Last autumn on Artless we met an experimental poet who called literary realism “the language of fascism.” This to me was yet another iteration of a disdain for realism I’ve come across ever since taking a serious interest in art. Although the Franzens and Woods of the world do behave like sore winners about the precedence among their fellow literati of realist art over experimental (whatever that is), there are few trendier crowds you could move in where you’d lose any cred dunking on realism.
This crowd-think is a sort of aesthetic bigotry, ‘informed’ as much as others by ignorance and stereotyping. And the stereotypes of realism aren’t so much generalisations as not even wrong. So before we define what realism really is, let’s make like a theologian and define it apophatically: by what it’s not.
1. Realism is not a genre
Fans of fantasy, romance, horror and other genres of narrative art like to remind you, in a tit-for-perceived-tat way, that realism is ‘just another genre’. If so, what are its identifying conventions?
That it depicts only what’s possible and steers away from the improbable. That it tends towards family minutiae, usually in a middle class setting, hence the snarks for literary realism each side of the pond like ‘the Hampstead novel’ or ‘the MFA novel’. That it values psychology and character at the cost of story, or, for the avant-garde artist, at the cost of originality of language or expression.
But say you surveyed all realist art of the past hundred years and showed most concerned itself with mundane middle class family psychology. That still wouldn’t tell you anything definitive about the meaning of realist art, no more than the current global popularity of Western-style clothes proves that clothes mean jeans, skirts and t-shirts. Trends within art-forms aren’t definitions, they’re temporary, contingent, while definitions are necessary conditions.1
And does any genre have those? What must every science fiction story contain to count as one? Can you get a Western without horses? Or take Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy: is it a romance or spy novel? Too many exceptions disprove the rule.
At best, genre serves as a conversational short-hand for tagging which other artworks a given one has a family resemblance to. Any deeper criticism gets muddied by genre chitchat. (And there’s little more inane than arguing over which genre an artwork belongs or, as is more often the case, doesn’t belong to.) So when the usual genres aren’t worth the label, why tar realism with the same bristle-bare brush?2
2. Realism is not an artwork’s content being probable or possible
What if we flip the above stereotype that realism is just another genre and try defining it as all that’s not genre? So: no formulae, archetypes, conventions, no conceptual buy-in or suspension of disbelief. Just ordinary people in ordinary situations in the real world, ‘ordinary’ here meaning probable and ‘real’ meaning possible. (And there are droves of readers and viewers and reviewers who shrug off why they never bother with the typical genres along these lines: ‘Nah that couldn’t happen though.’)
Except now we run into another snag. What could probable mean when it comes to something made-up? That if what’s depicted were to happen in the real world (i.e. if it wasn’t art) it’d be likely to have happened? Do we have to be actuaries to tell what is and isn’t realist art? And what’s the percentage cut-off that separates the credulity-stretching melodramatic genre stuff on the one side and on the other side ‘sober reality’? (Is non-realist art drunk?)
At any rate how could ‘reality’ be any sort of yardstick seeing as it encompasses all improbabilities? As Dostoevsky wrote, “Nothing is more fantastic than reality itself.” And even if an artist in choosing their content always stuck to the median, always refrained from using any of that ‘stranger than fiction’ material either side, they’d still have chosen their content for being anomalous if only by a nose. Or else what would’ve been the point of making art about it? Why would it have caught their imagination, be deemed worth an audience’s time?
A truism of art: nothing is average or ordinary depending on how you put it.
OK look, you say, we don’t have to assess the ordinariness of every character and situation in an artwork or the probability of every incident were it to happen in the real world to know what we mean, in the vernacular sense, when we call an artwork realist. What it means is that, whether an artwork is about the everyday or the out-of-the-ordinary, its content has stayed within the bounds of the possible. Because surely an artwork has to be realist that portrays nothing impossible, whether that’s logically - no doubled characters, no meta self-awareness - or scientifically - no starships filling space with faster-than-light travel or pewpewpews.
