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The Real Thing: Reflections on a Literary Form
A clear-sighted and entertaining defence of literary realism, and an account of its key practitioners Realist fiction is one of the most enduring artforms history has ever witnessed. By describing the intricate inner life of its characters, or widening its focus to set their experience in context, it can evoke the reader’s sympathies as few other forms can. Yet it is also by and large a product of the middle boldly individualist and fascinated by money, property, marriage, and inheritance. Can such realism survive in the postmodern age? Acclaimed critic Terry Eagleton explores realism’s complex history, practice, and politics. Spanning several centuries, and including writers such as George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Iris Murdoch, Eagleton offers a witty, entertaining defence of a form which offers both panoramic scope and individual nuance in an increasingly fragmented world.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published February 27, 2024
About the author
Terry Eagleton
173 books1,317 followersWidely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
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April 21, 2024
I read this quickly the first time and when trying to explain it to a friend I said it was strange, because I didn’t come away from reading it with a clear understanding of what realism actually was. So, then I read it a second time more closely – and now I find I’m still not totally sure what Eagleton thinks it is – but have a better idea of what I think it might mean. This is complicated by the fact that he talks towards the end about naturalism, and I guess I might have thought before reading this that that was a form of realism.
It is perhaps too much to expect from book on this topic – covering so a broad range of forms – that there would be a simple answer. In much the same way that Romanticism can still be Romanticism across a range of divergent and even contradictory definitions – a kind of ‘I know it when I see it’ and ‘here are common features’ even if in some cases some of those features really don’t apply.
Except we want to believe that the real is real in ways that perhaps Romanticism doesn’t need to be. The first sentence of this book is, “In everyday language, realism means seeing a situation for what it is, without distortion or illusion.” Which makes realism an impossible task. At least part of the problem is that realism in literature is based on words, and no matter how authentic the images words create might seem, words are slippery things – having meanings that allow the most ironic of readings. And realism requires context – and people’s lives are also full of contradictory contexts too. A Black disabled woman and a white middle class man can be sitting beside each other in an airport and the reality they face would make you wonder if they were on the same planet. Which ‘reality’ is the ‘real’ one? Does that question even make sense? This can’t be just swept aside by complaining about relativity – the relativity is impossible to ignore.
I think this is part of the reason why Eagleton starts the book by talking (however briefly) about the nature of truth. Even if ‘what is real’ and ‘what is true’ are not identical concepts, we would generally struggle to not see some kind of overlap.
I think, if I had been writing this book, I would have also started with a discussion of Plato – but I would also have pushed this as the key to understanding realism and why realist writing might not be exhausted by how well the writing matches the ‘reality’ of how the world is a bit harder.
So, let’s do that. For Plato, the world we live in is a world of appearances. It is a world of change and death and decay. And he refused to believe such a world could be considered really, real. For him, the real is eternal and unchanging. And even if we don’t have access to that world – only the world of appearances we are forced to live in – the real world is that unchanging world that gives our world its structure and meaning. The philosopher’s job is to show the real world that hides behind the world of change. This is why he wanted to banish the artists from his ideal republic – they provided a copy of a copy of the real world – and so art takes us further away from the real. Realist literature, for Plato, would be a contradiction in terms.
Well, I think this is true not only of the idealism of Plato, but also for realists more generally. For so many realist writers, there is something fundamentally unreal about the world we live in. And they write to make the unreality of that world apparent to us. Whether it is the exploitative nature of our current society, or the horrors of patriarchy, or of racism – the world we live in has a kind of ugly distortion of what ‘reality’ ought to be. To grasp this unreality, we need a theory of what the world could and should be. So, realism is not exhausted by verisimilitude (the appearance of being real and true) but rather by making clear the unreality of the current world. As such, realism is a kind of call to action, rather than of acceptance. Unlike Plato, realism demands change, but change based on a vision for a better world.
There is an interesting part early on in this where he points to the problem of empathy. That realism can’t be merely about seeking to encourage empathy in the reader. Not least since he does not believe that empathy is enough – the world does not change by a change in sentiment alone, but requires real action, action directed towards a better world.
The problem with verisimilitude is also that it implies that truth is found in particulars. This seems an obvious way to make a piece of writing seem ‘real’. It is almost a version of the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim so many advise writers to follow. His point here is that particulars are infinite – their selection can’t be totally random – rather, they need to be chosen on the basis of a universal that groups them towards the objective of that universal. So that, even if the particulars end up being what makes realist writing feel real, their place in the writing is anything but a kind of eclectic mismatch of random images piled upon one another, but rather chosen for how they might bring into focus the need for change the writer has identified.
Some quotes – unfortunately, I read the ebook, so no page numbers:
“Facts can be freshly evaluated in the light of feelings, and feelings modified in the light of facts.”
“The good-hearted doctrine that a deeper understanding of people breeds a deeper tolerance of them is somewhat suspect. It overlooks the fact that to view actions or individuals in context may show them up as even more repellent than we first imagined.”
