The last stereotypes of realism
Plato takes the fight to Dawson's Creek
We all know of the degenerate-art-burner and his lifeless watercolours. But did you know that Plato - the man who warned of the dangers of poetry, who’d bar poets from his Republic, who thought it silly audiences sympathise with actors on stage they’d be ashamed to act like in real life - once fancied himself a poet only to be put off by the inimitable greatness of Homer’s verse?1
That sore spirit lives on in our last two stereotypes of artistic realism. In the previous post we learnt realism is not a lack of obvious technique, as though its opposite were ‘artificialism’: artworks that noisily announce their contrivance (that fart for art’s sake). But we also learnt this didn’t make realism the opposite of honest raw pulp. The same seesawing relationship links the last stereotypes: an accusation that realism isn’t even good at being real in the first place but is one of the phoneyest modes of making art, and a flummoxed contempt for realism’s copy-of-a-copy pointlessness. And yet…
6. Realism is not a redundant reproduction of reality
Say realist art were nothing but an attempt to ‘capture’ or ‘replicate’ reality, to ‘accurately’, ‘truthfully’ or ‘objectively’ depict it. Say, in the words of Eugène Véron, a realist artist:
were really able to reduce himself to the condition of a copying machine; if he could go so far as to efface and suppress himself as to confine his work to the servile reproduction of all the features and details of an object or event passing before his eyes: the only value his work would possess would be that of a more or less exact procès verbal [minutes-taking], and it would perforce remain inferior to reality.2
In other words we already have reality so what’s the gain in artists straining to reproduce it? Particularly when even their best work can only ever be partial, in both senses of the word. Or: “If you want realism, look out the window!” as suggested by that champion of non-realism, Dawson from Dawson’s Creek.
The elided flaw in his argument is that no artist, no person - none but mystics in a few precious moments - experiences most reality the first time round. Take that famous passage from Tolstoy’s diary:
This morning I thought of something which seemed to me important, namely:
1) I wiped away the dust in my room and walking around, came to the divan and could not remember whether I had dusted it or not. Just because these movements are customary and unconscious I could not remember them and I felt that it was impossible to. So that if I dusted and forgot it, i.e., if I did an act unconsciously, then it is just the same as if it never existed. If someone conscious saw it, then perhaps it could be restored. But if no one saw it, or saw it unconsciously, if the whole complex life of many people pass along unconsciously, then that life is as if it had never existed.
Though as I’ve quoted him Tolstoy writes about forgetting, his insight is into our default experiential purblindness: our unconsciousness of the most of life (not least of reproductions of it). A famous quoter of this quote was the Russian critic Viktor Shklovky who used it to elucidate what he felt was art’s purpose: getting us to break out of what we just automatically if not blankly remember so that we might really see, might recognise for the first time the “stoniness of the stone” and so on. A sort of being-in-the-world through art-making and -appreciating.
If we admit Tolstoy is right (and how can’t we?) then when critics of realist art call it redundantly accurate or inferiorly not, we might demur along the lines of a dry Edmund Burke that “all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human figure to enable them to judge properly of an imitation of it.”3 Like who are we to judge, with our unconsciousness, our ignorance, our perceptual limits and cognitive biases and emotional colourings and psychological defences and ideological filters, what art has departed from or hewn close to which aspect of reality?
Both criticism and defence share an assumption however: that there is a reality.
No forget holograms and simulations and other solipsist pinings; what I mean, in a weak sense, is that art and reality share too thin a Venn overlap. Unlike art, reality has no shape or design or end or purpose or point.4 Take back your well-duh—the stronger sense is that, whether you’re a realist trying to be faithful to it or an anti-realist decrying the attempt, both assume there’s this thing called reality which is in some way unitary, discreet, satisfactorily definable across space, time, for all people, against which we can gauge realist or non-realist art. When there is no such thing as described, no such thing as the ‘Life’ in lifelike. And this is a problem of reality’s being as much as a problem of how we come to know it. Because what we think of as “reality” - as I’m gonna start Dr.Evilly putting in scare-quotes - is made up of clines.
“Don’t talk to me about your hideous reality! What does it mean—reality?”
Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert
Consider something you’re meant to know like the back of your hand: the back of your hand. Who experiences its reality most fully? You, Joe Bloggs looking at it? Or the manicurist you visit every week? Neither of you have the expertise and sensibility of an orthopaedic hand surgeon. Who has less than the world’s greatest anatomist and physiologist. Then how about an applied physicist who understands its matter and motion? But what about your spouse who’s petted your hand every day for fifty years? Because the experience of a thing isn’t on the one linear scale, with higher definition detail this way and lower definition that. The axes are multiple and multidirectional, or what geologists call quaquaversal. And these clines - these continua with infinite gradations - must interact with one another and with you and with history. And they’re relative too: in some ways you do know the back of your hand better than a doctor or scientist since it’s your hand. (And maybe Dürer drawing it would see in it something none of the above would.) There’s likely no end to the parameters, and no end to each parameter’s scale—no limit to the richer detail with which someone could know the back of your hand. Yet despite all this there’s apparently still a “reality” we all experience more or less in common which realist artists can reproduce and their critics cite to justify their claims of redundancy!
