Realisms and Beauty

Here’s a philosophical problem that continually plagues me as a writer:

Is the primary aesthetic goal of a work of art, specifically in this case literary works of art such as the short story or novel, (a) to accurately portray a feeling or (b) to make the audience feel?

Let’s expand and define:

The portrayal of the private, emotional life of a fictional character is certainly an, if not the principle, aim of literary fiction. The writer plunks an invented character into some situation and explores that character’s experience—inner and outer. The character becomes a sort of virtual field (or virtual mind) to whom and upon and within which this experience occurs, analagous, say, to the two-dimensional action space of a painting.

Accuracy of the portrayal of this inner experience, what we might call its 'psychological realism,' is a quality often and widely (though certainly not universally) admired (as, of course, is how well-realized a world the writer depicts and how compelling a situation s/he creates: what we might call its 'narrative realism'). How truly human does this character seem? How well does the writer present the fullness of this character's interior life and his/her emotional engagement with the given situation?

But is this all? No.

In the classic formulation, this imitation of life serves to bring about an experience of catharsis in the audience. This is the purpose of tragedy: "There but for the grace of the gods (or fate or serendipity or overcoming my own flaws or whatever) go I."

Aristotle identifies the emotions tragedy produces in its audience. In summary strokes, tragedy is the depiction of the downfall of a noble hero due either to some flaw (hamartia) in his nature (e.g., pride) or, certainly in the older tragedians, to the actions of the gods. Feelings of disappointment, guilt, anger, resentment, shame, etc. are the sorts of feelings that might be depicted in the tragic hero, and the lifelikeness of their depiction is part of the art of the writer.

But, for Aristotle, these are not the same sorts of feelings the tragic work produces in its audience. The purpose/aim of a tragic work of art is to arouse the emotions of fear and pity in the audience. As the audience, we fear for the tragic hero. Though he does not recognize it, we know he is heading for a fall. And we pity him because we see aspects of ourselves in him. Once we come to this realization, we are able to overcome the same sort of hubris that might very well bring us low.

But, and this is the point, the depicted emotions are not the same as the emotions aroused in the audience. The audience's emotions are reactive, responsive to those of the tragic hero (and, of course, his plight). Sympathetic, if you will.

This helps frame the issue for me: Does the accuracy and, let's say, poignancy of the depiction of the nobility of the hero and his/her situation, the nature of his/her flaw, and the violence of his/her downfall determine the nature and quality of the audience's reaction? Is there a direct causal relation between the verisimilitude of the psychological and narrative realism and the nature and quality of the sympathetic emotions evoked from the audience? The closer our identification with the hero the more profound our catharsis?

Again: As the writer is my primary concern the perfection of my depiction of the narrative, and more specifically the psychological, realism or should I focus principally on how I want the audience to feel upon reading the narrative?

Some might say there isn't any real difference. Just write well and let the audience respond how it will.

I want readers to identify with my characters. I want them to feel sympathy for my characters' predicaments and plights. I am less concerned with whether they like a particular character than that they find her interesting/intriguing. I want them to experience a character's complexity—emotional and otherwise. To this end, my aim is akin to that of realism, both narrative and psychological.

(Aside: Thesis: I go beyond mere realism(-s) if I am able to depict a unique situation or a portray a new, or even fuller, emotional consciousness. But that's a point for another day.)

But this begs the main question. It is not just through literal, realistic depictions of situations or inner states of consciousness or even physical reactions that writers reach and, indeed, affect the emotions of their readers. Rather, it is primarily through techniques of persuasion.

