IS IT REAL?
Postmodernist Fiction, Realism,
and the Representation of
Reality
By Linda Darling
Copyright 2011 Linda Darling
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
ONE.
Realism and Beyond
CHAPTER
TWO.
Realism and Realisms
CHAPTER
THREE.
The Omniscient
Narrator and Other Voices
CHAPTER
FOUR.
Endings and
Non-Endings
CONCLUSION.
Histories and Stories
Realism has been inextricably linked with the form of the novel since the eighteenth century. The notion that the novel should portray a realistic and edifying situation that connects the work of art to the actual world and provides a window onto reality can be witnessed in the early English literary works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Realism as a literary movement took hold in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and it can be defined by a set of literary conventions which attempted to portray an elaborately constructed world of fiction to represent life in its most heightened and intricate details.
The notion that the novel should represent life in its highest complexity is by no means superseded. Indeed, the conventions of Realism are still prevalent as a point of reference for literary evaluation and criticism. This study attempts to investigate the development of the form of the novel and considers in what ways the literary conventions of Realism have been transcended and extended by Modernism and Postmodernism with a predominant focus on the latter. Postmodern fiction seems to have interesting affinities to the Realist tradition in its exploration of the techniques and assumptions intimately linked to classic realism. The classic realist text broke new ground in the genre and later novels either follow the model or consciously break away from it engaging in a different conception of realism to create multiple realities.
This study does not attempt to classify contemporary fiction, but rather engages in a thorough analysis in the attempt to determine and illustrate how post-war British fiction reworks and reinvents the literary conventions of the classic realist text to portray contemporary human experience.
The first chapter of this study considers in what modes the novel is associated with the representations of truth and reality and how this notion developed through time in the attempt to adapt literary conventions to an ever-changing reality. The second chapter explores the several techniques by which post-war British fiction approached the genre. Novelists either rejected or embraced Realism in the perpetual attempt to transpose reality into art. The same chapter also considers how the notion of realism is extended in the endeavour to portray not authoritative truths but multiple, shifting, and possibly distorted realities.
The novels discussed in this study all have one major aspect in common. Postmodern fiction has often been characterised by an attitude towards a crisis of representation. However, these novels do not particularly foreground this crisis; indeed, these novels may initially appear to be Realist texts. What these novels seem to unanimously assert is not that reality cannot be portrayed but rather that multiple realities and truths can be represented and thus they foreground one of the major postmodernist concerns that this reality is after all a construction.
History is fiction, and fiction is reality. The issues raised are addressed in the three concluding chapters that explore how classic literary conventions are undermined or put into question to foreground the postmodernist disaffection with universal truths, and to highlight the active role of the reader in interpreting the text.
Techniques of narration, characterisation, and narrative closure are discussed in relation to Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984), and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans (2000), and Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001). Finally, this study attempts to illustrate how these literary texts painstakingly convey the reality of human emotions and human experience, which in fact according to this approach marks them as real as the ineffability of reality itself.
We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that
is.
John Fowles
The debate on Realism, and the relations between art and life, is one which has prevailed since Plato and Aristotle. According to Plato, literature is a form of lying, because the artist's imitation of reality is but an imitation of an imitation, 'thrice removed from the truth'.[1]
The painter, or the poet, imitate reality without necessarily possessing thorough knowledge of its nature, and consequently hinder the citizen from what is moral or true. In the Republic, Plato is concerned with the notion of an ideal state and its production of the good citizen and its future guardians, rather than with aesthetics. Consequently, the development of the Realistic tradition is more affiliated to Aristotelian mimesis.
Like Plato, Aristotle classifies literature as an imitation. This imitation, however, is freed from its negative connotations in Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, the poet is primarily a creator not an imitator. He does not merely imitate reality, but creates a coherent and plausible world that reflects the real world. The poet, therefore, works 'according to the law of probability or necessity', to construct highly structured plots, which yield an insight into certain events or situations in real life.[2]
According to Aristotle, poetry is more scientific and serious than history, since poetry deals with universals and probabilities, whereas history is restricted to facts that actually happened, and thus fails to consider situations and events that are probable or necessary. Aristotle's thesis raises the notion that a 'probable impossibility' may reflect a higher truth on human nature.[3]
In Poetics, Aristotle counters Plato's contention that art as an imitation of an imitation corrupts the individual because 'it feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up'; instead, he insists that art purges the passions, and thereby instructs the individual.[4]
The concept of mimesis in art thus has deep roots. As M. H. Abrams points out, the 'mimetic orientation – the explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects in the universe – was probably the most primitive aesthetic theory'.[5] Indeed, the concern with the relationship between life and art is present to this very day.
