#### 3.2 Facts in Criminal Proceedings

While civil proceedings are subjugated to the will of the parties, criminal proceedings deal with the situation that the citizen faces the state. This implies a relationship of superiority and subordination. Due to this relationship, the so-called 'official investigation principle' ('Amtsermittlungsgrundsatz') or inquisition principle applies here, i.e., the court has to determine the actual facts independently of the submissions of the persons concerned.15

The basis of the entire procedure is the rule-of-law principle that doubts are always to the benefit of the accused, 'in dubio pro reo.' Therefore, the accused himself does not have to prove his innocence; rather, it is necessary that the facts he is charged with are fully proven. It does not have to be established that the accused is innocent. The latter does not have to prove his innocence either. The only decisive factor is whether a conviction is likely on the basis of the evidence available.16 A special constellation of this principle is the so-called 'choice determination.' This occurs when a decision between two factual constellations cannot be made without a doubt, the alternatives are further comparable in terms of legal ethics, and at least one alternative is realized in any case.17 If a car that has been proven to be stolen is discovered in the possession of a defendant, there is either the possibility that he stole it himself or that he bought it from the thief. In the first case he would be guilty of theft, in the second case of accepting stolen property. If one were to strictly apply 'in dubio pro reo,' one would conclude that both offenses are not existent, since they are mutually exclusive, and none can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. In order to avoid such an unsatisfactory result, a conviction according to the milder offense – in this case receiving stolen goods – is

15 § 155 para. 2 StPO, Schmitt StPO 2020: § 155 para. 2.

16 Schmitt StPO 2020: § 170 para. 1.

17 Fischer StGB 2021: § 1 para. 33.

possible. Theft and purchasing stolen goods have a comparable unlawful content, since both are directed against the property of others, so that a decision between the two does not seem necessary.

The investigations are not conducted by the court itself; rather, it is the responsibility of the prosecutor to gather both incriminating and exculpating facts for the accused and to bring them to court. Therefore, the criminal proceedings are divided into the following sections:

#### 3.2.1 Preliminary Investigation

The standard here is the initial suspicion, i.e., the possibility of a prosecutable offense exists according to criminalistic experience. There are no restrictions concerning the possible factual basis. The initial suspicion can thus arise from a multitude of circumstances. For example, in the case of a car driver who is found to be under the influence of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), regular consumption can be concluded from the presence of tetrahydrocannabinolcarboxylic-acid which is why the initial suspicion of illicit possession or even trafficking can be deduced

#### 3.2.2 Investigation

If such an initial suspicion is assumed, the preliminary proceedings are to be opened. Here, the prosecutor examines whether a conviction of a criminal offense is probable – the so-called 'sufficient suspicion' – and exists.18 Since the standard is the probability of conviction, the prosecutor must forecast the court's decision. Therefore, it is necessary to ask not only about the facts of the case but whether a conviction is possible according to the evidence of the criminal proceedings.19 Thus, a strict standard is set for the factual basis, already taking into consideration the principle of doubt.

In criminal proceedings, the confession of the accused, the testimony of witnesses, the expert opinion, objects of inspection as well as documents count as evidence. The collection of this evidence is also specifically regulated. While in civil proceedings it is basically irrelevant how a party obtains evidence, in criminal proceedings only facts that the state has obtained in a legally regulated procedure can be recognized as evidence.20 Thus, a judicial

18 § 170 StPO; Schmitt StPO 2020: § 170 para. 1.

19 Higher Regional Court (OLG) Karlsruhe, Decision 16.12.2002, Az. 1 Ws 85/02, Rn. 20, juris.

20 Decision 16.06.2015, Az. 2 BvR 2718/10 and also BVerfGE 20, 162 (223).

order is required for the interception of an accused's telecommunications, which also requires an offense of considerable importance regulated with the help of an exhaustive list. If questioning of witnesses during a court hearing is not possible, the accused must at least have the possibility of an adversarial questioning through his or her lawyer. If these requirements are not met, it does not automatically follow that evidence cannot be used. Rather, the public's interest in criminal prosecution must be weighed against the accused's interest in complying with the rules of criminal procedure.21 A result of this can be that a certain piece of evidence cannot be introduced into the proceedings, although it would prove the guilt of the accused beyond doubt.

When it comes to evidence, the confession, or the admission of the accused, is central, as this is the starting point for determining the facts of the case. However, a confession must always be verified and cannot simply be assumed to be true.

Witness statements are the most frequent but also the most difficult evidence in criminal proceedings. Witness testimony also poses the problem that witnesses can refuse to testify in later proceedings. If this is the case for justified reasons, especially when it comes to close family members, statements made beforehand may no longer be used in the court proceedings.22 Also, the former interrogators can then no longer be questioned about the statement as 'hearsay witnesses.' This often leads to dismissals, especially in domestic violence proceedings, because the injured parties subsequently refuse to testify, while objective proof is not possible without their testimony.

Less important are deeds and visual inspection. Experts play a role especially in medical matters.

If, at the end of the investigation, the prosecutor concludes that a conviction is likely because of the admissible evidence, a public prosecution must be filed. In doing so, the prosecutor names the evidence gathered from which the accused facts arise and thus creates the basis for the judicial investigation of the same.

#### 3.2.3 Criminal Trial

Subsequently, the court itself examines whether the basis of the case file offers sufficient suspicion of the offense.

21 Federal Constitutional Court, Decision 13.05.2015, Az. 2 BvR 616/13, HRRS 2015 Nr. 824 Rn. 41.

22 Schmitt StPO 2020: § 252 para. 12.

If this is the case, the hearing takes place. Here, the aforementioned standard is further tightened: The basis of the judgement is only the evidence of the aforementioned categories and that which has been introduced into the main hearing (principle of orality or 'Mündlichkeitsgrundsatz'). Even if a witness has already testified in the preliminary proceedings, he or she must now make this testimony again so that it can find its way into the judgement. Likewise, the procedure for taking evidence is precisely regulated.

The appraisal of the evidence is ultimately the task of the court. Here, too, there is a free assessment of the evidence.23 Regulations according to which a certain piece of evidence has an absolute evidentiary value are missing. In principle, the above-mentioned standards also exist here, wherefore the court must only reasonably exclude possible doubts. The court's free assessment of the evidence can only be subsequently reviewed to determine whether it is contradictory, unclear or incomplete, or whether it violates the laws of reasoning or established principles of experience ('Erfahrungssätze').24 Thus, the assessment of evidence in the so-called "pistachio ice cream case25 was criticized by the Federal Supreme Court: After several members of a well-situated family from Stuttgart had already died under not entirely clear circumstances, the youngest daughter ultimately died of food poisoning after eating pistachio ice cream with her aunt, who had married into the family. A post-mortem examination later revealed arsenic poisoning. Due to the chronological sequence, it was clear that the arsenic had been administered to the deceased two hours before the first symptoms. Although the parents could thus also be considered as perpetrators, the previous court convicted the aunt on the basis of several pieces of circumstantial evidence: She had been present at all other unexplained deaths of the family, furthermore, she had removed food supplies after the death from the house and had finally attracted attention with inappropriate behavior at the funeral. The Federal Supreme Court allowed the appeal against this, as the assessment of the evidence against the aunt was only based on circumstantial evidence which was interpreted negatively to her disadvantage. The necessary conviction of the commission of the offense could not be drawn from this. The murder was not solved by the courts.

As a result, it should be noted that due to the strict regulation of the gathering of evidence in criminal proceedings and despite the principle of offi-

23 § 261 StPO.

24 Fischer StGB 2021: § 261 para. 39.

25 Federal Court of Justice (BGH), Judgement 31.07.1996, Az. 1 StR 247/96, HRRS database.

cial investigation, the result can often deviate from the actual circumstances, since there either remains a point of contention or certain evidence cannot be gathered according to the prescribed procedure.

#### **4. Finding, Constructing, and Manufacturing Legal Facts**

The basis of a correct (in the highest claim: just) judgement is the truth of the facts. We argue that the facts in a trial are ultimately always legal facts, facts of law, which make only a limited claim to truth. A claim to objective truth – assuming that it exists and can be determined from unlimited evidence and resources – cannot be made for several reasons:

The law itself limits the determination of facts for a variety of reasons. One such reason is, for example, the rule of law in the case of the provocation of a crime which is contrary to the rule of law: A person who has no intention of committing a crime is persuaded to do so by an undercover investigator. So even if the rule of law could access evidence, sometimes it forbids itself to do so. Often it might be restricted to look for evidence at all: intelligence can sometimes be withheld if state or military secrets are involved. Even if evidence, as already described, was obtained with other means of proofs than those permitted in the respective type of proceedings, it will not be used. As explained in the previous section, there are prohibitions of evidence (prohibitions of facts of evidence, prohibitions of means of evidence, prohibitions of methods of evidence and relative prohibitions of evidence) which limit the investigation of facts.

The assessment of the (usable) evidence is also still subject to the court, i.e., the respective judge: due to the principle of free assessment of evidence, the judge still has a great deal of leeway in evaluating the evidence and ultimately recognizing a legal fact.

However, a restriction does not only result from the restriction of the means and the leeway of the judges but also in the possible scope of the means by which facts can be established.Whereas in criminal proceedings the official investigation principle applies, and the state mainly takes the investigation of the facts into its own hands (although the defense can still present facts), in civil proceedings it is left to the litigants through the principle of production ('Beibringungsgrundsatz'). The big difference is not necessarily a result of the circumstance that the parties are private: This could be supported by the fact that litigants are usually not legally pre-educated when experiencing

the legally relevant life event (for example, an accident) and the subsequent reporting of it (usually to the police). Those who do not know which circumstances are legally relevant also pay less attention to them. If one's own perception is trained by prior legal knowledge, for example through police training or a law degree, there is a higher probability of more consciously perceiving the decisive circumstances.26 In the trial, however, not only the private parties but also the public prosecution must rely on (mostly) legally untrained witnesses. The real difference lies in the different resources of the state and the private sector and thus in the possible extended possibilities of hiring expert opinions et cetera. However, no matter who investigates, resources are always limited. A trial may not take an infinite amount of time, nor do the public prosecutor's office or the parties to the trial have an infinite amount of money at their disposal.

The overall result is that the scope of what could potentially be recognized as fact in a trial depends very much on the parties, the prosecution, and the judge. In addition, there is limited evidence as well as limited resources of time and money. Therefore, the question of objective truth is not forming the basis of the court's decision. However, according to the generally accepted view, this would be the basis for a correct judgement. How can one speak of correctness if the facts of the case cannot claim to be objectively true?

At first glance, 'truth' seems to imply that there are things that exist independently of our imagination and that there is only one complete and correct description of how the world is (so called ontological realism).27 It is difficult to prove this assumption with philosophical arguments. Without going into further detail on individual concepts of truth and their application in factfinding, the focus here should rather be on the fact that even with a concept that does not have such high requirements, truth cannot be met in a legal context because of the limitations discussed above. Even if one does assume unlimited resources, reliable witnesses, etc.: the scientific and philosophical determination of truth is entirely distinct from the legal determination of facts.28 In science, there is a free choice of methods. The only limitation of science is one of logical necessity: the method must be scientifically proven. In the legal process, methods do not only rely on scientific interests but mostly on the constitutional principle of the rule of law. Therefore, one can rather

26 In favor of this position: Upmeier 2010: 72.

27 Definition from Putnam 1981.

28 Upmeier 2010: 147.

state (metaphysically-realistically) that there are different degrees of approximation to 'the' truth. This idea is also supported by the concept of 'finding the verdict,' to which the court retires before pronouncing the verdict. But just as the judgement is not 'found,' a finding of facts does not take place in the determination of the facts. The verdict does not reveal itself to the judge. This romantic notion, along with the elevated sitting position of the judge, the illocutionary force of the judgement, the required elevation of the persons in the courtroom, underscores an almost theological authoritativeness. If one had to formulate this process in constructivist terms, one would say that truth is constructed. However, this assertion is too simple in its brevity. Even if what is determined legally is always subjectively colored and sometimes also wrong, it is not completely arbitrary. To call the determination of facts a *finding* or simply a *construction* would be wrong. Since the term 'manufacture' no longer refers to traditional but to modern craft work in which highly specialized workers from different disciplines work together on a final product and the court precisely uses such highly specialized methods to determine the facts of a case by being very careful in its construction, we may speak of *manufacturing legal facts*.