“Ethics is a matter of social practice, not of sentiment.”
“It was the slave trade that was abhorrent and intolerable, not the reformers’ attempts to bring it to an end.”
“Only false teeth can be lifelike.”
“Most people think that you can judge whether a statement is valid by checking it against the facts. But if the facts are themselves interpretations, all we would seem to be doing is checking one set of interpretations against another.”
“Our perceptions are informed by bias, habit, interest, desire, assumption, convention and the like. So appealing to something called the world is pointless, since the world comes down to your own partisan version of it.”
“Our forms of description are constrained by the way things are. We are not free to ‘construct’ reality in any way we like. In any case, what is it that we would be constructing? The verb ‘constructing’ suggests that there is something out there to be fabricated.”
“The classical moral question is not ‘What should I do?’ but ‘What should I do, given the situation?”
“realism is ‘not a substitute for political action; it is the structure of consciousness that accompanies it’.”
“The word ‘fiction’ comes to us from a Latin term meaning ‘to feign’, so that there is a sense in which the term ‘realist fiction’ is a contradiction in terms.”
“Realism, then, has a historical basis. Roughly speaking, epic belongs to a heroic era, romance to the medieval age of chivalry and the realist novel to modern times.”
“a work intended as realist by the author may not be received in the same way by a reader.”
“In this sense, realism is for the most part a function of the relation between a literary text and its social context, rather than a set of intrinsic features. I say ‘for the most part’ because it is hard to see how any civilisation could regard as realist a work of art in which everyone has eight limbs apiece.”
“Because desire is absolute and unconditional, incapable of being satisfied by any actual object, it is blatantly unrealistic in its demands.”
“Macbeth is a gripping piece of drama even if it is doubtful that Shakespeare himself ever ran into three witches or watched his wife go mad. Conversely, there are plenty of authors who write unconvincingly about events they have actually experienced.”
“There is no more useless proposition, remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, than the identity of a thing with itself. On this estimate, the most realist kind of art represents nothing at all.”
“Broadly speaking, then, realism is a question of verisimilitude.”
“Ideology on this view presents itself as an ‘Of course!’ or ‘It goes without saying’.”
“One effect of this may be to legitimate the status quo, as well as to reinforce the reader’s sense of identity rather than unsettling it. In this view, then, we are dealing with a politically conservative form, whatever the occasionally radical nature of its content.”
“It is far easier to move a mountain than to demolish patriarchy.”
“Samuel Johnson remarked that while watching a play an audience never ceases to be conscious that it is in a theatre, and much the same applies to reading realist literature.”
“there is nothing radical about change itself, and what stays the same is not always to be spurned.”
“All revolutions leave more things unchanged than transformed.”
“Realism should be bleak, since that is the way the world is. There is something synthetic about happiness. That real life is a sombre, squalid affair is a typically modern assumption.”
“Generally speaking, people in modern times have ceased to believe that history itself is story-shaped”
“We also know that many of the details to be found in a realist novel are arbitrarily selected, and as such may have no special meaning in themselves.”
“Realism typically supplies us with a redundancy of information. Precisely because a detail isn’t essential, the only reason for its presence would seem to be that it is true.”
“The philosopher Michael Polanyi writes that ‘the belief that, since particulars are more tangible, their knowledge offers a true conception of things is fundamentally mistaken’. In his view, it is not particulars which first seize our attention but patterns or unified wholes. In fact, it is the particular which is abstract, in the sense of being lifted from a larger context.”
“Realism, then, is not simply a question of technique. It is, so to speak, the way the world itself would wish to be represented, the art which reproduces its inmost structure.”
“A purely photographic naturalism is to be rejected. Socialist realism is not a passive reflection of reality, but should look instead to a transformation of social consciousness.”
“The naturalistic artist no more passes moral judgement on his characters than a chemist does on a piece of manganese.”
“Putting a factory on stage, Brecht comments, will tell you nothing about capitalism.”
“Non-realist methods can be harnessed to realist ends. What matters is getting at the truth, not the means you use to do so.”
“Realism comes to mean the concrete and individual, rather than the notion of universal natures.”
“Realism tends to trade on a distinction between surface appearance and hidden depth, a model which postmodernism rejects.”
It is perhaps too much to expect from book on this topic – covering so a broad range of forms – that there would be a simple answer. In much the same way that Romanticism can still be Romanticism across a range of divergent and even contradictory definitions – a kind of ‘I know it when I see it’ and ‘here are common features’ even if in some cases some of those features really don’t apply.
Except we want to believe that the real is real in ways that perhaps Romanticism doesn’t need to be. The first sentence of this book is, “In everyday language, realism means seeing a situation for what it is, without distortion or illusion.” Which makes realism an impossible task. At least part of the problem is that realism in literature is based on words, and no matter how authentic the images words create might seem, words are slippery things – having meanings that allow the most ironic of readings. And realism requires context – and people’s lives are also full of contradictory contexts too. A Black disabled woman and a white middle class man can be sitting beside each other in an airport and the reality they face would make you wonder if they were on the same planet. Which ‘reality’ is the ‘real’ one? Does that question even make sense? This can’t be just swept aside by complaining about relativity – the relativity is impossible to ignore.
