Two more stereotypes of realism

Breaking the fourth wall - the wall that's in your head

At the start of this list we learnt that artistic realism is not a genre, despite the habit of saying so at the chippier ends of the internet. We then considered whether it’s a matter of what an artwork is about - the real, the fantastical, anything in between - only to learn that realism is not an artwork’s content being probable or possible. This took us to the how, to the way an artwork is about something; but realism is not an artwork having a realistic style either. In the faux-baffled words of Truman Burbank, “Blocked at every turn!” Refamiliarise yourself with the first steps of our confounding journey here:

Three stereotypes of realism

Once we’re purged of error and ignorance, the journey will finally end at the Holy Mountain pictured above: that is, at the conclusion of this series, on what realism really is. Till then, we have two more veils, more stereotypes to get through, sticking with the apophatic approach of the last part. Contrary to popular opinion, both are not realism—both are, in their own way, incoherent…

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4. Realism is not an artwork lacking obvious technique or devices

‘Technique’, I’ll hazard, is the more familiar term, not least because artists get marked down for it. (“Of course I’ve always felt he was essentially a- a technical filmmaker.”) We’re familiar with the term, too, when applied to musicians because it’s seen (or heard) as their competence at playing music if not their skill in it, at best their signature flourish. Since movies, TV, even the stage arts draw so much on technology, we know in critiquing them we ought at least to pay lip-service to technique: staging, blocking, lighting, sound design, editing and so on. When it comes to writers, technique is taken for the most part linguistically - what words does the writer use, how and when? - and sometimes, if you’re lucky, structurally: how do they punctuate, paragraph, set a scene, transition?

A device, though, is more like a solution, and one that can be effected through any technique. Billy Wilder says he was especially proud of the compact-mirror device he came up with for The Apartment. It wasn’t a technique intrinsic to the film medium but a solution to a narrative problem: how to get one character to find out a crucial piece of story information, to arrange a line of cause-and-effect for greatest dramatic impact.¹

Like Wilder’s, lots of devices have impact yet don’t stick out as what they literally are: contrived. Same with technique—it isn’t a lack of it but its unobtrusiveness that we tend to associate with realist art. John Barth reminds us that even the subtlest camera effects or use of music in a film are “essential elements of [its] irreality” (reality doesn’t cut or have a score). I myself am not trying to remind you that actually all art is artificial no matter how unworked-at it seems. Instead, granted you can’t have an intrinsically realist style, I wanna consider whether one of the deciding factors from artwork to artwork might be how subliminal the artist is with their technique and devices, or how self-conscious and obvious.

Take those devices that reference the artwork as being an artwork. When Milan Kundera in his novel Immortality interrupts the story to describe how he went about creating its characters and why, the non-realist motive seems clear. We might generalise from this to conclude all references in an artwork to itself are there to point out it’s contrived, made-up and not a window onto something real.²

But what about when Tolkien does it?

‘I wonder,’ said Frodo. ‘But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.’

Is this The Lord of the Rings referencing itself or not (“you don’t want them to”…)? A meta moment of postmodern self-consciousness right at the start of the fantasy genre or just comprehensively naturalistic world-building? After all, hobbits read tales in the world of their story; naturally they would think of them when they were living out an adventure like the ones that they’d read.

Taking Tolkien’s device further is the comic Providence by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows. A multi-volume tribute to the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the comic alternates its chapters with journal entries from the protagonist, Robert Black (seen above). In his entry that concludes volume 1, Black writes it’s unfair to think of the doomed characters in horror stories as gullible or reckless, for the simple fact that they don’t know they’re in a horror story, like we reading it know. As such, it’s plausible they’d dismiss creepy hints with mundane explanations, like we do in real life. And so what seems reckless for a protagonist and infuriating to us (“Don’t go in there!”) is how we’d behave if we were in their shoes (‘That probably wasn’t really a monster I think I just heard’). Since the supernatural - or, for that matter, atypical levels of threat - aren’t meant to happen, we rationalise them, don’t make a fuss and risk embarrassing ourselves till, in some cases, it’s too late. Just like Black is doing in his journal entries: unaware or in denial that he himself is the doomed character of a horror story.

