Consensus reality

Paul Klee, Forest Architecture, 1925

George Saunders, in "A Swim in the Pond at Night" refers to "consensus reality" as the good-enough match between the world and language and writes about how stories "exploit" our fondness for consensus reality.

I once heard the term "consensus reality" used to describe the set of things about the world that we all pretty much agree to be true. Water is blue, birds sing, and so on. And although water is not simply blue and not all birds sing, and to call what some birds do "singing" approximates and undersells what they actually do, agreeing on this consensus view is natural and useful. When I say,"Singing birds were skimming low over an expanse of blue water;" that image is useful if you want to know, roughly, what's going on down at the lake. When I say, "Look out, a piano is about to fall on your head from above," the fact that we've agreed to call that collection of wood, ivory, and metal a "piano," and that thing at the end of your neck a "head," and that direction up there "above" enables you to step out of the way in time, I hope.

"Realism" exploits this fondness of ours for consensus reality. Things happen roughly as they do in the real world; the mode limits itself to what usually happens, to what's physically possible.

 I find the term consensus reality interesting.  I also find interesting how the "exploiting" works in readers brains.  (Listeners brains, too, because everyday langauge does the same thing and jokes and lies also exploit it.)

Saunders goes on to say that stories do NOT need to be realistic to contain truth.

But a story can also be truthful if it declines consensus reality--if things happen in it that don't and could never happen in the real world.