Realism

Pam Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134583768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. However, because realism is unavoidably tied up with the gnarly concept of 'reality' and 'the real', it has been one of the most widely debated terms in the New Critical Idiom series.
This volume offers a clear, reader-friendly guide to debates around realism, examining:
*ideas of realism in nineteenth-century French and British fiction
*the twentieth-century formalist reaction against literature's status as 'truth'
*realism as a democratic tool, or utopian form.
This volume is vital reading for any student of literature, in particular those working on the realist novel.

II
LITERARY REALISM
An Innovative Tradition

3
LITERARY REALISM
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
FRANCE

To move from the sustained critique of literary realism that I traced in Part I to the substantial body of positive writing on realism is to encounter a strikingly different view of the topic: there is not one unified form of realism but many. As with the term ‘romanticism’, quite distinctive national histories and artistic conventions can easily be overlooked when realism is invoked in an over-simplified way. French, Russian, British, and American traditions of realism, to name but four, all developed somewhat differently under the impact of diverse national cultures and social forces. (Becker 1963: 3–38 surveys the different national developments of realism in his Introduction and provides documents on the subject from a wide range of countries.) The achievements of realist writing can only be fully understood within the specific context in which it was produced. Within the compass of Part II I have space only to look at the intertwined histories of French and British realist fiction during the nineteenth century. This is usually regarded as the great age of realism and France is also seen as the country in which the realist novel genre was most consciously pursued, debated, acclaimed and denounced throughout the century.

As this suggests, realist writing has not always been perceived as a conservative form, offering its readers a soothing view of reality that accords with moral, social and artistic conventions. On the contrary, as the Russian critic and philosopher of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), has shown, the development of realism is propelled by radical experimentation with narrative technique. Bakhtin argues that the novel genre is essentially iconoclastic, subverting conventional literary forms and assimilating others: letters, diaries, journalism, fairy tale and romance. The history of literary realism is shaped by a protean restlessness and its dominant modes are those of comedy, irony and parody (Bakhtin 1981: 3–40). The Marxist critic of realism, György Lukács (1885–1971), also sees irony as inherent to realist form (Lukács [1914–15] 1978: 72–6). The novel genre undoubtedly gained popularity with a rapidly expanding bourgeois readership at a time when middle-class economic and political strengths were becoming dominant social forces, and by and large nineteenth-century novels tended to concern themselves with the values and life style of this class. However, the perspective offered in much nineteenth-century fiction was confrontational and critical rather than conciliatory. Bourgeois respectability, materialism and moral narrowness were the focus of ridicule more often than of praise. Moreover, as the century progressed, the novel continually widened the scope of its subject matter. As the critic Harry Levin says, ‘The development of the novel runs parallel to the history of democracy, and results in a gradual extension of the literary franchise’ (Levin 1963: 57). Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) in his classic study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, defines the central achievement of the development of realist writing from Homer to Virginia Woolf, as the ‘serious treatment of everyday reality, [and] the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter’ (Auerbach [1946] 1953: 491). Like most other major critics of realism, Auerbach sees the novel as the first literary form to develop a complex understanding of time as historical process and to find technical means within novelistic prose to represent this sense of temporality as it is experienced in individual lives.

Yet despite its innovatory energy, most historians of realism also stress its formal and thematic continuities with earlier and later literary forms. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt, for example, situates the realist novel within an empirical philosophical tradition stretching from John Locke (1632–1704) to Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and in a literary line from Cervantes (?1547–1616) to James Joyce (1882–1941) (Watt [1957] 1987: 21, 206, 292). Harry Levin sees the pictorial effect developed by Émile Zola (1840–1902) as the forerunner of cinematic art and he also includes Marcel Proust (1871–1922), usually associated with early modernism, as the fifth realist writer within the main tradition of French realism (Levin 1963: 327). The influence of previous literary styles and conventions is part of the context in which we need to understand realism, but it is also important to locate literary history itself within the wider processes of economic, commercial, political, and cultural change. A helpful way of thinking about this is to understand the practice of writing as taking place within a literary field, that is, within a cultural space in which each writer must position him or herself in terms of choices of style, genre, readership, past traditions and future reputation. (Bourdieu 1996 provides a very full historicized account of the functioning of the literary field in nineteenth-century France.) Clearly this literary field is multiply interconnected with the much broader social field that is the location of economic, cultural and political power. For example, in France for much of the nineteenth century, poetry was regarded as the most prestigious literary form. The art of poetry was consecrated by long association with the sacred and spiritual. So the successful practice of poetry was rewarded with the highest amount of cultural capital or prestige. Yet the financial rewards of poetry were relatively low, so aspiring poets tended to come predominantly from a class wealthy enough to provide independent means of support. In contrast, the novel as a genre was held in low esteem in the early part of the century but financial rewards could be significant. Entry into the profession of novel writing was reasonably open to talent and did not require, as poetry did, a long formal education in literary tradition. As the century progressed, the expansion of cheap forms of mass publication and increases in literacy continually shifted the dynamics of the literary field and the choices of position it afforded would-be writers.