Is Moore and Burrows’ journal device a meta self-reference, then, or at least a use of dramatic irony? In either case the point could be to remind us the comic isn’t a realist one. Or have they used the device to address a perennial genre gripe - that characters in horror stories act against their own interests - and given us a plausible explanation for it that they then built into the world of their story? Making it not less but more realistic for Robert Black to stroll towards the kind of horrible fate he writes about in his journal entry on horror characters.³

Even in cases where it doesn’t seem like textual self-awareness is being used for the sake of a richer and more precise in-world realism, it still doesn’t have to be inherently non-realist. Laurent Binet’s HHhH is a historical novel about the Operation Anthropoid to assassinate ‘Hitler’s brain’, Reinhard Heydrich. It’s also about Binet’s attempt to write said novel: throughout he keeps referencing what he’s writing or trying to. It’d be easy to scorn this as the old po-mo trick to glibly underline the artificiality of all historical novels. But the way Binet uses the device exposes the even more artificial way that a lot of supposedly realistic historical novels are written. By openly incorporating his struggle to write a novel about real history into his novel, and by not writing it as a straight historical one, he gets closer to real history than a straight historical novel would’ve. Because, as shown by HHhH, the historian and their writing about history are a part of history too.

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When Binet wrote his compositional anxieties into his novel, he addressed the reader. So what about when a character addresses the reader or the audience, what happens to the status of the work when they reference its apparatus?

Ecce theatrum!

The term ‘breaking the fourth wall’ originates from when a stage actor would acknowledge the audience through the invisible wall that’s given to stand in place of the proscenium. Extended to TV and film, it’s when a character acknowledges us watching them, and so, the theory goes, emphasises the fictionality of the artwork rather than collaborating in our make-believe that we’re sneaking a peak onto something real. Famously Annie Hall starts with Alvy Singer telling the camera a couple of jokes; more famously still, he ducks out of a tiff with Annie to complain to the camera about a loudmouth queueing behind them. These moments function as part of the comedy of the film, like a stand-up comic’s monologue, their crowd-work or appeals to the audience, reminding us what we’re watching is a rhetorical performance.

But the way this functions in Annie Hall is still relative to it. In the most famous scene of The Blair Witch Project, when Heather addresses the camera, it works the opposite way. Instead of reminding us this is only a performance, it enhances the conceit that what we’re watching is the last testament of a doomed documentarian via footage found in the woods. It bolsters the fourth wall.

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So, too, voice-over functions relatively. Michael Horden’s in Barry Lyndon is ironic but not self-conscious (he doesn’t acknowledge he’s in a film). The effect is of someone telling you a story as it happened, with what we see on-screen filling in what we don’t necessarily hear narrated but is by implication being conjured by the narration (like images are by a storyteller in the listeners’ minds). Less typical is Francis Urquhart’s voice-over in the UK original of the TV show House of Cards, used not to narrate the story but comment on it (he addresses the camera as well). Though this is more self-conscious than Barry Lyndon, it’s still not there to remind us we’re only watching a TV show, but so Urquhart can take us into his confidence in the manner of a villain’s soliloquy in a Shakespeare play.⁴ Whereas Nic Cage playing Charlie Kaufman in the film Adaptation (written by Charlie Kaufman) uses voice-over to comment on voice-overs in films; at one point his voice-over gets interrupted by screenplay guru Robert McKee lambasting the use of voice-over. Here the undercutting of any pretension to unobtrusively depict reality is more obvious. It’s like David Bordwell stressed in Narration in Fiction Film:

[Filmic] self-consciousness is a matter of degree, not of absolutes (as, say, “first person” and “third person” [in written narratives] are)… Furthermore self-consciousness varies in degree and function within different genres and modes of filmic practice. Groucho Mark’s asides to the audience are more self-conscious than Popeye’s muttered imprecations, but the patriotic voice-over of Capra’s Why We Fight is more self-conscious than either.

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This comparative approach might imply that the stronger an artwork’s self-consciousness, the more often and prominently its technique and devices feature, then the more assuredly we can call the artwork non-realist. Take Gary Shandling’s sitcom ‘The Gary Shandling Show’. Its theme song has Randy Newman singing, 🎵This is the theme to Gary’s show / Gary called me up and asked me to write the theme song🎵. In every episode, Shandling talks to the audience and crew; at one point he says, “You guys cut to the next scene—I’m gonna walk.” The way the show does flashbacks is for Shandling to enter a ‘Flashback Machine’. In one episode he strips naked only for a censor’s black dot to appear just in time: it’s actually a g-string with a black disc on the front.