The judgement is limited in the scope of its claim, despite the coercion it imposes: It is only absolute as far as the established facts are concerned. These facts can – with good reason – only be determined by limited means. In a further step, another limitation is added to the subsumptions made so far: in certain cases – so-called 'hard cases' – one cannot necessarily assume a single correct decision.29 However, this is what judges convey in the language of their judgements: Every judgement contains the only correct normative assessment of the only correct set of facts. The fact that these limitations of the claim are not linguistically conveyed to laypersons is an existing challenge.

#### **Bibliography**

29 In favor of this position: Dworkin 1977; convincingly arguing against this position: Siedenburg 2016.

## **LITERATURE AND ARTS**

## **Towards a Poetics of Fact** Subjugated Knowledges, Historiographic Metafiction, and the 'Terrible Truth' behind Words in Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature

*Stefan L. Brandt (University of Graz)*

### **1. Introduction: Towards a Poetics of Fact**

In his well-known Gothic short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1819),1 American writer Washington Irving relates the following fantastic, yet allegedly historical account: A headless horseman, the restless ghost of a Hessian trooper killed by a cannonball during the Revolution, terrorizes a Dutch settlement in the New York area, haunting the town's superstitious inhabitants with his bloodthirsty appearances. Set in 1790, just one year after the U.S. became a republic, the events narrated in the tale – albeit clearly fanciful in nature – are portrayed as evidenced by fact. In a characteristic passage, Irving cites – through the voice of his narrator – "the most authentic historians" (273) who have collected and collated the "floating facts" (ibid.) surrounding the Headless Horseman. While subtly challenging the reliability of these reports (by means of conjuring up an unsettling image of volatility and flux), the reference to *floating facts* is also supported – and, on the level of narrative transmission, authenticated – by the seemingly 'factual' composition of *The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent* (the volume that "Sleepy Hollow" is part of).2 In many ways, Irving's story is symptomatic of the hegemonic imagi-

1 Irving 1993 [1819]: 272–297.

2 The 34 essays and short stories of Irving's *Sketch Book* are organized in a mock-documentary fashion, with the fictional Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker appearing as the actual author. In the sketches, the line between fact and fiction is constantly blurred. "So vividly and naturally are these scenes of humor depicted," Irving's narra-

nation in late-Enlightenment America that meandered smoothly between the established templates of fabulous, truthful, and satirical historiographies, all of these employing the notion of *floating facts* as a key pattern.3

This essay deals with the phenomenon of *floating facts* in early nineteenthcentury U.S. literature.4 My basic premise is that the paradigms of factuality and fictionality became contested in post-revolutionary America, with increasingly blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. With Romanticism becoming the dominant literary movement after the Revolution, "distinctions of genre, fact and fiction, literary and subliterary had to be reconstructed."5 What followed – at least in the genre of historical fiction that used elements of both facticity and narrative embellishment – was, in Cathy Davidson's words, "an intentional blurring of the division between fiction and fact and an invitation to the reader to enjoy that same blurring."6 If we conceive of postrevolutionary American literature as a dynamic field of cultural interaction, in which the texts involved readers in the playful acts of fictional fact-making, we come to the following questions: How were facts circulated and negotiated in

5 Kelly 1990: 158.

tor utters in one section, "that they become mingled up in the mind with the facts and personages of real life." (Ibid.: 92)

3 According to HaydenWhite, three versions of historiography dominated in eighteenthcentury cultural practice: fabulous (historical tales that included fictional elements), true (factually accurate representations), and satirical (accounts designed as critiques of the dominant historical discourse). (Cf. White 2014: 49–53)

4 American writing in the late eighteenth century was obsessed with 'truthfulness' as an ethical ideal. Two of the most widely received novels of the early period of U.S. literature, William Hill Brown's *The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth* (1789) and Susanna Rowson's *Charlotte Temple. A Tale of Truth* (1791), focus on 'truth' as a key paradigm, even though from a distinctly sentimental perspective. 'Truth,' in these novels, carries a notion of moral rectitude rather than an appeal to candidness. With the emergence of a more independent strain of thought in the 1820s (accompanied by the arrival of transcendentalism and the empowerment of the self), new modes of representing truth as an individualized concept became desired forms of cultural identity-fashioning.

6 Davidson 1986: 143. Analyzing, among others, Brown's *The Power of Sympathy* (1789), Rowson's *Charlotte Temple* (1789), and Hannah Webster Foster's *The Coquette* (1797), Davidson demonstrates that the confusion of the boundaries between fact and fiction was an important parameter in post-revolutionary writing, which conveyed to readers that the sentimentalized events they were reading about were "founded on fact," as Foster already claims in the title page of her novel. (Cf. ibid.: 83–109, 140–150)

literary texts during this time? Which counter-hegemonic forms of fact-formation became viable in literary practice? To elucidate these questions, I will propose the concept of a *poetics of fact* as a hermeneutic tool. Hereby I define a counter-normative mode of representation in literary texts that encompasses and hails what Foucault has described as "subjugated knowledges."7 It is the goal of this essay to isolate an aesthetics of what I term *poetic factuality* in early nineteenth-century American writing. One could assume that – with the arrival of Enlightenment thinking – a fully-fledged sense of rationalism had developed in the new nation around 1800. My analysis, however, contends that a *hybrid* version of factual and fictional representation was more compatible with the emergent needs of readers in the nascent republic that could only be satisfied by a combination of fact-based tales and Romanticist narrativizations.8 Far from intimating a clearcut distinction between history and fiction in texts of the time, I want to emphasize what has been called "the problematic relationship of fact, fiction, and literariness in Romantic culture."9 My focus here lies on Catharine Maria Sedgwick's influential novel *Hope Leslie*, first published in two volumes in 1827, and how it reconstructs the history of native people in colonial America in a poetic fashion. Employing the technique of historiographic metafiction, *Hope Leslie* – arguably one of the most unusual texts ever published in America – calls attention to the subjective reality *behind* the official version of American history, especially concerning the atrocities committed against natives.

The concept of a *poetics of fact* is not limited to the nineteenth century but can be viewed as a diachronic parameter that helps us understand the constant struggle in Western culture between fact and fiction, history and rumor, truth and gossip. Consider the following citation from a science-fiction classic written more than a century later, namely Ursula K. Le Guin's *The Left Hand of Darkness* (1969):

7 Foucault 1980: 82.

8 In Davidson's words, many post-revolutionary novels suggested, at least partly, "a kind of covenant between the reader and the text" by mentioning, in the frontmatter to the books, truth and fact as reference points. (Ibid. 1986: 96) Likewise, Kelly, in his reading ofWalter Scott's popular historical novel *Waverley* (1814), points out that"[t]he combining of fact and fiction delighted most readers and critics […]." (Kelly 1990: 172) Similar to the British writer Scott, who related the history of Scotland in a fictional manner, American writers such as Sedgwick inspired readers to explore the in-between territory of historiography and fiction.

9 Ibid.: 166.

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The *soundest fact* may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular *organic jewel* of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.10

In the passage, the first-person narrator Genly Ai, a male Terran explorer, ponders about his mission to go to the planet Gethen to negotiate a collaboration of humanoid worlds. By choosing this quote from Le Guin's 1960s scifi novel as a reference point for my essay on literature of the 1820s, I want to draw attention to the *diachronic* dimension of the fact/fiction conjunction. Truth, we learn in *The Left Hand of Darkness*, is no more than a cultural construct, designed to tell stories and create a sense of communal identity.11 The 'facts' taken for granted in a given culture are likened in Le Guin's novel to the beads of a necklace worn by a woman. This reference evokes the established image of native women in colonial America greeting the white explorers, yet representing their own versions of history and culture. It is no coincidence that the English ethnographer and translator Thomas Harriot uses a similar image (see figure 1) in his "Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia" (1590) when describing native women: "They wear a chain about their necks of pearls or beads of copper, which they much esteem […]."12

Harriot's graphic depiction of indigenous people as *factual*, yet at once also *fictionalized* creatures allows him to interconnect what he calls "the greatness of the facts" (5) to the natives' (mostly unknown) "traditions and stories." (Ibid.) These passages from Harriot's early treatise illustrate how closely interwoven factuality and imagination have traditionally been in the dominant Western imagination since its colonial beginnings. The interpretational sovereignty regarding the 'truthfulness' of *established* facts on the one hand and the abject nature of *unacknowledged* facts on the other is linked to what, in

10 Le Guin 2010 [1969]: 1, emphasis added.

11 Le Guin's emphasis on a *floating* connection between fact and fiction is underpinned by the book's transgression of oppositional corporeal and spatial spheres. Not only are the Gethenians marked as androgynous creatures that know no clear gender boundaries, the novel also bridges the gap between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial as well as that between present and future.

12 Harriot 1590: 12.

13 Picture taken from ibid.: 13.

*Figure 1: A native woman's pearl necklace as a symbol of the conjunction between fact and fiction.13*

a Foucauldian sense, could be called the power/knowledge dynamics.14 Facts and truth cannot be claimed to encapsulate some atemporal essence or purity. Rather, in Hayden White's words, history itself must be considered

a construction of those who already enjoy membership and indeed privileged positions in already formed communities. No appeal to "the facts" alone can touch this construction, because these same constituencies control what will count as the appropriate kind of science for determining, not

14 Foucault's coinage of power/knowledge suggests that our conception of the world is deeply conjoined with questions of hierarchy and privilege."Each society has its régime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true […]." (Foucault 1980: 131)

only "what are the facts" but also and most important "what can count as a fact."15

Living in an era in which words can quickly assume the force of a firestorm through social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, we are well aware of the extraordinary power that language has over our imagination. In a way, we are what we 'hear.' Or, in the Derridean sense: "*There is nothing outside of the text*."16 Our understanding of the world is fundamentally shaped by the dominion of words. And the written or spoken word, endlessly reiterated in chains of autopoietic systems of reduplication, is able to substitute our sense of the 'factual' and effectively replace first-hand experience.17

A *poetics of fact* – a retelling of seemingly 'factual' events in a way that acknowledges the subjective quality of all representation – can embolden us to expose the *personal* dimension of history and recognize the constructedness of official versions of reality. The idea of a *poetics of fact* is akin to what Jacques Rancière has called "poetics of knowledge,"18 whereby he defines "a study of the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status." (Ibid.) Following Rancière's approach, I propose the idea of a *poetics of fact* as a literary strategy in Romanticism that challenges the paradigm of factuality and melds it with an alternative model of poetic articulation. Davidson postulates in *Revolution and the Word* that the "usual prescriptions for fiction and history"19 were not seldomly reversed in the literary imagination of the early nineteenth century. Analyzing James Fenimore Cooper's euphemistic 1822 response to Royall Tyler's historical novel *The Algerine Captive* (1797), Davidson

15 White 1994: ix–x.

16 Derrida 1997: 158, emphasis in the original. Due to the difficulties of translating this sentence accurately, Spivak adds both the original quote and an alternative in square brackets: "[there is no outside-text; *il n'y a pas de hors-texte*]." (Ibid., emphasis in the original)

17 In his iconoclastic polemic *Kindly Inquisitors*, Jonathan Rauch uses the term "knowledge industry" to describe a social system that autopoietically produces its own facts and truths, following the mission "to tell us how things 'really' are." (Rauch 2013: 38) The result of such biased knowledge production is not a sober and truly objective version of reality but, as Hans Rosling et al. have postulated, an "overdramatic worldview" that shows a blatant lack of what the authors call "factfulness." (Rosling 2019: 16)

18 Rancière 1994: 8.

19 Davidson 1986: 200.

summarizes Cooper's viewpoint as follows: "History is a fiction and the novelist is the true historian." (Ibid.) To conceive of literary texts as harboring a *poetics of fact* also means to challenge the opposition between fact and fiction and intimate that 'fact' itself is an essentialist category that should be rethought.20 In the following, I will showcase how such a poetics of fact can operate in literary works to interrogate what Foucault terms "the order of knowledge."21 Catharine Maria Sedgwick's novel *Hope Leslie* shall serve as a key example to illustrate how 'knowledge' can be inventively re-interpreted in literature and equipped with a sense of poetics.

