Part Six
Realism as Negation
Ever since the publication of ‘On Realism and Art,’ that authoritative and succinct analysis of the vicissitudes of meaning in the term ‘realism’ by Roman Jakobson (1921, in Czech), its interpreters—although to no such extent its users, alas—have shown commendable caution in ascribing to it any coalescence between its broader philosophic and everyday usages on one hand and its purely theoretical usages in the other. We have now many times been sternly admonished to restrict the term’s prescribed meaning to a conventional context, as a designation of a literary or artistic movement or group or mode in the nineteenth century, to abandon all foolish hope of finding any permanent mimetic criteria for the term, and to content ourselves with family likenesses in the references of the term. Even Professor Wellek, who is always on his guard against such ‘extreme nominalism’ fully as much as against vacuous metaphysics, is, on the whole, hesitant about supplying tangible criteria for realism in his Concepts of Criticism. There is, even more surprisingly, no reference here to Jakobson’s famous article, in spite of their erstwhile although temporary sharing of the same language, nor is there any listing of it in Wellek & Warren’s Theory of Literature.
If this be true of the Western world, even represented by such emigré eminences as Jakobson and Wellek, it is not so within the Central European Marxist tradition. There the focus of the discussion of realism has been sharply and unashamedly aimed at mimesis. The whole Brecht-Lukács debate is firmly anchored in a general view of human reality that is impermeable to formal criteria. ‘Realismus ist keine Formsache,’ [‘realism is not a matter of formality’ Brecht writes, ‘man kann nicht die Form von einem einzelnen Realisten (oder einer begrenzten Anzahl von Realisten) nehmen und sie die realistische Form nennen. Das ist unrealistisch’ [‘one cannot take the form of individual materialists and call it realistic form. That is unrealistic’] (41). In Discriminations Wellek states, with some satisfaction one may guess, that he has counted the instances of the phrase ‘wiederspiegelung der wirklichkeit’ [‘reflection of reality’] in the first volume of Lukács’s Aesthetics and found that it appears 1032 times (92).
As it is, the essay by Jakobson seems to have had little direct influence, its relativistic bias apart. Relativism is of course a main tenet of the essay, but there are also others, more easily overlooked. They have hardly been perceived, either by the nominalists or the mimeticists. Not even in that chic penumbra of intellectual catch-as-catch-can which is present-day structuralisme have they made any noticeable impact, doubtless because of the general aversion to realism in that movement (the only exception seems to be Gérard Genette, in Figures).
A parallel observation can be made regarding Erich Auerbach, whose monumental Mimesis is, sometimes surprisingly, taken wholly as a magnificent brief for relativism. Thus Harry Levin: ‘when Professor Auerbach finds no formula for the presentation of actuality (dargestellte wirklichkeit) in different languages at different epochs, he impressively documents our need for assuming a relativistic point of view (69).
Far be it from me to rock, as it were, the relativistic boat. Let us just look at some usages of the term that, although open to nominalist strictures, seem to throw some light on historical and psychological connections.
1
It does not appear necessary, in order to maintain an historical awareness and terminological accuracy, to ban from one’s vocabulary all usages that seem derived from quotidian experience. Raymond Williams argued precisely this very convincingly in his discussion of tragedy as a natural mode of experience in Modern Tragedy. It would instead seem plausible to assume that the specialized usage takes its strength from various everyday usages. When the politician, the legislator, etc. talks about realism, isn’t he then referring to well-definable qualities of a hard-nosed, level headed, no-nonsense kind? So Thurman Arnold speaking from the experiences of the New Deal: ‘Realism, effective as it is as a method of political attack, or as a way of making people question ideas which they had formerly considered as established truths, ordinarily winds up by merely making the world look unpleasant’ (6). The cost of level headedness is an unpleasant world, at least in the eye of the beholder; its reward, presumably, some kind of moral integrity. In this quasi-philosophical sense, the word is in the English language clearly of an Emersonian pedigree (as citations in the Oxford English Dictionary make clear). And the source beyond is as obviously Schiller and Goethe. In their intense correspondence of the summer of 1796, the two German writers discuss at great length the recently published Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister. Speaking, with his customary critical acumen, of two of the heroines of the book. Schiller says: ‘Natalie und Therese sind beide Realistinnen; aber bei Theresen zeigt sich auch die Beschränkung des Realism [sic], bei Natalien nur der Gehalt derselben’ [‘Natalie and Therese are both realistic, but Therese shows the limits of realism, Natalie its content’] (137). It is (I take it) not altogether surprising to find that the female sex has claims to seniority in realism; it is at least altogether fitting that the first realists appear in a Gothic fiction like Wilhelm Meister and not in real life!