As the writer, I want to show you how the overarching power of love can fulfill a life's course and make you feel the sadness of a missed chance at true love. (Love in the Time of Cholera). I want to show you how a selfish, adulterous act can be unwittingly cruel to an underserving character and can, in fact, destroy your own life—so don't do it! (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina). I want to show you how religious belief can have a positive/negative impact on your life and, in fact, on society in general and persuade you to convert your lifestyle. (Brothers Karamazov, Origin of the Brunists) I want to portray the presence of evil in the world in all its multifaceted, larger-than-life-and-death enormity and terror and leave you in awe of its abject beauty and power. (Blood Meridian, Omensetter's Luck) I want to show you the power that unseen conspiratorial forces exercise over our daily affairs and make you feel that perhaps it's reasonable to be afraid, very afraid—paranoid even. (Gravity's Rainbow, and A-game Pynchon) I want to show you how certain political/social/economic situations are manifestly unjust and ultimately untenable and move you to want to change them. (Disgrace, and anything from early Coetzee) I want to show you that fascism is a bad thing so you'll recognize its symptoms in yourself and be repulsed by its very presence. (Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Auto-da-Fe)

Affecting catharsis. Scaring. Shaming. Educating. Moralizing. Sermonizing. Proselytizing. Propagandizing. These goals are not different in kind, merely in degree.

And how do I achieve these types of ends? Rhetoric, affective language, figurative language—the tools of aesthetics. Blatant or subtle manipulations. The realisms of discursive language—psychological and narrative—are, on this view, subsidiary concerns.

Granted, situational poignancy and its accurate depiction can take us partially there, can move us—but only to a certain extent. It takes persuasive power to amplify its effect and make it stick. And these same techniques can either "beautify" or "ruin" the work. That is to say, the techniques of beautification can quite easily be used for purposes other than aesthetic.

Therein lies the dilemma. And the delicate balancing act of/for the writer/artist.

I know this post has been longish and a bit rambling, and I apologize. Yet it has helped me clarify the problem I began with: As a writer, should I be more concerned about trying to keep my characters' actions (and emotions) true to (that character's) experience as I've envisaged it or should I constantly be keeping in mind how I hope to move my audience by my depiction? Should I be more concerned about the realism of the piece or its aesthetics? Which is more important, the verisimilitude or the message? The depiction or the rhetoric?

There is a difference, an important one. Please feel free to weigh in.There are reasoned approaches and well-thought-out positions in both directions on this issue. I'd like to hear from you.

I don't think I'm any closer to a resolution of this issue as a writer, but I do think I have a better handle on what a resolution must entail. Of course, it might turn out that my formulation of the problem is faulty and there's no real issue here. If so, how might that look? Or maybe there's something other than emotionality at stake?

Realisms

Mainly because I'm dense—a slow-learner, if you will—I want to try to get my head around a term that gets thrown around in discussing fiction and literary criticism (and in other contexts, too, but they're not the ones that concern me just now). And that term? Realism.

In his now infamous broadside against Zadie Smith's White Teeth, James Wood called out a trend he called 'hysterical realism.' By that, he seemed to indict the sort of fiction that allows too much of the noise of the world into its cocoon. You find it, presumably, in William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, William Vollmann, and others of its chief offenders. One thinks, too, of Tom Wolfe and his ilk. It's a 'the world is too much with us' sort of concept where the 'news of the world' takes precedence over the 'news of the soul.'

Smith riposted in the NYRB, in an article comparing two recent novels, Netherland and Remainder (both of which I've reviewed here), with a stab at something she labeled 'lyrical realism'.

Once you start qualifying a term like 'realism' you begin splitting into factions and you start losing focus on the substantive issue. Both Wood and Smith are arguing FOR realism, they just differ over which flavor of realism they prefer. Realism is a sort of catch-all term that can mean so many different things it has become virtually meaningless. Arguments shoot by each in the night without ever really touching because the antagonists hold two different views of realism. The debate often is really over what kind of realism or what meaning to give it.

Below, I've tried to sort out some of the things that go by the name 'realism'. The following is by way of anatomy, then, rather than polemic.

First, the term realism is used to describe a period or genre of literature. Thus, we might describe the works of Balzac or Dickens and their ilk as realism—19th Century, French, English, whatever. This category is generally for literary historians. On the genre view, realism is opposed to fantasy or allegory or myth. Or, we might say how much we admire Raymond Chandler's gritty noir realism, referring, for example, to the seaminess of the world he depicts and the sordidness of his characters. On this view, realism is opposed to a presumed sugarcoating of things in, for example, bourgeois fiction.

