Realism - The Eye The... · 2020. 1. 17. · marily to literary realism only drawing upon philosophical and scien-tific issues where these have direct relevance to writerly forms

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel literaryrealism has traditionally been associated with an insistence that artcannot turn away from the harsher more sordid aspects of humanexistence However the fluid nature of the related concepts oflsquorealityrsquo and lsquothe realrsquo have led to realism becoming one of themost widely debated terms to be covered in this series

Realism offers an accessible account of literary realism as a dis-tinctive mode of writing setting out the defining attributes of thegenre and exploring the critical debates surrounding it illustratedthroughout with examples taken from a wide variety of prose fic-tion The book covers the historical development and artisticachievements of literary realism and presents a lucid argument forits continuing status as an innovative and challenging tradition ofwriting with rigorous exploration of the radical critique brought tobear on realist forms of representation during the twentieth cen-tury from the perspectives of modernism poststructuralism andpostmodernism

This comprehensive guide is essential reading for any student ofliterature and will prove indispensable for those with a particularinterest in the realist novel

Pam MMorris is Professor of Modern Critical Studies at LiverpoolJohn Moores University and has written extensively on nineteenth-century literature and culture She is the editor of The BakhtinReader (1994) and author of Literature and Feminism (1993) andImagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels TheCode of Sincerity in the Public Sphere (2004)

REALISM

THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOMSERIES EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to todayrsquoscritical terminology Each book

bull provides a handy explanatory guide to the use (and abuse) of the termbull offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural

criticbull relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation

With a strong emphasis on clarity lively debate and the widest possiblebreadth of examples The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach tokey topics in literary studies

Also available in this series

Autobiography by Linda AndersonClass by Gary DayColonialismPostcolonialism by Ania LoombaCrime Fiction by John ScaggsCultureMetaculture by Francis MulhernDiscourse by Sara MillsDramatic Monologue by Glennis ByronGenders by David Glover and Cora KaplanGothic by Fred BottingHistoricism by Paul HamiltonHumanism by Tony DaviesIdeology by David HawkesInterdisciplinarity by Joe MoranIntertextuality by Graham AllenLiterature by Peter WiddowsonMetre Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip HobsbaumModernism by Peter ChildsMyth by Laurence CoupeNarrative by Paul CobleyParody by Simon DentithPastoral by Terry GiffordRomanticism by Aidan DayScience Fiction by Adam RobertsSexuality by Joseph BristowStylistics by Richard BradfordThe Unconscious by Antony Easthope

REALISM

Pam Morris

First published 2003 by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor amp Francis Group

copy 2003 Pam Morris

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means now known or hereafter inventedincluding photocopying and recording or in any informationstorage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMorris P 1940ndashRealismPam Morrisp cm ndash (New critical idiom)Includes bibliographical references (p ) and index1 European literature ndash 19th century ndash History and criticism 2Realism in literature I Title II SeriesPN761M625 2003809rsquo912rsquo09409034ndashdc21 2002156322

ISBN 0ndash415ndash22938ndash3 (hbk)ISBN 0ndash415ndash22939ndash1 (pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library 2004

ISBN 0-203-63407-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-63759-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

For Vicky

C O N T E N T S

SERIES EDITORrsquoS PREFACE X

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

Introduction What Is Realism 1

PART IREALISM VERSUS EXPERIMENTALISM

1 Realism and Modernism 9The Practice of Literary Realism 9The Modernist Critique of Realism 14The Frankfurt School Modernism versus Realism 17

2 Realism Anti-realism and Postmodernism 24From Structuralism to Poststructuralism and

Postmodernism 25The Poststructural Critique of Realism 30Deconstructing Realism 34

PART IILITERARY REALISM AN INNOVATIVE TRADITION

3 Literary Realism in Nineteenth-Century France 47Idealism and Classical Theories of Art 49Realism and French History 52Count Frederic de Stendhal (1783ndash1842) 55Honoreacute de Balzac (1799ndash1850) 59Gustave Flaubert (1821ndash1880) and the lsquoReacutealismersquo

Controversy in France 63Emile Zola (1840ndash1902) 69The Future of Literary Realism 74

4 Literary Realism in Nineteenth-Century Britain 76The Early Development of British Literary Realism 77A Distinctive British Tradition of Nineteenth-Century

Literary Realism 79British Debates on Realism 87Thomas Hardy and the Culmination of British

Nineteenth-Century Realism 91

PART IIILITERARY REALISM AS FORMAL ART

5 Reality Effects 97The Empirical Effect 101The Truth Effect 109The Character Effect 113

6 The Reader Effect 119Stanley Fish Interpretive Communities 120Wolfgang Iser the Implied Reader and Wandering

Viewpoint 122Hans Robert Jauss Horizon of Expectation 125

PART IVREALISM AND KNOWLEDGE A UTOPIAN PROJECT

7 Realism and the Crisis of Knowledge 131Logical Positivism and the Verifiability Principle 133Relative Truths and Incommensurate Worlds 134Michel Foucault and Knowledge as Power 136

8 Realism and other Possible Worlds 142Realism and the Politics of Space 142Donald Davidson and Interpretive Charity 147Juumlrgen Habermas and Communicative Reason 149

contents viii

GLOSSARY 163SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 171BIBLIOGRAPHY 174INDEX 181

contents ix

The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks toextend the lexicon of literary terms in order to address the radicalchanges which have taken place in the study of literature during the lastdecades of the twentieth century The aim is to provide clear well-illus-trated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use and toevolve histories of its changing usage

The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one wherethere is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminologyThis involves among other things the boundaries which distinguishthe literary from the non-literary the position of literature within thelarger sphere of culture the relationship between literatures of differentcultures and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cul-tural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies

It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamicand heterogeneous one The present need is for individual volumes onterms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness ofperspective and a breadth of application Each volume will contain aspart of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the defi-nition of particular terms is likely to move as well as expanding the dis-ciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have beentraditionally contained This will involve some re-situation of termswithin the larger field of cultural representation and will introduceexamples from the area of film and the modern media in addition toexamples from a variety of literary texts

S E R I E S E D I T O R rsquo S P R E F A C E

I would like to thank John Drakakis and Liz Thompson for their gener-ous and supportive editorial concern throughout the writing of thisbook

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

lsquoJohn MacNaughton was nothing if not a realistrsquo Imagine you have justopened the first page of a novel in a book shop What expectationsabout the character will have been raised by the final word of the sen-tence Would you be inclined to put the book back on the shelf or takeit to the till Very sensibly you would probably read a bit more but letus assume you are an impulse buyer In which case you may havethought lsquoNow here is a character I can fully sympathise with as pursu-ing a clear-sighted unromantic approach to life Whatever problemsthe fictional John McNaughton meets in the course of the story I shallenjoy the way he responds rationally and practically overcoming diffi-culties by an accurate evaluation of all the facts of the situation thatavoids self-indulgent whimsy and sentimentalityrsquo On the other handyou might have rejected the book as featuring a protagonist who willlack vision and high idealism you may feel that literature must aspire totruths and values beyond the everyday mundane The approach to lifeindicated by the first response is most briskly encapsulated in the adviceto lsquoGet realrsquo and perhaps its most uncompromising fictional advocate isMr Gradgrind in Charles Dickensrsquos Hard Times who insists lsquoNowwhat I want is Facts Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts Factsalone are wanted in lifersquo ([1854] 1989 1) To which a non-fictionalVictorian contemporary of Gradgrind might well have respondedseverely lsquoIt is a fact sir that man has a material body but the only truereality that concerns man is his spiritual soulrsquo

INTRODUCTIONWhat is Realism

What is demonstrated here is the slippery nature of the related termsrealist and realism and the difficulties involved in defining them in anyprecise and unambiguous way In the first place the terms realism andrealist inhabit both the realm of everyday usage and the more specialistaesthetic realm of literary and artistic usage As we can see above inordinary speech situations there is frequent traffic between these tworealms Inevitably our judgements about fictional characters and novelsare generally influenced by our attitudes to non-fictional reality It isimpossible to draw absolute boundaries separating the meaning and val-ues of the terms as they are normally used from their evaluative mean-ing as used in critical discourse Related to this is the entanglement ofrealist and realism with a series of other words equally resistant to clear-cut definition factuality truth reality realistic and real Sometimesthese words are taken to have roughly the same meaning as realist butequally they are sometimes used to stake out the opposite This pointsto the third area of problem the term realism almost always involvesboth claims about the nature of reality and an evaluative attitudetowards it It is thus a term that is frequently invoked in making fun-damental ethical and political claims or priorities based upon percep-tions of what is lsquotruersquo or lsquorealrsquo As such the usage is often contentiousand polemical

In Humanism (1997) Tony Davies describes lsquorealismrsquo as one of thosewords lsquowhose range of possible meanings runs from the pedanticallyexact to the cosmically vaguersquo (p3) I cannot offer any exact definitionbut I will attempt to avoid both undue vagueness and cosmic propor-tions as to what is considered under the term Because of its associationwith claims about reality the concept of lsquorealismrsquo participates in scien-tific and philosophical debates The visual arts theatre and film have alldeveloped quite distinctive traditions of realism as a representationalform Due to limitations of space I shall restrict my consideration pri-marily to literary realism only drawing upon philosophical and scien-tific issues where these have direct relevance to writerly forms I shallalso deal pre-eminently with the novel genre since it is within prose fic-tion that realism as an art form has been most fully developed

The inherently oppositional nature of the word lsquorealismrsquo is broughtout in one of the definitions offered in the Oxford English Dictionary(OED) as lsquoany view or system contrasted with idealismrsquo Idealism as a

introduction2

system of thought that subordinates sensory perceptions of the world tointellectual or spiritual knowledge is often also opposed to the termlsquomaterialismrsquo which the OED defines as the doctrine that nothingexists but matter the stuff that constitutes the physical universe Thisbrings us back again to the central question of what constitutes realityThe debate over this goes back certainly as far as the ancient worldbut the issue between idealism and materialism came especially to thefore during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the rise ofthe empirical sciences like botany anatomy and geology For the firsttime the authority of metaphysical and divine truth came under chal-lenge from a secular form of knowledge that claimed to reveal thetruth of the material physical world By and large the development ofthe realist novel coincided with and aligned itself to the modern secu-lar materialist understanding of reality Realist plots and characters areconstructed in accordance with secular empirical rules Events andpeople in the story are explicable in terms of natural causation withoutresort to the supernatural or divine intervention Whereas idealism isgrounded upon a view of Truth as universal and timeless empiricismfinds its truths in the particular and specific Yet this does not preventthe sympathetic treatment of idealism or of a characterrsquos religiousbeliefs within the narrative The struggle of an idealist against thehampering materiality of the social world is a structuring device of agreat many realist novels In fact one could argue that realist formshave given expression to some of the most powerful representations ofspiritual conviction and commitment The character Levin in LeoTolstoyrsquos (1928ndash1910) Anna Karenina (1875ndash7) for example discov-ers meaning in life only through a religious revelation

Yet undeniably realism as a literary form has been associated with aninsistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harshaspects of human existence The stuff of realism is not selected for itsdignity and nobility More positively realism participates in the demo-cratic impulse of modernity As a genre it has reached out to a muchwider social range in terms both of readership and of characters repre-sented than earlier more eacutelite forms of literature In particular realismas a form uninfluenced by classical conventions has been developed bywomen writers and women readers from its beginnings Thus as anupstart literary form the novel lacked the cultural capital or prestige of

introduction 3

traditional forms like poetry and drama Novels also were the first liter-ary products to discover a mass market and they made some of theirwriters a great deal of money For all of these reasons novels were opento attack as materialist in a pejorative sense by those who felt a need todefend a more spiritual expression of human existence So for examplethe poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837ndash1909) drew a distinctionbetween lsquoprosaic realismrsquo and lsquopoetic realityrsquo In tracing the debates thathave developed around realism as a literary form it becomes apparentthat issues about its relationship to the non-fictional or non-textualworld are frequently influenced by fears about mass culture Novelswere perhaps the first popular form to be accused of lsquodumbing downrsquo

There is one distinction between realist writing and actual everydayreality beyond the text that must be quite categorically insisted uponrealist novels never give us life or a slice of life nor do they reflect realityIn the first place literary realism is a representational form and a repre-sentation can never be identical with that which it represents In thesecond place words function completely differently from mirrors Ifyou think for a moment about a mirror reflecting a room and compareit to a detailed written description of the room then reversal of imagesaside it is obvious that no writing can encompass every tiny visualdetail as a mirror faithfully does Writing has to select and order some-thing has to come first and that selection and ordering will always insome way entail the values and perspective of the describerFurthermore no matter how convincing the prose is in its rendering ofsocial reality even the most realist of texts deploys writerly conventionsthat have no equivalent in experiential reality use of punctuationdenotations like lsquohe saidrsquo Indeed if we accept too quickly or unques-tioningly the assumption that realist texts copy reality we tend to over-look a long impressive tradition of artistic development during whichwriters struggled and experimented with the artistic means to convey averbal sense of what it is like to live an embodied existence in the worldThis history of experimental prose fiction is one of great artisticachievement Realism is a technically demanding medium Part III ofthis book will explore some of the complex and impressive formaldevices that constitute the art form of realism as a genre

The OED gets nearest to the sense of realism as a representationalform in its definition lsquoclose resemblance to what is real fidelity of rep-

introduction4

resentation the rendering of precise details of the real thing or scenersquoClosely associated with this meaning are the two terms lsquomimesisrsquo andlsquoverisimilitudersquo that often crop up in discussions of realism as an artform Mimesis is a term that derives from classical Greek drama whereit referred to the actorsrsquo direct imitation of words and actions This isperhaps the most exact form of correspondence or fidelity between rep-resentation and actuality As it developed as a critical term the meaningof mimesis has gradually widened to encompass the general idea ofclose artistic imitation of social reality although it is occasionallyrestricted in use to refer only to those textual passages in which charac-ters appear to speak and act for themselves in contradistinction to nar-rative commentary I shall use mimesis in the former wider senselsquoVerisimilitudersquo is defined as lsquothe appearance of being true or real like-ness or resemblance to truth reality or factrsquo

The problem with definitions of realism and related terms that usephrases like lsquofidelity of representationrsquo or lsquorendering of precise detailsrsquo isthat they tend to be associated with notions of truth as verifiabilityThere is a popular and somewhat paradoxical assumption that realistfiction is to be judged according to how faithfully it corresponds tothings and events in the real-world The more exact the correspondencethe more a one-to-one concordance can be recognised between wordsand world the more the realist writer is to be praised as having achievedher or his aim Realist novels developed as a popular form during thenineteenth century alongside the other quickly popularised representa-tional practice of photography This coincidence may well have encour-aged a pictorial or photographic model of truth as correspondence Wehave probably all pointed a camera at a scene or person and beenpleased at the likeness reproduced Yet as I stressed above there can beno simple identification of verbal with visual representations and bothare equally distinct from the actuality they convey Practised seriouslyphotography and realist fiction are distinctive art forms that carefullyselect organise and structure their representations of the world Theselection and arrangement of verbal and visual codes or languages aregoverned by very different rules In fact as we shall see in Part II thereis little evidence to suggest that the major realist writers of the nine-teenth century ever saw their goal in terms of a one-to-one correspon-dence with a non-verbal reality Nevertheless it was this kind of

introduction 5

perception of realismrsquos aims as accurate reportage or lsquoreflectionrsquo thataroused the criticism of idealists who invoked truths that lay beyond thesurface appearance of things During the latter part of the twentiethcentury however realism has suffered a far more radical attack upon itsartistic integrity Realist writing has been caught up in a much largercontroversy which has put in question the whole tradition of knowledgeand truth as it developed from the eighteenth through to the twentiethcentury Within this critique it is the capacity of novels to communi-cate any truths at all about human existence in the real-world beyondthe text that comes under fire

From this sceptical anti-realist framework it is sometimes suggestedthat the term lsquorealismrsquo should be confined to the specific period of thenineteenth century when novelists like Honoreacute de Balzac (1799ndash1850)wrote within a historical context in which the possibility of observationaltruth about the world was unquestioned This was certainly the periodwhen realism especially in France was most consciously avowed anddebated as an artistic form and Part II gives an account of the achieve-ments of realist writers during those innovative decades However real-ism as artistic practice has much wider historical scope than thenineteenth century aspects that we want to call realist can be found inChaucerrsquos writing and in even earlier classical literature while today artis-tically innovative realist novels are still being produced Even in writingthat seems to adopt a mode of expression very far from realist representa-tion there are frequently passages that move into realist style For thisreason although a water-tight definition of realism is impossible we con-tinue to need the term within the discourse of literary criticism As astarting point I shall define literary realism as any writing that is basedupon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communi-cate about a reality beyond the writing I shall attempt to define and sup-port that claim most fully in the final chapter In Part I I outline thehistorical development of the radical twentieth-century critique of thegrounds of knowledge or epistemology for realism and explore thepolitical and social controversies that are involved in such scepticism

introduction6

IREALISM VERSUS

EXPERIMENTALISM

THE PRACTICE OF LITERARY REALISM

Realism I have suggested is a notoriously tricky term to define Evenwhen limited to the realm of literary writing it has an aesthetic and acognitive dimension neither of which can be wholly separated one fromthe other Aesthetically realism refers to certain modes and conventionsof verbal and visual representation that can occur at any historical timeYet realism is associated particularly with the secular and rational formsof knowledge that constitute the tradition of the Enlightenment stem-ming from the growth of scientific understanding in the eighteenthcentury Underpinning Enlightenment thought is an optimistic beliefthat human beings can adequately reproduce by means of verbal andvisual representations both the objective world that is exterior to themand their own subjective responses to that exteriority Such representa-tions verbal and visual are assumed to be mutually recognisable by fel-low human beings and form the basis of knowledge about the physicaland social worlds The values of accuracy adequacy and truth are fun-damental to this empirical view of knowledge and its representationalform realism It follows from this that literary modes of writing thatcan be recognised as realist are those that broadly speaking presentthemselves as corresponding to the world as it is using language pre-dominantly as a means of communication rather than verbal display

1REALISM AND MODERNISM

and offering rational secular explanations for all the happenings of theworld so represented Two central theses drive the argument I shalldevelop throughout this book firstly questions of knowledge and rela-tive truth are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a repre-sentational form and secondly our ability to communicate reasonablyaccurately with each other about the world and ourselves is whatmakes human community possible Perhaps not surprisingly the liter-ary genre most closely associated with realism is the novel whichdeveloped during the eighteenth century alongside Enlightenmentthought and alongside more generally that most secular mode ofhuman existence capitalism For this reason aesthetic evaluations ofrealism are frequently informed by or entangled with views on thedevelopment of the Enlightenment the expansion of capitalist produc-tion and the emergence of a modern mass culture

But before moving on to questions of how literary realism has beenevaluated it will be useful to look at a piece of realist prose to see howfar it conforms to the paradigm I have set out above George Eliot(1819ndash80) is usually regarded as one of the most accomplished ofEnglish nineteenth-century realist novelists Here is the opening of herfinal novel Daniel Deronda (1874ndash6)

Was she beautiful or not beautiful And what was the secret of formor expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance Was thegood or the evil genius dominant in those beams Probably the evilelse why was the effect of unrest rather than undisturbed charm Whywas the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing inwhich the whole being consents

She who raised these questions in Daniel Derondarsquos mind wasoccupied in gambling not in the open air under a southern sky toss-ing coppers on a ruined wall with rags about her limbs but in oneof those splendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has pre-pared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy cost of gilt mould-ings dark-toned colour and chubby nudities all correspondinglyheavy ndash forming a suitable condenser for human breath belonging ingreat part to the highest fashion and not easily procurable to bebreathed in elsewhere in the like proportion at least by persons of lit-tle fashion

realism versus experimentalism10

It was near four orsquoclock on a September day so that the atmo-sphere was well-brewed to a visible haze There was deep stillnessbroken only by a light rattle a light chink a small sweeping soundand an occasional monotone in French such as might be expected toissue from an ingeniously constructed automaton Round two longtables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings all saveone having their faces and attention bent on the table The one excep-tion was a melancholy little boy with his knees and calves simply intheir natural clothing of epidermis but for the rest of his person in afancy dress He alone had his face turned towards the doorway andfixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a mas-querading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show stoodclose behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table

(Eliot [1874ndash6] 1988 3ndash4)

It seems obvious that what is being foregrounded here is the humancapacity to perceive an external reality and thereby come to know it Thequestions that construct the first paragraph arise in the mind of Derondaas he observes an attractive woman engaged in gambling Accustomednovel readers will expect their own uncertainty as well as Derondarsquos to betransformed into firm knowledge by the end of the story In this Eliotrsquosbeginning of Daniel Deronda only makes explicit what is implicit in theopening pages of most realist fictions questions are raised about charac-ters and situations which will be resolved by fuller knowledge gainedduring the course of the narrative In this respect the readerrsquos epistemo-logical progress through novels imitates the way we acquire empiricalknowledge of the actual social and physical worlds by means of observa-tion of factual details behaviour and events Derondarsquos questions indi-cate his lack of present knowledge about Gwendolin Harleth theheroine but the language of his speculations surely suggests a confidentreliance upon an existing structure of evaluative meaning which willprovide a shaping framework for whatever factual details he obtainsabout the woman he observes lsquoWas she beautiful or notbeautifulhellipWas the good or evil genius dominant in those beamsrsquoThere seems little suggestion in these eitheror formulations that there

realism and modernism 11

may be qualities of personality that are simply unknowable or beyondaesthetic and moral recognition and categorisation The subsequentcharacterisation of Gwendolin also conforms to the positive epistemol-ogy as expansion of knowledge that underlies realist writing The storytraces Gwendolinrsquos painful emotional and rational process towards self-awareness and moral certainty and in so doing constitutes for the readerthat sense of a complex intimately known individual psychology that isone of the achievements of nineteenth-century fiction

If we move on to the tone and language of the omniscient narrator(see narrator) in the subsequent paragraphs it is clear that they restupon a confident sense that understanding of the world can be truth-fully reproduced and communicated in verbal form The narratorrsquoscapacious knowledge of gambling allows open air penny-tossing to bebrought into telling conjunction with the play at fashionable resortsThe perspective unites knowledgeable generalisation (lsquoin one of thosesplendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for thesame species of pleasurersquo) with empirical specificity (lsquoIt was near fourorsquoclock on a September day so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to avisible hazersquo) In the paragraph following the extract given above thewriting traces the movement from empirical observation of the externalworld to inductive knowledge of its underlying economic energies Thenarrator notes that the activity of gambling brings together an assort-ment of nationalities and social classes not usually seen in such proxim-ity to each other Sitting close by a countess is a sleekly respectableLondon tradesman lsquoNot his the gamblerrsquos passion that nullifiesappetite but a well-fed leisure which in the intervals of winning moneyin business and spending it showily sees no better resources than win-ning money in play and spending it yet more showilyrsquo (Eliot [1874ndash6]1988 4) The novelrsquos opening image of gambling thus crystallises a his-torical insight into the development of speculative forms of capitalismin the second half of the nineteenth-century As the quotation abovesuggests speculative finance was intimately associated with the expan-sion of consumerism

During the twentieth century realist writing such as this became thefocus of critical attack during two separate but related periods which

can be thought of as the moment of modernism and the moment ofpostmodernism The exact duration of both modernism and postmod-ernism is still a matter of historical and critical debate as is the relation-ship between them (For a succinct account of this debate see Brooker1992 1ndash29) Some commentators argue for a continuity from mod-ernism into postmodernism and some insist upon a distinct aestheticand epistemological break Our only concern with this complex historyis how it impinges upon the practice and understanding of realist writ-ing For this purpose it makes sense to recognise modernist experimen-tation with traditional narrative form as beginning with writers likeJoseph Conrad (1857ndash1924) in the last years of the nineteenth centuryand continuing into the 1920s and 1930s with the publication of JamesJoycersquos Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) The earliest refer-ences to postmodernism come from American cultural critics in the1950s and the term has developed as a means of theorising the geo-graphical and historical world of late capitalism (Jameson 1998 con-tains essays exploring some of the main issues of Americanpostmodernism see especially lsquoTheories of the Postmodernrsquo 21ndash32Brooker 1992 also offers key writing on postmodernism and excellentbibliographies for further reading) A third term lsquopoststructuralismrsquo isalso closely interwoven with this complex intellectual history As a theo-retical perspective poststructuralism has offered both a criticalapproach to modernist and postmodernist forms of art and has itselfprofoundly influenced the way artists understand their role By andlarge a French-influenced American perspective on postmodernism hastended to dominate critical thinking in Britain since the 1980s asopposed to a somewhat differently inflected German theoretical under-standing What is most relevant for us at this point is that all three ofthese lsquoismsrsquo modernism postmodernism and poststructuralism havetended to define themselves against their own versions of realism and inso doing have produced a many-faceted critique of realist forms of writ-ing that has become the dominant critical orthodoxy So it makes senseto start by understanding the development of this rather negative viewof realism that most readers are likely to encounter I will start chrono-logically in this chapter with the relationship of modernism to realismand in the following chapter turn to postmodernism

THE MODERNIST CRITIQUE OF REALISM

Here by way of comparison with Eliotrsquos realist writing is the openingpassage of Mrs Dalloway a modernist novel written by Virginia Woolf(1882ndash1941) in 1925

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herselfFor Lucy had her work cut out for her The doors would be taken

off their hinges Rumpelmayerrsquos men were coming And then thoughtClarissa Dalloway what a morning ndash fresh as if issued to children ona beach

What a lark What a plunge For so it had always seemed to herwhen with a little squeak of the hinges which she could hear nowshe had burst open the French windows at Bourton into the open airHow fresh how calm stiller than this of course the air was in theearly morning like the flap of a wave the kiss of a wave chill andsharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn feelingas she did standing there at the open window that something awfulwas about to happen looking at the flowers at the trees with thesmoke winding off them and the rooks rising falling standing andlooking until Peter Walsh said lsquoMusing among the vegetablesrsquo ndash wasthat it ndash lsquoI prefer men to cauliflowersrsquo ndash was that it He must havesaid it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out onto the ter-race ndash Peter Walsh He would be back from India one of these daysJune or July she forgot which for his letters were awfully dull it washis sayings one remembered his eyes his pocket-knife his smile hisgrumpiness and when millions of things had utterly vanished ndash howstrange it was ndash a few sayings like this about cabbages

(Woolf [1925] 1992 3)

Superficially these first paragraphs have much in common with theopening of Daniel Deronda Both passages convey a sense of enteringimmediately into the midst of things both focus upon a central femalecharacter and both contain the voice of a third person narrator Yetthere is surely a vast difference in the assumptions about knowledge thatunderlie each piece of writing Despite the use of an impersonal narra-tive voice no objective perspective is offered the reader of Mrs Dalloway

from which to understand and evaluate the characters referred to or thesocial world evoked The focalisation or narrative perspective remainsalmost entirely within the subjective consciousness of ClarissaDalloway it is her way of knowing things that the writing aims to con-vey Yet lsquoknowledgersquo in any traditional sense is hardly the appropriateword for the subjective continuum of personal thoughts memoriessensory responses speculations and emotions that constitutes the sec-ond paragraph The lsquocharacterrsquo Clarissa Dalloway thus produced is toofluid multiple changing and amorphous to become a fully compre-hended object of the readerrsquos knowledge Although the past is evokedthere is no sense of progressive rational self-development over time ofa moral growth of awareness and enlightenment as the adult learns fromearlier errors and misunderstanding In Clarissarsquos consciousness the pastremains an active force flowing into each current moment but intellec-tual understanding seems much less important than the sharp recall ofphysical sensation inseparably bound to an emotion still felt freshly onthe pulses This passage is typical of the whole novel in which the lsquoplotrsquois encompassed in a single day and resolves no mysteries leaves thefuture of the lives presented in the story as uncertain as at the begin-ning and refuses the reader any objective knowledge of the main pro-tagonists that could form the basis of moral or epistemologicalevaluation Put in technical terms the novel refuses closure nothing andno-one is summed up in the writing as a coherent truth that can beknown As a final point we should notice the very different way inwhich Woolf uses language to that of Eliot Rather than understandingwords primarily as a means of accurate communication transmissionWoolf foregrounds their creative capacity Mrs Dallowayrsquos thought pro-cess is not explained rationally to the reader in the way the narrator ofDaniel Deronda explains the gambling psychology of the wealthyLondon tradesman rather in Mrs Dalloway the rhythm and sound ofwords are utilised to directly suggest something of the actual textureand flow of inner feeling A few sayings about cabbages constitutesPeter Walsh in his immediacy for Clarissa Dalloway in a way that fac-tual details about him cannot

Virginia Woolf (1882ndash1941) was part of the early twentieth-centuryavant-garde movement of modernist writers for whom realist narrativeshad come to seem stylistically cumbersome over-concerned withdetailed description of things their plots determined by narrow middle-class morality and exuding a naive and philistine confidence that objec-tive truth about reality entailed only accurate reportage of sufficientmaterial details These criticisms are forcefully expressed in Woolf rsquoswell-known essay lsquoMr Bennett and Mrs Brownrsquo (1924) in which sheattacks the realist tradition of novel writing as it was currently beingpractised by a somewhat earlier generation of writers like ArnoldBennett (1867ndash1931) Bennett was so concerned to provide a docu-mentary inventory of social aspects about his fictional characters Woolfclaims that the essence of personality escaped him (Woolf [1924] 1967I 319ndash37) In another essay on lsquoModern Fictionrsquo (1925) she argues thatreality as actually experienced by each of us is composed of lsquoa myriadimpressions ndash trivial fantastic evanescent or engraved with the sharp-ness of steelrsquo She asks lsquoIs it not the task of the novelist to convey thisvarying this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit whatever aberrationor complexity it may display with as little mixture of the alien andexternal as possiblersquo (Woolf [1925] 1972 II 106) The oppositionWoolf sets up in these essays between a realist absorption in the surfacemateriality of things on the one hand and an lsquouncircumscribed spiritrsquoas artistic consciousness of subjective reality on the other suggests thatin part at least modernist writers were reacting against the increasingconsumerism and mass production of their culture One element withinmodernism is a somewhat fastidious repulsion at what they felt was thephilistine materialism of much of middle-class life and tastes As popu-lar literature and other forms of art became objects of mass productionand consumption serious writers were challenged to re-assert the claimsof art for artrsquos sake in a way that earlier writers like Charles Dickensand George Eliot for example had not been

There is also a sense in which criticism of realist writing made bymodernist writers like Woolf was in large part the invariable revolt of ayounger generation against their literary precursors Yet importantlythe claims asserted by modernist writers for their own work largelyretained the evaluative language of the Enlightenment Their art wasnew and often aimed to shock bourgeois complacencies but their goal

remained the pursuit of truth Woolf quarrelled with Bennett becauseshe believed that the orderly pattern imposed on life by much realistfiction was inaccurate Joseph Conrad experimenting with narrativeform at the end of the nineteenth century developed his modernisttechniques in the service of literary art ndash lsquodefined as a single-mindedattempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe bybringing to light the truth manifold and one underlying its everyaspecthellipThe artist then like the thinker or the scientist seeks thetruth and makes his appealrsquo (Conrad [1897] 1988 xlvii) In the1930s James Joyce explained that his aim in Ulysses was to present thehero Leopold Bloom as a complete human being seen from all sidesin all human relationships an anatomical human body that lsquolives inand moves through space and is the home of a full human personalityrsquo(quoted in Budgen 1989 21) Modernist writers wrote out of a trou-bled sense that lsquorealityrsquo whether material or psychological was elusivecomplex multiple and unstable but they still believed that the aim oftheir art was to convey knowledge by some new aesthetic means ofthat intangibility In this sense their quarrel with realism was predom-inantly an aesthetic and epistemological one However during the1930s and 1940s the oppressive dictatorship of Stalin in Russia andthe growth of fascism in Germany produced a cultural climate inwhich all public debates including the contending claims of realismand modernist experimentation became highly politicised Thispolemical conflict which inevitably veers towards over-simplificationhas tended to dominate all subsequent discussion and evaluation ofrealist representation

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL MODERNISM VERSUSREALISM

The most powerful advocacy for modernist art came from a group ofGerman cultural critics influenced by Marxism who were associatedduring the 1930s with the Frankfurt Institute for Social ResearchSubsequently known collectively as the Frankfurt School membersof this group produced a series of brilliant cultural diagnoses of whatthey saw as the malaise of contemporary society symptomatic in therise of fascism and mass consumerism These diagnostic essays

transformed the aesthetic repulsion at increasing materialism expressedby many modernist writers into the intellectual foundation of moderncultural and media studies Members of the Frankfurt School claimedthat the root of modern political and cultural intolerance and repressivemoral and social conformity lay in the collaborative relationship thathad developed between the Enlightenment and capitalism The fullestaccount of this Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodor Adorno(1903ndash69) and Max Horkheimer (1895ndash1973) begins strikingly lsquoInthe most general sense of progressive thought the Enlightenment hasalways aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing theirsovereignty Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphantrsquo(Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1997 3)

According to Adorno and Horkheimer disaster attends the projectof the Enlightenment because knowledge came to be understood as aform of rational functionalism In other words knowledge was desiredonly as a means of mastering and making use of the world Implicit insuch a view is a hostility towards any form of mystery What isunknown becomes a source of fear rather than reverence Knowledge isa means of human empowerment Adorno and Horkheimer acknowl-edge but lsquoMen pay for the increase of their power with alienation fromthat over which they exercise power Enlightenment behaves towardsthings as a dictator towards men He knows them in so far as he canmanipulate themrsquo (Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1997 9) The logi-cal result of this functional pursuit of knowledge is ever greater rational-isation and systematisation the ideal of knowledge and languagebecomes mathematical certainty (This ideal was formulated byBertrand Russell and taken up by logical positivist philosophers Afuller account of this will be given in Chapter 4) Thus theEnlightenment lost the capacity for a questioning self-reflexive knowl-edge that could have produced understanding of its own dangers andlimitations Human beings and objects alike are categorised regularisedand unified into the conforming mass order required by a capitalistmode of production and consumption lsquoThrough the countless agenciesof mass production and its culturersquo Adorno and Horkheimer write lsquotheconventionalised modes of behaviour are impressed on the individual asthe only natural respectable and rational onesrsquo (Adorno andHorkheimer [1944] 1997 28)

It can be argued that realist fiction mass produced as part of this con-sumer culture is complicit with functional rationalism Popular novelswritten in a realist mode can function to naturalise a banal view of theworld as familiar morally and socially categorised and predictable Suchstories reproduce the gender class and racial stereotypes that predomi-nate in society at large waywardness and unconventionality of any kindare shown by means of the plot structure to lead to punishment andfailure of some kind while morally and socially condoned patterns ofbehaviour are those rewarded by wealth and opportunities in the case ofheroes and love and marriage in the case of heroines The implicit episte-mological message of such realist writing is to insist lsquothis is how it isrsquo thisis lsquojust the way things are and always will bersquo Art as a special form ofknowledge-seeking gives way to art as diversion from any troubling real-ity and lsquoenlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the massesrsquo(Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 1997 42) Adorno and Horkheimerargue that the end product of the Enlightenment has not been anincrease in human freedom as promised but on the contrary the enclo-sure of all human existence within a total system that is seamlessly con-trolled by the culture industry multinational capitalism and bureaucraticforms of power As we shall see throughout the critique ofEnlightenment and realism that Part I traces images of entrapment andenclosure are recurrently applied to both mass culture and realist writing

Despite the severity of Adornorsquos and Horkheimerrsquos attack upon theproject of Enlightenment there is a degree of ambiguity in the way theterm lsquoenlightenmentrsquo is used in Dialectic of Enlightenment As the titlesuggests the aim is not a wholesale rejection of all progressive thoughtThe real focus of the critique would appear to be what is at times calledthe bourgeois enlightenment as the pursuit of a dominating functionalrationality This leaves the suggestion at least that a positive self-reflex-ive form of enlightenment could emerge and in so doing produce a cri-tique of the alienating totalising system of mass culture Within thislogic it is also arguable that some kinds of realist art can offer a form ofknowledge that constitutes just such a negative critique A later mem-ber of the Frankfurt School Juumlrgen Habermas (1929ndash) has subse-quently advanced a defence of the Enlightenment project and we shallcome to his ideas and their implications for a positive understanding ofrealism in the final chapter

The only concrete example Adorno offers of this negative kind ofknowledge is that achieved by the experimental avant-garde works ofmodernist writers like Franz Kafka (1883ndash1924) and Samuel Beckett(1906ndash89) lsquoArt is the negative knowledge of the actual worldrsquo hewrites a knowledge produced by the distancing effect of aesthetic inno-vation (translated in Taylor 1980 160) Kafkarsquos prose and Beckettrsquosplays have the effect of lsquodismantling appearancesrsquo so that lsquothe inescapa-bility of their work compels the change of attitude which committedworks merely demandrsquo (Taylor 1980 191) By lsquocommitted worksrsquoAdorno largely means traditional realist forms of writing and he arguesthat lsquoArt does not provide knowledge of reality by reflecting it photo-graphicallyhellipbut by revealing whatever is veiled by the empirical formassumed by realityrsquo (Taylor 1980 162) Realist art he argues in an essayon Kafka accepts lsquothe facade of reality at face-valuersquo whereas in the workof Kafka lsquothe space-time of lsquoempirical realismrsquo is exploded through smallacts of sabotage like perspective in contemporary paintingrsquo (Adorno[1967] 1983 261) How vulnerable is George Eliotrsquos realism to suchcriticism of realist form If not exactly photographic the extract fromDaniel Deronda at the beginning of this chapter certainly aims at astrong effect of verisimilitude in its representation of the chink andsweep of money sounds and the visual appearance of the gaming roomwith the rapt attention of the gamblers set against the melancholyblank gaze of the little boy incongruous in such a setting The peopleassembled are individualised as sharply detailed visual portraits lsquothesquare gaunt face deep-set eyes grizzled eye-brows and ill-combedscanty hairrsquo of the English countess contrasted to the London trades-man lsquoblond and soft-handed his sleek hair scrupulously parted behindand beforersquo (Eliot [1874ndash6] 1988 4) There are no acts of artistic sabo-tage here to make us doubt the temporal and spatial certainty of theworld represented Furthermore Eliotrsquos readiness to categorise her char-acters morally and socially might be seen as complicit with the systema-tising impulse of knowledge as mastery that Adorno associates with theEnlightenment However in defence of Eliotrsquos realism we might wantto question how far her writing accepts at face-value the faccedilade of socialreality the recognition of gambling as an image of the dynamics ofspeculative capitalism surely suggests a more complex understanding ofthe structural and economic forces of her age

A more damaging charge against realism than that of epistemologi-cal complacency is Adornorsquos claim that the representation of acts of suf-fering and atrocity in popular art contains lsquohowever remotely thepower to elicit enjoyment out of itrsquo (Taylor 1980 189) This argumentundermines the validity of claims that have been central to the longpolitical tradition of realist writing ndash that powerful depiction of suffer-ing and injustice can act as a vehicle for social reform and change Itwas the force of this belief that graphic accounts of injustice couldshock the public conscience into more progressive attitudes andbehaviour that provided the motive for passionate protest fictions likeHarriet Beecher Stowersquos (1811ndash1896) novel Uncle Tomrsquos Cabin (1851)for example It was certainly a belief at the heart of Dickensrsquos writingLess spectacularly in terms of Daniel Deronda it raises the question asto whether Eliotrsquos negative view of gambling highlighted by the threat-ened innocence of the child in such a scene is undercut by the force ofher realist representation which so powerfully naturalises the situationthat there seems no opportunity for the reader to question the waythings are The empirical verisimilitude functions perhaps to imply thathuman weakness and vice have always injured the vulnerable and inno-cent and always will Adornorsquos criticisms of realist writing areformidable and have remained influential within subsequent criticalperspectives Nevertheless as with his attack on Enlightenment modesof thought more generally there remains some ambiguity in his argu-ments against realism and in favour of modernism in that he aligns thefiction of Honoreacute de Balzac (1799ndash1850) and Charles Dickens(1812ndash70) with that of modernism (Taylor 1980 163)

This ambivalence towards the Enlightenment and the associatedform of literary realism is even more marked in the writing of anotherassociate of the Frankfurt School Walter Benjamin (1892ndash1940)Benjaminrsquos imaginative responsiveness to the stuff of modern life isremarkably similar to the gusto of realist writers like Dickens and Balzacboth in their appetite for and hatred of the proliferating materialism oftheir age Moreover Benjamin on the whole avoids the binary polari-sation that sets up a progressive modernism against a conservative real-ism Benjamin is perceptive in recognising the more significantcontinuities between certain kinds of realism and modernism The greathero of modernism for Benjamin is Charles Baudelaire (1821ndash67)

whose lyric poetry gives dramatic voice to the shock and alienation thatcharacterised the first impact of mass urban society around the middleof the nineteenth century More accurately perhaps Benjamin recog-nised in the personae of Baudelairersquos poems a new type of the modernhero and writer a type fascinated yet repelled by the heterogeneity andspectacle of city streets always aloof and isolated in the midst of thecrowd This modernist urban hero is part dandy part flacircneur or boule-vard-saunterer part detective part criminal Benjamin argues(Benjamin [1955ndash71] 1983 40ndash1) He connects this kind of hero withthe cunning watchfulness that the North American writer JamesFenimore Cooper (1789ndash1851) had represented in his apache charac-ters in his popular Mohican stories of the American wilderness Thatrelentless attention to the smallest detail as a source of knowledge istransferred to the city apache to whom the lsquopedestrians the shops thehired coaches or a man leaning against a windowrsquo have the same burn-ing interest as lsquoan immobile canoe or a floating leaf rsquo in one of Cooperrsquosstories (Benjamin [1955ndash71] 1983 42)

Like Adorno Benjamin associates the force of modernist writingwith its shock effect that defamiliarises a habitual customary responseto reality (Benjamin [1955ndash71] 1983 117) However Benjamin in hisstudy of Baudelaire embeds the practice of writing much more pro-foundly and inseparably than Adorno in the economics and materialityof the life of its era in the new glamour of consumerism in the threat-ening electric energy sensed in the agitated amorphous city crowds inthe squalor and precariousness of urban poverty Benjamin pays tributeto Baudelairersquos supreme poetic expression of this modernist response tomass society but he sees Baudelaire as working in the same tradition aswriters like Balzac and Dickens who are usually regarded as nineteenth-century realists Benjamin quotes Dickensrsquos complaint that he cannotwrite without the imaginative resource of London streets lsquoIt seems as ifthey supplied something to my brain which it cannot bear when busyto lose For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retiredplacehellipand a day in London sets me up again and starts me But thetoil and labour of writing day after day without that magic lantern isimmensehellipMy figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds aboutthemrsquo (Benjamin [1955ndash71] 1983 49) (The source of this quotation isForster 1892 317)

Benjamin shares the critical perspective of the Frankfurt Schooltowards the culture industry and the negative perception of society asincreasingly dominated by mass production consumerism and bureau-cracy He recognises in mass produced cheap literature and in the newpopular cinema powerful forces for an induced moral and cultural con-formity and for frivolous distraction from real social problems Yet thelanguage in which he speaks about modern urban life has little ofAdornorsquos disdainful austerity (Benjaminrsquos essay lsquoThe Work of Art in theAge of Mechanical Reproductionrsquo provides one of the fullest expressionsof his complex response to mass consumption and production SeeBenjamin [1955] 1999 211ndash44) In Charles Baudelaire Benjaminwrites of mass production lsquoThe more industry progresses the moreperfect are the imitations which it throws on the market The commod-ity is bathed in a profane glowrsquo (Benjamin [1955ndash71] 1983 105)Benjamin writes so perceptively about commodity culture because he issusceptible to its specious profane glamour This mixture of horror andattraction for the materiality of the modern world is an ambivalence heshares not only with Baudelaire but also with the great realist writersHis typically detailed observation of the preference of the bourgeoisiefor things made of plush and velvet fabrics which preserve the impres-sion of every touch would have delighted Dickens (Benjamin[1955ndash71] 1983 46) Moreover Benjamin regards popular forms ofwriting like Fenimore Cooperrsquos adventure stories and Edgar Allan Poersquos(1809ndash49) detective fiction both forms that became the staple of amass-produced realist mode of literature with real appreciation recog-nising the relevance of their formal and thematic qualities to modernexistence In this openness to the progressive potential of differentgeneric forms of creative realist expression and in his responsiveness tothe sensual material substance of reality Benjamin is not unlike the per-sona of the writer he recognises in Baudelairersquos image of the rag-pickerwho sifts the daily city waste for his livelihood Such an attitude consti-tuting an absorbed unfastidious connoisseurship towards the material-ity of existence offers a useful way of understanding part of the artisticimpulse behind realism a complex ambivalent responsiveness towardsrather than repulsion from the tangible stuff of reality Realism is com-mitted to the material actuality we share as embodied creatures

