content and epoch as Richardson, Henry James and Malcolm Brad-
bury, all of whom refute the idea that literature, and in particular the
novel, should be read as fiction. ⁴ Witness Henry James, insisting in The
Art of Fiction that ‘the novel is history’. He lambasts Trollope for
conceding to the reader that he and ‘this trusting friend’ are only
‘making believe’. This seems to James a ‘terrible crime’, ⁵ and yet the
distinction between history, journalism and biography on the one hand,
and fiction on the other is a basic ingredient in the conceptual diet of
literary critics and reviewers alike. How do we read the work of writers
who are either oblivious to this tension, or happy to absorb it? In many
literatures, the modern American novel for example, the application of
the fact/ fiction dialectic yields precious little insight; writers such as
Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Don Delillo, John Updike even, seem
unconcerned as to the fictive character of their fiction, to the extent that
those who can tolerate horrendous neologisms have begun to talk of a
new genre called ‘literary faction’. However, the conspicuous strain of
self-consciousness in modern European literature, where the reader is
frequently made aware of the fictional identity of the work and of the
distinction between narrator and author, has coincided with a theoret-
ical appropriation of metaphor. In competition with a host of other
interesting concepts and approaches, metaphor seems to have lost the
privileges it once enjoyed when it was venerated by the Romantics, and
upheld subsequently in the thinking of Proust and Valé ry. Modern
literary theory has circumscribed metaphor by taking it out of the
speculative domain of thought and identifying it as a figure of speech
associated with a fundamental tenet in modern linguistics. The principle
at issue, which has its source in Saussure's exposition of language
as a synchronic phenomenon, states that language is generated from
our ability as human beings to discriminate between various para-
digms. This skill derives from a perceptual faculty by which we
differentiate between things or phenomena on the grounds of similarity
and contrast. In the discourse of literary theorists, ‘metaphor’ is
sometimes used to qualify this process of paradigmatic selection. The
figure of metonymy is correspondingly elevated, to illustrate what
Saussure termed the ‘rapports syntagmatiques’ of our language. ⁶
Metaphor and metonymy are henceforth apposite figures, presiding
over the dual process of selection and combination in which language is
produced. Much of the theory involved in modern poetics resides in this
distinction, between the syntagm and the paradigm, and the alternating
modes, defined as metonymy and metaphor, in which they are ‘figured’.

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