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24REALISM: Thoughts by Catherine Brown
We cannot be that concerned with the real, otherwise we would have chosen to study, not English literature, but history, social sciences, natural sciences, or the kind of practical subjects which in Germany are learned in Realschulen (real schools). In fact, we would be involved in manipulating things rather than words, outside of the ivory tower, in what the employers of that metaphor call ‘the real world’. Or would we?
Let’s ask the philosophers. Realism, as a philosophical concept, holds that the world has independent existence apart from the perceiver. Literary realism - that is fiction committed to representing what is commonly the case - tends to rest on this assumption too. Realistic works of literature represent a world which purports to exist independently of the narrating voice, in which things might have happened differently to the way they do, in which details have varying levels of significance in relation to larger narratives. Literary realism has never been a coherent movement in the same way as, say, suprematism. It originated in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and, in part because it was never tied down to a single theory or type of art, it has proved a promiscuous and durable concept. According to some senses of the term, Wordsworth is more of a realist than Charles Dickens; according to others, Henry James is more of one than George Eliot. In the twentieth century it has leant itself to qualification by prefixes such as hyper; psychological, photographic, sur; and socialist. Literary realism is therefore flexible, polyvalent, and hard to define. It can best be discussed in terms of what it opposes:
1. Stylization
2. Classicism and Neo-Classicism
3. Romanticism
4. Naturalism
5. Interiority
1. Stylization
A stylized representation conforms to the rules of an artistic style in a way which makes it depart from direct representation of the object’s external aspect. Realism, by contrast, purports not to have a style which interposes itself between the object and its representation; it is art which hides its artfulness. In 1839 the Daguerre-Neipce method of photography was invented, and subsequent literary realism took it as an influential model. Yet visual art which is faithful to the appearance of (for example) the human form, has existed on and off since the Ancient Greeks. Literary realism, which represents the relatively ordinary actions of relatively credible people in a relatively free literary form, has existed only since the eighteenth century. Therefore, although visual realism forms only a small minority of the art which has ever been created, in the case of literary art that minority is much smaller.
Literary realism tries to be faithful not just to the appearance of the world, but to the experience of living: to what the French critic Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’. Some details do not advance the plot, or even its interpretation, but give an air of solidity to the world which the characters inhabit. Objects are not seen in close-up, because that is not how we experience most of the world: the typical frame of the realist’s lense is middle distance. Yet in other respects, realist works do depart from how we usually experience the world: there is often a degree of foreseeability of content, there are regular alterations of highs and lows in the lives of the characters, those lives are consistently interesting, and their ends are eventually revealed (in a way that we do not know our own ends). We therefore agree to call realist writing something which is not only imperfectly reflective of the reality which it purports to describe, but which departs from common features of the experience of life.
2. Classicism and Neo-Classicism
A Greek fifth-century BC sculpture of a discus-thrower, and Michelangelo’s David of a thousand years later, both look more like a real man than do a mediaeval icon of Saint George, or an African sculpture of a man; they were based on actual models. Yet they represent not only individuals, but the ideal of young manhood. Realist portraits in paint and prose of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represent people who are more dominantly individuals. That is not to say that they don’t also represent a class. Jude the Obscure is both himself, and representative of working class men who try and fail to break into academia in late nineteenth century England; in this sense, realism is metonymic, a part represents a whole. But all those parts are different, and Jude possesses quirks which in Classical and Renaissance sculptures are absent.
Seventeenth century literary neo-Classicism in France observed certain rules of form which realism rebelled against. Its doctrine of levels of representation stated that characters of high social class had to be dealt with in a high literary style, whereas simple subjects could only be dealt with only in comedy or farce. This rule never pertained in Russia, with its Christian sense of the worth of all people, to the same extent - but in Western Europe literary realism was revolutionary in depicting the typical lives of common people seriously and at length.