What modernist writers largely rebelled against in the texts of theirnineteenth-century predecessors was what they saw as the complacentmoral certainty and over-rational coherence that seemed to underpinplot structure narrative perspective and characterisation in realist nov-els They did not by and large reject the very possibility that literaryart could produce some form of knowledge of reality however elusiveand uncircumscribed the real had come to seem During the secondhalf of the twentieth century however a new theoretical understand-ing of what constitutes reality developed undermining far more radi-cally the rational grounds of Enlightenment values and the expressiveform of realism This new perspective was both anti-realism and anti-humanism The new paradigm wholly rejects the human capacity forknowledge creation recognising instead the constituting force of animpersonal system of language to construct the only sense of reality wecan ever achieve Our intuitive commonsensical view of language isthat words refer to a pre-existing reality beyond linguistics words arethe means by which we transmit or reproduce experience and knowl-edge of the physical and social worlds Clearly this is the view of lan-guage informing the narrative voice of Daniel Deronda with itsconfidently detailed account of a specific social world In this sense lan-guage tends to be thought of as somehow transparent we look throughthe words as it were to the actuality they point to

2REALISM ANTI-REALISM AND

POSTMODERNISM

FROM STRUCTURALISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISMAND POSTMODERNISM

This unquestioning acceptance of what we can call the referentialcapacity of language to offer us access to the extra-linguistic world wasundermined by the structural linguistics developed by Swiss semiolo-gist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857ndash1913) in the early years of thetwentieth century (Saussure [1916] 1983) At the centre of Saussurianlinguistics is the counter-intuitive claim that words are meaningfulnot because they refer to things in the world but because of their rela-tionship with other words The most easily grasped example of thisstructuralist thinking is the case of binary oppositions No understand-ing of the concept lsquoshortrsquo is possible in the absence of the conceptlsquolongrsquo The meaning of both words is produced by their structuralrelationship of difference The same interdependent structure producesthe meaning of those binary concepts that form the major frameworkof categories by which we think good and evil beautiful and uglyabove and below light and dark nature and culture enlightenmentand ignorance right and wrong and so on The relationship of allwords to the actual world Saussure argues is arbitrary and accidentalIf there were some inherent necessary connection between the writtenform or the sound of lsquogoodrsquo and its meaning then the word (or signas Saussure calls it) would have to be identical everywhere in all lan-guages which is clearly not the case Language is a closed system thatproduces meaning from its own internal relationships This is so foreven the most basic unit of sound human beings can only acquirespeech because they have the ability to recognise difference to distin-guish lsquotrsquo from lsquodrsquo from lsquobrsquo Language is constituted as a system of dif-ferences at the micro and macro levels

Where does this radical view of language leave realist fiction with itsimplicit claim to use words to produce an accurate imitation of the realworld What we might notice looking again at the opening of DanielDeronda from a structuralist perspective is Eliotrsquos reliance on binaryoppositions to produce her meaning The questions of the first para-graph are structured overtly upon conceptual oppositions but in thesecond paragraph also gambling lsquoin the open air under a southern skyrsquoproduces most of the negative force accruing to the contrary image of

realism anti-realism and postmodernism 25

the condensation of human breath in the enclosed luxury of fashionableresorts The readerrsquos responsiveness to this passage is achieved by thisinternal relationship within the paragraph itself rather than by checkingpersonal knowledge of nineteenth-century gambling resorts and con-firming the empirical correspondence of the words to external realityThe image of the child in the third paragraph summons up the binarymoral categories of innocence and experience upon which the meaningof the chapter as a whole depends hence its title lsquoThe Spoiled ChildrsquoIn this way Eliotrsquos novel can be thought of as a closed linguistic struc-ture that produces its own meaning system independent of any accu-rate referential correspondence to external reality From approximatelythe 1960s into the 1980s this kind of formal structuralist approach tonarratives of all kinds provided a dominant critical method and I shallreturn to this in more detail in Part III

The radical import of structural linguistics consisted of its logicalsevering of words from the world but in other ways structuralism canbe understood as part of the Enlightenment project of producing sys-tematic knowledge The ideal driving structuralism was the success ofnatural sciences like physics and chemistry which had reduced theimmense multitudinous physical properties of things to the simplicity ofa few basic chemical elements whose structural relationships couldaccount for the diversity of forms the material world assumed By anal-ogy structural linguists hoped to arrive at a basic elemental grammar orsystem of rules that would be able to show how the infinite number ofverbal variations apparent in the social world were produced The scien-tific search for this basic grammar (termed langue) underlying all verbalforms (termed parole) has proved elusive It was the radical aspect ofstructuralism as it turned out that had an ambitious and excitingfuture The various strands of this development of structuralist logic arebrought together under the umbrella term lsquopoststructuralismrsquo Whatthese various forms of poststructuralism share is a concern to thinkthrough the implications of the structuralist account of language in thebroader terms of culture and history The advent of structuralism issometimes referred to as the lsquolinguistic turnrsquo and poststructuralism asthe lsquocultural turnrsquo Since the 1980s the lsquocultural turnrsquo has producedsome of the most challenging and rigorous accounts of social structuresideological processes and cultural productions In what follows I shall

deal largely with those aspects of poststructuralism that are mostdirectly related to an understanding of realism

The optimistic humanist ideals of Enlightenment are based on thebelief that intellectual and empirical observation of subjective and mate-rial realities produces an objective knowledge of the world which togetherwith rational morality propels human progress This optimism cannotlogically survive an acceptance of the constructive function of languageLanguage does not serve as a neutral or translucent means of communica-tion All human beings are born into an already existing system of mean-ing and they can only ever lsquoknowrsquo reality by means of the conceptualcategories their language system allows them As an illustrative examplethink of the ways in which we order our understanding of and response tothe furry four-footed creatures with which we share geography pets wildlife game vermin pests meat Yet these categorising words are culturalmeanings and values by which we classify the creatures not intrinsic qual-ities that they bear with them straight from the hand of god or nature Theconceptual and classifying structure of language is the bearer of values aswell as meanings and we cannot operate the meaning system without atthe same time activating the values The grand narratives ofEnlightenment thought with their ideals of human progress and a justcommunity dependent upon the sovereign power of rational knowledgeand moral judgement can themselves be seen as a fiction or illusion pro-duced by language they are a cultural and linguistic construct The termlsquoenlightenmentrsquo derives value and meaning from its structural relationshipto the concept of lsquoignorancersquo but these classifying values are attributed towhat is actually a continuum of human skills and cultural activities asarbitrarily as the terms lsquopetsrsquo and lsquopestsrsquo are used to classify the animalkingdom Similarly the terms lsquorationalrsquo and lsquoirrationalrsquo lsquomoralrsquo andlsquoimmoralrsquo are cultural categories that we impose on the continuum ofhuman behaviour and thought they are not inherent meanings by whichwe know the world objectively Even the subjective self the sovereign loca-tion of rationality and moral discrimination can only know its lsquoself rsquo bymeans of the language system into which it is born Without the pronounlsquoIrsquo as a binary opposition to lsquoyoursquo how could a sense of unique self identitybe achieved Yet everyone refers to themself as lsquoIrsquo

It is easy to see the extent to which realist fiction both depends uponand supports the illusion of the underlying Enlightenment narrative

Novelistic language purports to correspond faithfully to the social andphysical worlds the realist plot is typically structured upon the episte-mological progress of readers and principal characters from ignorance toknowledge and characterisation normally focuses upon the highly indi-vidualised inner subjective self-development of rational understandingand moral discrimination This movement of the novel towards the res-olution of mysteries and difficulties produces a reassuring sense of clo-sure an affirmation that life understood in its totality forms ameaningful pattern Let us compare this traditional form of novel withthe opening of a novel that expresses a postmodern perception and isinformed by an understanding of poststructural thinking Here are thefirst paragraphs of Angela Carterrsquos (1940ndash1992) Nights at the Circus(1984) which like Daniel Deronda begins with a young man attempt-ing to gain knowledge of the central female protagonist But what kindof epistemology underwrites the aesthetics of this passage

lsquoLorrsquo love you sirrsquo Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dust-bin lids lsquoAs to my place of birth why I fancy I first saw light of dayright here in smoky old London didnrsquot I Not billed the lsquoCockneyVenusrsquo for nothing sir though they could just as well rsquoave called melsquoHelen of the Hire Wirersquo due to the unusual circumstances in which Icome ashore ndash for I never docked via what you might call normalchannels sir oh dear me no but just like Helen of Troy washatchedrsquo

lsquoHatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang as everisrsquo The blonde guffawed uproariously slapped the marbly thigh onwhich her wrap fell open and flashed a pair of vast blue indecorouseyes at the young reporter with his open notebook and his poisedpencil as if to dare him lsquoBelieve it or notrsquo Then she spun round onher swivelling dressing-stool ndash it was a plush-topped backless pianostool lifted from the rehearsal room ndash and confronted herself with agrin in the mirror as she ripped six inches of false lash from her lefteyelid with an incisive gesture and a small explosive rasping sound

Fevvers the most famous aerialiste of her day her slogan lsquoIs shefact or is she fictionrsquo And she didnrsquot let you forget it for a minute thisquery in the French language in foot-high letters blazed forth from awall-sized poster souvenir of her Parisian triumphs dominating her

London dressing-room Something hectic something fittinglyimpetuous and dashing about that poster the preposterous depictionof a young woman shooting up like a rocket whee In a burst of agi-tated sawdust towards an unseen trapeze somewhere above in thewooden heavens of the Cirque drsquoHiver The artist had chosen todepict her ascent from behind ndash bums aloft you might say up shegoes in a steatopygous perspective shaking out about her thosetremendous red and purple pinions pinions large enough powerfulenough to bear up such a big girl as she And she was a big girl

(Carter 1984 7)

This writing constitutes a radical challenge to any notion of verifiabletruth as an evaluative criterion of good fiction The question of moralcategorisation that opens Daniel Deronda (lsquowas the good or evil domi-nantrsquo) is replaced by the query lsquoIs she fact or is she fictionrsquo It is imme-diately obvious that the whole point of the passage is to keep thisuncertainty in oscillation Not only does Fevvers reject the normalempirical origin in a biological family history she is quite openly tellingstories about herself lsquoI fancy I first saw the light of dayrsquo She constructsself identity as a performance that is as extravagantly artificial as the sixinches of false eye-lash that she rips off so theatrically Her being defiesepistemological definition she operates across the boundaries of factand fiction myth and reality human and supernatural The binaryeitheror alternatives that open Daniel Deronda have no purchase in thisscheme of things The references to Helen of Troy Venus and the wall-size poster of Fevvers in upward flight upon huge red and purple wingssuggest the way notions of identity are ultimately dependent upon cul-tural narratives and images Birth is not the unique originating point ofwho we are rather a self is produced by the stories of self throughwhich we interpret our lives This textuality of identity the constructivepower of cultural texts and fictions to produce the notion of self oper-ates most obviously at the level of stereotypes like the dumb blonde thewarm-hearted cockney whore woman as chaste angel or divinity all ofthese fictions are jokingly evoked in the introductory representation ofthe novelrsquos heroine Fevvers

THE POSTSTRUCTURAL CRITIQUE OF REALISM

This open acknowledgement of the fictionality of all lsquoknowledgersquo theinsistence that reality amounts to cultural stories and interpretationsthat we impose upon existence to create meaning for ourselves and ofourselves is the most typical characteristic of postmodern writing It isneedless to say directly contrary to the implicit epistemological claimsof realist writing to convey knowledge about the extra-linguistic worldNights at the Circus is also postmodern in its pervasive use of parodyand burlesque to mock the conventional cultural order that attempts tohold in place stereotypical moral and social binary oppositions and theideological values they perpetuate Equally postmodern is the concernwith commodification and repeatability Fevvers presents herself as aproduct for public consumption while the notion of being hatchedfrom an egg suggests simultaneously a non-human uniqueness and aninfinite reproduction of sameness We should finally note the playful-ness of the language the double entendres like lsquonormal channelsrsquo thedip and swoop of lexicon from lsquobums aloftrsquo to lsquosteatopygous perspec-tiversquo the energised vitality of the syntax Carter is not using words asself-effacing transmitters of knowledge all of the qualities of her prosecombine to foreground the textuality of the text the delightful sensualmateriality of the words themselves

The poststructuralist French philosopher Jean-Franccedilois Lyotard(1924ndash1998) has been an influential critic of what he calls the grandnarrative of Enlightenment with its legitimisation of systematic totalis-ing forms of knowledge and its ideology of rational progress In articu-lating this critique Lyotard positions himself within the tradition of theFrankfurt School and its negative analysis of the Enlightenment forpursuing an instrumental form of knowledge as mastery of things andpeople Lyotard ignores the ambivalence of writers like Adorno towardsthe Enlightenment and is actively hostile to Juumlrgen Habermas whowent on to develop a more positive account

Following Adorno Lyotard criticises realism for its ideological andaesthetic conservatism Realist art in the era of late capitalism can nolonger evoke reality he claims but it feeds the nostalgic desire for aworld of moral certainties and experiential coherence a world that canbe grasped and known as a totality The task assigned to realism he

says is lsquoto preserve certain consciousnesses from doubtrsquo (Lyotard [1979]1984 74) It fulfils this task he argues by drawing upon language syn-tax images and narrative sequences that the reader is familiar with andcan easily decode to produce a reassuring interpretation of reality interms of predictability unity simplicity and communicability Whatthis kind of realist representation veils is the anarchic postmodern con-dition of the late capitalist world This constitutes a social universeruled by global markets and a communication explosion based on com-puter technology situated in a physical world of relativity chaos theoryand particle physics rather than the old predictable Newtonian narrativeof cause and effect These forces produce a postmodern culture of anti-realism dominated by visual surface simulation fictionality repetitionand the instantaneous Images of war and disaster flash around theworld in seconds but there is no way of separating their quality as ideo-logical presentation from their correspondence to any actualityConflicts are fought out in high-tech media images as well as high-techweaponry A financial rumour circulating in Chicago can close downfactories in Taiwan The lives of media stars performed in the glare ofglobal publicity blur inseparably into the fictional world of soaps TheEnlightenment narrative of knowledge as progressive understanding isredundant in an anti-realist culture of simulation and transitory identi-ties Yet Lyotard suggests that there is a positive potential here in thedestruction of the basis of traditional forms of authority and powerThe dominating Enlightenment grand narrative of rational progressand mastery and associated realist expression can he argues bereplaced by little narratives local truths unfinished meanings LikeFevvers we can refuse the conventional humanism type of life narrativeof rational and moral development and instead create and perform ourown instantaneous little histories making a playful burlesque out of allthe cultural fictions available to us For Lyotard the aesthetic form andunderlying cognitive beliefs of realism are utterly incapable of represent-ing the antirealism and antihumanism of the postmodern conditionOnly avant-garde writing like Carterrsquos can provide lsquoknowledgersquo of therandom multiplying synthetic hyper-reality that is late capitalism Yetif this is the case it could be argued against Lyotard that Carter is amodern realist still writing within the paradigm that knowledge of theextra-textual world can be produced and communicated Literary

genres do not stand still to remain vibrant they adapt to the changingsocial realities within which they are produced We might also just notein passing that George Eliotrsquos similation of consumer-driven speculativecapitalism to a gambling casino would seem also to foreground unpre-dictability as a structural force of the modern condition David Harvey aleading theorist of postmodern culture has termed the speculativefinance of late capitalism the lsquocasino economyrsquo (Harvey 1990 332)

The French literary critic Roland Barthes (1915ndash80) also castigatesrealist novelists for representing a world lsquopurged of the uncertainty ofexistencersquo (Barthes [1953] 1967 27) lsquoFor all the great storytellers of thenineteenth century the world may be full of pathos but it is notderelictrsquo he writes (Barthes [1953] 1967 28) By this Barthes meansthat human life and characters as represented in realist fiction may begiven the sombre colour of intense suffering and catastrophe butwithin such fiction life and human identity are never denied all mean-ing and purpose A consoling sense of pattern or closure is never finallyrefused Barthes labels those kinds of novels that provide such reassur-ance readerly (Barthes [1973] 1990 4) He associates this kind of writ-ing with mass commodity culture The readerly work offers itself to thereader to be passively consumed he says It demands only an acquies-cent acceptance of its predictable familiar representation of characterand plot Such products Barthes claims lsquomake up the enormous massof our literaturersquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 5) Complicity with con-sumerism is not the only role of such reassuring realism Barthes arguesthat it has a yet more insidious ideological effect Despite the great vari-ety of characters and the many different plots that novels offer theirreaders a basic framework of conceptual beliefs about human life iscontinually reasserted For example the binary oppositions that insistthat male is only and always different from female black from whiterich from poor west from east are continually reiterated as is the hier-archical predominance of the first term over the second in each of thesepairs Realist novels present these value as if they were universalattributes of an unchanging human nature Barthes claims that thiskind of writing allowed the lsquotriumphant bourgeoisie of the last cen-turyhellipto look upon its values as universal and to carry over to sectionsof society which were absolutely heterogeneous to it all the Nameswhich were part of its ethosrsquo (Barthes [1953] 1967 29) What Barthes

is suggesting here is that realist novels were complicit in fostering theconfidence with which European nations imposed their understandingof moral identity and values upon colonised peoples claiming andoften believing they were upholding abiding human laws and promot-ing enlightenment and progress This perception of the eurocentric val-ues of realist writing has been radically developed by critics like EdwardSaid (1935ndash) Gayatri Spivak (1924ndash) and Bill Ashcroft who writingfrom the perspective of postcolonial countries point out among otherthings the way a colonial education system offered native peoples lsquogreatliteraturersquo as part of its civilising mission a literature which includedadventure stories of noble British heroes fighting for the honour of theircountry and the purity of their women against perfidious superstitiousand bestial lsquonativesrsquo (See for example Bill Ashcroft et al 1989 Said1984 and 1994 Spivak 1988 Azim 1993)

Barthes contrasts what he terms writerly texts to the complacentgender and racial ideologies of the classic realist story Writerly textshave to be actively produced by the reader rather than consumed sothat the reader in this sense lsquowritesrsquo the text in the act of readingBarthesrsquo thinking is drawing upon the structuralist insight that languageis a system of differences that signs (words) acquire meaning only bymeans of their relationship to other signs (words) Saussure had shownhow signs are composed of two elements a signifier comprising a soundor visual mark and a signified comprising the concept culturally associ-ated with the signifier Yet there is no necessary and fixed relationshipbetween signifier and signified and a single signifier can slide across awide chain of meaning In Nights at the Circus Fevvers declares lsquoI neverdocked via what you might call normal channelsrsquo The phrase lsquonormalchannelsrsquo usually signifies a proper or official way of doings things in abureaucratic context Fevvers is sliding the meaning humorously acrossto accommodate the concept of normal birth via an anatomical canalBut canals and channels also suggest water hence the idea of dockingand this in turn plays upon the nineteenth-century euphemism forbirth as a little boat bearing a baby over the ocean This propels a fur-ther spillage of meaning into the myth of Venus arising from the waterAll of these connotations are brought into play by Carter as part of theunorthodox plurality that is her heroine Barthes uses the terms lsquotextrsquoand lsquotextualityrsquo to suggest the interwoven many layered quality of this

kind of writing For Barthes writerly texts are those that exploit theproliferation of the signifying chain thereby shaking the assumed sta-bility of conceptual meaning Such writing he claims is potentially rev-olutionary subverting social orthodoxies and breaching cultural taboosThe ideal text he says is lsquoa galaxy of signifiers not a structure of signi-fiedsrsquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 5) and the ideal reading aims to recognisethat lsquoeverything signifies ceaselessly and several timesrsquo (Barthes [1973]1990 12)

However despite this insistence upon distinguishing readerly realistworks from writerly experimental texts Barthesrsquo own brilliant writerlyreading of Balzacrsquos story Sarrasine (1830) suggests that it may not berealist narratives per se that can be categorised as imposing closed uni-tary meaning What may be at stake is the way in which we chose toread any piece of writing You may have noticed already how conve-niently I have been able to turn to the passage from Daniel Deronda toillustrate most of the points I have been making This is not just a caseof having carefully chosen a novel that would let me have my cake andeat it Texts of all kinds prove very hospitable to the meanings readersseek to find in them

DECONSTRUCTING REALISM

Barthesrsquo emphasis upon play and textuality draws upon the work ofFrench philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930ndash) Derridarsquos deconstructivemethod has exerted a very powerful influence upon current literary crit-icism especially as practised in America His project has been no lessthan the deconstruction of the whole tradition of Western thought andwhat he calls its metaphysics of presence In this sense at least Derridacan be seen as operating within the Enlightenment tradition whichseeks to free human intellect by demystifying superstitious beliefs andsecularising the sacred He shows by means of meticulously detailedreadings of philosophical texts from Plato to Nietzsche Heidegger andHusserl how speech has been consistently valued as more authenticthan writing This is because the meaning and truth of speech is held tobe more immediately in touch with an originating thought or intentionthan writing is Truth in Western philosophy has always been under-stood to be guaranteed by presence of an author or a mind or God

Writing is seen as secondary or supplementary to speech in that it is atleast two removes from an originating and authenticating presence Thislsquometaphysics of presencersquo underpins an ideal of Truth as whole and uni-tary and of meaning as fixed stable and definitive It also provides thebasis of a conceptual hierarchy which values speech over writing pres-ence over absence the spiritual over the material the original over thecopy the same over difference Derrida calls this Western structure ofthought logocentrism Derridarsquos deconstruction of these hierarchiesbegins from the Saussurian sense of language as an impersonal system ofdifferences Yet Derrida takes the logic of this insight much further thanSaussure ever envisaged Saussure theorised signs as composed of a sig-nifier and a signified that is a mental concept but Derrida claims thata signifier cannot be arrested in a single meaning that is present in themind Signifiers refer only to other signifiers in an unstoppable motionThus language must be understood as a signifying practice in whichmeaning is constantly deferred

Let us take a rather simple way of demonstrating this complex ideaThe signifier lsquoevilrsquo depends upon the binary relationship with the signi-fier lsquogoodrsquo for its signified meaning and vice versa Yet logically thisentails that neither meaning exists positively in its own right Each sig-nifier must point perpetually to its opposite in an unstable oscillationthat can never cease The same structural interdependence ensures thatany definitive meaning of the word lsquofactrsquo is continually deferred by itsnecessary relationship of difference to lsquofictionrsquo But these are only microexamples of the general condition of being of language the very possi-bility of language is founded upon difference Derrida describes lan-guage as a field of infinite substitutions (Derrida [1967] 1978 289) Hesays lsquothe meaning of meaning (in the general sense of meaninghellip) isinfinite implication the indefinite referral of signifier to signifierrsquo(Derrida [1967] 1978 25) Derrida uses the word lsquodisseminationrsquo toevoke this notion of language as spillage and spread of meaning withoutclosure or end and he coins the term diffeacuterance from the French verblsquodiffeacutererrsquo meaning both to differ and to defer to bring together theideas that language is a system of difference in which meaning is alwaysdeferred

By affirming language as diffeacuterance Derrida totally rejects the idealof Truth enshrined in all forms of logocentrism Traditional critical

studies of realist novels have been based upon implicit logocentricbeliefs critics assume that the writing expresses the authorrsquos intentionwhich constitutes the lsquoreal truthrsquo or lsquoessential meaningrsquo of the story orthe lsquotruthrsquo of the fiction is understood as guaranteed by the accuratecorrespondence of the words to an authentic objective reality beyondthe text One of Derridarsquos most quoted remarks is lsquoIl nrsquoy a pas de horstextersquo (Derrida [1967] 1976 163) This is sometimes taken as a denialthat there is any reality at all beyond texts and textuality beyond thoseinterpretations or fictions imposed on us by our language systemHowever rather than asserting that there is no reality apart from textsDerrida might more reasonably be taken to claim that there is no out-side-text In other words there is no authority beyond the writing itselfwhether that authority be thought of as the author God science objec-tivity that can guarantee its lsquotruthrsquo Derrida perceives language as animpersonal creative energy that exists quite independently of any inten-tion of an author or speaker

Derrida calls this energy that constitutes writing lsquoforcersquo or lsquoplayrsquo Hewrites lsquoThere is not a single signified that escapes even if recapturedthe play of signifying references that constitute language The advent ofwriting is the advent of this playrsquo (Derrida [1967] 1976 7) Derridaalso suggests that forms of avant-garde writing consciously elaborate apractice of writing as infinite play of meaning rather than deployinglanguage as a medium for conveying an authorial truth or attemptingan accurate imitation of a pre-existing non-linguistic objective realityThis notion of the playful deferral of meaning has been immenselyinfluential on critical practice and on literary postmodern writing espe-cially in North America

However despite his affirmation of language as limitless playDerrida himself continues to insist upon the necessity for rational dis-course especially on the part of the critic He argues that it is through lsquoacareful and thorough discoursersquo brought to bear upon any particulartext that a critic comes to discover lsquothe crevice through which the yetunnameable glitter beyond the closure can be glimpsedrsquo (Derrida[1967] 1976 14) His deconstructive method consists of a lsquocertain wayof readingrsquo (Derrida [1967] 1978 288) which brings to light thosepoints in the text where the language seems to escape its own closurewhere images metaphors and phrases function to put into doubt the

meaning that the writing seems elsewhere to assert Derrida is mainlyreferring to the kind of critical reading that should be brought to thestudy of philosophical texts but there is no reason why the sameapproach should not be brought to literary texts in general and to realisttexts in particular By means of lsquoa certain kind of readingrsquo perhaps real-ist writing too can be shown to contain crevices glittering with a play ofmeaning that explodes their apparent closure

Before moving on to an example of a deconstructive reading of real-ist writing that aims to do just this it may be helpful to summarise thecritique of realism produced by those three lsquoismsrsquo of modernism post-modernism and poststructuralism At the heart of this critique is arejection of the Enlightenment view of rational knowledge and humanprogress Far from producing new understanding of the world realistnovels are accused of colluding with functional reason to producephilistine readerly narratives These give comfort to the readerrsquos moraland cultural expectations of what life should be like rather than chal-lenging the existing conceptual and socio-political status quo Evenwhen graphic accounts of suffering and injustice are represented theeffect of the surface verisimilitude of realist form is to naturalise suchhappenings as part of the inevitable condition of human existence Thisuniversalising tendency has also functioned to underpin Europeanbourgeois morality and individualism as timeless values to be imposedupon the rest of the world With the full development of the postmod-ern condition the aesthetic and cognitive bankruptcy of realism is con-firmed even popular culture is currently abandoning realism as a modeof expression This is a formidable charge sheet against realism but aswe have seen co-existing with this critique there have been elements ofunease at thus dismissing the near century of literary achievement con-stituted in the novels of writers like Dickens Eliot Balzac and TolstoyA way of circumventing this embarrassment is that suggested byBarthesrsquo reading of Balzacrsquos novella Sarrasine and Derridarsquos deconstruc-tive method lsquoA certain kind of readingrsquo can be used to liberate so-calledrealist writers from accusations of linguistic and cognitive complacencyby demonstrating that their writing is covertly proto-poststructuralistexperimental sceptical and self-reflexive The limitation of this libera-tion approach which aims to free realism from its own entrapment isthat it perpetuates the rather unhelpful dominant critical binarism that

constitutes the experimental as progressive open and good and realismas conservative restrictive and bad art It thus functions to inhibit gen-uinely new thinking about realism that might move understanding onbeyond the current assumptions

Let us now look at a typical deconstructive reading of a realist textby J Hillis Miller (1928ndash) one of a group of American literary criticsincluding Paul de Man (1919ndash1983) at Yale University who have beenstrongly influenced by Jacques Derrida Paul de Manrsquos most influentialtext is Blindness and Insight (1983) and central to the Yale deconstruc-tionist approach is the notion that frequently a textrsquos blindness to logi-cal inconsistencies within its discourse is in fact the site of its mostprofound insights These points of illuminating blindness are very oftenrevealed by means of a close critical reading of the writerrsquos use of rhetor-ical tropes and figurative language From this perspective it is significantto my argument that throughout his essay on lsquoThe Fiction of RealismSketches by Boz Oliver Twist and Cruikshankrsquos Illustrationsrsquo Millerreturns continually to the binary trope of liberation versus entrapment(Miller 1971 85ndash153) He opens his discussion by pointing out thatstructural linguistics has brought about the lsquodisintegrationrsquo of the realistparadigm which holds that a literary text is lsquovalidated by its one-to-onecorrespondence to some social historical or psychological realityrsquo(Miller 1971 85) He goes on to argue however that while realist textsmay invite readers to interpret stories according to this paradigm theyalso provide openings for another kind of reading Sketches by Boz(1836ndash7) Miller suggests is a particularly challenging text on which totest this claim that realist texts offer deconstructive insights into theirown realist blindness since the writing seems very firmly rooted inDickensrsquos journalistic mode Comprised of highly detailed sketches ofLondon streets people and ways of living lsquohere even if nowhere elseDickens seems to have been practising a straightforward mimetic real-ismrsquo (Miller 1971 86ndash7) The fallacy that realism offers an accurate cor-respondence to external reality lsquoherehellipaffirms itself in the sunlight witha clear consciencersquo (Miller 1971 89) And he points out that the wholetradition of critical response to Sketches by Boz has similarly affirmedthis fallacy in praising the Sketches for their fidelity to the real

The main strategy by which Dickensrsquos writing in Sketches by Bozinveigles the unwary reader into a realist interpretation is the recur-

rent use of metonymic contiguity Metonymy is a figure of speech inwhich the part stands in for the whole to which it belongs as in thephrase lsquoall hands on deckrsquo lsquoHandsrsquo in this expression refers to thewhole body and person to which the hands are joined or contiguousOur normal experience of reality accords to metonymic contiguityIn focusing upon Dickensrsquos use of metonymy Miller is drawing uponthe work of linguist Roman Jakobson (1896ndash1982) whose theorieswill be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 As I walk across aroom or down a street for example I experience space and time interms of adjacency and continuity one shop moves me on to theadjacent one and one moment of window gazing flows into the nextI take this small part of my experience of the world as standing inmetonymically for the whole which extends contiguously from it inlike manner In Sketches by Boz the narrator typically describes hisprogress down a street moving contiguously from one spectacle tothe next In addition Boz frequently pursues an imaginary contigu-ous progression in which he moves from some perceived detail of acharacterrsquos clothes or behaviour to speculation about the whole per-sonality and thence to the even larger whole of the personrsquos life Thisnarrative pattern of metonymic progression Miller argues mimicsone of the underlying assumptions of realism that there is lsquoa neces-sary similarity between a man his environment and the life he isforced to lead within that environmentrsquo (Miller 1971 98) It is bymeans of these rhetorical strategies Miller says that Dickensrsquos writ-ing entraps the naive reader into a readerly consumption of the textas mimetically lsquotrue to lifersquo

However for a discriminating reader able to espouse the kind ofdetached distance that Miller attributes to Boz the text contains suf-ficient clues for a more insightful reading one that performs an actof liberation from the illusion of realism Miller claims lsquoIn severalplaces Boz gives the reader the information he needs to free himselffrom a realistic interpretationrsquo (Miller 1971 119) This kind of dis-criminating reader is in sharp contrast both to the naive realist readerand the characters of the stories most of whom Miller claimslsquoremain trapped in their illusionsrsquo (Miller 1971 104) What the nar-rator indicates is that all the characters live their lives as some formof imitation their behaviour gestures and mannerisms are constantly

likened in the text to those of theatre pantomime and farcelsquoCharacter after character in the Sketches is shown to be pretending tobe what he is notrsquo Miller claims but they remain blindly unaware ofthis hollowness behind the surface display that is their entire exis-tence (Miller 1971 109) Only Boz and the perceptive reader recog-nise the fraudulence of social reality the fictive nature of all socialidentities For the mass of the urban inhabitants of London as repre-sented in Sketches by Boz life is a sordid sham

People in the Sketches are trapped not by social forces but by humanfabrications already there within which they must live their lives Theylive not in free creativity but as stale repetitions of what has gonebefore The world of the Sketches is caught in the copying of whatpreceded it Each new form is a paler imitation of the past Each per-son is confined in the tawdry imitation of stale gestureshellipThey arepathetically without awareness that their cheapness is pathetic hope-lessly imprisoned within the cells of a fraudulent culture

(Miller 1971 111)

Although Miller is ostensibly describing the fictionality of all humanidentities as represented in a fictional text here his language strikinglyevokes the non-linguistic materiality of mass commodity productionMillerrsquos own rhetoric transforms the urban poor who crowd the pagesof Sketches into a mass-produced unenlightened cheap uniformity

The critical act of revealing the fictitiousness of realist claims to cor-respond to a non-linguistic extra-textual reality is not performedMiller says in pursuit of some truth beyond or behind the fictions thatconstitute society lsquoBehind each fiction there is another fictionhellipNoone can escapersquo (Miller 1971 121) The only liberation possible fromimprisonment in a fraudulent culture of repeated imitations of imita-tions is by means of the detached aware playfulness cultivated by theartist and the intelligent critical reader There is a striking similaritybetween the opposition Miller sets up between lsquofree creativityrsquo on theone hand and on the other the lsquotawdry imitationrsquo of mere surface towhich the mass of people are condemned and that antithesis found inWoolf rsquos essays on realism in which she contrasts an lsquouncircumscribedspiritrsquo to realismrsquos philistine materialism Miller chooses Sketches by Boz

as an uncompromisingly realist text for deconstruction I have chosento discuss Millerrsquos essay for somewhat opposite reasons it seems to meto offer a particularly clear insight into the blindness of much poststruc-turalist critical theory As we have seen one recurrent theme in thedeveloping critique of realism from modernism to a postmodern pre-sent has been the accusation that realist writing supports a comfortingconservatism its form and content matches the naive readerrsquos conven-tional expectations about the way things are Yet does not the practiceof deconstructive criticism offer its own form of seductive and flatteringcomfort The reassurance of feeling above the crowd more individualthan the mass Who would not want to recognise their self as that cer-tain kind of discriminating reader operating at a detached distancefrom those naive entrapped consumers of popular culture A readermoreover who shares the liberating insight and playfulness of the artistThe tropes of freedom and enclosure that structure Millerrsquos essay pointto an underlying anxiety within the critical tradition I have traced inPart I an almost visceral dread of the proliferating amorphousness of amass culture To escape immersion in this materiality artists and intel-lectuals seek the spaciousness of an uncircumscribed playfulness This isthe ideology inscribed in the long critique of realism To recognise thishowever is not to reject the radical insights of poststructuralism or todeny the forms of knowledge offered by experimental art A properunderstanding of realism however requires us to disentangle theinsights of the critique from its ideological blindness

Miller does not refer in his essay to one of the most overt statementsthe narrator of Sketches makes as to the relation of the writing to exter-nal reality In giving an account of Newgate Prison Boz disclaims lsquoanypresumptuous confidence in our own descriptive powersrsquo (Dickens[1836ndash7] 1995 235) Moreover he promises not to fatigue the readerwith the kinds of details offered in authoritative statistical and empiricalreports lsquoWe took no notes made no memoranda measured none ofthe yardshellipare unable even to report of how many apartments the gaolis composedrsquo (Dickens [1836ndash7] 1995 235) Clearly this writing is notseeking to inveigle the naive reader into a sense that they are about tobe offered a one-to-one correspondence with existing reality What mostcontemporary readers would have recognised here is Bozrsquos rejection ofthe kinds of truth and accuracy that formed the basis of scientific claims

to knowledge as mastery of the objective world When Boz comes torefer to the condemned cell at Newgate he makes a direct appeal not toempirical fact but to the readerrsquos imagination lsquoConceive the situation ofa man spending his last night on earth in this cellrsquo (Dickens [1836ndash7]1995 243) This invitation to a shared understanding of what would beentailed in such a situation is followed by an intensely imaginative rep-resentation of the anguish dreams false hopes and terror of such aman Surely it is immensely condescending to assume that most ofBozrsquos nineteenth-century readers would have naively confused hisappeal to imaginative conjecture for an hour by hour factual account ofsome actual manrsquos last night alive Instead of subscribing to the cur-rently dominant critical myth that realism naively claims to give itsreaders unmediated access to extra-linguistic reality aiming at animpossible one-to-one fidelity between words and things it will bemore productive to think in terms of what I shall call referential gener-alisation Bozrsquos appeal to his readers to lsquoconceive the situationrsquo can beunderstood as the founding invitation of realism and indeed of all com-munication It is a gesture which openly admits to a specific referentialabsence hence the need to conceive to imagine to represent Yet theinvitation is based upon an underlying grammar of consensual belief inthe possibility of a shared communication about our experience and theworld This is the underlying grammar of community As opposed topostructuralismrsquos grand liberation narrative into a discriminating realmof play realismrsquos contract with the reader is based upon theEnlightenment consensual belief in the possibility of a shared under-standing We might view both of these aspirations Enlightenmentrsquos andpoststructuralismrsquos as equally but oppositionally insightful and blind

I conclude this chapter and Part I with a brief case study that sumsup the shifting relationship of realism and experimentalism It also helpsus to see what is at stake in this long debate Elaine Showalterrsquos (1941ndash)publication of A Literature of Their Own (1978) could almost be said tohave founded the whole enterprise of feminist criticism In what was aground-breaking study Showalter brought to critical recognition theexistence of a long tradition of women novelists who had been largelyignored in canonical perceptions of literary history One of the achieve-ments of this literature was its witness to womenrsquos struggle against patri-archal prejudice and injustice In both their determination to write

despite hostile male commentary and in the stories they told womenwriters asserted the right for a literature and for lives of their own YetShowalter wrote rather unsympathetically of Virginia Woolf rsquos signifi-cance within this tradition of womenrsquos writing (Showalter 1978263ndash97) Showalter claimed that Woolf rsquos experimental style and subjectmatter precluded her from offering women readers positive realist repre-sentations of female identity that could serve as role models in the fightfor greater social equality with men Toril Moirsquos Sexual Textual Politics(1985) can be seen as another landmark text this book was highly influ-ential in introducing and fostering poststructural theory in Britain In itToril Moi a second generation feminist critic took Showalter vigorouslyto task for her adherence to realism (Moi 1985 1ndash8) Moi argued thatexperimental writers like Woolf challenged the conventional common-sense binary division of gender inscribed in the language system Her fic-tion like that of other avant-garde writers aimed to shatter the faccedilade ofempirical reality thus it undermined the status quo of power structuresfar more radically than any amount of grimly detailed realist representa-tions of womenrsquos suffering and exploitation This kind of interpretiveview has prevailed and the poststructuralist critical paradigm that Moiadvocates has become the dominant evaluative orthodoxy experimental-ism is privileged over realism The critical hierarchy is reversed but thebinary structure remains in place Whereas Showalter working withinrealist values had difficulty in adequately recognising Woolf rsquos artisticachievement current critical thinking has difficulty in fully accommo-dating and appreciating the writing of a novelist like Pat Barker (1943ndash)whose powerful novels such as Union Street (1982) and The RegenerationTrilogy (1991ndash5) are written predominantly within a realist modeDespite its radical themes and import must we write off Barkerrsquos workas cognitively and aesthetically conservative and hence complicit withexisting structures of authority and power Or do we need to find someway of moving beyond the present limiting binarism that constitutescritical values

For it is not only predominantly realist novels that cause criticalembarrassment to the poststructural anti-realist paradigm ArundhatiRoyrsquos (1961ndash) prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1999) withits deconstruction of binary identities and its self-consciously playful lan-guage is clearly an experimental text Yet in representing the brutal

murder of an Untouchable in police custody the writing emphasises thegruesome materiality of splintered bone smashed teeth broken fleshchoking blood by shifting into a realist mode Is this to be read as a sud-den conciliatory gesture to a naive desire for one-to-one correspondencebetween words and things so as to provide the illusion of a reassuringlyfamiliar Eurocentric order of existence This would obviously be anabsurd interpretation One solution to the problem might be to distin-guish between the main European tradition of realist writing arising inthe eighteenth and continuing throughout the nineteenth century on theone hand and on the other the less systematic adoption of a mode ofrealism by all kinds of writers at any historical period and in any cultureYet this does not actually resolve the difficulty The epistemology thatunderwrites all uses of realist representation is the same the need to com-municate information about the material non-linguistic worldThematically and formally realism is defined by an imperative to bearwitness to all the consequences comic and tragic of our necessarilyembodied existence Royrsquos description of police brutality is not primarilya fiction referring only to other fictions of atrocity It invokes realismrsquoshumanist contract with the reader based upon the consensual belief thatshared communication about material and subjective realities is possibleThis I have stressed is also in large part the basis of community We needan intelligent critical understanding of writing that aims to respond ade-quately to the materiality of existence in all its sensuous plushness and itsbloodied flesh It goes without saying that this understanding must alsoaccommodate the recent insights of experimental writing and theoryWalter Benjaminrsquos critical practice offers a model that is open and recep-tive to the whole range of cultural production and that recognises signifi-cant continuities between different genres and traditions rather thanfixing them into binary opposition With this in mind I shall turn inPart II to the insights offered by the positive proponents of realism

IILITERARY REALISM

An Innovative Tradition

To move from the sustained critique of literary realism that I traced inPart I to the substantial body of positive writing on realism is toencounter a strikingly different view of the topic there is not one uni-fied form of realism but many As with the term lsquoromanticismrsquo quitedistinctive national histories and artistic conventions can easily be over-looked when realism is invoked in an over-simplified way FrenchRussian British and American traditions of realism to name but fourall developed somewhat differently under the impact of diverse nationalcultures and social forces (Becker 1963 3ndash38 surveys the differentnational developments of realism in his Introduction and provides doc-uments on the subject from a wide range of countries) The achieve-ments of realist writing can only be fully understood within the specificcontext in which it was produced Within the compass of Part II I havespace only to look at the intertwined histories of French and Britishrealist fiction during the nineteenth century This is usually regarded asthe great age of realism and France is also seen as the country in whichthe realist novel genre was most consciously pursued debatedacclaimed and denounced throughout the century

As this suggests realist writing has not always been perceived as a con-servative form offering its readers a soothing view of reality that accordswith moral social and artistic conventions On the contrary as theRussian critic and philosopher of the novel Mikhail Bakhtin

3LITERARY REALISM

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURYFRANCE

(1895ndash1975) has shown the development of realism is propelled by rad-ical experimentation with narrative technique Bakhtin argues that thenovel genre is essentially iconoclastic subverting conventional literaryforms and assimilating others letters diaries journalism fairy tale andromance The history of literary realism is shaped by a protean restless-ness and its dominant modes are those of comedy irony and parody(Bakhtin 1981 3ndash40) The Marxist critic of realism Gyoumlrgy Lukaacutecs(1885ndash1971) also sees irony as inherent to realist form (Lukaacutecs[1914ndash15] 1978 72ndash6) The novel genre undoubtedly gained popularitywith a rapidly expanding bourgeois readership at a time when middle-class economic and political strengths were becoming dominant socialforces and by and large nineteenth-century novels tended to concernthemselves with the values and life style of this class However the per-spective offered in much nineteenth-century fiction was confrontationaland critical rather than conciliatory Bourgeois respectability materialismand moral narrowness were the focus of ridicule more often than ofpraise Moreover as the century progressed the novel continuallywidened the scope of its subject matter As the critic Harry Levin sayslsquoThe development of the novel runs parallel to the history of democracyand results in a gradual extension of the literary franchisersquo (Levin 196357) Erich Auerbach (1892ndash1957) in his classic study Mimesis TheRepresentation of Reality in Western Literature defines the central achieve-ment of the development of realist writing from Homer to VirginiaWoolf as the lsquoserious treatment of everyday reality [and] the rise of moreextensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subjectmatterrsquo (Auerbach [1946] 1953 491) Like most other major critics ofrealism Auerbach sees the novel as the first literary form to develop acomplex understanding of time as historical process and to find technicalmeans within novelistic prose to represent this sense of temporality as it isexperienced in individual lives