I think this is part of the reason why Eagleton starts the book by talking (however briefly) about the nature of truth. Even if ‘what is real’ and ‘what is true’ are not identical concepts, we would generally struggle to not see some kind of overlap.
I think, if I had been writing this book, I would have also started with a discussion of Plato – but I would also have pushed this as the key to understanding realism and why realist writing might not be exhausted by how well the writing matches the ‘reality’ of how the world is a bit harder.
So, let’s do that. For Plato, the world we live in is a world of appearances. It is a world of change and death and decay. And he refused to believe such a world could be considered really, real. For him, the real is eternal and unchanging. And even if we don’t have access to that world – only the world of appearances we are forced to live in – the real world is that unchanging world that gives our world its structure and meaning. The philosopher’s job is to show the real world that hides behind the world of change. This is why he wanted to banish the artists from his ideal republic – they provided a copy of a copy of the real world – and so art takes us further away from the real. Realist literature, for Plato, would be a contradiction in terms.
Well, I think this is true not only of the idealism of Plato, but also for realists more generally. For so many realist writers, there is something fundamentally unreal about the world we live in. And they write to make the unreality of that world apparent to us. Whether it is the exploitative nature of our current society, or the horrors of patriarchy, or of racism – the world we live in has a kind of ugly distortion of what ‘reality’ ought to be. To grasp this unreality, we need a theory of what the world could and should be. So, realism is not exhausted by verisimilitude (the appearance of being real and true) but rather by making clear the unreality of the current world. As such, realism is a kind of call to action, rather than of acceptance. Unlike Plato, realism demands change, but change based on a vision for a better world.
There is an interesting part early on in this where he points to the problem of empathy. That realism can’t be merely about seeking to encourage empathy in the reader. Not least since he does not believe that empathy is enough – the world does not change by a change in sentiment alone, but requires real action, action directed towards a better world.
The problem with verisimilitude is also that it implies that truth is found in particulars. This seems an obvious way to make a piece of writing seem ‘real’. It is almost a version of the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim so many advise writers to follow. His point here is that particulars are infinite – their selection can’t be totally random – rather, they need to be chosen on the basis of a universal that groups them towards the objective of that universal. So that, even if the particulars end up being what makes realist writing feel real, their place in the writing is anything but a kind of eclectic mismatch of random images piled upon one another, but rather chosen for how they might bring into focus the need for change the writer has identified.
Some quotes – unfortunately, I read the ebook, so no page numbers:
“Facts can be freshly evaluated in the light of feelings, and feelings modified in the light of facts.”
“The good-hearted doctrine that a deeper understanding of people breeds a deeper tolerance of them is somewhat suspect. It overlooks the fact that to view actions or individuals in context may show them up as even more repellent than we first imagined.”
“Ethics is a matter of social practice, not of sentiment.”
“It was the slave trade that was abhorrent and intolerable, not the reformers’ attempts to bring it to an end.”
“Only false teeth can be lifelike.”
“Most people think that you can judge whether a statement is valid by checking it against the facts. But if the facts are themselves interpretations, all we would seem to be doing is checking one set of interpretations against another.”
“Our perceptions are informed by bias, habit, interest, desire, assumption, convention and the like. So appealing to something called the world is pointless, since the world comes down to your own partisan version of it.”
“Our forms of description are constrained by the way things are. We are not free to ‘construct’ reality in any way we like. In any case, what is it that we would be constructing? The verb ‘constructing’ suggests that there is something out there to be fabricated.”
“The classical moral question is not ‘What should I do?’ but ‘What should I do, given the situation?”
“realism is ‘not a substitute for political action; it is the structure of consciousness that accompanies it’.”
“The word ‘fiction’ comes to us from a Latin term meaning ‘to feign’, so that there is a sense in which the term ‘realist fiction’ is a contradiction in terms.”
“Realism, then, has a historical basis. Roughly speaking, epic belongs to a heroic era, romance to the medieval age of chivalry and the realist novel to modern times.”
“a work intended as realist by the author may not be received in the same way by a reader.”
“In this sense, realism is for the most part a function of the relation between a literary text and its social context, rather than a set of intrinsic features. I say ‘for the most part’ because it is hard to see how any civilisation could regard as realist a work of art in which everyone has eight limbs apiece.”
“Because desire is absolute and unconditional, incapable of being satisfied by any actual object, it is blatantly unrealistic in its demands.”
“Macbeth is a gripping piece of drama even if it is doubtful that Shakespeare himself ever ran into three witches or watched his wife go mad. Conversely, there are plenty of authors who write unconvincingly about events they have actually experienced.”
“There is no more useless proposition, remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, than the identity of a thing with itself. On this estimate, the most realist kind of art represents nothing at all.”
“Broadly speaking, then, realism is a question of verisimilitude.”
