist novel, so dominant from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is by definition an alienated form of writing, hiding its literariness at the same time as establishing this mode as the standard of ‘good writing’, of ‘literary’ writing. Barthes refers to the fact that the realist novel is at one and the same time the kind of novel still privileged in bourgeois schools and the kind of novel officially sanctioned by Soviet Communism and its international off-shoots, such as the PCF (WDZ: 58–61). The realist novel, far from creating an unalienated mode of writing, has become the ‘sign of Literature’ for both bourgeois and anti-bourgeois culture. Its conventions – the use of the third person (‘he’, ‘they’) or the use of the first-person voice of a character (‘I’), certain characteristic tenses and adjectives, a particularly detailed attention to objects – all go to build up what Barthes, in subsequent contributions to this critique of realism, will call ‘the reality effect’ (see ‘ The Reality Effect’ , RL: 141–8). Thus, a mode of writing that was created initially in an attempt to move beyond literary conventions towards an accurate representation of the social world, ends by establishing tenacious codes and conventions for the creation of the illusion of reality.

reality effect, n.All

reality effect