If the poetics of fact had a dictionary, it would need to contain a long entry on the reality effect. The concept originates with Roland Barthes, whose 1968 essay by that name addresses literary details that can't be assimilated to character, atmosphere, or narrative function. Such “futile” or “useless” details (141, 142) — Barthes's examples are a barometer in Gustave Flaubert's novella A Simple Heart and a little prison-cell door in Jules Michelet's History of the French Revolution—seem to fall outside any symbolic function and refer directly to concrete reality. In the essay's key move, however, Barthes claims that such insignificant details possess a second-order significance in certifying the existence of a world “out there,” irreducible to narrative function. Far from denoting the real, Flaubert's barometer and Michelet's little door connote reality; they “finally say nothing but this: we are the real” (148). The reality effect achieved by this implied speech act is ideological, Barthes adds, in the way it consecrates the separation and opposition between what exists and what has meaning. This ideology, in turn, has been indispensable to a roughly coemergent set of modes, disciplines, and institutions “based on the incessant need to authenticate the 'real,'” from literary realism, photography, and reportage to “objective” history and its manifestations in museums and tourism sites (146).