By this standard, Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine would qualify as realist novels. Yet the former uses the word ‘Now’ to overlay present moment on moment of a narrator surveilling his wife without obvious causal relation between each; while the latter dilates an office worker’s lunch-break to 100 pages plus; and both novels pay a pedantically close attention to the geometry of space and sense perception.3 As such, does either read as remotely ‘realist’ when taken to mean portraying the ordinary experience of the everyday world? If anything it’s like their authors took up the ironic challenge Camus wrote of in The Rebel:
The realistic artist ought, if he is to be logical, to use several volumes to describe characters and settings, still without managing to exhaust all the details. Realism is indefinite enumeration.
With their indefinite enumerations Jealousy and The Mezzanine are like realism taken too seriously, to the point of parody. (‘Think your novel’s realist? Then where’s all the optics of light and shadow in its scene descriptions???’) Yet in neither novel was any law of science or fourth wall broken; there’s no content in either that’d make a dull reader think, ‘Yeah right.’
So: an artwork can depict only the probable and possible in ways that wouldn’t strike us as realist. But at the same time, an artwork’s content being improbable or even impossible in the real world doesn’t inherently bar it from being realist either—as counterintuitive as that might sound…
If content had been the deciding factor, then two artworks with the same impossible content would be as non-realist as each other. Now time travel remains scientifically impossible in the real word whether it’s portrayed in the cerebral indie film Primer or Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me.4 Our hunch though - and it’s not a bad one - is that there’s something about the heaviness or lightness with which each film handles time travel that makes them different.
Mind you, neither film goes into the science of its time travel: Primer palms it away by having its engineers invent it by accident; while in Austin Powers the character Basil Exposition tells a paradox-flummoxed Austin that he, and the audience, shouldn’t worry about it and just enjoy the ride. Yet giving your audience an albeit cockamamie explanation for how time travel functions wouldn’t necessarily make your story more realist either. In Back to the Future Doc Brown ‘explains’ time travel mainly so the film can set up its climax, and as a nod too from the filmmakers to the harebrained plans of mad scientists in B-movies. Whereas in Primer the engineers’ very lack of explanation, combined with their struggles (and ours) to untangle their timelines, better dramatises the daunting complexity we assume would attend any Actually Existing Time Travel.
There’s one avenue left if you still insist on marking the boundaries of realist art along content lines. You could side with the fans and creators of ‘hard’ science fiction: for them it’s actually an extension of realism to make artworks about what’s possible in theory if not extant in the real world yet, what’s been credibly extrapolated from the current science.5 And even the farther-fetched conceits of soft science fiction are still meant to be, within the world of each particular story, grounded in science and not magic. (A professor has to invent Flubber, it wasn’t granted him by a fairy.)
Can’t we at least, then, give non-realism jurisdiction over art with magic in it, mythological characters and creatures, the pure make-believe—that is, over fantasy? I mean it’s not like you could call a book about wights and wizards and dragons realist. Could you?
Since you get all these things and more in both the Middle-earth books and A Song of Ice and Fire, it’d be instructive to find somebody who’s ignorant of either series and get them to read them in chronological order. Would they think all George R R Martin had done was redo J R R Tolkien but with added sex and violence? Or would they notice a qualitative difference in the text and their reading experience, even conclude that Martin had in fact written in counterpoint to Tolkien’s earlier, fairytale- or legend-like story, retelling it (after a fashion) as a warts-and-all history? That is telling it in more realist ways.6
Well what about those narrative artworks somewhere in between the hardest, realist-aspirational science fiction on the one hand and pure fantasy on the other, those that aren’t usually about the impossible but often are about the improbable: action films, spy thrillers, romances? Their characters and situations have to straddle the forward-slash of im/plausibility at just the right angle to be out-of-the-ordinary enough to compel our attention (‘no way!) and at the same time remain persuasive enough (‘I suppose that could happen’). At one level of remove however, when you compare their characters and situations to the audience’s everyday experience, these works still contain a higher-than-average density of incidence and coincidence, of good and bad luck. Does that mean they’re non-realist? Or are they realist because they don’t have any dragons or UFOs? We can’t ever seem to have confidence in content as the deciding factor.
But what else might be it?
