Literary Realism

I have some problems with Scott McLemee's recent article on "literary realism" in the July 30 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. While I would agree with the article's contention that, given the sociological and political approach exemplified by the realist writers McLemee discusses, it is surpising that academic critics do not give more attention to these writers, the reason that it is surprising is that the approach taken by most of these critics is itself emphatically sociological and political. On the other hand, it is not suprising that critics interested in the specifically literary and aethetic accomplishments of fiction would shy away from such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell. Their work has little aesthetic appeal in the first place, although, to be fair to them, these writers really did not take up the writing of fiction for its aesthetic potential, anyway.

I'm not quite clear why McLemee chose to focus on these particular writers if the object is to bring some attention to "realism" as a literary mode. The realists in American fiction are writers like James, Twain, Crane, and Edith Wharton, or the "colorists" such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. Lewis, Sinclair, Farrell, and Theodore Dreiser are really "naturalists," a further development of realism to be sure, but one that is inherently programmatic, that is to say, it is an approach that deliberately uses fiction to illustrate larger ideas about, in this case, the biological determinants of human nature and the clash of the biological and the social. Most of the naturalists would be more accurately called commentators or polemicists rather than artists. Again, since the overwhelming trend in academic criticism is to view literature as, at best, an opportunity for polemics and social analysis, it is perhaps correct to say that these naturalist writers are unduly neglected, but if literary study was still mostly about literature these writers would quite rightly get little atttention.

I think we should preserve a distinction between the kind of social realism discussed in Scott McLemee's article and "literary realism" more concretely understood. If analysis of social conditions is what you want from fiction, then probably social realism is where you should go. Realism as an aesthetic strategy, however, requires that both writers and readers first of all put aside the consideration of social conditions and political debates. Well-conceived and -crafted literary realism might finally lead the reader to reflect on the state of society or on political ideas, but this would be a secondary effect, a consequence of the fact that the writer has taken a particular aesthetic strategy--to create an illusion of "real life" sufficiently compelling that the reader is willing to put aside the knowledge that it's constructed, finally just words on a page--and allowed it to discover the integrity of its own internal logic, to go where it will. If social analysis is what the writer wants to provide instead, then that's what we'll get. But it won't be something that could plausibly be called literary art. And no argument is going to convince me, at any rate, that writers like Sinclair and Farrell (or for that matter Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) are anything but polemicists and would-be social philosophers.

As it happens, at least one of the writers to whom McLemee refers, Dreiser, managed to produce work that can be regarded as literary art, even though it's clear enough in reading his books that he had the ambition to be a social philosopher as well. But Dreiser is a good example of a writer whose instincts for fiction to some extent subverted his more schematic intentions. (Flannery O'Connor is another example.) Although Dreiser was surely not subtle, his narratives have a power that comes much less from any insights he may have had into the grinding away of the social machinery than from the impression his novels create that they have proceeded from their original arresting images--a young girl from the provinces on her way to start a new life in the city, a family of itinerant Christian proselytizers plying their trade on the streets--to dramatize the possiblities inherent in those images with great amplitude and discernment, the narrative unfolding in what finally seems the only way it could have developed. Both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy seem "real" in that they are faithful to the particulars their subjects already--naturally--seem to possess, their worlds and their characters built up out of accumulated details that give them credibility as fictions, no matter how readily we are tempted to interpret them as vehicles for the author's social commentary.

Something like this has to be true of any realist fiction that makes a claim on us as fiction rather than an excuse for dubious political or cultural analysis--and the latter would have to be dubious because making up stories is first of all not a very efficient way of engaging in such analysis and because there's nothing inherent in the act of writing fiction that gives the writer any particular wisdom to convey about politics or social arrangements. Again, an artfully composed work of realist fiction might provoke in readers some reflection on these topics, but it would be the result of the work's success in literary terms, its capacity to stand up to subsequent readings because of its aesthetic interest. Otherwise it is inevitable that "realist" works such as The Jungle or Babbitt or Studs Lonigan are ultimately going to be of concern mostly to the kinds of historians who, as McLemee laments, "treat realist fiction strictly for its documentary value" and who, in the words of one scholar McLemee quotes, "[l]ike strip miners,. . .rampage through texts, interested in only the most obvious social references." Unless it can be shown that books like these work first of all as skillfully shaped and convincing examples of literary art (and I admit I don't think this can be shown), they will in the future attract few readers other than these kinds of historians.