Yet despite its innovatory energy most historians of realism also stressits formal and thematic continuities with earlier and later literary formsIn The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt for example situates the realist novelwithin an empirical philosophical tradition stretching from John Locke(1632ndash1704) to Bertrand Russell (1872ndash1970) and in a literary line fromCervantes (1547ndash1616) to James Joyce (1882ndash1941) (Watt [1957]1987 21 206 292) Harry Levin sees the pictorial effect developed by

literary realism an innovative tradition48

Eacutemile Zola (1840ndash1902) as the forerunner of cinematic art and he alsoincludes Marcel Proust (1871ndash1922) usually associated with early mod-ernism as the fifth realist writer within the main tradition of French real-ism (Levin 1963 327) The influence of previous literary styles andconventions is part of the context in which we need to understand real-ism but it is also important to locate literary history itself within thewider processes of economic commercial political and cultural changeA helpful way of thinking about this is to understand the practice of writ-ing as taking place within a literary field that is within a cultural spacein which each writer must position him or herself in terms of choices ofstyle genre readership past traditions and future reputation (Bourdieu1996 provides a very full historicized account of the functioning of theliterary field in nineteenth-century France) Clearly this literary field ismultiply interconnected with the much broader social field that is thelocation of economic cultural and political power For example inFrance for much of the nineteenth century poetry was regarded as themost prestigious literary form The art of poetry was consecrated by longassociation with the sacred and spiritual So the successful practice ofpoetry was rewarded with the highest amount of cultural capital or pres-tige Yet the financial rewards of poetry were relatively low so aspiringpoets tended to come predominantly from a class wealthy enough to pro-vide independent means of support In contrast the novel as a genre washeld in low esteem in the early part of the century but financial rewardscould be significant Entry into the profession of novel writing was rea-sonably open to talent and did not require as poetry did a long formaleducation in literary tradition As the century progressed the expansionof cheap forms of mass publication and increases in literacy continuallyshifted the dynamics of the literary field and the choices of position itafforded would-be writers

IDEALISM AND CLASSICAL THEORIES OF ART

Within the literary field in France especially in the early decades of thenineteenth century realist writers almost inevitably perceived them-selves as taking an oppositional stance towards idealism In briefwhereas realism derives from an acceptance that the objects of the worldthat we know by means of our sensory experience have an independent

literary realism in nineteenth-century france 49

existence regardless of whether or not they are perceived or thoughtabout idealism gives primacy to the consciousness or mind or spiritthat apprehends This privileging of the non-corporeal as the ultimatesource of reality begins in the classical world with the teachings of Plato(428427BCndash348347BC) and Aristotle (384ndash322BC) which togetherconstitute a pervasive and powerful tradition within western notions ofknowledge and aesthetics (Williams 1965 19ndash56 discusses the influ-ence of classical views of the relationship of art and reality from theRenaissance into modern times)

At the centre of Platorsquos philosophy is his concept of the Forms orIdeas These he understands as eternal transcendent realities that canonly be directly comprehended by thought Plato contrasts these Formsto the changeful contingent world that constitutes our empirical exis-tence For example we apprehend the notions of perfect justice and idealbeauty even though we never experience these phenomena in that per-fection in our actual lives Our knowledge of these ideals thereforePlato would argue cannot derive from sensory information but rathercomes from an intellectual intuition of the transcendent universalForms of Justice and Beauty Platonist philosophy sees human beings asmediating between the two realms of the Ideal and the sensible Thehuman mind or soul can strive upwards and inwards towards an appre-hension of the transcendent incorporeal reality of the Forms seekingunion with an eternal Oneness that comprehends all Being On theother hand the physical instincts can obliterate these higher yearningsand human beings then live wholly within the limits of their biologicalnature or even degenerate into brutish creatures ruled by irrational pas-sions and gross materialism Plato entertained a poor opinion of artists assimply imitators of the sensible world which was itself only a poor imita-tion of the ideal Forms Artistic representations for Plato were thereforeat two removes from transcendent reality and in the Republic (360BC) heproposes that poets be excluded from the polis Within the general cur-rents of a Platonist tradition however as it became dispersed in westernthought the notion of spiritual apprehension of an ideal reality beyondthe merely sensible world was very easily transmuted into a special claimfor an artistic vision of perfection and timeless universal truth

Aristotelian thought rejects the mysticism of Platonic FormsAristotle was also more favourably inclined towards artistic representa-

tions seeing imitation as central to the human capacity to learn In thePoetics (350BC) he notes

The general origin of poetry was due to two causes each of them partof human nature Imitation is natural to man from childhood one ofhis advantages over the lower animals being this that he is the mostimitative creature in the world and learns at first by imitation And itis also natural for all to delight in works of imitationhellipThe explana-tion is to be found in a further fact to be learning something is thegreatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the restof mankindhellipthe reason of the delight in seeing the pictures is that itis at the same time learning ndash gathering the meaning of things

(Aristotle 1963 8)

So for Aristotle art as imitation of the phenomenal world is a formof knowledge linked to pleasure it is not as it is for Plato a danger-ous distraction from a higher transcendent reality But Aristotle doessomewhat complicate the way in which poets and artists fulfil theirfunction as knowledge producers Although he understands the sensi-ble world as the primary reality he distinguishes between particularphenomena and the universal categories to which we assign them aspart of the abstract ordering that structures our knowledge of theworld So we recognise individuals as particular people but also knowthem as sharing attributes that constitute the universal definitionlsquohumanityrsquo Similarly with all else we recognise particular thingsfrom a specific outburst of grief to an individual daisy and simultane-ously understand them in general terms as partaking of the universalcategories of lsquogrief rsquo or lsquoemotionrsquo and lsquodaisyrsquo or lsquoflowerrsquo Aristotle sug-gests that it is the poetrsquos responsibility to represent the universal notthe particular In this way the knowledge offered by art will have ageneral principled application not a contingent one that changesfrom particular case to case

The poetrsquos function is to describe not the thing that has happenedbut a kind of thing that might happen ie what is possible as beingprobable or necessaryhellipHence poetry is something more philosophic

and of graver import than history since its statements are of thenature of universals whereas those of history are singular

(Aristotle 196317)

I shall suggest in Part III that the tension between particular historicalreality and universal reality within literary realism is the means bywhich it conveys its own form of knowledge about the world

The intermingling through time of Platonic and Aristotelianthought produced a classical view of art as nature perfected and as anintimation of timeless ideals From this perspective literary works werevalued to the extent that they seemed to offer universal and enduringtruths rather than local or particular perceptions of the world InFrance neo-classicism a return to what was perceived as the aestheticrules of antiquity became by the eighteenth century an exacting stan-dard against which all creative works were judged Deviation from clas-sical decorum put any rebellious writer or artist beyond the pale ofpublic approval The Acadeacutemie franccedilaise a literary academy establishedin 1634 to regulate the standards of the French language was at thecentre of the institutionalisation and policing of an inflexible frame-work of literary conventions that imposed an idealist view of art

REALISM AND FRENCH HISTORY

Realism with its overt adherence to the representation of historical timeand of things as they are however brutal or sordid asserted a direct chal-lenge to the system of rules governing aesthetic conventions in France atthe beginning of the nineteenth century Realist writers were not the firstto oppose neo-classicism however An earlier generation of Romanticwriters outraged public opinion and the Acadeacutemie in the 1820s and1830s Most notable of these was the poet novelist and dramatist VictorHugo (1802ndash85) The preface to his play Cromwell (1827) became ineffect the manifesto of the French Romantic movement Frenchromaniticism evokes a heroic world of titanic struggle and rebellionagainst injustice but it also elaborates a sense of the writer as a visionary inquest of non-material ideals This theme of rejecting the world for art wasa formative influence on the art for artrsquos sake movement that developedmore fully in France in the 1850s If realist writers had perforce to posi-

tion themselves in opposition to idealism as upheld by the Acadeacutemie theyestablished a more complex relationship to romaniticism Early realistwriters like Stendhal (1783ndash1842) and Balzac stressed the more prosaicprofessionalism of the novelist rather than the writerrsquos role as visionaryInstead of the transcendental truth of idealism French realists espousedthe new authority of science with its disciplined observation of empiricalreality Yet realist writers were in sympathy with romantic writersrsquo rejec-tion of classical decorum and their attitude of rebellion towards stateauthority and bourgeois materialism and respectability

What is difficult for us now to grasp imaginatively is the intensepoliticisation of every aspect of French culture throughout its continu-ally turbulent history for most of the nineteenth century The stormingof the Bastille in 1789 was hailed by progressives in France and else-where especially in England as symbolising the beginning of a new eraThe absolutist powers of the Monarchy and Church twin pillars of theancien reacutegime were to be swept away and the restrictive mental horizonsof superstition and servility replaced by the Enlightenment ideals ofrational democracy Yet the new Republic lasted only until 1804 whenNapoleon crowned himself Emperor and led French armies tri-umphantly against the massed forces of European political reactionThe ideals of the Revolution became etched in the sacrifices and gloriesof Napoleonrsquos armies raised largely by mass conscription that left nofamily in France untouched Napoleonrsquos defeat by the European powersin 1815 brought the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy

In the following decades French national life was dominated by vio-lent power struggles between monarchists and republicans traditional-ists and economic modernisers In 1830 an insurrection in Paris oustedthe unpopular Bourbon Charles X Louis-Philippe a distant Bourboncame to the throne on the promise of popular monarchy He inculcatedfavour with the new wealthy middle class by initiating state support forrailway companies and infrastructure expansion of industry and theestablishment of the Bourse as the financial exchange to promote specu-lative capitalism Known as the bourgeois monarchy the regime wasbitterly denounced by both republicans and traditionalists as betrayingthe glory of France for the franc Heroism and noble sacrifice had givenway it seemed to opulent respectability In 1848 political discontenterupted into violent protest the king fled the capital and a Provisional

Government of republican politicians writers and journalists was pro-claimed The Provisional Government hastily passed progressive mea-sures like universal male suffrage and press liberties and a proliferationof new journals newspapers and clubs were founded in Paris and theprovinces Yet the new Republic faced economic catastrophe at homeand reactionary hostility abroad A conservative backlash in Franceallowed the nephew of Napoleon auspiciously called Louis-NapoleonBonaparte and his lsquoparty of orderrsquo to seize power After a short harshlyrepressed resistance by republicans Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte becameNapoleon III in 1852 The brief Second Republic gave way to theSecond Empire which was to last until 1871 (See Tombs 1996 for aclear account of the period also Hobsbawm 1975a and 1975b alsoMarx [1852] 1954 for his classic account of the coup drsquoeacutetat that estab-lished the second empire)

French literary realism developed during the years of these politicalstruggles and it is unsurprising that the writing is characterised by acomplex consciousness of the multiple interactions of historical pro-cesses and forces upon the lives of individuals The literary field inwhich realist novelists took up their positions as writers was thoroughlyinter-penetrated by the partisan struggles of conflicting political affilia-tions The insecurity of each new political regime ensured that censor-ship remained an active weapon against dissension while the patronageof the court was extravagantly lavished on those writers who supportedauthority Challenges to the consecrated literary values of classical deco-rum of style and language were inevitably perceived as attacks upon thedignity of the state In such a context French writers and artists gener-ally could not fail to be highly aware of the formal and stylistic aspectsof their work because aesthetics always carried a political dimension

For this reason an account of French literary realism in the nine-teenth century has to keep two intertwined but separate threads inview there is the history of the public claims artistic manifestos andcontroversies in which the writers engaged but there is also the historyof their writerly practices and achievements The two do not alwaysmap neatly one on to the other In addition there is also the twentieth-century critical tradition that has evaluated nineteenth-century realismas a literary form and that critical history also has its conflicts andpolemics While aiming to keep both the contemporary and the later

critical debates in view I shall give most prominence in my account towhat I see as the artistic achievements of French nineteenth-centuryrealist writing as practised by the major novelists of the periodStendhal Balzac Flaubert and Zola The four defining features of thisbody of writing are i) an emphasis on the particular at the expense ofuniversal truth the focus is upon individual characters perceived as thelocation of the multiple social forces and contradictions of their era ii)formal experimentation especially in terms of narrative perspective andlinguistic innovation iii) the novel form is a participant in the move-ment towards greater democracy and social justice but iv) it is alsocaught up and shaped by the complex tensions between the commercialdemands of a mass market and the requirements of artistic integrity

COUNT FREDERIC DE STENDHAL (1783ndash1842)

Stendhal born Henri Beyle is the earliest of the major French nine-teenth-century realists although his influence as a writer began todevelop only at the end of his life after a warm review of his last novelThe Charterhouse of Parma (1839) by his younger and already famouscontemporary Honoreacute de Balzac Although Stendhal wrote his novelswell before lsquorealismrsquo became a widely used term in the mid-century aes-thetic struggles in France his work exemplifies the defining qualities ofthe genre historical particularity and stylistic innovation put to the ser-vice of sceptical secularism that ironises all idealist claims Like manyother realists Stendhal came to novel-writing by way of journalism heinaugurated the novelistic technique of incorporating actual items fromnewspapers into the texture of his fiction He retained the journalisticpractice of improvisation and rapidity making very few revisions or cor-rections to his first drafts Even Balzac himself a prolific writer criti-cised Stendhal for his apparent lack of artistic concern with style YetGeorg Lukaacutecs sees Stendhalrsquos frugal disciplined prose and his rejectionof romantic embellishment as one of the artistic strengths of early real-ism that would be sacrificed in later formalist developments of thegenre under Flaubert (Lukaacutecs [1950] 1972 76ndash7) Stendhal located hisvalues solely in eighteenth-century rational enlightenment but hefought for fifteen years in Napoleonrsquos Grand Army and said of theEmperor lsquohe was our sole religionrsquo (Martineau ed Memoires sur

Napoleon quoted in Levin 1963 86) He felt only a mocking contemptfor the social values of Restoration France The artistic position fromwhich he represented his contemporary world was one of sceptical ironyas to its pretensions and projected version of reality Documentary pre-cision was thus not the goal of his realist mode and despite the particu-larity of detail and use of newspaper items his fiction is full of factualinaccuracies Nevertheless most historians of realism agree thatStendhal was the first writer to consistently understand and representcharacter as the shifting location of multiple social forces In MimesisErich Auerbach associates Stendhalrsquos new historical understanding ofcharacter with the immensely disturbed times in which he actively par-ticipated Auerbach concludes that lsquoInsofar as the serious realism ofmodern times cannot represent man otherwise than embedded in atotal reality political social and economic which is concrete and con-stantly evolving ndash as is the case today in any novel or film ndash Stendhal isits founderrsquo (Auerbach [1946] 1953 463)

Typically the aspiring young heroes Julien Sorel of Scarlet and Black(1830) and Fabrizio of The Charterhouse of Parma can only be under-stood as coming of that generation born amid the fading glory ofNapoleonrsquos Empire and growing up to consciousness of self in the disil-lusionment and reactionary politics of the Restoration Their charactersand their lives are compounded of a youthful romantic idealism thatgives way to disenchanted pragmatism even cynicism Yet ultimatelythey resist personal corruption Although both Julien and Fabrizio areintensely particularised individual psychologies they can also be seen asembodying in the typicality of their characters and in the courses thattheir lives take the historical forces of an era

Fabriziorsquos earliest life is suffused with the afterglow of Napoleonrsquos lib-eration of Italy from the reactionary German Empire in 1796 lsquoat thehead of that youthful army which but a short time before had crossedthe Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after so many centuriesCaesar and Alexander had a successorrsquo (Stendhal [1839] 1958 19)Alternating with this world of largely imagined heroism and high idealsis the repressive authoritarianism of the ancien reacutegime represented byFabriziorsquos austere father a man of lsquoboundless hatred for the new ideasrsquo(Stendhal [1839] 1958 27) Not surprisingly when Fabrizio learns thatNapoleon has escaped imprisonment and landed in France he declaims

fervently lsquoI will go forth to conquer or to die beside that Man ofDestinyrsquo (Stendhal [1839] 1958 44) Fabrizio achieves neither of theseambitions but Stendhalrsquos rigorously realist representation of the Battleof Waterloo has exerted a pervasive influence on subsequent artistictreatment of warfare In this extract Fabrizio desperately trying to findthe scene of active fighting is befriended by a kindly cantiniegravere

lsquoBut good Lord I bet you donrsquot even know how to bite open a car-tridgersquo

Fabrizio though stung to the quick admitted all the same to hisnew friend that she had guessed rightly

lsquoThe poor lad Hersquoll be killed straight off and thatrsquos Godrsquos truth itwonrsquot take long You really must come with mersquo went on the can-tiniegravere in a tone of authority

lsquoBut I want to fightrsquolsquoAnd you shall fight too [hellip] therersquos fighting enough today for

everyonersquo [hellip]Fabrizio had not gone five hundred paces when his nag stopped

short It was a corpse lying across the path which terrified horse andrider alike

Fabriziorsquos face which was naturally very pale took on a very decid-edly greenish tinge The cantiniegravere [hellip] raising her eyes to look at ourhero she burst out laughing

lsquoAha my boyrsquo she cried lsquoTherersquos a titbit for yoursquo Fabrizioremained as if petrified by horror What struck him most was the dirti-ness of the feet of this corpse which had already been stripped of itsshoes and left with nothing but a miserable pair of trousers allstained with blood

lsquoCome nearerrsquo said the cantiniegravere lsquoget off your horse yoursquoll haveto get used to such things Lookrsquo she cried lsquohersquos got it in the headrsquo

A bullet entering on one side of the nose had come out by theopposite temple and disfigured the corpse in a hideous fashion leav-ing it with one eye still open

lsquoGet off your horse then ladrsquo said the cantiniegravere lsquoand give him ashake of the hand and see if hersquoll return itrsquo

Without hesitating although almost ready to give up the ghostfrom disgust Fabrizio flung himself off his horse and taking the hand

of the corpse gave it a vigorous shake Then he stood still as thoughno life was left in him He did not feel he had the strength to mounthis horse again What most particularly horrified him was the stillopen eye

(Stendhal [1839] 1958 53ndash4)

As this first intimation warns the glorious battle that Fabrizio passion-ately desires to join turns out to be an unheroic brutal chaotic appar-ently purposeless series of inconclusive incidents Following thisepisode Fabrizio fails to find any opportunity for heroic figuring he issnubbed and robbed by the hard-bitten regular soldiers and most com-ically he wholly fails to recognise the Emperor when he passes close byAt the crisis of the battle he falls asleep from fatigue The whole thrustof Stendhalrsquos writing is anti-idealist and anti-romantic As in this pas-sage the mode of ironic mockery encompasses the hero but events arelargely conveyed from Fabriziorsquos perspective so that while his idealism isthe subject of comic deflation there remains a sympathetic insight thathis mistakes derive from finer impulses than the self-interest and oppor-tunism that surrounds him We might also note Stendhalrsquos representa-tion of the shrewd cantiniegravere who takes Fabrizio under her wing Inmost earlier forms of writing certainly in any literature influenced by aclassical notion of decorum she would have figured as a comic yokel InStendhalrsquos story she stands out as one of the few purposeful resourcefuland intelligent characters There is a democratic impulse here that influ-ences Brecht in his choice of heroine for his play Mother Courage(1941) In his epic novel War and Peace (1863ndash9) Tolstoy also drewupon Stendhalrsquos anti-heroic techniques

Harry Levin claims that Stendhalrsquos writing is characterised by anlsquounremitting sense of modernityrsquo (Levin 1963 85) This modernityderives largely from the pervasive secularism that constitutes Stendhalrsquosartistic position producing a novelistic prose of sparse concentrateddirectness and an innovative complex use of narrative perspective It isa perspective that eschews authority or claims of consecrated visionTypically in his novels the focalisation rejects traditional omnisciencedrawing the reader into the consciousness and viewpoint of the charac-ters especially that of the hero while maintaining enough ironic dis-tance to balance sympathy with a very modern sense of comic deflation

The narrative voice sustains an intimacy of tone that interpellates thereader into a non-hierarchic democratic familiarity with the narratorand the represented world These are the modern secular novelisticqualities that Stendhal offers subsequent generations of writers

HONOREacute DE BALZAC (1799ndash1850)

It was the younger writer Balzac who made the most immediateimpact upon his contemporaries and literary successors Harry Levinstates a critical consensus when he says that lsquoBalzac occupies the centralposition in any considered account of realismrsquo (Levin 1963 151) In thefirst place there is the sheer scale of his work between 1830 and hisdeath in 1850 he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories involv-ing more than two thousand characters His days were ordered like amonastic regime in which he laboured twelve to eighteen hours out ofthe twenty-four on his current book Henry James in an affectionateessay conveys the impact of Balzacrsquos creative energy on a subsequent fel-low writer

The impression then confirmed and brightened is of the mass andweight of the figure and of the extent of ground it occupies a tract onwhich we might all of us together quite pitch our little tents open ourlittle booths deal in our little wareshellipI seem to see him in such animage moving about as Gulliver among the pigmies

(James 1914 87)

Only when a large part of his great output was already published didBalzac explicitly formulate the ambitious programme he had set himselfin his lifersquos work In 1842 he wrote the Preface [Avant-propos] to TheHuman Comedy the general title he had given lsquoto a labour which Iundertook nearly thirteen years agorsquo (Balzac [1842] 1981 134) In out-lining this vast project Balzac associates the role of the writer with thatof the rational scientific observer In particular Balzac singled out thework of Saint-Hilaire who had demonstrated that the variety of externalforms distinguishing different species were the result of the environ-mental determinants within which each type developed From thisBalzac concluded lsquoI saw that in this sense Society resembled Nature

For does not Society make man according to the milieux in which heacts into as many different men as there are varieties in zoologyrsquo(Balzac [1842] 1981 135) Balzac was the first to use the word lsquomilieursquoin this way but thereafter it became a central concept within Frenchcritical and sociological discourse His task as he set it out in TheHuman Comedy was to encompass lsquomen women and things ie peopleand the material form they give their thinkingrsquo (Balzac [1842] 1981136) In line with his scientific paradigm of knowledge Balzac sawhimself as the lsquosecretaryrsquo of French Society which was itself the histo-rian Balzac planned to draw up an lsquoinventoryrsquo of the vices virtues pas-sions events and types that constitute society as a whole and in sodoing lsquowith much patience and courage I would write the book fornineteenth-century Francersquo (Balzac [1842] 1981 137ndash8)

The scientific language and models that Balzac draws upon in partsof the lsquoPrefacersquo declare his affiliation with the rational-empirical tradi-tion stemming from eighteenth-century Enlightenment The lsquoPrefacersquoto The Human Comedy became in effect the manifesto of realism justas Hugorsquos lsquoPrefacersquo to Cromwell became the central document of Frenchromaniticism Harry Levin argues that in writing it Balzac inaugurateda shift in artistic values traditional emphasis on the visionary universal-ising imagination was replaced by trust in the power of scientific objec-tive observation Nevertheless the lsquoPrefacersquo articulates the duality ofBalzacrsquos artistic and political allegiances Like a good scientist the writershould lsquostudy the causes or central cause of these social facts and discoverthe meaning hidden in that immense assembly of faces passions andeventsrsquo (Balzac [1842] 1981 138) Yet the novelist whom Balzac com-mends for conveying the forces and energies that drive human passionsand social conflicts is the romantic writer Sir Walter Scott (1771ndash1832) whose characters lsquoare drawn up from the depth of their centuryrsquo(Balzac [1842] 1981 137) This element of romaniticism in Balzacrsquosartistic affiliations is aligned with his political adherence to Catholicismand Monarchy as lsquoeternal Truthsrsquo (Balzac [1842] 1981 139)

Yet Balzac was a romantic royalist writing in the era of the bourgeoisking Louis-Philippe who came to power by aligning the throne to thenew force of emergent capitalism and to the new moneyed-class offinanciers and industrialists The novels that compose The HumanComedy constitute Balzacrsquos perception of French history from 1789 to

1848 It is a tribute to his realist historical consciousness that as GeorgLukaacutecs says lsquoHe recognized with greater clarity than any of his literarycontemporaries the profound contradiction between the attempts at feu-dal-absolutist Restoration and the growing forces of capitalismrsquo (Lukaacutecs[1937] 1969 96) Despite his political and religious sympathies Balzacrsquosnovels persistently pay tribute to the heroic nobility of the generationwho risked their lives for republican ideals alongside Napoleon Just ashonestly his fiction recognises that feudal values of reverence andhomage on which the lsquoeternal Truthsrsquo of monarchy and religion restcannot survive in a predatory world dominated by money markets

Stendhalrsquos fiction brought to realism an understanding of characterin terms of the determining effect on individual lives of multiple capil-lary currents of historical change What is additionally new and distinc-tive in Balzacrsquos work is the compendious detail in which he grasps ahistorical milieu Balzac more than any other writer developed the pic-torial quality of realism Yet this visual element is not aiming simply atphotographic mimetic effect Balzac sees his world in an intensely his-torical way Erich Auerbach comments on the absolute precision withwhich he defines the social and historical setting of each of his charac-ters noting that lsquoto him every milieu becomes a moral and physicalatmosphere which impregnates the landscape the dwelling furnitureimplements clothing physique character surroundings ideas activi-ties and fates of men and at the same time the general historical situa-tion reappears as a total atmosphere which envelops all its severalmilieursquo (Auerbach [1946] 1953 473) What Balzacrsquos writing forcesupon our attention is the clotted thingness that constitutes modernsocial space And for Balzac every thing declares its money value AsHenry James noted wryly lsquo ldquoThingsrdquo for him are francs and centimesmore than any others and I give up as inscrutable and unfathomablethe nature the peculiar avidity of his interest in themrsquo (James 191487) Balzacrsquos continuous concern with money is not that surprising hebegan writing the novels that form The Human Comedy under theimmediate pressure of bankruptcy and throughout his life he remainedfinancially insecure

As with the pictorial effect Balzacrsquos practice in his novels of pricingand cataloguing the world of things does not aim at merely documen-tary accuracy Balzacrsquos experience of the insecurities that typified the

new speculative capitalism of Louis-Philippersquos France brought to his fic-tion a dominating sense of the rapacious energies of early venturefinance More than any other writer Balzac insists that money is thestuff of life For Balzac all human passions have an exact price in francssexual desire family affections noble aspiration religious devotionsocial ambition courage loyalty hatred and revenge he costs them allIn his novel Cousin Bette (1846) a character comments casually lsquoAllone can do is to snatch as much hay as one can from the hayrack Thatrsquoswhat life amounts to in Parisrsquo In agreeing her companion notes lsquoInParis most kindnesses are just investmentsrsquo (Balzac [1846] 1965 113115) Balzacrsquos modernity as a writer consists largely in the sense con-veyed in his major fiction of social reality as a glittering unstable sur-face a veneer that fails to mask the circulating impersonal force ofmoney

From Marx and Engels onwards realism has held a privileged posi-tion within Marxist literary criticism This critical tradition was mostfully developed by Gyoumlrgy Lukaacutecs in his two studies The HistoricalNovel (1937) and Studies in European Realism (1950) Lukaacutecs acclaimedBalzacrsquos fiction as the culminating point of realist achievement inFrance emphasising two central qualities that defined this triumph ofform Balzacrsquos ability to convey the forces of history underlying thesocial details of milieu and his representation of characters as typesrather than as averages In Studies in European Realism Lukaacutecs claims

The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type apeculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general andthe particular both in characters and in situations What makes a typea type is not its average qualityhellipwhat makes it a type is that in it allthe humanly and socially essential determinants are present on theirhighest level of development in the ultimate unfolding of the possi-bilities latent in them in extreme presentation of their extremes ren-dering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs

(Lukaacutecs [1950] 1972 6)

Balzac himself seems to be saying something rather similar about hischaracters when he describes his method as lsquoindividualizing the typeand typifying the individualrsquo (Souverain Lettres agrave lrsquoEtrangegravere quoted in

Levin 1963 200) Balzacrsquos characters are certainly not average or lsquopho-tographicrsquo They are frequently monstrous driven by obsessive passionsBalzac may see his role as being the secretary of society but his novelsare peopled by figures that owe more to dreams and nightmares than toscientific categorisation While the influence of romantic drama is clearin the heightened force of these representations it is romaniticismbrought into the service of realism The consuming passions of his mainprotagonists are always tracked back in the narrative to precise historicalevents and contradictory social pressures so that in their larger-thanlife-intensity individual characters become demonic embodiments ofimpersonal historical forces In Cousin Bette one of the central charac-ters Madame Valerie Marneffe brings about the ruin of two very dif-ferent men ostensibly by the same means besotted lust Yet the originof their obsession for her is traced to very different social causesMonsieur Crevel is one of the new men of the 1830s a lsquowealthy self-made retired shop-keeperrsquo whose self-satisfied complacency marks himout as lsquoone of the Paris electrsquo Crevel hankers after a mistress who as alsquoreal ladyrsquo can set the gloss of class distinction upon his bourgeois socialaspirations (Balzac [1846] 1965 11 131) His rival Baron Hulotbelongs to the generation that served under Napoleon and owes his for-tune (now fast-declining) to financial opportunities afforded by hisattachment to the Emperor Hulotrsquos lechery is a desperate and patheticsearch for the lost valour and glamour of his youth under the EmpireSo the comically calamitous struggle of two ageing men for sexualfavours enacts as farce the historical forces that brought to dominancethe bourgeois regime of Louis-Philippe

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT (1821ndash1880) AND THE lsquoREacuteALISMErsquoCONTROVERSY IN FRANCE

For all historians of literary realism Balzac is a central and commandingfigure Yet the term lsquorealismrsquo and the controversies surrounding it did notbecome current in France until the mid-1850s five years after his deathIt was not a novelist but the painter Gustave Courbet (1819ndash1877)who sparked off the controversy that publicised the term realism almostas a slogan In 1855 his paintings were excluded from the Paris exhibi-tion because of their unclassical rendering of peasants and labourers In

response Courbet set up his own exhibition under the title Pavillon duReacutealisme Writers and journalists quickly rallied in defence of the kind ofart that the title seemed to proclaim Typical of the polemical tone of thetimes was an article by Fernand Desnoyers entitled lsquoDu Reacutealismersquo whichappeared in LrsquoArtiste on 9 December 1855 The article begins

This article is neither a defence of a client nor a plea for an individualit is a manifesto a profession of faith Like a grammar or a course inmathematics it begins with a definition Realism is the true depictionof objects

(reprinted in Becker 1963 80)

The article goes on to oppose realism to both classical and romanticidealisation and to over-conventionalised form lsquoThe writer who candepict men and things only by the aid of known and conventionalmeans is not a realist writerrsquo (Becker 1963 81) From 1856 to 1857seven monthly numbers of a magazine Reacutealisme kept the word andthe issue before the attention of the art-conscious public But thewidest publicity and notoriety came with the trial of Flaubertrsquos novelMadame Bovary published in 1857 The prosecution for offence topublic morals was initiated by the repressive regime of EmperorNapoleon III as the lsquoparty of orderrsquo in an attempt to consolidate itsconservative ethos of moral conformity The trial failed but Flaubertwas infuriated that his lawyers defended his book on the grounds ofits edifying morality

The acquittal of the novel was hailed as the vindication and tri-umph of realism yet Flaubert was reluctant to assume the title Late inhis life he wrote lsquoBut note that I hate what is conventionally calledrealism although people regard me as one of its high priestsrsquo (inBecker 1963 96) In Madame Bovary Flaubert brings a poetic sensi-bility into a very taut balance with what he believed was required forgreat art the meticulous impersonal objectivity of the scientistFlaubertrsquos characters no less than those of Balzac and Stendhal areconceived historically Their personalities and the events of their livesare wholly shaped by the larger social forces in which their existencesare enmeshed Flaubert brings two new qualities to realist writing hispassionate commitment to artistic objectivity and his almost mystical

sense of artistic dedication There are innovative strengths but alsolimitations associated with both qualities

Flaubert declared lsquoIt is one of my principles that you must not writeyourself The artist ought to be like God in creation invisible andomnipotent He should be felt everywhere but not seenrsquo (in Becker1963 94) In Madame Bovary he felt he had achieved this total invisi-bility of the writerrsquos own personality Emma Bovary is a young womanwhose consciousness and existence is confined to a provincial petitbourgeois milieu Her dreams of something more gracious and impas-sioned in her life have been shaped wholly by romantic fiction and soher vague aspirations take the form of social elevation and romanticlove The means by which Flaubert represents her rather common-placetragedy encapsulates his main innovations to realist form He brings adisciplined poetic intensity to subject matter that is ostensibly trivialand vulgar He also develops a complex limitation of narrative perspec-tive to a characterrsquos point of view matching this by modulating his styleto evoke the rhythm and tone of that personrsquos thoughts and feelings Inthe following passage Emma Bovary passing a tedious Sunday winterafternoon on an uninteresting walk to lsquoa large piece of waste groundrsquo isconfronted by the contrasting appearances of her dull husbandCharles and a younger man of their acquaintance

She turned round there stood Charles his cap pulled down over hiseyes his thick lips trembling which lent an added stupidity to hisface Even his back that stolid back of his was irritating to see Hisfrock-coat seemed to wear upon it the whole drabness of the person-ality within

As she surveyed him tasting a kind of vicious ecstasy in her irrita-tion Leon moved a step forward White with cold his face seemed toassume a softer languor between his neck and cravat the collar of hisshirt was loose and showed some skin the tip of his ear stuck outbeneath a lock of hair and his big blue eyes raised to the cloudslooked to Emma more limpid and more lovely than mountain tarnsthat mirror the sky [hellip]

Madam Bovary did not accompany Charles to their neighboursrsquothat evening [hellip] As she lay in bed watching the fire burn bright thescene came back to her Leon standing there bending his walking-cane

in one hand and with the other holding [the neighbourrsquos child]Athalie who had been calmly sucking a lump of ice She found himcharming couldnrsquot stop thinking of him remembered how he hadlooked on other occasions the things he had said the sound of hisvoice everything about him And pouting out her lips as though for akiss she said over and over again

lsquoCharming yes charminghellipAnd in loversquo she asked herself lsquoIn lovewith whomhellipWith mersquo

(Flaubert [1857] 1950 114ndash15)

Much of the writing in this passage is highly pictorial Yet in contrast toBalzacrsquos plethora of things the effect is achieved here by a rigorouspoetic selection of only the most telling detail Charlesrsquos way of wearinghis cap his thick lips the contrasting delicate tip of Leonrsquos ear Thiskind of artistic compression is the result of Flaubertrsquos painstakinganguished composition often writing only a few lines a day The per-spective throughout most of the passage is that of Emma Bovary and wesee the two men entirely through her eyes the judgements are hers notthe narratorrsquos Neither does the narrative appear to assume any evalua-tive attitude towards Emma and again this contrasts with Balzacrsquos fre-quent authorial commentary to explain and moralise upon hischaracters for the reader Yet although the author remains as Flaubertsays invisible the perspective conveyed is subtly larger and more dis-criminating than Emma Bovaryrsquos view of things The writing conveysthe scene that she sees but it also sees her within that scene with anobjectivity she never achieves in the course of her story Emma sees her-self fantastically as a romantic heroine lsquopouting her lips as though for akissrsquo but the reader sees her posing as a self-imagined heroine in aromance With similar effect words in the passage take on the synthetictexture of Emmarsquos own thoughts as Leonrsquos blue eyes look to her lsquomorelimpid and more lovely than mountain tarns that mirror the skyrsquo Suchlanguage points beyond Emmarsquos own consciousness to the popular sen-timental poetry and novels that are the sources of her imagining

This shuttling narrative effect that takes us into the shallow limita-tions of the heroinersquos individual sensibility and beyond this restrictionto the determining horizons of her social milieu sustains the pervasiveironic position from which the provincial world of Madame Bovary is

surveyed Nevertheless this scrupulous narrative distance does notwholly preclude reader sympathy for Emma This is perhaps whatFlaubert was getting at when he wrote lsquoIf Bovary is worth anything itwonrsquot lack heart Irony however seems to dominate life Is this whywhen I was weeping I often used to go and look at myself in the mir-ror This tendency to look down upon oneself from above is perhapsthe source of all virtuersquo (in Becker 1963 91) It is this ironic detachedrealism that Flaubertrsquos characters singularly fail to achieve

The distanced poise of Flaubertrsquos prose suggests a cultivated sensibil-ity shared by the writer and the implied reader but cannot in any waybe identified with the characters in the work Flaubertrsquos sense of theartistrsquos absolute dedication to his art was hugely influential in raising thestatus of the novel in the second half of the century but at the price ofits comprehensive appeal Balzacrsquos financial situation absolutely requiredhim to reach a wide readership whereas Flaubertrsquos independent meanssupported the low sales of his novels Flaubert was one of a group ofartists including the poet Charles Baudelaire who by the mid-centurywere proclaiming the lsquodisinterestednessrsquo of art In many ways their pub-lic pose of indifference to political and social issues derived from thepolitical situation they found themselves in after 1852 (Bourdieu 1996107ndash112 provides a detailed analysis of the historical development ofaesthetic claims for artistic disinterestedness in mid to late nineteenth-century France) Republicanism and revolution failed in 1848 and theSecond Empire that crushed radical political hopes was a travesty ofthe ideals that had brought the first Empire into existence underNapoleon For many writers after 1852 the only integrity that seemedavailable was the disinterested pursuit of art for artrsquos sake and a disdain-ful contempt for the bourgeois values that had brought Louis-Napoleonto power as Napoleon III

One effect of this disaffection was an increasing tendency for seriousartists to address themselves to a small select audience of the like-minded The romantic writers of the 1830s had first represented thepoet-artist as an alienated figure at odds with a corrupted society By theend of the 1850s the sense of aloof separation from bourgeois philistin-ism and materialistic self-serving had become the prevalent attitudeamong many artists in France This artistic contempt for their publicwas dramatically expressed in the Preface that Edmond and Jules de

Goncourt prominent members of the Flaubert circle wrote for theirnovel Germinie Lacerteux (1864)

The public likes false novels this is a true novelhellipThe public further likes innocuous and consoling reading adven-

tures which end happily imaginings which upset neither its digestionnor its serenity this book with its sad and violent distraction is somade as to go against its habits and be injurious to its hygiene

(Auerbach [1946] 1953 494ndash5)

The striking identity between this language and some of the languageencountered in the critique of realism outlined in Part I indicates thebridging point of the two chronologies Modernism and postmod-ernism inherit from the lrsquoart pour lrsquoart movement of the French mid-century not only a radical concern with formal experimentation butalso the more questionable ideology of lsquocultivationrsquo as an aloof sensibil-ity that keeps its distance from the vulgarity of mass culture

Lukaacutecs argues that this disengagement by Flaubert and his genera-tion from active participation in the social conflicts of their era broughtthe dynamic vitality of the realist tradition to an end in France (Lukaacutecs[1937] 1969 246ndash7) For all his artistic perfection Flaubert is a lesserwriter than Balzac Lukaacutecs argues because he diverts the writerrsquos properconcern to evoke the immense historical forces determining social real-ity into the pursuit of style Moreover Flaubertrsquos aim of total scientificobjectivity encompasses only what is average failing to grasp the impor-tance of Stendhalrsquos and Balzacrsquos representation of the individual charac-ter as historical type Lukaacutecs concludes that because Flaubert lacksBalzacrsquos conception of the organic relationship between an individualand the social moment that conditions their existence his representa-tion is limited to personal psychology (Lukaacutecs [1937] 1969 224)

Most critics recognise Flaubert as a pivotal figure in French litera-ture His poeticisation of the language of prose was important for theSymboliste movement in France in the 1880s which was a reactionagainst the publicised scientific aims of realism particularly as insistedupon by the powerful French critic Hippolyte Taine (1828ndash93)Symbolisme was in turn a formative influence upon French and Britishliterary modernism Yet most critics also count Flaubertrsquos novels among

the high achievements of French realism Erich Auerbach sums up morepositively than Lukaacutecs Flaubertrsquos dual artistic position that straddles arealist commitment to the social world and an idealist dedication to aes-thetic disinterestedness

Flaubert may insist that he is an artist and nothing but an artist Themore one studies Flaubert the clearer it becomes how much insightinto the problematic nature and the hollowness of nineteenth-centurybourgeois culture is contained in his realist workshellipthe political eco-nomic and social subsoil appears comparatively stable and at thesame time intolerably charged with tensionrsquo

Realist form throughout the nineteenth century continually revisesitself Flaubert could not write like Balzac because he did not live in thesame reality What he undoubtedly established was the status of therealist novel as a form of art he extended the democratic reach of thegenre by the serious and sympathetic treatment of average people likeEmma Bovary who had previously not figured in literary traditions andhe developed further than Stendhal the complex artistic potential ofnarrative technique

EacuteMILE ZOLA (1840ndash1902)

Zola was twenty years younger than Flaubert The literary field inwhich he had to make a position for himself was completely differentfrom that in which Balzac had achieved fame and quite different fromthat which had confronted Flaubert Two processes in particular areimportant for an understanding of Zolarsquos literary realism In 1859Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species and theories of natu-ral selection were quickly popularised seeming to underwrite theauthority of a scientific model of knowledge Second by the lastdecades of the century the practice of literature was completelyabsorbed into the commercial market place In the struggle for salespublicity even notoriety became a key factor Unlike Flaubert Zoladepended for his livelihood on the success of his novels His determina-tion to impose himself on the literary world is characterised by a

commercial opportunism that is inseparable from his serious artisticcommitment

Zola recognised that in the commercialised literary field of latenineteenth-century France a slogan and a manifesto were effectivemeans of self-publicity The slogan he chose was lsquoNaturalismrsquo and heset out his claims for this and for his own work in The ExperimentalNovel (1880) During the 1860s and 1870s the influential French his-torian and literary critic Hippolyte Taine had vigorously expounded adeterminist view of reality expanding Balzacrsquos notion of milieu as themeans by which literary art could incorporate the documentarymethodology of natural sciences Responding to the influence of Taineas well as Darwin Zola pushed Balzacrsquos and Flaubertrsquos espousal of sci-ence to the logical extreme In The Experimental Novel he advocatedlsquothe idea of literature determined by sciencersquo taking as his explicitmodel the work of Dr Claude Bernard in Introduction agrave lrsquoEtude de laMeacutedicine Expeacuterimental (reprinted in Becker 1963 162) Using theexperimental method developed by scientists and doctors Zola arguesnovelists too can produce new knowledge of the passionate and intel-lectual life of human beings which is their special provenanceFollowing Claude Bernard Zola describes experiment as provokedobservation lsquoThe novelistrsquo he continues lsquois both an observer and anexperimenter The observer in him presents the data as he has observedthemhellipThen the experimenter appears and institutes the experimentthat is sets the characters of a particular story in motion in order toshow that the series of events therein will be those demanded by thedeterminism of the phenomena under studyrsquo (Becker 1963 166) Asthis last sentence suggests Zola accepts a Darwinian sense of the deter-mining power of environment and heredity on all living organisms Theexperimental novel therefore aims to show lsquothe influences of heredityand surrounding circumstances then to show man living in the socialmilieu which he himself has produced which he modifies every dayand in the midst of which he in his turn undergoes continuous modifi-cationhellipand [by this method] to resolve scientifically the question ofknowing how men behave themselves once they are in societyrsquo (Becker1963 174) Zola counters the claim that in following this experimentalmodel the naturalist novelist denies the importance of artistic imagina-tion Naturalist novelists are certainly concerned to start from a detailed

knowledge of the relevant social facts but in setting in motion theexperimental plot the writer calls upon the power of invention and thatis the lsquogenius in the bookrsquo (Becker 1963 168) Zola was continuallyattacked for what was seen as his evolutionary focus upon the sordidand bestial aspects of human existence especially the sexual but in TheExperimental Novel he rejects idealism declaring lsquoThere is no nobilityno dignity no beauty no morality in not knowinghellipThe only greatand moral works are true worksrsquo (Becker 1963 184)