Schiller continues his criticism the following week and is still keen on reading the novel in the categories realism vs. idealism in their relationship to Nature, a framework familiar from ‘Über naive und sentimentalische dichtung’ (‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’). He criticizes—with ample praise for details—the ‘machinery’ of Gothic plots and counterplots which he sees as extraneous to the moral fable and goes on to comment on the hero of the novel:
Dass er nun, unter der schönen und heitern Führung der Natur (durch Felix) von dem Idealischen zum Reellen, von einem vagen Streben zum Handeln und zur Erkenntnis des Wirklichen übergeht, ohne doch dasjenige dabei einzubüssen, was in jenem ersten strebenden Zustand Reales war…, dieses nenne ich die Krise seines Lebens, das Ende seiner Lehrjahre, und dazu scheinen sich mir alle Anstalten in dem Werk auf das vollkommenste zu vereinigen. (147)
[‘The fact that he passes under the beautiful, happy guidance of nature (through Felix) from the ideal to the real, from a striving to act to a recognition of what is real, without losing that which was initially real…
I call this the crisis of his life, the end of his apprenticeship, and I think all the devices of the work unite perfectly to this end.’]
Goethe, not without some hidden amusement one may assume, replies that he is well aware of the creaking of the Gothic machinery in the novel, adapting Schiller’s philosophical term for his literary purposes:
Der Fehler, den Sie mit recht bemerken, kommt aus meiner innersten Natur, aus einem gewissen realistischen Tic, durch den ich meine Existenz, meine Handlungen, meine Schriften den Menschen aus den Augen zu rücken behaglich finde. (149)
[‘The error, which you are right to notice, comes from my inner nature, from a certain realistic tic, which makes me want to hide my existence, my actions, my writings from others.’]
In the phrase ‘realistic tic’ we can, I would venture, observe at close quarters an important semantic shift; Goethe has evoked what Keats would have called the negative capability of the word and is now able to invest it with specific technical content, referring it to his unwillingness, in the name of verisimilitude, to accept the full consequences of the overriding silliness of contemporary literary conventions. Schiller is also happy to accept it thus and remarks in his reply: ‘Das, was Sie Ihren realistischen Tic nennen, sollen Sie dabei gar nicht verleugnen’ [‘You are by no means to deny what you call your realistic tic’] (151).
There is here a rare opportunity to witness the genesis of new meaning in this unique dialogue. Professor Wellek dates the birth of the new meaning to a letter from Schiller to Goethe two years later, 27 April 1798, with a much less dramatic shift (226).
The following dialogue is fully as interesting and entertaining, but I refrain from making any claims for its originality:
‘My dear fellow,’ said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, ‘life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.’
‘And yet I am not convinced of it,’ I answered. ‘The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.’
