Vraisemblance

Recognition of this first level of vraisemblance need not depend on the claim that reality is a convention produced by language.

Vraisemblance does not entail “realism” in the sense that Ian Watt gives it in The Rise of the Novel. It is not the “realistic particularity” ([1957] 1974, 17) of the processes of experience, as Watt defines his “formal realism.” Rather, vraisemblance takes the guise of “elegant concentration,” not typical of the novel in Watt’s account (30).

The notion of vraisemblance, “in whose name all the literary battles were fought, is at the root of all criticism” (Bray 1931, 192; c'est en son nom que se livrent toutes les batailles littéraires, elle est à la base de toutes les critiques). Derived from Aristotle’s “probable,” in the rediscovery of the Poetics in Renaissance Italy, vraisemblance takes the key hierarchical position in seventeenth-century neoclassicism (see Duprat 2009) and maintains it until well into the eighteenth century (see Kremer 2011).