It is only too easy to spot the fallacy in Zolarsquos claim that the novelistrsquosown plot can function as a scientific verification of the laws of heredityIt is more generally Zolarsquos detractors that have held him accountable tohis naturalist manifesto Zola himself seems to have admitted that headopted the label lsquonaturalismrsquo with a view to publicity lsquoI repeated itover and over because things need to be baptized so that the public willregard them as newrsquo (quoted in Levin 1963 305) Zolarsquos great series oftwenty novels Les Rougon-Macquart claiming to show the slow evolu-tionary workings of heredity and environment through the history ofone extended family was already half-completed before he explicitlyformulated his notions of the experimental method Yet this should notbe taken to indicate that Zola was not seriously committed to the pur-suit of a materialist scientific view of reality and Harry Levin is surelycorrect when he says that lsquono comparable man of lettershelliptried so hardto grasp the scientific imaginationrsquo (Levin 1963 309)

lsquoImaginationrsquo is the key word here like the other major French real-ists Zola the lsquonaturalistrsquo is also a poet and romanticist Those parts ofhis novels that least convince are the passages that baldly state amechanical view of hereditary or environmental determinism Zolarsquosfirst published piece was a fairy tale that he described as a lsquopoetic dreamrsquo(quoted in Levin 1963 318) The power of his realism derives from hisfusion of detailed factual observation of social reality with the visualintensity of dream or nightmare What Zola brings to realism is the useof poetic symbolism and imagery to convey the awesome power ofhuge impersonal industrial and political forces exerted on human lifeThe opening chapter of Germinal (1885) in which the out-of-workhero Etienne Lantier approaches the coal-mining district of northernFrance a scene of bitter conflict between labour and capital provides apowerful example of the intensity Zola achieves In these extracts

Etienne frozen with cold is drawn irresistibly to a fire at the pit-headof Le Voreux mine and into conversation with an old man employed atthe surface

And then they both went on grousing in short sentences as the windcaught their breath Etienne told him about his weekrsquos useless tramp-ing around Had he just got to peg out with hunger then Soon therewould be nothing but beggars on the roads Yes the old man agreedit was bound to end up in a row for by God you couldnrsquot throw allthese decent people out on the streets [hellip]

The young man waived an arm at the unfathomable darknesslsquoWho does all this belong to thenrsquoBut just at that moment Bonnemort was choked by such a violent

fit of coughing that he could not get his breath At length after spit-ting and wiping the black foam off his lips he said into the howlingwind

lsquoWhat Who does this belong to God knowshellipPeoplehelliprsquoAnd he pointed to some vague unknown distant spot in the night

where these people lived for whom the Maheus had been hacking coalat the seam for a hundred and six years His voice had taken on a kindof religious awe as though he were speaking of some inaccessibletabernacle where dwelt unseen the gorged and crouching deity whomthey all appeased with their flesh but whom nobody had ever seen

lsquoIf only you could eat your fillrsquo said Etienne for the third time with-out any obvious transition [hellip]

Where was there to go and what was to become of him in a landravaged by unemployment Was he to leave his corpse behind somewall like a stray dog And yet here on this naked plain in this thickdarkness he had a feeling of hesitation Le Voreux struck fear intohim Each squall seemed fiercer than the last as though each time itblew from an even more distant horizon No sign of dawn the skywas dead only the furnaces and coke ovens glared and reddened theshadows but did not penetrate their mystery And huddled in its lairlike some evil beast Le Voreux crouched ever lower and its breathcame in longer and deeper gasps as though it were struggling todigest its meal of human flesh

(Zola [1885] 1954 22 27ndash8)

We can recognise in the characters of this novel the culminating pointof the democratic impulse of realism The people who constitute Zolarsquosfictional world come largely from the lowest social levels and earntheir living by the most gruelling and poorly paid forms of labour Hehas been criticised for the way in which he represents his human fig-ures as dwarfed by social forces denied agency and wholly propelledby determining circumstances Yet it is surely undeniable that much ofhuman existence consists of such vulnerability and powerlessnessMoreover the vigour of the charactersrsquo language and the vitality itimparts to Zolarsquos narration (lsquoHad he just got to peg out with hungerthenrsquo) belies the passivity imposed by economic necessity Zolarsquosabsorption of the ordinary discourses of work of the streets and ofworking-class life into his novelistic prose was seen as an offenceagainst the purity of French literary language but the poet SteacutephaneMallarmeacute (1842ndash98) recognised it as a quite new exploration of thecapacities of poetic language By incorporating the language of thecharacters into narrative language Zola also cancels the distance main-tained by Flaubert whose aloof irony encompasses the circumscribedconsciousness of the protagonists within its more knowing reach Inthe passages above as in Zolarsquos work generally the narrative perspec-tive remains on the same level as that of the characters claiming nosuperior knowledge or more cultivated sensibility

Moreover the attitude articulated by his novels in their total effect iscertainly not one of fatalistic or submissive acceptance of suffering andinjustice His work no less than his campaign on behalf of the unjustlycourt-marshalled and imprisoned Captain Dreyfus is an insistentlsquoJrsquoaccusersquo levelled at the state and at the powerful (For an account of theDreyfus affair see Tombs 1996 462ndash72) Zola transformed the newlywon authority based on artistic disinterestedness into a moral impera-tive to writers to speak out for those without a public voice the respon-sibility to bear witness Erich Auerbach praises Zola as lsquoone of the veryfew authors of the century who created their work out of the greatproblems of the agersquo (Auerbach [1946] 1953 512) Despite his claimsto scientific method and the documentary investigations of mines ofprostitution of the working of railways and laundries that he carriedout before embarking on any novel the power of Zolarsquos realist engage-ment derives from his imaginative transformation of factual detail into

memorable artistic form The image of Le Voreux gasping as it gorgeson human flesh fuses mechanical knowledge of the workings of the ven-tilation shaft and lift into an unforgettable image of industrial capital-ismrsquos unshrinking appetite for the muscle and bone that constituteshuman labour This kind of extended symbolism is kept grounded inthe particularity of the fictional world by Zolarsquos ability to select the onetelling detail out of the mass of his preparatory documentation In theopening section of Germinal the unseen deity of the mine spews out asblack foam on the old manrsquos lips Flaubert said of Zolarsquos novel Nanathat it lsquoturns into a myth without ceasing to be realrsquo and this is equallytrue of all Zolarsquos major novels (quoted in Levin 1963 325)

THE FUTURE OF LITERARY REALISM

Given the social and political content of Zolarsquos work it seems somewhatpuzzling that Marxist critic Georg Lukaacutecs should have seen him also assharing in the decline of what he terms the classic realism of Balzac andStendhal For Lukaacutecs the defining achievement of classic realism wasthe organic perception of the human being as the location of multipleoften contradictory social forces This fundamental insight was materi-alised for Lukaacutecs in the way both Stendhal and Balzac conceived ofcharacters as types at once highly individualised even monstrous butsimultaneously as embodiments of prevailing historical energies andconflicts For Lukaacutecs after Balzac this comprehensive understanding ofhuman existence was fragmented The political alienation of writers likeFlaubert and Lukaacutecs claims even Zola entails a loss of insight intosocial forces Zola Lukaacutecs argues retreated to a belief in scientificprogress and the literary naturalism that he initiated projects an impov-erished perception of human nature conceived almost entirely in termsof biological determinism (Lukaacutecs [1950] 1972 86) On the otherhand Flaubert is seen by Lukaacutecs as the originator of the subjectivistnovel centred upon purely individual psychology and overly concernedwith artistic form This second trend culminated for Lukaacutecs in what heterms the decadence of modernism in which formalism usurped artisticcommitment to social reality It was this wholesale rejection of mod-ernism in favour of classic realism that provoked the opposing responsesof Adorno and Benjamin included in Chapter 1

The dramatist Bertholt Brecht (1898ndash1956) was also stung into avigorous retort against Lukaacutecs but he did so as an advocate of realismnot modernism Brecht argues passionately that art cannot stand stillWhat was reality for Balzac no longer exists so lsquowe must not conjure upa kind of Valhalla of the enduring figures of literaturersquo (cited in Taylor1980 70) Experimental art is necessary to keep pace with social trans-formations of everyday reality Avant-garde art in that sense is neitherempty formalism nor elitist Brecht insisted that lsquoThere is not only sucha thing as being popular there is also the process of becoming popularrsquo(Taylor 1980 85) In that sense experimentalism popular art and real-ism become allies not terms of opposition to one another He con-cluded lsquoIf we wish to have a living and combative literature which isfully engaged with reality and fully grasps reality a truly popular litera-ture we must keep step with the rapid development of realityrsquo (Taylor1980 85) The realist novels of Stendhal Balzac Flaubert and Zolaresulted from the combative position that all four writers in their dif-ferent ways took to the literary and social fields that constituted theirconditions of existence As Harry Levin reminds us during the nine-teenth century

They were dammed by critics ignored by professors turned down bypublishers opposed by the academies and the Salons and censoredand suppressed by the state Whatever creed of realism they pro-fessed their work was regarded as a form of subversion and all theforces of convention were arrayed against them

(Levin 1963 72ndash3)

British literary realism has a less heroic history than that of FranceThe literary field was not nearly so antagonistic as the French for theobvious reason that the larger field of national power politics was alsoless turbulent The nineteenth century after a period of oppressivereactionary politics in the two decades immediately following theFrench Revolution saw the extension of parliamentary democracy tothe middle class in the Reform Act of 1832 and to large numbers ofworking-class men in 1867 The growth of Empire in the last decadesof the century helped to consolidate a sense of national identity thatendowed even the least of Queen Victoriarsquos subjects with a pleasingsense of inherent superiority over the rest of the world This more evo-lutionary form of social and political change resulted in a literary fieldin Britain that was relatively less polarised and interpenetrated bywider struggles for power What is more the absence in Britain of anyequivalent to the Acadeacutemie franccedilais and its concern to safeguard neo-classical correctness also made for a far less antagonistic literary con-text in which new writers had to establish themselves As in Francethe novel was not really recognised in Britain as a serious literary formuntil after the mid-century but unlike France it had already estab-lished a firm history and tradition during the eighteenth century EarlyFrench novelists like Stendhal and Balzac had to look to Britain forthe origin of their craft

4LITERARY REALISM IN

NINETEENTH-CENTURYBRITAIN

THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH LITERARYREALISM

In The Rise of the Novel (1987) Ian Watt traces the establishment of arealist mode of writing as it developed during the eighteenth centuryin the fictional works of Daniel Defoe (1660ndash1731) SamuelRichardson (1689ndash1761) and Henry Fielding (1707ndash54) He linksthis firmly to the empirical tradition of philosophy stemming fromReneacute Descartes (1596ndash1650) and John Locke (1632ndash1704) which hesays lsquobegins from the position that truth can be discovered by theindividual through his sensesrsquo (Watt [1957] 1987 12) This emphasisupon the individual apprehension of reality marks a shift from the clas-sical concern with universal truth to a notion of particularity This par-ticularised epistemological perspective stemming from Lockersquos Essayconcerning Human Understanding (1690) brought a new emphasiswithin literature upon individualised character located in a carefullyspecified place and time Watt illustrates this innovative shift to particu-larity by noting how proper names for characters and places in novelschanged from allegorical ones or ones suggesting essential attributeslike Squire Allworthy to more realistic ones like Moll Flanders orElizabeth Bennett With particularity as the artistic aim there came astress on verisimilitude as accuracy of detail and correspondence toexternal reality Watt associates the new novel genre with the decrease ofaristocratic patronage to literature during the eighteenth century andan increase in more commercial forms of publication for the increas-ingly prosperous middle class The novel came to replace the courtlyform of romance a narrative genre based upon the ideals of chivalry Inromances idealised knights and ladies meet with fantastic adventures inenchanted landscapes peopled by magical figures of good and evilCourtly forms of literature required a taste educated by classical learn-ing and cultivated leisure Growing wealth gave the eighteenth-centurybourgeoisie especially women more time freed from work but the lit-erary forms that expanded to meet that new demand were the interre-lated ones of journalism and the novel Watt emphasises the significantrole played by the middle class in the development of the eighteenth-century realist novel He also points out the importance of Defoersquos hero-ine Moll Flanders and Richardsonrsquos heroine Clarissa in establishing the

literary realism in nineteenth-century britain 77

individualised psychological realism that is one of the novel genrersquos out-standing achievements Yet he fails to recognise just how importantwomen writers were to the successful rise of the novel (Spencer 1986redresses this balance)

The longer less politicised history of the development of thenovel genre in Britain is an influential factor shaping a different real-ist tradition to that of France Three other cultural differences wereimportant Women novelists such as Austen the three BronteumlsGaskell and Eliot played a central role in the development of nine-teenth-century realism in Britain The strong dissenting traditionwithin British culture fostered a scrutinising emphasis upon individ-ual consciousness but as a down-side puritanism also sustained moralconservatism The relationship of realism to romanticism in theBritish novel is also different to that which developed in France(Stone 1980 offers a scholarly account of the influence of Romanticwriting upon novelists) In the first place while individual Britishnovelists were variously and pervasively influenced by individualRomantics there was during the first half of the century very littlerecognition of British Romanticism as a cohesive movement takingup clearly defined aesthetic and political positions within the literaryfield (Day 1996 84 makes this point and provides a fully histori-cized discussion of English Romantic writing) In France Romanticwriters had spearheaded the attack upon classicism In Britain lack-ing the oppressive influence of an Academy Romantic writers tendedto position themselves in opposition to Jeremy Benthamrsquos (1748ndash1832) rational philosophy of utilitarianism understood as hostile tothe truths of imaginative creativity and the sympathetic heartRomantic writers like William Blake (1757ndash1827) and WilliamHazlitt (1778ndash1830) and later Thomas Carlyle (1795ndash1881) lam-basted utilitarianism as a bleak philosophy of statistical facts that wasused to justify a punitive attitude to the labouring poor codified asThe New Poor Laws of 1834 This romantic critique linking eigh-teenth-century rationality to repressive political authority is one rea-son why realist writers during the first half of the century at leastwere wary of identifying the aims of the novelist with those of thescientist in the way that Balzac Flaubert and Zola had done

A DISTINCTIVE BRITISH TRADITION OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY REALISM

These cultural differences between the two countries have the effect ofmaking the British nineteenth-century novel less explicit as to its realistproject Humanist critic Erich Auerbach and Marxist critic GyoumlrgyLukaacutecs identify two defining achievements of nineteenth-century real-ism first the perception that individual lives are the location of histori-cal forces and contradictions and second the serious artistic treatmentof ordinary people and their experience British nineteenth-centurynovelists also write out of a historicised imagination but they articulatea less explicit sense of history than writers like Stendhal and BalzacThis is not surprising given the less tumultuous national history As inDaniel Deronda (1874ndash6) where Eliot figures the economic reality ofspeculative capitalism as gambling British novelists typically representsocial forces of change at deeper structural levels or by means of sym-bolism and imagery The critic Raymond Williams (1921ndash88) forexample argues that a major element of Dickensrsquos innovative realism islsquoto dramatize those social institutions and consequences which are notaccessible to ordinary physical observationrsquo by means of metaphor andfiguration (Williams 1974 30) Indeed more generally the develop-ment of writerly techniques of indirection and suggestion is a distin-guishing feature of British realism This is perhaps a creative dividend ofthe moral puritanism which forbade writers the direct expression ofmany aspects of human experience

British novelists also participate in the democratic impulse of real-ism from Jane Austen through to Thomas Hardy fictional representa-tion moves away from the world of the higher gentry to theworking-class sphere of characters like Tess of the DrsquoUrbervilles andJude the Obscure In George Eliotrsquos Adam Bede (1859) when the narra-tor associates the art of novel-writing with the realism of Dutch paint-ings she does so in the cause of sympathetically rendering lsquomonotonoushomely existencersquo and the hidden value of humble life lsquoold womenscraping carrots with their work-worn handsrsquo (Eliot [1859] 1980 ch17 224) This passage in Adam Bede is one of Eliotrsquos most explicit elab-orations of her realist aims and of her rejection of idealism in art hersense of the artistrsquos responsibility she says is lsquoto give a faithful account

of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mindrsquo (Eliot[1859] 1980 222) Yet in the very next sentence she admits the nearimpossibility of achieving a representation of reality that is lsquofaithfulrsquo interms of the objective ideals of science The mind as a mirror lsquois doubt-less defective the outlines will sometimes be disturbed the reflectionfaint and confusedrsquo (Eliot [1859] 1980 222) Rather than rehearseagain the main features of realism that British realists share with Frenchnineteenth-century novelists in particular the historicised and demo-cratic understanding of character and event I will focus upon the moreinteresting difference the sense of doubt and ambivalence at the heartof British realism

In The English Realist Imagination English Fiction from Frankensteinto Lady Chatterley George Levine convincingly demonstrates that nine-teenth-century novelists wrote from an alert awareness of lsquothe possibili-ties of indeterminate meaningrsquo and lsquothe arbitrariness of thereconstructed order to which they pointrsquo (Levine 1981 4) One of themain reasons for this uncertainty and scepticism towards any claim thatnovels can provide faithful or accurate representations of reality is thepervasive influence of romanticism on all of the major nineteenth-cen-tury British novelists Ian Watt is right to emphasise the centrality ofEnlightenment thought especially the philosophy of Locke upon thedevelopment of the eighteenth-century novel but for nineteenth-cen-tury writers like the Bronteumls Dickens Eliot and even Hardy that isonly half the story Their attitude to the claims of rational scientificmodels of knowledge is filtered through the Romantic critique of utili-tarian thinking Frequently sympathetic imagination is regarded as amore reliable guide to aspects of reality than rational objectivity Inaddition the tradition of dissent provides an inherent tendency to ques-tion authoritative views on what constitutes social reality and animpulse to undermine dominant perspectives with opposing view-points This more multiple sense of lsquorealityrsquo is also fostered by a tradi-tion of popular culture which includes fairy tales melodrama poetryreligious and radical discourses All of these forms feed into the realistnovel genre often through the medium of romanticism For this rea-son over-simple definitions of realism have difficulty in accommodat-ing the achievements of British nineteenth-century novels Yet asGeorge Levine argues this writing lsquoalways implies an attempt to use

language to get beyond language to discover some non-verbal truth outtherersquo (Levine 1981 6) and thus is properly regarded as realist This def-inition is even generous enough to comprehend Wuthering Heights(1847) the novel that most radically draws upon romanticism popularculture and multiple perspectives to undercut any epistemologicalcertainty

Wuthering Heights concentrates all of those qualities that separate theEnglish nineteenth-century novel from the French It is of course writ-ten by a woman Unlike France women writers made a major contribu-tion to the development of British realism and in particular to itscharacteristic questioning of the nature of social realities An influentialtradition of feminist criticism has highlighted the role of female charac-ters in nineteenth-century womenrsquos novels as subversively lsquootherrsquo maddoubles of virtuous heroines midnight witches and monsters (Gilbertand Gubar 1979) This vein of otherness and madness undoubtedly con-tributes powerfully to the ambivalent and multiple sense of reality con-veyed by texts like Jane Eyre Villette and Mary Elizabeth Braddonrsquos(1837ndash1915) sensational best-seller Lady Audleyrsquos Secret (1862) forexample Yet it is perhaps timely and in the context of realism certainlyappropriate to recognise equally the long line of clever rational wittyimaginative resilient and able women characters found in all of Austenrsquosnovels as the protagonists of Anne Bronteumlrsquos The Tenant of Wildfell Hall(1848) Charlotte Bronteumlrsquos Jane Eyre (1847) Shirley (1849) and Villette(1853) as Nelly in Emily Bronteumlrsquos Wuthering Heights (1847) and asmajor characters in Elizabeth Gaskellrsquos novels Mary Barton (1848) Ruth(1853) North and South (1855) and Wives and Daughters (1866)George Eliotrsquos heroines are undoubtedly some of the most intelligent infiction but the novelist who wrote so sternly on lsquosilly women novelistsrsquohas an unfortunate tendency of making her clever women rather silly(Pinney 1963 300ndash24) The most obvious contribution that womenwriters make to realism by means of such characters is the extension ofsubject matter The perception of reality is broadened to encompass aview of women as rational capable initiating and energetic Male writ-ers like Flaubert with Madame Bovary (1857) and Tolstoy with AnnaKarenina (1875ndash7) have written impressive books centred upon femaleprotagonists but in these texts women are understood predominantly interms of their relationships with men and as victims of patriarchal codes

The women writers I am discussing construct plots that frequently turnupon gender relations and a love story but their perception of theirfemale characters is not determined by these relationships Women intheir stories are intelligently complex beings producers of distinctiveknowledge of the world and highly capable of executive action

In addition to offering a more extensive representation of the realitythat constitutes the female half of the human race women writersrsquo rep-resentation of women also articulates a different view of the ideologicaldivision of the social world into a public sphere governed by lsquomasculinersquorationality and a domestic sphere of affections and sensibility withwomen largely restricted to the latter In Jane Austenrsquos last novelPersuasion (1818) Admiral Croftrsquos wife puts the hero CaptainWentworth her brother robustly in his place lsquoBut I hate to hear youtalking sohellipas if women were all fine ladies instead of rational crea-tures We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our daysrsquo (Austen[1818] 1990 69) Mrs Croft goes on to recount how she has spentmost of her married life on board a ship crossing the Atlantic fourtimes and travelling to the East Indies lsquothough many women have donemorersquo (Austen [1818] 1990 70) She concludes that it was only on theoccasion of enforced normal domesticity in Britain lsquothat I ever reallysuffered in body or mind the only time that I ever fancied myselfunwellrsquo (Austen [1818] 1990 70) This exchange offers a sudden sharpglimpse of a quite different reality to the one usually conveyed of nine-teenth-century women it reminds us of women as intrepid travellersand pioneers sharing hardships and dangers alongside men throughoutthe century Mrs Croft suggests that a lsquofemininersquo domestic sensibility isnot the opposite of a lsquomasculinersquo rational capacity rather emotional sen-sibility is what happens to rational energies when they are denied activeoutlet by domestic confinement

At the conclusion of the story it is the heroine Anne Elliotrsquos ratio-nal understanding and the initiatives she takes on the basis of it thatbring about her reconciliation with Frederick Wentworth In this sec-tion of the novel Austen marks his masculine discourse with indica-tors of emotional distress and indecision whereas Annersquos response isgiven as lsquorepliedrsquo Wentworthrsquos is given as lsquocried hersquo and his sentencestake the form of exclamations and questions in comparison to Annersquosfirm statements The heroine indeed gently rebukes his failure of

rational judgement lsquoYou should have distinguishedrsquo Anne repliedlsquoYou should not have suspected me now the case so different and myage so differentrsquo (Austen [1818] 1990 230) Wentworth is forced toadmit that due to the strength of irrational feelings lsquoI could not derivebenefit from the late knowledge I had acquired of your characterrsquo(Austen [1818] 1990 230) In contrast Anne affirms the rational cor-rectness of her thinking and actions lsquoI have been thinking over thepast and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong I meanwith regard to myself and I must believe that I was rightrsquo (Austen[1818] 1990 232)

lsquoI must believe that I was rightrsquo equally summarises the impressiverational capacities and principled action of Eleanor Dashwood in Senseand Sensibility (1811) Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1814) Jane Eyrein Jane Eyre Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853) Margaret Hale in North andSouth (1855) Molly Gibson in Wives and Daughters (1866) Romola inRomola and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871ndash2) Women writ-ers further show that the crucial mechanisms of social relationships thestructures of marriage parenthood and family life as well as the dailymaintenance of domestic affairs rest upon womenrsquos production ofknowledge their rational judgement and executive and managementskills Mrs Croft in Persuasion claims the right as a wife to traverse theconventional boundaries of public and private spheres By the midnineteenth century the protagonists of women-authored texts are repre-sented on the point of assuming active roles within the public sphere intheir own right Lucy Snowe as a teacher running her own schoolMargaret Hale as an industrial property owner and social worker amongthe London poor and Dorothea Brooke albeit as a subordinate helperto her progressive MP husband

This challenge to the conventional gendered categorization of thesocial world is part of a more fundamental questioning of the nature ofreality Women realist writers are particularly aware of the fictionalnature of representation and the vested interests lodged in authoritativetruth claims In Persuasion a male character tries to refute Anne Elliotrsquosdefence of the integrity of womenrsquos attachments asserting lsquoall historiesare against you all stories prose and versersquo (Austen [1818] 1990 220)Anne replies lsquoIf you please no reference to examples in books Menhave had every advantage of us in telling their own story Education has

been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their handsI will not allow books to prove anythingrsquo (Austen [1818] 1990 221)She concludes that the different perspectives of men and women consti-tutes lsquoa difference of opinion which does not admit of proof rsquo (Austen[1818] 1990 221) Women writers transform this recognition that sci-entific objectivity is impossible into the structuring irony of their narra-tive technique Womenrsquos writing articulates a comic duality at times adisturbing multiplicity of viewpoints

Charlotte Bronteumlrsquos narrators typically cast doubt upon the conven-tional notion of reality entertained by the comfortably respectable Asnarrator of Villette (1853) the character Lucy Snowe emphasises theshifting unreliability of perspective and the uncertain boundariesbetween actuality and hoped for or feared realities Leaving England forEurope in search of a wider horizon of life Lucy Snowe describes atsome length the inspiring scene that she envisions from the deck of theship as it crosses the Channel Europe lies before her like a dream-landbathed in sunshine lsquomaking the long coast one line of goldrsquo (Bronteuml[1853] 2000 ch 5 56) The detailed description ends abruptlylsquoCancel the whole of that if you please reader ndash or rather let it standand draw thence a moral ndash an alliterative text-hand copy ndash ldquoDay-dreams are delusions of the demonrdquorsquo (Bronteuml [1853] 2000 57) There isabsolutely no way of stabilising any one authentic or objective point ofview from the oscillating possibilities of this passage

In Eliotrsquos Middlemarch (1871ndash2) the narrative perspective ironicallyundercuts the authority of young doctor Lydgatersquos new scientific enter-prise and the Reverend Casaubonrsquos traditional scholarship Both menaspire to be extraordinary producers of knowledge but both are shownto be damagingly defective in their egoistic perception of a single realitythat suits their own interests and blinds them to the other realities thatwill determine their lives In Gaskellrsquos Wives and Daughters (1866) thenarrative juxtaposes the scientific knowledge of Dr Gibson and evolu-tionary biologist Roger Hamley to the discourses of fairy tales andpoetry associated with women Medical and biological advancesdepend upon the precision and acuteness with which the scientific prac-titioners observe natural phenomena and the intelligence with whichthey interpret these external signs The comedy of the story resides inthe huge blunders in perception and interpretation that both men

make In particular their understanding of women is shown to beinvested in the domain of fairy stories and sentimental poetry while theviewpoints of the women characters are represented in the text as clear-sighted goal-directed and knowledgeable

There is an obvious reason for women writers to exploit the possibil-ities of narrative technique to suggest that what is seen as lsquorealityrsquodepends on the social position of the perceiver But this development ofperspective is not confined to them Dickens continually aims in hiswriting practice to dwell upon lsquothe romantic side of familiar thingsrsquo(Dickens [1852ndash3] 1996 6) as he expresses it in his preface to BleakHouse (1852ndash3) Thackeray was determinedly anti-romantic and wasidentified as lsquochief of the realist schoolrsquo by Fraserrsquos Magazine in 1851 (p86) but he too makes innovative use of apparently traditional narratorsto put in question the conventional truth claims made for realist fic-tion In The Newcomes (1853ndash5) the narrator playfully mocks the con-vention of omniscience with its assumption that past conversations andpersonal feelings can be faithfully represented This scepticism is thenextended to scientific narratives by means of an analogy drawn betweenthe novelist and the evolutionary anatomist

All this story is told by one who if he was not actually present atthe circumstances here narrated yet had information concerningthem and could supply such a narrative of facts and conversationsas is indeed not less authentic than the details we have of otherhistories How can I tell the feelings of a young ladyrsquos mind thethoughts in a young manrsquos bosom ndash As Professor Owen orProfessor Agassiz takes a fragment of bone and builds an enor-mous forgotten monster out of it wallowing in primeval quagmirestearing down leaves and branches of plants that flourished thou-sands of years ago and perhaps may be coal by this time ndash so thenovelist puts this and that together from the footprint finds thefoot the brute who trod on it from the brute the plant he browsedon the marsh in which he swam ndash and thus in his humble way aphysiologist too depicts the habits size appearance of the beingswhereof he has to treat traces this slimy reptile through the mudand describes his habits filthy and rapacious prods down this but-terfly with a pin and depicts his beautiful coat and embroidered

waistcoat points out the singular structure of yonder more impor-tant animal the megatherium of his history

(II 9 Thackeray [1850] 1996 81)

Typically in this passage Thackeray makes no appeal to the artistrsquosintuition or poetic insight as the means of entering into the feelings ofhis characters rather he likens the process to the rational deductions ofinvestigative science Paradoxically though under the imaginativeimpulse of the writing science itself becomes the discovery of the mar-vellous and the monstrous The culminating metaphoric intensificationof language shifts the meaning even further from the realm of rationalorder hinting at hidden psychic realities and potentially monstrousimpulses lurking beneath the surface of appearances

By a rich variety of such means British nineteenth-century realismexploited narrative techniques to question the nature of reality espe-cially as it took the form of any authoritative truth British realist writ-ing also has a marked tendency to radically undercut what was forLocke the privileged site of knowledge individual identity and con-sciousness Despite the particularised individuality of novelistic charac-ters in nineteenth-century British fiction closer analysis frequentlyreveals that they are represented as shifting unstable or multiple subjec-tivities Dickensrsquos work in particular with its representation of strangestates of mind and obsessive patterns of behaviour was highly influen-tial on later writers like Fydor Dostoevsky (1821ndash81) and Franz Kafka(1883ndash1924) In an early episode of Oliver Twist (1837ndash8) Oliver goeswith Mr Sowerbury the undertaker to a scene of utter destitutionwhere they have to measure for a coffin a young woman dead from star-vation Her husband and children sob bitterly but her old mother sud-denly hobbles forward

lsquoShe was my daughterrsquo said the old woman nodding her head in thedirection of the corpse [hellip] lsquoLord Lord Well it is strange that I whogave birth to her and was a woman then should be alive and merrynow and she lying there so cold and stiff Lord Lord ndash to think of itndash itrsquos as good as a play ndash as good as a playrsquo

(Dickens 1982 ch 5 32)

This is a dramatic example of how fairy tales and popular culture espe-cially popular theatre feed into Dickensrsquos work to produce some of itsmost powerful and disturbing effects The mad old womanrsquos grotesquebut somehow apposite sense that overpowering horror has intensifiedreality into theatre contains an insight into the performative elementthat inhabits all social existence Dickensrsquos characterisation has beencriticised as failing to match the psychological realism achieved byGeorge Eliot in her representation of a complex inner life ButDickensrsquos concern is with the equally complex performative patterns ofexternal behaviour by means of which non-rational states of mind andhidden identities are articulated

A more extended characterisation that draws upon the same sourcesof fairy tale and popular culture and the same psychological insights isthat of the witch-like figure of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations(1861) Miss Havisham has turned her life into a spectacular theatre ofdecay even choreographing the climactic scene after her death when herbody will be laid upon the table set for the bridal meal and her greedyrelatives summoned to feast upon her (Dickens 1965 ch 11 116)Fantastic though the figure is it does not relinquish realismrsquos concernwith the individual character as a location of social forces The disturb-ing image of age-wasted bride offers a powerful symbolic rendering ofthe self-denying withered existence imposed upon many middle-classwomen in Victorian England Dickensrsquos imaginative representation hasits non-fictional counterpart in Florence Nightingalersquos embittered secretwriting in her unpublished essay Cassandra (1852) (Strachey [1928]1978 contains the text of Cassandra which was not published duringNightingalersquos own life) Great Expectations was published in 1861 thesame year as the death of Prince Albert Following his death QueenVictoria transformed her life into a royal performance of grief that kepther secluded from any public appearance for years

BRITISH DEBATES ON REALISM

By the mid-1860s almost all of the major realist writing of the nine-teenth century had been achieved Dickensrsquos last complete novel OurMutual Friend was published in 1865 and Gaskell died that year withWives and Daughters not quite concluded Thackeray had died in 1863

and Charlotte Bronteuml in 1855 well outliving her sisters Eliot publishedMiddlemarch in 1871ndash2 and Daniel Deronda in 1874ndash6 but onlyThomas Hardy still had his career to make in the last part of the cen-tury So it is somewhat paradoxical that the main artistic debates aboutrealism only reached Britain from France in the 1880s From the moreaware artistic consciousness of that era it seemed to writers like HenryJames (1843ndash1916) George Gissing (1857ndash1903) and Robert LouisStevenson (1850ndash94) that the earlier novelists had practised the craft ofnovel-writing blithely unaware of aesthetic considerations According toHenry James lsquothere was a comfortable good-humoured feeling abroadthat a novel is a novel as a pudding is a pudding and that our onlybusiness with it could be to swallow itrsquo (James [1894] 1987 187)James rather overstates the case here Throughout the nineteenth cen-tury the periodical press carried long serious review articles on novels(Graham 1965 and Stang 1959 provide details of critical debates onnovels during the second half of the nineteenth century) However it istrue that realism as such was not a central issue of aesthetic concern Yetthe first use of the term in Britain when Frazerrsquos Magazine describedThackeray as lsquochief of the Realist Schoolrsquo just predates the passionateFrench controversy over the term lsquoreacutealismersquo sparked off by GustaveCourbet in 1855 In 1853 The Westminster Review printed a longadmiring essay on lsquoBalzac and his Writingrsquo recognising him as lsquohead ofthe realist school in Francersquo (Evans 1853 203) In recommending hiswork as such to British readers the reviewer gives absolutely no indica-tion that there might be anything controversial about such a mode ofwriting Indeed the reviewer comments that in England spared lsquotheinfliction of an Academyrsquo the lsquoliterary warfarersquo that met Balzacrsquos workcould lsquoscarcely be comprehendedrsquo (Evans 1853 202ndash3)

Certainly on the whole debates around realism in Britain during the1880s and 1890s were typified by pragmatic moderation rather thanartistic let alone political passion Three main issues were involved thecomparative merits of realism to those of romance and idealism ademand for more concern with formal aspects of fictional art and whatwas seen as the affront to moral decency in naturalistic novels In anessay entitled lsquoRealism in Art Recent German Fictionrsquo published inThe Westminster Review in 1858 G H Lewes the life-partner ofGeorge Eliot argued that all lsquoArt is a Representation of Realityrsquo and so

it follows that lsquoRealism is thus the basis of all Art and its antithesis isnot Idealism but Falsismrsquo (Lewes 1858 494) Lewesrsquos thinking showsquite clearly the influence of romanticism on British notions of lsquotruthrsquoand lsquorealityrsquo Great painters and writers Lewes argues convey images ofreal things and people but these are intensified by the artistrsquos poetic sen-sibility By this means without departing from strict accuracy of exter-nal detail they produce art which is lsquoin the highest sense ideal andwhich is so because it is also in the highest sense realrsquo (Lewes 1858494) In the 1880s there was a resurgence of interest in the romancegenre stories of high adventure often set in exotic locations of theEmpire inhabited by strange peoples Robert Louis Stevenson(1850ndash94) was regarded as one of the chief exponents of romance butin his critical writing he too refused to see realism in an oppositionallight In lsquoA Note on Realismrsquo (1885) he sets out a view very close tothat of GH Lewes lsquoAll representative art which can be said to live isboth realistic and idealrsquo (Stevenson 1999 67) George Gissing(1857ndash1903) was influenced by the French naturalism of Zola yet hereiterated the same point in his book on Dickens lsquoBut there can bedrawn only a misleading futile distinction between novels realistic andidealistic It is merely a question of degree and of the authorrsquos tempera-mentrsquo (Gissing 1898 218) Henry James magisterially dismissed thelsquocelebrated distinction between the novel and the romancehellipThere arebad novels and good novels as there are bad pictures and good picturesbut that is the only distinction in which I can see any meaningrsquo (James[1894] 1987 196)

James was passionately concerned with what makes a good noveland although he says in lsquoThe Art of Fictionrsquo that lsquothe air of reality(solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of anovelrsquo it is obvious from the prefaces he wrote to his own fiction andfrom his essays on other novelists that he set a very high premium onthe kind of self-conscious craftsmanship practised by a writer likeFlaubert (James [1894] 1987 195) R L Stevenson was also influencedby French artistic concern and he too favoured greater attention toartistic form insisting in his essay lsquoA Humble Remonstrancersquo thatwhile lsquoLife is monstrous infinite illogical abrupt and poignant awork of art in comparison is neat finite self-contained rational flow-ing and emasculatersquo (Stevenson 1999 85) Given the terms in which

Stevenson sets up this opposition between art and life most of his read-ers might well opt for life Art for artrsquos sake was never articulated withsuch conviction as in France The move towards greater formalism byBritish modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century was proba-bly influenced more by the work of French novelists and poets and bythe fictional practices of James and Conrad than by public criticaldebates

Public passion over the issue of realism was only aroused by whatwas seen as an attack upon the foundations of British morality Formuch of the nineteenth century Mudiersquos Circulating Library(1842ndash1937) which claimed to purchase 180000 volumes a year hadeffectively operated a system of censorship by refusing to stock any liter-ature likely to cause offence as family reading Since library sales consti-tuted a very substantial part of any authorrsquos earnings all writers wereforced to conform to Mudiersquos conventional moral code However bythe 1880s cheap mass publication had put an end to Mudiersquos control ofthe book market and the publisher Vizetelly hoped to cash in on Zolarsquosfame or notoriety by publishing English translations of his work Inresponse the National Vigilance Association launched a vociferouscampaign to suppress such lsquopernicious literaturersquo Attacks on the lsquofilthrsquoand lsquoobscenityrsquo which were projected as a threat to national lifeappeared in the religious local and national press There was a debateon the matter in Parliament in May 1888 and a criminal case was takenout against Vizetelly who voluntarily undertook to withdraw all offend-ing literature from sale (Becker 1963 reprints the transcript of thedebate in Parliament as it was published by the National VigilanceAssociation Becker 350ndash382 also provides extracts from newspaperitems of the affair Keating 1989 241ndash84 contains a good account ofthe Vizetelly prosecution and of end-of-century challenges to forms ofmoral censorship) This incident was but the most extreme example ofthe moral conformity that had governed British public life during thewhole century and beyond Balzac had much earlier noted that WalterScott was false in his portrayal of women because he was lsquoobliged toconform to the ideas of an essentially hypocritical countryrsquo (Balzac1981 142) In his Preface to Pendennis (1850) Thackeray complainedthat lsquoSince the author of Tom Jones was buried no writer of fictionamong us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a

MANhellipSociety will not tolerate the natural in artrsquo (Thackeray [1850]1994 lvi) Gissing makes the same point in comparing Dickensrsquos workto that of Dostoevsky and James acknowledges the selective principle ofMrs Grundy as symbol of Victorian proprieties (Gissing 1898 223James [1894] 1987 200)

THOMAS HARDY AND THE CULMINATION OF BRITISHNINETEENTH-CENTURY REALISM

Thomas Hardy (1840ndash1928) was heir to the achievements of the ear-lier generations of nineteenth-century realists and to the later debatesderiving from French realism Hardy wrote in defiance of Victorianproprieties attempting to incorporate into his fiction the aspects ofhuman experience most notably those concerned with sexuality thathis predecessors had been forced to avoid As a result his novels espe-cially Tess of the DrsquoUrbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) weremet with outrage and denunciations Yet in the commercial literarymarket-place that had come into existence by the end of the centuryHardy like Zola discovered that notoriety meant sales (Keating 1989369ndash445 describes the rise of the lsquobest sellerrsquo) He made enough moneyfrom Jude the Obscure to give up novel writing and turn to the poorerfinancial rewards but greater cultural capital of poetry Hardy alsoresembled Zola in accepting a Darwinian perception of a social andphysical universe ruled by the harsh laws of natural selection andheredity Again like his fellow French writer critics have judged thoseparts of his work that most clearly conform to such a lsquoscientificrsquo per-spective the least artistically successful As critic Gillian Beer (1983) hasshown the more creative and pervasive influence of Darwinrsquos On theOrigin of Species (1859) on British novelists was an imaginative grasp ofevolutionary forms of change historical and natural and an absorptionof Darwinrsquos own metaphors for natural forces The great insight thatHardyrsquos realism gained from Darwin resides in a very complex sense oftime The poeticising of his historical imagination enables him toembody intensely particularised individual characters within a vastsweep of change from primeval to present time as inscribed on thepanoramic surface of landscape It is this symbolic intensification of thelocalised individual as historical type caught up in an unending process

of change that is one of Hardyrsquos unique contributions to realism not hisoccasional depiction of character as mechanically determined by physi-cal and social laws

Raymond Williams argues that Hardy uses his major characters toexplore new novelistic territory his protagonists inhabit the insecureborder country between familiar customary patterns of life and theunmapped mobility of new social formations (Williams 1974 81)lsquoTerritoryrsquo is a precise term since the charactersrsquo insecurities are alwaysmaterialised as geographical dislocation and unsettlement In Tess of theDrsquoUrbervilles Tess and Angel Clare travel by horse and cart through theremote and ancient landscape of Egdon Heath to deliver milk to thenew railway station

They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at handat which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence a spotwhere by day a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the darkgreen background denoted intermittent moments of contact betweentheir secluded world and modern life Modern life stretched out itssteam feeler to this point three or four times a day touched the nativeexistences and quickly withdrew its feeler again as if what it touchedhad been uncongenial

They reached the feeble light which came from the smokey lamp ofa little railway station a poor enough terrestrial star yet in one senseof more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the celes-tial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast The cans ofnew milk were unladen in the rain Tess getting a little shelter from aneighbouring holly-tree

Then there was a hissing of a train which drew up almost silentlyupon the wet rails and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into thetruck The light of the engine flashed for a second upon TessDurbeyfieldrsquos figure motionless under the great holly-tree [] Tesswas so receptive that the few minutes of contact with the whirl ofmaterial progress lingered in her thought

lsquoLondoners will drink it at their breakfast tomorrow wonrsquot theyrsquoshe asked lsquoStrange people that we have never seenrsquo

(Hardy [1891] 1988 187ndash8)

Typically Hardyrsquos language renders an intellectual insight into theincompatibility of traditional and modern worlds as palpable experi-ence the creeping pace of the cart juxtaposed to the lsquofitfulrsquohelliplsquosteamfeelerrsquo quickly pulling back from contact with what is felt as unconge-nially other Yet the apparently idyllic world of Talbothays Dairy(which can so easily be idealised as lsquotimelesslyrsquo rural) depends for theviability of its large-scale milk production upon the new transporta-tion system that brings London consumers within a few hours reachIn this passage as elsewhere in the novel Tess is at the juncture ofthese two historical worlds and as her question indicates is perceivedas a consciousness percipient of both The historicised understandingof character is made yet more complex by the association of Tess inHardyrsquos writing with a rich tradition of fairy tale and popular cultureas here in the representation of her figure picked out in light lsquomotion-less under the great holly-treersquo Without sacrificing any of the preciselocation of Tess at the point of junction between a newly formingmass consumer mobility and a more slow-paced agricultural societythis understructure of myth and folk tradition reminds us of theunending process of historical change and all those numberless andnameless individuals who have found themselves haplessly on insecureborder territory

A final point to notice about the passage is that Hardy makes noattempt to offer a rational account or objective analysis of just howTessrsquos consciousness is shaped by her perception of two worldsRealism neither requires nor claims certainty In practice it does notaim at scientific or objective truth and most especially its goal is notany authoritative or singular notion of truth Its use of surface detail isgoverned by poetic selection and historicising imagination not docu-mentary inventory Its predominant mode is comic irreverent secularand sceptical Realism is capacious enough to recognise that socialrealities are multiple and constructed it is formally adventurous enoughto incorporate non-realist genres like fairy tale romanticism and melo-drama appropriating their qualities to realist ends However the pro-ject of realism is founded upon an implicit consensual belief thatrealities do exist lsquoout therersquo beyond linguistic networks and that we canuse language to explore and communicate our always incomplete

knowledge of that ever-changing historical materiality Thus the formof realism is necessarily protean but the commitment of the genre tohistorical particularity is non-negotiable

