Realism and Power (Routledge Revivals)

Postmodern British Fiction

Alison Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317634928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1990, this study focuses on the subversive techniques of British postmodernist fiction and examines its challenge to Realist traditions, and the liberal humanist ideology behind it. Exploring the concept of literary postmodernism, and the strategies and philosophies to which it has given rise, Alison Lee investigates how they are developed in a selection of contemporary British novels, including Midnight's Children, Waterland, Flaubert's Parrot, and Lanark. Postmodernism is considered in relation to history, the visual and performing arts, popular culture, including advertising, music videos, and popular fiction, notably Stephen King's Misery.

A detailed and comprehensive study, this reissue of Realism and Power will be essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies.

Chapter One Realism and its discontents

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758022-1

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1967: 35

In Julian Barnes’ novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Geoffrey Braith-waite, a Flaubert enthusiast, tries to identify the “real” stuffed parrot which served as Flaubert’s inspiration for Loulou in Un coeur simple. Finding the true parrot, he feels, would be tantamount to finding the author’s true voice and, as Braithwaite discovers, this is a difficult task. Having found one authentic parrot, he is moved to feel he “had almost known the writer” (Barnes 1984: 16). Having found another, he feels rebuked: “The writer’s voice – what makes you think it can be located that easily?” (ibid. 22).

Braithwaite is only intermittently self-conscious about his attempt to find the “true” Flaubert through this and other relics of his life, although he is well aware that Flaubert “forbade posterity to take any personal interest in him” (Barnes 1984: 16). He recognizes that the past is “autobiographical criticism pretending to be parliamentary report” (ibid.: 90), and that the “truth” about Flaubert is as difficult to authenticate as are the various stuffed parrots. Nevertheless, Braithwaite is obsessed by the minutiae of Flaubert’s every movement. He tries to reconstruct the past to the extent that he tries to be both Flaubert and Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress. His attempt at scrupulous documentation sometimes extends to the ridiculous. Having read that Flaubert “watched the sun go down over the seas and declared that it resembled a large disc of redcurrant jam” (Barnes 1984: 92), Braithwaite writes to the Grocer’s Company to find out if an 1853 pot of Rouennais jam would have been the same color as a modern one. Assured that the color would have been very similar, he writes, if somewhat bashfully, “So at least that’s all right: now we can go ahead and confidently imagine the sunset” (Barnes 1984: 93). While his obsession with documentation is almost maniacal where Flaubert’s life is concerned, Braithwaite derides with confident irony those critics who try to treat fiction as documentary history:

I’ll remember instead another lecture I once attended, some years ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. It was given by a professor from Cambridge, Christopher Ricks, and it was a very shiny performance. His bald head was shiny; his black shoes were shiny; and his lecture was very shiny indeed. Its theme was Mistakes in Literature and Whether They Matter. Yevtushenko, for example, apparently made a howler in one of his poems about the American nightingale. Pushkin was quite wrong about the sort of military dress worn at balls. John Wain was wrong about the Hiroshima pilot. Nabokov was wrong – rather surprising this – about the phonetics of the name Lolita. There were other examples: Coleridge, Yeats and Browning were some of those caught out not knowing a hawk from a handsaw, or not even knowing what a handsaw was in the first place.

(Barnes 1984: 76)

The point of this is that if “the factual side of literature becomes unreliable, then ploys such as irony and fantasy become much harder to use” (ibid.: 77). In other words, the literariness of the text is dependent upon the veracity of the facts.

Interestingly, the novel as a whole plays with precisely this notion. Braithwaite accumulates a vast amount of information about Flaubert, but this knowledge only makes him Flaubert’s parrot. For Félicité in Un coeur simple, the parrot Loulou has mystical, religious connotations. Finding the “real” parrot, however, will not give Braithwaite any mystical insight into either Flaubert or his fiction. The facts do not lead, as he hopes they will, to truth. Flaubert’s Parrot uses the Realist convention of historical documentation in order to give the novel an illusion of reality. It does, after all, contain references to real people – Gustave Flaubert, Enid Starkie, Christopher Ricks – and places – Rouen, Trouville, Croisset. That these people exist or existed is verifiable in the “Ricksian” sense. However, they exist in the novel not as objective facts, but as determined by the fictional Braithwaite’s perception of them. Indeed, they become fictional constructs, both because of this, and because they are framed within the covers of a novel. Through metafictional techniques the novel creates levels of fiction and “reality” and questions the Realist assumption that truth and reality are absolutes. Flaubert’s Parrot is typical of contemporary metafictional texts in that, while it challenges Realist conventions, it does so, paradoxically, from within precisely those same conventions. Metafiction often contains its own criticism, and the novels which play with Realist codes criticize, as this one does, their own use of them. More generally, they call into question the basic suppositions made popular by nineteenth-century Realism.