“Ideology on this view presents itself as an ‘Of course!’ or ‘It goes without saying’.”
“One effect of this may be to legitimate the status quo, as well as to reinforce the reader’s sense of identity rather than unsettling it. In this view, then, we are dealing with a politically conservative form, whatever the occasionally radical nature of its content.”
“It is far easier to move a mountain than to demolish patriarchy.”
“Samuel Johnson remarked that while watching a play an audience never ceases to be conscious that it is in a theatre, and much the same applies to reading realist literature.”
“there is nothing radical about change itself, and what stays the same is not always to be spurned.”
“All revolutions leave more things unchanged than transformed.”
“Realism should be bleak, since that is the way the world is. There is something synthetic about happiness. That real life is a sombre, squalid affair is a typically modern assumption.”
“Generally speaking, people in modern times have ceased to believe that history itself is story-shaped”
“We also know that many of the details to be found in a realist novel are arbitrarily selected, and as such may have no special meaning in themselves.”
“Realism typically supplies us with a redundancy of information. Precisely because a detail isn’t essential, the only reason for its presence would seem to be that it is true.”
“The philosopher Michael Polanyi writes that ‘the belief that, since particulars are more tangible, their knowledge offers a true conception of things is fundamentally mistaken’. In his view, it is not particulars which first seize our attention but patterns or unified wholes. In fact, it is the particular which is abstract, in the sense of being lifted from a larger context.”
“Realism, then, is not simply a question of technique. It is, so to speak, the way the world itself would wish to be represented, the art which reproduces its inmost structure.”
“A purely photographic naturalism is to be rejected. Socialist realism is not a passive reflection of reality, but should look instead to a transformation of social consciousness.”
“The naturalistic artist no more passes moral judgement on his characters than a chemist does on a piece of manganese.”
“Putting a factory on stage, Brecht comments, will tell you nothing about capitalism.”
“Non-realist methods can be harnessed to realist ends. What matters is getting at the truth, not the means you use to do so.”
“Realism comes to mean the concrete and individual, rather than the notion of universal natures.”
“Realism tends to trade on a distinction between surface appearance and hidden depth, a model which postmodernism rejects.”
December 6, 2024
This slim book in Eagleton's Yale Univ Press series--with cute cartoon covers and large fonts and wide line spacing--seems a 2024 summation of his previous writings on literary realism in fiction, and some new takes I'm sure. I learned quite a bit. I wanted a counter to Northrop Frye's arguments on Romanticism vs Realism. Eagleton gave that, yet takes on more than Frye: Barthes, Catherine Belsey, Jameson, Lukács, Zola, Wilde (yay!), Auerbach, and the postmodernists. Rabbit-hole stuff.
Yet, also not what I expected, which was a trenchant Marxist defense of realism in art. Eagleton writes in a conversational and discursive way, so that each paragraph requires close reading all the way through. The good-ole Marxist fire seems to have gone out of him, which is okay.
Just for my own remembrance, here are some points Eagleton makes:
CAN HUMANS TRANSFORM THEMSELVES, OR BE TRANSFORMED? Romanticism idealizes its characters and situations by positing that we have the power to transform ourselves. We can be heroes, go on quests, undergo personality arcs. Realism tells it like it is, casts doubt on any transforming change. Heroes are behind us, in the face of a cold-uncaring-universe.
DOING GOOD AS A REALIST, BEING OBJECTIVE: A Realist, to act appropriately, must know how things are with humans and the world. Must be honest with himself, have a tenacity to seek the truth, a capacity for self-criticism, and effort to view the world without self-interest or self-delusion, a refusal to foist our own private fantasies on it. An intellectual courage to confront the ugly and inconvenient and the recalcitrance of things.
DON QUIXOTE AS THE FIRST REALIST NOVEL, LAMBASTING ROMANCE: Sancho Panza’s spirit priding himself on his robust common sense and what he can touch and taste—in contrast to the privileged Don’s fantasies, believing in idle abstractions.
REALISTS’ BRUTAL TRUTH-TELLING: Realism is insolently upfront about its predatory nature, substituting naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation for those forms of oppression that are veiled by religious and political illusions. Realism is the way the world itself would wish to be represented, the art that reproduces its inmost structure.
REPORTING REALITY —VS— IMPOSING REALITY: Realism reveals something about the order inherent in reality. Romanticism imposes it own designs on reality.
STORY CONVENTIONS SLIDING INTO PLACE: Literary Art is a practice we have to learn. When we open a book (or sit down in a theater) a complete set of literary/story/dramatic conventions move spontaneously into place: (1) these events are mostly fictions; (2) but you’re supposed to make believe they’re real without actually believing they are; (3) you’re not supposed to ask how a narrator came to know all this; (4) you are not to waste your time worrying about if some of this happened in real life; (5) you’re not expected to do anything practical as result of reading text or seeing the play; (6) you’re invited to take it all not just as a particular narrative but as somehow illustrative of more general truths; (7) that the novel/play is the product of techniques which don’t advertise themselves.