#### **2. Subjugated Knowledges, Aural Aesthetics, and the Politics of Denunciation**

Designed as a historical romance, *Hope Leslie* bestows a powerful voice to two groups that were widely misrepresented in antebellum literature – women and Native Americans. Sedgwick's book shows how in early American culture – that is, the Puritan Era – a *semblance* of veracity often replaced truth.22 It demonstrates how defamation and social exclusion became the basis for communal knowledge. At the same time, *Hope Leslie* also teaches us how a *poetics of fact* can be instrumental in overcoming rumor and hearsay. Set in seventeenth-century New England, the novel revolves around the twin figures of Hope Leslie (the English immigrant William Fletcher's affable stepdaughter) and Magawisca (a Pequot chief 's passionate daughter adopted by the Fletcher

20 The term 'knowledge' has been widely applied to systems of thought and belief in general. Foucault's coinage of power/knowledge, for example, suggests that our conception of the world is linked to the microstructures of empowerment and hierarchization. In postmodernist theory, 'knowledge' is often used in the plural form, thus hinting at the complexities and oftentimes subjective appearance of 'knowing.' Donna Haraway, for example, speaks of "situated knowledges," thus indicating that knowledge is always subject to change, dependent on its cultural and temporal context. (Cf. Haraway 1991: 111)

21 Foucault 1980: 128.

22 In a private letter (written as a response to a reader), Sedgwick articulates her "filial reverence" for the Puritans, simultaneously underlining that "their bigotry, their superstition, and above all their intolerance, were too apparent on the pages of history to be forgotten." (Sedgwick, quoted in Nelson 1992: 193)

family). Hope and Magawisca are caught in a whirlwind of increasing tensions and armed conflicts between the white settlers and the natives in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. *Hope Leslie* distances itself decisively from the Puritans' "self-righteous historiography,"23 which seems burdened with misrepresentations and a lack of authentic voices from women and natives. Truth, the book suggests, can hardly be found in the authorized historiographies presented by Puritan annalists but rather in forgotten counter-histories.

The character of the native Magawisca is a key figure in this rejection of conventional historicism. Magawisca's first appearance in the second chapter already marks her as a non-conformist character, "clothed in her Indian garb"24 and "having shewn a loathing of the English dress." (22) In the novel's preface, Sedgwick clarifies that there can naturally be no authoritative model for those portions of historical practice that remain unwritten: "The writer is aware that it may be thought that the character of Magawisca has no prototype among the aborigines of this country." (4)

Portrayed as a subaltern figure who gradually emancipates herself from the yoke of hegemonic ascriptions, Magawisca is an example of what Foucault has described as "subjugated knowledges."25 By this term, Foucault defines "something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate […]: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity." (Ibid.) "[L]isten to me," thus Magawisca addresses both the readers and the Puritan characters in one of the novel's key scenes: "[W]hen the hour of vengeance comes, if it should come, remember it was provoked."26 Through the voice of Magawisca, the passage juxtaposes the common stereotype of the irrational Indian with a new narrative pattern that, despite being marked as different, evokes reason, empathy and understanding.

The credibility of the Magawisca character is further enhanced by her counter-figure in the novel, the sinister Jennet, a busybody in the village who personifies malevolent talk as opposed to facts. Jennet is the archetypal Puritan fanatic who raises testimony against socially ostracized individuals such as Nelema, an old native woman who helps both Magawisca and Hope Leslie. Jennet's disparaging characterization of Nelema as "the old heathen witch"

23 Pelegri 2009: 136.

24 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 22.

25 Foucault 1980: 82.

26 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 48.

(107) and "that mother-witch" (69) is presented as symptomatic of Puritan hypocrisy. As Jennet denounces natives as "offspring of a race that are the children and heirs of the evil one," (39) the novel reminds us that her "tongue far outruns [her] discretion." (Ibid.) Jennet is associated with the harmful practice of eavesdropping that produces half-truths and lies rather than an accurate representation. At one point, she feels "tempted beyond what she was able to hear, drew nigh to the door with a cat's tread, and applied her ear to the aperture." (312) The novel here explicitly mentions the "interesting relation" between "speakers and listener." (Ibid.)

*Hope Leslie* interrogates the accuracy of 'historical truth' by employing a compositional technique I describe as *aural aesthetics*. Instead of showing the reality of New England Puritans in the form of visual images, the book takes recourse to the motif of the 'ear,' a key metaphorical device in discourses of denunciation and defamation. Using the typical narrative techniques of sentimental fiction (focus on individual agency and imagination), Sedgwick draws the readers' attention to the harmfulness of "fables" (106) and "gossips." (112) Through its aural aesthetics, *Hope Leslie* debunks denunciation as a tool of Foucauldian power/knowledge in the Puritan era. Life in Colonial America can be seen as a textbook lesson about the dangerous effects of denunciation. The trial against Ann Hutchinson and her ensuing banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 stands as an example of defamation as social control. After Hutchinson was banned, women were – by law – no longer allowed to speak in churches. Puritan society went along with these practices out of fear of persecution. As Sedgwick's novel showcases, there are always alternatives to conformist behavior. The book's ambiguous title alludes to the main character, the rebellious Hope Leslie, but also functions as a pun to the word 'hope*lessly*,' alluding to situations in which we feel trapped, but hope is still a reference point.

This sense of hope that shimmers through in *Hope Leslie* is connected to the body's ability to adapt to its environment, especially when it comes to organs linked to the senses. Sedgwick's novel suggests that all forms of gossip and denunciation rely on the ear as an organ of reception. Following this narrative trajectory, the book proposes a rediscovery of the 'ear' as a metaphor for communicative exchange. We have to listen *differently*, the novel tells us, in order to reach a point of true insight and understanding. *Hope Leslie* is a stunning and courageous text that debunks the insidious nature of denunciatory practices which in many ways have built the fundament for modernday America.27 Gossip – as a trivial, community-based form of denunciation – is negotiated in the novel as a malicious counter-discourse to science.28 As Rachel Brownstein notes, "[g]ossip is a way of turning life into story."29 In this sense, it resembles fiction. While gossip cannot be classified as literature in the classic sense, it encapsulates elements of the narrative. And, of course, not all forms of gossip are pure denunciation. There is what one scholar calls "serious gossip,"30 a form of intimate verbal exchange between two or more people that is meant to "reflect" about the speakers and "reflect their knowledge of one another."31 Yet, there is also gossip as "distilled malice."32 This form of gossip denunciation aims at "circulating truths and halftruths and falsehoods," (ibid.) playing with reputations, and attempting to purify the community through social exclusion. In the logic of denunciation, such accusations speak on their own, even though their substance may long have crumbled. The English philosopher Francis Bacon noted more than 400 years ago that rumors contain an eerie power that can hardly be invalidated once released into the world: "Slander boldly, something always sticks."33

Denunciatory practices can be an effective tool of social control. Most importantly, denunciation can become an apparatus of cultural formation, by manifesting a divide between the 'self ' and the 'other.'34 Denunciation culture may manifest itself in drastic events such as the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692/93 and the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s and early 50s. But it also

27 Another influential text from the early nineteenth century dealing with the detrimental effects of denunciation is Washington Irving's 1807 short story "The Little Man in Black." Similar to Irving's "Sleepy Hollow" in its equivocal narrative structure, "The Little Man in Black" relates the story of an innocent small-town pariah whose existence as a "poor outcast" is shaped by "the gossips of the neighborhood" that make any objective evaluation from his fellow citizens impossible. (Cf. Irving 2011 [1807]: 6, 1)

28 Following Block and Madden, I am using the term 'science' not in the sense of the word that is attributed to it today, but "in the more general ways it was understood in Sedgwick's day." (Block/Madden 2003: 23)

29 Brownstein 1982: 7.

30 Spacks 1986: 5.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.: 4.

33 Bacon 1597: 392. This translation is provided in Bacon's text itself. The original Latin phrase appears thirty pages earlier: "Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret." (Ibid.: 362)

34 Cf. Butler 1997: 129.

presents itself in the seemingly trivial practices of denigration and non-factbased accusation in everyday life. "*Everyone knows you can't disprove a rumor*,"35 the ill-fated protagonist Hannah in Jay Asher's *Th1rteen R3asons Why* (2007) informs us. When another character tells Hannah that she "*knows the rumors*," (65) Hannah replies: "*You can't know rumors.* […] *You can hear rumors* […]*, but you can't know them*." (65–66) Discourses of denunciation are deeply interwoven with acts of storytelling. Denunciatory practices usually pick up an already existing narrative and extrapolate on it in order to augment its credibility. This brings us to three fundamental questions: Why are such stories told in the first place? Why do we listen? And what can we do when we become the subject of unjustified denunciation?

As an answer to the third question, namely, what we can do about the spreading of falsehoods, *Hope Leslie* proposes a revision of existing narratives through a *poetics of fact*. This revision needs to counter the schemes and stratagems of denunciation that operate on a fine level. Semi-fictional characters in the novel, such as the powerful governor John Winthrop, communicate to the public a devious kind of truth that unfolds its true force in the people's imagination. They do so by using innuendo and suggestion as tools of manipulation. This rhetoric in the receptive mind evokes "much more than [meets] the ear,"36 to cite Sedgwick's novel.The author's reinterpretation of the phrase "more than meets the eye" is indicative of the *Hope Leslie*'s aural aesthetics that connects the Puritan discourses of witch-hunting and missionizing not only to the "abusive ceremonies" (207) of sermon culture but also to the judgmental aspects of eavesdropping and defamation, especially bigotry and chauvinism. (Cf. 312)

The written or spoken word, endlessly reiterated in chains of autopoietic systems of reduplication, is able to substitute our sense of the '*factual'* and effectively replace it by hearsay. Derrida describes this process of de-factualization as follows: "At the origin there is a rumour, an 'it is said,' an 'it is said that he is supposed to have said.' The origin of a rumour is always unknown. Indeed, this is how a rumour is identified."37 Derrida's description of rumor as a source of non-factual meaning-making may remind us of the prototypical Trumpist mantra of subliminal denunciation: "A lot of people

35 Asher 2017 [2007]: 30, emphasis in the original. The title of Asher's book is stylized as "Th1rteen R3asons Why" to highlight the number 13.

36 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 156.

37 Derrida 1994: 176.

are saying …"38 This type of slander is capable of obscuring the more complicated realities of what the philosopher Edmund Husserl has called "life-world" [*Lebenswelt*].39 What people *say* and what they *hear* often conceals whatever realities lie behind the gossip – power games, social control, and survival instinct. The following section deals with how *Hope Leslie*, operating as historiographic metafiction, salvages fragments of a subjugated 'life-world' and thus enables access to what the novel discloses as the 'terrible truth' behind words.

#### **3. Historiographic Metafiction and the 'Terrible Truth' behind Words**

In his philosophical study *The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge*, Rancière provides a vivid example of how 'facts' are often rendered indistinguishable from acts of imagination. "[T]here are facts," he observes, "that do not belong to the discursive order but require a discursive act, none other than interpretation."40 Many subjective and individual 'facts' are disguised from the public view and have to be excavated by means of literary revisionism. "[B]etween the facts and the interpretation," Rancière maintains, "there is an obstacle to overcome, a thick cloud of words to dissipate."41

Sedgwick's *Hope Leslie* manages to penetrate this 'thick cloud of words' in order to reveal what is described as the 'terrible truth' *behind* words. As stated in the novel's preface, the author's goal was "to illustrate not the history, but the character of the times."42 In a procedure that would be called 'constructionist,' had the novel been published in our day, *Hope Leslie* creates an *alternative history*43 with "delineations [in which] we are confined not to the actual, but to the possible."44

38 Johnson 2016: n.p.

39 Husserl 1970 [1936] : 103–189. Cf. Käufer/Chemero 2015 : 39.

40 Rancière 1994 : 32.

41 Ibid.

42 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 3.

43 I borrow this phrase from Jeffrey Insko's essay on *Hope Leslie*'s revision of conventional historicism. (Insko 2004: 179) Discussing "the novel's many historical and temporal entanglements," Insko concludes that "*Hope Leslie* provides an alternative conception of what history is." (Ibid.: 180)

44 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 4.