If each person’s experience of these clines is in fact always relative, a matter of degree and fitfully conscious then there’s a way in which realist art might be realer than our otherwise commonsensical acquaintance with “reality”. (It’s not purely a delusion of grandeur when artists believe this.) As Joseph Conrad wrote in his Personal Record:
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
The critic Guy Davenport went further. In praising the poet Marianne Moore he wrote:
[s]he describes with an accuracy that is literal about the imagination only, but manages to make us see a jerboa more sharply than Disney’s camera, a National Geographic article, or even our seeing one in a zoo.5
Art is not only clearer than documentary but sharper than our perceptions, not a parroting of reality but the best way to experience it the first time.6 Davenport went further still when describing the M.O. of another poet, Charles Olson. Contrary to the likes of Barthes for whom realism, as we read in our first post, is a kind of inane, even insecure collecting, cataloguing and furnishing of an artwork with stabilising real-life details, the point of art is knowledge, knowledge as:
a compassionate acquisition, an act of faith and sympathy. [Olson] meant primarily that knowledge is a harvest of attention, and he fumed in great rages that the hucksters prey on our attention like a plague of ticks. [This was written in the 1970s by the way; how would he feel about all the new tiks and toks?]
So, art is anti-bamboozling at least - not distracting fakery - and in the main is knowledge-building, close to a science. And at most, Davenport claimed when writing about a third poet, Ronald Johnson, it’s miraculously productive rather than merely reproductive:
True imagination makes up nothing; it is a way of seeing the world… This seeing where there is nothing to see, guided by mere words, is still the most astounding achievement of the human mind.7
Remember, Coleridge had never seen the sea before he wrote ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. It’s like when Grace Paley had the narrator of her short story ‘The Long-Distance Runner’ explain her own writerly motive: “I felt a strong obligation as though remembering was in charge of the existence of the past.” Or when Borges said that reading a poem didn’t make us remember second-hand a beauty we already knew, but instantiated beauty first-hand, like how the taste of an apple is instantiated only by someone eating it.
This exalted concept of art is worse blasphemy than artists insulting God by daring to ape with their crude mock-ups the divine creation (and, to add insult to insult, luring people into venerating those mock-ups in divinity’s place). For by this concept, art doesn’t just restore some of that unconscious majority of life Tolstoy missed or have a special part to play in a more accurate perception but in the fuller coming into being of “reality”—art its apotheosis. (Sucks for Plato, the mimic making the form…)
Which concept, with respect to clines, we’d also have to amend. Since the concept of “reality” itself is meaningless then artists, realist or otherwise, can’t and don’t reproduce or even restore it. When Samuel Johnson wrote in his Preface to Shakespeare that “Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for reality, but because they bring realities to mind” he meant that mimetic art connotes rather than denotes, evokes rather than conflates. I like to think bringing realities to mind can also be read like Davenport read Ronald Johnson: great artist don’t replicate reality, they create realities, even if all creation is inevitably recreation (I suppose in the vernacular as well as literal sense of the word: they have fun with it!). True imagination makes up nothing—and everything.
7. Realism is not ‘so-called realism’
The Platonist beef with the gimcrack mimicry of art (worse! with art poorly mimicking “reality” that already poorly mimics the true Forms) leads to another, and ongoing, beef: the galling gap between realism’s pretensions and Actually-Existing-Realism.
This, our last stereotype, is the subtlest, because, like the first, that realism is just another genre, it incorporates the fact of the contrived nature of all art. Call them betraying contrivances or genre conventions, either way they void realism’s grand supposed aim to accurately or truthfully depict “reality.”
In realist dramas how come trains always arrive at the platform just as the characters do? Why aren’t realist historical novels written in the strange, alienating idiolects of the time they’re claiming to depict? If a period film is meant to be set in the well-researched Medieval past where’s all the burred hair and waxy teeth? Remember in our first post how Nabokov listed the far-fetched moments in Madame Bovary but only to defend his fabulist Flaubert from getting co-opted by the realists? The critics of ‘so-called realism’ are the inverse of that. For them realism is never realist enough. It fails in its one po-faced mission.
Adolescence is usually when we start to spot art’s coincidences and conveniences and find them phoney. (Most of us smarten out of this, some never do.) Every art-form with realist pretensions goes through a parallel growth-phase. Hollywood dramas were found more and more to be melodramas, with too-large-for-life characters, all bad language and fucking and shitting elided, the villains never winning and other Church-approved outcomes. This supposedly unacknowledged phoniness is in part what rouses independent and art filmmaking (or experimental fiction or punk in music). Studio pictures, literary fiction: that’s not what life is like. This is.
And so the badness of bad realist art isn’t its class-swot obedience to the facts or its piddling imagination at all, but its un-self-awareness at best and hypocrisy at worst. And oh can no one bear the sanctimony of hypocrisy. ‘You actually expect us to believe that’s how things really go?’ Call it an argument from sheesh, from brother please.
