ABSTRACT
An explanation of the ideological interpellation of Victorian novel readers inevitably engages discussion of literary realism, and so I shall begin by presenting a materialist critique, from the problematic of Louis Althusser and Michel Pêcheux, of a recent description of the production of the ‘realistic’ fiction effect. I shall argue a theory of literary realism (based on Pêcheux’s Language, Semantics and Ideology2) as a process of simultaneous reproduction and transformation of the ideological formation, demonstrating this process in the text of Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I want to construct an argument, that is, against the description of fictional realism as a form of consensus; by invoking ‘consensus’, a social category, such a description of realism invites ideological analysis: whose consensus, I would ask, is it, and whose, at any particular historical moment, is it not? Fictional realism is said to be ‘an aesthetic form of consensus, its touchstone being the agreement between the various viewpoints made available by a text’.3 The consensus of available viewpoints in a novel ‘establishes an agreement of meanings’; it ‘literally “objectifies” the world’:
The genial consensus of realistic narration implies a unity in human experience which assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone. Disagreement is only an accident of position. However refracted it may be by point of view and by circumstance, the uniformity at the base of human experience and the solidarity of human nature receive confirmation from realistic conventions.
