French theorists have recently proposed a theory which describes all literature in terms of the probable, the vraisemblable.6 This poetics of the probable commences with a purely relativistic claim. What is probable not only changes in accordance with the audience’s concept of reality but also changes in accordance with the needs of the story and with the narrative possibilities open to various genres. It includes all of the norms and models making a given text understandable to the reader, however outlandish (...) and eccentric it may be. Various levels of the vraisemblable are distinguished from each other, and the vraisemblable based upon models of the world or the world view prevalent in a given culture is scrupulously separated from types of the vraisemblable that are based upon literary, generic models. However, as Tzvetan Todorov gladly admits, “the two notions tend to melt into each other.”7 He and other theorists see the literary genre itself as one of the models “probabilizing” a given text, at times in direct contradiction with “natural” models of the world. Still others see the world, or the prevalent world view, as the universal text which probabilizes other texts.[…]Rather than how this new concept of the vraisemblable, of probability, fares in relation to farce in films, theater, and literature, I prefer to ask how farce fares in relation to it. I think that it doesn’t do well. Farce shows that it is a mistake to unify the possibilities for understanding a text and the possibilities for understanding its fictional world within a single integrated concept. It is a further mistake to term such a concept “probability.” When dealing with the fantastic or the marvelous, for instance, probabilizing the text and probabilizing the work’s fictional world may legitimately be unified under a single principle or concept. If we agree to change or suspend a fundamental belief about the world, we will be able to perceive as logical and probable not only the texts but also the fictional worlds of such works. Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” excellently fits works that are written in these genres. Such works require that we temporarily forget a certain general belief about the world. After we’ve agreed, as a result of this suspension, to include certain elements in the world , we may then rebuild the fictional world while using the rest of our beliefs along with this new assumption. Farce’s incredibility creates a different situation. Before we have even begun to recover from an attack upon one probability principle, another is undermined. In farce the rules of probability are not neutralized in one specific realm of reality; their inversion operates constantly on all of reality’s realms. The image of a seemingly real world, reminding us of our own world and of our own set of probabilities, is all we need to be constantly astonished by farce’s persistently novel deviations from predictable probability. Here, in direct opposition to the marvelous, the new deviations must keep on coming from unexpected directions, because farce won’t allow its incredibilities to consolidate and become new rules of probability. The fictional world of overt farce lacks a specific factor, the one that would have probabilized all of the other factors of this world. Such an Archimedean center might seem to be located in the genre’s definition—this genre, however, does not probabilize the incredible. Farce’s definition does not make farce’s world more intelligible in any sense of that word. At the very most, farce allows us to forgo such intelligibility without transgressing the established boundaries of art.6. For an excellent presentation of their views, see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature , pp. 131-60.7. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard , p. 83. See also his introduction to Communications 11 : 2. (shrink)

These two short essays are a hebrew translation of an exchange that followed the publication of "verisimilitude, conventions and beliefs" by menachem brinker which contained a criticism of nelson goodman's theory of representation and realism in "languages of art" (1969). (edited).