Aleatory Realism: Reflections on the Parable of the Pier-Glass

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Published: May 1, 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16869
Keywords:
realism reality perspective aleatory realism representation George Eliot Eliot
Matthew Beaumont
Abstract
This article challenges the simplistic conception of realism sponsored by postmodernist thought, through a re-engagement with those moments in George Eliot's fiction in which she reflects self-consciously on realist representation. After re-examining the opening of Adam Bede, which is notable for its experimental attitude to realism, the article proceeds to a discussion of the famous metaphor of the pier-glass sketched in Middlemarch. This metaphor, the article contends, offers a glimpse of a realism beyond realism, in which the realist aesthetic collapses, and reality appears instead in the form of unmediated, unprocessed matter. The article identifies this inchoate, almost unthinkable form of representation, which it associates with the perspectival device called anamorphosis, as ‘aleatory realism.’
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Author Biography
Matthew Beaumont
Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900 (2005), and the co-author, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He is the editor of Adventures in Realism, and the co-editor of As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century (2007), The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble (2007), and Restless Cities (2010). He is currently writing a book about nightwalking in cities, entitled Midnight Streets.
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