The development of the novel in England is closely associated with realism. Daniel Defoe in his novels purported to provide autobiographical memoirs recounting the individual experiences of his characters. Walter Scott explored the causes and conditions of history, and is considered as the pioneer of the historical novel, while Jane Austen provided 'pictures of domestic life in country villages'.[6] Indeed, according to Ian Watt, the 'formal realism' of the eighteenth-century novel embodies the defining characteristic 'of the novel genre as a whole'.[7]
Nevertheless, Realism as a literary movement was first introduced in mid-nineteenth century France, and its doctrines were before long adopted by England and the rest of Europe.[8] The ideology of Realism was that art should portray 'things as they really are, in the sense of portraying objectively and concretely the observable details of actual life'.[9] Realism assumes that language is a transparent medium, which provides faithful representations of daily life that mirror external reality.
The concept of reality transmuted into art demanded verisimilitude and the delineation of 'man wholly into his physical setting'.[10] The novelist thus becomes a detached observer of contemporary society, who provides the reader with a transparent window onto reality. To the Victorian novelist, critic, and reader, the correspondence of fiction to actual life became the central aim of literary creation.
The ultimate aim of the realist author is to make the reader believe that what is being narrated is true, or has really happened; it reconstructs reality to give the semblance of the truth. The classic realist text thus purports to instruct the reader by providing a detailed representation of daily life and ordinary experience.
The classic realist text presupposes an omniscient author, who manipulates the plot and the characters as he or she desires. Authorial intrusions serve to guide the reader's moral response and put forward universal truths. In Middlemarch, George Eliot clearly states why the omniscient author is indispensable for the realist text:
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea – but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.[11]
George Eliot follows the stance to depict art as an attempt to interpret reality; she contends that if fiction should represent 'life in its highest complexity', the point of view in her novels should be multiple and shifting, seeing that any attempt to limit the representation of her characters to a single point of view would fatally simplify it.[12] Her aim in her novels was to focus on the ordinary lives of common people, and apart from the desire to portray a rounded character she had the moral aim of promoting sympathy by extending knowledge and experience. She had an allegiance to the truth; and as the omniscient narrator presented the multiple perspectives of her characters to provide the knowledge necessary to interpret reality.
The aim of nineteenth-century writers was thus 'to reproduce pictures that shall impress by their close and truthful resemblance to something or other in real nature or life'.[13] In Adam Bede, George Eliot affirms that one of the important requirements of the novel was to enact the faithful representation of external reality: 'my strongest effort is […] to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind'.
Nonetheless, she proceeds by acknowledging that 'The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed; the reflection faint or confused'.[14] It is significant that Eliot appears to deprecate the fact that some distortion of reality is inevitable when it is imitated in art, despite the claims of Realism to offer a transparent window onto reality.
Indeed, the precept of Realism as Alison Lee points out is in itself contradictory, because once reality is transformed into art, 'it ceases to be real and becomes instead an imaginative construct'.[15] Eliot herself acknowledges that artistic creation involves the selection and interpreting of actions and events, and thereby can only represent a partial truth: 'All the truths of nature cannot be given; hence a choice must be made of some facts which can be represented from amongst others which must be passed by in silence'.[16]
It appears then, that although Realists set out to undermine the artifice of fiction, and to evoke the illusion of reality, they were themselves consciously aware that this reality is in itself a construction. As George Levine points out, Realism in the nineteenth century 'was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality'.[17]
Nevertheless, Realist thought held the assumption that the role of the novelist was to be true to life and construct a comprehensible world in fiction. In the 'Art of Fiction', Henry James asserts that 'the air of reality', is the 'supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits […] helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life.'[18]
Indeed, the quest to convey the 'illusion of life' remained a concern with Modern writers, who shifted their concerns from objective realism to subjective realism. As Christopher Nash remarks, 'in a profound sense Realism and Modernism are devoted to the same end – the retrieval, the recovery of that ultimate reality'.[19]
The convictions of Realism did not perish with the advent of Modernism. F. R. Leavis, like the Victorians who preceded him, equated good art with good men. Indeed, the novelists who were worthy to be included in The Great Tradition are endowed by a 'vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity'.[20] Their novels are 'significant in terms of the human awareness they promote, awareness of the possibilities of life'.[21]
According to Leavis, great literature is synonymous with moral seriousness, which has the capacity to transform the reader into a better person. Leavis viewed literature as a moral teacher that is a vehicle for the truth, and he promoted several of the tenets of Realism in his literary career. Indeed, Leavis singles out the great achievement of Dickens' Hard Times in its portrayal of the 'unquestionably real'.[22]
For Georg Lukács, the classic realist text also retained its appeal, albeit for different reasons. Lukács held that the classic realist text in depicting events of ordinary experience and social conditions provides a vivid picture of the totality of a society and its development. Lukács contends that the 'literature of realism […] displays the contradictions within society and within the individual in the context of a dialectical unit'.[23]
Although Lukács conceded that the realist novel could only represent a partial image of society, he held that the value of the novel lies in its portraying as accurately as possible the nature of society in a historical period. For this reason, the modern novel held little appeal to him, claiming that the subjective nature of the modern novel is ahistorical and reflects the disorder of modern capitalism. For Lukács, the realist novel reflected reality in 'truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection', which revealed the underlying structures of society.[24]
Lukács's prescriptions for literature were countered by Bertolt Brecht, who argued that as society changes, reality changes, and the modes of representation must change accordingly. For Brecht, the methods and aims of representation are always changing in the pursuit to depict contemporary realities.