The typical, however, can be hard to determine. If families on average have 2.4 children, does that mean that that is how many a family in a realist novel should have? In addition, the sense of what is real varies between cultures. The fact that, for people with certain religious beliefs living in for example Latin America, spirits do intervene in the world, has led to the creation of a narrative genre which the less metaphysical West has designated - in relation to its own realism -magical realism. The sense of the real also varies over time. Will we be able, in five hundred years’ time, to consider George Eliot’s work as realistic in the same way as we do now?
3. Romanticism
The Romantics had already made several of the breaks away from
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Neo-Classicism which realism continued - notably, by taking the lower classes seriously, as Wordsworth does. But in other respects realism was in reaction against Romanticism too. This was principally for two reasons. First, Romanticism valued subjectivity, where realism valued objectivity. Secondly, the realists perceived the Romantics to be as idealizing as the Neo-Classicists, albeit in a different way. And this way was more dangerous, because whereas Neo-Classicism had rules which clearly marked its art as distinct from reality, the Romantics, in their rebellion against these rules, purported to be more directly concerned with the real, and were therefore potentially more misleading.
Realism made reference to the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) which were emerging over the course of the nineteenth century. George Eliot thought of her own writings as studies. She wrote that what was needed was: ‘a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives [...] the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or towards development’.
4. Naturalism
However, realism did not go as far in the direction of social science as did its French offshoot, literary naturalism. Whereas realism is a term borrowed by aesthetics from philosophy, naturalism is taken from natural science: a naturalist is either Darwin, or Zola. And the juxtaposition is apt, since Darwin’s works had a considerable influence on this movement, which extended from roughly the 1870s to the 1940s, mainly in France. Its distinguishing method was a concern for the effects of hereditary and environment - nature and nurture - on the individual, as opposed to the relatively insignificant free will. It ended, decisively, because it was so closely aligned with certain scientific ideas which themselves were superseded. It was also,
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in the works of Zola, associated with particularly painful and sordid aspects of human experience. As such, it met with criticism on the part of English realists including George Eliot, whose wish to make literature reflect the reality of ordinary life did not extend to its most distasteful, discomforting, or lubricious aspects. The Russian realist novel, by contrast, was welcomed in England as a moral contrast to the French novel.
The English realist project itself was moral, in a way in which the more scientific naturalist project was not. Realistic writing aimed to extend the reader’s understanding of and sympathy with average humanity by paying it patient and careful attention. It depicted flawed characters who struggled gradually to make themselves better, rather than unrealistic heroes, who might be less effective moral models to readers. Most importantly, it represented aspects of life among the common people to the wealthier class of people who read realistic novels, and who might otherwise never come to know these things. In this sense, it ‘spilt the beans’ on life, and revealed a country to itself. This was what Dickens did, and his writing contributed to the reformation of British working conditions and the legal system.
5. Interiority
Psychological realism is another kind of objectivity - a faithfulness to the reality of subjective experience. Compared to this, Victorian ‘high realism’ is more external. But this is relative. George Eliot, who is more associated with realism than any other English author, criticized Charles Dickens for being superficial in his characterization, and D.H. Lawrence credited her with having been the first to have moved towards the interior of characters. Henry James moved another step in the same direction - and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce went considerably further. Some people argue that psychological realism is ‘real’ realism - yet this conflicts with the philosophical sense of the term realism, as Victorian realism does not. Other people point out that all art which claims our sustained attention deals with some aspect of reality, and that no art deals with all of reality, and therefore
that all art is realism. This is tautologous. Unreality, by definition,
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does not exist, and therefore cannot be the subject of art. It is better to keep the term realism as denoting that family of qualities which I have been describing - and to allow it to be qualified by other terms, which give it clearly distinct denotations.
It is a complicated term, and therefore it is good to use other, connected, terms when these would more precisely indicate your meaning: mimetic, common, likely, credible, quotidian, vraisemblant, verisimilitudinous. These will all help you to fulfil your own commitment - as literary critics rather than literary authors - to describe the reality of literature.