Intentionally blurring the lines between "our histories" (3) – that is, the white, hegemonic view of the nation's past – and various hidden versions of history, *Hope Leslie* functions as "historiographic metafiction."45 By this, Hutcheon defines a type of popular text that is "intensely self-reflexive" and "paradoxically also lay[s] claim to historical events and personages." (5) In historiographic metafiction, the lines between fact and fiction appear obscured. "[R]ather than asserting the unique possibilities of fiction as compared to history proper," one scholar observes, "the preface [to *Hope Leslie*] actually calls attention to their *affinities*."46 As a result, readers of Sedgwick's novel face the challenge of uniting the actual historical events and personae (the Pequot War, John Winthrop, and so on) with their imagined – and often mythologized – literary versions. *Hope Leslie* suggests, in Amy Dunham Strand's words, that "both history and fiction are forms of representation with ongoing rhetorical and political effects."47 In the book's preface, an invitation is directed towards readers to become actively involved in the process of historical meaning-making: "These volumes are so far from being intended as a substitute for genuine history, that the ambition of the writer would be fully gratified if, by this work, any of our young countrymen should be stimulated to investigate the early history of their native land."48

In its rejection of claims of writing 'genuine history,' *Hope Leslie* demonstrates a self-conscious, almost postmodernist approach.49 The novel subtly delegates the responsibility for a truthful comprehension of history to an implied reader stylized as an "enlightened and accurate observer of human nature."50 Following Strand's argument, the novel here not only "reconstruct[s] the past by 'putting the chisel' into new hands," but also employs "reverberating rhetorical effects, simultaneously constructing and impacting the present,

45 Hutcheon 2000: 105–123.

46 Insko 2004: 186, emphasis added.

47 Strand 2009: 19.

48 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 4.

49 On the novel's use of self-conscious imagery – especially its "complex preoccupation with language" and the inclusion of "conflicting levels of signification," see Ford 1997: 81–92. Cf. Pelegri 2009: 140.

50 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 4. Sedgwick's reference to the 'enlightened reader' recalls the famous phrase in the "Declaration of Independence": "[L]et Facts be submitted to a candid world." (Jefferson et al. 2008 [1776]: 54, emphasis in the original; cf. Ferguson 1994: 127)

[…] to re-make history, but also, perhaps, to make history happen."51 Similarly, Insko characterizes the set of appellative narrativizations in *Hope Leslie* as "anachronistic imaginings"52 that disrupt a traditional conception of history. The novel's tightrope act between historicization and fictionalization allows its author to demand a new, alternative mode of history-making53 that subverts the conventional boundary between *myth* and *science*.

Notably, science is portrayed in *Hope Leslie* not as a monolithic block of rationalist truisms but rather as a set of "scientific truths – about medicine, race, or gender" that "individuals may accept or reject."54 While dealing with many scientific insights (for example, regarding progress and human rights), Sedgwick's novel also suggests that individuals may well "come to discover new ones."55 In the context of nineteenth-century literature, science cannot be limited to 'natural science' (as our contemporary mindset would suggest); on the contrary, science was perceived, according to *OED*'s definition, as "a connected body of demonstrated truths […] which includes *trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth* within its own domain."56 In his study of denunciatory speech, Jonathan Rauch invites us to interrogate the conventional distinction between 'subjective' myth (as relying on imagination) and 'objective' science (as sticking to "good old hard facts"57):

The difference between a scientific society and a mythmaking group is not that one relies on imagination while the other does not; it is that the skeptical and empirical rules set up a tension which makes imagination its own watchman.58

In a similar fashion, *Hope Leslie* encourages its readers to look skeptically at the facts, events and personae they know from history books. By overtly deviating from the official version of historiography, the novel invites us to challenge the

51 Strand 2009: 20.

52 Insko 2004: 179.

53 Hutcheon points out that historiographic metafiction often uses the "conventions of historiography" (e.g., the use of paratextual devices) to "both inscribe and undermine the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations." (Hutcheon 2000: 123)

54 Block/Madden 2003: 22.

55 Ibid.

56 Quoted in ibid.: 23, emphasis added by the authors.

57 Rauch 2013: 69.

58 Ibid.

'facts' as we know them, thus elevating imagination itself to a kind of "watchman,"59 to borrow Rauch's phrase. While questioning the claim to absolute truth often attributed to science, *Hope Leslie* also sets apart science from gossip and denunciation. In the opening sections of the first chapter, the book clearly speaks out against "vain speculation and idle inquiries"60 that may lead to an infinite process in which one is forever "inquiring and inquiring, and never coming to the truth." (6) The character of the native woman Magawisca is presented as the novel's narrative linchpin, who, by virtue of her heroic resistance to the repressive culture of Puritanism, stands above the evils of denunciation: "I am your prisoner," she tells the British rulers, "and ye may slay me, but I deny your right to judge me." (302) The hierarchy between the colonists and Magawisca, *Hope Leslie* indicates, is grounded in superficial judgment. This judgment, naturally linked to the ear as a receptive organ, is conveyed through hearsay but is not substantiated by what actually happened in colonial history, especially during the Pequot War of the 1630s.

The relation between Magawisca and Hope Leslie is equally signified through the contact of mouth and ear. But this time, the transfer of thoughts is marked as ingenuous and deep, for example, when Magawisca, in the eighth chapter of the second volume, "lower[s] her voice for Hope's ear only." (282) A similar scene of a truthful exchange of words occurs in the following chapter when Hope's half-brother Everell "whisper[s] words into Magawisca's ear." (310) Not only does the novel conjure up a situation of intimacy and "kindness," (ibid.) it also lets us share the reactions of Magawisca who *rises* as Everell whispers in her ear. The intimate exchange of thoughts – as opposed to the spread of hearsay – is staged as an act of true understanding and a deeper visceral knowledge. Magawisca also appeals to her father, the deluded Pequot chief Mononotto, to listen not to the sounds of destruction engendered by his blind hatred, but to what she calls the "song […] of happiness." (87) Magawisca's emotional speech is garbed with a sense of aural aesthetics, expressed through the interplay between ear and mouth: "Nay, father, listen not to the sad strain; it is but the spirit of the tree mourning over its decay; rather *turn thine ear* to the glad song of this bright stream, image of the good." (Ibid.)

*Hope Leslie* does not fundamentally reject the power of the ear as a receptive organ, but it urges us to rely upon real stories, told by real people, and not

59 Ibid.

60 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 5–6.

upon hearsay. In one of the novel's key scenes, Magawisca is equipped with an authoritative voice that allows her to give a dramatic recitation of "the last acts in the tragedy of her people." (48) Her performance, the novel suggests, is a "new version of an old story" (55) that replaces the stereotyped version of native identity in the readers' imagination. As such, it stands in drastic contrast to the "pernicious lore" (6) of Puritanism, in which natives are often "represented as 'surly dogs.'" (3)

Notably, Sedgwick's novel conveys this *new version of an old story* through the focalizer of a white character, Everell Fletcher, who has already heard all circumstances about the Pequot tribe and their allegedly causal role in the war of 1636 to 1638. Or so he thinks. However, as the novel reminds us, the character had only "heard them in the language of the enemies and conquerors of the Pequods [sic]; and from Magawisca's lips they took a new form and hue." (55) When Everell listens to the native woman telling *her* version of the gruesome battles between settlers and natives, it seems to him that her narration "was putting the chisel into the hands of truth, and giving it to whom it belonged." (Ibid.)

What *Hope Leslie* here effectively accomplishes is a *poetics of fact*. It capitalizes on the real suffering of native American people and invites us to sympathize with this subjugated voice. In doing so, the book urges us to rely not on second-hand knowledge of exchanged words but rather on our own perception. The "terrible truth" (10) of real life-experiences, the novel suggests, is not only invisible to the fleeting eye, it is also inaudible to an ear that only listens superficially.

My analysis of *Hope Leslie* has demonstrated that a *poetics of fact* can be an effective literary strategy to engage in an interpersonal dialogue on historical events and personages. In contrast to mere gossip knowledge, historiographic metafiction combines an interest in the personal with the desire to stay true to the life-world, the *Lebenswelt* of actual people.61

The literary strategy of a *poetics of fact* is thus not so dissimilar from the method of *epochē* – sometimes described as the *bracketing* of natural phenom-

61 For Husserl, actual experience is the crucial factor that fills the 'life-world' with its essential component – namely life. "To live is always to line-in-certainty-of-the-world. Waking life is being awake to the world, being constantly and directly 'conscious' of the world and of oneself as living *in* the world, actually experiencing [*erleben*] and actually effecting the ontic certainty of the world." (Husserl 1970 [1936]: 142–143, emphasis in the original)

ena – employed by transcendental phenomenology.62 "In carrying out this epochē," Husserl explains, "we […] continue to stand on the ground of the world; it is now reduced to the life-world which is valid for us prescientifically; […] we may take the sciences into consideration only as historical facts, taking no position of our own on their truth."63 Magawisca's recital of her people's hidden history in *Hope Leslie* is a good example of how this "life-world" can be revealed in literature as the "realm of original self-evidences."64 While the official Puritan historiography – that legitimized sphere of "secure facts" that seems "undisturbed by any noticeable disagreement"65 – is exposed as a nonfeasible "theoretical-logical substruction,"66 Magawisca's own story points to the field of "the subjective" which is "distinguished in all respects precisely by its being actually *experienceable*."67

By inspiring an "ontology of the life-world"68 – in other words by invoking and reanimating a set of untold stories of colonized people in the Americas – *Hope Leslie* gives voice to an abject discourse that is not part of the history books and thus commonly banned from the discursive order. In its consequential "historical relativism,"69 the novel makes us aware that the difference between official historiography and narrative fiction is always skindeep. The search for the underlying 'truth' of a native American 'life-world' [*Lebenswelt*] that permeates Magawisca's narration leads us *beyond* the barriers of hearsay and rumors into what New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt has termed a "poetics of culture,"70 namely the study of the collective production of cultural practices. To recover and reanimate the "poetics of everyday behavior in America"71 means, for Sedgwick, to endow indigenous people, whose lives have long been subjugated by hegemonic practice, with an unequivocal and empowered voice.

63 Husserl 1970 [1936]: 147, emphasis in the original.

67 Ibid., emphasis added.

62 Cf. Käufer/Chemero 2015: 34–35.

64 Ibid.: 127.

65 Ibid.: 138.

66 Ibid.: 127.

68 Ibid.: 173.

71 Ibid.: 8. Greenblatt borrows this phrase from literary scholar and historian Juri Lotman.

#### **4. Conclusion**

To conclude, Sedgwick's novel *Hope Leslie* teaches us that there is, in fact, an alternative to simply accepting and replicating denunciatory practices. We "*can't know rumors*,"72 to cite once again from Jay Asher's novel, but we can try to understand how they work. The characters of Hope Leslie and Magawisca are powerful literary examples of counter-discourses that tell a "new version of an old story"73 and replace the superficial truth of hearsay by the "terrible truth" (10) of the life-worlds of actual people.

In this sense, the novel encourages us to search for the *subjugated knowledges* behind the talk, to listen to a *poetics of fact* that surpasses the foul talk of defamation. This kind of truth, symbolized by Magawisca's retelling of her people's story, may be shocking at first. Yet, it renders a deeper sense of historical practice that manifests itself not in rumor or hearsay but on a visceral and poetic level. This *poetics of fact* is ultimately more satisfying to the reader, since it endows us with a deeper understanding of reality, a type of understanding that is founded not in the circulation of rumors but in actual, firsthand practice.

#### **Bibliography**

Asher, Jay (2017) [2007]: *Th1rteen R3asons Why*, London.

72 Asher 2017 [2007]: 65.

73 Sedgwick 1998 [1827]: 55.

gtonpost.com/politics/a-lot-of-people-are-saying-how-trump-spreads-c onspiracies-and-innuendo/2016/06/13/b21e59de-317e-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b 7a0\_story.html (21.04.2022).

## **'Writing Facts' and 19th-Century English Realist Fiction**

Theoretical Reflections and the Complexity of the Relationship in Charles Dickens' *Hard Times*, and George Eliots *Adam Bede*

*Werner Wolf (University of Graz)*

## **1. Introduction: Fact-Writing and Fiction – a Relationship with a Variegated History1**

'Fiction,' by its very name, is commonly understood as the opposite of fact. Thus, a literary genre which uses, at least in English, this term as its denomination appears to be an unfitting choice for a volume sporting the topic "writing facts." Indeed, strictly speaking, fiction seems to have nothing to do with facts. Yet, literary history belies this impression. In 'fact,' the role of 'writing facts' is anything but immaterial to the development of fiction in general, and the novel in particular, with which I will be concerned in the following. Rather, the novel's relationship with facts has a variegated and interesting history. This is true both with respect to the more or less factive objects of novels, and the ways and effects of novelistic storytelling which oscillate between seemingly objective, factual2 narration and the laying bare of fictionality or, rather, fictiveness. From the 'editor's' claim that his text is "a just history of facts," as made in the "Preface" to Daniel Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, 3 to a postmodernist narrator's metafictional disclaimer, "I wander the island, inventing it"

1 My thanks are due – as so often – to Cecilia Servatius and Jutta Klobasek-Ladler for their expert help with the manuscript.

