Verisimilitude (literature) - Continued Evolution

Continued Evolution

The idea that credibility, and in turn verisimilitude, rested on the reader's sense of the world encountered opposition because of the dilemma it created: every reader and every person does not have the same knowledge of the world. This kind of theory suggests that the novel consisted of distinct parts. The way novelists avoided this dilemma initially was by adding a preface to the work of fiction stating its credibility or by including more references to known history within the text of the fiction.

As more criticism on the novel surfaced, the inclusion of a preface or a scattering of some historical references was not enough to engage the reader. French theorist Pierre Nicolas Desmolets' notion that the author should obscure the fiction or art of the novel to avoid destroying illusion: the made up attributes of the text. The novel before was perceived as a work of distinct parts. Now the novel was not thought of in terms of separate parts, but rather as a work as a whole. The novel was a total illusion of life within itself. It was a closed fictional world that could establish its own rules and laws. Verisimilitude then became deeply rooted in structure. The focus of credibility did not rest solely on the external world of the reader. The novel's credibility then could be seen in terms of the novel's own internal logic.

The focus of verisimilitude was no longer concerned with the reader. The focus shifted to the novel itself. Verisimilitude was a technical problem to resolve within the context of the novel's fictional world. Detail centered on the creation of a logical cause web in the text that then could reinforce the overarching structural logic of the plot.