There is no such thing as a “real” representation of “reality.” Except perhaps, in algebraic formulae. All the literary schools pretend that they are more realistic than their predecessors. Who knows what reality is? The impressionists stopped pretending to represent the visible world and presented the public with the “impressions” they received from it. If it’s true that we only perceive the exterior world in fragments, the canvases of the cubists’ “synthetic” period are realistic. More realistic still are the “assemblages” of Schwitters, Rauschenberg, or Nevelson.
Claude Simon, interviewed by Alexandra Eyle in “The
Art of Fiction”
