Realism

Damian Grant

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138283190
• eBook ISBN: 9781351631013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1970, this book provides an introduction to literary realism. After considering what realism is and its philosophical roots, it goes on to examine the emergence of the idea of realism in nineteenth-century France and its gradual spread across the wider republic of letters.

This work will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century European literature.

1

Introduction

I

If, as Henry James claimed, ‘the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms’ (AN, p. 326) then the word realism – so often invoked in the discussion of it – must surely be the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of critical terms. But whereas the qualities James celebrates extend the possibilities of a literary form, they are more likely to restrict the possibilities of a critical term; and certainly the word realism, with its apparent independence of any formal, contentual, or qualitative description, and its unmanageable elasticity, is a prodigy that most people feel they could do well without.

Nothing illustrates the chronic instability of the word more clearly than its uncontrollable tendency to attract another qualifying word, or words, to provide some kind of semantic support. The curious reader will not have to adventure far into critical literature before coming upon some of the following, which I have arranged in alphabetical order since they could not be persuaded to obey any other: critical realism, durational realism, dynamic realism, external realism, fantastic realism, formal realism, ideal realism, infra-realism, ironic realism, militant realism, naïve realism, national realism, naturalist realism, objective realism, optimistic realism, pessimistic realism, plastic realism, poetic realism, psychological realism, quotidian realism, romantic realism, satiric realism, socialist realism, subjective realism, super-subjective realism, visionary realism. Many of these will be found scattered in George J. Becker’s collection of documents on realism; others are from modem criticism. Wimsatt and Brooks create a scale of low realism, high realism, and drab realism in their Literary Criticism (p. 102); Walter Lacher’s book Le Réalisme dans le roman contemporain is a successive categorizing of different realisms, Chateaubriand’s ‘réalisme pastoral’, Duhamel’s ‘réalisme spiritualiste’, Proust’s ‘réalisme du moi profond’, and even Jules Romains’ ‘réalisme de la plus grande ville’ (pp. 332–3).

One can sympathize therefore with Becker’s mild suggestion that ‘it would add to ease of discourse in the future if whatever happens next should be given a new name and not be tagged by some variant or permutation of the word “realism”’ (DMLR, p. 37). Also with the practising critic who reminds us that ‘“realism” is a notoriously treacherous concept’ (Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor, William Golding: a Critical Study, London, 1967, p. 121); who says-perhaps with some impatience – ‘I do not want to get bogged down in definitions of the word realism’ (W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot, London, 1961, pp. 50–1) and simply gets on with the word as well as he can, leaving it to generate a meaning in the critical context itself; or who declares – of Harold Pinter – that ‘all question of realism or fantasy, naturalism or artifice becomes irrelevant, and indeed completely meaningless’ (John Russell Taylor, Anger and After; 2nd ed., London, 1969, p. 358). Roland Stromberg authorizes this scepticism of theory when he says that ‘realism and naturalism must be defined by their historical content. The terms were shorthand for certain cultural phenomena of the times, and can be grasped only through a study of these phenomena’ (RNS, p. xix).

The word is in fact delinquent, and writers have indicated their mistrust of its behaviour either be sending it out under escort (as in the above list) or by letting it loose only when safely handcuffed by inverted commas. Ortega y Gasset makes it quite clear that he adopts the latter course on principle: ‘I cannot now discuss this involved term which I have been careful always to use in quotation marks to render it suspect’ (The Dehumanization of Art, p. 102).

II

If one wishes to achieve a genuine discrimination between the unruly meanings of realism as they jostle and overlap then one must accept the necessity of going back to the philosophers. René Wellek deliberately avoids what he sees as ‘the whole fundamental epistemological problem … of the relation of art to reality’ in his chapter on realism in Concepts of Criticism (p. 224), and the temptation is to provide (as he does) an historical account. As we have seen, Roland Stromberg considers this the only one possible. But the drawback here is that one achieves no critical view of the word’s uses, and no sense emerges as preferable to (or even properly distinguishable from) another; one needs some basic orientations, however simple, in order to structure this semantic flux.

