An Imperfect World, Imperfectly Retold : Mimetic Uncertainty in Early, Late, and Meta-Modern Fiction

Abstract: Proposing the concept of mimetic uncertainty, this project aims to provide a critical inquiry into the correspondence of unreliable narration and realism. Building on Springett (2013) and Olsen (2003), a distinction between narratorial unreliability and uncertainty is proposed to denote whether a narrator explicitly signals an awareness of their fallible narration. I thereafter indicate how narratorial uncertainty, on the one hand, can serve to evoke a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989) on a receptive aesthetic level; and on the other hand, can provide a form of historicity (Jameson 1985) and discursive realism (Auerbach 2003) on an expressive historical axis. Through this tripartite framework, realism is contextualised within the discourse of unreliable narration, as well as the specific debate which surrounds uncertainty and fallibility. The textual analysis focuses on three separate works—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year (1722), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and finally, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)—with the twofold aim of (1) providing a model for approaching uncertain narration and (2) applying a historically contingent realist reading. I argue that in all three novels, emphasis on how readers may respond to uncertain narration provides insight into socio-historical and discursive points of friction surrounding their authors. The overarching ambition of this study is to provide a more substantial and historicized understanding of the stylistic devices of contemporary authorship, while more broadly signifying the unexpected critical acuity of mimetic approaches as well as the challenges and demands which metamodernist literature approaches.