Leavis and Lukács both held the belief that Realism had the capacity to render a truthful reflection of reality. However, according to Roland Barthes, the concept that literature mirrors reality is merely an assumption encouraged by ingeniously applied literary conventions, which produce what he calls 'the reality effect'.[25] Barthes argues that the superfluous details that we encounter in realist novels construct the illusion of the real.
Realism, therefore, disguises its own artifice, by evoking the sense of the real through language. According to Barthes, the classic realist text is a readerly text in that it attempts to focus on the reader by conforming to the reader's expectations. The classic realist text thus creates the passive reader and restricts meaning to a rigid set of rules and conventions.
In S/Z, Barthes develops his argument further by engaging in a critical analysis of Balzac's novel Sassarine to show that realism does not reflect the real world, but is in fact employing codes of communication to evoke the illusion of reality. By applying his theory to a classic realist text, Barthes proved that Realism is not as transparent as it presents itself to be, and invites more interpretations than the one the author constructed for the reader.
Realism puts forward the assumption that what is depicted as real is somehow equated with the revelation of truth. Barthes challenges this assumption by showing that language is not transparent and what is presented as real is in fact highly constructed. As Catherine Belsey points out, Realism 'reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as true'.[26]
The notion that reality and truth are a construct, rather than an entity or an essence, is one of the major concerns of postmodern novels. Nineteenth-century fiction endorses the notion that reality is a commonly shared experience that can be shared between author and reader. Modernism challenged such a view, and moved from an objective representation of reality to individual perspectives of reality. Postmodern fiction was to go further, representing a world where 'reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures'.[27]
As Jean-François Lyotard aptly puts it, postmodern fiction is characterised by an 'incredulity toward metanarratives'.[28] Postmodern fiction rejects the notion of universal truths and plays with the possibilities of interpretations, multiple perspectives, uncertainties, and contradictions. The novel, therefore, does not profess to be a coherent whole, and subverts both the expectations of narrative closure and of the disclosures previously provided by the omniscient narrator. Christopher Norris suggests that:
The main point of post-modernist narratives is to challenge, subvert or paradoxically exploit the conventions in play when we make sense of texts. This involves a high-degree of self-conscious contrivance and, by implication, a manipulative stance outside and above the story-line flow of events. In this sense […] post-modernism carries along with it a strong 'meta-narrative' tendency which precisely undermines the naïve habit of trust in first-order 'natural' narration.[29]
Postmodern fiction is characterised by a strong metafictional impetus. As Linda Hutcheon remarks, 'metafiction is today recognized as a manifestation of postmodernism'.[30] Metafiction, as Hutcheon simply puts it, 'is fiction about fiction'.[31] Metafictional novels engage with the conventions of Realism in a contradictory manner, which ultimately works to overthrow the illusion of reality in their self-conscious narration.
Taking realist conventions as their point of departure, they proceed to parodic undermining in such a way that the search for the real and the true, the omniscient narrator, and the idea of closure, are all proved a literary device as any other. What metafiction sets out to do 'is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction'.[32]
Such writing overtly displays its conventions; it lays bare the illusion of reality and its artifice. Consequently, it foregrounds the problematic relationship between life, fiction, and the very existence of reality. It represents 'the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems'.[33] The metafictional novel, thus, creates the illusion of reality only to dismantle it, and in the process displays 'the fictionality of the fiction itself, and all that it's composed of'.[34]
Consequently, metafiction incorporates within it a level of familiarity that proceeds to innovation in a recognisable fictional form; it simultaneously fulfils and subverts the reader's expectations. As Patricia Waugh remarks, metafiction differs from experimental fiction because it 'offers both innovation and familiarity through the individual reworking and undermining of familiar conventions'.[35]
In Narcissistic Narrative, Hutcheon makes a distinction between 'mimesis of product' and 'mimesis of process'.[36] She contends that realistic fiction is restricted to product mimesis because it rejects the notion of a fictive improbable world that has the capacity to reflect the actual world. Indeed, she argues that Aristotle's conception of mimesis entailed the creation of an alternative world, which does not pretend to be real, but rather only simulates the real world.