2 For the use of 'factive/fact' vs. 'fictive/fiction' in an ontological and 'factual(ity)' vs. 'fictional(ity)' in a reception-oriented sense, see below.

3 Defoe 1719/1965: 25.

(the first sentence in Robert Coover's short story "The Magic Poker"),4 dealing with facts has obviously changed in a drastic way. After the 'rise of the novel' as we know it, epitomized by *Robinson Crusoe*, 19th-century realism appears to be a continuation, if not an intensification, of the preceding proto-realism, especially when it comes to often critical (hetero-)references to individual geographical, sociological, historical, etc., facts of contemporary reality and/or making the reader believe in the facticity of the represented world.

In view of this privileged place of the 19th-century novel in the history of the relationship between fact and fiction, I will, in the following, focus on English 19th-century realist fiction by way of two mid-century examples which appear to me to be of particular relevance: Charles Dickens's *Hard Times* (1854), and George Eliot's *Adam Bede* (1859). From a superficial point of view, the relationship between 19th-century realism and positivistic fact-orientation appears to be un-problematic. At closer inspection, however, this relationship turns out to be more complex, as will be shown with respect to the two novels mentioned. *Hard Times* implies a strong criticism of a one-sided contemporary belief in positivistic facts as the only phenomena one ought to care or know about, a belief drastically represented by the fact-ideology as practiced in the school of Mr. M'Choakumchild. However, when it comes to the reception attitude presupposed by the novel, the seeming factuality of the represented world (within the reception contract of illusionist storytelling) is never really challenged. Something similar can be said about *Adam Bede*, albeit with the difference that the criticism of a belief in objective facts is here not transmitted through the reprehensible activities and attitudes of problematic characters but rather through an authorial narrator who, at times, betrays a remarkable, if limited, skepticism towards objective storytelling.

My remarks will be structured as follows. First, I will briefly deal with the concept of 'fact' and with related terminology and concepts such as truth, reality, and aesthetic illusion as a 'reality effect' of sorts occurring in the process of reception. In the preliminary theoretical reflections on the fact/fiction opposition and the use of facts in novels, I will also characterize the prototypical relationship of 19th-century realist fiction with these concepts. In the ensuing two chapters, the two novels and their complex relationships to facts, factuality, and the immersive illusionist reading-effect will be discussed, before placing, in conclusion, the position of these novels in a wider historical context between romanticism, modernism and post-modernism.

4 Coover 1969/1970: 20.

#### **2. 'Fact(s)': Concept, Terminology, Related Concepts, and the Prototypical Relationship of Realist Fiction to These Concepts**

What is a 'fact'? In the present contribution, while this question cannot be answered in detail in a philosophical sense, it can be addressed with respect to the common-sense use of the term, which is also the sense relevant to literary studies. Generally, according to the *New Oxford Dictionary of English*, a fact is "a thing that is indisputably the case."5 More precisely, and as mentioned in the call for papers of the conference on which the present publication is based, one may describe 'fact' in accordance with today's usage as a verifiable phenomenon of reality believed to exist independently of the observing subject and thus objectively true. The belief in such facts and such a reality is what I term 'epistemological realism.' Fact, in this context, has an obvious relationship to the notions of 'objectivity,' 'truth,' and 'reality' (which I will also refrain from further discussing here). It should be noted, however, that in today's use of the term the etymological origin of *factum* is obscured: *factum* as something made or created (especially by God – the "Nicean Creed" refers to this meaning twice in a positive and once – concerning Christ – in a negative sense).6

For literary and media studies, a further antonymic concept is of obvious importance, namely 'fiction,' which in English has the somewhat unfortunate double meaning as a literary genre (as used in the title of the present contribution) and as an ontological or reception-centered category (related to construction, simulation, invention, delusion or lie and opposed to truth and reality). The complex literary relationship between fact and fiction has been systematized in a thought-provoking way by Andreas Kablitz (2008): he distinguishes between an ontological or referential and a reception-centered facet of the opposition, which results in two pairs of opposition (see Figure 1). With somewhat clumsy English translations, the ontological facet is the opposition between **facticity** and **fictiveness** (or factive vs. fictive), while the

5 *New Oxford Dictionary of English* 1999: 656–657; note the interesting implied reference to a community within which something is 'indisputable'!

another, more (post)modern, point of view, used by deconstructivists and the like, the constructivist nature of so-called facts is highlighted, and this may also serve to gesture to the obscured etymology in which fact and fiction become merged. 6 "Credo in unum Deum […] **fact**orem caeli et terrae […] et in […] Iesum Christum […] genitum, non **factum** […] consubstantialem Patri; per quem omnia **facta** sunt […]"; from

reception-centered opposition may be called **factuality** vs. **fictionality** (or factual vs. fictional). The advantage of the differentiation is the possibility of distinguishing between what is the case in a given text (the first pair of terms) and how and in which cognitive frame a given text is received (the second pair of terms). Novels, for instance, are generally read in the cognitive frame of fictionality, while autobiography is received, as a rule, in the frame of factuality. However, both genres can contain factive as well as fictive elements: a novel may refer to real historical persons but characterize them with fictive features, while an autobiography may combine facticity with fictive (untrue) self-stylizations or errors. One may say it is the predominance of either facticity or fictiveness in a genre and/or convention which makes it eligible for the respective frames through which it is received (with literary deviations being possible in fictional biographies parading as factual ones, for instance).

A further differentiation is helpful for our context, namely one with respect to where facts, their discussion, or the impression of factuality are created or occur: within a literary text and its represented world or in the relation between this text-world and the recipient (see figure 2).

As for the latter, '**extracompositional**' facets of facts and related concepts, they concern two aspects: a) an impression a text and the world represented in it creates in the recipient, and b) the referential, or, as I term it, heteroreferential relation7 between text (world) and the world of reality or facts.

7 The term serves to distinguish between hetero-reference and self- as well as metareference. (Cf. Wolf 2009: 16–25)

In the former, '**intracompositional**' case, facts or the concept of 'fact' can occur in two forms: facts can either be thematized (in the mode of '**telling**') or be observed (and believed) as parts of the represented world (in the mode of '**showing**'). The **thematization of facts** may refer to mentions of truthful phenomena by characters or the narrator as opposed, for instance, to lies; in rare cases, it may also include quasi 'philosophical' discussions of the existence and perception of facts and related concepts and problems. The **showing of facts** refers to the world building of literary texts which create their own realities by positing the existence of their elements. Here, again, an opposition exists between fictional facts and mere dreams, illusions, simulations, etc., in short, elements of the represented world that are supposed to be taken seriously as fictional facts and those that are not.8 The 'facts' a novel creates or refers to can – and in fact often do – coalesce in the recipient's mind into a more or less coherent representation of a world in which one has the impression of being immersed – in short, they are the buildings blocks of 'aesthetic illusion.'9

This reader-related immersion, or in Roland Barthes's term 'effect of reality,'10 can be differentiated according to its nature or 'level.' On a first level, we encounter the general impression created by immersive or illusionist works of an 'as-if-reality.' As I have discussed elsewhere, the creation of **aesthetic illusion** can in principle occur in both texts that are read in the framework of factuality and in texts that are received under the auspices of fictionality.11 Likewise, both fictive and factive representations can exist within either frame, and the respective objects can trigger an impression of being immersed in the respective worlds regardless of their ontological or referential status. When these worlds are narrative worlds (as in fiction) and not, for instance, descriptive worlds (as in much poetry) the impression of a quasi-reality is enhanced. The reason for this is that aesthetic illusion is essentially coupled with experientiality. As experience is arguably more intense when related to dynamic objects in time, the immersive part of aesthetic illusion (as opposed to the quantum of distance and media-awareness which keeps it from becoming a delusion) is intensified by the essentially dynamic nature of narrativity.

8 In narratology, parts of these 'deleted' or non-'factual' facts have been discussed under the terms 'disnarrated elements' (cf. Prince 1996: 98) and "shadow stories" (Abbott 2015).

9 Cf. Wolf 2013.

10 Cf. Barthes 1968.

11 Cf. Wolf 2013.

As opposed to this first and general level of the impression of a quasireality which, owing to the common reception contract of a 'suspension of disbelief,' we tend to provisionally accept as if it were fact, there is a second level implied by some works: This is the additional impression that one is not confronted with **a** reality or with fictional facts but with **our** reality as we know it or with reality *tout court* and thus with actually, or seemingly, ascertainable facts of contemporary or historical reality. In literature, this impression is termed '**referential illusion**.' One should, however, note that referential illusion is not co-extensive with aesthetic illusion but a special case of it.12

#### *Figure 2: Aspects of 'fact' relevant to fiction*

To sum up: aesthetic illusion (as well as its breaking) can occur both within the frame of factual and fictional reception; it always creates the effect of an experienceable reality and thus of 'facts,' that is, being immersed in **a reality**; in some rare cases, the additional impression is elicited of being immersed in **reality** *tout court*.

It should be noted that literary hetero-reference comprises references to **general** facts of life as well as **specific** references to contemporary or historical reality. 'Reference' can in both cases imply positive reference but also problematization or, in extreme cases, for instance in postmodern deconstruction, denial.13

12 Cf. ibid. 2008.

13 It should be noted, though, that even the most radically anti-referential (or antimimetic) texts cannot dispense with using references to the world of our experience and knowledge (hence to what Iser called the 'repertoire,' cf. Iser 1975: 299).

What is now the prototypical position of 19th-century realist fiction in relation to these aspects, uses, and impressions of 'fact'? Generally, one can align this kind of novel with what was termed 'epistemological realism' above. This can already be seen in the intracompositional dealing with facts: in realist fiction, the represented world, as a rule, is a system of probable, believable (fictional) facts, and the phenomena of this world are observable and (ultimately) explicable rationally or, at least in an inner-worldly way, without recourse to transcendental or supernatural agencies. This can, for instance, be seen in the frequent use of physiognomic descriptions of characters' faces and bodies, since such descriptions are based on a belief in transparency, that is, in the belief (or, we tend to say today, myth) that empirically observable surface facts reveal underlying character dispositions and histories.14 Moreover, the fact-orientation of realism can be observed in the emphasis placed on the ultimate revelation of truth and facts wherever they are temporarily obscured by characters and the novel's action. This emphasis is also responsible for the frequent 'disillusionment' of characters as a topos of realist story telling. The underlying positivistic belief in the unproblematic existence of facts and the possibility of accessing and representing them correctly also renders the problematization of facts as such through characters of the narrator relatively rare in realism.

As for the extracompositional aspect of dealing with facts and concomitant reception effects, 19th-century realist novels are, according to widespread opinion,15 based on the belief in an objective, subject-independent reality to whose facts they refer, often in a concrete and specific way, and about which they try to create a consensus between implied author and reader.16 This optimistic, positivist epistemology is supported by a pervading illusionism and thus by the novels triggering the impression, in the readers, of being immersed in a quasi-reality. While this general illusionism is also true of Gothic fiction or, for instance, H.G. Wells' science fiction, realist novels, in addition, frequently elicit the impression that the readers are confronted with contemporary reality as they know it from experience of history. Realist fiction thus often reaches the second level of illusionism, namely referential illusion. Symptoms of the fact that realist writing tends towards this direction include the use of well-known settings with real place-

14 Cf. Wolf 2002a, Wolf 2002b.

15 Cf. Ermath 1983: 77.

16 Cf. Fluck 1992: 27, 35.

names, the choice of temporal settings that are contemporary or quasi contemporary, and the representation of characters from all classes and milieus observable in Victorian society. In harmony with the middle-class orientation of this society and the predominantly middle-class readership, both the dominant reservoir of characters and most of the implied norms tend to show clear middle-class preferences. All of this creates the impression that the represented world is an extension of the (middle-class) readers' world.

