Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

23.4 Non-realist texts
Unit 23 Narrative realism
Section 5 Narrative

Many contemporary literary texts play with the conventions of realism, either to challenge traditional notions of realism (for example, surreal, science fiction or fantasy texts) or to challenge notions of what reality is (for example, representing the perspective of narrators or characters with different or altered states of consciousness). Many of these non-realist texts force the reader to question both their sense of what counts as realism in a text and what is real. For example in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time(2003), the central character and narrator is not the conventional middle-class educated narrator of classic realist fiction. Take for example, this extract:

Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side. The policewoman put her arms round Mrs Shears and led her back towards the house. I lifted my head off the grass. The policeman squatted down beside me and said ’Would you like to tell me what’s going on here, young man?’ I sat up and said ’The dog is dead.’ ’I’d got that far,’ he said. I said ’I think someone killed the dog.’ ’How old are you?’ he asked. I replied, ’I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.’ ’And what precisely were you doing in the garden?’ he asked. ’I was holding the dog,’ I replied. ’And why were you holding the dog?’ he asked. This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead. I like policemen too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.

This extract is not a conventionally realist text, although it shares certain of the features of realism. There is a certain amount of descriptive information given about the characters, and yet this information seems not to be the type of relevant character-revealing information that we find in realist texts. Instead, the reader is presented with information about the police officers that appears random: that the policewoman has a hole in her tights and that there is a scratch on her leg; that the policeman has a leaf stuck to his shoe. This type of information seems to conform to Barthes’ reality effect in that it is excessive, non-necessary information, but here its relevance to the plot or character development is in question. In a similar way, we are not informed that the character/narrator is lying on the ground but rather we are forced to work this out when he says ’I lifted my head off the grass’. We expect realist narrators to spell out what is happening clearly to the reader. The fact that the protagonist gives the police officers either too much information (about his age) or too little (about his reasons for being in the garden) leads the reader to surmise that this is not the trustworthy narrator of classic realism. We are forced to assume that this narrator’s perspective is just one of many different views of the events and thus the hierarchy of discourses of class realism is reversed: instead of the narrator presenting us with the ’truth’ of the events, here, his perspective needs to be set alongside the perspective of the police officers. Thus, contemporary texts may be non-realist in the sense that they play with the conventions of classic realism or they may be attempting to represent different ’realities’, calling for different forms of representation.