IDEALISM AND CLASSICAL THEORIES OF ART

Within the literary field in France, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth century, realist writers almost inevitably perceived themselves as taking an oppositional stance towards idealism. In brief, whereas realism derives from an acceptance that the objects of the world that we know by means of our sensory experience have an independent existence regardless of whether or not they are perceived or thought about, idealism gives primacy to the consciousness, or mind or spirit that apprehends. This privileging of the non-corporeal as the ultimate source of reality begins in the classical world with the teachings of Plato (428/427BC–348/347BC) and Aristotle (384–322BC) which together constitute a pervasive and powerful tradition within western notions of knowledge and aesthetics. (Williams 1965: 19–56 discusses the influence of classical views of the relationship of art and reality from the Renaissance into modern times.)

At the centre of Plato’s philosophy is his concept of the Forms or Ideas. These he understands as eternal, transcendent realities that can only be directly comprehended by thought. Plato contrasts these Forms to the changeful, contingent world that constitutes our empirical existence. For example, we apprehend the notions of perfect justice and ideal beauty even though we never experience these phenomena in that perfection in our actual lives. Our knowledge of these ideals, therefore, Plato would argue, cannot derive from sensory information but rather comes from an intellectual intuition of the transcendent, universal Forms of Justice and Beauty. Platonist philosophy sees human beings as mediating between the two realms of the Ideal and the sensible. The human mind or soul can strive upwards and inwards towards an apprehension of the transcendent, incorporeal reality of the Forms, seeking union with an eternal Oneness that comprehends all Being. On the other hand, the physical instincts can obliterate these higher yearnings and human beings then live wholly within the limits of their biological nature or even degenerate into brutish creatures ruled by irrational passions and gross materialism. Plato entertained a poor opinion of artists as simply imitators of the sensible world which was itself only a poor imitation of the ideal Forms. Artistic representations for Plato were therefore at two removes from transcendent reality and in the Republic (360BC) he proposes that poets be excluded from the polis. Within the general currents of a Platonist tradition, however, as it became dispersed in western thought, the notion of spiritual apprehension of an ideal reality beyond the merely sensible world was very easily transmuted into a special claim for an artistic vision of perfection and timeless, universal truth.

Aristotelian thought rejects the mysticism of Platonic Forms. Aristotle was also more favourably inclined towards artistic representations, seeing imitation as central to the human capacity to learn. In the Poetics (350BC) he notes:

The general origin of poetry was due to two causes, each of them part of human nature. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation.…The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind,…the reason of the delight in seeing the pictures is that it is at the same time learning – gathering the meaning of things.
(Aristotle 1963: 8)

So for Aristotle, art, as imitation of the phenomenal world, is a form of knowledge linked to pleasure; it is not, as it is for Plato, a dangerous distraction from a higher transcendent reality. But Aristotle does somewhat complicate the way in which poets and artists fulfil their function as knowledge producers. Although he understands the sensible world as the primary reality, he distinguishes between particular phenomena and the universal categories to which we assign them as part of the abstract ordering that structures our knowledge of the world. So we recognise individuals as particular people but also know them as sharing attributes that constitute the universal definition ‘humanity’. Similarly with all else: we recognise particular things, from a specific outburst of grief to an individual daisy, and simultaneously understand them in general terms as partaking of the universal categories of ‘grief ’ or ‘emotion’ and ‘daisy’ or ‘flower’. Aristotle suggests that it is the poet’s responsibility to represent the universal not the particular. In this way the knowledge offered by art will have a general, principled application not a contingent one that changes from particular case to case:

The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary.…Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals whereas those of history are singular.
(Aristotle 1963:17)

I shall suggest in Part III that the tension between particular historical reality and universal reality within literary realism is the means by which it conveys its own form of knowledge about the world.