It’s not all pique. There’s a healthy pleasure in spotting, calling out and correcting phoniness. That pleasure is rarely in art that overcorrects and fulfils realism’s pretensions with some of the “indefinite enumeration” that Camus called for in our first post, albeit ironically (is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles fun?). It’s more often in postmodern art, where you find the same elided conventions and clichés of ‘so-called realism’ presented ironically, or with enough accretion and emphasis that makes it a parody.
One kind of postmodern fiction, the systems novel, reacted to ‘so-called realism’ in one specific aspect: its factual and intellectual paucity. Again this goes back to Plato; in The Republic he withered that “the poet is like a painter who… will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does”; and further (and contra to Olson), “the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates.”
For the systems novelist, the average realist artist who came before was just this kind of (and sometimes wilful) know-nothing: realist art was by definition opposed to, or ignorant of, or had little insight about, all those systems beyond the domestic and psychological that make up and shape our reality: history and myth, natural and market forces, human institutions and physical geography. And to think realist art has ever had any claim on reality when it will only look at it through the narrowest of peepholes! A peephole that its practitioners don’t even admit or realise has its own lenses and filters…
There’s an irony, though, in taking to task ‘so-called realism’ for its paucity of intellectual content, its bad historicity, for the way it omits or flubs the depiction of various textures of life (but what is it really like to discover this cure or lose your virginity or win that war?), for being too serious when life and people aren’t. In short, those galled by the phoniness of ‘so-called realism’ sound like they actually want art to be more realist, as they’d define it.
This reaches an ‘On Exactitude in Science’8 nadir with the Imitative Fallacy. Life is boring so, to be realist, art ought to be boring, life is funny so it ought to be funny, life is everything, so it ought to have everything if it wants to fulfil its grand claim of capturing or reproducing reality.
But as E H Gombrich wrote, “not all things are possible at all times.” A realist artwork doesn’t have to (can’t) be as comprehensive as “reality”. So when a given realist artwork has no jokes this might not be a misapprehension or insufficient depiction of “reality” but a conscious exclusion for the sake of tone. Its shoddy historicity might be down to the artist wanting to depict the contemporary received notion of a historical event rather than the it’s-more-complicated-than-that version that all True Historians know. A realist film montage might not be denying the granular texture of characters’ lived experience but have skipped it so as not to slacken the pace. These aren’t, then, the telling goofs of ‘so-called realism’, they’re the formal choices of art, which, from the surrealest fantasy to the most documentary-like, always has to condense, omit, emphasise, to select; something which “reality”, being everything, doesn’t.
Ignoring the necessity of selection leads to its own phoney idea: that art made in opposition to ‘so-called realism’ will always be more a reflection of the real world. Take that famous scene in Adaptation (which I could only find bowdlerised in the modern style with ADHD editing, illiterate subtitles, and vertically letterboxed):
One last example: the one last job. Isn’t it a little handy that in supposedly realist stories that use said convention all these mad, bad things happen to happen right when the cop or criminal was on his last day or job? But the point of the convention was never to lie about what work or life is really like. It’s about what meaning a capping event or last act gives to what came before. It focusses and dramatises the notion that the point of life is preparing for or giving meaning to its end, the question whether or not our lives will feel justified at the point of death. (And what could be more realistic than the fact that we’re all one day gonna be on our one last job?)
So why spend four posts so far defending realism? It’s not like it needs cultural protection. Yet these seven stereotypes persist. Why they do goes beyond them and their confusions to what art is versus what people want it to be, and to a scorn for realism from people who assume they’re on the side of freedom, plurality and originality when in fact they are - if only they knew - so obliviously conservative they’re, in spirit and effect, enemies of art. (I call this the problem of unearned snobbery, which I’m writing about for an upcoming post.)
More peaceably, these people are missing out, which is a shame. My goal with this list hasn’t been to tear down realism’s critics but try persuade them that if they dropped their ill-founded resistance and refusals, they’d get to enjoy more modes of and examples of good art (without discounting the usual Sturgeon’s Law proportions of crap). And who’d wanna miss out on more good art in this life just because of a few stereotypes?
From The Symposium: “Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them evarlasting glory?”
From Véron’s Æsthetics (English translation by W.H. Armstrong).
From A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
The critic Joseph Addison writing in The Spectator (later collected as ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’) argued that:
If the Products of Nature rise in Value, according as they more or less resemble those of Art, we may be sure that artificial Works receive a greater Advantage from their Resemblance of such as are natural; because here the Similitude is not only pleasant, but the Pattern more perfect.
In other words, Addison believed we value nature the more it seems, like art, to be well designed (even though it’s not and can’t be) and so art that takes as its model this seeming design of nature, and in such a way as seems natural (even though it is artificial and can’t not be) is the best synthesis between art and reality, making realist art the most valuable art…
From The Geography of the Imagination, as are all subsequent Guy Davenport quotes.
Closer readers will notice here I’ve started eliding realism with art. MF! For why I have, wait for the next part in this series.
I’ve inverted the clauses.
A very short story by Borges (here translated by Andrew Hurley):
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Very very interesting.
Great piece Maz.