Merging action, spy and romance are the Bond films and books. All more or less have punches that would’ve floored a horse, tiny gadgets with massive effects, chill maintained no matter how harshly Bond’s advances get rebuffed. Even so, the Daniel Craig-debuting Casino Royale presented all this in quite a different way to Roger Moore’s Octopussy. Now we might chuck around crit-speak terms here like ‘verisimilitude’, or ‘gritty’ versus ‘camp’, but they do hint at a better conception of realism: that it’s not a what but a how. Nevertheless, and unfortunately for us…
3. Realism is not an artwork having a realistic style
Dropping the false lead of content, we might change tack towards style and try defining realism as the realistic. (Realist art has to be that—it’s right there, two letters away!) ‘Realistic’ here no longer means anything to do with how probable what’s depicted by an artwork is, whether or not it’d be possible in the real world, but the style that it’s presented in: less theatrical, more documentarian; less heightened, more naturalistic.
Take, for example, Doctor Who and The Expanse: both are shows with science fiction content but, in theory, the former with its rough-and-ready special effects and panto performances depicts it ‘unrealistically’ while the latter with its slow space travel and slower space politics does so ‘realistically’. (Back on terra firma, while a kitchen-sink drama and TV soap might share the same mundane, ‘perfectly possible’ content they manifestly depart from each other in style.) So maybe rather than a content binary, realism is a stylistic spectrum - grittier or more naturalistic or lifelike at the one end, camper or more theatrical or less lifelike at the other. We could even borrow from science fiction and call works of any genre and none ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ depending on how lifelike their style is.
But what could such a style consist of? How does an artist form their artwork to make it like life?
One way might be to get the sensory details right. It’s a note you get from editors across all forms and genres of narrative art. Whether an artwork’s set in historical Venice or future Venus, it has to earn our attention by capturing the look, sound, smell, taste and feel of life.7
The other note you get is to do with characters being psychologically realistic. They must feel, act and react in ways the reader or audience expects. And anything unexpected nevertheless must happen within a recognisable frame - passionate outbursts, irrational decisions, psychotic breakdowns - or risk losing our assent, whether the characters having those outbursts or making those decisions are humans or gods or anthropomorphic animals.
A subtler note might be to do with characters being socially realistic. This was Joyce’s achievement with A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. What academics call those novels’ ‘vernacular modernism’ or ‘poetics of dialogue’ we might call their ear for how people really talk. Better than any author before, Joyce got down into words what linguists call ‘conversational under-determinancy’: the way in which real-life conversations are rarely ever to-the-point or free from redundancies and repetition, or easy for to follow like they tend to be in most plays and films and books. (Try observing while unobserved a conversation and write down every word and gap of it. Notice how garbled it looks on the page.) In fact, so defamiliarising was Joyce’s dialogue compared to other literature of the time that it read at first as obtusely avant-garde. Nowadays we appreciate his was the more lifelike. And you can extend his sort of attentive literary technique from conversation to any social behaviour.
Finally there’s getting the phenomenological details right. Beyond the sensory, psychological and social, there are mor textures to life an artist can choose and manage to render faithfully or not. Part of Tolstoy’s achievement in War and Peace and Anna Karenina was to set the narrative pace to the pace of his characters’ lives: within a given scene the novels seem to pass in real-time. At the other end of the clock is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence which in the last chapter applies the KPF or Kundera Pace Formula to poignantly depict, in a short space of book, the acceleration of aging, especially of a life squandered as was the protagonist’s.
In theory, then, realist artworks are those which, once you’ve controlled for their central made-up conceit (ranging from the most verité to the most fantastical) otherwise hew as close to life as possible in other aspects: the sensory, psychological, social, phenomenological. (“Grant that the moon is made of cheese,” as Julie Maxwell wrote, “and all else follows.”) No artwork can incorporate every aspect of life; an artwork doesn’t have to be as comprehensive as real life to be lifelike; neither does it have to somehow average out real life. Rather that, whatever aspects of life are in it, they’ve been captured accurately thanks to the style and technique of the artist; the artwork’s been formed with such attention to detail and internal consistency that it seems to borrow from life some of life’s integrity and depth and substance.
But that’s the whole damn problem—for realism’s critics.
For them, the lifelike detail in whichever category above is more a tic or giveaway or calling card. In his essay ‘The Reality Effect’ Barthes asked why Flaubert put a barometer over a piano in a scene description in his novella A Simple Heart. For Barthes this detail wasn’t observant writing technique to make the novella more lifelike so much as an announcement, a ‘denotation’ in his words, that the work we’re reading was a realist one. Expanding on Barthes, we might say that any experiential accuracy - sensory, psychological, behavioural, phenomenological - that an artist puts in their work functions as just this sort of denotation.