When an author or playwright writes, he shapes his material, often unconsciously, according to a set of dramatic conventions, some so coercive that to write differently is inconceivable. And more!!! The “material” a writer mines/uses is already meaningfully organized. Reality has a rough-and-ready structure before the writer lays his hands on it. The world comes to the author or playwright, already granted a name and identity.
CASE AGAINST MYTH & ROMANCE (BARTHES) — SUSPECT INNOCENCE: Barthes regards myth as making things appear more innocent than they are. It does this by giving things a natural and internal justification, gives them a clarity which is almost a statement of fact.
CASE AGAINST REALISM (CATHERINE BELSEY) — SUSPECT TRUTHFULNESS: Far from being neutral, Realism is loaded with spectacular fabrication. Realism appears to be transparent, but is not. Realism relies on illusion, just to a lesser extent that Romance, but more problematic in that it hides its illusionistic underpinnings. Realism is convinced that truth is unproblematic. Realism is driven by a need for order and stability, shutting off a diversity if interpretations in its drive for closure. Its representations are largely static, and thus unable to present a fluid, self-contradictory world. All it can do is lend a spurious solidity to a reality that secretly resists it. Moreover, in striving for coherence, it helps insulate the audience from conflict and ambiguity. All this turmoil is contained by the unity of form, which seeks to harmonize the whole. Realism creates a fictional world that reduces the unknown to the comfortably familiar. Our longing for story and its conventions is our innate fear of Reality that disturbs us to the core. We want story to uncover everything strange, unusual and questionable into something we can classify, file away, understand, so that it no longer disturbs us (Nietzsche). Realism helps satisfy our unquenchable curiosity about the world around us. Realism choses the stuff of everyday life on purpose—to preserve the coherence/continuity of its narrative it passes over “revolutionary fractures” in silence. Thus it shows/requires an unchallenged stability of social relationships. No, blow this up with “history” with “truth” and the stability comes undone—then farewell everyday life—farewell “personality”, “conversation”, “episode”, “harmony”, “closure”. What holds us captive to story is the happening itself—our insatiable desire to watch events unfold before our eyes, and to find out what comes next. We are wary of dramatic crises since they threaten to undermine our assurance that Reality/Story will trundle on in the same old style.
CASE AGAINST STORY AND CLOSURE (WITH EAGLETON’S COUNTER): Realism seems to give a blow-by-blow account of reality, but it’s really offering artfully shaped climax/closure. Frye: “The requirements of literary form (i.e. story) and plausible realistic content always fight against each other.” To ensure a happy ending, you need to grant the virtuous their rewards, the villainous their comeuppance—neither of which would probably happen if it were a “true history”. The author must step in and engineer the good “ending”, even with a degree of manipulation, and then the realist play gives a whiff of unreality. The gap between actual justice and poetic justice looms embarrassingly large.
TRUTH IS SACRIFICED FOR OUR UTOPIAN LONGING FOR HAPPINESS: Nabokov: “Some people—I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm of our lives. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet from the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.” Realism should be bleak, since that’s the way the world is. Eagleton rebuts this: Beauty and Elegance can be quite as real as horror, death, suffering, destruction. Beckett: everything is makeshift, and his world strips the mask from necessity. It is an implicit rebuke to the vision of a divinely ordered universe. Generally speaking, people in modern times have ceased to believe that history itself is story-shaped—that it represents a tale of PROVIDENTIAL DESIGN, or that there is some grand narrative afoot of which our own humble lives form a minor part. Once we arrive at Thomas Hardy, belief in Providential Design is DOA. If an author believes the world has an objective structure to it, then a realist play can reproduce reality in all its intricate detail while still preserving a certain [story-based] shapeliness. If an author does NOT believe in Providential Design, then things come to seem purely haphazard, and the author must foist an arbitrary design on them. And the more disorderly, the more elaborate the design—growing conspicuous and endangering the truth-effect of the play. “Realist Art” —vs— “Realism”. Realist art demands the author ditch story-structure altogether, in favor of truth: a truth that shows the world as fragmentary and conflictive, rather than one guided by providential order. There is a Middle Ground—Realist Art [Novels, Plays] do use “untruthful” Story Structure for all of its benefits. This is not exactly a “lie”, but the audience of course would not take it as “True” either. It’s called “fiction” after all. We exist in a middle space. Factual truth or falsehood is irrelevant.
NATURE—A POWER AGAINST RANK, INEQUALITY, ROTE CONVENTION: There is no class-distinction or cultural supremacy in Nature—and can be turned against ARTIFICE of social division and artistic convention. What all creatures share in common is much more fundamental than accidents of birth or upbringing.
