Get Real

Posted 4 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism |

Dan Green, responding to a post on Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog:

Reviewers privilege narrative, but not necessarily realism. There is no necessary connection between “story” and “realism,” although narrative in literary fiction has been used so often as a way of nominally depicting “real life” that most reviewers–and many readers–assume that they are inseparable, that real life can only be presented to us through a summarizable “story.” Thus, I would argue that the stituation [sic] Jacob describes is a consequence less of laziness or apathy on the part of reviewers than of the widely held assumption that “fiction” correlates to “story” which correlates to “realism” in a more or less natural progression.

While my own stance is not so rigorously anti-narrative as Green’s appears to be, I do have a certain amount of sympathy with his argument that book reviewers — or, perhaps more fairly, book review editors, since it is they who decide which books to assign for review — have historically given short shrift to books and authors that do not fit into a prescribed mould of “the well-made novel.” David Markson’s anti-narrative The Last Novel was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and in the Globe and Mail’s Books section in 2007, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

What makes me a tad uneasy is Green’s and Russell’s apparently dogmatic reaction against realism as a legitimate — or, indeed, interesting — literary mode.

It is important to define our terms precisely here. Realism is often employed as a catch-all, often used interchangeably with naturalism or mimesis, which are similar, yet distinct concepts, and different critics will have different interpretations of its meaning and import. In the entry for Realism in The Harper Handbook to Literature, Second Edition, the authors assert:

Realism is a slippery term, sometimes used too loosely to be of value except as an indicator of a reader’s reaction. What seems real to one reader seems preposterous to another, and the common reader’s idea of reality is different from the professional philosopher’s. Realism is most useful in literary studies when understood in the context of the nineteenth-century movement that first applied it to literature, discussed its qualities, and in the end gave it the widespread currency it still enjoys.

The 19th-century realist movement was modelled on the French school of réalisme, which was first applied to Rembrandt, but later came to describe Flaubert and his followers. Contemporary critics of Flaubert scorned him and other proponents of réalisme for what they perceived to be the baseness of their subjects and the immorality inherent in their treatment.

But as Ian Watt points out in his seminal study, The Rise of the Novel, what set the 18th-century creators of the English novel — Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding — apart from prose writers before them was their commitment to “formal realism,” which proceeds from the premise “that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience”:

Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres. The novel’s air of total authenticity, indeed, does tend to authorise confusion on this point: and the tendency of some Realists and Naturalists to forget that the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today.

Watt’s book was published in 1957, so the revolutions of modernism and early postmodernism had already occurred, but it is clear that fifty years on, the “rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works” that Watt identified is alive and well in the culture.

Boredom can account for at least part of this. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719; 289 years later, Defoe’s formal innovations do not seem nearly as revolutionary as they must have done in the early 18th century. By contrast, when confronted with yet another carefully rendered slice-of-life novel about farming on the prairies, a reader in 2008 is most liable to roll her eyes in despair and frustration.

And yet one hesitates to dismiss realism altogether, if for no other reason than it has a large claim to being the generic characteristic that sets novels — even anti-narrative novels — apart from other forms of writing. Watt continues:

[W]e must not allow an awareness of certain shortcomings in the aims of the Realist school to obscure the very considerable extent to which the novel in general, as much in Joyce as in Zola, employs the literary means here called formal realism. Nor must we forget that, although formal realism is only a convention, it has, like all literary conventions, its own peculiar advantages.

The advantages of this kind of formal realism do not run to baldly mimetic descriptions of places and things, but rather comprise what the American critic William Dean Howells called “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” It is this more philosophical notion that is most useful in assessing realism in novels, as in any art: the authentic literary artist, whether he be Stephen Crane or Stephen Dixon, must maintain fidelity to his art, which presupposes a “truthful treatment of material.” That such truthfulness can be found in abstraction or innovative exercises in style is not something I would wish to argue against; it can also exist, indeed flourish, in more traditional modes of storytelling.

