Antinomies of the Realism Modernism Debate Jameson 2012

Antinomies of the Realism- Modernism Debate

Fredric Jameson

R ealism. Realistic. Real. And why not add reality? These grammatical variants do not converge on any central meaning, but rather fan out, offering at best some options for classifying all the multiple and sometimes contradictory uses to which the bewildering term is put. They are scarcely sufcient but will perhaps serve as a starting point.

The word is, however, like so many other words, inextricably involved in what it is not: that is to say, it is dened against something else, and as those opposites are numerous, the content of our word or words will vary wildly. I enumerate a few: realism versus modernism, realism versus idealism, realism versus romance, realism versus natural-ism, realism versus materialism, and so forth. For any literary discus-sion, it seems to me that three of these oppositions are the most cru-cial: romance, naturalism, and modernism, which follow in a kind of chronological sequence (itself no doubt exceedingly misleading for any serious discussion). The rst opposition, that of romance, focuses atten-tion on the origins of realism; that of modernism, on its dissolution; while the opposition of realism to naturalism denes Georg Lukcss canonical approach, with which I would disagree, including naturalism within realism as I tend to do.

Even this preliminary discussion, however, often slips impercepti-bly into a historical and chronological mode, and its particular realism into a historical phenomenon. Two further complications warn us to arrest or at least to postpone this development. The rst is that realism is often more or less synonymous with the novel as such, so that what does not really seem to t in one of the two categories gets excluded

Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (September 2012)

DOI 10.1215/00267929- 1631487 2012 by University of Washington

476 MLQ September 2012

from the other as well. This is, we may say, the Bakhtinian tendency, in which the novelistic is somehow at one with modernity as such, whether that emerges in Alexandrian Greece or in the nineteenth cen-tury. It does seem to me that it would be very difcult to discuss either realism or the novel in any satisfactory way without also ending up in a discussion of the other.

Then there is the use of realism as a term of value (or, as with the lmmakers and aestheticians of the 1960s, as a term of reproach and opprobrium: for them it tends to mean Hollywood). On the left, how-ever, realism will be saluted as a conquest of reality and a weapon in cognitive struggle; and we may assume that in the Third World, whose intellectual perspectives are generally left- wing ones, the term has much the same positive value. Yet the Third World is also (tradition-ally) a modernizing place, and the imported form which is the novel is fully as much a component of modernization as the importation of automobiles. All of which leads us to yet another paradox: namely, that genuine realism, taken at the moment of its emergence, is a discovery process, which, with its emphasis on the new and the hitherto unre-ported, unrepresented, and unseen, and its notorious subversion of inherited ideas and genres (the Quijote!), is in fact itself a kind of mod-ernism, if not the latters rst form.

Insofar, however, as historically realism has been identied with the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois lifestyle, and indeed with the bour-geois cultural revolution itself, it becomes the target of a modernist critique of the bourgeoisie: in fact, there is a sense in which modern French culture in general, from Balzac on, is a critique of the bourgeoi-sie, and thereby inclined to include realism as part of that bourgeois culture and the latters values and representations. So each genuinely new realism denounces its predecessors as unrealistic; and we confront the paradox in which a Balzac or a Flaubert the very founders of modern realism are somehow antirealists and protomodernists. It is a paradox that might be claried by the word satirical, to the degree to which a Daumier, for example, is as realistic as he is modernist; or a Joyce, in his Irish context, is far more realistic than other contempora-neous strains of a romantic or nationalist Irish culture.

In all of this, however, we have not yet raised the crucial issue of the political, which then equally restructures the whole debate. The

