IF YOU HAD TO PICK the first shot in this conflict, you could do worse than reread the section in The Corrections in which Chip Lambert, former holder of an “assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts,” teacher of “Consuming Narratives,” lecturer on phallic anxiety in Tudor drama, and casualty of a drug-fueled affair with an undergraduate, heads repeatedly to the Strand Bookstore to sell his large, costly collection of Theory. It is a miniature triumph of realist notation at its most aggressive. Starting with his Marxist theorists, whose collective sticker price of $3,900 is knocked down to $65, Chip works his way through “his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers” to raise money for expensive dinners to impress a new girlfriend. Reduced at the end to “his beloved cultural historians,” Chip “piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.” The pathetic, specific numbers, the terribly accurate roster of names (not just famous Continental names, but the kind of American academics that demonstrate Franzen’s realist-insidery expertise): this is what Theory is worth.

Scenes in which the vain things of this world are sold — auctions, foreclosures, negotiations with pawnbrokers — occur often in realist fiction, always expressing the hard principle that our ideals don’t translate into market terms. In the end, our fantasies or desires or self-delusions come to the bar, not of Truth, but of what others will give us for them.