Artworks in which a character doesn’t merely show they’re aware of the apparatus of their depiction but interferes with it - the moment in Funny Games when a killer finds a remote control and rewinds the film; the scene in The Holy Mountain where the hero orders “Zoom back camera!” - we might refer to with the short-hand ‘Brechtian’. In theatre this means the use of technique and devices that estrange and distance the audience, baring the play’s artifice. And it goes back long before Brecht. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche, by way of Schiller, cited the introduction of the Chorus into Greek drama as “the decisive step by which open and honourable war was declared against all naturalism in art.” Borges, who read Nietzsche in German, might’ve been alluding to this when he had the narrator of his short story ‘The Secret Miracle’ admire “verse in drama because it does not allow the spectators to forget unreality, which is a condition of art.” It’s hard then to see how Brechtian technique or devices in any art could ever be used to allow spectators to forget that unreality.

Here’s one way, off the top of my head. Imagine a realist play about a theatre troupe putting on a Brechtian play. All those techniques hitherto assumed to be estranging, distancing, self-conscious in the extreme and inherently non-realist, are now put into a frame, put into use to naturalistically depict the theatre troupe using those techniques as they would in reality.⁵

I wonder whether such a play would make its spectators forget unreality or not. Even with the Brechtian techniques restricted to the play within the play, their presence might function both to constitute a comprehensively naturalistic depiction of the theatre troupe’s reality and to remind spectators the play about the troupe that they’re watching is itself just a play. There’s a reason this device got coined, via pictorial art, as ‘mise en abyme’. Which sounds like something that could only ever be dizzying or discombobulating. I’d say there’s a life-expanding joy in such mirrors or loops, which don’t just muss our idea of what reality is but what unreality is (see Lanark, see Altman’s The Player or Lorrie Moore’s Self-help).

Meta self-references, voice-overs, audience addresses, overtly artificial sets and performances—none couldn’t be used in a different context to a realist end. Which suggests that what makes them achieve, for the most part, non-realist ends doesn’t lie in the techniques and devices themselves. How could it? Where would it exist, in what part? (Can a brick be intrinsically art deco?) The same applies to the obvious or subtle ways these otherwise QED neutral techniques and devices are used; since an explicit address to the audience can achieve a realist or a non-realist end (or, as in the case of our hypothetical play above, both) it can’t be the explicitness per se that defines the non-realism. (Is there such a thing as an intrinsically non-realist camera zoom?) Every way is relative, too. What collapses that relativity for a given artwork is neither in it nor in its form. So where is it?⁶

5. Realism is not the opposite of pulp

You can see why critics of realism try detach themselves from all this formal finickiness and switch to another plane. ‘Forget style and content and technique and devices. We know realism when we see it: it’s New Yorker fiction, it’s Booker prize nominees, it’s Academy painting from the 19th century: the overground; if you want its opposite, look to the underground, to zines, to genre before it got co-opted and when it was still pulp.’

Though pulp may be associated with certain genres (e.g. Westerns⁷, sf, punk), certain forms (e.g. comics) and certain schools (e.g. Beat) it’s defined by its lowly origins and ongoing ambivalent cultural status. These save it, so the assumption goes, from Big Money pressure to conform to bourgeois decorum and mainstream politics and conventional aesthetics, and afford it more freedom to revel in melodrama, transgression, to be camp or vulgar or pure entertainment in a way that realism starchily denies itself and its audience.

Now, we’ve already dispatched the stereotype that realism is a genre with the convention of depicting bourgeois life. And earlier we learnt that realism doesn’t have any inherent political bias, nor even, historically speaking, that modish a one. So why does the stereotype persist that pulp is subversive to realism’s passive, to its acquiescence, its “status-quotation”? Especially since what’s taken to be the pernicious apoliticalness of realist art is in fact something milder and more reasonable.

Alexander Herzen said (according to Isiah Berlin anyway) that Russian literature was “one uninterrupted indictment of Russian reality.” So where’s the Anglosphere equivalent? critics here demand. In doing so, they conflate a deliberate aesthetic feature with a complicit political neutrality (or centrism or both-sidesism). The stronger, the more specific, or more explicit a politics in any artwork then the more the artist’s presence and activity - their artifice - will be foregrounded. Structurally, then, art that aims at realism finds it hard to bear that strong or specific or explicit a politics (of any stripe). Now, there is a meta-aesthetic counterpoint here, that this incompatibility is just what debilitates realism. But in that case why not reject art tout court because it’s not as good as politics at politics?