You find Barthes’ criticism in the carps still made against realism’s supposed obsession with minutiae, its exaggeration of drab detail. Zadie Smith, in her rattled account of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder as two paths for the novel, wrote about verisimilitude in terms similar to Barthes’ ‘denotation’. To paraphrase: when you read in a novel about a cyclist seen from a train window - one foot on the pedal, one on the ground - you do so not because cyclists are often seen from trains like that in real life but primarily so the reader feels: ah, now this is realism! (In other words, realism is a kind of mannerism, a social signification of belonging to a literary school.)
Whether you subscribe to the importance of lifelike detailing for a realist artist to achieve their aesthetic ends, or, like Barthes and Smith, you think such detailing - barometers and all - is really there to denote what’s conventionally agreed to be realism, you’re still depending on style as realism’s measure. But it’s another false lead.
Because in the same way you can get lifelike details and a realistic style in artworks of whatever content, factual or fantastical, so too can you get them mixed in among fanciful details and an artificial style within the same artwork.
Consider three writers often drafted in to the cause of (or arraigned in the dock for) 19th Century realist literature. One of my favourite fine-grain details is a line in War and Peace (as translated by Anthony Briggs):
he said at once but without haste.
At the risk of us thinking he’d written a contradiction-in-terms, Tolstoy had in fact captured (to a pedantic Robbe-Grillet / Nicholson Baker extent) - a trivial but intricate detail of life: the way a person can speak immediately and slowly at the same time. Yet this is the author Rebecca West called - and even with War and Peace it’s hard to disagree - not a paragon of realism but “fully as sentimental a writer as Charlotte Brontë… [one who] pushes his characters about with the greatest conceivable brusqueness in order to prove his thesis.”
Second, consider a similar sentence from Dickens in Little Dorrit:
‘And, now, Minne Gowan,’ at length, said Clennam, smiling; ‘will you ask me nothing?’
We might think that ‘at length’ is more naturalistic precision-detailing of how people really speak. But it’s actually quite a contrived and literary trick (‘literary’ in the positive sense that we say a film is ‘cinematic’). David Trotter explains:
The ‘at length’ is syntactically premature and yet in narrative terms belated, since the delay it refers to in fact took place before Clennam began to speak. An aftershock ripples through the rejoinder’s stately stoicism (‘“And now, Minnie Gowan…’). Clennam has always known both that [his unrequited love] Minnie would be certain to ask of him the hardest think she possibly could—to effect a reconciliation between her father and [her husband] Gowan—and that his self-respect depends on her asking it. He badly wants to have to oblige her, at his own expense. His ability to deceive himself strikes us as at once abject and strangely uplifting. The abjectness lies in the silence, in our only getting to hear about that silence after the point of no return, when he is already fully committed to doing what he least wants to do. The sentence has given us the shape of awkward emotional experiences. (From an essay on The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist for the London Review of Books)
Third, Flaubert again. In his stories and novels he put in to practice a thorough and exact style (the ‘mot juste’ etc). But as much as the textual weft of Madame Bovary is lifelike, its characters and story and overall aesthetic are intentionally fabulist. Nabokov has a great bit on this in his lectures on the novel, taking to task those critics who’ve vaunted it over the years for being a ‘landmark of realism’ by breaking down (with approval) all its unrealistic details:
A novel in which a young and healthy husband night after night never wakes to find the better half of his bed empty; never hears the sand and pebbles thrown at the shutters by a lover; never receives an anonymous letter from some local busybody;
A novel in which the biggest busybody of them all, Homais—Monsieur Homais, whom we might have expected to have kept a statistical eye upon all the cuckolds of his beloved Yonville, actually never notices, never learns anything about Emma’s affairs;
A novel in which little Justin—a nervous young boy of fourteen who faints at the sight of blood and smashes crockery out of sheer nervousness—should go to weep in the dead of night (where?) in a cemetery on the grave of a woman whose ghost might come to reproach him for not having refused to give her the key to death;
A novel in which a young woman who has not been riding for several years—if indeed she ever did ride when she lived on her father’s farm—now gallops away to the woods with perfect poise, and never feels any stiffness in the joints afterwards;
A novel in which many other implausible details abound—such as the very implausible naïveté of a certain cabdriver—such a novel has been called a landmark of so-called realism, whatever that is.