Hutcheon suggests that contemporary self-conscious fiction seems to challenge this restricted view of mimesis by mirroring the conventions of Realism in what she calls 'a mimesis of process', which foregrounds the highly wrought conventions of that purporting to be real. Such novels do not reject Realism outright, but employ the conventions of Realism, while simultaneously seeking to undermine them: 'The novel no longer seeks just to provide an order and meaning to be recognized by the reader. It now demands that he be conscious of the work, the actual construction', of the work of art.[37] The reader is thus positioned in a contradictory position:
On the one hand, he is forced to acknowledge the artifice, the "art," of what he is reading; on the other, explicit demands are made upon him, as a co-creator, for intellectual and affective responses comparable in scope and intensity to those of his life experience. In fact, these responses are shown to be part of his life experience. In this light metafiction is less a departure from the mimetic novelistic tradition than a reworking of it.[38]
As Nash aptly puts it, 'the mirror now becomes its own counter-reflection – the sign of the inadequacy of mimesis itself'.[39] And as Waugh remarks, 'there may be as much to be learnt from setting the mirror of art up to its own linguistic or representational structures as from directly setting it up to a hypothetical "human nature" that somehow exists as an essence outside historical systems of articulation'.[40]
Contemporary authors seem to unanimously assert that 'totalistic perspectives could not hold'.[41] The Realism of the nineteenth-century novels is no longer viable to represent contemporary reality, and contemporary fiction thus explores and re-invents the novel form to discover other possible realities, creating 'worlds as real as, but other than the world that is'.[42]
The reader no longer engages in what Barthes calls the readerly text but is now confronted with a writerly text, that makes 'him or her aware of possible alternatives to this "commonsense" reality'.[43] In the following chapter, we will begin to examine how postmodern fiction sets about to explore the possibilities of creating these alternative worlds, which manifest the authors' desire to represent contemporary reality while being consciously aware of the hindrances such a task entails.
________________________
[1] Plato, Republic, cited in David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 1956), p. 16.
[2] Aristotle, Poetics, cited in Critical Approaches (see Plato, above), p. 37.
[3] Aristotle, cited in Daiches, p. 38.
[4] Plato, cited in Daiches, p. 22.
[5] M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 8.
[6] R. W. Chapman, ed., Jane Austen's Letters, 2nd edn, cited in Nicholas Marsh, Jane Austen: The Novels (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 230.
[7] Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Pimlico, 2000), p. 34.
[8] Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 4.
[9] Alice R. Kaminsky, 'On Literary Realism', The Theory of the Novel, ed. by John Halperin (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 217.
[11] George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by Rosemary Ashton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 278.
[12] Letter to Mr. Frederic Harrison (15th August 1866).
[13] Geoffrey Hemstedt, 'The Novel', The Victorians, ed. by Laurence Lerner (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1978), p. 9.
[14] George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 221.
[16] George Eliot, 'John Ruskin's Modern Painters, Vol. III', Selected Critical Writings, ed. by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 251.
[17] George Levine, 'The Realistic Imagination', The Realist Novel, ed. by Dennis Walker (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 244.
[18] Henry James, 'The Art of Fiction', Selected Literary Criticism, ed. by Morris Shapira, fwd. by F. R. Leavis (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 57.
[19] Christopher Nash, World-Games: The Tradition of Anti-Realist Revolt (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 36.
[20] F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 18
[23] Georg Lukács, 'The Ideology of Modernism', 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1992), p. 483.
[24] Georg Lukács, cited in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th edn, ed. by Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker (Essex: Prentice Hall, 1997) p. 94.
[25] Roland Barthes, 'The Reality Effect', The Realist Novel (see Levine above), p. 260.
[26] Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 7.
[27] Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 7.
[28] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, cited in Andrzej Gąsiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), p. 18.
[29] Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 158.
[30] Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Methuen, 1984), p. xiii.
[31] Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, p. 1.
[32] Waugh, Metafiction, p. 6.