On Realism

J. P. Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000357295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1973, On Realism is a comprehensive introduction to the complex problem of literary realism.

Written from both a critical and philosophical perspective, the book brings together the concrete study of literary cases and the conceptual analysis of the terms used in describing them.It usesexamples drawn from a wide range of European literature and engages in philosophical discussion to argue for a richer and freer sense of the concept than was more commonly in favour at the time of writing. The book describes the literary forms of realism as an art of the 'middle distance' and sets out its character and value against alternatives and distortions - symbolism, naturalism, socialist realism, faits divers, and the literature of language consciousness.

On Realism will appeal to those with an interest in literary history, the history of literary theory, and literature and philosophy.

1

Three samples

i The riches of the world

§ 1

Chapter 33 of the Tickwick Tapers is devoted to certain minor events which occurred on the thirteenth of February 1828, the day immediately preceding that appointed for the hearing of Mrs Bardell v. Mr Pickwick. We know what a traumatic subject the law-courts were for Dickens. In the very next chapter, and then again when describing Mr Pickwick’s life in the Fleet, Dickens will break the serene flow of his narrative with harsh facts and acid comment. But here his tone is light, with occasional laconic understatements: ‘People who go voluntarily to law, or are taken forcibly there for the first time, may be allowed to labour under some temporary irritation or anxiety.’ Mr Pickwick, ‘in a state of excitement and worry’, is no exception to the rule. Not until we have been given ‘a full and faithful Report of the memorable Trial’ for breach of promise, and verdict has been passed against him, does Mr Pickwick regain that ‘perfect cheerfulness and content of heart’ which we know to be his usual mood.

However, our business is with Samuel Weller junior, his servant of ‘imperturbable good humour and unrufflable composure’. Having said goodbye to his master, who is quite glad to be left alone with his worries, Sam sets out for a meeting with his father at the Blue Boar in Leadenhall Market. Walking past a stationer’s window, he notices an especially picturesque and exotic Valentine:

The particular picture on which Sam Weller’s eyes were fixed… was a highly coloured representation of a couple of human hearts skewered together with an arrow, cooking before a cheerful fire, while a male and female cannibal in modern attire: the gentleman being clad in a blue coat and white trousers, and the lady in a deep-red pelisse with a parasol of the same: were approaching the meal with hungry eyes, up a serpentine gravel path leading thereunto. A decidedly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else, was depicted as superintending the cooking; a representation of the spire of the church in Langham Place, London, appeared in the distance; and the whole formed a Valentine’, of which, as a written inscription in the window testified, there was a large assortment within, which the shopkeeper pledged himself to dispose of, to his countrymen generally, at the reduced rate of one and sixpence each.

[Nelson Classics edition]

The novelist’s ostensible reason for this diversion is that the valentine reminds Sam of ‘Mary, Housemaid at Mr Nupkins’s [the] Mayor’s, Ipswich’, with whom he was smitten when attending on Mr Pickwick in the course of his adventures in that town. Obviously, the whole description is too elaborate to serve merely as a reminder, but what other purpose does it serve?

Two very simple narrative lines are here combined. The homely sentiment of a ‘gentleman’ and a ‘lady’ in love is contrasted with luridly exotic and fanciful allegory. The people depicted are very ordinary mortals, like Sam and Mary. This fact is established by their dress, and the prosiness is underlined by such expressions as ‘of the same’ ‘leading thereunto’, and ‘decidedly indelicate’. The allegory on the other hand takes us to distant lands, far away from ‘the spire of the church in Langham Place, London’. The mildly humorous effect of the passage derives from this contrast between the prosy and the romantic; and this contrast in turn—with the prosy side dominant—is characteristic of Sam Weller. He is something of a romantic, even though his main role in the novel is to be severely practical and down-to-earth. Yet even this doesn’t fully explain the purpose of the scene, for by dwelling on it the narrator is not adding much to our understanding of one of his main characters. Why ‘Langham Place’, why ‘London’? Because here we all are—Sam Weller, his creator, readers and all—friendly neighbours and inhabitants of one world. The fullest purpose of the diversion is to add and superadd to that sense of assurance and abundance and reality that speaks to us from every page and every episode of the novel—to add to that sense both by the fantasticality of the ‘cannibals in modern attire’ as well as by the quaint commercial flourish with which the passage ends.

Now Sam enters the shop and purchases ‘a sheet of the best gilt-edged letter-paper, and a hard-nibbed pen, which could be warranted not to splutter’ (which in due course it does), and proceeds to the Blue Boar where, on being told that his ancient parent isn’t expected for a while yet, he orders a drink and settles down to his unwonted labour:

The brandy and water luke, and the inkstand, having been carried into the little parlour, and the young lady having carefully flattened down the coals to prevent their blazing, and carried away the poker to preclude the possibility of the fire being stirred, without the full privity and concurrence of the Blue Boar being first had and obtained, Sam Weller sat himself down in a box near the stove, and pulled out the sheet of gilt-edged letter-paper and the hard-nibbed pen. Then, looking carefully at the pen to see that there were no hairs in it, and dusting down the table, so that there might be no crumbs of bread under the paper, Sam tucked up the cuffs of his coat, squared his elbows, and composed himself to write.

To ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves practically to the science of penmanship, writing a letter is no very easy task; it being always considered necessary in such cases for the writer to recline his head on his left arm, so as to place his eyes as nearly as possible on a level with the paper, and while glancing sideways at the letters he is constructing, to form with his tongue imaginary characters to correspond. These motions, although unquestionably of the greatest assistance to original composition, retard in some degree the progress of the writer; and Sam had unconsciously been a full hour and a half writing words in small text, smearing out wrong letters with his little finger, and putting in new ones which required going over very often to render them visible through the old blots.…

§ 2

There are countless such scenes in the Pickwick Papers, such slightly shapeless lagoons of expatiation, where the flow of the narrative slackens almost to a standstill (not to mention the numerous novelle, whose connection with the main story is hardly discernible to the most partial eye). There are so many of them, in fact, that we are apt to regard them as signs of authorial self-indulgence. After all, the main function of Sam Weller in the structure of the whole story is quite clear. He provides the common-sense contact between the guileless, harmless, and awkward Mr Pickwick, a figure of almost angelic innocence but also of impractical righteousness, and a world which, if not outright evil, is at all events calculating and expedient, money-minded and ‘sharp’. Sam provides a contact, and a defence. For he too is sharp, capable of ruses on his master’s behalf, while he remains loving and loyal to him throughout. Sam’s blandness can be deceptive, and there are many occasions when his endless anecdotal patter saves Mr Pickwick from disaster (though again these rescue operations don’t justify nearly all the anecdotes he tells). At the same time there is about Sam—especially in matters of the heart—a naivety and lack of sophistication, which are apparent in the passages I have quoted. These qualities explain his elaborate preparations for the epistolary task, the mention of ‘ladies and gentlemen who are not in the habit of devoting themselves’ to what after several more lines of banter will be described as ‘original composition’; and it is this good-natured naivety that speaks from the letter itself, which will be quoted, cockney spelling and all, albeit with many anxious interruptions from Sam Weller senior, later in the chapter.

Of the charm of this scene in the Blue Boar there is, I think, little doubt. Yet we feel that here again is a good deal that hasn’t very much to do either with Sam, Mr Pickwick’s naive, kindly, and unlettered servant who is having a crush on a housemaid, or with Sam, Mr Pickwick’s wily protector and extricator from awkward situations. The brandy-and-water, the inkstand, the mild ploy about the fire, even perhaps the details of Sam’s painful penmanship, seem a little in excess of what may be needed to establish the appropriate mood. What is it that Dickens is indulging?

§ 3

I chose these scenes because there is nothing grand or passionate about them. They are set in the modest regions of life, of social and emotional life alike. The scenes are, if you like, ‘typical Dickens’, but they aren’t typical of anything much else (to the social historian they will say something, but not very much). They offer us physical details, some of the ‘brie à brae’ of the age, but not from very close by, and with no emphasis on their symbolical quality. Many of the details (‘Leadenhall Market’) point to the whole of which they are a part, yet they do so perfunctorily, in the most casual way. For this is no more than a tiny corner of that England which Dickens will never tire of evoking: sometimes humorously (as here), sometimes nostalgically and sentimentally (as in David Copperfield), sometimes satirically (as in the Eatanswill scenes), sometimes with deepest indignation at its barbaric ugliness (The Old Curiosity Shop), with scathing comments on its social injustice and heartlessness (Hard Times), on its hideous poverty (Barnaby Rudge), and again and again with violent invective against its petrified and inhuman legal system.

Yet, however different the moods, what informs his evocations is always an unabating interest in this world and in this society as a thing real and, as to its reality, wholly unproblematic. This is the indulgence of the narrator’s self, and the acknowledged condition of his muse. Brandy-and-water, inkstand and mean coal-fire in the little parlour at the Blue Boar are the signs of this acknowledgment, of the eros that binds him to this world. They are the signs not of a deprivation, not of a want of reassurance, but the emblems of plenty.

On the other hand these abundant scenes from the social and physical world are not very carefully arranged, not ‘highly structured’, and only in the later novels will they be informed by a critical consciousness. But even then the delight in the elaboration of the circumstances of living situations and encounters, of jobs and houses and rivers, of clothes and bodies and faces, will often get the better of the narrative line. Franz Kafka, who saw his own unfinished Amerika as ‘sheer [imitation of] Copperfield’, is critical yet full of admiration mixed with envy. It is all so unlike what he himself can ever hope to do, he writes in his diary (8. x. 1917), for ‘Dickens is all richness and heedless overflowing’.

ii The testing of the prince

§ 4

‘The meek shall inherit the earth’: what would it be like, a novel on that theme?^* It is difficult to think of a biblical text that would lend itself more readily to fantasy, utopia, and spiritual extravaganzas, yet from Don Quixote through the Tickwick Tapers to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot it has been the inspiration of some of the greatest works of modern fiction. Here is a text which offers a paramount challenge to the writer who makes it his task ‘to bring into being … an instance of the feeling of what life is about’;¹ to the novelist who, with this task before him, chooses to restrict his imaginative and creative resources to a specific set of conditions in the worldly world. It is the accomplishment of this task in its most rigorous and most exacting form—the very palpable problem it poses—that interests us here.