REALISM IN ART “DESACRALIZES” ROMANCE: (Per Jameson) Realism punctures the illusions of fable and romance, and strips the halo of holiness from the world. In pre-modern (romantic) societies, things are invested with symbolic, mythological, or supernatural meaning. For middle-class (realism) society, things are simply, starkly themselves. A “desacralized, post-magical, commonsense, everyday, secular reality. A Disenchanted World. Yet!!! Myth, fable, magic do not simply vanish—when realism encounters problems it cannot tackle in realist terms, it may turn to magic and fairy tale to pull of an unlikely resolution.
LUKÁCS’S CALAMITY OF MODERNISM: Modernism coincides with the crackup of middle-class civilization of WWI—military slaughter, social turmoil, economic crisis, political insurrection. The middle class lost whatever remained of its visionary power. Much modernist art turns its eyes from this ravaged historical landscape and retreats into the autonomy of ART. The concrete sacrifices to the abstract. The alienated worlds of Kafka, Proust, Musil, Joyce, Beckett, Camus. Objective reality falls to pieces; the world now incoherent and impenetrable. It is no longer possible to grasp a complex totality. Cynicism and nihilism set the artistic tone. Modernism exalts life’s baseness and emptiness through art. Literature become obsessed with the aberrant and psychopathic. With the loss of a historical sense, narrative art buckles or collapses. It leaves conflicts unreconciled
In support of High Realism of the Greats from Homer to Mann. Realist fiction is historical, and its form is UTOPIAN. There is struggle, discord, upheaval—but they are contained by the formal unity of the artwork. Literary Form allows a foretaste of a harmonious world.
ZOLA’S REALIST METHOD: He was not mere passive spectator, taking dictation. He is an experimenter who places his characters in a series of situations in order to record how they behave under the joint influences of heredity and environment.
OSCAR WILDE’S ICONOCLASTIC COUNTER, THE STRONGEST DEFENSE OF ROMANTICISM. WOW. Wilde regards both realism and naturalism as shameful betrayals of the ARTISTIC SPIRIT. He fights against those authors who fall into careless habits of accuracy, developing a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling. We must put an end to the monstrous worship of facts, which is usurping the realm of fancy and vulgarizing mankind. Art does NOT hold up a mirror to life. On the contrary, it is art that is real and life that tries blunderingly to imitate it. No great artist ever see things as they are—if he did, he would cease to be an artist.
HIGH STYLE OF EPIC/ROMANCE —VS— POPULAR STYLE OF REALISM: Legend and Myth and Romance tend to neglect precise details of time and place and presents largely unambiguous meanings, stripping narrative of all that is uncertain and unresolved. History and Realism is a question of conflicts and cross-currents, of multiple, ambiguous events, that resign neat schematics.
AUERBACH’S DISTASTE FOR ROMANCE: His clear distaste for epic, heroic, romance, which invites us to admire a distant world, whose ideals evolve in uncompromising purity and freedom, in comparison with the friction and resistance of real life. They are schematic, idealizing, rigid in structure, and socially restricted. Chivalric art hinders the full appreciation of reality and life. A huge admirer of Montaigne. Western literature is the story of an ever richer, more intricate realism (until the arrival of Modernism). A tale of literary historical progress. The concrete and changeable are inherently superior to the abstract and static of romance.
POSTMODERNISM HILARIOUSLY DISSED BY EAGLETON: If critical realism can place too gullible a faith in order and stability, postmodernism overreacts by viewing the world as infinitely malleable. Realism finds normality interesting as normality—postmodernism looks upon norms as restrictive and oppressive. What excites the postmodern mind is what deviates from the orthodox and consensual. Postmodern thought is too captivated by the marginal and off-beat to find the life of the majority anything but uncool. In an unfathomably complex world beset by terrorism and genocide, war, disease, poverty, mass migration and the gradual death of Nature, on of our most pressing needs is to grasp the OVERALL SHAPE of what is afoot. Realism can provide us with this cognitive mapping, and do so enjoyably.
Yet, also not what I expected, which was a trenchant Marxist defense of realism in art. Eagleton writes in a conversational and discursive way, so that each paragraph requires close reading all the way through. The good-ole Marxist fire seems to have gone out of him, which is okay.
Just for my own remembrance, here are some points Eagleton makes:
CAN HUMANS TRANSFORM THEMSELVES, OR BE TRANSFORMED? Romanticism idealizes its characters and situations by positing that we have the power to transform ourselves. We can be heroes, go on quests, undergo personality arcs. Realism tells it like it is, casts doubt on any transforming change. Heroes are behind us, in the face of a cold-uncaring-universe.
DOING GOOD AS A REALIST, BEING OBJECTIVE: A Realist, to act appropriately, must know how things are with humans and the world. Must be honest with himself, have a tenacity to seek the truth, a capacity for self-criticism, and effort to view the world without self-interest or self-delusion, a refusal to foist our own private fantasies on it. An intellectual courage to confront the ugly and inconvenient and the recalcitrance of things.
DON QUIXOTE AS THE FIRST REALIST NOVEL, LAMBASTING ROMANCE: Sancho Panza’s spirit priding himself on his robust common sense and what he can touch and taste—in contrast to the privileged Don’s fantasies, believing in idle abstractions.