This is, perhaps, best illustrated by the frequent use of the formula "one of those" as, for instance, in the initial characterization of Marty South in Thomas Hardy's novel *The Woodlanders*: "She was one of those people who, if they have to work harder than their neighbours, prefer to keep the necessity a secret as far as possible […]."17 "One of those," here and elsewhere, is an appeal to the reader to link the observation following this formula to their own world-knowledge and thus both an appeal to see, and a confirmation of, the close relationship between the novel's world and their own world. This strategy of realist storytelling to reference experiential reality may even be so intense that the frame of fictionality, in which realist fiction, like all fiction, is read, may temporarily be obscured in favor of the opposing framework of factuality. As announced above, the complex relationship between (seeming) fact writing and 19th-century fiction will be illustrated in the following by two examples.

#### **3. Charles Dickens'** *Hard Times***: The Implied Criticism of Facts in a Novel Based on Critical References to Contemporary Facts of Life**

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them."18 These are the instructions of a major character, Mr. Gradgrind, which he gives to the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild in the opening of Dickens' *Hard Times*. This *medias-in-res* beginning is emblematic of

17 Hardy 1999 [1887]: 16.

18 Dickens 1854/1969: 47. References to *Hard Times* (Penguin edition) in the following in the abbreviated form: "*HT*: page number". In the case of subsequent quotations only with page numbers in brackets.

the relevance of this novel to our topic 'writing facts.' Indeed, I do not know of any other 19th-century novel in which facts and a fact-centered worldview are so pervadingly thematized and its effects so graphically shown, more precisely, in which such a worldview is so devastatingly criticized.

The details of this criticism in this frequently discussed novel are too well known19 to require further belaboring, so that I can restrict myself here to a few 'facts': The fact-ideology at issue in the novel is represented by a number of negative characters, some of them with telling names denoting facets of their negativity: the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild; the industrialist Gradgrind; the "banker, merchant, manufacturer" and alleged self-made man Bounderby; and, moreover, the dandy and promoter of statistics Harthouse. Their fact-centered ideology is based on a materialist empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, in which only reason (cf. *HT*: 62), measurable and classifiable facts, and their general calculability in statistics and economics count. This ideology is linked to a view of man in which self-interest, or rather selfishness (Harthouse's belief "everyman is selfish in everything he does") (205), and generalities rather than individuality (131–132) are emphasized. The effects of this ideology are critically shown in several fields.

The first fact-related issue the reader is confronted with right from the above-quoted opening scene onwards is education, epitomized by M'Choakumchild's model school and the education of Mr Gradgrind's children Tom and Louisa and his foster-daughter Sissy, an education in which "it hailed facts all day long." (95) The importance of this area, in particular in a moral respect, is underlined by the titles of the novel's three parts which suggest a natural causality between "Sowing" (Book 1), "Reaping" (Book 2) and "Garnering" (Book 3). The consequences of an education exclusively based on 'facts,' which suppresses fancy or imagination, and neglects morality speak for themselves: Sissy is unhappy, and so is Louisa, who is encouraged, especially by her egoist brother, to enter a merely rational marriage (from which she tries to escape in an all but adulterous affair with Harthouse). Yet it is Tom who, besides the model-pupil Bitzer (see III.8), is the most glaring illustration of what can be 'reaped' and 'garnered' from the 'seeds' of an erroneously fact-centered education and a neglect of morality in particular (which is also present in Harthouse's moral indifference and relativity): Tom becomes a gambler and a criminal: he steals a considerable sum of money, for which he directs suspicion on the innocent worker Stephen Blackpool,

19 Cf. Simpson 1997, notably 1–11.

who then, in his flight from criminal persecution, has an accident and dies. Tom himself is ultimately forced to flee Britain, repents too late, and dies on his return journey.

Another area where the pernicious effects of the fact-ideology loom large is the industrial world in the manufacturing city of "Coketown", described by Dickens in the well-known chapter entitled "The Keynote:" "COKETOWN […] was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs Gradgrind herself." (*HT*: 65) The novel represents at large the poor labor conditions of the working class, the "unnatural" (ibid.) life they are forced to lead, and its consequences: poverty, rebellion (in the chartists), alcoholism (in Stephen's wife), and endless suffering. It is made clear that all of this is connected with the view that only material facts, in this case, the calculable financial profit of the masters, count.

A third area, in part linked with the industrial theme, is aesthetics. The exclusive reign of useful, utilitarian facts is most graphically illustrated in the terrible architecture which this mindset produces. This refers to Gradgrind's Stone Lodge, to Bounderby's home, and, above all, to Coketown at large. It is a town full of "severely workful" and monotonously repetitive buildings (ibid.), where "[a]ll the public inscriptions were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white," and where "[t]he jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either or both […] Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town." (66)

All in all, the criticism of the fact-ideology implied in *Hard Times* rests on its following deficiencies:20 It is wrongly holistic owing to its claim to embrace the totality of reality. It is reductionist in disregarding or neglecting essential human dimensions: moral and religious feelings, general emotions, human motivations, imagination/fancy, and individuality.21 And it is generally accused of forming an inadequate approach to human nature and reality at large. Its negative effects impact vast areas of reality: education, ethics, religion, arts/literature, economics and society at large, and last but not least, epistemology.

In the face of such an intracompositional indictment of 'facts' – can one say that *Hard Times* is really a realist novel, for which, as was said above, the

20 As partly detailed by Nussbaum 2001 [1991].

21 There are numerous references to human nature and its incalculability, starting with p. 48.

validity of facts must be postulated? Do facts here only play a role as the cornerstones of a pernicious ideology which the novel strives to dismantle in favor of ethics and the imagination? No, facts do play a major and positive role both on the intra- and extracompositional level, that is, both with respect to the relation between the novel and contemporary reality and the way and effects of the world building within the novel.

As for the extracompositional reception effect created by *Hard Times*, it is in line with all realist fiction in its eliciting aesthetic illusion, even to the extent of creating a referential reality effect. As opposed to, notably postmodernist fiction, the reader is at no point meant to doubt the reality of the fictional facts.

In addition, the impression is frequently elicited that the novel deals with specific aspects of contemporary reality and thus at times adds 'referential illusion' to the general aesthetic illusion it elicits. This impression of referential illusion is corroborated by the history of the novel's gestation: *Hard Times* first appeared in serialized form in Dickens's weekly journal *Household Words* in 1854 and, as Simpson convincingly argues in a chapter entitled "The Interdependency of the 'Great Magazine of Facts' and 'Hard Times'",22 manifests a common concern with contemporary England and a remarkable "correspondence between the journalism and the fiction."23 The fact-orientation of the novel has also been acknowledged by its generic classification as an 'industrial novel' or 'Condition of England novel.'24 These designations, which have traditionally been used for a special sub-genre of 19th-century realist fiction dealing with the problems of the Industrial Revolution, imply a clear critical hetero-reference to the poor living conditions in industrial towns and 'chartism' and 'chartists,' the forerunners of modern trade unions, as a reaction to what was referred to as the "Condition of England Question" (Dickens is known to have visited the Midland industrial town of Preston in order to study this problem,25 which is why Preston is generally considered to be the model on which Coketown was created). Yet, the novel's gestures at contemporary facts of life go further: they also include the well-known references to the "Manchester Lancasterian School"26 and the importance given in con-

22 Simpson 1997: 4.

23 Ibid.

24 Cf. Lodge 2001 [1981]: 400.

25 Cf. Maack 1991: 138.

26 Cf. Craig 1969: 22–23.

temporary politics to statistics as published in the so-called blue books. (cf. *HT*: 96, 131 and note 26, 327–328) And, last but not least, the main critical object of the novel, namely the fact-ideology, shows clear references to contemporary utilitarianism, materialism, and positivism. While *Hard Times* as literature presupposes, of course, the reception frame of fictionality, these details gesture towards an occasional readability with the frame of factuality in mind.

Admittedly, the in part highly satirical representation of the above-mentioned facts, which, as in all satires, goes along with their distortion,27 relativizes the realist 'fact-writing' nature of *Hard Times*, and so does Dickens' general tendency towards sensationalism, caricature, and occasional sentimentalism (for instance, observable in the scene of Stephen's death after having fallen into what aptly is called "Hell Shaft"). *Hard Times*, with its sentimentalism and socially critical and satirical exaggerations, is thus hardly an example of novelistic fact writing in the strictest sense. Indeed, where was there ever a school as one-sided as M'Choakumchild's (and directed by a teacher of such a tell-tale name!), and where was there ever an industrial city with *such* monotonous architecture and life as Coketown, and where can or could one really encounter a fact-propagating character such as Mr. Gradgrind, whose outer, regular appearance – to which we will come back later – is so much in harmony with his attitudes and inner convictions?

Yet, satire also implies clearly readable hetero-referentiality to its objects in real life, for otherwise it would not work. This realist hetero-referentiality of the novel and its relevance to contemporary reality is underlined by the subtitle of the one-volume edition, *For These Times*, and its own fact-orientation is thematized in one of the rare direct metafictional self-characterizations of the book by the narrator, who calls it "the present faithful guidebook." (*HT*: 54). This metaphor aligns *Hard Times* with a non-fictional genre bound to facts as typical of realist fiction.

The novel's implied fact-orientation not only shows in the intracompositional detailed world building as typical of realism but also in the emphasis on disillusionment, which is responsible for the novel's tendency to reveal obscured fictional facts and the truth in the course of the plot: this applies to the debunking of Bounderby's myth of the self-made man by his mother which

27 Satire works, according to a concise formula by Preisendanz (1976: 413), on the basis of the principle of "transparent distortion" ("transparente Entstellung").

shows that he had a very comfortable childhood and upbringing,28 and especially to Gradgrind, who over several steps is made to see his error in giving his children a wrong education.29

Thus one can say that, on the one hand, facts do play a (positive) role in *Hard Times*, and its affiliation with realism is to a large extent justified (except for the caricatures and theatrical sentimentalism/sensationalism typical of Dickens in general).30 On the other hand, the novel is not only fact-oriented itself but, as detailed above, is also an indictment of relentless fact-orientation. Yet, what are we to make of this ambivalence? What is, after all, the real view on facts in the worldview implied in *Hard Times*? This is an epistemological question and in harmony with what Warning, drawing on a formula by Umberto Eco,31 considers one of the major functions of literature, namely to form epistemological allegories.32 Doris Feldmann (1986), in an illuminating article, endeavors to highlight what she considers a certain skepticism towards objective facts which she sees at work in *Hard Times*. To substantiate this claim, she quotes some elements in which characters are given clearly subjective perspectives but neglects the fact that the narrator is ultimately reliable and an agency able to highlight erroneous views as such (for instance, Bounderby's conviction that "dissatisfied" workers invariably are "fit for anything," a "fiction" as the narrator says and as Stephen's history shows [*HT*: 211]). While it is true that the epistemologically sharpened gaze of the narrator recognizes the subjective element in the perception of others,33 his own perceptions and statements of fictional facts are hierarchically superior and never relativized so that, in sum, no epistemological skepticism can be derived from the novel. This is in part acknowledged by Feldmann herself, who states that the novel ultimately does not contain "a radical epistemological skepticism." (cf. *HT*: 227) Consequently, one can state that while facts as part

28 Cf. Humphreys' (2008: 395) felicitous formulation: "Bounderby, one of the hard fact man, is really the great fiction-maker in the novel […]." Appearances can lead to deceptions and illusions, but eventually – and this is important for the epistemology underlying realism – the facts of reality are allowed to surface.

29 One fictional fact, however, remains obscure, namely the reason for Sissy's father to abandon her (cf. 308: "never will be known," as Sleary says).

30 For a certain ambivalence in the relationship between *Hard Times* and realism, see Kearns 1992.

31 Cf. Eco 1967 [1962]: 151–159.

32 Cf. Warning 1990: 357.

33 Cf. Feldmann 1986: 206.

of the fact-ideology illustrated in *Hard Times* are subject to a critical perspective, this criticism does not aim at facts *per se* but at their exaggerated and absolute position in an ideology and in the one-sided, wrong use made of them in the practice of life. All of this testifies to the reality and in part importance of facts, but also to their relativity.