Another use of the term realism has to do with with the traditional view stemming from the work of Aristotle. It goes by other names such as Mimesis or verisimilitude. On this view, it is the world to which the text points that alone is real. This is the most obvious, most common usage of the term. It is analogous to what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth, or the propositional form we find in Tractarian Wittgenstein. I believe the term 'hysterical realism' refers to an extreme adherence to this form: the perceptual world of table and chairs intrudes too noisily on the novel.

On yet a third view, it is capturing the character's consciousness of his or her own world that alone is real. The 'form of life' (to borrow and perhaps bastardize yet another Wittgensteinian term) the text embodies or portrays alone is real. The perceptual/psychological/emotional/ethical/social being whose expression just is the text alone is real. Stated another way, the form of life inside of whose head/being the text transpires is what is realistic. We may liken this to the philosophical coherentist view of truth. The character, on this view, has no purchase on any truth about the world. In fact, s/he may misperceive his/her world and that is what is realistic about the work. The character's attitude, or stance, with respect to the world is what matters. This is what is behind the privileging of 'free indirect style' by such public critics as James Wood.

It is between these two views that a significant polarity has arisen: the 'world is too much with us' school (The Recognitions is ur-text here, with a little 'u') vs. the 'navel [sic] observatory' school (contemplative narrative where everything takes place in the head, so to speak, of the character(s); the 'yes, Virginia, there is a soul or the remnants thereof' school; Augie March is the ur-text here).

These three views are not the only ones, however; though to hear some of the proponents you would think they had exhausted the richness of the term realism.

In an earlier post, I cited Maurice Shroder's view that the novel alone is the most realistic literary art form because "protagonists succeed only because they have let fall their illusions and their pride. Such a fall, in a novel, is a happy one, since it represents the completion of that educational process with which the novel deals, an education into the realities of the material world and of human life in society." Thus, realism is an essential characteristic, perhaps the essential characteristic, of the novel and describes the arc of the character's (whatever his attitude) coming to grips/terms with his/her world (however conceived).

A further view of realism holds that it is the reader's response to the text that alone is real. Roland Barthes exploded the myth of Balzacian realism in his monumental S/Z. As Barthes says, the reader is no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. There are many versions of reader response theory, but the point is that it is what the text implies alone that is real. Thus, all men are mortal; Gatsby is quite a man, but a man nonetheless; so, draw your own conclusions. Realism relates strictly to the communicative effect of the text. Philosophically, this flows from the deconstructionists' notion that the text is an empty signifier [where signifier + signified = sign]. It is, in effect, a sociological realism: what is real is the way the text is emblematic of [feminist, queer, Marxist, Darwinian, (insert your pet theory here)] theory, for theory alone is real.

A more analytic view is that it is the text alone that is real. William Gass is the most vocal proponent of this view. The reality of the text just is the words on the page. The text thinks the world. Once published, the text becomes a historical object capable of not only being acted upon (as in reader response theory) but in acting upon the world. One thinks here of feedback loops in cybernetic theory. Not only does art imitate life, life, too, at times imitates art. It is not the world which the text depicts, nor the character's attitude toward that world that is real; to get at what is real, don't focus on what is represented, rather focus on the picture itself and its aspects. I'd better let Gass speak for himself:

"..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about..."[Wm. H. Gass, "The Book as a Container of Consciousness," in Finding a Form, pp. 348,351]

"[T]he philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely taken its first steps, Philosophers continue to interpret novels as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak from, middens from which may be scratched important messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for content, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of viewing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways of refusing experience. This is one of them.

So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul, or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No distinction is presently made between laws and rules of inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds. The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? ... No search is made for first principles, none for rules, and in fact all capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. William Gass, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life, pp. 25-26

"To see the world through words means more than merely grasping it through gossipacious talk or amiable description. Language, unlike any other medium, I think, is the very instrument and organ of the mind. It is not the representation of thought, as Plato believed, and hence only an inadequate copy; but it is thought itself. ...Literature is mostly made of mind; and unless that is understood about it, little is understood about it." William Gass, "Finding a Form" pp. 34-36 in Finding A Form.