Jameson The Realism- Modernism Debate 477

postwar polemics against realism whether those of the nouvelle vague against Hollywood, or those of such very different repudiations of tra-ditional bourgeois realism as Brecht and Robbe- Grillet saw it as the enemy for political reasons: for them, realism either encouraged accep-tance of the status quo by way of its stereotypes or left no place for political pedagogy, owing to its mimesis of a paralyzed world in which political action seemed impossible or inconceivable. On the other hand, political defenders of antimodernist realisms denounced the increasing subjectivization of modern art and the latters formal exclu-sion of class and political realities that were no longer visible within the lived experience of Western writers and artists. This is the point at which the term social realism needs to be introduced, which has its afnities with naturalism, on the one hand, and socialist realism, on the other, but which is somehow sharply distinguished from bourgeois realism by its lower- class content fully as much as by its political moti-vations. What seems to have happened in the West, however, is that the proletarian experiences so scandalously disclosed by naturalism have tended to be replaced by ethnic, racial, or gender realities, whose representation can certainly be political in intent, but not necessarily realistic in the sense of the older literary traditions (the rivalry between Ellison and Wright offers just such a replay of the opposition between modernism and realism).

The possibilities of a literature which is at one and the same time a political intervention have traditionally been predicated on an epis-temological dimension: such literature shows us things we have never seen before, whose existence we have never suspected things which have possibly never been expressed or represented before in literature (or maybe even in language). In late twentieth- and twenty- rst- century conditions, even that ignorance or silence takes on a relatively psycho-logical or subjective sense, since it needs to be explained that this lack of awareness is structurally related to our class isolation, to our lack of personal experience, to our spatial separation from the conditions in question. But it is always also accompanied by what is a rhetorical assumption: that to know these alien conditions will be to experience indignation and pity, and to be stirred thereby to political action. Any theory of political realism will thus also involve a rhetoric, and will then confront the problem of the way in which the new hitherto unseen


realities are staged: will the protagonists be victims, for whose suffer-ing one feels pity; or will they be heroes of resistance, who (however they fail) inspire emulation along with hatred for their oppressors? Or perhaps, as with the naturalists, they will simply inspire their comfort-able bourgeois readers to a certain satisfaction with their own estate, and a thankfulness that they have not been and will never be placed in such circumstances themselves. But such are always the uncertainties of rhetoric and the unforeseeability of any attempt to use realism for political ends unless it should turn out that we are always political and class beings, and inevitably react politically to any kind of represen-tation in the rst place (feeling disgust for the subjective indulgences of certain modernisms, for example, or for complacent celebrations of the way we ourselves live, when we do not feel indignation at the attempts of literary agitators to indoctrinate us).

Clearly enough, this range of issues must necessarily be bewilder-ing, and anyone could be excused for deciding to abandon words like realism in general and sticking to the individual text. Yet the very com-plexity of these matters rules out in advance any peremptory xing of meanings and denitions which might seem helpfully to simplify them. The decision to limit realism to one of its meanings is not an option. Hegel once observed that our task, as thinkers, was the oppo-site of the situation of the Greeks, who found themselves obliged to draw abstractions and general ideas out of the mass of particulars and the pense sauvage of their everyday life: we ourselves are, on the other hand, drowning in abstractions of all kinds, the accumulation of cen-turies of philosophizing, of thinking, dening, and naming, and we face the problem of mapping navigable paths through them (the Witt-gensteinian therapy being available only to English philosophers). This means that every use of the generic term will involve contested terrain and needs by denition to be problematized; every analysis of a realistic work needs to be theoretical as well as critical. We may even wonder whether the most useful denition of realism may not lie in the capac-ity of a text to raise the issue of realism as such within its own structure, no matter what answer it decides to give. In that case, we might call realist any literary work which raises the question of realism, whether to problematize it or to attempt to reinvent it: realism would then name any narrative that is organized, not around the question of the real or of


reality (philosophical questions), but around the very interrogation of realism and the realistic itself. Yet even here it seems to me that there would be a separation between modernistic realisms and realistic mod-ernisms. The fruitful idea of estranging estrangement might well be broached here, in the context of a text that uses and then questions the experimental; and a modernist realism would begin to emerge when the traditional methods of narrative representation (novelistic realism) are used and then undermined.

But when we get to that point, we will also need to wonder whether postmodernity has not rendered the opposition of realism and mod-ernism obsolete, and whether we do not need to invent some new cat-egories, which is to say, to articulate some new kinds of oppositions.