The implied positive norms point to this relativity and in particular to the poverty of the fact-ideology represented in the novel by emphasizing additional or alternative accesses to facts and an ultimate reality: In this context, we encounter traditional values, such as "the wisdom of the heart" (246), love (as propagated by Sleary),34 "fanciful imagination" (92), epitomized by the circus world and, by implication,35 also literature and, thus, Dickens's own literary product(s). This latter aspect is best perceptible in the fanciful similes and metaphors which the narrator uses in describing the monotonous reality of Coketown in the afore-mentioned chapter "The Keynote" (in itself an imaginative musical metaphor).36 Most important, though, for the relativity of facts is the novel's endorsement of a view of man that allows for areas inscrutable to reason but that can nevertheless be experienced by the heart.This includes the "unfathomable mystery" presented by even the "meanest" of individual human beings (*HT*: 108), human morality (as the narrator reflects: "not all the calculations of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred […] in any single moment of the soul," ibid.). And this also includes religion, that is, Christianity (I here differ from Feldmann37); although Victorian realism is generally characterized by a tendential secularization which brackets off metaphysical explanations and frames of references in favor of secular ones.38 And yet, at times, realist novels show curious 'lapses' into remnants of an old episteme in which the supernatural and religion played a greater role in this respect. In *Hard Times* such traces may, for instance, be seen in the narrator's – and no doubt also the implied author's – belief in the superior dignity of "the work of GOD" as opposed to "the work of man." (*HT*: 108)

34 "[…] there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all" (*HT*: 308); the novel shows that love is not restricted to humans but extends to animals such as Merrylegth, "Sissy's father's dog" (*HT*: 307).

35 Cf. Feldmann 1986: 204 and note 22.

36 Cf. also "like the painted face of a savage," "Serpents of smoke," "like the head of an elephant." (*HT*: 65)

37 Feldmann 1986: 210–211.

38 Cf. Wolf 1998: 438–442.

As a result, *Hard Times* does not invalidate a belief in the objective existence of facts (Feldmann's emphasis on subjectivity implied in the novel therefore appears to be exaggerated). Yet the realm of facts is both enlarged and restricted: On the one hand, it is enlarged, since certain elements of human nature are also represented as facts although not as calculable ones, in particular psychological needs such as the yearning for fanciful entertainment, for which the circus world caters. It is restricted, on the other hand, since there are areas of mystery which are part of reality but cannot be ascertained as facts in a positivistic way. As the narrator says: "Supposing we were to reserve our arithmetic for material objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities [of human nature] by other means!" (108) Reason as an epistemological means thus does have a place in *Hard Times*, but not one of absolute power,39 for it must be coupled with the wisdom of the heart, with imagination and "other means" which, no doubt, include literature itself with its fanciful imagery as displayed in *Hard Times*. In sum, there is a complex relationship between *Hard Times* and facts, an ambivalence which, however, does not destroy the basis of a largely unshaken belief in an objective reality 'outside' fiction. It includes both facts and inscrutable mysteries, and both may be accessed, at least to some extent, through fictional literature such as *Hard Times*.

#### **4. George Eliot's** *Adam Bede***: Narratorial Uneasiness with the Representation of Objective Facts. A Novel Based on and Criticizing Historical Facts**

George Eliot (Marianne Evans), in her novels, appears – at least at first sight – to testify to an attitude towards facts and their role in (social) reality that is less ambivalent, relativizing, and critical than the one observable in Dickens's *Hard Times*. The subtitle of Eliot's best-known novel *Middlemarch* (1871/72), *A Study of Provincial Life*, aligns her with the endeavor of French realists and naturalists in particular to close the gap between fiction and science by giving fiction a scientific, and that is fact-oriented, touch.40 While, as is well known, Balzac chose biology as the model of accounting for the diversity of character

39 Cf. Nussbaum 2001 [1991]: 437.

40 For the close relationship between George Eliot and 19th-century science, see Shuttleworth 1984.

in *La Comédie humaine*, 41 Zola tended towards various branches of science and scholarship, including sociology and historiography,42 and based his fiction on extended research of individual milieus as a preparation to the writing of the individual parts of his novel cycle *Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire*. In a similar way, Eliot's use of the term 'study' for *Middlemarch* suggests a fact-oriented representation of contemporary provincial life in England and, more strongly than with Dickens, implies an affinity with the reception frame 'factuality' into the general literary frame of fictionality.

In *Adam Bede*, the novel in focus here, this fact-orientation is emphatically and famously propagated and combined with a poetological program of realism in what can be called a *locus classicus* of English realist aesthetics: the metafictional chapter 17, entitled "In Which the Story Pauses a Little."43 The terms the narrator uses here are, besides "fact" (*AB*: 221) as the object of his44 mimetic representation, "truth" (222) and "truthfulness" (223) as the attitude to achieve his realist ideal. This ideal consists in "giv[ing] an exact likeness" of reality, including humble everyday reality as epitomized in Dutch 17th-century genre painting, of which the narrator includes two ekphrastic descriptions. (Ibid.) All of this is destined to contribute to an ethical function Eliot's realism is meant to fulfill (and which she already pursued in her first novel, *The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton* [1857]), namely to elicit sympathy even with humble, morally mediocre, and fallible characters – which is why one may label her particular kind of realism 'sympathetic realism.'45

The chapter in question is triggered by a problematic non-reaction of the parish priest of Broxton, Rector Irwine, to the selfish courting of the beautiful Hetty by a young squire and heir to an aristocratic estate, Arthur Donnithorne. In fact, Arthur is about to start an amorous relationship with Hetty in spite of the fact that the class difference between the two of them makes

41 Cf. Kablitz 1989.

42 Cf. Warning 1990.

43 Eliot 1985 [1895]: 221–230. References to *Adam Bede* (Penguin edition) in the following in the abbreviated form: "*AB*: page number". In the case of subsequent quotations only with page numbers in brackets.

44 In harmony with the common practice of attributing the author's sex to the narrator, and since 'George Eliot' is a male pseudonym, the narrator will here be referred to with the masculine form.

45 For the importance of an ethics of empathetic 'sympathy' in Eliot's works, see Nünning 2015.

marriage highly unlikely (a 'fact of life' which Hetty does not consider properly. (Cf. *AB*: 196) What is more likely is that Hetty becomes pregnant and is then abandoned by Arthur, which is what does happen. But, before it comes to this, Arthur wants to make a clean breast of his feelings and moral scruples. Yet the rector, being dependent on Arthur's father, is too delicate or pusillanimous to speak his mind. And so, the chance of reforming the potential 'rake' Arthur is lost – with catastrophic consequences for Hetty in the following story (she will abandon her baby, be sentenced to death, and ultimately be transported to the colonies). This over-cautious conduct of the priest in a decisive moment is criticized by a fictitious lady reader, who complains about the unedifying portrayal of the rector and would have preferred that the narrator "had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice" and, if necessary, "improve[d] the facts." (221) To this, the narrator opposes his feeling of being "obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact," a fact-orientation which he then develops into a programmatic aesthetics of a "faithful representation of commonplace things" and behavior rather than of rare "prophets," "heroes," and "sublimely beautiful women" (224), "picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals." (225) Thus, the narrator clearly espouses a realist and anti-romantic, and in any case anti-conventional, aesthetics based on the conviction: "It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste," (221) Rather than an infraction of conventions, the narrator "dread[s] nothing […] but falsity," even if "[f]alsehood is so easy, truth so difficult." (222) Yet in spite of this difficulty, his aim is a representation of common, average reality "as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath." (221)

The novel – with some exceptions – follows this fact- and truth-based aesthetics. As in *Hard Times*, the fictional world shows its fact-orientation through detailed world building that contains a plethora of real-life (hetero-)references. These include, for instance, references to the work life of carpenters (the profession of the eponymous central character), to religious life at the end of the turn of the 18/19th century (the tensions between Methodism and the Church of England in particular) and to contemporary social problems (the utter dependence of tenant farmers on their landlords, abusive attitudes of young aristocratic heirs to village beauties). And, like Dickens in *Hard Times*, the implied attitude towards, among other things, the problematic social facts is clearly critical.

Yet, unlike Dickens's novel, in *Adam Bede* there is less satirical distortion and more serious, quasi objective representation of country life around 1800. As has been pointed out,46 the novel can be read as a fulfilment of Eliot's own plea for a book "studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans and peasantry" which she made in her essay (published in 1856 in the *Westminster Review*) on Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl's sociological study on "the German peasantry,"47 an essay which Cunningham qualifies as "a programme of sociological research into the life of ordinary England." (Ibid.) The parallels between Eliot's wording "natural history" and Zola's later novel cycle, which also sports 'natural history' in its subtitle, are striking and gesture towards a common quasi scientific, fact-oriented concern in realist and naturalist novel writing. Incidentally, this orientation was also perceived by Eliot's first readers, albeit in a negative light, as the criticism of the alleged incompatibility between the "brutal facts" represented in the novel with "a work of Art" in a contemporary review shows.48

Where, however, yet another parallel with *Hard Times* appears is in the extracompositional effect created by both novels: they both elicit a strong belief in the quasi factuality of the represented storyworlds and thus keep the reader immersed in them through a powerful aesthetic illusion that is sometimes even expanded to referential illusion. This powerful impression is strengthened in *Adam Bede* by a number of devices: They include graphic descriptions of (here often idyllic rural) settings and of the main characters but also – quasi covertly – by the appeal to a world (knowledge) shared by both narrator and reader through the frequent use of the phrase "one of those." (See, e.g., *AB*: 67, 293, 225) In addition, the term "fact" appears a number of times in the novel, although intracompositional thematization of the concept 'fact' is less frequent than in Dickens's novel (where, as we have seen, it is linked to an ideology thematized in the storyworld). When the term 'fact' appears in Eliot's text, it does so without the negative connotations it has in *Hard Times*. Moreover, its occurrence is not limited to a quasi grammatical expletive of the conjunction 'that', as in the phrase 'the fact that,' but "fact" – besides its telltale use in the aforementioned programmatic chapter 17 – frequently refers to givens of the fictional world (e.g., 178, 181, 221, 268, 323) and thus emphasizes not only the belief in its assumed factuality which all illusionist representations require but more specifically the firm spatial and historical setting of the storyworld in a recognizable English reality.

46 Cf. Cunningham 1996: x–xi.

47 Ibid.: x.

48 Quoted from ibid.: xxiii.

So far, one may have received the impression that *Adam Bede*, much more than *Hard Times,* is in harmony with the contemporary veneration of objective positivistic facts and strives to represent them in novel form. Yet this impression is misleading. For the narrator – and one may with confidence claim the implied author as well – is quite conscious of the problems, if not impossibility, of objective representation: this consciousness derives from the awareness that the subjectivity of perception is inescapable and that experience and representations stemming from it are therefore also tinged by subjectivity. Interestingly, the narrator enters this relativization and his uneasiness with exact and objective fact writing into the very program of realism discussed above, when he says: "I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused; […]." (221) To speak of such a "defectiveness" of the literary mimetic "mirror," which is the narrator's (and implied author's) mind, is a clear acknowledgment that absolute truth is cognitively and epistemologically impossible and that therefore "there is reason to dread" the very opposite of what the program of realism strives for, namely "falsity." (222)49

Eliot's skepticism towards the accessibility of objective facts can be illustrated with one particularly tell-tale detail, namely the handling of physiognomic descriptions. As I have detailed elsewhere,50 such descriptions are a privileged site when it comes to ascertaining the position of the worldview implied in a text concerning the epistemological question of the readability of the world and its perceivable facts. The reason for this is the literary convention that descriptions are rarely 'innocent': they do not simply make the reader 'see' something in an imaginative perceptual sense, they are also frequently enriched with implicit connotations, explicit evaluations, and other elements of meaning which make the reader 'see' the described character or object in the cognitive sense of 'understanding'. In this context, 'transparent' physiognomic descriptions are depictions of bodies and faces in which

49 In *Middlemarch*, at the beginning of chapter 27 (p. 296), the authorial narrator uses a well-known simile (the "concentric circles" produced by a light shining on a scratched surface) for the same purpose of laying bare the subjectivity of the perception of reality and facts, the "flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement," that is, of some seemingly objective fact, while it is in reality the subjective "candle" of a subjective consciousness which produces the impression depending on its point of view. (Cf. Nünning 2015: 124; Postlethwaite 2001: 115)

50 Wolf 2002b.

the perceivable surface, the fact of the bodily signifier, is – often explicitly – linked to, and gives access to the hidden character beneath this surface as its 'signified.' Frequently, the meaning of bodily details is made explicit in the narratorial discourse, and where such semiotically 'transparent' descriptions precede the actions of the described character – as is often the case, descriptions being a convention of character exposition not only in realism – the subsequent behavior is in line with the meaning and expectation elicited by these descriptions. On the level of the implied worldview, this can then be read (by way of the afore-mentioned 'epistemological allegorization' operating in literature) as an indication of a positive, unproblematically optimistic attitude towards the readability of the world and its facts. In contrast to this, 'opaque' physiognomic descriptions do not yield results with respect to the readability of the respective character on the basis of an allegedly transparent semiotic relationship between what can be observed as a bodily fact on the surface and a deeper essence and, per extension, the represented world may remain partially 'opaque' and inexplicable as well. Such descriptions may thus betray some degree of epistemological skepticism as part of the implied worldview.