IIILITERARY REALISM AS

FORMAL ART

We saw in Part I that during the twentieth century the tradition of real-ist writing came under criticism from first a modernist and then a post-modernist perspective At the centre of these critiques is an accusationthat literary realism practises a form of dishonesty veiling its status asart to suggest it is simply a copy or reflection of life In so doing itscritics claim it shores up the complacency of assumed notions and prej-udices about the world rather than producing challenging new forms ofknowledge In Part II I aimed to show that the development of therealist novel during the nineteenth-century was characterised by contin-uous experimentation with narrative techniques by democratisation ofsubject matter and often by confrontation with authority Yet the verysuccess of realism as a form means that we do now rather tend to take itfor granted One of the main aims of Part III therefore is to look moreclosely at the intrinsic formal aspects of realist writing in order toappreciate more fully the artistic achievement of creating the effect oflsquobeing just like lifersquo

Formalism is an approach to art that focuses primarily upon imma-nent or inherent self-contained aspects of the artistic form and struc-ture of a work rather than its extrinsic relationship to actuality In theearly part of the twentieth century formalism was developed as the pre-ferred approach to literature in both America and Russia AlthoughAmerican New Critics and Russian Formalists pursued quite different

5REALITY EFFECTS

agendas and were unaware of each otherrsquos existence they shared a com-mon belief that the study of literature needed to aspire to the objectivestatus of science (For a succinct account of New Criticism see Robey1986 or Selden 1985) By the beginning of the twentieth century thegrowing prestige of scientific disciplines as a means of furthering humanknowledge made former approaches to literary study seem amateurishand lacking requisite objectivity In order to emulate the success of sci-ence it was argued literary studies must be defined by a rigorous focusupon the literary text itself as its sole object of investigation In elabo-rating their quite different critical methodologies for approaching thisscientific ideal American New Critics tended to concern themselvespredominantly with poetry while Russian Formalism encompassed awider perspective of the literary Moreover Russian Formalism had aformative influence on the subsequent development of structuralism Inthis chapter therefore I shall map this critical history from RussianFormalism to French poststructuralism focusing upon those aspects offormal analysis that are most immediately applicable to literary realism

In adopting a scientific model both Russian Formalists and laterstructuralists rejected any concern with the value of literature or of thevalues inscribed in literary texts In pursuing knowledge of molecularstructures for example scientists do not ask whether these are good orbad progressive or repressive their concern is with how the molecularsystem functions By analogy for Russian Formalists and for structural-ists the key question for literary studies is not what does a text mean orhow fine is the writing but how does it work how does it producemeaning Yet when the linguistic lsquoturnrsquo of structuralism was displacedby the cultural lsquoturnrsquo of poststructuralism this scientific approach wasseen as mistaken The formal aspects of a work no less than its contentwere understood to carry lsquomeaningrsquo in the sense of sustaining thoseunderlying structures that produce the unquestioned ideologicalassumptions mapping our reality To take a simple example we havenoted how the lsquoclosedrsquo structure of many realist novels the culminationof the plot in resolution of all mysteries and uncertainties functions toreassure us that human existence is ultimately meaningful The formalanalyses of poststructural critics therefore aim to reveal the means bywhich realist texts produce the illusion of reality that functions to con-firm our expectations Yet I shall argue if the formal aspects and

literary realism as formal art98

structures of texts frequently work to produce a comforting sense of theworld as we expect it to be it follows that they can by these same for-mal structures draw attention to underlying epistemological assump-tions that shape our perception of social reality de-naturalising thesestructures so that they become visible to us and we are able to thinkbeyond their limits The second aim of this chapter then is to investi-gate both the artistic means by which literary realism achieves theeffects of an already existing actuality and the extent to which it dis-comforts presuppositions encouraging us to challenge or rethink them

For Russian Formalists the first issue of importance was to define theobject of their study what constituted the literariness of literary textsOr what makes literary language different in kind from everyday use oflanguage This led Victor Shklovsky in an influential essay lsquoArt asTechniquersquo (1917) to distinguish poetic or literary language as thatwhich makes use of techniques of estrangement or defamiliarisation(reprinted in Lodge 1988 20 21) Whereas everyday language andexperience rests upon processes of habituation so that perceptionbecomes automatic literary language shocks us into seeing the familiarwith fresh eyes For Shklovsky the triumph of Tolstoyrsquos realism is thathe brings a shocking strangeness to his representation of the world lsquoHedescribes an object as if he were seeing it for the first timersquo (Lodge1988 21)

Ferdinand de Saussurersquos structural linguistics was known to RussianFormalists and shaped the work of two critics who were influentialwithin the later structuralist movement in France Vladimir Propp(1895ndash1970) and Roman Jakobson (1896ndash1982) Just as Saussure hadsuggested that the vast multiplicity of lsquoparolersquo that is actual speechutterances were produced by an underlying grammar or lsquolanguersquo sostructural narratologists like Propp hoped to discover the limited set ofrules that produce the numerous diversity of stories that human beingshave created throughout history In his early structuralist essaylsquoIntroduction to Structuralist Analysis of Narrativesrsquo (1966) RolandBarthes points out lsquoThe narratives of the world are numberlesshellipunder[an]hellipalmost infinite diversity of forms narrative is present in everyage in every place in every society it begins with the very history ofmankind and there nowhere is or has been a people without narrativersquo(Barthes 1977 79) Barthes goes on to point admiringly to Propprsquos

reality effects 99

analysis of over a hundred Russian folk tales to isolate just thirty-tworecurrent constitutive narrative elements that he calls lsquofunctionsrsquo (Propp[1929] 1971 91ndash114 Propp 1968 21) So for example in fairy talesthe element of lsquothe giftrsquo performs the constant function of enabling thehero to accomplish his lsquotaskrsquo which is another constitutive functionThe exact nature of the gift or task and who gives or performs it isimmaterial to the structural function of each element which remainsidentical in all the tales The project to establish narratology as a sci-ence was strongest during the 1960s and into the 1970s substantiatedin the work of Seymour Chapman (1978) and AJ Greimas (1971) aswell as Propp (An account of their work can be found in Culler 1975Rimmon-Kenan 1983 Currie 1998 gives a highly readable account ofmore recent theoretical approaches to narrative) Thereafter enthusiasmfor the enterprise faltered somewhat no generally accepted lsquogrammarrsquoable to account for all forms of narrative could be found and moreimportantly that goal came to seem reductive and mistaken It aimed totranslate the rich multiplicity of the worldrsquos stories into rather banal ele-ments like lsquofunctionsrsquo and it was indifferent to the cultural specificity oftexts and to the ideological functioning of narrative structure

Roman Jakobson was probably the most important figure bridgingthe theoretical endeavours of Russian Formalism and French structural-ism His work is primarily linguistic not literary but he was centrallyconcerned like other Russian Formalists to define the distinctivenature of poetic language lsquoOn Realism in Artrsquo (1921) is the only essayin which he specifically addressed the topic of realism His main con-cern was to point out how of all literary forms realism is the least likelyto be objectively defined and evaluated lsquoWe call realisticrsquo he says lsquothoseworks which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitudersquo(Jakobson [1921] 1971 38) Yet more often than not this so-called aes-thetic judgement simply means that the reader agrees with the view ofreality that the text offers Jakobson is arguing for the need of an objec-tive definition of realism He does not come up with one but his recog-nition of the ideological investments embedded in praises of a workrsquosrealism looks prophetically forward to the rigid artistic doctrine ofsocialist realism adopted by the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 atthe behest of Stalin Socialist realism conveyed as reality only heroicproletarian protagonists in plots of always ultimately optimistic struggle

any form of experimentalism was denounced as decadent It was GeorgLukaacutecsrsquos attempt to justify this Soviet attack upon modernist art that ledto the public quarrel with the critics of the Frankfurt School outlined inChapter 1

Jakobsonrsquos most influential contribution to structuralist poetics wascontained in his important essay on lsquoLinguistics and Poeticsrsquo (1960) Inthis work he provides a valuable insight into one way in which literarytexts convey a lsquoreality effectrsquo Before turning to this essay I shall contex-tualise my use of the term lsquoeffectrsquo By the 1970s Roland Barthes hadrejected the structuralist enterprise In SZ (1973) which comprises adetailed textual dissection of Balzacrsquos story Sarrasine he declares thatthe goal of discovering a common grammar underlying all narratives islsquoa task as exhaustinghellipas it is ultimately undesirable for the text therebyloses its differencersquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 3) What Barthes is implicitlyacknowledging is the particularity of detail that constitutes the distinc-tive quality of realist writing its fascination with the diverse multiplic-ity of the material world In SZ he claims that the very gratuitousnessof apparently insignificant detail in a realist story lsquoserves to authenticatethe fiction by means of what we call the reality effect (Barthes [1973]1990 182 He discusses this device at greater length in lsquoThe RealityEffectrsquo Barthes 1960 11ndash17) Borrowing Barthesrsquo term I shall outlinein the rest of this chapter the artistic means by which literary realismauthenticates itself in terms that I call the empirical effect the trutheffect and the character effect

THE EMPIRICAL EFFECT

By the empirical effect I mean all those techniques by which realistwriting seems to convey the experiential actuality of existence in physi-cal space and chronological time In novels this spatial and temporalreality has to be transposed or translated into the order of words asthey traverse the space of the page and as the linear sequence in whichthey are read In lsquoLinguistics and Poeticsrsquo (1960) Roman Jakobsonargues that all language is governed by two fundamental principlesthat of combination and that of selection (Jakobson 1960 358) Therules of syntax govern the way in which words can be combinedtogether to form a grammatical sentence the combination of lsquoThe

reality effects 101

elephant packed her trunkrsquo forms a meaningful sequence whereaslsquoPacked her the elephant trunkrsquo does not In addition to the principleof orderly combination the sentence is also formed by means ofselecting an appropriate word at each point of the syntactic sequenceInstead of lsquoelephantrsquo as the subject of the sentence lsquorhinorsquo could beselected or lsquoholiday makerrsquo or any other word able to function in asimilar or paradigmatic way Equally the verb lsquopackedrsquo could bereplaced by lsquofilledrsquo or lsquolockedrsquo or some other selected word able to fillthat place in the combinational or syntagmatic sequence Whereas theprinciple of selection is governed by recognition of similarity the prin-ciple of combination is governed by rules of contiguity of what cancome next to what Jakobson calls the selection of words from similarsets of words the paradigmatic axis of language and the combinationof words into a contiguous order of syntax the syntagmatic axis Tomake the complicated more complex still he associates the combina-tional or syntagmatic axis with the figure of speech known asmetonymy and the selective or paradigmatic axis with metaphor Thisis because metaphor is also based upon a principle of selecting for sim-ilarity lsquoHis words were pure goldrsquo metaphorically associates the metallsquogoldrsquo with the apparently disparate term lsquowordsrsquo because of the per-ceived similarity of high value

Metonymy on the other hand is based upon the perception of con-tiguity In metonymy an attribute of something comes to stand for thewhole One of the most familiar figures of metonymy is when the termlsquocrownrsquo is used as a way of referring to the monarch as in rhetorical dec-larations of the lsquodignity of the crownrsquo or lsquothe crown in parliamentrsquoSubsumed within Jakobsonrsquos use of the term metonymy is the figure ofspeech known as synecdoche which is based even more closely uponcontiguity since it substitutes a part of the whole for the entirety in aphrase like lsquoall hands on deckrsquo the term lsquohandsrsquo stand for the wholebodies and persons being called upon to help lsquoThe crowned heads ofEuropersquo might accordingly be seen as drawing upon the figures of bothsynecdoche and metonymy

What has all this to do with realism Well Jakobson defined poeticfunctioning of language as that in which the paradigmatic or metaphor-ical axis of selection based upon similarity comes to dominate the com-binational or syntagmatic axis based upon contiguity The poetic

function Jakobson stressed is not confined to what would normally berecognised as poetry or even as canonical literature more generally Thepoetic function exists whereever the axis of selection takes predomi-nance over that of contiguity Jakobson quotes the political slogan lsquoIlike Ikersquo as an example of the poetic function in non-literary discourse(Jakobson 1960 357) Most of Jakobsonrsquos exposition of the poetic func-tion in lsquoLinguistics and Poeticsrsquo is taken up with illustrations of theways the principle of selection is governed by recognition of similaritymetaphorical comparisons rhyme rhythm phrasing and sound repeti-tions ambiguous playing upon double meanings Almost as an aside heremarks that while there has been considerable study of poeticmetaphor lsquoso-called realistic literature intimately tied with themetonymic principle still defies interpretationrsquo (Jakobson 1960 375)In another essay on lsquoTwo Aspects of Language and Two Types ofAphasic Disturbancesrsquo (1956) he returns to the idea arguing that lsquoit isstill insufficiently realised that it is the predominance of metonymywhich underlies and actually determines the so-called ldquorealistrdquo trendrsquo(reprinted in Lodge 1988 31ndash61)

Unfortunately Jakobson did not develop these suggestions furtherbut perhaps an example will clarify the connection of metonymy as aprinciple of contiguity with the empirical effect of realist writing Hereis a passage from a modern novel Grace Notes (1998) by BernardMacLaverty in which the young female protagonist flies home toIreland on the death of her father

When they dropped down through the cloud at Aldergrove she sawhow green the land was And how small the fields A mosaic of vividgreens and yellows and browns Home She wanted to cry again

The bus into Belfast was stopped at a checkpoint and a policemanin a flak jacket a young guy with a ginger moustache walked up theaisle towards her his head moving in a slow no as he looked fromside to side from seat to opposite seat for bombs He winked at herlsquoCheer up love it might never happenrsquo

But it already hadOn the bus home she watched the familiar landmarks she used as

a child pass one by one Toomebridge her convent school the dropinto low gear to take the hill out of Magherafelt

reality effects 103

The bus stopped at a crossroads on the outskirts of her hometown and a woman got off Before she walked away the driver andshe had a conversation shouted over the engine noise This was thecrossroads where the Orangemen held their drumming matches Itwas part of her childhood to look up from the kitchen table on stillSaturday evenings and hear the rumble of the drums Her motherwould roll her eyes lsquoTheyrsquore at it againrsquo

(MacLaverty 1998 6ndash7)

Jakobson noted that as well as realist writing film is also a medium inwhich the metonymic principle predominates (Lodge 1988 59) It iseasy to recognise how cinematic the above passage is The sentencescould be translated directly into a visual medium that would show analmost seamless contiguous tracking movement through space theplane dropping down through the air the land moving in closerthe passenger transferring to bus the policeman walking slowly fromthe front of the bus to the back the bus drive through landscapepassing one feature after another This movement through contiguousspace can be mapped almost automatically by the reader on to a con-tiguous passage through chronological time from the moment of thedescent of the plane to the time of arrival home The empirical effectachieved by Grace Notes in this extract derives very largely from thedominance of the metonymic principle which organises the writingThe critic David Lodge who has developed Jakobsonrsquos analysis of lit-erary language in terms of opposing metaphoric and metonymicmodes of writing has pointed out that all literary texts are ultimatelyabsorbed by metaphor when we come to speak of the general valuesthat the work as a whole seems to express (Lodge 1977 109ndash11) Inthe case of the passage from Grace Notes we might want to understandit as representing lsquogrief rsquo or lsquoexilersquo and in that sense it would be func-tioning metaphorically not metonymically Nevertheless what is spe-cific and valuable about realist writing is the way the principle ofcontiguity pushes any over-facile universalising tendency of metaphorinto a very tense balance with historical particularity The particu-larised empirical effect of Grace Notes its here and now feel resistsany complacent or comforting translation of its meaning into thecommonplaces of a timeless human nature

In SZ Roland Barthes performs an almost microscopic structuralstudy of Balzacrsquos story Sarrasine by analysing very small semantic units(lexias) in terms of five codes or voices that interweave to constitute thetext (Barthes [1973] 1990 13) Two of these codes participate closely inthe empirical effect the first he calls the code of actions or the voice ofempirics and the second is the cultural or referential code or the voiceof science The code of actions can be associated with the principle ofcontiguity since the code provides names or titles that embody anempirical sequence of events such as lsquoanswering a knock at the doorrsquoBarthes says that lsquoto read is to struggle to namersquo and the code of actionsallows readers to recognise and name contiguous empirical sequencesand this lsquorecognitionrsquo has the effect of authenticating the experientialvalidity of the text In the extract from Grace Notes readers will auto-matically recognise and name the narrative sequences as lsquotaking a flightrsquolsquoreturning homersquo or lsquogoing to a funeralrsquo and in addition to allowingreaders to recognise with a name and thus seem to authenticate thesequence from their own experience it also fulfils their expectations ofthe order of events in the sequence and the need for an end to eachsequential chain It thus implies that the sequence unfolds within thetemporal contiguity of linear time This concordance of events intomeaningful recognisable sequences can be thought of as constituting astructure of intelligibility Barthes calls this fulfilment of the principle ofcontiguity an operation of solidarity whereby everything seems to holdtogether the text is lsquocontrolled by the principle of non-contradic-tionhellipby stressing at every opportunity the compatible nature of cir-cumstance by attaching narrated events together with a kind of logicalldquopasterdquorsquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 156) We can perceive the extract fromGrace Notes as lsquopastedrsquo into an intelligible solidarity by means of its logi-cal and empirical contiguities

The second code that contributes to the empirical effect of realistwriting is what Barthes calls the cultural or referential code and lessappositely the voice of science By cultural code he understands allthose multiple explicit and implicit references in a text familiar culturalknowledge proverbial wisdom commonsensical assumptions schooltexts stereotypical thinking By means of a dense network of citation tosuch cultural sources of information a text lsquoform[s] an oddly joinedminiature version of encyclopaedic knowledge a farragohellip[of ] everyday

reality effects 105

ldquorealityrdquorsquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 185) In Grace Notes this lsquofarragorsquo ismade up of references to Irish place names military knowledge as towhat is a lsquoflak jacketrsquo historical recognition of the significance oflsquoOrangemenrsquo and drumming awareness of the need to change a vehi-clersquos gears on hills and the familiar gestural language in which rollingeyes signifies shared irony This web of citation evokes what Barthescalls a sense of repleteness the text seems to share the semantic fullnessof a known social reality

Although Barthes recognises a code of actions that names a sequenceof events he pays little attention to the complex handling of time innarrative which is one of the great achievements of realist writing tech-niques subsequently developed and extended by modernist novelistsGerard Genette provides the most systematic structural analysis of nar-rative time in Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method (1980) which is adetailed study of Marcel Proustrsquos novel Remembrance of Things Past(1913ndash27) Genette begins by making a clear distinction between storytime and narrative time in this context lsquostory timersquo refers to theabstracted chronological chain of events upon which the actual spokenor written narrative is based whereas lsquonarrative timersquo refers to the han-dling of that story chronology in the specific telling of the tale (Genette1980 35) Consider for example the sequential chain of events thatconstitutes the traditional story lsquoCinderellarsquo her mother dies her fatherremarries her step-mother and step-sisters ill-treat her they go to theball without her she is visited by her fairy god-mother she goes to theball and meets the prince In an actual narrative this abstract or lsquonatu-ralrsquo chronological sequence of the story can be re-ordered many waysThe narrative could begin with marriage to the prince and then lookback on the events leading up to the happy ending or it could beginwith Cinderella left alone while the family goes to the ball look back tothe beginning and then proceed to the ending of the story In additiona narrative can linger far longer over one event than another the sceneof the ball might take up more than half the narrative with the otherevents recounted briefly Genette reminds us that this complex arrange-ment of temporal relationships in narrative exists primarily in space thematerial space of the lines of the text on the page and the only real timeinvolved is lsquothe time needed for crossing or traversing it like a road or afield The narrative text like every other text has no temporality than

what it borrows metonymically from its own readingrsquo (Genette 198034) Genettersquos account of narrative time is extremely detailed and sub-stantiated by close reading of Proustrsquos text Here I shall only outlinethose points that contribute most directly to the empirical effect

The main disruptions that narrative order makes to story order isthat of flashbacks to earlier events or foreshadowings of what is to yetcome Genette terms narrative flashback lsquoanalepsisrsquo and anticipatorysegments lsquoprolepsisrsquo (Genette 1980 40) In addition narrative canmake use of external analepsis and prolepsis which are so-called becausethey reach beyond the beginning and ending of the temporal span ofthe main narrative Novelistic prose typically organises these temporalrelationships in very complex ways Although time is often thought ofas a one-way linear flow from past towards the future our actual empir-ical experience of temporality is much more complicated than thisFrequently our current actions are determined by participation of theirfuture effect and by memory of previous events Similarly a presentevent may give a completely new meaning to something that occurredin the past

The ordering of time in realist narratives authenticates an empiricaleffect by simultaneously meeting readersrsquo expectations of the orderlysequence required for intelligibility and their sense of temporalanachrony the disorder of strict linear progression In her novel ThePrime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) Muriel Spark (1918ndash) utilises anextremely skilful and subtle play with the order of narrative time Inthis extract from early in the novel Miss Brodie is holding her class inthe garden of Marcia Blaine School

She leant against the elm It was one of the last autumn days whenthe leaves were falling in little gusts They fell on the children whowere thankful for this excuse to wriggle and for the allowable move-ments in brushing the leaves from their hair and laps

lsquoSeason of mists and mellow fruitfulness I was engaged to ayoung man at the beginning of the War but he fell on Flandersrsquo Fieldrsquosaid Miss Brodie lsquoAre you thinking Sandy of doing a dayrsquos washingrsquo

lsquoNo Miss BrodiersquolsquoBecause you have got your sleeves rolled up I wonrsquot have to do

with girls who roll up the sleeves of their blouses however fine the

reality effects 107

weather Roll them down at once we are civilized beings He fell theweek before Armistice was declared He fell like an autumn leafalthough he was only twenty-two years of age When we go indoorswe shall look on the map at Flanders and the spot where my loverwas laid before you were born [hellip]

The story of Miss Brodiersquos felled fiance was well on its way whenthe headmistress Miss Mackay was seen to approach across thelawn Tears had already started to drop from Sandyrsquos little pig-likeeyes and Sandyrsquos tears now affected her friend Jenny later famous inthe school for her beauty who gave a sob and groped up the leg ofher knickers for her handkerchief lsquoHugh was killedrsquo said Miss Brodielsquoa week before Armistice After that there was a general election andpeople were saying lsquoHang the Kaiserrsquo Hugh was one of the Flowers ofthe Forest lying in his graversquo Rose Stanley had now begun to weepSandy slid her wet eyes sideways watching the advance of MissMackay head and shoulders forward across the lawn

(Spark 1965 12ndash13)

As our eyes traverse the linear progress of the passage on the page wecan map this semantically onto an intelligible sequence of events in lin-ear narrative time According to Barthesrsquo code of actions we recognisethe sequence as the somewhat subversive activity of lsquotaking a school les-son outsidersquo followed by an expected sequence lsquointerruption by author-ityrsquo This logical and temporal contiguity performs what Barthes calls anoperation of solidarity that provides the passage with a firm ligature ofintelligibility Yet within this framework temporal order becomes verycomplex indeed Miss Brodiersquos reference to the death of her fiancee atFlanders is an external analepsis looking back to a time before thebeginning of the actual narrative Her quotation from Keatrsquos lsquoOde toAutumnrsquo could perhaps been seen as an even longer reach of analepsisbeyond the scope of story time altogether In contrast her plan to findthe spot on the schoolroom map that marks where her lover fell is aninternal prolepsis looking forward to an imminent event when the classreturns indoors The reference to Jennyrsquos later fame in the school for herbeauty is also an internal prolepsis but one that reaches further into thefuture of narrative time This interweaving of past present and futurenarrative time is made yet more complex by the insertion of deictic

words like lsquonowrsquo into the narrative past tense Deictics are words thatseem to point to or be referring to an immediately present spatial ortemporal context Thus although the sentences lsquoSandyrsquos tears nowaffected her friend Jennyrsquo and lsquoRose Stanley had now begun to weeprsquo arerelated in the past tense the deictic lsquonowrsquo conveys a sense of unfoldingpresentness

In addition to sequence of events realist narratives also carefullymanipulate the representation of temporal duration and frequency toauthenticate the empirical effect In lived experience time does notappear to pass at the same regular pace some events seem to stretch outfor hours while others flit by almost unnoticed The allocation of narra-tive space is used to convey this subjective experience of time passingyet by the same means realist writing can foreground this relativism oftime and throw it into question Realist texts frequently use narrativerepetition to challenge simplistic views of reality an event retold fromdifferent perspectives suggests that truth may be shifting and even mul-tiple A more complex and interesting organisation of relations of fre-quency utilised by realist writers is the fusion of reiteration with asingular event This occurs in Grace Notes when the narrative refers toan oft repeated pattern that lsquowas part of her childhood to look up fromthe kitchen table on still Saturday evenings and hear the rumble of thedrumsrsquo This produces the effect of a customary texture of life in whichevents become habitual through repetition But the next sentencemoves into the particularity of her motherrsquos speech lsquoTheyrsquore at it againrsquoPresumably she did not parrot this on each and every occasion Theeffect produced is a simultaneous sense of quite particular empiricalspecificity and an encompassing social world This duality of focus fromparticular to general I shall argue is a defining and inherently challeng-ing characteristic of realist writing

THE TRUTH EFFECT

Despite this here and now feel of realist novels they do seem frequentlyto be offering us more than just forms of empirical knowledge of partic-ularised lives within a more generalised social milieu They seem oftento imply truth claims of a more universal philosophical or ethicalnature This is what I term the truth effect and it functions ideologically

reality effects 109

to affirm the availability ultimately of at least a degree of knowledgeand enlightenment within the order of human existence Many criticshave come to see the human desire to impose meaning on the chaos ofexistence as the impulse underlying the ubiquity of narrative in all timesand places It is the strong desire for order which keeps us turning thepages hurrying onwards to the resolution of all mystery and confusionspromised at the conclusion of the tale For this reason the detectivestory is often seen as the narrative of narratives in that it is the genrewhich reveals most explicitly the quest for truth impelling all fictionsBarthes understands two of his five codes as particularly involved in thistruth effect the hermeneutic code that he otherwise calls the voice oftruth and the symbolic code or field

Novels typically begin by raising some question in the readerrsquos mindthat immediately compels them to follow the plot (the word is sugges-tive) for clues that will unravel the mystery or clarify the puzzle Clearlysuch enigmas cannot be solved too quickly or the story would be overSo although a realist narrative must appear to be structured upon theforward progression of historical time the hermeneutic code must con-tinually frustrate these expectations and invent delaying tactics lay falseclues and set snares for the reader It is only at the conclusion of thereading that the reader can look back and make sense of the whole pat-tern of events Thus although the narrative appears to construct a for-ward linear movement it simultaneously inscribes a reverse projectionbackwards The effect of teasing the reader with delayed enlightenmentis to strengthen the belief that lsquotruthrsquo does exist and will prevail howeverdifficult the passage towards it proves to be As Barthes commentslsquoExpectation thus becomes the basic condition for truth truth thesenarratives tell us is what is at the end of expectationrsquo ([1973] 1990 76)In other words we could say that desire for truth produces our belief intruth

Barthes claims that the hermeneutic code works in tandem with thesymbolic field of the text to convey a sense of truth that moves beyondthe horizons of the particular This is best explained by means of anillustration The title of Charles Dickensrsquos novel Great Expectations(1861) immediately suggests its involvement in the process of anticipa-tion and the opening pages of the story provide one of the moststartling eruptions of an enigma in fiction The adult narrator begins

his story with the early moment in his childhood when he firstbecomes aware of his own identity and his orphaned state

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of thingsseems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoontowards evening At such a time I found out for certain that this bleakplace overgrown with nettles was the churchyard and that PhilipPirrip late of this parish and also Georgiana wife of the above weredead and buriedhellipand that the flat dark wilderness beyond thechurchyard intersected with dykes and mounds and gates with scat-tered cattle feeding on it was the marches and that the low leadenline beyond was the river and that the distant savage lair from whichthe wind was rushing was the sea and that the small bundle of shiv-ers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip

lsquoHold your noisersquo cried a terrible voice as a man started up fromamong the graves at the side of the church porch lsquoKeep still you littledevil or Irsquoll cut your throatrsquo

A fearful man all in coarse grey with a great iron on his leg Aman with no hat and with broken shoes and with an old rag tiedround his head A man who had been soaked in water and smotheredin mud and lamed by stones and cut by flints and stung by nettlesand torn by briars who limped and shivered and glared andgrowled and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me bythe chin

lsquoO Donrsquot cut my throat sirrsquo I pleaded in terror lsquoPray donrsquot do itsirrsquo

lsquoTell us your namersquo said the man lsquoQuickrsquo(Dickens [1860ndash1] 1965 35ndash6)

This dramatic opening immediately raises two enigmas who is thisfrightening figure and what affect will his possessive seizing hold of theorphaned child have upon Piprsquos subsequent life and expectations Therest of the narrative is a hermeneutic network of false snares and posi-tive clues as to the complete answers to these related mysteriesAlthough Grace Notes and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie similarly set upmysteries in their opening pages it is the stylistic difference of GreatExpectations from the other two that is most striking This is not

reality effects 111

primarily because it is a nineteenth-century text whereas they are con-temporary novels The difference resides in the fact that the prose ofboth Grace Notes and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is dominated by themetonymic principle of contiguity while the passage from GreatExpectations is governed by what Jakobson terms the metaphoric princi-ple of similarity This is most easily recognised in the paragraph begin-ning lsquoA fearful manrsquo which is wholly structured by similarities ofrhythm phrasing syntax and the insistent repetition of the word lsquomanrsquoYet the dominance of the metaphoric principle in the passage involvesfar more than formal patterns of similarity It produces the symbolicsystem that will structure the whole narrative

In his analysis of Sarrasine Barthes points out that the symbolic fieldof a novel is frequently ordered by antithetical oppositions like goodand evil The extract from Great Expectations is structured upon verycomplex systems of interrelated antitheses Perhaps most obviouslythere is play upon the oppositions of the natural elements of windearth (the churchyard) and sea to the human world Second the refer-ence to the churchyard and lsquothe small bundle of shiversrsquo threatened withhaving his throat cut evokes a precarious antithesis of life to death Thisantithesis associates with the notion of bestiality evoked by the lsquosavagelair of the windrsquo and the emphasised animal physicality and violence ofthe manrsquos bodily state brought into an opposing relationship to the nor-mal cultural connotations even the biblical resonance of lsquomanrsquo Thesame images symbolise the opposition of power to vulnerability or help-lessness Finally there is the antithesis between the wildness and rushingenergy of the unbound natural elements and the restriction and con-tainment of human relationships of power and possession implied bythe leg iron and the seizure of the child

The stability of antithetical relationships is what holds the entireconceptual structure of any language in place Meaning is a system ofdifferences the significance of the term lsquoevilrsquo for example derivesfrom its binary opposition to lsquogoodrsquo So if the dense particularity of arealist text can be metaphorically reduced to simple antithetical termsthen the lsquotruthrsquo of its resolution functions to affirm preconceivednotions of the order of existence It does not disturb or challenge con-ventional patterns of thinking It is for this reason that Barthesargues that any mixing or joining of antithetical terms constitutes a

transgression ([1973] 1990 27) In Sarrasine the enigma that centresupon the character of that name turns out to be a transgressionSarrasine is a castrato and so erases the lsquonaturalrsquo opposition betweenmale and female upon which so large a part of conventional socialorder is founded The lsquofearful manrsquo of Great Expectations is also trans-gressive ndash not only as a criminal outlaw but semantically in exceedingthe boundaries that define animal against human nature against civili-sation and power against weakness Jonathan Culler points out that inrealist novels symbolism associated primarily with the poetic function-ing of language or Jakobsonrsquos metaphoric pole tends to be recuperatedto the metonymic mode of realism by means of contiguity (Culler1975 225) For example in the extract from Great Expectations thesymbolism of graveyard and death and of elemental physical forces arelsquonaturalisedrsquo within the empirical effect by means of the proximity ofcemetery and sea to Piprsquos home in the marsh country This interdepen-dence of metaphor and metonomy suggests a new way we might beginto understand and evaluate realism At its most epistemologically chal-lenging realist writing produces a very complex balance betweenmetaphor and metonymy between the empirical effect and the trutheffect and this results in a radical testing of universal lsquotruthsrsquo againsthistorical particularity in such a way that neither localism nor generali-sation prevails

THE CHARACTER EFFECT

The lsquocharacter effectrsquo is probably for many readers the primary meansof entry into the fictional world of a novel or at least the main vehiclefor effecting the willing suspension of disbelief But how is the charactereffect achieved Barthes ascribes this function to the semic code whichhe also calls the voice of the person In the most general sense a seme issimply a unit of meaning but Barthes emphasises their accretive capac-ity lsquoWhen identical semes traverse the same proper name several timesand appear to settle upon it a character is createdhellipThe proper nameacts as a magnetic field for the semesrsquo ([1973] 1990 67) The openingof George Eliotrsquos novel Middlemarch (1871) provides a clear illustrationof this clustering of meaning around a name

reality effects 113

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown intorelief by poor dress Her hand and wrist were so finely formed thatshe could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which theBlessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters and her profile as well asher stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from herplain garments which by the side of provincial fashion gave her theimpressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 7)

Most competent readers can easily translate the semes or units ofmeaning that constitute this passage according to notions of lsquocharacterrsquothat are already culturally familiar physical beauty dignity ofdemeanour a somewhat high-minded even puritan disregard forostentation of dress the suggestion of moral seriousness connoted bythe religious associations What the passage also lets us recognise is thedegree to which these character schemas that support the notion ofindividuality are produced and circulated by various artistic and cul-tural conventions Eliot is drawing here upon the long tradition ofpainterly portraiture upon religious models of character like lsquotheBlessed Virginrsquo and perhaps even upon fairy tales of virtuous beautyclothed in poor dress To a remarkable extent lsquocharacterrsquo which is sooften taken as a privileged index of individual particularity is largely thelocation of a network of codes and of course novels themselves notonly draw upon these cultural semes of personality but contribute pow-erfully to them Barthes argues that what gives this semic convergencelsquothe illusion that the sum is supplemented by a precious remainder(something like individualityhellip) is the Proper Namersquo ([1973] 1990191) For Barthes it is pre-eminently the Proper Name that functionsideologically to sustain belief in human identity as unique coherentand individual rather than as amorphous clusters of attributes It is thisbelief in the special particularity or individuality of each subject thatunderlies humanism and bourgeois individualism Thus Barthes main-tains lsquoall subversionhellipbegins with the Proper Namersquo ([1973] 1990 95)

However Barthes almost certainly exaggerates the importance of theName in the constitution of individual fictional characters in realistnovels No matter how complex or dense the semic convergence it isnot wholly or mainly personality traits or attributes that produce the

character effect Certainly semes do not create that sense of an innerconsciousness or individual subjectivity that in literary terms has beenmost fully elaborated in novelistic prose Elsewhere in SZ Barthesacknowledges that lsquothe character and the discourse are each otherrsquos accom-plicesrsquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 178) A comparison of the character effectachieved by the opening description of Miss Brooke in Middlemarchwith the effect produced by Miss Brodiersquos speech quickly indicates theimportance of dialogue Direct dialogue purporting to be a characterrsquosspoken words or sometimes the verbal articulation of their thoughtsgives substance to the sense of an individual consciousness Genettecalls direct character dialogue lsquoobjectivised speechrsquo but he points out aparadoxical effect The most lsquorealisticrsquo dialogue is that which is ratherbanal and unmemorable The more individualised and idiosyncratic acharacterrsquos speech becomes the more that character seems to be imitat-ing and even caricaturing himself or herself (Genette 1980 185) Thiseffect of self performance or self parody is clearly apparent in the case ofMiss Brodiersquos speech pattern and functions in the text to make anysense of her identity strangely insubstantial and elusive Thus dialogueis at once a primary means by which the ideological effect of a uniqueindividuality is constructed but also deconstructed or at least discom-forted in realist fiction

The objectivised speech of characters is not the only way in whichthe effect of individual subjectivity or consciousness is produced Otherimportant techniques pertain to the division in narration summarisedby Genette as lsquowho speaksrsquo and lsquowho seesrsquo (Genette 1980 186) Earliercritics termed these two aspects lsquonarrative point of viewrsquo and lsquonarrativevoicersquo Genette uses the term lsquofocalisationrsquo to name the aspect of lsquosee-ingrsquo that is the perspective from which characters and events areviewed (Genette 1980 189) Consonance between narrative voice andnarrative focalisation to provide detailed understanding of a characterrsquospsychology and subjective state of mind are a characteristic feature ofnineteenth-century realist fiction As typically used by realists likeBalzac and George Eliot such lsquopsycho-narrationrsquo can construct a verycomplex sense of a characterrsquos consciousness and even illuminate ele-ments of their psyche that would be unknowable to the person them-selves (I take the term lsquopsycho-narrationrsquo from Cohn 1978 21ndash57who provides a very detailed structural analysis of various forms of

reality effects 115

lsquopsycho-narrationrsquo) Yet for this very reason consonant psycho-narra-tion always maintains an evaluative distance from the individual con-sciousness or subjectivity that it describes and in so doing confirms forthe reader a somewhat comforting and complacent sense of superiorknowledge or wisdom to that of the character

It is dissonance between narrative voice and focalisation that pro-duces a more immediate or direct sense of a subjective consciousness Acomplex form of such dissonance is that usually called free indirectspeech in which the voice and focalisation of the narrator become as itwere infected or invaded by the speech and perspective of a characterIn the following passage from Middlemarch in which Dorothea iscourted by the rather elderly Mr Casaubon the first two sentences arenarrated and focalised by the impersonal narrator Thereafter the pas-sage undergoes a lsquostylistic contagionrsquo (Cohn 1978 33) as the languagesyntax and focalisation seem to merge with the fervour and rather naiveidealism of Dorothearsquos consciousness

It was not many days before Mr Casaubon paid a morning visit onwhich he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay thenight Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him andwas convinced that her first impressions had been just He was allshe had at first imagined him to be almost everything he had saidseemed like a specimen from a mine or the inscription on the doorof a museum which might open on the treasures of past ages andthis trust in his mental wealth was all the deeper and more effectiveon her inclination because it was now obvious that his visits weremade for her sake This accomplished man condescended to think ofa young girl and take the pains to talk to her not with absurd compli-ments but with an appeal to her understanding and sometimes withinstructive correction What delightful companionship

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 32)

The last exclamatory sentence here could easily be put straight intoquotation marks as Dorothearsquos own emotional form of speech and eagerperspective of an anticipated future In the previous sentences the dis-tinction between narrator and character is much more blurred Thesomewhat exaggerated images of mine and museum as figures for

Casaubonrsquos mind and heightened phrases like lsquoabsurd complimentrsquo seemexpressions of Dorothearsquos emotional response and viewpoint while theunderstanding that Dorothearsquos trust in her suitorrsquos intellect is renderedlsquoall the deeper and more effective on her inclinationrsquo move closer to themore sober evaluative language and stance of the narrator The ground-ing of free indirect speech in narrative voice and focalisation alwaysmaintains a potential position of greater knowledge and worldlinessfrom which the stylistic contagion that is the characterrsquos consciousnesscan be evaluated In this example from Middlemarch the use of freeindirect speech offers readers a sense of direct access to the heroinersquossubjective state of mind which provokes sympathetic understanding ofher hopeful emotions but without loss of an objective perspective as totheir possible dangers and limitations Again in a case like this onemight argue that psychological realism is functioning here to confirmthe availability of knowledge

By contrast the first person narration of Great Expectations sets up adissonance between the focalisation of the adult narrator and theyounger self as character in the story The narrative voice and perspec-tive of the adult Pip are frequently darkened by a brooding self-recrimi-nation as to the moral weakness of his younger self Yet the focalisationof the child Pip as in the extract given above produces a sense of himas largely a powerless victim of people and social forces over which hehas little control The total effect of this non-consonant focalisation isto raise radical questions as to the nature of subjectivity Does self con-sist of an autonomous individuality responding with responsible freewill to the promptings of conscience and rational judgement or is aself merely the product lsquothe bundle of shiversrsquo of coercive social pres-sures

Modern novelists tend to follow Dickensrsquos type of character effectthey abjure claims to superior knowledge of a characterrsquos psychologyand subjectivity In Grace Notes third person narration is fused to theprotagonistrsquos Catherinersquos focalisation The story opens with what couldseem an over-detailed account of her early morning journey by bus tothe airport until we realise that what is being conveyed is the conscious-ness of Catherine herself desperately fixing her attention upon a trivialimmediacy to keep her overwhelming feelings of grief blocked out Thisnarrative technique conveys the multiple often contradictory levels of

reality effects 117

sensory emotional and rational awareness that intermix to constitutesubjectivite reality It is the kind of many-layered complexity of perspec-tive voice temporality and particularity that only novelistic prose of allliterary forms achieves

lsquoAchievesrsquo is the correct word here facilitating an analytic formalistunderstanding and evaluation of the complex artistry of realist writingToo frequently recent structural analyses of realism have resorted toreductive or suspicious terminology Pointing out the means by whichnovels produce the effect of experiential particularity is understood bysuch critics in terms of unmasking duplicity Typical of this kind of dis-missive language is Genettersquos reference to the lsquoillusion of mimesisrsquo andhis implicit claim to be revealing the artifice that lies behind the trick-ery lsquoThe truth is that mimesis in words can only be mimesis of wordsrsquo(Genette 1980 164) The word lsquoonlyrsquo in this sentence functions tooeasily to dismiss the impressive artistic techniques and formal arrange-ments and strategies outlined in this chapter and of course meticu-lously analysed by Genette himself As I have also indicated throughoutthe chapter these techniques do not function only in complicity withthe existing status quo they also discomfort prevailing assumptionsespecially the tendency to naturalise and simplify historical particularityas universal unchanging truth In serious realist writing universality isalways formally and rigorously tested against specificity

In the previous chapter I argued that we cannot do justice to the artisticachievement of literary realism or recognise its capacity to facilitate newways of understanding our reality if we remain within a suspicious criti-cal perspective that only perceives reality effects as illusions Realist nov-els do not seek to trick their readers by lsquoillusionrsquo they do seek to givethem pleasure from the recognition of verisimilitude The empiricaleffect and the character effect are understood by the vast majority of ordi-nary readers as just that an effect When novels are praised as life-like thisimplicitly recognises they are not life An effect cannot be identical tothat which it aims to imitate As we saw in Chapter 2 the language ofcritical detraction as applied to realism depends upon the construction oftwo kinds of implied readers the naive readers who are duped by lsquoillu-sionrsquo and the sceptically intelligent who know that it is only mimesisOne of the problems arising from this view is that it denies any means ofevaluating or differentiating the vast disparate range of writing that goesunder the label of realism some of which is undoubtedly thematicallyand formally conservative but some of which is certainly not It also failsto take account of the complexity and variety of aesthetic intellectualand pleasurable experiences that are subsumed under the term lsquoreadingrsquoIn this chapter then I want to begin to turn our attention to thoseaspects of reading that have been associated with realism as a genre fromits beginnings active enjoyment and knowledge production

6THE READER EFFECT

In referring to a lsquoreader effectrsquo I am using the term in a somewhatdifferent way to that implied by lsquocharacter effectrsquo or lsquoempirical effectrsquoClearly novel readers have an existence extrinsic to the text in a way thatfictional characters and fictional worlds do not Yet there is a sense inwhich literary works produce the kinds of readers they require As wehave seen there was a symbiotic relationship between modernism as apractice of experimental writing and formalism as a innovative criticalreading approach both in American and in Russia Modernist experi-mentalism and critical approval for writerly techniques of defamiliarisa-tion radically altered the terms of literary evaluation with the highestaccolades going to those works perceived as challenging aesthetic con-ventions and defying accepted cultural norms From the RussianFormalists to Adorno and the Frankfurt School and on to RolandBarthes and poststructuralist critics generally a new critical traditionhas developed which privileges writing that expresses a negative critiqueof prevailing cultural values Alongside this shift in critical evaluation ofliterary art there has evolved a new perception of readers Experimentalwriting Barthes claims produces the reader as lsquono longer a consumerbut a producer of the textrsquo whereas conventional forms of writing likerealism require only passive consumers of stories (Barthes [1973] 1990 4)The elitism that underlies this division of readers emerges when Bartheswrites of a moderately plural realism for which lsquothere exists an averageappreciatorrsquo (Barthes [1973] 1990 6) In addition to fostering a dismis-sive attitude towards the majority of readers an aesthetics based purelyupon negative critique has difficulty accounting for those positive val-ues associated with art through many centuries and in many culturesfrom Aristotle to the present affirmation praise learning identifica-tion enjoyment