‘A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect,’ remarked Holmes. ‘This is wanting in the police report, where more stress is laid perhaps upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter. Depend upon it there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.’ (190)
This passage, first published in 1891, shows the full weight of the intervening discussions of realism and naturalism, the other differences between the respective pairs of distinguished interlocutors notwithstanding. The rhetoric of naturalism is ingeniously invoked, although the mythical situation is of some antiquity: it derives from Le diable boiteux (The Lame Devil), a proto-naturalistic fable of the demon who plays peeping Tom to the complacencies of the bourgeois world, removing the roofs of houses to feast his eyes on the unsavoury spectacle – which also vastly fascinated Strindberg. As the original tranche de vie, this exactly prefigures naturalism’s interest in the seamy side of life, the lower depths of human existence. But here the moral fervor of the literature of indignation has been displaced in favor of the more decadent search for strangeness. The habitual objection to art as being lacking in verisimilitude is thus not brushed aside but met with the argument that life itself is as quaint if not more so. The emphasis is on ‘selection and discretion’ but even more on specification the living details against the dead commonplaces. Sir Arthur would probably agree with the Elizabethan dramatists who according to T.S. Eliot professed an ‘impure art’: ‘The aim of the Elizabethans was to attain complete realism without surrendering any of the advantages which as artists they observed in unrealistic conventions’ (116).
Let us summarize the similarities and differences with the dialogue of almost a hundred years earlier. Both have a psychological point of departure in realism as a negative activity, in Goethe’s case a refusal to conform wholly with the conventions of Gothic fiction; in the case of Sherlock Holmes a similar wish to break through the barriers of convention and take the lid off the phenomena. What has been added in the latter is the insistence on ‘selection’ and the absolute value invested in ‘detail.’ In the first instance, he is but echoing another naturalist commonplace, implied in itself in the metaphor of ‘cutting’ in ‘the slice of life,’ which was authoritatively expressed by Henry James in the ‘Preface’ to Roderick Hudson: ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so’ (5).
While as to the second, the obsession of realism is with detail, not infrequently inessential or gratuitous detail. This is interestingly stressed by Roman Jakobson, who refers to it under the heading of his characteristic D as a ‘condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity’ (43). Too little attention has been given to this element in Jakobson’s presentation of realism, which he later expanded into his theory of figurative language and aphasia. It is a genuine observation of a concomitant characteristic of realism, which is contingent as to both the conventional and mimetic concepts of realism, i.e. there is no necessary entailment between richness in detail and veracity, or consequently, between richness in detail and verisimilitude. It is nevertheless a well corroborated observation that realism—like some other movements—tends to favor discourse on what is known as a high level of redundancy: it is tempting to refer to this as the Principle of Redundancy (abbr. PR).
2
Terms like ‘realism’ become difficult to handle not only because of any inherent ambiguity in their meaning but also – more importantly – because they command the assent of their users. Terms which evoke persuasive definitions of this type might be called protreptic or hortatory. ‘Realism,’ however, has a wider range of hortatory appeal than most terms: it is rare to find creative artists or writers seriously maintaining that their art is in no way in correspondence with reality. This is often realized even among the enemies of realism. So Robbe-Grillet:
Tous les écrivains pensent être réalistes. Aucun jamais ne se prétend abstrait, illusioniste, chimérique, fantaisiste, faussaire… Le realisme n’est pas une théorie, définie sans ambiguité, qui permettrait d’opposer certains romanciers aux autres: c’est au contraire un drapeau sous lequel se range l’immense majorité sinon l’ensemble– des romanciers d’aujourd’hui. (171)
[‘All writers think themselves realistic. No one ever calls himself abstract, illusionary, chimerical, whimsical, or a forger… Realism is not a theory, clear and unambiguous, which would allow us to oppose some novelists to others. It is on the contrary the flag under which gather the vast majority, if not all, of today’s novelists.’]
Attacks on realism are most often launched in the name of some greater claim for realism. Therefore it seems that Strindberg is quite justified in observing, late in his life in Tal till svenska nationen (Speeches to the Swedish Nation), that there was something snobbish and effete in the attack on ‘skomakarrealism’ [‘shoemaker realism’]: ‘Och på ett gammaldags junkeraktigt sätt begagnades namnet på ett aktat yrke som skällsord’ [‘and in a clunky, old-fashioned way use the name of a respected profession as a slur’] (84).