But here I need to open a large parenthesis about Lukcs, on whom many interesting things are said in these pages. For myself, I would want to challenge concepts of realism attributed to Lukcs on the basis of verisimilitude (or, in his terminology, description): accuracy of pre-sentation, adequacy to the real or to reality, and so on. These concep-tions seem to me static; they convey (perhaps in spite of themselves) the idea that reality is a kind of thing out there, to be described as faithfully as possible: social situations and circumstances; the being of social classes, even in their conicts; historical accuracy; the ideologies of the situation in question. Totality is then here imagined in a rather Spinozan way, as an enormous entity that must somehow be accessed through its multifarious internal relationships.

But I believe that for Lukcs totality was history, and that in real-ity (sic) his conception of realism had to do with an art whereby the narrative of individuals was somehow made to approach historical dynamics as such, was organized so as to reveal its relationship with a history in movement and a future on the point of emergence. Realism would thus have to do with the revelation of tendencies rather than with the portrayal of a state of affairs. I think the attack on naturalism in Narrate or Describe? conveys this latter critique rather strongly, even though Lukcss attempts to portray the participation in action, or the approach of the average hero to deeper historical currents (most often revolutions and revolutionary tendencies), may not be vivid enough, or may not correspond to all the varieties of historical expe-


rience. History is in that sense like Heideggerian Being: it cannot be looked at or perceived directly or head- on; it emerges and disappears; one has to seize it at the moment of emergence.

This is why a historical realism of this kind falters when it attempts to deal with situations in which historical movement is not perceptible (the colonial situation, for example); and it is also left perplexed when the historical currents of a society are buried under layers of appear-ance of Lukcsian second nature (our own society of the spectacle would appear to correspond to this dilemma). Essence does not always appear, to paraphrase the great Hegelian watchword, or at least not always when you want it to: it cannot be conjured by at out of the mists of the everyday, any more than a truly revolutionary situation can be brought into being by an effort of the will, or forced into being by 1960s- style guerrilla warfare. Not only must history (the history of the classes) be surprised in the least likely places; we must also have the instruments of registration ready to seize it; and those may not be old- fashioned stories of individuals at all, but we may also not yet have the right ones. This is the sense in which I would like to maintain and strengthen the word margins: not as the useless eaters who have been rejected by society, or as the spatial deserts in which no production is to be done or money made but rather as these weak links in the chain, where the Real may appear without warning, and disappear again if we are not alert to catch it.

The focus of the present collection requires us to complicate these con-siderations with a supplementary theoretical problem that largely tran-scends the literary issue of realism. That is the question of the nation and the national as such. It is a question the superpowers do not have to ask, in the blindness of the center; a question that so- called western European literature thought it could by now omit, but over which east-ern Europe and the rest of the world must agonize interminably. It is also a question of language as well as of generation: for younger writers or lmmakers, for example, the category of a national literature or of national lm seems to consign them to a limited and old- fashioned shelf of the new world market, which mainly speaks and reads English (or, in the case of lm, is organized around the great festivals and their distribution circuits).


A notorious essay of mine once suggested that all literature was a kind of national allegory, inasmuch as its texts presupposed the uni-versal or collective symbolic meaning of private or existential situations. National in this usage referred to the historical moment of the construc-tion of the nation in a given geographic space, that is, to the cultural revolution (whether bourgeois or socialist) in which a collectivity and a public Gramscis national- popular was being produced, in which, as Deleuze put it, un peuple venir was to emerge. My examples Lu Xun, Ousmane Sembne represented in their different ways that construction and that hope, which also knew any number of specic disappointments and failures. The term collectivity indeed is much bet-ter for those later moments, inasmuch as ethnic and racial cultural nationalisms were in the same way allegorical and attempted to create a new collectivity, but on other terms than that of ofcial nationhood. Today, in the era of globalization, these older collectivities seem to be giving way to that new kind of grouping called multitude; but the new phenomenon remains a collective one and poses formal and represen-tational problems in the same allegorical way, if not necessarily of the same type.

But old- fashioned nations continue to exist as well; they are cer-tainly not in the process of withering away, as an older liberalism thought, even though they often seem to fulll essentially negative functions: to limit the political power of resistance, to limit the symbolic and ideological power of their narratives, to drive down local standards of living in the name of great multinational corporations, and to secure an appearance of multiculturalism at odds with economic, existential, and class realities.

