Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

23.1 The traditional view of realism
Unit 23 Narrative realism
Section 5 Narrative

’Realism’ as a critical term is sometimes taken to signify a relationship between a text and reality that is felt to be immediate and direct. Examples of realism are typically chosen from genres such as ’the nineteenth-century novel’, ’the Hollywood film’ and ’popular fiction’. An alternative way of thinking about realism has developed within more recent critical theory, however, and that is to see it as marked out by the adoption of specific devices or formal techniques for producing a sense of the ’real’. Realism is thus a style that need not be considered to have any necessary reference to an external reality. It is possible, therefore, to make a distinction between realistic, commonly used to mean something like ’ close to how I see reality’ or ’life-like’, and realist, in the more technical sense of conforming to conventions for passing something off as real, so that even future-fantasy or science fiction could be seeing as drawing on conventions of realism stylistically or formally. Realistic is an evaluation of a piece of prose whereas realist is an assessment of the formal elements of a prose narrative.

23.1 The traditional view of realism

Realism is both the name of a literary movement involving primarily novels, which flourished between about 1830 and 1890 and included, for instance, George Eliot as one of the major British exponents, and a particular ’genre’ (see Unit 4) of writing in which certain formal features of realist texts are displayed. This was the view held by realist writers and many critics until recently. Within the traditional critical view it is possible to see realism in two ways: either as a direct imitation of the facts of reality, or as a special reconstruction of the facts of reality, which Eric Auerbach (1953) calls mimesis. In the first of these views of realism it is seen as a style of writing that acts as a simple window onto the world, mirroring events, almost as if the writing is a direct transcription of events in the real world. In mimesis, while the reader recognizes the vision of reality that is represented in the narrative, since it includes elements from external reality with which he or she is familiar, it is a more generalized or universalized version of reality than that which the reader habitually experiences, and it is this that is thought to be of most value. Mimesis does not simply describe ’a’ reality, but teachers readers about ’reality’ in general.

In Unit 4, Recognizing genre, we looked at the possibility of listing characteristics of particular genres. In the traditional view, the characteristics of realism revolve particularly around its subject matter and its message or moral intentions. The subject matter of realist novels is generally concerned with what is considered in the West to be ’ordinary life’ - centring on the home, on work and on human relationships. Most of the events described are not about heroic deeds but are, rather, the seemingly ordinary events within the lives of ordinary people, their emotions, their relationships, etc. One of realism’s aims is to present ordinary people as complex and multifaceted. Although realist texts are about individual characters and their lives, their message - often developed in terms of a secular, socially based morality - is supposed be true for all readers.¹

23.1.1 Language, reality and representation

In such an approach to realism, there is not generally much attention to the language of the text; in fact it is often seen to be non-self-reflexive language, that is, it does not draw attention to itself as language. Rather, the language is treated merely as a transparent medium for the transmission of the message, as if it were capable of simply reflecting reality. However, it is clear that the relation between texts, particularly literary texts, and reality is far more complex than simply reflection or idealization. As Leech and Short state: ’The myth of absolute realism arises from a mistaken attempt to compare two incomparable things: language and extralinguistic realities’ (1981, p. 152). Realist texts are, after all, only verbal constructs, and yet it is this essentially textual nature that is often ignored in traditional critical discussions of realism. It is for this reason that some critics have turned to analysing not the relation between words and the material world outside the text but the relations between words within the text.

23.1.2 How traditional realism shapes ways of reading

The traditional view, by which realist texts are assumed to describe the reality of a period or a place, is common in the criticism and teaching of texts, and is often tied into stereotypical views of the place of particular people in reality. Realism is firmly linked to stereotypical notions of authenticity, whereby certain experiences or individuals are deemed to be more ’real’, or closer to ’life’ than others. The so-called ’gritty’ realism of a novel about working-class life in the inner city, for example, is often considered to be more authentic than a close examination of refined middle-class behaviour in north London. Many texts are assumed to be realist for these stereotypical reasons. For example, novels written by women are often interpreted, when they are included on university courses, as though they were autobiographical (drawing upon the stereotypical notion that women are restricted to the private sphere and to descriptions of the personal, intimate intricacies of relationships); novels by working-class writers are read as documentary accounts (according to a stereotype in which working-class people see everyday reality as it really is but are unable to transcend the particularity of that view); or novels by Black writers are read as documenting personal struggles against oppression, rather than being concerned with larger, more universal issues that concern both white and Black people.