Department of English Brock University

ENGL 2F55, Modern Fiction

Some Notes on Realism

by Professor John Lye

Realism is the creation of the effect of the representation of the concrete, historical nature of human
life. Lilian Furst comments in her book Realism1 that "As an artistic movement realism is the product
and expression of the dominant mood of its time [the mid- to late 19th century]: a pervasive rationalist
epistemology that turned its back on the fantasies of Romanticism and was shaped instead by the
impact of the political and social changes as well as the scientific and industrial advances of its day."
In Realism the details of environment, of motivation, of circumstance, and of temporality with its
cause and effect, become the context for the exploration of human values and fate. The emphasis of
Realism tends to be on the individual, in her social environment.

Realism is the representation of the common life:

a. in an age in which the human was seen as, most fundamentally, a secular being, or at the least,
a being living in a world which was not transformed by or informed by spiritual presence.
b. in an age of mechanism, empirical thought and materialism, when what was important was
coming to be defined as what works, and what was real was what could be demonstrated
physically.
c. in an age when the 'rights of the individual' had been theorized, with a consequent focus on
the located self as the object of moral and political importance and concern.
d. particularly at a time of rapid sociological change, when the conventions and character of
'everyday life' and of the formation of the individual ceased to be a taken-for-granted backdrop
and became the site of significant meaning and action.
e. at a time when the economic consciousness is becoming dominated by the ideology of
capitalism: materialism, the commodification of so many aspects of human life, the rightness
of that obsession with property and its distribution which marks capitalist society, the primacy
of the individual over the communal.

There have been a number of theorists, for instance the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, who have held
that through the methodology of realism literature reflects a social reality whose phenomena serve as a
model for the work of art -- the realist gives a complete and correct account of observed social reality,
and thus is able to uncover the driving forces of history, the principles governing social change.

It became clear to some of the realists, however, as they attempted to represent the 'real world' in art,
that all they could represent was what structuralist theorists call a 'reality effect': that they were using
language, that is, a symbol system, and that they were placing humans in complex systems of social
relations and of material conditions which could be represented only by signs, and then only briefly
and selectively. See the selection from Flaubert's discussion on some problems of realism; Flaubert
concludes that talented Realists should in fact call themselves illusionists. Phillipe Hamon in "A
Constrained Discourse" (in Furst), agrees that realism is a constructed form which does not
unproblematically 'represent reality', and he gives a number of salient procedures of realism

In the structuralist (and poststructuralist) understanding, aesthetic effects and representation ( mimesis)
are created through the use of signs, codes and conventions, and are constituted as well through
reference to previous literary representations -- that is, through intertextuality. Because signs are
culturally constructed and used, any representation using them will inevitably be imbued with the way
of viewing and discussing the world of that particular use of signs. Consequently 'realism' will
inevitably be ideological, although it represents itself as transparent (that is, it claims tht it allows
'reality' to appear, fully and completely, through its signs).

On the other hand, realism has been such a durable form, and has been put into use so consistently in
popular literature, in history, in journalism with at its best its intense commitment to the truth, that one
must grant both its power, and its evident social utility as a representational mode.

The advantages of realism

Realism is faithful to our experience of life lived in a physical and social environment, and
governed by causes and effects. The most powerful argument for realism is that it represents life as we
live it -- sequential, contextualized, rooted in the concrete. It can be argued that realism is to be found
everywhere in literature, especially when the high mimetic forms such as the epic give way to a feel
for the life of the common person -- in Scripture, in comedy, in historical texts, in fabliaux.

Realism brings us close to the physical, to our material existence, and so is less likely than other
forms of representation to be distorted by ideology or mystification. It is responsible directly to the
life we recognize that we live.

The language we speak in our ordinary life -- our explanations, our accounts, our vocabulary -- is
the same kind of language-use that one finds in realism.

The problems of realism

To understand most reservations about realism one has to go first to the idea that any representation
is a selection, and hence implicit or explicit set of inclusions, exclusions, elisions, arrangements. As
Calvin explains to Hobbes (in the comic strip, you understand) when he realizes that whereas people
think that cameras tell the truth, cameras in fact lie, "Select the facts and you manipulate the truth." In
another strip Calvin, faced with the idea that different perspectives might be equally valid, finds
himself living in a Cubist rather than a Realist world (Cubism is an attempt to represent all
perspectives at once -- it looks really weird); to claim back his normal sense of reality, he asserts that
he is right, in this case his Dad, is wrong -- the world shifts back from Cubism to what we think of as
normality.

Even were one to be able to 'include everything', and to have a wholly objective perspective, and to
represent all possible valid construals of the 'reality' before one, one has to use words to represent, and
authors generally as well make heavy use of tropes (in fact many words are metaphoric in their
etymology). Words are, specifically, not reality, but are arbitrary signifiers of it -- they have no
necessary, or as it is called 'motivated,' relationship to what they represent. In fact a claim can be
made that the meanings of words are constructed in the first instance by differentiations from other
signs -- as we understand "hot" in relation to "cold", "warm", "tepid", "sweltering", "oppressive", and
so forth. Words also belong to cultural systems of meaning, and cultural ways of saying, as
ethnographers have documented. So as signs, and as culturally-located elements of meaning, words
cannot objectively and clearly represent 'reality'.

This brings us (I'll get back to tropes in a minute) to the problem with the word 'reality' -- it is too
inclusive to be very useful: it refers to objects, phenomenon, feelings, perceptions, to various different
stati (statuses?) of being, susceptible to different kinds of knowing. So 'realism' may restrict our very
sense of what 'reality' is.

Representation in language is often tropic -- we use metonyms, metaphors, irony. These all lead
away from, rather than toward, any sense that one can say that the writing is a transparent, reliable
representation of what actually is. David Lodge has shown, in Modes of Modern Writing, that whereas
modernist writing is marked by the use of metaphor, realism, rather than being free from tropes, is
marked by the use of metonymy. Catherine Belsey makes a similar argument in writing against
"expressive realism" in Critical Practice.

The argument is made that the 'reality-effect' of realism, its apparent objectivity, concretion and
neutral view-point, make realism a dangerous form: better to have a way of representation, the
thinking goes, which either foregrounds the problems of representation, or at least does not pretend
that it is objective. The 'objective,' distanced voice of the realist narrator, it is argued, is a ultimately a
dishonesty which masks the ideological commitments of the text.

Realism forms and enforces a world without a genuine spiritual dimension, a world of place and
time, and so has inherent limitations as a form; it has for instance serious limitations in its capacity to
represent the spiritual being of humankind. This argument seems opposed to the previous one, as 'the
spiritual in man' may be a mystification, but it is a dimension that humans have often longed to
express and live in, and realism, with its devotion to a world of physicality and the everyday, has little
room for it.

The concretion of realism also militates against the expression the hidden forces in the human
psyche, a power that Romance possesses.

All the same...

 All the same realism is a very attractive form. Many things, it is claimed, can be accurately
represented, or at least more accurately represented than in any other form, because realism is the way
in which we genuinely know and configure our experience as physical beings in a contingent world.

.... Just a mystification, say realism's opponents...

1. Realism, Longman, New York and London, 1992, LC # PN 98 R4 R43 1992. I recommend this book as a very good set
of selections with a very good introductory essay.

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