H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 2 2be in a medical textbook, or for any practical purpose. They are
used to help build up a certain way of seeing. Works of fiction are
thus allowed to bend the facts to suit this purpose. They are more
like politicians’ speeches than the weather forecast. When they
falsify bits of reality, we assume they are doing so for artistic
reasons. If a writer consistently spells ‘Buckingham’, as in the royal
palace, with a capital F, we would probably assume that she is
making some sort of political point, not that she is illiterate. We do
not charge an author with unpardonable ignorance because his
twelfth- century characters never stop arguing about The Smiths. It
is possible that the writer, having only a feeble grasp of history,
really does believe that The Smiths were around in the twelfth
century, or that Morrissey is such a superlative genius as to be time-
less. But the fact that this occurs in a work of fiction inclines us to
the charitable view that the distortion is deliberate. This is highly
convenient for poets and novelists. Literature, like an absolute
monarch among his fawning courtiers, is where you can never
be wrong.
A realist novel presents characters and events which seem to
exist independently of itself. We know, however, that this is an illu-
sion, and that the work is actually fashioning this world as it goes
along. This is one reason why some theorists hold that works of
literature only ever refer to themselves. There never was an Ahab
or Joe Christmas. Even if we discovered that there is a real- life
Harry Potter, and that he is currently a registered heroin addict
living in an Amsterdam squat, it would make no difference to our
reading of the novels. It could be that there actually was a detective
called Sherlock Holmes, and that unknown to Conan Doyle all the
events recorded in the Holmes stories actually happened to him