The Antinomies of Realism

Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781688175
• eBook ISBN: 9781781685020
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism's emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.

PART I

THE ANTINOMIES OF REALISM

Chapter I

The Twin Sources of Realism: The Narrative Impulse

If there is anything distinctive to be discovered about realism, then, we will not find it without somehow distinguishing between realism and narrative in general, or without, at least, mapping some vague general zone of narrative which lies outside it (at the same time including it as well, since the realisms are presumably narratives themselves). Single-shot answers always seem possible: the fantastic, for example, or so-called primitive myth (the very word mythos means narrative); or in some narrower and more literary sense, the epic (insofar as we distinguish it from the novel), or the oral tale, insofar as we distinguish it from the written one.

This is not the solution I want to begin with here, for I am looking for a storytelling impulse that precedes the formation of the realist novel and yet persists within it, albeit transformed by a host of new connections and relationships. I will call the products of this impulse simply the tale, with the intent of emphasizing its structural versatility, its aptness for transformation and exploitation by the other forms just enumerated. The tale can thereby be pressed into service by epic performance fully as much as by tribal and mythic storytelling, by the Renaissance art-novella and its equivalents in the Romantic period, by the ballad, by sub-forms and subgenres like the ghost story or SF, indeed by the very forms and strictures of the short story itself, as a specific strict formal practice in its own right with its own history.

At the level of abstraction at which we are working, then, the tale becomes the generalized object of which narration is the generalized production process or activity, but this generic specification also becomes a convenient way of evading psychological or anthropological analysis of that activity, which would be a distraction in our present context.

Yet we may retain one feature from traditional or modern psychological theories of the faculties and/or functions, in which narrativity might be opposed to cognition for example, or emotion to reason; and that is the requirement that the storytelling function, if we want to call it that, must form part of an opposition, must be defined against something else: otherwise the potentiality we are trying to circumscribe risks extending over the entire field of mental activity, everything becoming narrative, everything becoming a kind of story.¹

So it is that in an influential pronouncement of the 1920s, Ramon Fernandez developed an opposition between the tale and the novel—or rather, to use the more precise and only imperfectly translatable French terms, between the récit and the roman.² It was a distinction that proved useful for several generations of French writers from Gide to Sartre; and that will remain helpful for us here, particularly since the same general opposition has taken somewhat different forms in other national traditions.

In effect, Fernandez organized his distinction around two distinct genres, which may be taken as markers for either historical developments or structural variations. Translators have tried to render “récit” in English with its cognate, the recital, which is suggestive only to the degree to which someone might recite an account or even a chronicle of events. But even the word “tale,” which I prefer here, bears a weight of generic connotation, and can easily crystallize back into historical forms such as the Renaissance novella or the Romantic art-story.

This is the sense in which the active content of Fernandez’ theory lies in the opposition itself and the differentiation it generates. For in itself, the term “novel” is even less structurally operative here than that of the récit: the latter can be more rigorously specified, particularly with the use of those national variants I mentioned. As for the novel itself, however (not to speak of the realist novel which interests us here), very little is to be deduced from Fernandez’ opposition, and writers have tended to fill in their own blank check according to their aesthetic and their ideology.

So it is that Gide, conceiving of the récit as the tale of a unique personal existence or destiny (mostly, for him, a tale told in the first person), is able to draw the conclusion that the novel ought then to be a “carrefour,” a crossroads or meeting place of multiple destinies, multiple récits. The only book of his own that he was willing to call a novel, then, Les faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), offers just such a convergence of a number of different life stories; and it may be agreed that many writers, particularly those specializing in the short story, have thought of the novel in this general way, as a sort of formal Everest to be confronted.

Sartre, on the other hand, has a much more philosophical and ideological conception of this opposition, which he grasps in temporal terms and wields with no little critical and polemic power. Here is his evocation of the Maupassant short story, which he grasps as a kind of bourgeois social institution and translates into a concrete after-dinner situation set in the den of cigar-smoking affluent men:

The procedure is nowhere more manifest than in Maupassant. The structure of his short stories is almost invariable; we are first presented with the audience, a brilliant and worldly society which has assembled in a drawing-room after dinner. It is night-time, which dispels fatigue and passion. The oppressed are asleep, as are the rebellious; the world is enshrouded; the story unfolds. In a bubble of light surrounded by nothing there remains this élite which stays awake, completely occupied with its ceremonies. If there are intrigues or love or hate among its members, we are not told of them, and desire and anger are likewise stilled; these men and women are occupied in preserving their culture and manners and in recognizing each other by the rites of politeness. They represent order in its most exquisite form; the calm of night, the silence of the passions, everything concurs in symbolizing the stable bourgeoisie of the end of the century which thinks that nothing more will happen and which believes in the eternity of capitalist organization. Thereupon, the narrator is introduced. He is a middle-aged man who has “seen much, read much, and retained much,” a professional man of experience, a doctor, a military man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the time of life when, according to a respectful and comfortable myth, man is freed from the passions and considers with an indulgent clear-sightedness those he has experienced. His heart is calm, like the night. He tells his story with detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it.³

Gide practiced both “genres”; Sartre has nothing but contempt for the kind of anecdote which forms the structural core of the récit and which he associates with the oppressive cult of “experience” wielded by the older generation over the younger (see La nausée). But it is precisely that judgement that allows him to formulate what the novel ought to be—the authentic, existential novel—in temporal terms.