The Realist movement endorsed a particular way of looking at art and life as though there was a direct correspondence between the two. The critical method, then, involved charting the similarities and differences between experiential reality and the artist’s transcription of it, assuming, of course, that experiential reality was common to all. Geoffrey Braithwaite and “Christopher Ricks” in Flaubert’s Parrot are in this sense Realists. In fact, however, Realism has little to do with reality. It is, rather, a critical construct which developed in a particular social and ideological context. Nevertheless, some manifestations of the Realist movement still have currency, particularly, as Flaubert’s Parrot suggests, the notion that art is a means to truth because the artist has a privileged insight into a common sense of what constitutes “reality.” In a sense, even Geoffrey Braithwaite’s touristy enthusiasm is the result of this suspect belief. His example, however, is followed by all those similar enthusiasts who look for Michael Henchard’s house in Dorchester or Romeo and Juliet paraphernalia in Verona. Recently, the English National Trust decided to refashion the Suffolk landscape to make it resemble Constable’s painting The Hay wain, and a series of huge timbers found in the River Stour have become news items because they may be from the boat that inspired Constable’s Boat Building Near Flatford Mill. All of these are examples of a fascination with Realism.

As a literary movement,¹ Realism was first formulated in mid-nineteenth-century France, although it soon gained currency in England and the rest of Europe. The term first appears in France in 1826 when a writer in Mercure Français comments that “this literary doctrine, which gains ground every day and will lead to faithful imitation not of the masterworks of art but of the originals offered by nature, could very well be called realism. According to some indications it will be the literature of the 19th century, the literature of the true” (Wellek 1966: vol. 4:1).

There is no formal manifesto of Realism in the way that the prefaces to the 1802 and 1805 editions of the Lyrical Ballads set the scope and limits of English Romanticism. However, a conjunction of publications and events in France in the mid-1850s made Realism a topic for often heated debate:

It was in 1855 that the painter Courbet placed the sign “Du Réalisme” over the door of his one man show. In 1856 Edmond Duranty began a short-lived review called Réalisme, and in the following year Champfleury, an enthusiastic supporter of Courbet and the new literature, brought out a volume of critical discussions entitled Le Réalisme. The term was launched though its meaning was still to be defined.

(Becker 1963: 7)

In England, Thackeray was called “chief of the Realist school” in Fraser’s in 1851 (Stang 1961: 148), and an 1853 article in Westminster Review discussed Balzac in association with Realism (Becker 1963: 7). The Oxford English Dictionary cites volume four of Ruskin’s Modern Painters as first using the term “realism” in 1856. It is clear, then, that by the mid-1850s Realism had become topical either as a “rallying cry or a term of disparagement” (Hemmings 1974: 162).

The theoretical premise of Realism is that art should eschew the “idealist metaphysics” (Becker 1963: 6) of Romanticism, and portray instead “things as they really are, in the sense of portraying objectively and concretely the observable details of actual life” (Kaminsky 1974: 217). This apparently simple dictate creates such innumerable difficulties that it has become a commonplace that Realism is one of the most problematic of terms. One of the major problems is that the Realists appear to have wanted to create a formula for the literal transcription of reality into art. This very premise is contradictory since, as soon as there exists a frame for reality, anything that is within that frame ceases to be “reality” and becomes artifact. A good example of this problem is illustrated by Magritte’s painting The Human Condition I (1934). Within the painting is a painting on an easel which overlaps a landscape seen through a window. The painting-within-the-painting is an exact continuation of the view, and so it appears that there are two levels: the “real” view and the painted copy. As Robert Hughes points out in The Shock of the New:

the play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of mind. We know that if we moved the easel, the view through the window would be the same as the one shown on the painting within the painting; but because the whole scene is locked in the immobility and permanence of a larger painting, we cannot know it.

