Question

What is verisimilitude, and how is it used in literature?

Answer 1

Hint:
i) It comes from the Latin word verum, meaning truth and similis, which means similar.
ii) The first known example of verisimilitude dates back to the 5th century in Italian poetry.

Complete answer:
Verisimilitude is the act of ‘establishing and maintaining the appearance of reality within the confines of a constructed setting’. In simpler words, it is the believability of a piece of fiction, or its lifelikeness. It means creating a convincing, internally consistent world bounded by its own rules.

It is used to create fictional ideas in stories and make it believable for the reader. Verisimilitude can be classified into two types-
Cultural Verisimilitude – it the creation of a fictional work confined by the boundaries of the culture or the history of the real world; i.e. outside the fictional work.
Generic Verisimilitude – it is the creation of a fictional work in a specific genre of fiction. For e.g. in the cartoon ‘Tom and Jerry’, it is seen that Jerry takes the shape of anything that he eats which is larger than him in size. This feature is a part of the world in which Tom and Jerry live (which is totally fictional) and when the same thing occurs with other characters it is very much believable.

Any piece of fiction is primarily understood as a work of art. According to readers, fiction should challenge the construction of reality. The reality needs to catch up with the world in the text instead of the text being restricted to the reality. Verisimilitude is that characteristic of a fictional work that transports the reader to a different world.

Note:
i) Another meaning for the word ‘verisimilitude’ is a belief that one theory is closer to being true than any other theory.
ii) This meaning is used to disprove a false theory by proposing another false theory which might be closer to the truth than the previous one.