It is also true that a collection of this kind thus confronts us with what seem to be intractable global multiplicities, if not of theoretical con-tradictions that surround words like nation, collectivity, multitude, and that then traverse and distort the already unstable theoretical eld of terms like realism. So alongside the seemingly unresolvable literary and generic conceptual confusion, in this issue we are faced with a juxtapo-sition of texts and topics no less bewildering mixed bag or cornuco-pia, depending on your mood. What do Roberto Bolao and Toni Mor-rison have to do with earlier generations of properly colonial writers


such as Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable), Thomas Mofolo (Chaka), or even Jade Snow Wong (Fifth Chinese Daughter)? What do novels dealing with Irish workmen in England have to do with 1968 and its African expres-sions? Can we relate Achebes diatribes against modernism in any way to the evolution of Taiwanese literature, let alone to the modernism of Maxine Hong Kingstons Woman Warrior? And what is the awful Nai-paul (here subject to a remarkable revaluation) doing in the middle of this noisy party? (I discount the unfair complaint about the absence of Philippines literature, or the Maghreb, or the Balkans, etc., etc.)

It is true that our abstract genre questions come vividly to life here. When literary- historical perspectives are called into play, the evolution from realist novels to modernist ones becomes visible both in inter-nal minority or ethnic traditions and in the externality of the national cultures themselves. Romance makes one stunning appearance in Simon Gikandis essay, history an even more shattering one in Susan Z. Andrades. Hegel pops in and out, both predictably and unexpectedly, along with slavery and coloniality. Dialectical oppositions upset our careful classications: thus at one point, modernism, associated with the metropolis, is condemned by the (post)colonial writers as a connota-tion of subalternity and submission; while at another point and perhaps even in the same place, realism itself is identied as a toxic European gift. Or else, turning back to literary history, the previous generation of writers and intellectuals and their respective achievements of modern-ism or realism are (as in Ireland) stigmatized for their class perspective (elitism) or for their working- class internationalism (socialist realism). The DNA kits then work overtime to measure the level of subversion in these texts, or the degree to which they can qualify as minor, which is to say, oppositional. Reading publics can scarcely be mentioned, since they bring up embarrassing questions about English as the capitalist world currency or, on the other hand, about the political value of Ngu-gis extraordinary linguistic politics: questions which of course have everything to do with history and historical change and with the pas-sage from a national moment of decolonization to one of helpless mar-ket globalization, passing through all kinds of attempts to denounce corruption in the neocolonial era.

All this changes with the bookended foreword by Joe Cleary and introduction by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, where all of a sudden we


become aware that the theoretical classications of the texts (as real-ist or modernist, or variants of the two Poloniuss generic subtleties colonial- pastoral, tragical- realistical, etc., never being very far from this kind of enterprise) begin to live a very different kind of life of their own in some other space than the novels themselves. Cleary deals with the fate of this much- rehearsed opposition between the wars (Lukcs, Auerbach, Bakhtin), while Esty and Lye bear witness to its astonishingly complex functional metamorphosis in the whole postwar period, the period in which the very production of what they call peripheral works began to multiply, some of them indeed taking center eld in anyones canon. Still, it looks like such an enlargement could be engaged in the normal literary- historical way, by adding a few more chapters to the relevant survey or anthropology.

This is to reckon without the erce political and ideological debates inherent in the struggle between the theories of realism and modern-ism in both periods. In the one dominated essentially by the Soviets, before World War II, the tone is set and the stakes are determined by the rm association between realism and progressive politics, and by the assignment of the many modernisms to Lukcss permanent carni-val of fetishized interiority, if not worse. The West reverses this power-ful slander (but its inuence is still detectable, not only in Lukcs but in Auerbach and even in Bakhtins emphasis on the modernity of the novel) by invoking high literary value and contrasting the literarnost of the modernist canon with the increasingly perfunctory formulaics of socialist realism.