§ 5

‘Of course, all that happened tonight was ephemeral, fantastic, unseemly—and yet, don’t you agree, it was full of colour, full of originality’: the character who, at the end of part I of The Idiot, thus describes his impression of that first evening at Nastasia Filipovna’s, might be describing our first impression of the novel itself. ‘Ephemeral, fantastic [or perhaps we had better stick closer to the text: romantic], unseemly’: the novel is placed at the farthest remove from those middle regions of life in which Mr Pickwick has his benign being. There is something extreme about the regions of experience that are here charted. The ambience is heavy with every kind of passion and desire, rank with an assortment of crimes and sins (and some, for which there is no room in the action, are added by way of anecdote); it is full of ineptitudes and faux pas, of monstrous betrayals, heedless avowals and accusations and, again and again, absurd because pointless ‘declarations’ and confessions. An attempted suicide, two strokes of apoplexy, two epileptic fits, an attempted murder and, finally, a successful one seem amply to bear out the narrator’s claim that ‘it is better for the writer to content himself with a bare statement of events’ because ‘the motives of human actions are as a rule infinitely more complicated and diverse than our subsequent explanation of them’ (IV. iii). However, unless we include conversations under the heading of ‘events’, we had better not hold the narrator too strictly to his word. For of course we must add to our list all those long and frequently absurd and always inconclusive discussions about Mother Russia, Russian and Roman Christianity, love and beauty, the ‘social question’, the ‘woman question’, the present and future standing of the aristocracy, the. … It is far from easy to complete this patently unprepossessing catalogue of the novel’s dramatic data. Are those critics right who charge Dostoevsky with a lack of narrative discipline? Or those others, who see his work smothered in a syrup of sensational spirituality?

§ 6

The novel opens breathlessly, with Prince Lev Nikolaevitch Myshkin’s arrival at St Petersburg Station at the end of a long journey from Switzerland. The Prince’s guilelessness and innocence, his sweet temper and inability to see other people’s motives except in a good light, in brief his other-worldliness, are established before the train has come to a stop; and so is the fact that he was, and perhaps still is, an epileptic. His last two sleepless nights in the third-class compartment are followed by an even more exhausting day, which occupies the whole of part I. (Small wonder that Yevgeni Radomsky, whom Dostoevsky wished to present as the last gentleman of the old style,² suggests caustically at the end of the novel that a good night’s sleep might have saved the Prince a lot of trouble.) Myshkin is twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. Having left Russia as a child, he comes as a complete stranger, yet within a few hours he will be fully involved in an intricate network of relationships.

Almost all the characters of the drama are presented in the course of that first day and the following night, and all the convolutions of plot and ideas will develop from these early encounters. On the train Myshkin meets the ghastly Lebedev, lowly clerk, money-lender and cat’s-paw, the Uriah Heep of the piece, and Parfen Rogozhin, who has just come into a fortune and who will soon see Myshkin as his rival for the love of Nastasia Filipovna, the Mary Magdalen of the story. Myshkin as yet knows nobody, but his ancient family name and its snob appeal (of which he is at first unaware) secure him admission to the family of General Yepanchin, whose wife, Lizaveta Prokofievna, is a distant relation of his. Almost instantly he falls in love with Aglaia, the youngest and most charming of the three Yepanchin girls. From the Yepanchins he moves to other circles, all interrelated, each more questionable in its social standing, intersecting again at Nastasia Filipovna. She is much admired by old General Yepanchin, she is wooed by Gania (Gavrila Ardalionovitch), the General’s impecunious secretary, and for her Rogozhin will stake his all. Gania, who has just unsuccessfully proposed to Aglaia, offers Myshkin lodgings in his family’s flat, where he meets the ‘nihilist’ Ferdishenko, and Gania’s brother, the boy Kolia, who will be Myshkin’s dearest and only friend and who is the hope (if there is a hope) for a better Russia. All these people will in due course move to their residences at Pavlovsk, the summer resort of Petersburg society, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous Lebedev. They will be followed by that Lumpenproletariat of drop-out students and retired sub-lieutenants who call themselves ‘socialists’ and ‘nihilists’, of whom Ferdishenko is one and whom Rogozhin has ‘introduced’ to Myshkin during that first astonishing evening (‘ephemeral, fantastic, unseemly’); and they will accompany Myshkin like a hideous chorus, like a band of marauders, almost to the end. They in turn … but enough has been said to indicate how close are the interconnections between the respectable and the scurrilous, how claustrophobic is the social network in which the Prince is caught up, how substantial is the w...