In point of fact, all fiction is fiction. All art is deception. Flaubert’s world, as all worlds of major writers, is a world of fancy with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences. The curious impossibilities I have listed do not clash with the pattern of the book—and indeed are only discovered by dull college professors or bright students. And you will bear in mind that all the fairy tales we have lovingly examined after Mansfield Park are loosely fitted by their authors into certain historical frames. All reality is comparative reality since any given reality, the window you see, the smells you perceive, the sounds you hear, are not only dependent on a crude give-and-take of the senses but also depend upon various levels of information. Flaubert may have seemed realistic or naturalistic a hundred years ago to readers brought up on the writings of those sentimental ladies and gentlemen that Emma [Bovary] admired. But realism, naturalism, are only comparative notions. What a given generation feels as naturalism in a writer seems to an older generation to be exaggeration of drab detail, and to a younger generation not enough drab detail. The isms go; the ist dies; art remains.
To return to Barthes, why did Flaubert in his other story put that barometer over the piano if it wasn’t to promote his own ism or ist, to reassure his readers they were getting the Realism Experience? I think it was more to do with that most un-naturalistic and artful of elements: meaning.8
Had Flaubert described the room in his novel with only a piano, the piano would’ve been foregrounded, seemed more prominent than intended - a room, a piano, that’s it: like a stage-set for a Beckett play. By putting a barometer over the piano he balanced the mental picture, avoided by its absence any unintended overemphasis on the piano’s significance. The barometer itself had no meaning in and of itself (or a minor shade of meaning that a writer of Flaubert’s meticulousness would’ve been remiss to neglect); rather, its meaning, its point was compositional, structural, was generated by its relationship to the other elements of the scene.
What the case of the barometer shows is that, in the same way content can’t guarantee which artworks are and aren’t realist, neither is there such a thing as an intrinsically realist style.9 One artist details their scene with barometers to paint a recognisable picture, another as a symbol, another to tamp down symbolism. Because all style is relational and unsystemisable. Each artwork has to be read on its own terms.
And that’s the case even when an artwork’s doing the opposite of a Barthes-style, covert denotation but seems to give us no choice than to believe: ‘This isn’t real, it’s artificial—it’s only art!’ For since there’s no such thing as an inherently realist style, there’s no such thing as an inherently non-realist style either, as we’ll find out in the next part.
Seeing as this newsletter’s M.O. is to defend art as embodied intention, to call me a prescriptivist here wouldn’t be to catch me out. You’re knocking on an open door.
Part of the problem is genres tend to be that most mercenary of categories: marketing ones. Really they’re labels for the sellers of art to shelve products for consumer convenience.
This concept of chosisme came out of French, ‘anti-novel’ discourse, which ought to further underline how far from contemporaneous realist novels these ones were.
OK, time travel into the past then.
Their allies in publishing are those who gave SF its modern, ashamed rebrand of ‘speculative fiction’. Their counterparts in LF are the likes of Clarice Lispector who regard their writing not as fantastical but an account of a “more delicate difficult reality.”
And yet no one talks of hard and soft fantasy. One explanation is all those authors who shove any old fantastical element into their story to announce how they definitely don’t belong to any realist tradition (if only they knew!). That is, they treat content as a tag of genre-belonging then go on to write in ways any realist author would.
This generic word, ‘capturing’, encompasses both the recognition that a journeyman artist achieves - re-presenting to their audience the world they already believe in - and the actual seeing that a true artist achieves, revealing to their audience how the world actually is beyond received wisdom or what we might call ‘received perception’. (To put this classic formalist principle in stand-up comedy terms, recognition is ‘Don’t you hate it when…?’ while seeing is ‘Isn’t it weird how…?’)
Not even a photorealistic painting is unequivocally realist in motive or effect. Have you ever actually looked at one of those deeply, deeply uncanny works? Their technicolour palette, their wall-eyed omni-focus, their nauseating fractal details make them far more hallucinatory paintings than was ever made by a surrealist.