Lincoln Michel makes some very good points in his recent essay about the limitations of our loose way of referring to "realism" in fiction, usually when thinking about the alternatives to this practice, in particular the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, Michel's argument is framed specifically as an effort to deconstruct the binary opposition of realism and science fiction/fantasy that so often obtains in discussions of the artistic value of the latter. (In my experience, the distinction is upheld most vehemently by the science fiction writers themselves, usually in denigration of realism as compared to the greater imagination shown in their own genre.)
Michel wants to regard realism as a "spectrum," with gradations of realist practice that take some works of literary realism farther from the genres associated with the "fantastic," while taking others closer. He creates a chart in which the primary distinction is between the "naturalistic" and the "expressionist" but allows for works that might straddle the line as well as fall more clearly on one side or the other, and that might also incorporate elements of both modes to a greater or a lesser extent. Michel assures us that his chart does not assign inherent value to any of the practices that are thus duly located, but instead "Every single point on this chart has its own strengths and possibilities. The pleasures of fabulist literature are simply different from the pleasures of hard science fiction, just as the effects of noir are different than the effects of autofiction."
"Naturalistic" and "Expressionist" are perfectly useful terms in identifying very general tendencies among the multifarious works of fiction writers actually create. They might ease the confusion that can arise when we try to categorize using more specific designations: surrealism, absurdism, minimalism, etc. Of course, their utility is limited if the goal is to accurately encompass what makes a particular work or writer distinctive, not in order to make comparisons (writer x is a true postmodernist, not that poser writer y) but to make literary criticism relevant beyond the temptation to imperiously pass judgment. Part of criticism's responsibility should be to scrupulously describe, and in doing so essentially create a form of knowledge, characterizations and taxonomies that ideally can be applied in other contexts, perhaps by other critics. Writers might indeed synthesize different--even nominally opposing--modes or strategies, but it is still good to have names for those modes that aren't just subsumed to broad invocations of "naturalistic" or "expressionist."
Michel does not do this. He wants to show that both realism and the modes of anti-realism come in different versions, which he is again entirely correct in pointing out. Michel goes further, however, and maintains that labeling a work of fiction "realistic" has become "more ideological than it is aesthetic." Using the term to contrast the practice of "straight white" writers and those "from other cultures, backgrounds, and traditions" is, he writes, "to privilege a certain experience of reality," This seems to me a dubious proposition, not because white American writers haven't dominated American literary culture (it is undeniable they have), but because Michel's foundational definition of "realism" in this context seems inadequate. The assertion that realism is about the representation of a "certain experience of reality" implies that realism arises from the content of that experience, and thus, since people from different "backgrounds" presumably have different experiences, the issue at hand is whose experience is depicted.
But realism, at least when considered in its rise and development as part of literary history, is identified not as much by the content of any particular experience as by the nature of the depiction of that content. Thus when William Dean Howells, perhaps the 19th century American writer who most directly proselytized on behalf of the new realism, urged writers to cast their attention on "ordinary" people, he was trying to move the focus away from the quasi-heroic or "larger than life" characters often featured in the fiction of the previous era (Hawthorne, Melville) toward "real" people of the kind more often encountered in actual life, but he was also advocating a new kind of narrative that attempted to convince readers, through the kinds of actions portrayed and details presented, they were witnessing life as lived. Realism consisted of using literary strategies, which, generally speaking, involved evoking a sense of lifelike authenticity in setting and traits of character (including, say, local details and habits of speech), as well as de-emphasizing artificial plot devices and cultivating a "plain" prose style.
Thus the original expression of the antithesis between the naturalistic and the expressionistic in fiction can be found in this emerging divide in the mid to late 19th century between realism and romance. The issue is whether, in Hawthorne's words, "to pursue a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" or whether the writer might instead "manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture," perhaps to the extent of introducing what Hawthorne called the "marvelous." If Raymond Carver is considered a realist, it is because he believed the characters and experiences on which he wished to focus would be best served by the former approach, and if Toni Morrison could be called an expressionist, this is because the stories she wanted to tell are better suited to the latter. I see little evidence that Carver is more favored than Morrison because they work in different modes.
The tenuousness of Michel's conception of realism is only reinforced by his additional juxtaposition of two other writers on either side of the boundary: "Are [James] Salter’s stories more real than, say, the stories of George Saunders, which may include fantasy or SF elements yet more clearly evoke the daily news?" I'm not quite sure why Michel suggests that the inclusion of "fantasy or SF elements" would make it surprising that a work of such fiction might still "evoke the daily news." Doesn't science fiction ground itself in "news" (current conditions in the world) that is projected into the future through "speculative" narratives? Isn't most "expressivist" fiction similarly attuned to actually existing conditions to which the author is implicitly responding? How many writers live their lives totally isolated from "the daily news"?
However, these quibbles aside, the real problem with Michel's rhetorical question is the inference that the soundness of fiction's relationship to reality somehow corresponds to it's assimilation of "the daily news" to begin with. Are we really to accept that direct references to current topical concerns makes fiction more "real"? I can certainly see how including such references might sometimes accompany realism in a given story or novel, as part of the portrayal of characters' interaction with their environment or as a specific plot device, but otherwise this requirement seems to reduce realistic fiction to something like reporting, which I suppose in certain kinds of autofiction might actually happen, but surely the "daily news" as a measure of a work's engagement with "the real" is the most superficial test imaginable.
If Michel's ultimate goal is to drop "realism" altogether from the literary/critical lexicon (his final sentence suggests it is), he needs to make it clearer what he actually does mean by the term, because his operative definition doesn't sufficiently reflect its actual historical meaning. Michel is probably correct in asserting that "In modern American literature, both the literary fiction world and the SFF world have a bias toward naturalistic modes," if by "modern" he means the last 25-30 years, but during the previous 80 years or so (since the beginning of high modernism), and in American literature, especially the previous 25 years (since the 1960s), realism was a greatly contested practice. (Indeed, Carver, the writer Michel seems to lean on as an example of the sort of writer on whose behalf this "bias" works, to a great extent was trying to retrieve realism as a viable practice after the postmodernist years.) Whether or not the current preference for "naturalistic modes" is in fact a reinforcement of realism per se (I think it probably is not), Michel's proposal to abandon the term is not an abandonment of actual realism, because finally his essay doesn't fully explicate that.
In his conclusion, Michel suggests that for writers the main advantage to his cataloguing schema is that "understanding where our stories chart helps us improve and sharpen the work," while for critics "understanding the multiple directions that reality can be skewed might help avoid the still-far-too-common complaints about 'unrealistic' elements of intentionally unreal works." Although I don't think complaints about lack of realism in "intentionally unreal works" come from a lack of appreciation of the range of non-realistic methods that might be available (they come from objections to non-realism itself), nevertheless a more extensive vocabulary for discussing the variety of such methods would certainly be a good thing.
On the other hand, the notion that writers should consult a chart like Michel's to locate and "sharpen the work" seems to me almost totally misbegotten. This is an invitation to conform to expectations in order to reduce the risk of "complaints." "Sharpen the work" becomes "standardize the work." It narrows the possibilities of innovation even within the boundaries of pre-existing categories, much less extending those boundaries (or perhaps prompting a new category). Writers should disregard such categories altogether and instead trust their inner inspirations. What critics might later call the result is not as important.
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