STANLEY FISH INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES

American critic Stanley Fish (1938ndash) a Renaissance scholar trained inthe tradition of American New Criticism has elaborated a more demo-cratic and creative view of the reader In reaction to New Criticismrsquos insis-tence upon the self-contained autonomy of the text Fish argues that themeaning of a literary work and its formal structures are all produced bythe interpretive assumptions and strategies that the reader brings to the

text For Fish meaning and structure have no independent existence out-side of the reading experience The end point of this logic is Fishrsquos insis-tence that it is the reader who lsquowritesrsquo the text which only comes intobeing by means of the interpretive activity that is readingwriting Indeedeven the recognition of a category of lsquothe literaryrsquo is a prior interpretiveassumption upon which the whole critical enterprise depends for its rai-son drsquoecirctre Two questions are raised by Fishrsquos empowerment of the readeras interpretive writer of the work how in that case can even a relativecritical consensus be achieved rather than critical anarchy and converselywhy does the same reader produce different readings of a particular text atdifferent times in her or his life Fish meets these difficulties by elaborat-ing a notion of lsquointerpretive communitiesrsquo lsquoInterpretive communities aremade up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in theconventional sense) but for lsquowritingrsquo texts that is for constituting theirproperties and assigning their intentionsrsquo (Fish lsquoInterpreting theVariorumrsquo reprinted in Lodge 1988 327) Thus for example readerswho agree about the meaning of Great Expectations do so because theybelong to the same interpretive community while the reader who changesher mind as to its form and values does so because heshe has adoptedanother interpretive affiliation

Apart from Fishrsquos insistence that an interpretive community pro-duces or writes the text which has no other form of being there doesnot seem anything very radical about this notion However it does sug-gest a way of accounting for the somewhat confused critical evaluationof realism New Criticism Russian Formalism and poststructuralism allproduced new interpretive communities The aesthetic values of a criti-cal community largely determine those formal aspects of texts deemednoteworthy and to that extent at least they lsquowritersquo the work By andlarge the literary qualities favoured by New Critics Russian Formalistsand poststructuralists have been those associated with negative critiqueand self-reflexivity rather than verisimilitude As a result the interpre-tive strategies brought to bear on realist texts by these three communi-ties have tended to perceive realism in terms of what it lacks rather thanwhat it actually achieves More recently poststructuralist interpretivestrategies have been applied positively to nineteenth-century realist nov-els and behold we discover that they too are ironic self-reflexive andstructured by indeterminacy Stanley Fish would claim that as members

the reader effect 121

of a new interpretive community we are simply writing different novelsfrom those that traditional critics wrote when they read Bleak House orMiddlemarch or Cousin Bette

WOLFGANG ISER THE IMPLIED READER ANDWANDERING VIEWPOINT

The German reception theorist Wolfgang Iser (1926ndash) was also inthe early part of his career a practitioner of New Criticism but hisunderstanding of the readerrsquos role in producing the text is less radicalthan that of Stanley Fish For Iser the relationship is more one ofequal partnership there is the objective existence of the literary workbut this has to be actualised by the creative subjective interaction ofthe reader The literary form that most concerns Iser is the novel Thenovel for Iser is somewhat like a schematic programme or skeletonoutline that the reader completes through an lsquoact of concretizationrsquo(Iser 1980 21) Yet Iser is not concerned with actual readers but withthe implied reader imminent in the form of the text itself He arguesthat since texts only take on their potential reality through the act ofbeing read it follows that they must already contain lsquothe conditionsthat will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mindof the recipientrsquo (Iser 1980 34) For Iser then in his theoretical con-siderations the reader is the recipient implied by the interactive struc-tures of the text lsquoThus the concept of the implied reader designates anetwork of response-inviting structures which impel the reader tograsp the textrsquo (Iser 1980 34) Among the most important of thenovelrsquos response-inviting strategies are the four main perspectives ofnarrator characters plot and the fictitious reader (Iser 1980 35)None of these viewpoints are completely identical but according toIser they provided differing starting points for the readerrsquos creativeprocess through the text The role of the reader is to occupy the non-identical shifting vantage points of the four textual perspectives lsquothatare geared to a prestructured activity and to fit the diverse perspectivesinto a gradually evolving patternrsquo (Iser 1980 35)

Thus taking Great Expectations as an example the novel in its firsttwo pages offers the reader at least four differing reading perspectives orstarting points There is that of the adult narrator sufficiently distanced

from the immediacy of narrative events to describe his youthful self aslsquothe small bundle of shiversrsquo A second viewpoint is the character per-spective of the child Pip and the urgency of his terror of the fearfulman and sense of shivering powerlessness in the face of a hostile violentworld both elemental and human There is the third perspective of theconvict lsquosoakedrsquo lsquolamedrsquo lsquocutrsquo and lsquotornrsquo who glares and growls withferocity but also shivers like the child who is a lsquomanrsquo not a beastFinally I think we glimpse what can be understood as a fourth view-point that of text or plot It is conveyed pre-eminently by languageassociations and encompasses a larger perspective that any of the previ-ous ones What it expresses is a sense of lsquothat universal strugglersquo for thebare sufficiencies of life warmth food shelter love in an order of exis-tence that tilts towards death suffering and want Iser utilises thenotion of lsquowandering viewpointrsquo to suggest how the reader travelsthrough the text inhabiting multiple perspective positions each ofwhich influences modifies and objectifies the others

This creative activity of the reader in actualising the meaning immi-nent in the response-inviting structures and strategies of the text is rele-vant to the realist agenda of conveying knowledge about a non-textualreality Iser rejects the poststructuralist view that texts can only refer toother texts that there exists an unbridgeable gap between words and theworld Fiction and reality should not be placed in opposition he argueslsquofiction is a means of telling us something about realityrsquo (Iser 1980 53)However this should not be understood in terms of lsquoreflectionrsquo or lsquoimita-tionrsquo of the reality conveyed because lsquothe conveyor [the text] cannot beidentical to what is conveyed [reality]rsquo (Iser 1980 54) The relationshipbetween novels and reality must be understood in terms of communica-tion Utilising the speech-act theory of J L Austin (1911ndash60) Iser sug-gests that a literary work should be thought of as an illocutionary act Innormal speech contexts illocutionary acts gain force only when speakerand recipient share the same conventions and procedures so that therecipientrsquos response brings into being the speakerrsquos intention or meaningMagwitchrsquos injunction to Pip lsquoHold your noisersquo is an illocutionary actdependent upon Pip understanding what is required of him by the formand context of the utterance Magwitchrsquos words have no truth status assuch but they connect to reality by their illocutionary force (which isirrespective of Magwitchrsquos physical force) to produce a response

Iser argues that novels are a special form of illocutionary act They tooorganise and make use of cultural and linguistic conventions and proce-dures but within a literary text these conventions are separated fromtheir normal and regulating context Thus they become foregroundedfor the reader as objects for conscious knowledge and evaluation Isercalls these conventions the repertoire upon which the text calls and thisrepertoire constitutes a verbal territory shared by text and reader that ini-tiates the act of communication that is reading This act of communica-tion tells us something new about reality because the literary textreorganises the familiar repertoire of social and cultural norms As aresult readers are able lsquoto see what they cannot normally see in the ordi-nary process of day-to-day livingrsquo (Iser 1980 74) In Great Expectationsthe fictional context of Magwitchrsquos illocutionary command pushes intosharp focus the more usually veiled distribution of power betweenspeaker and recipient that gives silencing injunctions their force Thisknowledge about social reality is reinforced by Piprsquos utilisation of linguis-tic conventions of subordination such as begging pleading deferencelsquoPray donrsquot do it sirrsquo

It seems rather more difficult to recognise what social and linguisticnorms are being organised at the opening of Middlemarch Yet perhapswe should understand it within the cultural and linguistic conventionsof lsquomaking an introductionrsquo This invokes all those literary traditions forstarting a narrative but also all the social rituals of making a personknown to new acquaintances both of these conventions are performedwith the expectation that they will illicit an appropriate response inrecipients As it turns out Middlemarch is centrally concerned withrumour prejudice first impressions and misunderstandings so the illo-cutionary conventions associated with introductions constitute thataspect of the repertoire of the text that comes under closest scrutiny

Although this approach to texts as illocutionary acts can clearly beproductive it is open to the criticism that it fails to get beyond the limi-tation of negative critique Literary value for Iser resides in the capacityof the work to recodify norms so as to question external reality therebyallowing the reader to discover the motives and regulatory forces under-lying the questions The repertoire of the text lsquoreproduces the familiarbut strips it of its current validityrsquo (Iser 1980 74) This may produceunderstanding of the power residing in communicative conventions but

it does not offer much in the way of an approach to affirmative writingor the function of literature to provide enjoyment However Iser doessee another positive epistemological outcome of the creative responsethe text provokes in the reader In the process of reading a literary textthe reader must perforce enter into many perspectives or points of viewsome of them quite unfamiliar and this enables the reader to move outof that part of their self that has been determined by previous experi-ence They have to alienate part of themselves to accommodate what isnew and other The lsquocontrapuntally structured personalityrsquo produced bysuch reading results in an extended self-awareness in which lsquoa layer ofthe readerrsquos personality is brought to light which had hitherto remainedhidden in the shadowsrsquo (Iser 1980 157) Reading statements like this inIserrsquos work it is easy to forget that the reader here is only the impliedreader the reader Iser assembles from textual structures that seem tointerpellate or call such an active readerproducer into existenceUnderstood from this perspective the implied reader could equally beseen as the ideal of an enlightened open-minded European individualreadercritic imagined and interpellated by Iser himself that he thenprojects into texts As Stanley Fish has commented lsquothe adventures ofthe readerrsquos lsquoldquowandering viewpointrdquo ndash will be the products of an inter-pretive strategy that demands themrsquo (Fish 1981 7) Nevertheless as weshall see in Part IV Juumlrgen Habermasrsquo (1929ndash) develops the notion ofshifting perspective positions to set out a more general notion of knowl-edge as communicative discourse

HANS ROBERT JAUSS HORIZON OF EXPECTATION

Iserrsquos colleague at Constance University Hans Robert Jauss was influ-enced by Russian Formalism rather than New Criticism Jaussrsquos concernwith reception theory focuses upon the macro level of literary historyHe argues that in order to properly understand the historical develop-ment of any literary genre it is necessary to recognise the dynamiclsquointeraction of author and publicrsquo (Jauss 1982 15) To elucidate thisinteraction between writers and readers Jauss turns to the RussianFormalistsrsquo concept of defamiliarisation linking this to what he calls alsquohorizon of expectationrsquo (Jauss 1982 23) This latter term is never pre-cisely defined in his work but it seems to refer to an intersubjective set

of expectations cultural aesthetic and social that the generality of indi-viduals bring to the reading or writing of any text This would seem tobring him close to Fishrsquos notion of an interpretive community But Jausstheorises a triangular relationship between text reader and world whichallows a more critical and creative role to both texts and readers than ispossible from within Fishrsquos closed interpretive worlds Jauss claims thatdefamiliarisation techniques in literary works challenge more that justthe established artistic conventions familiar to their readers they canproduce a new evaluation of the everyday experience of life Jausswrites lsquoThe social function of literature manifests itself in its genuinepossibility only where the literary experience of the reader enters intothe horizons of expectations of his lived praxis reforms his understand-ing of the world and thereby also has an effect on his social behaviourrsquo(Jauss 1982 39) He illustrates this claim by reference to Flaubertrsquosnovel Madame Bovary the new artistic devices of this work enabled itto lsquoradicalize or raise new questions of lived praxisrsquo (Jauss 1982 43)Thus Jauss stakes out a positive even a utopian role for literary writing

Nevertheless Jauss came to realise that this perception remainedcaught up in the long negative critique deriving from the lrsquoart pour lrsquoartof mid-century aesthetic debates in France Affirmative art cannot beaccommodated within this critical evaluation Jauss was dissatisfied bythe concept of the reader as constituted in the tradition of negative cri-tique It only recognises two poles of reception for art On the onehand there is the conception of an eacutelite group of readers and critics ableto respond to the alienating form of avant-garde art On the otherhand there is the vast majority of people who are relegated to the roleof passive consumers of banal conventions Such a puritan aestheticsleaves a huge range of art work and response to it unaccounted forbetween the two poles of its extremes Jauss points out that this highvalue accorded the new is a very recent shift in artistic judgement andone which coincides with the mass commodification of art products inthe nineteenth-century Jauss wants to find a way of doing justice to theneglected functions of art by returning to a much older recognition ofthe lsquoprimary unity of understanding enjoyment and enjoying under-standingrsquo (cited in Holub 1984 75) This looks back to Aristotlersquos non-separation of knowledge and pleasure In Poetics Aristotle givesimitation a central role in learning arguing that it is the imitative

capacity above all that ensures humanrsquos superiority to brutes lsquoit is natu-ral for all human beings to delight in works of imitationrsquo (Aristotle1963 8) This delight is evident even when the object of imitation isitself offensive as with the form of a dead body and this is becausedelight in imitation is directly related to the enjoyment that comes fromacquiring knowledge lsquoTo be learning something is the greatest of plea-sures not only to philosophers but also to the rest of mankindhellipThereason for the pleasure derived from looking at pictures is that one is atthe same time learning ndash gathering the meaning of thingsrsquo (Aristotle1963 8)

lsquoGathering the meaning of thingsrsquo as an expression of the cognitivefunction of art by no means has to depend upon a reflectionist or posi-tivism correspondence view of either literary work or knowledgeCertainly Jauss is not primarily concerned with artistic verisimilitudeHe looks back to Leonardo da Vinci as an ideal of an artist whose for-mal practice encompassed a pursuit of knowledge His poetic praxisconstitutes lsquocognition dependent on what one can do on a form ofaction that tries and tests so that understanding and producing canbecome onersquo (cited in Holub 1984 75) Jauss understands the interre-lated cognitive communicative and enjoyment functions of art in termsof three traditional critical categories poetics aesthetics and catharsisHe reconceptualises these within the context of a mass capitalist modeof production to emphasise their creative potential for knowledge gen-eration allied to pleasure

Poetics as usually understood refers to the activity and pleasure tobe derived from an ability to produce an art object In the ancientworld this activity was understood in terms of imitation of transcendentForms By the Renaissance this association of knowledge creative prac-tice and perfection had become located in the individual artistrsquos skilland vision With the advent of mass industrialisation aesthetic activityremained the only form of non-alienated creative production In thiscentury as art work has come to be characterised by indeterminacy andambiguity the reader too has been brought within the ambit of poeticsin its extended meaning as creative praxis that evokes knowledge asenjoyment of self-discovered ability

Jauss associates aesthetics the reception side of artistic activity withthe positive potential for community As opposed to the growing

alienation of modern atomistic social existence art can provide a spacefor the experience of communicative bonds through the practices ofshared knowledge and enjoyment Finally with his third term catharsisJauss considers ways in which identification functions as an importantelement in artistic reception He rejects the model of two extremes ofeither avant-garde producer or passive consumer Instead he suggestsfive interactive modes of identification that characterise the readerrsquosreceptive position All of these identifying positions available to therecipient as reader or audience involve forms of knowledge as enjoyablepraxis and of course any one literary work can offer the reader a shift-ing range of possible identifications

Jausslsquos ideas like these on identification often seem schematic ratherthan fully developed Looking at a passage like that from The Prime ofMiss Jean Brodie for example the complex shifting identifications ofthe reader seem easier to analyse by means of Iserrsquos notion of wanderingviewpoint than by five separate modes of identification In turning tothe work of Jauss I have undoubtedly moved beyond the range of criti-cism that can be called formalist in that its primary concern is withqualities imminent in the text Nevertheless Jauss coming from thetradition of Russian Formalism is helpful for a reconsideration and re-evaluation of realism because of his central concern to reconnect litera-ture to knowledge production and to enjoyment These have been twoof the persistent claims underpinning any privileged or continuingregard for realist writing Jaussrsquos work challenges an over-simple posi-tivist view of knowledge or realism as a kind of hollow transmissiontube that aims to convey an accurate unmediated reality He reminds usthat knowledge can also be a form of creative praxis associated withpleasure Together with Wolfgang Iser he urges us to think of novelsand reading as very complex communicative acts In opposition to themore nihilistic anti-humanist anti-realist theories of writing he affirmsthe cognitive and communal functions of art In the final chapter I shallargue for a defining association of realist writing with knowledge com-munity pleasure and justice

IVREALISM ANDKNOWLEDGEA Utopian Project

lsquoKnowledge is powerrsquo was widely proclaimed during the nineteenthcentury as the aspirational slogan of the radical press and working-classpolitical and educational movements In using it political radicals andworking people were consciously aligning themselves with the traditionof eighteenth-century Enlightenment which linked the universal idealsof freedom equality and justice with the pursuit of progress and ratio-nal knowledge By and large the realist writers of the nineteenth cen-tury also associated their literary endeavours with Enlightenment idealsas against what were seen as the reactionary politics and prejudices ofthe ancien reacutegime Dickens Hardy Balzac and Zola used their novels toattack arbitrary authority corrupt officialdom the abuse of justice andto highlight the oppression and suffering of those victimised LikeAristotle they believed that mimesis representation of the world couldfunction without contradiction as a source of both popular pleasureand progressive knowledge and politics Early twentieth-centuryMarxist and humanist critics of realism like Lukaacutecs and Auerbach alsoevaluated the genre within this general Enlightenment perspectiveLukaacutecs argues that realism is defined by its profound historical imagina-tion that offers unique insights into the underlying forces shaping alikethe social formation and individual types Auerbach aligned a realistproject stretching from Homer to Woolf with the expansion of demo-cratic ideals For Auerbach realism is defined as the first serious artisticrepresentation of everyday life

7REALISM AND THE CRISIS

OF KNOWLEDGE

At the beginning of Chapter 1 I claimed that questions of knowl-edge are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a representa-tional form It is my aim in these final chapters to argue for a positiveunderstanding of realism which I shall define as a genre based upon animplicit communicative contract with the reader that there exists anindependent extra-textual real-world and that knowledge of this real-world can be produced and shared This performative investment in thepossibility of communicative knowledge undoubtedly joins realismwhatever its subject matter to the emancipatory project of theEnlightenment The capacity for intersubjective communication is theprerequisite for community and community is the necessary location ofall particular individual civic and political rights and responsibilitiesSharable knowledge about the conditions of existence of embodiedhuman creatures in the geographical world constitutes the material basisfrom which universal claims of justice and well-being must spring Yetthe literary field in which late twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury writing is produced is very different from that in which Frenchand English nineteenth-century realists operated In the first placedemocratic institutions and scientific advances have frequently disap-pointed any optimistic hope of human advance This in turn has led towhat we might see as a crisis in the very possibility of knowledge Yet asBrecht retorted to Lukaacutecs against any over-narrow definition of realismlsquoIf we wish to have a living and combative literature which is fullyengaged with reality and fully grasps reality a truly popular literaturewe must keep step with the rapid development of realityrsquo (Brecht 197785) Brechtrsquos sense of the genre as always in process and transition dis-mantles that unhelpful binary opposition that misrepresents realism asthe conservative other to radical avant-garde experimentalism Withinthe present literary and theoretical field however a coherent defence ofrealism must start from an understanding of the crisis of knowledgewhich has led to such widespread anti-realism in current critical cul-tural and philosophical thought

As outlined in Chapter 1 the Enlightenment project centred uponrationality came during the twentieth century to be viewed in a pes-simistic light lsquoKnowledge is powerrsquo is now understood within much cul-tural theory as expressing a more sinister truth In Dialectic ofEnlightenment (1944) Adorno and Horkheimer turned Enlightenmentrsquos

realism and knowledge a utopian project132

rational critique against reason itself They argued that the conceptionand constitution of knowledge during the Enlightenment was overlyconcerned with control and mastery Rationality they claimed was con-ceived exclusively in terms of individual consciousness of a human sub-ject who observes the external world as passive object to be understoodand systematised This perception of knowledge is often referred to assubject-centred it is criticised as self-assertively individualistic and asaggrandising the power of reason to order and subordinate the world inthe pursuit of material and economic lsquoprogressrsquo

In addition to this influential critique initiated by the FrankfurtSchool the logical trajectory of Enlightenment empiricism itself wasrunning into trouble by the early decades of the twentieth centurySeventeenth- and eighteenth-century empiricism as elaborated by thephilosophers John Locke (1632ndash1704) and David Hume (1711ndash76)placed human experience and observation of the material world at thecentre of knowledge acquisition as part of their exclusion of religiousand metaphysical beliefs from the domain of rational understandingThe increasing success of the empirical and experimental sciences dur-ing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appeared to confirm thetruth and validity claims of this secular perception of knowledge Yetempiricism is based upon a logical contradiction that eventuallyundermines the notion of truth upon which objective scientific knowl-edge rests

LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND THE VERIFIABILITYPRINCIPLE

Taken in one direction the empirical project leads to logical positivisma development of the mathematical philosophy of Bertrand Russell(1872ndash1970) and the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889ndash1951)and expounded in the Vienna Circle during the 1920s and 1930s Itwas logical positivism in particular that Adorno and the FrankfurtSchool took as the paradigm of a narrow systematising form of reasonLogical positivists severely restrict notions of truth to only those mattersof fact that can be verified by empirical observation or experiment Theideal of truth for which they aim is mathematical certainty Any thingthat cannot be verified and that would include all universal ideals like

realism and the crisis of knowledge 133

justice equality and freedom cannot be deemed either true or false andhence cannot be recognised as meaningful objects of knowledge Thislsquoverifiability principlersquo produces a notion of truth that constitutes anideal of exact correspondence between a propositional statement abouta piece of the world and that actual piece of material existence The definition of truth as what is verifiable lends itself to a pictorial analogyin which a statement or proposition is visualised as an image or picturewhich exactly copies or corresponds to an objective physical reality Asimple example would be the proposition lsquoThe Houses of Parliamentare situated on the bank of the Thames at Westminsterrsquo

It is frequently this rather restricted view of verifiable truth largelyformalised in the early twentieth century that is projected backwardsonto fictional realism in the kinds of critique that accuse realists ofclaiming to offer readers a true picture of the world or a one-to-one cor-respondence between their writing and social reality As we saw in PartII nineteenth-century realists were very far from making such absolutistclaims One of the great formal achievements of nineteenth-century fic-tion was its experimental development of shifting and multiple focalisa-tions and perspectives Ultimately logical positivism has proved to besomewhat a dead end Too many domains of human experience andvalues have to be excluded from the realm of knowledge and truthaccording to the verifiability principle In addition subatomic particlescience has moved well beyond the range of empirical validity testingthat logical positivism defined as the only basis of scientific truth Whatlogical positivism undoubtedly brought into focus is the extreme diffi-culty of grounding truth claims upon any wholly objective and absolutefoundation

RELATIVE TRUTHS AND INCOMMENSURATE WORLDS

The second logical path from nineteenth-century empirical sciencesleads to the opposite extreme from an over-restriction on what can bedeemed truth but it equally contributes to the crisis of knowledge Ifempirical knowledge derives from the observation of material realitythen it can be argued its truth is dependent upon the subjectiveresponse of the observer truth therefore has to be recognised as relativeand multiple This line of thought was much influenced by the later

work of Ludwig Wittgenstein on language in which he rejected his ear-lier concern with logical truth Wittgenstein suggested that meaningshould be understood in terms of lsquolanguage gamesrsquo in which analo-gously to other games like chess it is rule-governed practice that pro-duces significance The lsquomeaningrsquo of the bishoprsquos move is onlyunderstandable or coherent in terms of the rules that govern chessSimilarly Wittgenstein says lsquoThe use of a word in practice is its mean-ingrsquo (Wittgenstein [1933ndash35] 1972 69) Meaning thus understoodbecomes enclosed within the set of rules that demarcate separate lan-guage games Within the scientific field development of subatomicphysics seems to provide analogous evidence of separate meaning sys-tems in which the rules of one conceptual scheme are nontransferableor incommensurate to the other The system of knowledge that governsNewtonian science is completely irrelevant when it come to explainingthe existence and form of subatomic particles The logic and knowledgeof one world does not transfer to the other This perception of a com-plete shift of conceptual scheme as a means of understanding physicalreality radically questions the Enlightenment sense of scientific reasonas a continuous process of expanding knowledge In place of that pro-gressive history philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922ndash96) setout a very influential theory claiming that science must be understoodin terms of radical paradigm changes in which one systematic way ofknowing the world is wholly replaced by another (Kuhn 1970)

This sense of incommensurate worlds and relative realities wasaugmented by the lsquolinguistic turnrsquo Saussurersquos work gave to twentieth-century western thought Language itself was to be understood as aself-contained system that produced meaning by means of its ownstructural rules This insight led inevitably to the central thesis of thelsquocultural turnrsquo language does not reflect external reality rather it con-structs the order that we perceive as our world As we saw inChapter 2 sceptical anti-realism became the new orthodoxy withinpoststructural and postmodern cultural theory from around the1960s onwards Within this purview claims of universal truth andprinciple are regarded as mistaken misleading and politically suspectThe claims of disinterested objectivity and generality put forward inmany fields of scientific and cultural knowledge have been shown tobe the relative and self-interested constructions of western masculine

forms of understanding Realist novels have been included in this cri-tique in so far as they appear to offer their individualist frequentlybourgeois protagonists as examples of a universal human nature Inopposition to all such bogus aggrandising and imperialist universal-ism postructuralists and multiculturalists insist upon the irremediablylocal nature of truth validity and knowledge they affirm the irre-ducible difference of a plurality of incommensurate worlds In con-trast to the Enlightenment aim of totalising knowledge postmoderntheory has tended to focus upon the individual physical body as themost local site of cultural production

MICHEL FOUCAULT AND KNOWLEDGE AS POWER

It was the French poststructural historian Michel Foucault(1926ndash1984) however who launched the most direct attack upon thetwinned ideals of knowledge and progress Foucault rejects both theEnlightenment sense of history as a continuous temporal progressionand the ideal of science as participating in the historical narrative ofhuman improvement Foucaultrsquos New Historicism dissolves historyinto a series of discontinuous lsquoepistemesrsquo (Foucault 1961 and 1969) Bythe term episteme Foucault conceptualises a total way of perceiving theworld a totalised order of things that determines everything that canbe known and said during each particular historical moment An epis-temic order of reality is produced and sustained by an interconnectednetwork of discursive practices religious political literary scientificand everyday These discursive formations are like the epistemes theyproduce discontinuous and incommensurate What can be thoughtand said within one particular epoch is inconceivable to the understoodorder of things within another

Foucaultrsquos main object of scholarly interest is the modern age orepisteme that comes into being around the eighteenth century and isclosely associated by him with the rise of the human sciences The newinterest in the scientific treatment of the insane from the end of the sev-enteenth century onwards is understood by Foucault not as a sign ofprogressive rational enlightenment but as the inception of a wholly newform of disciplinary social order based upon regulatory reason (Foucault1963) Foucault sees the birth of medical and social institutions like the

clinic the prison the school the barracks the hospital as the materi-alised mechanisms and practices of a will to power that masks itself asknowledge All of these institutions are based upon a regime of surveil-lance and observation that positions any persons suspected of potentialdeviance within a field of relentless watchfulness Those who are sub-jected to this all-seeing gaze come to internalise surveillance disciplin-ing themselves into conformity with regulatory social and moral normsThus for Foucault the modern age is carceral or imprisoning in itsbasic social structure the entire population is caught within capillarymechanisms that intervene in the minutiae of every action and thoughtThese regulatory mechanisms of disciplinary knowledge are targetedupon the individual body which is discursively produced as the alwaysdangerous location of potential deviancy sexual vagrant disorderlyrowdy insane criminal (Foucault 1976)

Foucault has been criticised for his pervasive unanchored notion ofpower which tends to represent it as totalising and omnipresent inevery sphere of human life Nevertheless New Historicism has pro-duced some of the most rigorous and insightful of recent criticalapproaches to nineteenth-century realist writing In this body of worknovels are read as actively participating within the wider discursivenetworks that constitute nineteenth-century epistemic reality So forexample critic Mary Poovey reads Dickensrsquos Our Mutual Friend(1864ndash5) as part of proliferating discourses concerned to representspeculative capitalism as an impersonal amoral order beyond the remitof moral judgement (Poovey 1995 155ndash81) D A Miller analysesBleak House (1852ndash3) to demonstrate the way the text is complicitwith the expanding disciplinary mechanisms of moral conformity inVictorian public and private spheres (Miller 1988 58ndash106) CatherineGallagher in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985)shows the way the realist novel itself was transformed by its participa-tion in the new discourse of industrialism that emerged in the earlydecades of the nineteenth century John Plotz has recently made a sim-ilar argument for the impact of Chartism and the nineteenth-centurycrowd upon literary forms With variations of emphasis and approachall of these New Historicist critics concur with Pooveyrsquos claim thatcritical analysis and historical studies are lsquofacets of a single enterprisersquo(Poovey 1995 1)

This approach to realist fiction has been impressively fruitful in itsability to reconnect literary texts to the worlds they purport to representyet without resorting to reflectionist claims that novels are offering atrue or accurate picture of their times New Historicist studies have illu-minated the very complex ways in which realist writing like that of allother discourses and genres is governed and organised by those ideo-logical struggles that are constitutive of the social realities at themoment of production The analysis of realist texts from this perspec-tive often facilitates recognition of the tensions and contradictionslocated at the point of competing value systems Gallagher for instanceindicates the way traditional paternalism co-existed in an uneasy rela-tionship with the new market values of political economy within earlyrepresentations of industrial conflict as in Elizabeth Gaskellrsquos novelMary Barton (1848) for example The limitation of much NewHistoricism is that it remains largely a negative critique unable toaccount for the pleasures of a text or acknowledge a textrsquos capacity togenerate its own forms of knowledge New Historicist readings tend toconfirm the complicity of realism with repressive ideological discoursesEven when New Historicists highlight the contradictions and tensionsbetween competing discursive structures in a text or moments of textualtransgression the ultimate conclusion of analysis is usually to demon-strate that as Gallagher says lsquoformal and ideological transgressions areelicited by and recontained within the logic of larger historical dis-coursesrsquo (Gallagher 1985 xiiindashxvi)

As an example of New Historicist practice let us look briefly at D AMillerrsquos reading of Bleak House He suggests that Dickensrsquos representa-tion of the Court of Chancery with its pervasive labyrinthine powersand interminable and obscurantist legal practices can be understoodmimetically as an image of the developing Victorian state bureaucracythat would spread regulatory tentacles into all areas of social and privatelife (Miller 1988) Miller argues that the novel is structured around twoopposing domains there is the public carceral domain of entanglementwithin the institution of law and there is the domain of freedom andprivacy located in the family As well as representing the newly expand-ing bureaucratic state power by means of Chancery Bleak House alsooffers its readers the new figure of the detective policeman in the char-acter of Mr Bucket In the course of his various investigations Mr

Bucket continuously traverses the boundaries between institutionalspace and family privacy He appears to protect the family and invadeit Thus even as the novel holds out to its readers the promised ideal offamily sanctity it suggests the familyrsquos porosity and openness to scrutinyfrom outside What the novel teaches its readers is that to maintain itsright to privacy the family must continually police itself

Miller further suggests that the very form of the novel particularlyits length and complexity collude with these ideological effects Thecomplicated intertwined strands of the story the sustained mysteries ofthe plot and the duration of reading all work together Miller argues toestablish the text as lsquoa little bureaucracy of its ownrsquo so that despite thethematic satire upon the Court of Chancery lsquoBleak House is profoundlyconcerned to train ushellipin the sensibility for inhabiting the new bureau-cratic administrative structuresrsquo (Miller 1988 88 89)

This brief summary does not do justice to Millerrsquos lengthy subtleand complex essay on Bleak House the reading of which could itself beseen as a disciplinary practice What does become apparent is the ten-dency within New Historicism to render power monolithic In Millerrsquosreading uneven historical developments and different degrees of socialcoercion are levelled into the uniform oppression of a totalised disci-plinary regime Millerrsquos discussion of Bleak House is part of his largerstudy of nineteenth-century novels entitled The Novel and the Police(1988) The work elaborates a parity between the ideological function-ing of police powers newly established in the nineteenth century andthose of realist fiction In doing so it erases all distinction between thecallous brutality meted out by the state to those without family orhomes and the tactfulness with which authority approaches those shel-tered by domestic privacy To suggest that novel readers are subjected tosimilar disciplinary mechanisms as are social outcasts and vagrants is tolose sight of the more important differences

A much more nuanced recent study deriving from a New Historicistperspective Nancy Armstrongrsquos Realism in the Age of Photograph (1999)shifts critical attention from the entanglement of realist novels in ideo-logical discourses to their interaction with visual codes of reality Thisusefully reminds us of the strong element of pictorialism that distin-guishes literary realism as a genre and that has tended to be overlookedin the current theoretical concern with the constitutive function of

language Nineteenth-century realism and photography developed atapproximately the same time To some extent this may account for theeasy assumption that in producing a pictorial effect realist novels offer akind of verbal snapshot As I stressed in the Introduction there can beno simple equation of the verbal and the visual Yet Armstrong suggeststhat there is an important connection between the two major realistforms of the novel and photography Armstrong argues that fromaround the mid-nineteenth century fiction and photography collabo-rated to provide the literate public with a proliferating supply of imagesand a set of unstated rules for interpreting them (Armstrong 1999 3)Photography found a ready public among the Victorians and takingphotographs soon became a widespread activity enthusiastically patron-ised by Queen Victoria herself (See Dimond and Taylor 1987 Homans1995) For both consumers and producers photography was regardedas a technology of science and knowledge rather than an art formPhotographs promised more accuracy than any previous visual illustra-tion they appeared less influenced by subjective fallibilities of theobserver and they opened up new regions of reality to visual scrutinycity slums panoramic overviews exotic racial peoples and landscapesmug shots of criminals and the insane Armstrong argues that despitethe rapid proliferation in the quantity of visual images for consump-tion from the mid-century onwards there was not a concomitantexpansion in the variety Increasingly photography established andadhered to generic protocols for classifying posing shooting and nam-ing its subject matter (Armstrong 1999 21) For example urban spacewas repeatedly photographed according to three distinct territorialmodels the decaying slum the dynamic flow of business and trafficthrough arterial networks of streets the privacy of the suburban homePhotographs of people similarly utilised quite distinct poses for por-traits to suggest the interiority of a cultured sensibility the blank full-faced mug shot of the deviant or criminal the abject posture toindicate the racial degeneracy of lsquonativesrsquo Armstrong argues that as aresult of this continuous repetition of predictable visual images lsquoanentire epistemology of knowing imperceptibly installed itself in read-ersrsquo imaginations along with the images that allowed them to identifyvirtually anything that either had been or could be rendered as a pho-tographrsquo (Armstrong 1999 21)

This process of accumulation produced a visual order of things thatacquired the truth-status of an order of actual reality Novels thatwanted to be accessible and convincing to a mass readership hencefor-ward had to conform to the visual protocols that regulated how theworld was seen Armstrong argues that works of realism lsquodo not attemptto lsquoreflectrsquo an extratextual realityrsquo instead they lsquorender legible in visualtermshellipthe city the Celtic fringe the colonies territories attractive tothe camera as wellrsquo (Armstrong 1999 11) When Bleak House lsquorefers tothe street people and dilapidated tenements of nineteenth-centuryLondon the novel is actually referring to what either was or wouldbecome a photographic commonplacersquo (Armstrong 1999 5)

Armstrong sees the impatience of Modernist writers with what theycondemn as realismrsquos over-concern with the appearance of things asconceptually mistaken She insists that there is no truth or knowledgeto be discovered about some more authentic realm of reality beyondimages There is always only an order of things which produces and sus-tains the forms of lsquoknowledgersquo conceivable There is nothing beyondrepresentation Armstrong defines realism as lsquoany representation thatestablishes and maintains thehellipsocial categories that an individualcould or could not actually occupyrsquo (Armstrong 1999 168) It will bemy aim in the final chapter to argue that realism can and does rationallyrefer to a material domain beyond representation and can and doescommunicate knowledge of that extra-textual reality In pursuit of thataim it will be useful to follow up the valuable insight offered byArmstrong that novels are profoundly concerned with the politicalorganisation of geographical space

The pictorial or visual aspect of realism is perhaps the characteristic ofthe genre that lends most credence to the view that such writing fostersan illusion of offering an accurate correspondence of a material realitybeyond the text From an anti-realist postmodern position this is eithernaive or dishonest unmediated knowledge of the world is not availablediscourses or textuality constitute the only sense of reality we can possi-bly perceive and know Yet literary realism as I have defined it is distin-guished by its implicit contract with the reader that it does refer insome way to a world beyond the text For that reason to defend realistwriting from the charge of naivety or bad faith I must turn in this finalchapter to the wider philosophical arguments brought more generallyagainst current anti-realist theories of knowledge truth and the worldAlthough most of these projects to rehabilitate realism are not con-cerned specifically with literary realism I will try as far as possible tokeep that relevance to the fore

REALISM AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE

It will be helpful to begin by emphasising that visualising aspect ofrealism which perhaps elicits most immediate pleasure in readers itsworld-representing capacity Thomas Hardy immediately comes tomind as a writer whose work is shaped by a geographical imagination

8REALISM AND OTHER

POSSIBLE WORLDS

as well as a historical understanding In Chapter 4 I discussed the his-torical implications of the episode in Tess of the DrsquoUrbervilles whereTess and Angel Clare deliver milk to the isolated country railway sta-tion for transportation to London consumers The geographical per-ception that underpins the representation of agricultural work in thenovel is equally complex and impressive Tessrsquos only period of well-being in the story is the summer time she spends at the dairy YetHardy does not represent Talbothays farm in terms of a utopian spaceThe dairy is progressively modern producing milk for urban massconsumption It can only do this because of its geographical proximityto a new railway connection and because it is situated in the water-meadows of the fertile Var Vale with the capacity to graze a large herdof dairy cows lsquothere are nearly a hundred milchers under Crickrsquos man-agementrsquo (Hardy [1891] 1988 113) The word lsquomanagementrsquo notesthe market orientation of this enterprise The dairyrsquos size and up-to-datedness make it the sensible choice for Clarersquos agricultural appren-ticeship before going out to South America as a colonial farmerClarersquos possession of abstract scientific knowledge as well as practicalexperience is a form of capital that he accumulates from the developedagricultural world of Europe It allows him to colonise the undevel-oped geography of South America where land was offered lsquoon excep-tionally advantageous termsrsquo (Hardy [1891] 1988 355) Tess hassuperior practical skills but lacks the capital of scientific knowledgeand for her the only means of livelihood is gruelling winter workwithin the harsh terrain of Flintcomb-Ash where the lsquostubbornsoilhellipshowed plainly enough that the kind of labour in demand herewas of the roughest kindrsquo (Hardy [1891] 1988 274) In the bleakupland geography of this location modernisation was not an optionThe winter crop of swedes had to be manually forked from the stonysoil as food for livestock Hardy thus represents Tess at the nexus ofinterconnecting forces of differently valued knowledge physical geog-raphy agricultural economics class communication infrastructureand colonial expansion His geographical imagination grasps the spa-tial relationship between those local national and global forces andthe individual physical body of a female land-worker

In The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx (1935ndash) a whole com-munity is represented in which all individual lives and social relations

realism and other possible worlds 143

are shaped by the extremes of geography and weather on theNewfoundland arctic coast There is in the text a historical understand-ing also of the international national and local forces of change upon thecommunity but it is undoubtedly the particularity of a starkly unfamiliargeography and its pattern of life that imposes itself upon the readerrsquosimagination There is no way for the majority of readers responding tothe realist force of the writing to verify the accuracy with which Proulxrepresents the strange social and physical world of the story In any caseshe explicitly disclaims factuality lsquoThe Newfoundland in this bookthough salted with grains of truth is a island of inventionrsquo (Proulx 1993authorrsquos disclaimer) Indeed this novel could be read as a fairy story toldin an intensely realist mode What might be called the world-disclosingknowledge that the realism of this text enforces is not that of accuratedocumentation It is the knowledge of the possibility of other possiblereal-worlds to the one that we inhabit and are habituated to As such itextends the horizons of the patterns of existence that we can imagine forembodied beings It suggests to us that things do not of necessity have tobe as we currently know them

In Spaces of Hope (2000) geographer David Harvey argues that amore complex geographical understanding is required to encompass thespatial politics and forces of the modern world He writes lsquoHumanbeings have typically produced a nested hierarchy of spatial scaleswithin which to organize their activities and understand theirworldhellipmatters look differently when analyzed at global continentalnational regional local or householdpersonal scalesrsquo (Harvey 200075) We not only need to develop this awareness of different spatialscales and their different realities Harvey says we also need to compre-hend the forces that continually create sustain decompose and reconstruct spatial domains Yet Harvey is critical of postmodern repre-sentations of a globalised world that emphasise only continuous fluxshifting identities and ubiquitous unlocated power A politics of justicehe argues needs a firmer grounding of the material conditions of peo-plesrsquo existence in a concrete historical and geographical world Of all lit-erary forms the realist novel is most suited to facilitate this kind ofgeographical understanding It typically grasps the individual not just asan identity located in space but as lsquoa juncture in a relational systemwithout determined boundaries in time and spacersquo (Harvey 1996 167)

In his essay lsquoForms of Time and of the Chronotope in the NovelrsquoMikhail Bakhtin uses the term lsquochronotopersquo to refer to the perception ofhuman existence as a temporalspatial juncture and he credits the realistnovel with developing this essentially modern way of understandingand representing human life (1981 84ndash258) Seen in this way the indi-vidual as the small spatial unit that comprises physical embodimenthas to be thought of as the location of the particular and the universalAs with Hardyrsquos fictional representation of Tess individual humanbeings participate in all stages of the hierarchy of geographical scalesfrom global to national to local right down to the physical body Forthis reason postmodern rejection of universalism for localism is inade-quate What is required is a way of understanding the particular in itsinseparable dynamic connection with the universal or general As I sug-gested in Chapter 5 novelistic language has developed various strategiesand resources that facilitate the translation of the particular experienceof protagonists into the realm of universal realities In the episode whereTess takes milk to the London train Hardy uses the imagery of the agedholly tree to imaginatively translate the modern experience of Tess atthe cusp of two historical worlds into an infinitely longer temporal per-spective encompassing the long process of historical change that hascaught up and shaped individual human lives throughout time Thisnotion of translation between the particular and the universal betweendifferent realms of historical experience different geographical scalesdifferent languages and worlds is central to what follows

Postmodern literary and cultural criticism especially that informedby postcolonial thinking stresses the incommensurability of otherworlds the localism of known realities It is argued that without adegree of common cultural roots in a community and place experienceand knowledge is incommunicable Meanings can only be sharedwithin autonomous lsquointerpretive communitiesrsquo The subjective thoughtsand feelings of an illiterate Indian female bonded labourer for exampleare held to be inaccessible to a western woman with the privileges ofeducation sanitation and professional career It is claimed that to speakfor the wretched of the earth is to enact another form of colonisationupon them Such arguments are politically sobering and morally power-ful Yet the bonded Indian labourer and the educated Western aca-demic do not live in hermetically sealed different worlds Their lives are

multiply interlinked by a powerful communicative currency that trans-lates effortlessly across all geographical and linguistic boundariesmoney If we are even to hope that it may be possible to produce aworld of greater justice and less exploitation we need to find otherforms of communicative currency that can traverse spatial scales ofglobal national and local citizenship forms that can draw strengthfrom being embedded in the particularity of individual existence buttranslate into wider fields of meaning Judging from the world-wideubiquity of narrative and the universal pleasures of story-telling itmight be that fiction is one such currency The word lsquofictionrsquo also drawsattention to another way of thinking about knowledge in contrast to astrictly empirical epistemology based upon observation of the existingmaterial world There is knowledge as creative activity knowledge thatperceives connections and similarities where none have previously beenrecognised knowledge that projects possible worlds rather than measur-ing the world as we presently have it