Realism is a critical term only by adoption from philosophy: it comes weakened from loss of blood in earlier battles, and one needs at least to be able to distinguish the opposing sides before one can decide which state is being challenged, and which advanced. Nor is this easy, because ‘realism’ has been distracted by the service of different philosophical masters, and has no exclusive or unqualified loyalty to any of them. Although the company it kept during the middle of the nineteenth century – at the time of its going into general circulation – was aggressively materialist, leaving ineradicable traces on its present character, it originally served idealism, and was used to describe the scholastic doctrine that universals (justice, goodness, etc.) have a real existence, independent of the particular objects in which they are found. This was maintained in opposition to conceptualism (which held that universals existed only in the mind) and nominalism (which denied the existence of universals altogether: they were simply names). Even at this stage there were qualifications: ‘extreme realism’ and ‘mitigated realism’ indicated variations of emphasis in the idea.

It was in the eighteenth century with Thomas Reid’s ‘common-sense school’ that realism assumed in philosophy the sharply different sense which was to have such a fatal – or at least confusing – attraction for writers, critics, and theorists in literature. Here it proclaimed that the objects of perception are objects, and have a real existence outside the perceiving mind; which idea was developed in opposition to all forms of idealism. Following ‘the Scottish tradition of “natural realism”’, and resisting what John Passmore describes as the main tendency of nineteenth-century thought ‘towards the conclusion that both “things” and facts about things are dependent for their existence and their nature upon the operations of a mind’ (A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Pelican ed., Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 279, 174), naïve realists, new realists, and critical realists all claimed the word to designate –with progressive subtlety – the idea of an external, physical existence independent of mind.

With its loyalties divided (however unequally) between idealism and materialism it may seem that realism has forgotten its duty to reality itself. And the reason is that the concept of reality, too, has exploded in the modern mind: this brings us to the source of our difficulties. Philip Rahv observes that it is no longer possible to use realistic methods ‘without taking reality for granted’ – and this is precisely what artists cannot now do: ‘it is reality itself which they bring into question’ (DMLR, p. 589). Wordsworth was prepared, at least in theory, to take reality for granted, as is evident from the kind of criteria he used in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads; but it is significant that Coleridge, made cautious by metaphysics, rejected Wordsworth’s terms, and accused him particularly of ‘an equivocation in the use of the word “real”’ (Biographia Literaria, ch. 17). It will seem to us today impossible to avoid the charge of equivocation in using the noun ‘reality’ or the adjective ‘real’ at all. Vladimir Nabokov, indeed, exercises the same caution with ‘reality’ as Ortega does with ‘realism’: he says in his postcript to Lolita that it is ‘one of the few words which can mean nothing without quotes’ (Corgi ed., London, 1967, p. 329). Bernard Bergonzi argues in a recent symposium that we are unable to write now as Tolstoy did ‘because we have no common sense of reality. We are saddled with all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness. We do not believe in there being one reality “out there” as undoubtedly Tolstoy did’ (‘Realism, Reality, and the Novel’, a Symposium reported by Park Honan, Novel II (1969) p. 200).

Philosophers, then, will disdain such treacherous footing. It is generally recognized that philosophy today has given up all pretension to what was once thought of as its first function – providing knowledge of reality – and is content to concentrate its energy on a collateral function, that of investigating the possibility of knowledge at all. Philosophy shrinks to epistemology. ‘As to what reality is, I take no great interest’ said the new realist E. B. Holt (Passmore, op. cit., p. 263). And so the concept of reality finds itself abandoned like some useless fortification, where poets, novelists, and other less responsible writers may play soldiers if they wish.

Which of course they do: more convincingly than the philosopher may be happy to acknowledge. For it is widely held, again, that it is creative writers rather than professional philosophers who have done most of the philosophical thinking during the twentieth century; of that kind, at least, which ‘returns to men’s business and bosoms’. Modern writers conduct as if by instinct a systematic critique of reality: ‘it is reality itself which they bring into question’ with an imaginativeness and sense of relevance that the philosopher has (apparently) forfeited. Reality is seen as something which has to be attained, not merely taken for granted; and the attainment is a continuous process that never allows the concept to stabilize, or the word to offer a convenient mould of meaning.