In *Hard Times*, descriptions, physiognomic and otherwise, tend to be epistemologically transparent. For instance, the representative of the condemned fact-ideology, Thomas Gradgrind, after having his say on the necessity of teaching facts only at school, is introduced on the first page, to give just one of the many details, as showing "bald head […] all covered with knobs […] as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside." (*HT*: 47) Needless to say, the character is then shown to behave exactly in the way this description makes us expect.51

Eliot, in *Adam Bede*, also introduces such elements of transparency in some of her physiognomic descriptions, notably at the beginning when it comes to outlining the appearance of the eponymous hero: His strong body is said to betray racial origins by pointing to his being a "Saxon," while "the dark eyes that shone from under strongly marked, prominent, and mobile eyebrows indicated a mixture of Celtic blood" and that his "face" showed "no other beauty than such as belongs to an expression of good-humored honest intelligence,"

51 Cf. also Wolf 2002b: 396–398. Interestingly, the same transparency extends, in *Hard Times*, to the description of the main setting, industrial Coketown, the (highly satirical and rhetorical) portrait of which is metafictionally announced in the chapter title "The Keynote" (ch. I.5).

(*AB*: 50) a narratorial qualification to which the character, in his behavior and actions then is shown to conform. Yet, this is not the whole story. Consider the description of Hetty's beauty in the context of her being an object of male desire:

The dear young, round, soft, flexible thing! Her heart must be just as soft, her temper just as free from angles, her character just as pliant, […] Every man under such circumstances is conscious of being a great physiognomist. Nature, he knows, has a language of her own, which she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself an adept in the language. Nature has written out his bride's character for him in those exquisite lines of cheek and lip, in those eyelids delicate as petals, in those long lashes curled like the stamen of a flower, in the dark liquid depths of those wonderful eyes. (197–198)

However, as opposed to the higher authority of the 'descriptor' of the passage quoted from *Hard Times*, this description is rendered from a limited, subjective and biased point of view (here the view of a lover): "It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words." (198) And while the satirical bias in Dickens's description of Gradgrind turns out to be justified and thus approaching objectivity, the subjectivity of Adam's gaze is treacherous, for Hetty, with her selfdelusions, coquetry and hard-hearted neglect of her own abandoned baby, is anything other than an ideal woman. Appropriately, the narrator relativizes Adam's all too positive physiognomic impression by stating:

Nature has her *language*, and she is not unveracious, but we do not know all her intricacies of her *syntax* just yet, and in a hasty *reading* we may happen to extract the very opposite of the real *meaning* […] One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct correlation beween [sic] eyelashes and morals or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair one's grandmother, which is on the whole is less important to us. (198–199, my emphasis)

This is a clear warning against physiognomic naivety – interestingly expressed in linguistic, almost semiotic terms (in italics). If the 'syntax' of natures 'factwriting' is not clear for us to read, what we consider as facts becomes problematic.

However, such a departure from an optimistic fact-reading is, in Eliot's fiction, as yet not coupled with a diffidence towards fact-writing, as the opening metafictional paragraph by the narrator indicates:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter, and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799. (49)

While the simile of the "sorcerer['s] […] visions" might be read as an indication of fictionality, the opposite is true here – the use of the mirror, the mimetic metaphor par excellence which we encounter here again, testifies to this: what is 'conjured up' in the narrator's mirror is not (as one might think) fantasy but a world anchored as solidly in fact as the date and the name of the village are meant to indicate.

The only drawback with respect to this typically realist claim is an episode in which the implied author deviates from a major rule of realism, namely, never to include supernatural elements: In a memorable scene, Adam works late at night, appropriately on a coffin, a task which he has taken over from his dipsomaniac and sloppy father, who has once again not come home in time. While doing so, Adam twice hears a strange knocking at his door which he opens and twice finds no-one before the house. This incident makes Adam "shudder" and reminds him of the "willow wand" as a "sign when some-one was dying." While this could be discounted as a subjective "superstition" of Adam's, fostered by the "blood of the peasant in him" and the stories "told him" by his "mother," there is one detail in the story which belies this: Adam's dog Gyp appears to be startled repeatedly by this knocking as well, each time giving a loud "howl." (93–94) The narrator does everything to dispel 'unrealist' surmises the reader may get from the episode, but the subsequent story appears to endorse the supernatural, for shortly afterward we learn that Adam's father has in fact died, drowned in a stream, while Adam heard the knocking. This is a coincidence (?) which is never really explained, so that one is almost nudged towards a supernatural assumption. Making readers accept something supernatural, be it ever so insignificant for the plot as a whole, is a puzzling departure from the, as we have seen, almost scientific fact-orientation of this realist novel, all the more so as the author is known to have been an atheist for a long period in her life.52

52 To some extent, this 'puzzle' may be explained as a residue of an older episteme in a novel which, in its 'rage for explanation,' harnesses a striking plurality of methods and

What does all of this amount to with respect to Eliot's 'fact writing' in *Adam Bede*? On the one hand, one must state the following: The aesthetics on which the novel is explicitly based endorse a positive attitude to 'fact writing': the novel is a prime example of fact-friendly realism by an author who emphasized "patient watching of external facts" as a scientific way of accessing truth.53 As could be observed with respect to *Hard Times* (and perhaps even more so, since *Adam Bede* never caricaturizes), Eliot's way of writing elicits a powerful immersion in a represented world that can be experienced as if it were a world of real facts – the introductory metaphor "sorcerer" has an indicative value in this respect, too, gesturing towards the 'magic' of aesthetic illusion.54 Moreover, *Adam Bede* is firmly based on historical and social facts, which (again as with *Hard Times*) at times elicits elements of referential illusion and gestures towards a readability in the frame of factuality. In addition, as I have detailed elsewhere,55 the novel not only posits the facts of the represented world but strives to explain them to the reader as much as possible. This applies in particular to the characters' actions and motivations, so that clear cause and effect relationships appear again and again (this is even done more systematically than in *Hard Times*).

On the other hand, the novel contains some elements that run counter to an easy endorsement of objective facts: besides the strange inclusion of the possibly supernatural (which is absent in *Hard Times*), there is above all a marked diffidence towards physiognomic readings which we did not find in Dickens. Of course, from a modern perspective,56 physiognomics – in particular as a characterological reading of physiognomies – is a pseudo-science and not affiliated with facts. Yet, this was not seen as such by all in the nineteenth century. Hence, an emphasis on subjective misreadings not only of physiognomies but generally, as chapter 17 of *Adam Bede* eloquently indicates, is a noteworthy relativization of the belief in objective facts. While *Adam Bede* is certainly not based on a downright epistemological skepticism which would deny the existence or accessibility of facts altogether, the novel is informed by

ideas in order to account for the fictional facts while the implied author is aware of the limitations of all explanations. (Cf. Wolf 1998)

53 From Eliot's essay "The Influence of Rationalism", quoted from Postlethwaite 2001: 108.

54 For the "air of reality" of *Adam Bede,* see also Gill 1980: 26.

55 Cf. Wolf 1998.

56 Which is not so 'modern' after all, since Lichtenberg, in the 18th century, was already skeptical about the physiognomic teachings of Johann Kaspar Lavater, the most important contemporary representative of this pseudo-science.

a remarkable ambivalence that is noteworthy in the history of literary 'factwriting' and concomitant epistemological stances.57

#### **5. Conclusion:** *Hard Times* **and** *Adam Bede* **– Ambivalence towards Fact-Writing and Different Historical Affiliations**

On the basis of general theoretical reflections on the complexity of the relationship between fact and fiction we have seen that both *Hard Times* and *Adam Bede* as realist novels show a strong concern with facts and fact-writing, albeit in different ways. What they share is a realism-typical focus on contemporary (or recent) historical reality, and on the lower classes in particular, and the eliciting of a powerful aesthetic illusion, that is, a belief in the verisimilitude of the represented worlds and, at times, even a referential illusion in the facticity of the representation of aspects of reality. In their intracompositional showing and thematization facts, the latter being particularly outstanding in *Hard Times*, as well as in their extracompositional immersive effects on the reader, they thus can be considered remarkable examples of 19th-century literary attempts at fact-writing. While the constituents of, and happenings in, the represented worlds are clearly fictive and presuppose a reading under the auspices of fictionality, the realism in the representation and its at times historically specific and thus 'factive' hetero-referentiality invite the readers to occasionally adopt a reception frame of factuality which permits them to consider parts of the novels as sources of socio-historical information.

However, as we have seen, the attitude towards facts is ambivalent in both novels, although from different motivations and with different historical affiliations. In Dickens's novel, in spite of the importance which fact-writing has, a hostility towards facts as absolutes in contemporary fact-venerating ideologies in education, economy, and society at large is clearly marked. Moreover, as typical of Dickens, the satirical and social-critical function of the novel at times leads to a distortion of the strict credibility of fictional facts such as the exaggeratedly monotonous aspect of Coketown or some character-caricatures such as Mr. Gradgrind's portrait. In *Adam Bede* criticism is also conveyed but

57 For the ambivalence underlying Eliot's thoughts (an awareness of the subjectivist difficulties in the perception and processing of facts and the simultaneous maintenance of the "goal of impartiality" and hence of objectivity), see Anger 2001: quotation on p. 92.

without the distortion of satire, as the novel strives to elicit sympathy even with fallible characters rather than harsh criticism.

Another difference between the two novels lies in the historical affiliation of the implied positions that create tensions with an unmitigated trust in objective facts. In *Hard Times*, crude fact-veneration and the reliance on economic reason is opposed to a celebration of the imagination which points back to romanticism. One might even see relationships between the implied norms of this novel and Wordsworth's sonnet "The world is too much with us" and its indictment of "getting and spending."58 In *Adam Bede*, while a certain Wordsworthian nostalgia with respect to rural life cannot be overlooked,59 distance towards an overly optimistic perspective on objective facts comes from an epistemological awareness of subjectivity as a relativizing factor of all reality perception – which arguably also applies to fact-writing. In this, *Adam Bede* does not point back to romanticism but rather forward to modernism. A remarkable proto-modernist element gesturing towards modernism's focus on subjectivity is to be found in the ambivalent attitude towards the readability of physiognomies. This ambivalence includes a 'reliable' portrait, such as the one given of the eponymous hero but also an incipient skepticism towards too much trust in 'physiognomics.' It is a skepticism which Virginia Woolf will later radicalize in storytelling that showcases the subjectivity and constructivism of perception, as is the case in her 'anti-physiognomical' short story "An Unwritten Novel" (1921/1991).60 All of this is, however, at best a protomodernist awareness of subjectivity in dealing with facts, since the aesthetic and epistemological basis of *Adam Bede* remains rooted in the notion of facts existing independently of subjectivist distortions61 and of truth as the ideal of literary representation, and this truth includes the representation of social milieus and external details, toward which Woolf was highly critical.62

58 Cf. also Lodge 1969[1966]: 99, who sees a relationship between*Hard Times* and Shelley's "criticism of the 'accumulation of facts'" in the latter's "Defence of Poetry".

59 Cf. Gill 1980: 29: "George Eliot's vision of rural life is […] essentially Wordsworthian."

60 In this story, a focalizer who is apparently quite confident about her ability to read faces, observes a female fellow traveler in a railway compartment and, on the basis of her physiognomy and facial expression (pathognomy), constructs a whole 'novel' about her, which, however, turns out to be false – which is why the imaginary 'novel' remains 'unwritten.' (Cf. Wolf 2002b: 412–416)

61 Cf. Anger 2001.

62 Cf. her parodic criticism of Arnold Bennett's 'Edwardian' (i.e., late Victorian realist writing style) in her essay "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" (Woolf 1928 [1924]).