If you want to see a good illustration of the kind of distinction I have in mind, compare the stories of Chekhov with those of his contemporary Maxim Gorky. Chekhov's fiction reveals a great deal about the state of Russian society in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but we still read these stories because they're splendid examples of the artistic possibilities of a certain kind of realism. Gorky's stories will perhaps tell you something about a Russian radical's attempt to change this society through fiction, but only if you're able to actually read them as something other than propaganda--that is, if you're even able to read them at all.

One final issue. In his conclusion, McLemee discusses a current scholar's attempt to show that "a careful reading of the American writers reveals a stronger influence that issued from an incongruous source: the deep current of literary romance, exemplified in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne." He claims further that "The genre of romance -- with its strong tendency toward symbolism and its eruptions of the fantastic and the supernatural -- seems like an improbable influence on, say, Frank Norris." But the very first book to propose the Romance as the dominant strand of American fiction, Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), included a chapter on "Norris and Naturalism." Writes Chase: ". . .the youthful father of naturalism was in dead earnest in describing his works as romances. . .And in the brief years of his growing maturity. . .he wrote books that departed from realism by becoming in a unified act of the imagination at once romances and naturalistic novels." And of Dreiser Chase writes "[He] performed the considerable service of adapting the colorful poetry of Norris to the more exacting tasks imposed upon the social novelist--very much as James assimilated Hawthorne's imagination of romance into novels."

Comments

[Scott McLemee]

The problems you have with my article are (ahem) also problems I have with it. So it is very gratifying to find the objections spelled out, not just in a temperate and generous manner, but with a lot more lucidity than the writer of the piece could have mustered.

For what it's worth: The article is the by-product of, among other things, a longstanding preoccupation with Lukacs. (I knew better than to say that sort of thing in an editorial meeting, of course.) Lukacs would complain to the failure to distinguish sharply between realism and naturalism, so that's another problem.

Insofar as GL exercised any indirect influence on the piece, it was through his way of framing realism as not just one literary school or period among others, but something like the maximum fusion of aesthetic form and ethical substance possible in literary art.

Now, I don't actually accept that idea. At any rate, when faced with the demand implicit in the title of GL's essay "Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka?" my impulse is to want both. (A response typical of the late-capitalist consumer, maybe; but there it is.) Still, when a few people began pointing out to me the relative lack of interest in American literary realism as such -- and especially in work published much after the turn of the 20th century -- it had all kinds of resonance.

That gap seemed interesting enough to merit writing a short piece, and taking the risk of being denounced as a blockhead for not having gone into nuances worthy of a book. A case in point: There are probably folks ready to present long lists of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s that might seem to contradict the whole premise of the piece. But my reading of that material suggested that an awful lot of it used realist or naturalist texts as a starting point for more or less Foucauldian exercises in ideology-critique of a sort that could have been conducted, just as well, upon a medieval romance or a modernist lyric, or whatever.

So while reading this material, the subliminal voice of Lukacs kept going: "This ignores the specificity of realism as such." I chose not to dispute that. Arguing with disembodied Marxist theorists is always a temptation when you spend several hours a day in an office cubicle, but you'd be surprised how many funny looks it will get you.

Thanks for the notice, in any case. You really ought to do a book of these pieces. That you haven't been drafted into the role of literary columnist for some print journal is inexplicable.

[Dan Green]

Scott: Thank you for the clarifications. They're actually a very useful addendum/correction to the remarks I made in the post.

[Kevin Holtsberry]

I am way out of my league here, but I don't think I fully agree with you. I think that an artist can succeed consciously on both the aesthetic and the intellectual level. In other words, he can set out to use literary realism that transcends mere artifice and that provokes intellectual/spiritual insight not as a byproduct of realism but as an intended consequence.

In my mind great works of art do this by showing us human nature in a way that analytical prose cannot. One could attempt to write a philosophical/historical treatise on a topic but its very form would limit its access. Or one could form a fictional narrative that reveals these insights by the fictional portrayal or people and events.

Didn't Dickens achieve this is some ways? (I know this is not really your time frame but I have been reading about him lately) His characters and descriptions are the result of a unique gift for observation and mimicry but the novels speak to the structure of society in a larger way.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. Good stuff as always and ditto on the book/columnist thing.

[Dan Green]

I don't want to be misunderstood as saying realism can't be great art. In fact, I think I emphasized that truly "literary" realism is as aesthetically viable as anything else. Chekhov is a great writer. Dickens is a great writer, although in my opinion his greatness lies in other things than his use of realism--his novels are "social," but only secondarily.

One could indeed "form a fictional narrative that reveals these insights by the fictional portrayal of people and events," but if that is your first and ultimate purpose, I, for one, would call it something other than art. (Which isn't necessarily a criticism.)