Finally, there is something we might call the Platonic view: it is the ideal Form to which the text aspires (call it the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, the True) and which it attempts to embody that alone is real. Realism (often mislabeled 'idealism') is seeing through the text to the Ideal Form it seeks to embody. To the extent the text liberates us from the world of the senses (i.e, shows us the way out of the Cave) and leads us into the ideal world of Forms, it is Realistic.

Well, that pretty much exhausts my anatomy of the uses of the term realism. There may be more. I suppose there are any number of hybrid types—ethical realism, theological realism, moral realism, journalistic realism, etc., etc. If so, as they relate to fiction and literary criticism, please enlighten me.

From this brief foray, I think we can safely say that what the various views of realism have in common is an attempt to describe the complex relation/interaction between the text and the world.

My own view of realism, however non-practical for the practice of criticism, is probably closer to, though not coextensive, with Gass's: It is reality alone which is real and it is this reality which produces the text, just as nature somehow produces consciousness. The text is a model of consciousness, linguistic in form. It not only represents an awareness of the reality that produced it, it is an awareness of the reality that produced it. The evolution of consciousness is aligned with the continual perceptual probing of the world and retreating from it: it is adaptive. Texts are, likewise, an adaptational form. Texts are evolving probings of and retreats from the reality from which they flow—whether it is the human agent that pens them and the humanity of which s/he is a part or the noisy, intrusive physical world they are made to mirror. The text is part and parcel of reality, a feature of it that must be taken into account—especially to the extent that it is 'aware of' reality—by all subsequent texts. For Gass, the text thinks the world. To my mind, it is the self-reflexive world that thinks the text, and any realism about texts must take this into account. The text is Foam.

Of course, my view is relatively unformed (and possibly unprecedented—I don't know) and will require much further thought and research to articulate. As I continue to review novels on this site, I plan to try to apply it—if possible.

I am left, however, with one last question: if these views are the forms of realism, what, we might ask, is its opposite? That, as they say, is a question for another day.

That Little Extra

"Truth, Convention, Realism": This is the title of the last chapter of How Fiction Works by James Wood. Here, he takes on the argument that "realism" in fiction is simply another genre one of whose chief proponents, he says, is the novelist Rick Moody.

Wood, too, is impatient with what he calls "commercial realism"—"intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling," the sort of conventional writing that gives us sufficient details to convince us that what is going on in the novel is really happening. Indeed, "[c]ommercial realism has cornered the market, has become the most powerful brand in fiction. We must expect that this brand will be economically reproduced, over and over again...when a style decomposes, flattens itself down into a genre, then indeed it does become a set of mannerisms and often pretty lifeless techniques." (p. 175) It does not give us "the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced." The conventionally realistic novel can be translated into film with little or no loss of content. Styles are interchangeable. Voice is absent.

He wants to draw a distinction between conventional fiction and realism as he would like to see it. Certainly, conventional fiction uses the techniques of realism as derived from Flaubert, but they are flat, efficient, merely utilitarian. Dead. Something more is needed.

Wood takes a quick detour from the thread of this argument to quarrel some more with Barthes and Gass. They move from the argument against convention to the charge that "fictive convention can therefore never convey anything real" (p. 176). Wood feels this move is unwarranted. It is never a question of reference—after all, fiction, by definition, has abandoned all claim on reference. Rather, it is what Wood calls "mimetic persuasion": "it is the artist's task to convince us that this could have happened. Internal consistency and plausibility then become more important than referential rectitude And this task will of course involve much fictive artifice and not mere reportage." (p. 179) This, I presume, is a shot at Tom Wolfe's 'billion-footed beast'.

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin...the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. (pp. 186-87)

The novelist is forever seeking after new forms to capture the substance of life. That, it seems to me, is the novel's vitality. It is also trying to capture or portray something about human life—call it meaning, truth, reality, lifeness, or whatever. My own qualm (as someone with philosophical training) with the use of such words as 'truth' (see also here) and realism in relation to fiction aside, Wood is on to something here. It is the "studiedly irrelevant" detail that works for him, such as Orwell's watching a condemned man walking toward the gallows swerving to avoid a puddle.