The intermingling through time of Platonic and Aristotelian thought produced a classical view of art as nature perfected and as an intimation of timeless ideals. From this perspective, literary works were valued to the extent that they seemed to offer universal and enduring truths rather than local or particular perceptions of the world. In France, neo-classicism, a return to what was perceived as the aesthetic rules of antiquity, became, by the eighteenth century, an exacting standard against which all creative works were judged. Deviation from classical decorum put any rebellious writer or artist beyond the pale of public approval. The Académie française, a literary academy established in 1634 to regulate the standards of the French language, was at the centre of the institutionalisation and policing of an inflexible framework of literary conventions that imposed an idealist view of art.

REALISM AND FRENCH HISTORY

Realism, with its overt adherence to the representation of historical time and of things as they are, however brutal or sordid, asserted a direct challenge to the system of rules governing aesthetic conventions in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Realist writers were not the first to oppose neo-classicism, however. An earlier generation of Romantic writers outraged public opinion and the Académie in the 1820s and 1830s. Most notable of these was the poet, novelist and dramatist, Victor Hugo (1802–85). The preface to his play Cromwell (1827) became, in effect, the manifesto of the French Romantic movement. French romaniticism evokes a heroic world of titanic struggle and rebellion against injustice but it also elaborates a sense of the writer as a visionary in quest of non-material ideals. This theme of rejecting the world for art was a formative influence on the art for art’s sake movement that developed more fully in France in the 1850s. If realist writers had perforce to position themselves in opposition to idealism as upheld by the Académie, they established a more complex relationship to romaniticism. Early realist writers, like Stendhal (1783–1842) and Balzac, stressed the more prosaic professionalism of the novelist rather than the writer’s role as visionary. Instead of the transcendental truth of idealism, French realists espoused the new authority of science with its disciplined observation of empirical reality. Yet realist writers were in sympathy with romantic writers’ rejection of classical decorum and their attitude of rebellion towards state authority and bourgeois materialism and respectability.

What is difficult for us now to grasp imaginatively is the intense politicisation of every aspect of French culture throughout its continually turbulent history for most of the nineteenth century. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was hailed by progressives in France and elsewhere, especially in England, as symbolising the beginning of a new era. The absolutist powers of the Monarchy and Church, twin pillars of the ancien régime, were to be swept away and the restrictive mental horizons of superstition and servility replaced by the Enlightenment ideals of rational democracy. Yet the new Republic lasted only until 1804 when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and led French armies triumphantly against the massed forces of European political reaction. The ideals of the Revolution became etched in the sacrifices and glories of Napoleon’s armies, raised largely by mass conscription that left no family in France untouched. Napoleon’s defeat by the European powers in 1815 brought the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

In the following decades, French national life was dominated by violent power struggles between monarchists and republicans, traditionalists and economic modernisers. In 1830, an insurrection in Paris ousted the unpopular Bourbon, Charles X. Louis-Philippe, a distant Bourbon, came to the throne on the promise of popular monarchy. He inculcated favour with the new wealthy middle class by initiating state support for railway companies and infrastructure, expansion of industry and the establishment of the Bourse as the financial exchange to promote speculative capitalism. Known as the bourgeois monarchy, the regime was bitterly denounced by both republicans and traditionalists as betraying the glory of France for the franc. Heroism and noble sacrifice had given way, it seemed, to opulent respectability. In 1848 political discontent erupted into violent protest, the king fled the capital, and a Provisional Government of republican politicians, writers and journalists was proclaimed. The Provisional Government hastily passed progressive measures like universal male suffrage and press liberties, and a proliferation of new journals, newspapers and clubs were founded in Paris and the provinces. Yet the new Republic faced economic catastrophe at home and reactionary hostility abroad. A conservative backlash in France allowed the nephew of Napoleon, auspiciously called Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and his ‘party of order’ to seize power. After a short, harshly repressed resistance by republicans, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte became Napoleon III in 1852. The brief Second Republic gave way to the Second Empire which was to last until 1871. (See Tombs 1996 for a clear account of the period; also Hobsbawm 1975a and 1975b; also Marx [1852] 1954 for his classic account of the coup d’état that established the second empire.)

French literary realism developed during the years of these political struggles and it is unsurprising that the writing is characterised by a complex consciousness of the multiple interactions of historical processes and forces upon the lives of individuals. The literary field in which realist novelists took up their positions as writers was thoroughly inter-penetrated by the partisan struggles of conflicting political affiliations. The insecurity of each new political regime ensured that censorship remained an active weapon against dissension, while the patronage of the court was extravagantly lavished on those writers who supported authority. Challenges to the consecrated literary values of classical decorum of style and lang...