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

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.’