REALISTS’ BRUTAL TRUTH-TELLING: Realism is insolently upfront about its predatory nature, substituting naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation for those forms of oppression that are veiled by religious and political illusions. Realism is the way the world itself would wish to be represented, the art that reproduces its inmost structure.
REPORTING REALITY —VS— IMPOSING REALITY: Realism reveals something about the order inherent in reality. Romanticism imposes it own designs on reality.
STORY CONVENTIONS SLIDING INTO PLACE: Literary Art is a practice we have to learn. When we open a book (or sit down in a theater) a complete set of literary/story/dramatic conventions move spontaneously into place: (1) these events are mostly fictions; (2) but you’re supposed to make believe they’re real without actually believing they are; (3) you’re not supposed to ask how a narrator came to know all this; (4) you are not to waste your time worrying about if some of this happened in real life; (5) you’re not expected to do anything practical as result of reading text or seeing the play; (6) you’re invited to take it all not just as a particular narrative but as somehow illustrative of more general truths; (7) that the novel/play is the product of techniques which don’t advertise themselves.
When an author or playwright writes, he shapes his material, often unconsciously, according to a set of dramatic conventions, some so coercive that to write differently is inconceivable. And more!!! The “material” a writer mines/uses is already meaningfully organized. Reality has a rough-and-ready structure before the writer lays his hands on it. The world comes to the author or playwright, already granted a name and identity.
CASE AGAINST MYTH & ROMANCE (BARTHES) — SUSPECT INNOCENCE: Barthes regards myth as making things appear more innocent than they are. It does this by giving things a natural and internal justification, gives them a clarity which is almost a statement of fact.
CASE AGAINST REALISM (CATHERINE BELSEY) — SUSPECT TRUTHFULNESS: Far from being neutral, Realism is loaded with spectacular fabrication. Realism appears to be transparent, but is not. Realism relies on illusion, just to a lesser extent that Romance, but more problematic in that it hides its illusionistic underpinnings. Realism is convinced that truth is unproblematic. Realism is driven by a need for order and stability, shutting off a diversity if interpretations in its drive for closure. Its representations are largely static, and thus unable to present a fluid, self-contradictory world. All it can do is lend a spurious solidity to a reality that secretly resists it. Moreover, in striving for coherence, it helps insulate the audience from conflict and ambiguity. All this turmoil is contained by the unity of form, which seeks to harmonize the whole. Realism creates a fictional world that reduces the unknown to the comfortably familiar. Our longing for story and its conventions is our innate fear of Reality that disturbs us to the core. We want story to uncover everything strange, unusual and questionable into something we can classify, file away, understand, so that it no longer disturbs us (Nietzsche). Realism helps satisfy our unquenchable curiosity about the world around us. Realism choses the stuff of everyday life on purpose—to preserve the coherence/continuity of its narrative it passes over “revolutionary fractures” in silence. Thus it shows/requires an unchallenged stability of social relationships. No, blow this up with “history” with “truth” and the stability comes undone—then farewell everyday life—farewell “personality”, “conversation”, “episode”, “harmony”, “closure”. What holds us captive to story is the happening itself—our insatiable desire to watch events unfold before our eyes, and to find out what comes next. We are wary of dramatic crises since they threaten to undermine our assurance that Reality/Story will trundle on in the same old style.
CASE AGAINST STORY AND CLOSURE (WITH EAGLETON’S COUNTER): Realism seems to give a blow-by-blow account of reality, but it’s really offering artfully shaped climax/closure. Frye: “The requirements of literary form (i.e. story) and plausible realistic content always fight against each other.” To ensure a happy ending, you need to grant the virtuous their rewards, the villainous their comeuppance—neither of which would probably happen if it were a “true history”. The author must step in and engineer the good “ending”, even with a degree of manipulation, and then the realist play gives a whiff of unreality. The gap between actual justice and poetic justice looms embarrassingly large.
TRUTH IS SACRIFICED FOR OUR UTOPIAN LONGING FOR HAPPINESS: Nabokov: “Some people—I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm of our lives. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet from the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.” Realism should be bleak, since that’s the way the world is. Eagleton rebuts this: Beauty and Elegance can be quite as real as horror, death, suffering, destruction. Beckett: everything is makeshift, and his world strips the mask from necessity. It is an implicit rebuke to the vision of a divinely ordered universe. Generally speaking, people in modern times have ceased to believe that history itself is story-shaped—that it represents a tale of PROVIDENTIAL DESIGN, or that there is some grand narrative afoot of which our own humble lives form a minor part. Once we arrive at Thomas Hardy, belief in Providential Design is DOA. If an author believes the world has an objective structure to it, then a realist play can reproduce reality in all its intricate detail while still preserving a certain [story-based] shapeliness. If an author does NOT believe in Providential Design, then things come to seem purely haphazard, and the author must foist an arbitrary design on them. And the more disorderly, the more elaborate the design—growing conspicuous and endangering the truth-effect of the play. “Realist Art” —vs— “Realism”. Realist art demands the author ditch story-structure altogether, in favor of truth: a truth that shows the world as fragmentary and conflictive, rather than one guided by providential order. There is a Middle Ground—Realist Art [Novels, Plays] do use “untruthful” Story Structure for all of its benefits. This is not exactly a “lie”, but the audience of course would not take it as “True” either. It’s called “fiction” after all. We exist in a middle space. Factual truth or falsehood is irrelevant.
