Stereotypes and Representation in Fiction

Abstract

As a cultural model through which we perceive, interpret, and describe reality, the stereotype is necessarily linked with representation. Its preconstructed forms provide representation with foundations; they guarantee its possibility and legibility at the same time. This point of view, without any doubt, flagrantly contradicts public opinion, which opposes the stereotype to the accurate reproduction of reality that is to say, to the living character, to the faithful depiction of feelings, and to scenes described as natural. In every attempt to seize hold of a reality which is by definition diversified and complex, the stereotype would act as a screen and therefore as an obstacle; in this sense it would be the opposite and the negation of representation. The persistent dichotomy between the real and the conventional is nevertheless, as we know, largely illusory in art. If it is true, as Gombrich (1960) has shown for the plastic arts, that all vision is conditioned by preexisting schemas, it is just as obvious that the literary text relies heavily on accredited models. Between the calm comfort of realistic illusion, and the irritation caused by the stereotype, there is only a very relative distance: that which separates the naturalized model where the reader confuses the stereotyped forms with reality as he sees it, from the prefabricated mold which he denounces as excessive codification and mere distortion of reality. The Russian Formalists' concept of automatization was designed to account for this process wherein convention stiffens and congeals. To really understand the stereotype in its constitutive relations with representation in fiction, it is, however, important to go beyond the original notion of automatization. The stereotype does indeed testify to the omnipresence of models which are not simply changeable literary conventions, but global cultural