There is No Spoon

Eagleton’s discussion of what is ‘real’ was very interesting. It made me think of the discussion that I have had every time I introduce the idea of realism to a literature class. The students are unable to distinguish between realism and truth. They assume that if a story is labeled as realism that means that it is actually a work of nonfiction. Eagleton would suggest that this mistake is often made with just about every type of literature out there. He claims that we cannot mistake fiction as a means of “imaginatively transposing the real,” but rather as “the production of certain produced representations of the real into an imaginary object” (173). We often hear that literature is a way for us to see and understand the world. Eagleton would disagree in the sense that literature does not show us some insight into what is real through a fictional medium. He would say instead, at least in the fictional conversation that I had with him in my head, that literature provides a way for us to see the products that come from the various representations that we call the ‘real’ world. Through varying degrees, literature can present us with an imaginary setting that is similar to, but never the same as our world. The degree of ‘reality’ is based on the work’s focus on the imagined representation or on the ways that the real signifies itself.