#JAMES WOOD, HOW FICTION WORKS#
Then Barthes turns to Flaubert’s description of Mme Aubain’s room in A Simple Heart: ‘Eight mahogany chairs were lined up against the white-painted wainscoting, and under the barometer stood an old piano loaded with a pyramid of boxes and cartons.’ The piano, Barthes argues, is there to suggest bourgeois status, the boxes and cartons perhaps to suggest disorder. But why is the barometer there? The barometer denotes nothing; it is an object ‘neither incongruous nor significant’; it is apparently ‘irrelevant’. Its business is to denote reality, it is there to create the effect, the atmosphere of the real. It simply says: ‘I am the real.’ (Or if you prefer: ‘I am realism.‘)
Realism in general, it is implied, is just such a business of false denotation. The barometer is interchangeable with a hundred other items; realism is an artificial tissue of mere arbitrary signs. Realism offers the appearance of reality but is in fact utterly fake - what Barthes calls ‘the referential illusion’.

We have seen that Flaubert’s method of different temporalities requires a combination of detail, some of which are relevant, some studiedly irrelevant. ‘Studiedly irrelevant’ - we concede that there really is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction, even in realism, which tends to use such detail as a kind of padding, to make verisimilitude seem nice and comfy. You wastefully leave lights on in your home or hotel room when you aren’t there, not to prove that you exist, but because the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive.

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摘于6/25/2026