The time of the récit is then a time of the preterite, of events completed, over and done with, events that have entered history once and for all. It will be clear enough what a philosophy of freedom must object to in such an inauthentic and reified temporality: it necessarily blocks out the freshness of the event happening, along with the agony of decision of its protagonists. It omits, in other words, the present of time and turns the future into a “dead future” (what this or that character anticipated in 1651 or in 1943). Clearly enough, then, what Sartre calls upon the novel to reestablish is the open present of freedom, the present of an open, undecided future, where the die has not yet been cast, to use one of his favorite expressions. The aesthetic of the existential novel will then bend its narrative instruments to the recreation of this open present, in which not even the past is set in stone, insofar as our acts in the present rewrite and modify it.

We will not fully appreciate the force of this conception of the novel until we recall the devastating critique of François Mauriac’s novels, with their sense of impending doom, their melodramatic rhetorical gestures (“this fatal gesture,” “she was not then to know,” “this encounter, in retrospect so full of consequences,” etc.), their built-in predictable mechanisms of sin and judgement. All this, Sartre tells us, is narrated from above, with a God-like omniscience of past and future alike. “Dieu n’est pas bon romancier,” he concludes, “M. Mauriac non plus.”⁴

But just as surely, even though more subtly, the Sartrean recipe for the novel is shaped and determined, preselected, by its own historical content: the time of the momentous decision and the impending Event, the effacement of everyday life and the iteratives of peacetime, the pressure of what he called extreme situations. The Sartrean taboo on foreknowledge will be replicated in a somewhat different way by the Jamesian ideology of point of view, and both will be appropriated, as we shall see, for far more inauthentic purposes after the end of realism as such, in what I will call a more commercial realism after realism.

What we can retain of the Sartrean perspective on the récit, however, is its insistence on irrevocability, on which a somewhat different light is shed by the German tradition, relatively poor in novels as it may be, but extraordinarily rich in storytelling of all kinds, particularly in the Romantic era. We have, for example, Goethe’s memorable encapsulation of the content of storytelling as an “unerhörte Begebenheit”⁵—an unheard-of event or conjuncture, one thereby itself memorable and worthy of retelling over and over again, and of being passed down in the family and even the community: the time of the single lightning bolt that killed three people at once, the time of the great flood, of the invasion of the barbarians, the time Lizzie Borden took an axe, and so forth. It is then this time of the memorable event, of the traditional tale or story, that Walter Benjamin memorialized in his great essay “The Storyteller” (on Leskov).

Indeed, Benjamin makes it clear what so many examples of the “unerhörte Begebenheit” have in common: namely death. “Warming your hands on a death that is told” is the way he characterizes the récit⁶; and if we feel that this is too bleak, we may substitute for death simply the mark of the irrevocable. This irrevocability adds a new dimension to Sartre’s critique of the inauthenticity of the récit: the temporal past is now redefined in terms of what cannot be changed, what lies beyond the reach of repetition or rectification, which now comes to be seen as the time of everyday life or of routine. The irrevocable then comes to stand as a mark of one specific temporality which is separated off from another kind; and Goethe’s definition may then be reread to designate, not strangeness or uniqueness, but precisely this shock of a marked time brutally differentiating itself from ordinary existence.

It should be added that for Benjamin, this ordinary existence is itself grasped as collective and historical, as the time of peasants or of the village, in which, as opposed to the great industrial metropolis of a later date, the tale as such flourishes.⁷ Indeed, we may further point out that for Benjamin, the opposite number of the tale or récit is not the realistic novel at all: it is the dissolution of the memorable and the narratable in Baudelaire’s modernism, or the technological and political recuperation of Baudelaire’s fragments in Eisensteinian montage, in the so-called reproducible work of art.⁸

Meanwhile, in a paradoxical turn-about, this new notion of the irrevocable mark as the very basis of the récit is also susceptible of a Sartrean authenticity very different from the bourgeois inauthenticity of the Maupassant smoking den. Indeed, the irrevocable also comes in Sartre to define the heroic, the freely chosen act, one that marks you forever and from which there is no turning back: the act one drags about with one like a ball and chain (again a Sartrean figure). It is then the recoiling in horror before such a choice that is inauthentic; and we may draw on Peer Gynt for a comic example. For when Peer is welcomed into the kingdom of the trolls, he is promised everything: the troll king’s daughter, riches beyond price, a life of leisure and pleasure, the succession to the throne—and all this, the king assures him, on the most minimal condition, namely, that you let yourself—painlessly, to be sure—undergo hideous defacement as a pledge of solidarity with us and a guarantee that you will never seek to return to the world of ordinary humans. Peer draws the line at that kind of guarantee, that mark of irrevocability, preferring to keep his options open and his “Sartrean freedom” untouched by any such binding commitments.⁹

We may thus grasp the lightning bolt of the récit as the marking of a body and the transformation of an individual into a character with a unique destiny, a “life sore,” as one American novelist puts it, something given to you uniquely to bear and to suffer¹⁰: something “je mein eigenes,” as Heidegger described individual death. This brings our account of the récit or the tale a little closer to the destinies once offered in spectacle by tragedy as a form. In modern times, however, such destinies at best mark a character as one of Todorov’s “hommesrécits,” the Thousand-and-One-Nights characters who are their own stories,¹¹ at the high tide of the récit as a form; while at worst, in yet more modern times, they are taken to be little more than bad luck. Still, I will retain the category o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Realism and its Antinomies
• Part One: The Antinomies of Realism
• Part Two: The Logic of the Material