Having said this, one recognizes that some writers will nevertheless be working towards some kind of stability in the idea, whilst others will be working away from it. The examples of Eliot, Joyce, and Lawrence will serve as an illustration of differing intentions in the presentation of reality. Eliot was committed to a Christian belief by the time he came to write his plays, and this is no doubt why we may observe a centripetal tendency in his characters’ discovery of reality. Becket’s whole endeavour in Murder in the Cathedral is towards an understanding of his own actions, a purification of motive worked by undeluded self-knowledge; an effort to contradict the Tempters’ cynicism:

All things become less real, man passes

From unreality to unreality.

Becket realizes, in a line repeated in Four Quartets, that ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’; it is his determination to face this himself, and bring others to face it (Collected Plays, London, 1962, pp. 28, 43). At the beginning of The Cocktail Party Edward Chamberlayne is faced with the fact that his wife has left him; he is made aware of his ‘obsolete responses’, realizes that he ‘must find out who she is, to find out who I am’, and having had ‘the unreality/Of the role she had always imposed upon me’ revealed to him, he can at last set about the process of readjustment (pp. 136, 176). In the same play Peter Quilpe speaks of his encounter with Celia as ‘My first experience of reality’, and Celia herself declares she has at last been made aware by what has happened of the reality of her situation (pp. 143, 186). The start of The Family Reunion shows Harry Monchensey reacting against his family’s protective behaviour, and although he fears reality – ‘the most real is what I fear’ – still insists on pursuing it beyond their limited perspectives: ‘What you call the normal/Is merely the unreal and the unimportant’; his own horrified guilt is ‘too real for your words to alter’ (pp. 90, 98, 99). But the difficulty of establishing ‘a reality’ is evident from his later words to Agatha, ‘what did not happen is as true as what did happen’ (p. 107): however common the endeavour, however much it seeks the centre, it is after all only the centre of the self that is being sought.

The inevitably subjective and therefore indeterminate status of reality is powerfully dramatized in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus’s developing consciousness of different levels of reality, from the simple sensuous reality of a child’s sensations to the liberated reality of the disengaged imagination. The novel describes a continuous process of dilation, as Stephen is ‘drawn to go forth to encounter reality’; there is always some further realization at hand that will conduct him to that core of consciousness which is (for him) the ground of the real. Stephen explicitly states he will ‘fly by those nets’ personal, religious, and national, which would limit his exploration of reality; ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race’ (Penguin ed., Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 159, 203, 253). And we reach the logical conclusion of this distribution of reality in Lawrence, where the word reaches its most fluid condition as it is used crucially but quite capriciously to qualify the shifting states of his characters’ consciousness. This is particularly evident in Lawrence’s presentation of Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow (and later in Women in Love). Reality for Ursula exists in her own stimulated consciousness. So when she is obsessed by thoughts of her future career as a teacher, her father sitting at the table becomes less real than her fancies (Penguin ed., Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 362). The schoolroom in Ilkeston proves to be a ‘hard, raw reality’, a ‘limited reality’, but its very unpleasantness, its ‘stark reality’, makes it more real, in that it occasions more of a reaction in her, than for example her home, which recedes to a ‘minor reality’ (pp. 367, 373). Her sexual experience with Skrebensky later in the book introduces her to a new level of reality, which again takes precedence over others: ‘they themselves were reality, all outside was tribute to them … They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest lived on a lower sphere’ (pp. 454–5). But even this is not then an ‘established’ reality: she can still cancel it by withdrawing her imaginative assent. Reality is ‘ever-changing’ with her; and when she does soon reject Skrebensky, she decides that he ‘had never become finally real’ to her, ‘she had created him for the time being’ (pp. 456, 494).

According to this usage, reality is not only located in the mind, but is at the mercy of the moods and caprices of that mind, dilates and contracts with the degree of activity of the consciousness. Reality is ‘for the time being’. The concept of reality is utterly atomized by this extreme subjectivity of viewpoint, and such usage as Lawrence’s (which is extreme but not untypical) seriously prejudices the word’s retention in more analytical contexts. Here, obviously, is no path for the philosopher or theorist to follow. Reality runs before the mind:

Reality is like a float that rides

all efforts of the irritated mind

to frame its definition: or a fish,

that swallows up all other forms of life

and then drinks off the sea in which it swims.

The analytic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conscientious Realism
• 3 Conscious Realism
• 4 Conclusion
• Note on Socialist Realism
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX