David Letzler Louisville 2012 “Blank Generaon” Barthes’ "Reality Effect" in Post-War Non-Realist Fiction In one of his most cited passages, Roland Barthes examines the puzzling fact that though 19 th -century realist fiction is perhaps most characterized by its reliance on “concrete details” for description, somehow, such details often seem to lack any apparent narratological purpose or significance. For instance, as Barthes notes, Gustav Flaubert’s A Simple Heart makes a point of mentioning a wall barometer hanging over Mme. Aubain’s piano, even though this barometer neither affects the plot nor apparently signifies anything about her household. About such pointless details, Barthes inquires, “if there exist insignificant stretches [in the text], what is, so to speak, the ultimate significance of this insignificance?” (12). He concludes that such details function as “reality effects” that negotiate the aporia in fiction between meaning – that is, something deeper than the text, signified by it – and a bare reality that exists only for itself and does not signify. “In the last analysis,” he writes, reality effects create a “referential illusion” that says “only this: we are the real. It is the category of the ‘real’, and not its various contents, which are being signified” (16). Though Barthes does not draw further conclusions explicitly, this passage has long been taken not only as identifying an objective textual phenomenon but as implicitly critiquing a 19 th -century literary ideology of which it is supposedly a symptom: the belief that authors may objectively present unmediated reality in their novels (cf. Shiner 168). However, this interpretation of the reality effect does not account for how, especially over the decades since Barthes’ essay, this type of insignificant text has been the stock-in-trade of not only realist novels but also highly experimental contemporary fiction. If the reality effect is primarily a vector for nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology, for instance, what are we to make of passages like #1? This painstaking, chapter-opening account of a nondescript bathroom is filled with concrete descriptions, like those Barthes discusses, that turn out to be insignificant 1