But is such thinking utopian Given the crisis of knowledge outlinedin the previous chapter and the persuasive anti-realist and anti-human-ist theories that currently dominate western intellectual thought isknowledge of other worlds and communication between them possibleAre universal notions of justice and well-being incoherentWittgensteinrsquos early work exerted a strong influence on logical posi-tivism with its verifiability principle and severe curtailment of whatcould properly count as truth his later concept of language games fedinto the influential relativism of philosophers like Richard Rorty (Rorty1991 vol 1 contains a discussion of Donald Davidson whose work isoutlined in this chapter Also relevant is Rorty 1991 vol 2 whichincludes commentary on Lyotard Habermas and Christopher Norris)Yet Wittgensteinrsquos later writings also point to a way out from both ofthese epistemological end points Wittgenstein came to dismiss corre-spondence notions of truth that look for an exact match between astatement about a state of affairs and the verifiable empirical observa-tion of that actual state lsquoA picture held us captiversquo is how he came todescribe that very limited view of realist representation (Wittgenstein[1945ndash49] 1972 48e) Instead of this picture or correspondence notionof how words convey truths about the world he suggests that to imaginea language is also to conceive of a form of social life (Wittgenstein

[1945ndash49] 1972 8e) He asks lsquoSuppose you came as an explorer intoan unknown country with a language quite strange to you In what cir-cumstances would you say that the people there gave orders understoodthemhellipand so onrsquo (Wittgenstein [1945ndash49] 1972 82e) The answer hegives to this question is lsquoThe common behaviour of mankind is the sys-tem of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown languagersquo(Wittgenstein [1945ndash49] 1972 82e)

DONALD DAVIDSON AND INTERPRETIVE CHARITY

The issue of translation that Wittgenstein raises here is taken up by theAmerican philosopher Donald Davidson to become the central thrustof his critique of all anti-realist arguments that assert the incommensu-rable nature of separate linguistic and cultural communities He arguesthat if the experiences and beliefs of one community are translatableinto the language of another community then it cannot sensibly beclaimed that the two communities constitute wholly self-containedincommunicable epistemological and linguistic worlds On the otherhand if they are wholly incommensurate it would not be possible evento make a claim for being incommensurate If another world were to betotally unknowable we would not logically be able to know that it wasdifferent If we can even speak of or recognise the difference betweentwo conceptual worlds or schemes then clearly they are to some extentknowable Davidson says lsquoWithout a vast common ground there can beno place for disputants to stand in their quarrelrsquo (Davidson 1984 200)

In his thinking about language Davidson in sharp contrast toDerrida privileges speech over writing and in particular intersubjectivespeech rather than monologue Davidson elaborates a triangulardynamic interaction between speaker respondent and world Heaccepts the common postmodern assumption that the world as weknow it is always an interpreted world and that there is no contact witha reality unmediated by language Yet he argues this does not meanthere is no such thing as objective knowledge Language as a practicecan only coherently be thought of as dialogic that is as an interactionbetween at least two speaking subjects An entirely private language issimply inconceivable Further in order to have the basis for mutualunderstanding of anotherrsquos speech there must be a reasonably common

view of the world Finally it is highly implausible to assume that speak-ers able to understand or interpret each other could be in massive erroras to their shared reality Davidson argues that lsquosuccessful communica-tion proves the existence of a shared and largely true view of the worldrsquo(Davidson 1984 201) Even to assume that a person who speaks in anunknown language is speaking rather than emitting random sounds isto accept that he or she shares conceptual beliefs that form the commonbasic lsquogrammarrsquo of speech possibility a notion of truth and meaning apositional notion of self and other a notion of difference and samenessof sequence of reference and so on Such features are the foundation ofany intelligible language and in their absence there could be nothing tosustain either agreement or disagreement

Yet although speech is thus predicated upon fundamental sharedconceptual ground it is equally for Davidson always approximateThere is rarely an exact one-to-one correspondence or translationbetween the meanings of two speakers To communicate effectively wemust continually adjust our own lsquotruth-theoriesrsquo to accommodate theperspective of the other speaker Davidson argues that all interlocutorsstart from a lsquoprior theoryrsquo that constitutes their view of the world Inany speech act the participants implicitly assume that there is sharedagreement on beliefs and interpretations that their lsquoprior theoriesrsquo are inaccord When speakers encounter disagreement they adopt a lsquopassingtheoryrsquo as a way of adjusting their assumptions to the new perspectiveso as to maximise agreement Davidsonrsquos term for this is lsquointerpretivecharityrsquo (Davidson 1986 433ndash46) The willingness to make sense ofanotherrsquos speech is a pre-condition of communication From this per-spective speaking is always something of a mutual guessing game Incontrast to Fishrsquos notion of interpretive communities in which the samepool of common meanings can only be endlessly recycled Davidsonrsquosnotion of interpretive charity puts creative activity at the heart of lan-guage practice The vision of language that emerges from Davidsonrsquoswork lsquois one of human linguistic behaviour as a highly dynamic open-ended activity in which we constantly adjust our linguistic usage withthe intent of helping our listeners adjust their truth-theories to convergesufficiently to ours to enable communicationrsquo (Gorman 1993 205)This is not naively to rule out discursive and ideological conflict WhatDavidson is getting at is that to disagree entails considerable conceptual

agreement between disputants Disagreement in fact becomes thedialectical push towards linguistic and epistemological innovation andlearning Reading a realist novel can be seen as providing excellenttraining in the practice of lsquointerpretive charityrsquo As we begin the firstpage of a fiction we start to interpret characters states of affairs andevents on the basis of our lsquohorizon of expectationsrsquo as Jauss calls it orour lsquoprior theoryrsquo according to Davidson Subsequent narrative infor-mation calls upon us continually to adjust our assumptions to inventnew interpretations so as to accommodate new perspectives

JUumlRGEN HABERMAS AND COMMUNICATIVE REASON

lsquoInterpretive charityrsquo is an apposite term for this co-operative willinginteractive pursuit of meaning It is also quite clearly a rational activityalthough one that is very different from a subjectobject form of knowl-edge in which the rational individual seeks to lsquograsprsquo (the metaphor isinstructive) an aspect of the external world perceived as a passive matterof fact Interactive reason is close to the ideal of intersubjective or com-municative reason put forward by Juumlrgen Habermas as an alternative tothe subject-centred or individualistic reason as mastery of the worldthat has come to be associated with the Enlightenment Habermas isreluctant to abandon the universal ideals of democracy justice andfreedom that he sees as the inheritance of the Enlightenment even ifthey have been subsequently misshaped by the will to power

Habermasrsquos concept of communicative reason derives from the viewthat a major function of language in the everyday world as in morespecialised realms like law science and morality is that of problemsolving and validity testing It is this imperative to deal practically withthe world that gives speech its lsquoillocutionary forcersquo This is a termHabermas takes from British speech-act theorist JL Austin to referto the effective power of speech most apparent in the making ofpromises giving orders but also in making factual or ethical claimsThe marriage contract enacted by saying the words lsquoI dorsquo is often usedas a clear example of illocutionary force as are commands likelsquoAttentionrsquo or lsquoShut the doorrsquo Yet once thought of performativelywithin an actual speech situation even a statement about the worldlike lsquoItrsquos hot todayrsquo has illocutionary force in that it requires assent or

dissent from the other participants in the speech act For this reasonHabermas places the process of truth and validity testing at the centreof linguistic practice generally This performative understanding of lan-guage is very different from that based upon a correspondence notionof truth in which words and statements are required to match or copyan external existing state of affairs Habermas comments that the workof Davidson has overcome lsquothis fixation on the fact-mirroring functionof languagersquo (Habermas 1987 312) Subsequently Habermas goes onto elaborate a much expanded notion of validity and truth to that ofcorrespondence or verisimilitude utilizing a performative notion ofspeech that bears close resemblance to Davidsonrsquos triangular relation-ship of speaker responder world

Rational knowledge as understood from the conventional perspec-tive of a subjectobject relation to the world or in other words as anactive knowing individual consciousness that understand the world as apassive object inevitably tends towards a view of knowledge as masterylsquoBy contrastrsquo Habermas argues lsquoas soon as we conceive of knowledge ascommunicatively mediated rationality is assessed in terms of the capac-ity of responsible participants to orient themselves in relation to validityclaims geared to intersubjective recognitionrsquo (Habermas 1987 314)Habermas suggests that the system of personal pronouns educatesspeakers in perspective translation that moves across objective commu-nal and personal worlds Once ideas of knowledge and truth arethought of within the intersubjective context of actual speech situa-tions any notion of verifiability as simply a correspondence betweenwords and world becomes inadequate In any actual speech situationutterances are structured upon three components that accord formallyto the perspectives of third second and first person pronouns There isthe impersonal third person perspective for representing states of affairsin the world lsquoThere are more professional musicians in Liverpool thanin any other British cityrsquo In actual speech situations such propositionalstatements are always directed towards a second person respondent evenif that respondent is the reader of a text book This relationship can bemade explicit by extending the sentence to lsquoYou may or may not knowthat there are more professional musicians in Liverpool than in anyother British cityrsquo This extended form also makes apparent the illocu-tionary force of all statements about the world in that they always

implicitly require a response either of assent or disagreement from thoseparticipating in the speech act This performative function can beunderstood as a form of bearing witness Finally the first person per-spective can be brought out by changing the form to lsquoI believe thatthere are more professional musicians in Liverpool than in any otherBritish cityrsquo For Habermas these three components that I haveunpacked here are contained within all performative propositionalstatements about events and states of affairs Once this is recognisednotions of truth validity and knowledge become complicated with nor-mative judgements and values that exceed simple issues of accuratecorrespondence

Wolfgang Iser suggests that realist novels produce knowledge of theworld by foregrounding the lsquorepertoiresrsquo that structure acts of socialcommunication An analysis of South African novelist NadineGordimerrsquos (1923ndash) realist novel The Conservationist (1972) offers a fic-tional demonstration of how the grammar of pronouns might functionto orientate consciousness towards different forms of knowledge andtruth The protagonist of the story Mehring a successful internationalinvestment director buys land to farm as a form of weekend indulgencehe can now afford Even so lsquohe made it his business to pick up a work-ing knowledge of husbandry animal and crop so that he couldnrsquot easilybe hoodwinked by his people there and could plan farming operationswith authorityrsquo (Gordimer 1978 23) This encapsulates the dominantqualities of the character Mehring has a confident belief in the power ofmoney to meet all his needs He finds a lsquospecial pleasure in having awoman yoursquove paid forhellipYoursquove bought and paid for everythingrsquo(Gordimer 1978 77ndash8) Additionally as with the farm he associatesknowledge in a wholly functional way with authority and mastery Thisis expressed most forcefully in his use of the third person mode whenthinking of the African workers on his farm the neighbouring Indianfamily of shopkeepers and even in his thoughts of his son and his mis-tress The use of the third person facilitates an easy move from the par-ticular to the general that positions those so known as passive objectswithin a totalising overview that always exceeds them For Mehring theIndian storekeeping neighbours are lsquoaffable as only shop-keeping Jewsand Indians arersquo (Gordimer 1978 197) Thinking complacently aboutJacobus who manages the farm in his absence he concedes lsquohis old boy

does better than any white manager What this really means is thattheyrsquore more honest than any white yoursquore likely to get in a menial yetresponsible positionhelliphe hasnrsquot the craft to crook youhellipyou can alwaystrust a man who canrsquot write not to keep a double set of booksrsquo (Gordimer1978 145) In his relations with his son and mistress where power ismore contested he resorts to a sense of superior knowledge even moreexplicitly to secure his authority lsquoHe knew all the answers she couldhave given knew them by heart had heard them mouthed by her kind ahundred timesrsquo (Gordimer 1978 70ndash1) His sonrsquos resistance to conscrip-tion in the South African army is similarly reduced to the typical lsquoWhatis it he wants ndash a special war to be started for him so that he can provehimself the conscientious objector herorsquo (Gordimer 1978 79) Withinthe representation of Mehringrsquos consciousness social relations are whollyunderstood in terms of subjectobject mastery Other people are objectsto be possessed by money and by knowledge lsquoHe has them uparraigned before him [in his thoughts] and they have no answerNothing to say He feels inside himself the relief and overflow of havingpresented the unanswerable facts To prevail is to be rechargedrsquo(Gordimer 1978 79ndash80)

This relationship of mastery is most fully figured in his use of a tele-phone answering device to which he listens but lsquogives no answer Hetakes no part in the conversationrsquo He hears the voices and invitations ofhis acquaintances in the attitude of lsquoa doctor or other disinterested con-fidant reliably impersonalrsquo (Gordimer 1978 201) This image conveysa perception of self as in complete control but the irony is that by thisstage in the story Mehringrsquos self-sufficiency is unravelling This ischarted linguistically in the text by a shift in pronoun use towards thesecond and first persons Even while he defends himself from socialcontact by using an answering machine he begins to imagine conversa-tions he would have should his son or ex-wife or ex-mistress actuallyphone him These imaginary conversations are conducted in a moreintersubjective mode than his earlier thought patterns that utilised pre-dominantly third person forms In his fantasy talk with his mistress heactually uses the communal words lsquousrsquo and lsquowersquo to recognise sharedexperience and perspective lsquoThatrsquos what you really like about me aboutus we wrestle with each other on each otherrsquos groundrsquo (Gordimer 1978223) Prior to this on New Yearrsquos Eve Mehring has become aware of

Jacobus as a person not just as an African worker to be classified andlsquoknownrsquo under that reductive category This realisation takes the form ofan acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge and authority Wonderingwhether Jacobus has sons he thinks lsquoI ought to knowrsquo and he goes onto admit that Jacobus probably knows more about cattle stock than hedoes (Gordimer 1978 207) This leads him on to think that they canlsquotalk together about cattle therersquos that much in commonrsquo From therethe conversation elaborates dream-like in his head into a sense of sharedfellowship denoted by the pronoun lsquowersquo lsquoBut wersquore getting along fineWersquore laughing a lotrsquo (Gordimer 1978 208)

It is all a fantasy though lsquoJacobus has not comersquo (Gordimer 1978209) For most of the story Mehring clings to a functional form ofknowledge that seems to promise mastery Yet his objectivising theworld by means of impersonal third person mode of discourse actuallykeeps him unknowing of the multiplicity and particularity of socialreality He imagines that he and his African workers exist in incommen-surate worlds but his ignorance is due to lack of intersubjective commu-nication with them He never enters into their perspective so as to sharetheir knowledge of their world Thinking about his son he wonderslsquoBut were they referring to the same things when they talked togetherrsquo(Gordimer 1978 134) Shared knowledge is produced by movementacross the first and second person subject positions and it is a co-opera-tive ongoing form of understanding that is produced

Habermas argues that what distinguishes literary language fromeveryday and scientific and legal discourses is that literary languagelacks illocutionary force It is not involved in the problem solving andvalidity testing in the same direct way as language that is participatingin the worldrsquos transactions and business This neutralising of a speechactrsquos normal binding force empowers it lsquofor the playful creation of newworlds ndash or rather for the pure demonstration of the world-disclosingforce of innovative linguistic expressionsrsquo (Habermas 1987 201) Thislsquoworld-disclosingrsquo force of literary language Habermas claims bindstogether the particular with the universal In order to satisfy readerswho are not held by the illocutionary force of dealing with the worldrsquoson-going business a literary text has to be recognised as worth thetelling Habermas claims lsquoIn its content a tellable text reaches beyondthe local context of the immediate speech situation and is open to

further elaborationrsquo (Habermas 1987 203) Literary language unlikescientific language is characterised by its capacity for the creative imag-ining of other possible worlds

Yet the division of language function between the discourses of litera-ture and science is perhaps not quite so distinct as Habermas suggests Inan attack upon the prevailing paradigm of anti-realism philosopher ofscience Christopher Norris points out that the presence of figurativelanguage and metaphor within scientific writing does not invalidate it asa form of rational knowledge Utilising a notion of translation and fol-lowing Aristotlersquos defence of poetic rhetoric Norris argues thatlsquometaphors ndash [especially] those which involve the analogical transfer ofattributes from one category or kind of object to another ndash are able toprovide genuine knowledge or even (on occasion) a decisive advance inscientific understandingrsquo (Norris 1997 105) The most dramatic exam-ple of this is some of the language used to translate the mathematicallogic of quantum mechanics into verbal logic The difficulty of express-ing this new science in any straightforward empirical discourse has beentaken as support for incommensurate worlds Yet Norris claims as thetheory of subatomic particles has become more developed and under-stood and its explanatory powers across a range of scientific fields recog-nised it lsquorenders implausible any wholesale scepticism with regard to [its]realist credentialsrsquo (Norris 1997 176) From the perspective of the idealof scientific knowledge as a continuing attempt to understand the worldEinsteinrsquos relativity theory lsquois not in the least anti-realist but on the con-trary a great stride towards discovering the underlying structure of realityrsquo(Norris 1997 228) What marks out the knowledge that constitutesquantum mechanics and relativity theory is that it has come into beingthrough an exercise of imaginative reason or thought experiment thatruns ahead of any possible empirical observation or experimentation It isknowledge derived from the fictional invention of possible worlds Likeliterary invention and experimentation scientific pursuit of knowledge isfreed from the illocutionary force attached to the everyday business ofthe world Within that freedom thought experiments have a legitimatefunction in the production of knowledge Yet in accordance with thedefining contract that constitutes scientific discourse as scientific its fic-tions are always subject to subsequent validity testing according to math-ematical consistency experimentation and empirical observation

The possible worlds of realist fiction are not subject to analogousproof of validity but realism is based on a defining commitment to thebelief that there is a shared material world external to textuality andsubjective solipsistic worlds In Sketches by Boz the narrator Boz turnsto implied readers and invites them lsquoConceive the situation of a manspending his last night on earth in this [condemned prisonerrsquos] cellrsquo(Dickens [1836ndash7] 1995 246) In Chapter 2 I described that perfor-mative gesture as a referential generalisation All words are substitu-tions for that which is not present but the recognition of a gesturingtowards a non-verbal materiality constitutes the underlying grammarof a consensual realist belief in the possibility of communication abouta shared world Bozrsquos statement simultaneously admits to a specific ref-erential absence in that the man has to be imagined and insists thatsuch men do exist in the world The grammar performs an act oftranslation between a fictional imagined world and an actual real-world and between the particular and the universal which is a definingfeature of realist form It is this that produces the peculiar illocution-ary force of realist writing and that commitment involves novels in thecomplex communicative reason as set out by Habermas involvingjudgements incorporating issues of factuality social rightness truthful-ness and aesthetics

Such judgements are of course less direct and perhaps more com-plex than many of those dealing with everyday activities tend to beWhen reading Bleak House we are not looking for a one-to-one corre-spondence or photographic pictorial match with Victorian society andVictorian London at the mid-century In order to consider the novelrsquosrelationship to its actual referential world we need to be aware of thevaried ways in which the text mediates or translates into its fictionalworld the anxieties issues and debates of its own time new statebureaucracy initiated by the Poor Laws of 1834 fears about urbanhealth the ambitions of a rising professional class the intense passionsaroused by the campaigns over the Corn Laws as the first real challengeto landed interests the new enthusiasm for photography and so onThis approach to the text closely aligned to New Historicism aims togenerate a form of knowledge of some of the ideological forces constitu-tive of mid-nineteenth century social reality Yet beyond the remit ofNew Historicism a communicative notion of knowledge would claim

that in thus referring to states of affairs in the non-textual world thenovel subjects the reader to the imperative of a normative judgementIn one episode of the story the main protagonists Esther Summersonand Mr Jarndyce come upon a family of three orphaned childrenvaliantly assuming adult responsibilities in order to survive Jarndycesays lsquoLook at this For Godrsquos sake look at thisrsquo (Dickens [1852ndash3]1996 226) The exclamation makes explicit the normative illocutionaryforce of bearing witness conjoined to the issue of factuality If such isthe state of affairs then some evaluative attitude towards it is requiredof the readerresponder This in turn brings to the fore the issue oflsquotruthfulnessrsquo or intentionality which we may think about in terms ofthe author or more productively in terms of the voice or voices of thetext In the case of Bleak House the indignation the text invites thereader to share at the neglect of the individualised children of the pooris dissipated in the passages that represent urban poverty in the massConfronted by the horror of city slums the text elicits fear and loathingrather than compassion and outrage Nevertheless this thematic contra-diction between the sympathy generated by the particular as opposed tothe fear evoked by mass is formally foregrounded by means of thenovelrsquos experimental perspective shifts from third person omniscience tofirst person narrative In untangling these tangled threads that consti-tute the text the reader is constantly moving across ultimately insepara-ble issues of form and reference In this way Habermasrsquos extendedunderstanding of communicative reason provides a theoretical under-pinning for a wide range of critical approaches to literary texts

To bring together the ideas and debates set out in Part IV and in ear-lier chapters I shall consider a story that actually has been translatedinto English from the very different language of Bengali The fictionalworld of lsquoDouloti the Bountifulrsquo by Mahasweta Devi translated byGayatri Chakravorty Spivak is that of the persecuted indigenous tribalpeople of India Devi explains in an authorial conversation that pre-cedes the tales that India belonged to the tribals long before the incur-sion of the Aryan-speaking peoples The tribals have their own quitedistinct culture from that of mainstream India and their very differentvalue system that having no sense of private property has left themexposed to gross exploitation and marginalisation Devi says lsquoEach tribeis like a continent But we never tried to know themrsquo (Devi 1995 xxi)

Yet that absence of knowledge is not due to the incommensurate qual-ity of tribal life it serves the interests of the mainstream Indian commu-nities only too well Devirsquos purpose in her journalism and her fiction isnot to preserve some irreducible ethnicity but on the contrary to fur-ther the lsquodemand for the recognition of the tribal as a citizen of inde-pendent Indiarsquo (Devi 1995 xvii) Moreover she moves from theparticularity of this cause to the universal plight of lsquoall the indigenouspeople of the worldrsquo Nevertheless Spivakrsquos lsquoPrefacersquo as translator issomewhat anxious or defensive in tone as to the status of her transla-tion This is not too surprising given her theoretical affiliation withdeconstruction and her earlier essay lsquoCan the Subaltern Speakrsquo (Spivak[1988] 1993 66ndash111) which suggests the question has to be answeredin the negative She concludes her Preface by quoting the warning con-tained in the South African writer JM Coetzeersquos comments on histranslation of the Dutch poet Achterberg

It is in the nature of the literary work to present its translator withproblems for which the perfect solution is impossiblehellipThere is neverenough closeness of fit between languages for formal features of awork to be mapped across from one language to another withoutshift of valuehellipSomething must be lsquolostrsquo

(Spivak [1988] 1993 xxviii)

While acknowledging the inevitability of loss in the process of all trans-lation and that includes the translation of experiential reality into rep-resentational form we can also bear in mind Davidsonrsquos sense thatalmost all communication involves a degree of unmapped territorybetween the conceptual schemes of two speakers The act of interpretivecharity with which we attempt to cross or bridge that gap calls up a cre-ative impulse that carries the potential for innovative thinking and newpossible worlds

The world of Devirsquos fiction is structured by a chronotopic imagina-tion that is she locates her protagonists at the juncture of intermeshinggeographical and historical forces In the story lsquoDouloti the BountifulrsquoDouloti is the daughter of a bonded labourer a system of conscriptedwork introduced by the British While Doulotirsquos knowledge is confinedto that of her impoverished village world her short life is determined by

forces that move unhindered across the spatial scales of local regionalnational and international geography The predominant medium oftranslation across these different worlds is money The system ofbonded labour was officially abolished by the independent nationalIndian government in 1976 It has continued to exist on a widespreadscale nevertheless because the poverty of the tribals enforces them intotaking loans at enormous rates of interest from high-caste Indianlandowners working in collusion with local government officials andpolice The compound interest ensures that the loans can never berepaid and the whole family is bonded to labour for life Local nationaland international industrial contractors collude with traditionallandowners to contract tribals as a cheap labour force Frequently wivesand daughters are taken away to brothels to work for the always out-standing debt There they service the sexual market created by the flu-idity of modern capitalist development their customers are largelyitinerant regional national and international contractors officials andlabourers

In the case of Douloti in the story the new democratic emancipa-tory rhetoric of national independence and the traditional religious ven-eration for the figure of the mother as symbol of Mother India arebraided together to translate the brutal economic exploitation thatdelivers her into sexual slavery In paying off the loan that keepsDoulotirsquos father in bondage in exchange for lsquomarriagersquo to his daughterthe Brahmin procurer boasts that he is prompted solely by religious andnationalist egalitarian principles lsquoWe are all the offspring of the samemotherhellipMother IndiahellipHey you are all independent Indiarsquos free peo-plersquo (Devi 1995 41)

This slick translation between the languages of different value sys-tems or conceptual schemes indicates their commensurability Indeedin Devirsquos stories generally it is the ease of translatability between theresidual religious order of things and Western secular materialism thatfacilitates the transposition of democratic ideology into new mecha-nisms of oppression It is the powerless poor who lack the means tooperate across different systems Douloti lacks the knowledge to per-ceive the interconnections between the larger economic world and herparticular suffering She has literally no alternative but to understandthe horror and pain of her life as somehow inevitable and unchange-

able lsquoThe boss has made them land He plows and plows their bodiesrsquoland and raises a crophellipWhy should Douloti be afraid She has under-stood now that this is naturalrsquo (Devi 1995 60ndash1) The world of thetribals within Devirsquos fiction as without is one of mass exploitation andvictimisation but it is not represented as a world hermetically sealedinto a passive fatalism In lsquoDouloti the Bountifulrsquo Douloti has an uncleBono who escapes the enclosure of a life already determined by geo-graphical and caste position at birth He declares lsquoI donrsquot hold withwork fixed by birthrsquo (Devi 1995 23) His refusal to accept bondageappears to make no difference to village existence Yet the story of Bonochanges the known reality it fractures the perceived closure of anenslaved social existence and institutes a new collective knowledge

The villagers themselves did not talk about this but cutting wheat inMunibarrsquos fields they would look at each other and think We couldnot escape the masterrsquos clutches However one of us has Bono hasescaped

The women started up the harvest song whenever they remem-bered Bono

Down in the wheat field a yellow bird has comeO his beak is red

(Devi 1995 30)

Bono is subsequently heard of travelling in far market towns where helsquogets people together with his drum and tells stories as he singsrsquo (Devi1995 35) Bono becomes a political activist The story imagisticallybrings together his role as popular artist entertainer a story-teller andmusician with the potential for revolutionary violence He describes hiskilling of an oppressive boss lsquoIt was as if my two hands did a dancersquo(Devi 1995 26)

Bono does not save Douloti When she is first taken to the brothel atthe age of fourteen the regime there retains enough of traditionalrespect for hierarchy to allow favoured clients to keep particular womenfor their own exclusive use Douloti as a highly prized virgin wins suchfavour with Latia who keeps her for three years Even though Latiaprides himself on bestial displays of virility this system of patronage

protects the favoured prostitutes from further exploitation Howeverwhen a younger generation takes over the running of the brothel theold ways are thrown out for more efficient financial management thathas only one ethic the maximisation of profits lsquoThe women atRampiyarirsquos whorehouse were put in a system of twenty to thirty clientsby the clock Pick up your cash fastrsquo (Devi 1995 79ndash80) When theybecome diseased the women are thrown out to beg or die This is thefate of Douloti It is Independence Day and children have prepared forthe celebrations by drawing the outline of the map of India in the dustfilling it in with coloured liquid chalk Douloti trying to crawl back toher village collapses

Filling the entire Indian peninsula from the oceans to the Himalayashere lies bonded labor spread-eagled kamiya-whore DoulotiNagesiarsquos tormented corpse putrified with venereal disease havingvomited up all the blood in its dessicated lungs

(Devi 1995 93)

Devirsquos text has a postmodern awareness of the discursive construction ofsocial worlds especially the powerful mythology within Indian cultureof the sacred mother Her writing highlights the utilisation of religiousdiscourses to enclose women especially poor tribals within regulatorymechanism of subservience obedience and duty Yet there is an equallyuncompromising recognition that discourses are embodied Devirsquos real-ism insists relentlessly on the vulnerable materiality of bodies In herstories the boundaries of the physical body are broken dismemberedviolated erupt in disease and putrifaction This loss of wholeness ismapped onto the ubiquitous flow of money across all borders The finalshocking image of Douloti clearly enacts that translation from the par-ticular to the general that I have associated with realist fictionHowever it is certainly not the kind of shift that Gordimer representsin the consciousness of Mehring in The Conservationist whereby hetransposes individuals into comfortable stereotyped generalisation It isthis form of totalising knowledge and universalism that critics of theEnlightenment have condemned as instrumental and collusive withpower The uncompromising realism of Devirsquos language cuts across themystifying rhetoric that universalises the nation as one people of

Mother India to insist upon the open perishable bodies of all of its par-ticular subjects

Devirsquos stories eschew any authoritative narrative voice they are acomplex intertextuality of many voices Single sentences move throughdifferent value systems One ideological world is continually juxtaposedto another In this sense they are constructed upon the principle ofintersubjective communication As such they offer a caution againstHabermasrsquos rather uncritical advocacy of communicative reason Theexploitative characters in Devirsquos fiction have no difficulty in occupyingthe second person position of those they are addressing but the ratio-nality they bring to bear on this is wholly instrumental They exploittheir respondentrsquos perspective to further their own self-interest Yet it isof course the formal structure of Devirsquos prose that foregrounds this AsWolfgang Iser argues literary texts represent the linguistic conventionsof everyday discourse in such a way that the play of power in intercom-municative relations is thematised (Iser 1980 74) Devirsquos texts are con-structed entirely as an interweave of social voices They are of courseonly fictional voices that articulate relations of power and subserviencebut have no direct bearing on the non-fictional world What providesthe illocutionary force of the stories is their emancipatory project Theimplied conceptual or ideological given that which constitutes thegrounds of possibility for meaningful reading is a passionate commit-ment to universal ideals of justice and freedom It is only within thatconceptual scheme for evaluating human existence that the exploitationthat structures Devirsquos narratives can find definitional space to stand

In her Inaugural Andre Deutsch Lecture given on 22 June 2002Nadine Gordimer asserted that a writerrsquos lsquoawesome responsibilityrsquo totheir craft is that of witness (citations from an edited extract in TheGuardian 15 June 2002) She traces this sense of commitment to anincident in her youth when she watched a white intern suturing a blackminerrsquos gaping head wound without anaesthetic because lsquoThey donrsquotfeel like we dorsquo She argues that what literary witness writing achievesin distinction from documentary evidence and photographs is theimaginative fusion of the duality of the particular with the widerhuman implications Yet any overdue privileging of the formal andwriterly is rejected Gordimer claims it is the pressure of the reality thatthe writer struggles to bear witness to that imposes the form of the

work She quotes as her witness Albert Camusrsquos declaration lsquoThemoment when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writerrsquoCamus is correct in the widest sense no writer is ever just a writerRealism as a form is witness to that juncture between the experientialand the representational

Throughout this chapter I have drawn upon realist stories recentlywritten in many parts of the world There seems no better way of sub-stantiating the continued vitality and relevance of the realist genre in aglobal but highly differentiated geographical and social reality I havedealt mainly with novelistic prose largely through constraints of spaceHowever my definition of realism as performative and based upon aconsensual contract with the reader that communication about a non-textual reality is possible can apply equally to poetry and drama and toparts of texts that otherwise foreground textuality or fantasy It isimpossible to prove with mathematical certainty that when we talk orwrite about a real-world we are not in massive error or wholly enclosedwithin an ideological order of things It is however equally impossibleto prove beyond doubt the incommensurate relativity of separateworlds What is at stake is the possibility of community and the poten-tial to make new worlds This is the inherent utopianism of realism asart form

Aesthetic the Greek derivation of the word refers to things perceptibleby the senses The current usage pertains to the appreciation of the beau-tiful or the formal attributes arrangement and qualities of objects andworks of art rather than their utility or meaning

Anti-hhumanism see Humanism

Art ffor aartrsquos ssakelrsquoart ppour llrsquoart a movement initially associated with agroup of poets and novelists in mid-nineteenth century France who some-what polemically claimed that the only proper concern of the artist asartist is with the formal demands of their art They thus rejected anysocial or political role for art This prioritising of lrsquoart pour lrsquoart became aninfluential aesthetic ideal throughout Europe during the latter part of thenineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth

Capitalism in Marxist economic theory lsquocapitalrsquo refers to the fund orstock of money that finances industrial and commercial undertakingsCapitalism is thus the name given to a social and cultural formation orsocial system that is predominantly organised and structured by the use ofprivate wealth to own and control for profit-making the production anddistribution of goods and services

Classic realist given nineteenth-century novelistsrsquo rejection of classicalrules of decorum in art this is a rather paradoxical label used primarily torefer to nineteenth-century realist fiction It implies a paradigm or idealof realism as a coherent body of aesthetic principles that in practice noone novel ever complied with As a short-hand term it has some use inreferring to novels produced while a positive view of human knowledgeand communication prevailed

Closure as a critical term this refers to the resolution of problems mys-tery uncertainty so as to produce a sense of comprehensively known mean-ing to a text to a character a theme and to words See also Totalising

Conceptual sscheme an intellectual or abstract system of understandingthat has a self-contained unity of meaning or intelligibility

G L O S S A R Y

Dialogic the term derives from the work of Russian linguist and criticMikhail Bakhtin Bakhtin uses it to suggest that words in use have to beunderstood as always engaged in lsquodialoguersquo with other words words inpractice whether written spoken or only thought are necessarily embed-ded in social contexts This social existence of words entails that they arealways freighted with echoes and intonations of their meanings in previ-ous usage while at the same time any speakerrsquos present intentionalmeaning will be influenced by the expected response their words willelicit

Diffeacuterance a term coined by Jacques Derrida to bring together thenotions of deferral and difference as constitutive of language The wordlsquodiffeacuterancersquo demonstrates graphically Derridarsquos claim that writing is not asupplement of speech in that only the written form can make the differ-ence and oscillation or deferral of denoted meaning apparent For aFrench speaker there is no distinction in sound between diffeacuterence anddiffeacuterance

Discursive nnetwork a discourse is usually taken to denote a socially andhistorically situated use of language which is sustained and demarcatedby shared vocabulary assumptions values and interests as for example amedical or legal discourse A discursive network thus denotes an intercon-nected system of different discourses that nevertheless share or produce acommon area of perceived knowledge For example we might understandthe cultural perception of lsquodelinquencyrsquo as produced by a discursive net-work that would include journalistic discourse academic sociological dis-course political discourse moral and religious discourse and novelisticdiscourse

Empiricism an approach to knowledge that rejects metaphysics purelyabstract thinking and idealism Empirical knowledge is that acquiredthrough sensory observation and experimentation British empiricism isassociated with the philosophical tradition that includes Francis Bacon(1561ndash1626) Thomas Hobbes (1588ndash1679) John Locke (1632ndash1704) andDavid Hume (1711ndash76)

Enlightenment sometimes called Age of Reason it is the era of the eigh-teenth century characterised by the intellectual espousal of progressiveideals of liberty justice and democracy and an emphasis on rationalmoral and scientific improvement of human existence Religious mystery

glossary164

and all forms of superstitious belief were displaced in favour of empiricistnaturalist and materialist understanding of the world

Episteme a term associated with the work of Michel Foucault and usedto refer to a fundamental underlying structure or set of rules that producesthe entire lived and known reality the discourses and practices of any par-ticular epistemic era of history In that sense an episteme constitutes acultural totality See also Conceptual sscheme Totalising

Epistemology the branch of philosophy that deals with the naturesource reliability and scope of knowledge

Fascism the principles system of thought and organisation of authori-tarian nationalistic movements Fascism was first instituted as a politicalmovement in Italy in the early part of the twentieth century whence itspread to Germany The term is currently used more loosely to denote anyextreme right-wing authoritarianism

Focalisation a critical term used by Geacuterard Genette to denote the aspectof narrative that orders the perspective from which events and charactersare perceived by the reader At times a story may be focalised through theviewpoint of one particular character while at other times the narrator con-trols the viewpoint What is important to grasp is that focalising can bequite separate from the voice that narrates

Formalism as a critical term formalism refers to an approach to verbaland visual art that concentrates upon the form structures and techniquesof the work rather than its subject matter meaning or historical context

Free indirect discoursespeech a literary critical term that refers to pas-sages of narration in which aspects of a characterrsquos language in terms ofvocabulary tone of voice values and perspectives invade the third per-son narrative discourse but are not separated out or distinguished bymeans of inverted commas as in direct character speech Bakhtin refersto this kind of writing as lsquodouble-voiced discoursersquo in that two differentsocial voices usually a characterrsquos and a narratorrsquos co-exist in the samepassage

Functionalism an understanding interpretation or valuation of things interms of the functions they fulfil

glossary 165

Grand narratives a term used by Jean-Franccedilois Lyotard to refer to cul-tural narratives such as those that order and legitimise scientific notionsof knowledge and political ideals of justice progress and liberty Lyotardargues that two grand narratives predominate an Enlightenment narra-tive of human emancipation from the bondage of ignorance and oppres-sion and a more philosophical narrative concerned with the evolution ofa self-conscious human subjectivity or spirit By terming them lsquonarra-tivesrsquo Lyotard points up their cultural fabrication

Humanism a term used initially to characterise the intellectual cultureof Renaissance Europe Contrary to the God-centred fatalistic medievalview of existence Renaissance scholars and artists responded optimisti-cally to human achievement in arts and sciences and celebrated thehuman potential to ever increase rational knowledge of the world andhuman nature In general terms lsquohumanismrsquo refers to a secular under-standing of humanity that emphasises peoplersquos rational understandingagency and progressive capacities Anti-hhumanism rejects this human-centred optimism and perceives human beings as lacking autonomy self-knowledge and objective understanding of the world Current versions ofanti-humanism stem from structuralist and poststructuralist perceptionsthat lsquorealityrsquo as we experience it is wholly determined without any humanindividual intervention by the pre-existing impersonal orders of languageand culture

Illocutionary aacts a term used by speech-act philosopher and theorist J Austin (1911ndash1960) to refer to the performative aspect of speech orutterances for example a warning a promise or an order In contrast to aphilosophical concern with how words mean Austen directs attention totheir lsquoillocutionary forcersquo the effect they produce in the world

Implied rreader the kind of reader that the text itself seems to assume inthe language register deployed in the values that are taken for granted indirect addresses to such a reader and in the handling of perspective andpoint of view In the strong sense of this texts can be thought of as callingthe reader into being in the act of complying with the textual attributeslisted above we unconsciously align ourselves with the kind of reader thetext requires or implies

Incommensurate wworlds material andor mental realities that share nocommon measure or standard of likeness in any degree or part

glossary166

Langue a term used by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure(1857ndash1913) to refer to language as an overall system of meaning as itexists at any single moment of time or synchronically lsquoLanguersquo in thissense approximates to the rather abstract notion of lsquohuman languagersquo or atotal perception of a national language like English Contrasting to this islanguage as it occurs throughout history ndash diachronically ndash in actual utter-ances that people speak or write The multiple and infinitely diverse utter-ances speech in actuality Saussure terms parole His scientific projectnever fulfilled was to understand how the finite system of lsquolanguersquo couldproduce the endless proliferation of parole

Literary ffield French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu uses this term to des-ignate the cultural space in which writers write It is a space structured byearlier traditions of different genres by the cultural values attached to dif-ferent forms of writing by the amount of prestige awarded to the new orthe established forms and so on All writers have perforce to positionthemselves within this cultural space in terms of choices of what styleform and genre they adopt

Marxism the political and economic theories of Karl Marx (1818ndash83) andtheir subsequent development by later Marxist thinkers Marx wasopposed to all forms of idealism expounding a materialist understandingof history and culture as determined by the prevailing mode of productionat any historical time His economic theories are grounded upon the ulti-mate contradiction of capitalism to labour

Mimesis a critical term deriving from Greek drama to refer to the dra-matic imitation of words and actions by actors In current usage it refersto the representation of the real world in visual and verbal art

Modernism a European phase of innovative and experimental art andthought occuring at the end of the nineteenth century and approximatelythe first three decades of the twentieth century It was largely characterisedby a rejection of the artistic social and moral conventions and values of aprevious generation

Narratology the study of the rules of combination and sequence thestructures and the formal conventions that produce narratives of all kinds

Narrator the voice that tells the story in either the first or third person

glossary 167

An omniscient nnarrator is one that has knowledge of all events in the storyand access to the thoughts and feelings of all characters

Naturalism an artistic approach and literary and artistic movement usuallyassociated with the declared aims of Emile Zola (1840ndash1902) and the criticaland historical writing of French scholar Hyppolite Taine (1828ndash93) The cen-tral emphasis is on the force of biological determinism and heredity uponhuman life and society Their critics often accuse naturalist writers and artistsof undue concern with the most degrading and bestial aspects of existence

Negative ccritique a cultural and artistic analysis that places value uponthe ability of a literary work to reveal oppressive and authoritarian ele-ments in the existing social formation or in the prevailing perception ofwhat constitutes social reality

New HHistoricism a historicised approach to writing strongly influencedby the work of Michel Foucault Typically New Historicists do not privilegeliterary texts above other textual forms literary texts are read as participat-ing in discursive networks that sustain and expand structures of powerSee also discursive nnetwork

Objective see Relative ttruth

Paradigm a mode of viewing the world or a model of reality which

underlies scientific and philosophical theories at a particular moment of

history See also conceptual sscheme

Parole see Langue

Particular pertaining to a single definite thing person or set of things asopposed to any other Particular things are the opposite of universalswhich denote classes or groups of things in general For example Stalin asan actual historical person was a particular instance of a universal classwe designate lsquotyrantsrsquo or lsquodictatorsrsquo

Positivism a philosophical system elaborated by Auguste Comte(1798ndash1857) rejecting all metaphysical systems of belief and accepting ashuman knowledge only positive facts established by means of empiricalobservation As a general scientific and philosophical outlook in the

glossary168

nineteenth century positivism was characterised by an optimistic confi-dence in an empirical approach to the world See also Empiricism

Postmodernism a term first emerging in American cultural analysis in the1970s to suggest a new historical social formation to that which had charac-terised the modernity of cultural and social reality from the Renaissanceonwards The postmodern world is theorised as transnational empty of anyessential or stabilised meaning and constituted by global markets and con-sumerism Within postmodernism the humanist confidence in progress andagency and a realist belief in the communicability of experience gives way tothe pessimism of anti-humanism and anti-realism See also Humanism

Readerly a translation of Roland Barthesrsquo term lsquolisiblersquo which translatesliterally as legible Barthes maintains that readerly texts offer themselvesto be passively consumed by their readers in so far as they challenge noconventional assumptions either in their use of artistic form or in theirhandling of subject matter See also Writerly

Relative ttruth a notion of veracity that makes no absolute claims tobeing universally true for all cases and all time but holds that truth willvary according to culture and even from individual to individual Objectivetruth by contrast claims to assert what is in fact the case independent ofany relative cultural or personal circumstances Subjective ttruth is thatwhich is believed to be and experienced as true by the individual claimantin the strong sense of limiting truth entirely to individual subjectivity thisis referred to as lsquosolipsismrsquo

Romance a narrative form developed initially in the Romance lan-guages during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in English from thefourteenth century Romance narratives are peopled by nobly born heroesand heroines as well as by magicians and mythical creatures Adventurestake place in unreal landscapes and plots are structured by the marvellousand mystical and celebrate chivalrous ideals