Finally, what is important is a recognition that, as Henry James put it, the house of fiction contains “not one window, but a million.” The critic Wayne C. Booth points this out in The Rhetoric of Fiction when he writes:

Fortunately, the alternative to dogmatic realism is not dogmatic antirealism. There are many other routes we can follow; whichever one we choose, our success will depend on our remembering the warning that Robert Louis Stevenson once gave James: what is the “making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.”

4 comments to “Get Real”

Nigel Beale, January 5th, 2008 at 1:09 am:

• Thanks for the interesting quotes. Booth brought to mind E.M. Forster who believed as I do that the novel as literary form is so wide that generalizations about it are impossible. The novel has no rules. So there’s no such thing as the art of fiction, just the particular art that each novelist employs to write his or her particular book.

Jacob Russell, January 5th, 2008 at 10:12 am:

• “What makes me a tad uneasy is Green’s and Russell’s apparently dogmatic reaction against realism as a legitimate — or, indeed, interesting — literary mode.”

  My complaint is not at all that “realism” (however defined) is not or cannot be an interesting literary mode. My point is–that realism *isn’t,* and that this is profoundly important, that it is profoundly important to acknowledge this and incorporate our awareness into the work. It’s not the use of older conventions that troubles me, it’s the absence of mindfullnes, the *pretense* without attending to what it *means* that we feel the need to pretend a work is real to enjoy it, the need to *suspend disbelief* (in the common misunderstanding of Coleridge’s idea)–as though this were an essential and necessary aesthetic element.

  Story telling gives us what we think we need. Story telling weaves the illusion of understanding, hushing our critical impulses, silencing our questions, or robbing them of their sting. Story telling that aspires to art shows us how to enjoy the story without losing our minds.

Dan Green, January 5th, 2008 at 5:03 pm:

• I just want to echo Jacob and say that I do not have any reaction against realism, much less a dogmatic one. My complaint is the one expressed in the passage you quote–that “realism” is too often considered inseparable from traditional narrative modes. Worthwhile experiments in realism are certainly still possible, but they’re not likely to get the attention of mainstream book review editors because they won’t necessarily use those modes.

Jacob Russell, January 7th, 2008 at 11:16 pm:

• I would stretch Dan Green’s idea here… that I think it is precisely the motive to represent reality with precision and honesty, that is the greatest driving force pushing artists to move beyond established conventions.

  I think it’s open question as to what has contributed to the confusion since the innovations of the Modernists, and their more insistent inclusion of the artifice as part of the reality. After all, this is far from new… think of Stern, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

  Somehow this has been cast as a quest for the new. I think critics of the visual arts have contributed more to this impression than literary critics. My idea here, is that this misrepresents a deeper and more telling impulse. We do want to represent reality–but reality eludes us. Again and again, we discover that all our attempts have fallen short–mere conventions mirroring, not “reality,” but the projections of the age. There’s a weak analogy here to scientific theories, with a difference that makes the difference–and this would be my main point: that the representations of art are self-deconstructing, in that they INCLUDE the artifice in the presentation itself, they do not hide it. The naive view of “realist” or “naturalistic” narrative is a reactionary misreading, ignoring the foregrounded structure… like ignoring that the pleasure of trompe d’oeil painting resides in our very awareness that the fly on the rose petal is made of paint!

  The triumph of a Flaubert set piece–the wedding in Mdm Bovary, or Zola’s race scene in Nana, resides, not in our making ourself stupid enough to believe it’s real, but in knowing, even while we physically and emotionally respond to its evocation, that it’s made of words!

  The reactionary response pretends the artifice doesn’t exist–or is only there to make us forget it (the so called, “suspension of disbelief”)… not at all unlike the rhetoric of reactionary politicians.

  Story telling that demands the suspension of mindfulness is not innocent entertainment. It is the fundament of propaganda, its necessary precondition. Those who write in this mode are the servants of the tyrants of our age.

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