“Why do you write what isn’t true?”: Dostoevsky and the Fantastic Paradox

Abstract

In this paper, my starting point will be Philip Roth’s famous essay “Writing American Fiction,” in which he complains about the difficulty of writing novels in a country “where the actuality is constantly outdoing our talents.” I shall contend that this perception is not a new one, nor does it apply to American reality alone, and trace it back through a series of writers commenting on the difficulty of writing novels in the face of contemporary reality to its origins in Byron’s Don Juan: “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” I shall argue that the aesthetics of “romantic realism,” as Donald Fanger labels it—the writing of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Gogol, etc—directly addresses this paradox, and that this partly accounts for the differences between it and “classic realism.” My contention is that we mistake the nature of such writing if we judge it by the criteria of “classic realism”—and find it wanting, as is often the case.