There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is aways more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ...the margin of surplus itself feels like life, feels in some curious way like being alive. (pp. 68-69)

Again, the devil is in the details. My own impatience with Wood's effort in this thought-provoking and book has to do with his failure to show how the details, beyond providing a means to understand characters, add up in fiction to make a compelling story. Roughly, stories provide something for us. Whether it is organization, order, form, structure, meaning, closure, WISDOM, or whatever I'm not prepared to say. But neither is he. This is why we keep reading stories and why they keep moving us. Sure, the brush-strokes are nice, the details (essential or superfluous) persuading us of the lifelikeness of the illusion (of the character)—and the raging debate here is whether the critic should focus chiefly on the way in which the illusion is presented (Gass) or on the illusion itself and its congruence with reality perceived or imagined (Wood). But stories wrap up, even Chekhov's; they end. And they begin as well. From our reading of Wood, however, we have no way of understanding how they get from the latter to the former. That is to say, how fiction really works.

The Devil Is in the Details

In paragraph 49 of his How Fiction Works, James Wood gives us a peek inside his skull: "I confess to an ambivalence about detail in fiction. I relish it, consume it, ponder it. ...But I choke on too much detail, and find that a distinctively post-Flaubertian tradition fetishes it: the over-aesthetic appreciation of detail seems to raise, in a slightly different form, that tension between author and character we have already explored. If the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style, it can no less be told as the rise of detail."

We are now reaching the soul of his book. Wood is beginning to distinguish himself from two giants of contemporary criticism: Roland Barthes and William Gass.

Of detail, there can be too much or too little, according to Wood; but what it must never do is explain its presence. Never apologize, never explain. Never comment. Let the detail itself illuminate the character, even if it is superfluous. These gratuitous bits are "reality effects" (Barthes's term for the illusion of reality fiction delivers). Wood agrees, but only up to a metaphysical point: "fictional reality is indeed made up of such 'effects', but realism can be an effect and still be true. It is only Barthes's sensitive, murderous hostility to realism that insists on this false division." Details are more than mere effects, more than the furniture of the narrative. They somehow give us the truth.

William Gass, another detail-oriented realism-murdering critic, takes the hit of over-aestheticization in his essay "The Test of Time," quoting from Thoreau:

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. (Walden, chapter 9, "The Ponds")

We cannot say with certainty what will live, and survival, by itself is no guarantee of quality; but I think we can say something about what is deserving. Thoreau's two unsimple sentences put me out on that pond, in prose as clear as its water is. ... There's no moment too trivial, too sad, too vulgar, too rinky-dink to be unworthy of such recollection, for even a wasted bit of life is priceless when composed properly or hymned aright...

Gass is saying that it is not the 'what' of fiction, but the 'how' that allows the work to stand the test of time. For Wood, it is not so much the 'how' as the "what and only the what' and the 'how much'.

De gustibus non est disputandum

James Wood ends the third chapter of How Fiction Works with this observation: "Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ...The artifice lies in the selection of detail."

You've gotta' love that 'tattoo of randomness.'

R.I.P. Alain Robbe-Grillet

We take a break from our reading of Wood's book to note the death of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French novelist who had some things to say pertinent to our discussion here. Below are quotes from his essay 'From Realism to Reality' in For A New Novel:

All writers believe they are realists. ... Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers by certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority—if not all—of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create "the real." ... Realism is the ideology which each brandishes against his neighbor, the quality which each believes he possesses for himself alone

...the novel is not a tool at all. It is not conceived with a view to a task defined in advance. It does not serve to set forth, to translate things existing before it, outside it. It does not express, it explores, and what it explores is itself.

Realism [according to Western academic criticism]...merely requires from the novel that it respect the truth. The author's qualities would be, chiefly, perspicacity in observation and the constant concern for plain speaking.

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation.

[As a novelist] I do not transcribe, I construct. This had been even the old ambition of Flaubert: to make something out of nothing, something that would stand alone, without having to lean on anything external to the work; today this is the ambition of the novel as a whole.

In this new realism, it is therefore no longer verisimilitude that is at issue. The little detail which "rings true" no longer holds the attention of the novelist, in the spectacle of the world or in literature; what strikes him—and what we recognize after many avatars in his writings—is more likely, on the contrary, the little detail that rings false.