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

23.3 Marxism and realism
Unit 23 Narrative realism
Section 5 Narrative

Marxist criticism attaches great importance to questions of realism, and the progressive or reactionary nature of realism has been much debated in Marxist circles. (This issue has also been debated within feminist circles. See, for example, Coward (1986) for an overview.) For some critics, such as Georg Lukacs (1962), realist novels can present to readers a vision of a greater harmony in the face of capitalist fragmentation; in this way, these novels can spur people to action, since they point out the problems within the present system, exposing the tensions between the individual and society in such a way as to foreground points of prevailing ideological contradiction. Lukacs, indeed, championed the cause of realism against the rival claims of modernism, rejecting the latter on the grounds of its subjective, fragmentary and disconnected modes of representation, which he felt amounted to a retreat from society into pathological individualism. Bertolt Brecht, however, saw realist novels as a form of anaesthesia (Brecht, 1977). Readers become hypnotized by realist narrative and become uncritical of the values within the text and within the wider social system. As an alternative, he proposed a new form of art that would deny the reader the comforts of realist narrative and encourage him or her to act on the contradictions in capitalism. Lukacs is thus closer to the traditional view, and Brecht closer to the structuralist view of realism.