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Squaring off pulp and realism isn’t just tendentious. It obscures their overlap in a way that’s intellectually unserious at worst and at best a weird kind of ressentiment. Look at how China Miéville blurbed M. John Harrison’s novel Light, only seeming able to do so by defining it oppositionally:

That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment... And yes, he writes fantasy and sf, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction.⁸

Say what you will about the polished prose and wild ideas of Light but it’s so Bookerish! Childhood sexual traumas, dry humour through tone but not comic structure, middle class characters with mental health struggles… This isn’t a crack against Harrison - Light is brilliant - but if it weren’t for the clone sex and serial killers and the dimension-crossing horse skull monster you could be reading Ishiguro or Ian McEwan. (And that’s not a crack against them.)

Realism is so condescendingly maligned in some quarters that its critics can’t spot it behind friend lines. Take the cultural assumptions made in genre fiction, that, outside of each work’s particular genre emphasis, tend to be the same as in any that you’d call realist. The arrival of an asteroid carrying a wormhole in Greg Bear’s novel Eon, kicks off an orbital World War, yet the warring powers on the asteroid still hold meetings in offices and drink orange juice. Or take transgressive fiction written in what Orwell would’ve commended as transparent prose—you don’t see its champions calling it realist however: it’s ‘raw’.

Since realist art does maintain an aura of stuck-up prestige, of assumed ‘quality’ which deserves to be questioned, since its prim pride of place for the cultural establishment does encourage in its practitioners a bourgeois hysterical control-freakery over craft and tone, we ought to treat pulp with a similar fair-minded scepticism. Nothing about the lowly origin or status of certain art forms or genres immunises them from any content or style, technique or device, convention or decorum, politics or lack we think characteristic of realism. There is a difference between it and non-realism. You just won’t essentially find it in pulp, with its own unsubstantiated aura. Pulp that is, in its own way, a bit stuck-up.

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1. For those who’ve seen it, Jack Lemmon’s character, ‘Buddy Boy’ Baxter, finds a compact with a cracked mirror in the apartment he lends out for the trysts of his work colleagues, including a superior. He returns the compact to the superior, who explains that his current bit-on-the-side threw it at him. Later, at a Christmas party, Baxter is flirting with the elevator girl he’s falling in love with, played by Shirley MacLaine, only for her to take out the same cracked compact. He catches up with the audience: his superior’s bit-on-the-side is the woman he loves. The compact’s freighted journey between locations and characters was Billy Wilder’s device.

2. Think of the way people complain that when a narrative artwork refers to itself it ‘took them out of the story.’ In the words of Gina McKee in Brass Eye, maybe that’s the point.

3. The device’s creepy cleverness is that it does both: Providence is just a story, but that doesn’t mean you reading it in the real world, as Robert Black reads horror stories, aren’t heading to a fate like his…

4. It’s a recentish innovation for soliloquies to become ‘naturalised’ as the inner monologue of the character which the audience is getting to overhear, as opposed to direct addresses to them.

5. Even The Gary Shandling Show was a matter of degree, had internal rules. Gary plays himself and sees the cameras and audience, but his friends play and stay in character; they know they’re in a TV show but don’t interact with the crew and can’t tell when they’re on air like him. This makes a useful contrast with another self-aware TV show, Dan Harmon’s Community, every episode of which is made up of parodies and homages to other TV shows and films but in which the characters never fess up that they’re only actors in a TV show created by a guy called Dan Harmon.

6. And where does poetry fit in? As the ultimate counter-example or ultimate synthesis? Whatever a poem’s technique - from the most intricate meter to the mildest white space - it’s typically the most artificed (=worked at) of the arts. (I like B S Johnson well enough but one of his weaker-sauce interventions was to slate Shakespeare because “ordinary people don’t talk in verse”). But does being the most artificed mean poetry is intrinsically non-realist? Compare a Larkin poem to a Prynne one: is one more non-realist than the other? Even prosaic Larkin wrote in verse. That’s what makes poetry for me neither the non-realist nor realist but the maximal art: the most explicit contrivance in order to penetrate most accurately into the heart of things.

7. Since Westerns aren’t so popular any more, artists who work in the genre seem to have less urgent a desire to prissily stake out their small differences from the literary mainstream.

8. A friend’s comment on this quote, and its wider critical M.O., was, “Whooooo caaaaaaaares?” My own comment: at least some of the antipathy towards realism is a weird kid’s rejection towards who’s perceived as too popular.