NATURE—A POWER AGAINST RANK, INEQUALITY, ROTE CONVENTION: There is no class-distinction or cultural supremacy in Nature—and can be turned against ARTIFICE of social division and artistic convention. What all creatures share in common is much more fundamental than accidents of birth or upbringing.
REALISM IN ART “DESACRALIZES” ROMANCE: (Per Jameson) Realism punctures the illusions of fable and romance, and strips the halo of holiness from the world. In pre-modern (romantic) societies, things are invested with symbolic, mythological, or supernatural meaning. For middle-class (realism) society, things are simply, starkly themselves. A “desacralized, post-magical, commonsense, everyday, secular reality. A Disenchanted World. Yet!!! Myth, fable, magic do not simply vanish—when realism encounters problems it cannot tackle in realist terms, it may turn to magic and fairy tale to pull of an unlikely resolution.
LUKÁCS’S CALAMITY OF MODERNISM: Modernism coincides with the crackup of middle-class civilization of WWI—military slaughter, social turmoil, economic crisis, political insurrection. The middle class lost whatever remained of its visionary power. Much modernist art turns its eyes from this ravaged historical landscape and retreats into the autonomy of ART. The concrete sacrifices to the abstract. The alienated worlds of Kafka, Proust, Musil, Joyce, Beckett, Camus. Objective reality falls to pieces; the world now incoherent and impenetrable. It is no longer possible to grasp a complex totality. Cynicism and nihilism set the artistic tone. Modernism exalts life’s baseness and emptiness through art. Literature become obsessed with the aberrant and psychopathic. With the loss of a historical sense, narrative art buckles or collapses. It leaves conflicts unreconciled
In support of High Realism of the Greats from Homer to Mann. Realist fiction is historical, and its form is UTOPIAN. There is struggle, discord, upheaval—but they are contained by the formal unity of the artwork. Literary Form allows a foretaste of a harmonious world.
ZOLA’S REALIST METHOD: He was not mere passive spectator, taking dictation. He is an experimenter who places his characters in a series of situations in order to record how they behave under the joint influences of heredity and environment.
OSCAR WILDE’S ICONOCLASTIC COUNTER, THE STRONGEST DEFENSE OF ROMANTICISM. WOW. Wilde regards both realism and naturalism as shameful betrayals of the ARTISTIC SPIRIT. He fights against those authors who fall into careless habits of accuracy, developing a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling. We must put an end to the monstrous worship of facts, which is usurping the realm of fancy and vulgarizing mankind. Art does NOT hold up a mirror to life. On the contrary, it is art that is real and life that tries blunderingly to imitate it. No great artist ever see things as they are—if he did, he would cease to be an artist.
HIGH STYLE OF EPIC/ROMANCE —VS— POPULAR STYLE OF REALISM: Legend and Myth and Romance tend to neglect precise details of time and place and presents largely unambiguous meanings, stripping narrative of all that is uncertain and unresolved. History and Realism is a question of conflicts and cross-currents, of multiple, ambiguous events, that resign neat schematics.
AUERBACH’S DISTASTE FOR ROMANCE: His clear distaste for epic, heroic, romance, which invites us to admire a distant world, whose ideals evolve in uncompromising purity and freedom, in comparison with the friction and resistance of real life. They are schematic, idealizing, rigid in structure, and socially restricted. Chivalric art hinders the full appreciation of reality and life. A huge admirer of Montaigne. Western literature is the story of an ever richer, more intricate realism (until the arrival of Modernism). A tale of literary historical progress. The concrete and changeable are inherently superior to the abstract and static of romance.
POSTMODERNISM HILARIOUSLY DISSED BY EAGLETON: If critical realism can place too gullible a faith in order and stability, postmodernism overreacts by viewing the world as infinitely malleable. Realism finds normality interesting as normality—postmodernism looks upon norms as restrictive and oppressive. What excites the postmodern mind is what deviates from the orthodox and consensual. Postmodern thought is too captivated by the marginal and off-beat to find the life of the majority anything but uncool. In an unfathomably complex world beset by terrorism and genocide, war, disease, poverty, mass migration and the gradual death of Nature, on of our most pressing needs is to grasp the OVERALL SHAPE of what is afoot. Realism can provide us with this cognitive mapping, and do so enjoyably.
October 23, 2024
A fun overview of the subject, filled with thorny contradictions and humor, as well as copious references.
April 26, 2026
Ο ρεαλισμός είναι προϊόν της μεσαίας τάξης. Η «κυριαρχία του πολίτη επί της Αυλής «.
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