Romanticism a European artistic movement occurring roughly between1770 and 1850 characterised by a strong reaction against Enlightenmentrationalism and hence concerned with the lsquotruthsrsquo of the individual imagi-nation intuition sensibility and affections

glossary 169

Self-rreflexive this term brings together the notion of a mirror reflectionwith the intellectual notion of reflecting as thinking to suggest the capacityto critically overview the self whether that self be an individual or a cul-ture or a creative practice

Sign any visual or aural entity that stands for something else and isinterpreted in this way by an individual or social group a red flag is a signfor danger in many western societies an individual may have their owngood luck sign and words of a language constitute one of the most com-plex sign systems

Socialist rrealism the form of realism officially adopted at the Congressof Soviet Writers in 1934 as approved by Stalin This doctrine decreed thatart should be realistic and optimistic showing the proletariat as heroicand idealistic in plot structures that led to positive outcomesExperimental art was denigrated as decadent and bourgeois

Subjective see Relative ttruth

Textuality as used in current theoretical discourse this term bringstogether the original notion of lsquotextrsquo as the actual words of a written orspoken utterance with the notion of lsquotexturersquo to focus upon the materialityof words This emphasis displaces lsquomeaningrsquo as an original idea in themind of the author to the endless process of producing meaning per-formed by the interweaving of the words themselves

Totalising this term is used in current theoretical discourse to suggestan imposed conceptual unity and completeness which ignores or disal-lows actual existing diversity and non-conclusiveness see also ClosureConceptual sscheme

Verisimilitude having the appearance of being real a likeness or resem-blance to reality Compared to mimesis verisimilitude implies a weakernotion of exactitude or correspondence and in that way can encompass awider range of effects within an art work as convincingly life-like or plausi-ble for example the singing of a love-song at a tender moment in a film

Writerly a translation of Barthesrsquo term scriptible a text which the readermust work to produce or lsquowritersquo Such a text resists lsquoclosurersquo or confine-ment to a unitary meaning See Textuality

glossary170

While all the texts cited in this book and listed in the Bibliography are ofrelevance to those studying realism the following provide useful startingpoints to some of the main aspects dealt with in the various chapters

Founding criticism of literary realism

Aesthetic and Politics Debates between Bloch Lukaacuteks Brecht BenjaminAdorno (1980) translation editor Ronald Taylor London Verso[This contains the main essays and responses that articulated thecontroversy over realism versus experimentalism]

Auerbach Erich [1946] (1953) Mimesis The Representation of Reality inWestern Literature translated by Willard T Trask PrincetonPrinceton University Press [A brilliant book this is essential read-ing for any serious study of realism]

Lucaacuteks Georg [1937] (1969) The Historical Novel translated by Hannahand Stanley Mitchell Harmondsworth Penguin [Both of Lukaacutecsrsquoworks listed here are still the best historicised account of literaryrealism and indispensable reading]

mdashmdash [1948] (1972) Studies in European Realism A Sociological Survey ofthe Writings of Balzac Stendhal Zola Gorky and Others translatedby Edith Bone London Merlin Press

Levin Harry (1963) The Gates of Horn A Study of Five French RealistsNew York and Oxford Oxford University Press [The first chaptersprovide an excellent general discussion of the development of nine-teenth-century realism]

Stern J P (1973) On Realism London Routledge and Kegan Paul [Attimes this is a difficult book but full of brilliant insights]

More recent defences of realist writing

Levine George (1981) The Realist Imagination English Fiction fromlsquoFrankensteinrsquo to lsquoLady Chatterleyrsquo Chicago Chicago UniversityPress [The book argues that nineteenth-century writers far fromclaiming to offer readers a one-to-one correspondence were fullyaware of the contested nature of reality]

S U G G E S T I O N S F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

Shaw Harry E (1999) Narrating Reality Austen Scott Eliot Ithaca NewYork Cornell University Press [This argues for the need to movebeyond the current poststructural lsquoaesthetics of suspicionrsquo andinvokes Habermas in the project of re-asserting the credentials ofrealist writing]

Reader response approaches to literary realism

Furst Lilian R (1995) All is True The Claims and Strategies of RealistFiction Durham Duke University Press

Rifaterre Michael (1990) Fictional Truth Baltimore and London JohnsHopkins University Press

Formalist approaches to narrative

Gennette Gerard (1980) Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method trans-lated by Jane Lewin Ithaca New York Cornell University Press [Adetailed analysis of narrative form based upon extended analyses ofMarcel Proustrsquos novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913ndash27)]

Rimmon-Kenan Shlomith (1983) Narrative Fiction Contemporary PoeticsLondon and New York Methuen [A succinct and comprehensiveaccount of formal and structuralist approaches to narrative]

Realism in the visual arts

Nochlin Linda (1971) Realism Harmondsworth Penguin [Provides a veryreadable and incisive account of realism in visual art]

Roberts John (1998) The Art of Interruption Realism Photography andthe Everyday Manchester Manchester University Press [A ratherdifficult but stimulating book]

Anthologies and collections of essays on literary realism

Becker George (ed) (1963) Documents of Modern Literary RealismPrinceton Princeton University Press [Very comprehensive cover-age including American and European sources]

Furst Lilian R (ed) (1992) Realism London and New York Longman[Contains structuralist and postmodern views as well as commen-tary by Balzac Dickens George Eliot and Lukaacutecs]

suggestions for further reading172

Hemmings F W J (ed) (1974) The Age of Realism HarmondsworthPenguin [A collection of essays on realism as practised in manycountries with a useful historical introduction]

suggestions for further reading 173

Adorno Theodor W [1967] (1983) Prisms translated by Samuel and Shierry WeberCambridge Massachusetts Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Adorno Theodor W and Horkheimer Max [1944] (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenmenttranslated by John Cumming London Verso

Aristotle [350BC] (1963) Poetics translated by John Warrington London DentArmstrong Nancy (1999) Fiction in the Age of Photography The Legacy of British

Realism Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University PressAshcroft Bill et al (1989) The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in

Postcolonial Literature London RoutledgeAuerbach Erich [1946] (1953) Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western

Literature translated by Willard R Trask Princeton Princeton UniversityPress

Austen Jane [1818] (1990) Persuasion Oxford Oxford University PressAzim Firdous (1993) The Colonial Rise of the Novel London RoutledgeBakhtin Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays translated by Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist Austin University of Texas PressBalzac Honoreacute de [1842] (1981) lsquoThe Human Comedyrsquo translated by Petra

Morrison in Arnold Kettle (ed) The Nineteenth-Century Novel CriticalEssays and Documents London Heinemann

mdashmdash [1846] (1965) Cousin Bette translated by Marion Ayton CrawfordHarmondsworth Penguin

Barthes Roland [1953] (1967) Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiologytranslated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith London Jonathan Cape

mdashmdash (1960) lsquoThe Reality Effectrsquo in Tzvetan Todorov French Literary Theory trans-lated by R Carter Cambridge Cambridge University Press

mdashmdash [1973] (1990) SZ translated by Richard Miller Oxford Blackwellmdashmdash (1977) lsquoIntroduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrativesrsquo in Image Music

Text translated by Stephen Heath London FontanaBecker George J (ed) (1963) Documents of Modern Literary Realism Princeton

Princeton University PressBeer Gillian (1983) Darwinrsquos Plots Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin George Eliot

and Nineteenth-Century Fiction London Routledge and Kegan PaulBenjamin Walter [1955] (1999) lsquoThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproductionrsquo in Illuminations translated by Harry Zohn London Pimlicomdashmdash [1955ndash71] (1983) Charles Baudelaire A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism

translated by Harry Zohn London VersoBourdieu Pierre (1996) The Rules of Art Genesis and Structure of the Literary

Field translated by Susan Emanuel Cambridge Polity Press

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Brecht Berthold (1977) lsquoBrecht against Lukaacutecsrsquo translated by Ronald Taylor inRonald Taylor (ed) Aesthetics and Politics London Verso

Bronteuml Charlotte [1853] (2000) Villette Oxford Oxford University PressBrooker Peter (ed) (1992) ModernismPostmodernism Harlow Essex LongmanBudgen Frank (1989) James Joyce and the Making of lsquoUlyssesrsquo and other writing

Oxford Oxford University PressCarter Angela (1984) Nights at the Circus London PicadorChapman Seymour (1978) Story and Discourse Ithaca New York Cornell

University PressCohn Dorrit (1978) Transparent Minds Narrative Modes Presenting Consciousness

in Fiction Princeton New Jersey Princeton University PressConrad Joseph [1897] (1988) The Nigger of the lsquoNarcissusrsquo Harmondsworth

PenguinCuller Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics Structuralist Linguistics and the Study

of Literature London Routledge and Kegan PaulCurrie Mark (1998) Postmodern Narrative Theory Houndsmills Basingstoke

MacmillanDasenbrock Reed Way (1993) (ed) Literary Theory after Davidson Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania State University PressDavidson Donald (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation Oxford

ClarendonDavidson Donald (1986) lsquoA Nice Derangement of Epitaphsrsquo in Ernest LePore (ed)

Truth and Interpretation Perspectives on the Philosophy of DonaldDavidson Oxford Blackwell

Davies Tony (1997) Humanism London RoutledgeDay Aidan (1996) Romanticism London RoutledgeDerrida Jaques [1967] (1976) Of Grammatology translated by Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak Baltimore Johns Hopkins University PressDerrida Jaques [1967] (1978) Writing and Difference translated by Alan Bass

London RoutledgeDevi Mahasweta (1995) Imaginary Maps Three Stories translated by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak London RoutledgeDickens Charles [1837ndash8] (1982) Oliver Twist Oxford Oxford University Pressmdashmdash [1836ndash7] (1995) Sketches by Boz Harmondsworth Penguinmdashmdash [1852ndash3] (1996) Bleak House Oxford Oxford University Pressmdashmdash [1854] (1989) Hard Times Oxford Oxford University Pressmdashmdash [1860ndash1] (1965) Great Expectations Harmondsworth PenguinDimond Frances and Taylor Roger (eds) (1987) Crown and Camera The Royal

Family and Photography Harmondsworth PenguinEjxenbaum Boris [1927] (1971) lsquoThe Theory of the Formal Methodrsquo reprinted in

Ladislav Matejka and Krystna Pomorska (eds) Readings in Russian PoeticsFormalist and Structuralist Views Cambridge Massachusetts MassachusettsInstitute of Technology

bibliography 175

Eliot George [1859] (1980) Adam Bede Harmondsworrth Penguinmdashmdash [1871ndash2] (1994) Middlemarch Harmondsworth Penguinmdashmdash [1874ndash6] (1988) Daniel Deronda Oxford Oxford University PressEvans Henry Sutherland (1853) lsquoBalzac and his Writings Translations of French

Novelsrsquo Westminster Review 4 new series 202Fish Stanley (1981) lsquoWhy no onersquos afraid of Wolfgang Iserrsquo Diacritics 11 7Flaubert Gustave [1857] (1950) Madame Bovary translated by Alan Russell

Harmondsworth Penguinmdashmdash [1857] (1961) Three Tales translated by Robert Baldick Harmondsworth

PenguinForster John (1892) The Life of Charles Dickens London Chapman and HallFoucault Michel [1961] (1965) Madness and Civilisation translated by Richard

Howard London Random Housemdashmdash [1963] (1979) Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Clinic translated by Alan

Sheridan Harmondsworth Penguinmdashmdash [1969] (1973) The Archaeology of Knowledge translated by Alan Sheridan

London Tavistock Publicationsmdashmdash [1976] (1981) The History of Sexuality An Introduction translated by Robert

Hurley Harmondsworth PenguinFraserrsquos Magazine (unattributed essay) (1851) lsquoWM Thackeray and Arthur

Pendennis Esquiresrsquo Fraserrsquos Magazine (43) 86Gallagher Catherine (1985) The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction Social

Discourse and Narrative Form 1832ndash1867 Chicago Chicago UniversityPress

Gennette Gerard [1972] (1980) Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method trans-lated by Jane E Lewin Ithaca New York Cornell University Press

Gilbert Sandra M and Gubar Susan (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic TheWoman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination NewHaven Yale University Press

Gissing George (1898) Charles Dickens A Critical Study London Blackie and SonGordimer Nadine (1978) The Conservationist Harmondsworth PenguinGorman David (1993) lsquoDavidson and Dunnett on Language and Interpretationrsquo in

Reed Way Dasenbrock (ed) Literary Theory after Davidson PennsylvaniaPennsylvania State University Press

Graham Kenneth (1965) English Criticism of the Novel 1865ndash1900 OxfordClarendon Press

Greimas A J (1971) lsquoNarrative Grammar Units and Levelsrsquo Modern LanguageNotes 86 793ndash806

Habermas Juumlrgen (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity TwelveLectures translated by Frederick Lawrence Oxford Polity Press

Hardy Thomas [1891] (1988) Tess of the DrsquoUrbervilles Oxford Oxford UniversityPress

Harvey David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity An Enquiry into the Originsof Cultural Change Oxford Blackwell

bibliography176

mdashmdash (1996) Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference Oxford Blackwellmdashmdash (2000) Spaces of Hope Edinburgh Edinburgh University PressHemmings Frederick W J (1953) Emile Zola Oxford Oxford University PressHobsbawn Eric J (1975a) The Age of Revolution 1789ndash1848 London Weidenfeld

and Nicolsonmdashmdash (1975b) The Age of Capital 1848ndash1875 London Weidenfeld and NicolsonHolub Robert C (1984) Reception Theory A Critical Introduction London

MethuenHomans Margaret (1995) lsquoVictoriarsquos Sovereign Obedience Portraits of the Queen

as Wife and Motherrsquo in Carol T Christ and John O Jordan (eds) VictorianLiterature and the Victorian Pictorial Imagination Berkeley University ofCalifornia Press

Iser Wolfgang [1976] (1980) The Act of Reading A Theory of Aesthetic ResponseBaltimore Johns Hopkins University Press

Jakobson Roman [1921] (1971) lsquoOn Realism in Artrsquo in Ladislav Matejka and KrystnaPomorska (eds) Readings in Russian Poetics Formalist and StructuralistViews Cambridge Massachusetts Massachusetts Institute of Technology

mdashmdash [1956] (1988) lsquoTwo Aspects of Language and Two Types of AphasicDisturbancesrsquo in David Lodge (ed) Modern Criticism and Theory A ReaderLondon Longman

mdashmdash (1960) lsquoClosing Statement Linguistics and Poeticsrsquo in Thomas A Sebeok (ed)Style in Language Cambridge Massachusetts Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology

Jakobson R and Halle M (1956) Fundamentals of Language The Hague MoutonJameson Fredric (1998) The Cultural Turn Selected Writings on the Postmodern

1983ndash1998 London VersoJames Henry [1894] (1987) lsquoThe Art of Fictionrsquo in Roger Gard (ed) The Critical

Muse Selected Literary Criticism Harmondsworth PenguinJames Henry (1914) Notes on Novelists and Some Other Notes London DentJauss Hans Robert (1982) Toward an Aesthetic of Reception translated by Timothy

Bahti Minneapolis University of Minnesota PressKeating Peter (1989) The Haunted Study London Fontana PressKuhn Thomas (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd edn Chicago

University of Chicago PressLeavis Frank R (1972) The Great Tradition Harmondsworth PenguinLevin Harry (1963) The Gates of Horn A Study of Five French Realists New York

and Oxford Oxford University PressLevine George (1981) The English Realist Imagination English Fiction from

Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly Chicago University of Chicago PressLewes GH (1858) lsquoRealism in Art Recent German Fictionrsquo Westminster Review

14 new series 494Lodge David (1972) (ed) Twentieth Century Literary Criticism A Reader London

Longman

bibliography 177

mdashmdash (1977) Modes of Modern Writing Metaphor Metonymy and the Typology ofModern Literature London Edward Arnold

mdashmdash (1988) Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader London LongmanLukaacutecs Georg [1914ndash15] (1978) The Theory of the Novel A Historico-Philosophical

Essay on the Form of Great Epic Literature translated by Anna BostockLondon Merlin Press

mdashmdash [1937] (1969) The Historical Novel translated by Hannah and Stanley MitchellHarmondsworth Penguin

mdashmdash [1948] (1972) Studies in European Realism A Sociological Survey of theWritings of Balzac Stendhal Zola Gorky and Others translated by EdithBone London Merlin Press

Lyotard Jean-Franccedilois [1979] (1984) The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi ManchesterManchester University Press

MacLaverty Bernard (1998) Grace Notes London VintageMan Paul de (1983) Blindness and Insight Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary

Criticism 2nd revised edn London MethuenMarx Karl [1852] (1954) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte London

Lawrence and WishartMiller D A (1988) The Novel and the Police Berkeley and Los Angeles University

of California PressMiller J Hillis (1971) lsquoThe Fiction of Realism Sketches by Boz Oliver Twist and

Cruikshankrsquos Illustrationsrsquo in Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (eds) DickensCentennial Essays Berkely University of California Press

Moi Toril (1985) Sexual Textual Politics Feminist Literary Theory LondonMethuen

Norris Christopher (1997) New Idols of the Cave On the Limits of Anti-RealismManchester Manchester University Press

Pinney Thomas (ed) (1963) Essays of George Eliot London Kegan PaulPlotz John (2000) The Crowd British Literature and Public Politics Berkeley and

Los Angeles University of California PressPoovey Mary (1995) Making a Social Body British Cultural Formation 1830ndash1864

Chicago University of Chicago Pressmdashmdash (1989) Uneven Developments The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-

Victorian England London Viragomdashmdash (1984) The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer Ideology as Style in the Works

of Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Shelley and Jane Austen Chicago ChicagoUniversity Press

Propp Vladimir [1929] (1971) rsquoFairy Tale Transformationsrsquo in Ladislav Matejka andKrystna Pomorska (eds) Readings in Russian Poetics Formalist andStructuralist Views Cambridge Massachusetts Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology

mdashmdash (1968) Morphology of the Folktale translated by L A Wagner Austin TexasUniversity of Texas Press

bibliography178

Proulx Annie (1993) The Shipping News London Fourth EstatePutnam Hilary (1990) Realism with a Human Face (ed) James Conant Cambridge

Massachusetts Harvard University PressRimmon-Kenan Shlomith (1983) Narrative Fiction Contemporary Poetics London

MethuenRobey David (1986) lsquoAnglo-American New Criticismrsquo in A Jefferson and D Robey

(eds) Modern Literary Theory 2nd edn London BatsfordRorty Richard (1991) Objectivity Relativism and Truth Philosophical Papers vol 1

and Essays on Heidegger and Others Philosophical Papers vol 2Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Said Edward (1984) The World the Text and the Critic London Faber and Fabermdashmdash (1994) Culture and Imperialism London VintageSaussure Ferdinand de [1916] (1983) Course in General Linguistics translated by

Roy Harris London DuckworthSelden Raman (1985) A Readerrsquos Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory Brighton

HarvesterShklovsky Victor [1917] (1988) lsquoArt as Techniquersquo reprinted in David Lodge (ed)

Modern Criticism and Theory A Reader London LongmanShowalter Elaine (1978) A Literature of Their Own London ViragoSpark Muriel (1965) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Harmondsworth PenguinSpencer Jane (1986) The Rise of the Woman Novelist From Aphra Behn to Jane

Austen Oxford BlackwellSpivak Gayari Chakravorty [1988] (1993) lsquoCan the Subaltern Speakrsquo in Patrick

Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-ColonialTheory A Reader Hemel Hempstead Harvester Wheatsheaf

mdashmdash (1988) In Other Worlds Essays in Cultural Politics London RoutledgeStang Richard (1959) The Theory of the Novel in England 1850ndash1870 London

Routedge and Kegan PaulStendhal Frederic de [1839] (1958) The Charterhouse of Parma translated by

Margaret R B Shaw Harmondsworth PenguinStevenson R L (1999) lsquoA Note on Realismrsquo and lsquoA Humble Remonstrancersquo in

Glenda Norquay (ed) R L Stevenson on Fiction An Anthology of Literaryand Critical Essays Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press

Stone Donald (1980) The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction CambridgeMassachusetts Harvard University Press

Strachey Ray [1928] (1978) The Cause A Short History of the Womenrsquos Movementin Great Britain London Virago

Taylor Ronald (ed and trans) (1980) Aesthetics and Politics Debates BetweenBloch Lukaacutecs Brecht Bejamin Adorno London Verso

Thackeray W M [1850] (1996) The Newcomes Memoirs of a Most RespectableFamily Ann Arbour University of Michegan Press

mdashmdash [1850] (1994) Pendennis Oxford Oxford University PressTombs Robert (1996) France 1814ndash1914 London Longman

bibliography 179

Watt Ian [1957] (1987) The Rise of the Novel Studies in Defoe Richardson andFielding London Hogarth Press

Williams Raymond (1965) The Long Revolution Harmondsworth Penguinmdashmdash (1974) The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence Frogmore St Albans

PaladinWittgenstein Ludwig [1933ndash35] (1972) The Blue and Brown Books Preliminary

Studies in lsquoPhilosophical Investigationsrsquo Oxford Blackwellmdashmdash [1945ndash49] (1972) Philosophical Investigations translated by G E M

Anscombe Oxford BlackwellWoolf Virginia [1924] (1967) lsquoMr Bennett and Mrs Brownrsquo in Collected Essays vol

1 London Hogarth Pressmdashmdash [1925] (1972) lsquoModern Fictionrsquo in Collected Essays vol 2 London Hogarth

Pressmdashmdash [1925] (1992) Mrs Dalloway Harmondsworth PenguinZola Emile [1885] (1954) Germinal translated by Leonard Tancock Harmondsworth

Penguin

bibliography180

Acadeacutemie franccedilaise 52 53Adam Bede (Eliot) 79ndash80Adorno Theodor 18 20 21 30 74 120

133Adorno Theodor and Horkheimer Max

Dialectic of Enlightenment 18 19132-3

aesthetics 2 9 10 127 163American New Criticism 97ndash8 120Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 3 81anti-humanism 24 166anti-realism 24 31 154Aristotle 50ndash1 Poetics 51ndash2 126ndash7Armstrong Nancy Realism in the Age

of Photograph 139ndash40 141art 19 20 67ndash8 88ndash9 idealism and

classical theories of 49ndash52art for artrsquos sake 16 52 67 90 163Ashcroft Bill 33Auerbach Erich 79 131 Mimesis 48 56

61 68 69 73Austen Jane 69 78 81 Persuasion 82ndash4Austin JL 123 149 166avant-garde art 75 126avant-garde writing 36 43

Bakhtin Mikhail 47ndash8 164 lsquoForms ofTime and of the Chronotope in theNovelrsquo 145

Balzac Honoreacute de 6 21 22 53 5559ndash63 66 67 68 70 74 88 90 115131 Cousin Bette 62 63 The HumanComedy 59 60ndash1 Sarrasine 34 37101 105 112 113

Barker Pat 43Barthes Roland 32ndash4 101 110 112ndash13

114 120 169 analysis of BalzacrsquosSarrasine 37 105 112 113 andcharacter effect 113 and code of

actions 105 106 108 lsquoIntroductionto Structuralist Analysis ofNarrativesrsquo 99ndash100 on readerly text32 on realist novels 32ndash3 lsquoTheReality Effectrsquo 101 SZ 101 105ndash6115 on writerly text 33ndash4

Baudelaire Charles 21ndash2 23 67Beckett Samuel 20Beer Gillian 91Benjamin Walter 21ndash3 44 74Bennett Arnold 16 17Bentham Jeremy 78Bernard Dr Claude 70binary oppositions 25ndash6 32 112Blake William 78Bleak House (Dickens) 85 137 138ndash9

141 155 156Bourdieu Pierre 49 67 167Braddon Mary Elizabeth Lady Audleyrsquos

Secret 81Brecht Bertholt 75 132 Mother

Courage 58British literary realism 76ndash84

contribution of women writers to81ndash4 debates on 87ndash91 distinctivetradition of 79ndash87 early developmentof 77ndash8 and narrative techniques84ndash6 Thomas Hardy andculmination of 91ndash4

Bronteuml Anne The Tenant of WildfellHall 81

Bronteuml Charlotte 84 88 Jane Eyre 8183 84 Villette 81 83 84

Bronteuml Emily Wuthering Heights 81

Camus Albert 162capitalism 10 13 18 32 163Carlyle Thomas 78

I N D E X

Carter Angela 31 Nights at the Circus28ndash9 30 33

character effect 113ndash18 119Charles X King 53Charterhouse of Parma The (Stendhal)

55 56ndash8Chartism 137Chaucer 6classic realism 33 74 163classicism 78closure 15 163code of actions 105 106 108Cohn Dorrit 115ndash16colonialism 33communication explosion 31communicative reason 149ndash55Comte Auguste 168 conceptual scheme 135 163Congress of Soviet Writers 100Conrad Joseph 13 17Conservationist The (Gordimer) 151ndash3

160conservatism 41consumerism 12 16 17 23contiguity 104 105 112 113Courbet Gustave 63ndash4 88Cousin Bette (Balzac) 62 63Culler Jonathan 113cultural code 105ndash6lsquocultural turnrsquo 26ndash7 135Currie Mark 100

Daniel Deronda (Eliot) 10ndash12 14 15 2021 24 25ndash6 28 29 34 79 88 89

Darwin Charles Origin of Species 69 91Davidson Donald 146 147ndash9 150 157Davies Tony Humanism 2defamiliarisation 125 126Defoe Daniel 77Derrida Jacques 34ndash7 38 164Descartes Reneacute 77Desnoyers Fernand lsquoDu Reacutealismersquo

article 64

Devi Mahasweta lsquoDouloti theBountifulrsquo 156ndash61

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno andHorkheimer) 18 19 132ndash3

dialogic 147 164dialogue 115Dickens Charles 16 21 22 38ndash9 79

80 85 86 91 117 131 Bleak House85 137 138ndash9 141 155 156 GreatExpectations 87 110ndash11 113 117121 122ndash4 Hard Times 1 OliverTwist 86ndash7 Our Mutual Friend 87137 Sketches by Boz 38ndash42 155

diffeacuterance 35 164discursive networks 137 164Dostoevsky Fydor 86 91lsquoDouloti the Bountifulrsquo (Devi) 156ndash61Dreyfus Captain 73

Einstein Albert 154Eliot George 16 20 32 78 80 81 87

88 115 Adam Bede 79ndash80 DanielDeronda 10ndash12 14 15 20 21 24 25ndash6

28 29 34 79 88 89 Middlemarch83 84 88 113ndash14 115 116ndash17 124

empirical effect 101ndash9 113 119empiricism 3 133 164Enlightenment 9 10 16 18 19 21 34

37 42 131 132 164ndash5 grandnarrative of 27 30 31 166

episteme 136 165epistemology 6 165experimentalism 42 43 75 120

fairy tales 100fascism 17 165feminist criticism 42Fenimore Cooper James 22 23Fielding Henry 77film as medium for metonymy 104Fish Stanley 120ndash22 125 126Flaubert Gustave 55 63ndash9 73 74 89

Madame Bovary 64ndash7 81 126focalisation 15 115 116 117 165

index182

formalism 74 90 97ndash8 120 165 seealso Russian Formalism

Foucault Michel 165 168 andknowledge as power 136ndash8

Frankfurt School 17ndash23 30 101 120 133free indirect speech 116ndash17 165French literary realism 47ndash75 features

55 and French history 52ndash5 futureof 74-5 idealism and classicaltheories of art 49ndash52 reacutealismecontroversy 63ndash9 88 see alsoBalzac Flaubert Stendhal Zola

French Revolution 53functional rationalism 18 19functionalism 18 165

Gallagher Catherine The IndustrialReformation of English Fiction 137138

Gaskell Elizabeth 78 81 Mary Barton138 North and South 81 83 Wivesand Daughters 81 83 84ndash5 87

Genette Geacuterard 165 NarrativeDiscourse 106ndash7 115 118

Germinal (Zola) 71ndash3 74Gissing George 88 89 91God of Small Things The (Roy) 43ndash4Goncourt Edmond and Jules de

Germinie Lacerteux 67ndash8Gordimer Nadine The Conservationist

151ndash3 160 Inaugural Andre DeutschLecture 161ndash2

Grace Notes (MacLaverty) 103ndash4 105106 109 111 112 117ndash18

grand narratives 27 166 andEnlightenment 27 30 31 166

Great Expectations (Dickens) 87110ndash12 113 117 121 122ndash4

Greek drama 5

Habermas Juumlrgen 19 30 125 149ndash51153ndash4 156 161

Hard Times (Dickens) 1Hardy Thomas 79 80 88 91ndash3 131

142ndash3 Jude the Obscure 91 Tess ofthe DrsquoUrbervilles 91 92ndash3 143 145

Harvey David 32 Spaces of Hope 144Hazlitt William 78hermeneutic code 110historical reality tension between

universal reality and 52horizon of expectation 125ndash8 149Horkheimer Max 18 19 132ndash3Hugo Victor Cromwell 52 60Human Comedy The (Balzac) 59 60ndash1humanism 31 166Humanism (Davies) 2Hume David 133

idealism 2ndash3 6 49ndash52 53 71 89identity textuality of 29illocutionary acts 123ndash4 166implied reader 67 119 122ndash5 155 166incommensurate worlds 135ndash6 166interpretive charity 148ndash9interpretive communities 121ndash2 126

145 148irony 48Iser Wolfgang 122ndash5 128 151 161

Jakobson Roman 39 99 112lsquoLinguistics and Poeticsrsquo 101 101ndash3lsquoOn Realism in Artrsquo 100 lsquoTwoAspects of Language and Two Typesof Aphasic Disturbancesrsquo 103

James Henry 59 61 88 89Jane Eyre (Bronteuml) 81 83 84Jauss Hans Robert 125ndash8 149Joyce James 48 Ulysses 13 17

Kafka Franz 20 86knowledge 10 12 14ndash15 18 31 150

crisis of 131ndash41 146Kuhn Thomas 135

language 24 27 147 148 and Derrida35 36 lsquoillocutionary forcersquo of speech

index 183

149ndash50 Jakobson on 101ndash3privileging of speech over writing34ndash5 147ndash8 and Saussure 25 135structural linguistics 25 26 38 99as a system of differences 25 33 35

langue 26 167Levin Harry 48 48ndash9 58 59 60 71 75Levine George 80ndash1 The English

Realist Imagination 80Lewes GH lsquoRealism in Artrsquo article

88ndash9lsquolinguistic turnrsquo 135linguistics 101ndash2 structural 25 26 38 99literary field 167Literature of Their Own A (Showalter)

42ndash3localism 145Locke John 48 80 86 133 Essay

concerning Human Understanding77

Lodge David 104logical positivism 18 133ndash4 146logocentrism 35ndash6Louis-Philippe King 53 60Lukaacutecs Georg 48 55 61 62 68 74 75

79 101 131Lyotard Jean-Franccedilois 30ndash1 166

MacLaverty Bernard Grace Notes103ndash4 105 106 109 111 112 117ndash18

Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 64ndash7 81126

Mallarmeacute Steacutephane 73Man Paul de 38Marx Karl 167Marxism 167Marxist literary criticism 62materialism 3 16 18metaphor 102 103 104 113 154metonymy 39 102 103ndash4 113Middlemarch (Eliot) 83 84 88 113ndash15

115 116ndash17 124milieu 61 62 70

Miller DA 137 138 The Novel and thePolice 139

Miller J Hillis 38 39ndash41mimesis 5 118 131 167modernism 13 68 74 120 167 critique

of realism 14ndash17 24 97 FrankfurtSchool and realism versus 17ndash23

Moi Toril Sexual Textual Politics 43morality 90Mrs Dalloway (Woolf) 14ndash15Mudiersquos Circulating Library 90

Napoleon I 53Napoleon III Emperor 54 64 67narrative 84ndash6 97 106ndash9 110 146narrative time 106ndash9narrative voice 115 116ndash17narratology 100 167narrator 167ndash8National Vigilance Association 90naturalism 70ndash1 89 168negative critique 168neo-classicism 52 76New Criticism 97ndash8 120 121 122New Historicism 136 137 138 155 168Newcomes (Thackeray) 85ndash6Nightingale Florence Cassandra 87Nights at the Circus (Carter) 28ndash9 30 33Norris Christopher 154North and South (Gaskell) 81 83novels 2 3ndash4 10 11 48 49 76 77ndash8

80 88 123 124 realist 3 4 5 6 1932ndash3 36 37 47 48 98 119 136 137144 151 see also individual titles

objective truth 169Oliver Twist (Dickens) 86ndash7omniscient narrator 168Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 87 137

parole 26 167Persuasion (Austen) 82ndash4photography 5 139ndash40 155

index184

Plato 50 51Plotz John 137Poe Edgar Allan 23poetic function 102ndash3poetics 127poetry Aristotle on 51ndash2 in France 49Poor Laws (1834) 78 155Poovey Mary 137positivism 127 168 logical 18 133ndash4

146postmodernism 13 28 68 91 169poststructuralism 13 26ndash9 30ndash4 41

43 98 120 121 123power knowledge as 136ndash8Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The (Spark)

107ndash9 111 112 115 128Proper Name 114Propp Vladimir 99ndash100Proulx Annie The Shipping News

143ndash4Proust Marcel 49 Remembrance of

Things Past 106lsquopsycho-narrationrsquo 115ndash16

rationality 132 133 150reader effect 119ndash28readerly 32 34 169reader(s) as interpretative writer of the

work 120ndash21 wandering viewpointand implied 122ndash5

realism deconstructing 34ndash44 defining2ndash6 9 44 defining achievements ofnineteenth-century 79

reacutealisme controversy 63ndash9 88reality effect 101relative truths 134ndash6 169relativity theory 154Richardson Samuel 77romance 48 77 89 169Romanticism 47 52 52ndash3 60 63 67

78 80 89 169Rorty Richard 146Roy Arundhati The God of Small

Things 43ndash4

Russell Bertrand 18 48 133Russian Formalism 97ndash8 99ndash101 120

121 125 128

Said Edward 33Saint-Hilaire 59Sarrasine (Balzac) 34 37 101 105 112

113Saussure Ferdinand de 25 33 35 99

135 167science 53 70 98 154Scott Walter 60 90self-reflexive 18 170semic code 113Shklovsky Victor 99Showalter Elaine A Literature of Their

Own 42ndash3signifiers 33 35signs 25 33 35 170Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 38ndash42 155socialist realism 100ndash1 170space realism and the politics of 142ndash7Spark Muriel The Prime of Miss Jean

Brodie 107ndash9 111 112 115 128speech lsquoillocutionary forcersquo of 149ndash50

privileging over writing 34ndash5 147ndash8speech-act theory 123 153Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty 33 156 157Stalin Joseph 100Stendhal Count Frederic de 53 55ndash9

61 68 74 The Charterhouse ofParma 55 56ndash8 Scarlet and Black 56

Stevenson Robert Louis 88 lsquoA HumbleRemonstrancersquo 89ndash90 lsquoA Note onRealismrsquo 89

story time 106Stowe Harriet Beecher Uncle Tomrsquos

Cabin 21structural linguistics 25 26 38 99structuralism 24ndash5 33 98 99ndash100subjective self 27subjective truth 169Swinburne Algernon Charles 4symbolic field 110 112

index 185

symbolism 113Symboliste movement 68synecdoche 102

Taine Hippolyte 68 70 168Tess of the DrsquoUrbervilles (Hardy) 91

92ndash3 143 145texttextuality 29 30 33ndash4 36 170Thackeray William 85 87 88

Newcomes 85ndash6 Preface ofPendennis 90ndash1

time narrative 106ndash7Tolstoy 99 Anna Karenina 3 81 War

and Peace 58totalising 19 170truth 10 34 35ndash6 150 169truth effect 109ndash13

Ulysses (Joyce) 13 17universalism 145utilitarianism 78 80

verisimilitude 5 20 21 37 100 119150 170

Vienna Circle 133

Villette (Bronteuml) 81 83 84Vinci Leonardo da 127Vizetelly 90

wandering viewpoint 123ndash5Watt Ian 80 The Rise of the Novel 48

77Westminster Review 88Williams Raymond 50 79 92Wittgenstein Ludwig 133 135 146ndash7Wives and Daughters (Gaskell) 81 83

84ndash5 87women writers 42ndash3 78 contribution to

development of British realism 81ndash4Woolf Virginia 17 40 43 lsquoModern

Fictionrsquo 16 lsquoMr Bennett and MrsBrownrsquo

16 Mrs Dalloway 14ndash15writerly texts 33 34 170Wuthering Heights (Bronteuml) 81

Zola Emile 49 55 69ndash74 89 90 91131 The Experimental Novel 70ndash1168 Germinal 71ndash3 74 Les Rougon-Macquart 71

index186

BOOK COVER

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel literaryrealism has traditionally been associated with an insistence that artcannot turn away from the harsher more sordid aspects of humanexistence However the fluid nature of the related concepts oflsquorealityrsquo and lsquothe realrsquo have led to realism becoming one of themost widely debated terms to be covered in this series

Realism offers an accessible account of literary realism as a dis-tinctive mode of writing setting out the defining attributes of thegenre and exploring the critical debates surrounding it illustratedthroughout with examples taken from a wide variety of prose fic-tion The book covers the historical development and artisticachievements of literary realism and presents a lucid argument forits continuing status as an innovative and challenging tradition ofwriting with rigorous exploration of the radical critique brought tobear on realist forms of representation during the twentieth cen-tury from the perspectives of modernism poststructuralism andpostmodernism

This comprehensive guide is essential reading for any student ofliterature and will prove indispensable for those with a particularinterest in the realist novel

Pam MMorris is Professor of Modern Critical Studies at LiverpoolJohn Moores University and has written extensively on nineteenth-century literature and culture She is the editor of The BakhtinReader (1994) and author of Literature and Feminism (1993) andImagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels TheCode of Sincerity in the Public Sphere (2004)

REALISM

Pam Morris

For Vicky

C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

contents viii

contents ix

introduction2

introduction 3

introduction4

introduction 5

introduction6

IREALISM VERSUS

EXPERIMENTALISM

(Woolf [1925] 1992 3)

POSTMODERNISM

(Carter 1984 7)

(Miller 1971 111)

IILITERARY REALISM

3LITERARY REALISM

(Aristotle 1963 8)

(Aristotle 196317)

(James 1914 87)

(Flaubert [1857] 1950 114ndash15)

(Zola [1885] 1954 22 27ndash8)

(II 9 Thackeray [1850] 1996 81)

(Hardy [1891] 1988 187ndash8)

FORMAL ART

5REALITY EFFECTS

reality effects 99

reality effects 101

reality effects 103

reality effects 105

reality effects 107

THE TRUTH EFFECT

reality effects 109

reality effects 111

reality effects 113

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 7)

reality effects 115

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 32)

reality effects 117

6THE READER EFFECT

OF KNOWLEDGE

8REALISM AND OTHER

POSSIBLE WORLDS

(Devi 1995 30)

(Devi 1995 93)

G L O S S A R Y

glossary164

glossary 165

glossary166

glossary 167

Parole see Langue

glossary168

glossary 169

glossary170

bibliography 175

bibliography176

Longman

bibliography 177

bibliography178

bibliography 179

Penguin

bibliography180

I N D E X

article 64

index182

Greek drama 5

index 183

115 116ndash17 124milieu 61 62 70

index184

Things 43ndash4

121 125 128

index 185

verisimilitude 5 20 21 37 100 119150 170

Vienna Circle 133

index186

BOOK COVER

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS

REALISM

Pam Morris

For Vicky

C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

contents viii

contents ix

introduction2

introduction 3

introduction4

introduction 5

introduction6

IREALISM VERSUS

EXPERIMENTALISM

(Woolf [1925] 1992 3)

POSTMODERNISM

(Carter 1984 7)

(Miller 1971 111)

IILITERARY REALISM

3LITERARY REALISM

(Aristotle 1963 8)

(Aristotle 196317)

(James 1914 87)

(Flaubert [1857] 1950 114ndash15)

(Zola [1885] 1954 22 27ndash8)

(II 9 Thackeray [1850] 1996 81)

(Hardy [1891] 1988 187ndash8)

FORMAL ART

5REALITY EFFECTS

reality effects 99

reality effects 101

reality effects 103

reality effects 105

reality effects 107

THE TRUTH EFFECT

reality effects 109

reality effects 111

reality effects 113

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 7)

reality effects 115

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 32)

reality effects 117

6THE READER EFFECT

OF KNOWLEDGE

8REALISM AND OTHER

POSSIBLE WORLDS

(Devi 1995 30)

(Devi 1995 93)

G L O S S A R Y

glossary164

glossary 165

glossary166

glossary 167

Parole see Langue

glossary168

glossary 169

glossary170

bibliography 175

bibliography176

Longman

bibliography 177

bibliography178

bibliography 179

Penguin

bibliography180

I N D E X

article 64

index182

Greek drama 5

index 183

115 116ndash17 124milieu 61 62 70

index184

Things 43ndash4

121 125 128

index 185

verisimilitude 5 20 21 37 100 119150 170

Vienna Circle 133

index186

BOOK COVER

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS

REALISM

Pam Morris

For Vicky

C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

contents viii

contents ix

introduction2

introduction 3

introduction4

introduction 5

introduction6

IREALISM VERSUS

EXPERIMENTALISM

(Woolf [1925] 1992 3)

POSTMODERNISM

(Carter 1984 7)

(Miller 1971 111)

IILITERARY REALISM

3LITERARY REALISM

(Aristotle 1963 8)

(Aristotle 196317)

(James 1914 87)

(Flaubert [1857] 1950 114ndash15)

(Zola [1885] 1954 22 27ndash8)

(II 9 Thackeray [1850] 1996 81)

(Hardy [1891] 1988 187ndash8)

FORMAL ART

5REALITY EFFECTS

reality effects 99

reality effects 101

reality effects 103

reality effects 105

reality effects 107

THE TRUTH EFFECT

reality effects 109

reality effects 111

reality effects 113

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 7)

reality effects 115

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 32)

reality effects 117

6THE READER EFFECT

OF KNOWLEDGE

8REALISM AND OTHER

POSSIBLE WORLDS

(Devi 1995 30)

(Devi 1995 93)

G L O S S A R Y

glossary164

glossary 165

glossary166

glossary 167

Parole see Langue

glossary168

glossary 169

glossary170

bibliography 175

bibliography176

Longman

bibliography 177

bibliography178

bibliography 179

Penguin

bibliography180

I N D E X

article 64

index182

Greek drama 5

index 183

115 116ndash17 124milieu 61 62 70

index184

Things 43ndash4

121 125 128

index 185

verisimilitude 5 20 21 37 100 119150 170

Vienna Circle 133

index186

BOOK COVER

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS

For Vicky

C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XI

contents viii

contents ix

introduction2

introduction 3

introduction4

introduction 5

introduction6

IREALISM VERSUS

EXPERIMENTALISM

(Woolf [1925] 1992 3)

POSTMODERNISM

(Carter 1984 7)

(Miller 1971 111)

IILITERARY REALISM

3LITERARY REALISM

(Aristotle 1963 8)

(Aristotle 196317)

(James 1914 87)

(Flaubert [1857] 1950 114ndash15)

(Zola [1885] 1954 22 27ndash8)

(II 9 Thackeray [1850] 1996 81)

(Hardy [1891] 1988 187ndash8)

FORMAL ART

5REALITY EFFECTS

reality effects 99

reality effects 101

reality effects 103

reality effects 105

reality effects 107

THE TRUTH EFFECT

reality effects 109

reality effects 111

reality effects 113

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 7)

reality effects 115

(Eliot [1871ndash2] 1994 32)

reality effects 117

6THE READER EFFECT

OF KNOWLEDGE

8REALISM AND OTHER

POSSIBLE WORLDS

(Devi 1995 30)

(Devi 1995 93)

G L O S S A R Y

glossary164

glossary 165

glossary166

glossary 167

Parole see Langue

glossary168

glossary 169

glossary170

bibliography 175

bibliography176

Longman

bibliography 177

bibliography178

bibliography 179

Penguin

bibliography180

I N D E X

article 64

index182

Greek drama 5

index 183

115 116ndash17 124milieu 61 62 70

index184

Things 43ndash4

121 125 128

index 185

verisimilitude 5 20 21 37 100 119150 170

Vienna Circle 133

index186

BOOK COVER

COPYRIGHT

CONTENTS