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STEVEN MARCUS
both internal, formal necessity and social convention isolated from
social and historical actuality, it registers social and historical changes,
if it registers them at all, more slowly and crudely than the novel, or
for that matter almost any other form of written expression.
How profound this confusion can become appears
in
Ashbee's
second discussion of fiction. In the Preliminary Remarks to Volume
III he states that "fiction, of whatever description, always was, and
still continues to be, one of the most influential branches of literature,
and one of the surest sources whence to gather a picture of the times."
He goes on to discuss different kinds of novels and novelists and then
reaches this conclusion: "Now, Erotic Novels, falling as they gen–
erally do into the category of domestic fiction, contain, at any rate
the best of them, the truth, and 'hold the mirror up to nature' more
certainly than do those of any other description." In addition, "their
authors have, in most instances, been eye-witnesses of the scenes they
have described, as were a Furetiere, a Restif de la Bretonne, or, to
borrow but two examples from our own writers, a Defoe, or a Dickens;
or even have, like a Marquis de Sade, themselves enacted, in part,
what they have portrayed." The assimilation of all the varieties and
degrees of this kind of writing to the Domestic Novel is ludicrous (it
does, however, add a new dimension of meaning to the idea of the
family romance). As for the argument on behalf of the superior
"realism" of this kind of fiction, it can at best be entertained in a
provisional and minimal way. But the whole case collapses when we
see that all its claims are based on the belief that the writers of such
fiction have in one way or another actually experienced the incidents
they represent. In the overwhelming majority of instances this is the
reverse of truth, and pornographic fiction cannot as a whole be
thought of as a record of experience but must be thought of as a
record of fantasy. Since these fantasies do actually exist, it is possible
to say that in a certain sense pornography is a "realistic" representa–
tion of them-at least they are "realized" in pornographic fiction.
But the question of "truth" or "reality" ends as a rule right there.
Much the same thing, it can be argued, is true of the novel itself.
And we must allow a degree of credibility to this assertion. In the
novel, however, the proportions are different, and the balance or
intermixture of fantasy and experience infinitely more complex. More–
over, however realistic a novel tries to be it is always conscious of
