This article attempts to formulate a new theoretical framework for literary realism, discussing in particular Joseph Vogl’s notion of ‘oikodicy’ and the second novel by Canadian-Indian writer Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995). My argument is that literary realism — through its form (one that asserts consensus, a common perspective, an ‘un-transcendable’ common horizon) — addresses the political problem of the state of nature, where everyone in principle has absolute rights, i.e. the right to construct and devise the public-collective world according to his or her own private-individual desire and will. Through a reading of the funeral scene of Shankar in A Fine Balance, I argue that literary realism provides an alternative to both Hobbes’ authoritarian solution and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, one that insists on the realness of that which is eliminated or marginalised within the sovereign’s reality. The problem of sovereignty re-emerges in Vogl’s concept of the oikodicy, albeit with the crucial difference that instead of the authoritarian sovereign, Vogl’s sovereign is that of finance capital itself; an impersonal, anonymous force, albeit no less frightening in terms of strength. Mistry’s realism offers an important response to this problematic in today’s global world

中文翻译：

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告诫，紧急状态和真实的回归

本文试图为文学现实主义建立一个新的理论框架，特别是讨论约瑟夫·沃格尔的“ oikodicy”概念以及加拿大-印度作家罗欣顿·米斯特里的第二本小说《精细平衡》（A Fine Balance，1995）。我的观点是，文学现实主义通过其形式（一种主张共识，一个共同的观点，一个“不可超越的”共同视野）来解决自然状态的政治问题，即每个人原则上都享有绝对权利，即根据他或她自己的私人个体的愿望和意愿来建立和设计公共集体世界的权利。通过阅读《精细平衡》中的香卡的葬礼场景，我认为文学写实主义为霍布斯的威权主义解决方案和巴赫金的狂欢节风格提供了另一种选择，坚持主权国家现实中被消灭或边缘化的现实。Vogl的oikodicy概念再次出现了主权问题，尽管有一个关键的区别，Vogl的主权不是专制主权，而是金融资本本身。一种非个人的匿名力量，尽管在力量方面同样令人恐惧。Mistry的现实主义对当今全球这个问题提供了重要的回应