| Aristotle's Poetics forms the context of a discussion of anagnorisis--recognition--as a powerful structural component of prose fiction which has, in addition to its unique affective force, important epistemological implications: it is a formal analogy to the myth of the "Fall" in Genesis, a particular kind of knowledge from which there is no retreat, and a synecdoche for mortality. There is a metastructure of epistemological assumptions which define the narrative values of the text, and an epistemological infrastructure which forms an interpretive context for the analysis of character and theme.;Readings of Middlemarch, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Pride and Prejudice define the distinct epistemological assumptions of each novel and consider the structural and thematic functions of anagnorisis in each.;In Middlemarch knowledge is a constituent of anagnorisis. Dorothea's reverential attitude toward learning and vocation is a form of ignorance expressed by her marriage to Casaubon; through Ladislaw she recognizes the value of subjective knowledge which admits expression of feeling and sexuality. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's death is not a consequence of fate but rather the effect of beliefs given the status of knowledge. Whereas in these two novels knowledge is of the kind associated with the paradigmatic transformation from ignorance to knowledge represented in Genesis, in comic novels such as Pride and Prejudice recognition is ameliorative and depends on knowledge which brackets suffering, loss and mortality.;Anagnorisis is the "life force" of prose fiction without which the novel would not have the affective power to mobilize the reader's will to know. Characters move inexorably toward anagnorisis and readers read to observe and to join that movement. Yet with anagnorisis, the novel must end. Incorporated into its structure is the persistent shadow of mortality: it forces the end of the fiction through its transformative knowledge by establishing a stable universe after which the fiction either must close or risk the destabilization of another moment of anagnorisis. |