(Hughes 1980: 247)

Because the “real” view is framed within a painting, it ceases to be real and becomes instead an imaginative construct. Even the very medium itself is not transparent, and therefore prevents any possibility of art mirroring reality. Indeed, Linda Nochlin comments that no matter how objective the artist’s vision is, the visible world must be changed in order to translate it on to the flat surface of the canvas: “The artist’s perception is therefore inevitably conditioned by the physical properties of paint and linseed no less than by his knowledge and technique – even by his choice of brush-strokes – in conveying three-dimensional space and form on to a two-dimensional picture plane” (Nochlin 1976: 15).

The nineteenth century, of course, was not the first to concern itself with the relationship of life and art. M. H. Abrams, in The Mirror and the Lamp, points out that the “mimetic orientation – the explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects in the universe – was probably the most primitive aesthetic theory” (1953: 8). Plato banishes the poet from the Republic (10: 606E), because his art is thrice removed from the truth (10: 595C): “painting and imitation generally carry out their work far from the truth and have to do with that part within us that is remote from the truth, and that the two arts are companions and friends of nothing wholesome or true” (10: 602C). That the poet deals in untruths is further compounded because he imitates things whose essence he knows nothing about, and does so in such a way as to delude (10: 602C) and corrupt good citizens (10: 605A). Plato’s reasons for his mistrust of the poet are social rather than aesthetic, and nineteenth-century Realism tends to be closer to Aristotelian mimesis than Platonic imitation. However, Plato’s mistrust of literature as a form of lying is echoed in the nineteenth century, and is related to the Realist and Naturalist desire to make literature conform to so-called “neutral” scientific laws and “objective” historical documentation.

In The Function of Mimesis and its Decline, John D. Boyd, S.J. writes: “What organic union there is in the Western critical tradition of poetry’s needed realism and autonomy is largely derived from Aristotle” (1968: 18). However, Boyd distinguishes between Aristotelian “realism” as a search into human action, and the “vogue since the nineteenth century of applying the word to literature that deals largely with techniques akin to the photographic” (ibid.: 24). As this suggests, for Aristotle, as for Plato, the poet is an imitator. The imitation, however, is, as Aristotle suggests in Poetics, of “men who are doing something” (2: 48al) rather than of shadows of truth. Primarily, for Aristotle, the poet is a creator. He does not merely mirror reality, but instead creates highly structured plots (7: 51al6; 50b21) not about what has happened but about “what might happen and what is possible according to probability or necessity” (9: 51a36). Within the conditions of the probable and the necessary, the poet has some creative choices about the subject of his imitation. He or she must always imitate “one of the three aspects of things: either as they were or are, or as men say they are and they seem to be, or as they ought to be” (25: 60b6). According to Aristotle, then, the poet is a fiction maker, not an historian. Poetry is, in fact, more serious than history, since while poetry deals with universals, history deals with each thing for itself (9: 51a36). Thus Aristotle is less concerned with documentation than with artistry: “it is less serious for a painter not to know that a female deer has no horns than to represent one inartistically” (25: 60b23). For painters as for writers, the mimetic issue has never really disappeared.²

In Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, the novel is described as a genre which should be democratic in subject-matter and objective in style:

a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his sack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road in which the puddle lies, and still more the inspector of roads and highways who lets the water stand there and the puddle form.

(Stendhal 1830: 365–6)

The Goncourt brothers, in the preface to Germinie Lacerteux, were equally insistent about the all-inclusiveness of the novel: “Living in the nineteenth century, in a time of universal suffrage, democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what we called ‘the lower classes’ did not have a right to the Novel” (1963: 118). Their “democracy,” like that of the other exponents of Realism, purported to embrace not only the lower classes, but also those “to which the past century gave that broad and encompassing name, Humanity” (Goncourt 1963: 119). Thus, the province of the novel expands to include not only the drawing room, but also the ordinary, the ugly, and the low. Whatever, in fact, can be observed is a fit subject for the novel. In this particular aspect of Realism, there is some correspondence between theory and fiction. This is often, particularly in English novels of the period, not the case. Many of the novels, however, make explicit comments, either in prefaces or within the text, about the use of characters and situations drawn from everyday life. George Eliot in Adam Bede, for example, begins her chapter “In ...