Clearys extraordinary dialectic now unsettles this oversimplied situation by historicizing it, and by performing that operation which, following Gayatri Spivaks famous phrase, we may call strategic essen-tialization. The latter, rather than reecting the inevitable taking of sides between a good and a bad stance (essentialism as human nature, antiessentialism as human production), makes the unexpected move of suddenly including the situation itself in realisms meaning: now the political assessment and judgment do not remain extrinsic, in some eld outside the object to be judged; it is in the very terms in which we think and dene the thing itself, accompanied by a history that assures us of its own ephemeral topicality, and that the judgment will not remain the same the next day, or in its next avatar. What is progres-


sive may very well harden into its opposite as the situation evolves, and the balance may well shift the other way.

Armed with the conviction that, however realist or modernist they may be, the great works of the West for the most part exclude the realities of the rest of the world, if not even their own peripheries, Cleary is able to set up a pair of axes traversing the realist- modernist one will be another, a kind of geopolitical class axis in which a pro-vincialized West is opposed to an essentially politically dened set of hitherto silenced marginalities. Now it becomes easier to see how in one situation a modernist stance may be progressive (for a time), while in another it is rather the realist impulse which will be politically (and culturally) indispensable. The function has now been indissolubly and organically included within the work itself (and maybe it always was in the so- called Western classics themselves as well).

As for the postwar, when, on the whole, the literatures in question are actually, after the great moment of decolonization, being produced, here paradoxically the infrastructure of our theories shrinks from the new globe of globalization to the university itself. Not the teeming masses ghting on de Gaulles side for his promise of independence, or those struggling for the same outcome with or against the Japanese; but rather the schools and departments, the theoretico- political tendencies which will secure recognition for their student and intellectual constit-uencies (and the related communities that stand behind them) these are now the renewed and transformed stakes in a theoretical struggle whose intricacies Esty and Lye so expertly explore in their overview.

The local infrastructure of many of these battles is material: support for new students and new programs, a struggle over scarce resources and even less generous administrative acknowledgment, internecine warfare between the competitors and more perfunctory shelling of the aesthetic adversary here the macrocosm of the politi-cal battles of the 1930s has been theoretically miniaturized and differ-entiated, and a proliferation of new courses and new methods (cultural studies, world literature, postcolonial literature, ethnic literature, anti- imperialist traditions, Fourth World studies, Westernizers versus nation-alists, etc.) has made possible all kinds of unexpected discoveries new texts, forgotten writers and traditions, new and more subtle theo-ries. Only self- hating intellectuals, who have not understood that the


enlarged university is the new public sphere, will wish to trivialize these new energies, which are in fact those of their own students and those of whole new constituencies in the new and communicational democrati-zation of a world in which only money holds immense class differences in place.

The editors of this issue modestly hope for a place for their periph-eral realisms at this groaning board around which the representatives of so many different tendencies mill and ll their plates. From time to time they also seem to wish for an end to the standard old realism- modernism opposition in the name of something else. But what would that something else be? An aesthetic consensus? The subsumption of nature or the object under culture or the subject? It is worth remem-bering that the whole richness of the present collection is to a certain degree dependent on the embattled and subordinate status of realism in this opposition (despite its momentary hegemonies in specic situa-tions): ghting back certainly allows you to identify the power centers more clearly. In any case, the realism- modernism debate is ultimately a social and political one, and therefore inevitably powered by the very forces in struggle that will never go away. There will always be a Left and a Right, there will always be struggle, and whenever the literary stakes are measured out so absolutely as here, they will not be immune to it. This is to say that realism and modernism will never be subsumed under a single new entity, a single new thesis: but they will assuredly also not be subsumed under some putative postmodern synthesis. At best, in postmodernity, we will witness new postmodern versions of this antithesis as it adapts to the shifting boundaries and margins of new peripheries and new centers.

Fredric Jameson is professor of literature at Duke University. His book Postmodern-ism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism won the 1990 MLA Lowell Award, and his recent works include Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), The Modernist Papers (2007), Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Hegel Variations: On The Phenomenology of Spirit (2010), and Repre-senting Capital (2011). He received the Holberg Prize in 2008 and the MLA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

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Antinomies of the Realism Modernism Debate Jameson 2012