For that very reason, it seems to me that there is something artificial and specious about the polarity of creatio and mimesis. The heterocosmic view of the created work as a self-contained world in its own right, is rarely construed as autotelic but most often as just-mimetic, like the monad of yore, mirroring the whole universe within its confines. The Christian and Platonizing dominance over the whole Western tradition has ensured a privileged position for anagogical and hermeneutical modes of thought. Every narrative is always in readiness to be interpreted as something else: the only authority to which appeal can be made is the intention of its creator. But nature and history are also there waiting to be interpreted, to give up their hieroglyphical keys, to display their signatures. Even a refusal to interpret is in fact a kind of interpretation, a statement of the impenetrability of the world. Hence the strange marriage of realism and symbolism in modern art: the epiphanies of authenticity in a contingent world. The more ardently the artist believes in the order of a transcendent world, the more is he willing to wax fanatical in his devotion to the reproduction of the imperfectibilities of this one. So Dostoevsky is—as Sven Linnér has documented so convincingly—always presenting his art as a realistic one, and the ageing Strindberg regards himself as the naturalist of spiritual experience.
A. D. Nuttall has demonstrated in A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination how a problem of greatest philosophical importance—the objective existence of the world—has dominated also the literary imagination for a long time. But this problem is seen almost exclusively from the viewpoint of British empiricism. There is a counterpart within the tradition of existentialist thought, the tradition that is the bearer of what Adorno used to call ‘the jargon of authenticity.’ Realism in a more philosophical sense is no doubt the problem child of this uncomfortable union. Adorno says in his late work, Negative dialektik:
The historic innervation of realism as a mode of mental conduct is not foreign to the philosophy of Being. Realism seeks to breach the walls which thought has built around itself, to pierce the interjected layer of subjective positions that have become a second nature. (78)
This is well put and gives, in fact, the first intimation of a more than contingent relationship between realism as a mode of experience and realism as a technique. The impenetrable, viscous nature of phenomena, as they appear to the existential observer—when Roquentin contemplates the root of the tree in La nausée for instance—seeks a technical counterpart in the rich, impenetrable texture of the language of realism, in short in the Principle of Redundancy.
3
That literature as a totality evolves according to complicated patterns that can best be discussed in dialectical terms is hardly any longer a controversial statement. None but the most inveterate positivist or old-fashioned evolutionist can seriously maintain that atomistic or organicist models are in any way useful for descriptive or explanatory purposes. But exactly how a dialectical evolutionary theory works in detail is much less often, if ever, discussed. This is in itself understandable as it involves the thorny technicalities of Hegelian dialectics.
Negation is a key phrase in the system of logic of Hegel who defines the dialectical movement as the Negation of a Negation. It is also an important, although extremely obscure, concept in the later metapsychological speculations of Freud; his short essay on ‘Die Verneinung’ (‘Denial’) discusses problems central to the formation of a reality principle. Negation and contradiction have a long history—from Marx to Mao—in the development of dialectical materialism. None of these often extremely technical questions can be discussed here.
In a quite general sense, however, it is obvious that the negative aspect of literary development seems at least as important as the positive one. This is quite striking when you contemplate direct or indirect influence, as does Anna Balakian:
It is interesting to note that very often the influences of authors of the same nationality and language are negative influences, the result of reactions, for generations often tend to be rivals of each other and in the name of individualism reject in the work of their elders what they consider to be the conventions of the past. (29)
A most elaborate theory of negative influence in poetry has been proposed by Harold Bloom, in a number of books of which The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading and Poetry and Repression are the most important ones. Bloom, who is heavily indebted to Freudian theory but also to present-day luminaries like Derrida and Lacan, is able to discern what he calls six ‘revisionary ratios’ in the psychological dependence of the ‘ephebe’ on the ‘strong poet’ in a semi-mythological confrontation known as the ‘primal scene of instruction.’ These ratios span the gap from clinamen, the swerving of atomic particles according to Lucretius, to apophrades, the return of the dead, which refers, somewhat surprisingly, to the influence of a younger poet on an older and dead one. A relevant example from Scandinavian literature would be the strange intrusion of Birger Sjöberg’s tone and vocabulary in the third stanza of Fredmans Epistel 81, ‘Märk hur vår skugga’ [‘Note how our Shadow’]. More recently, the visionary and theological aspirations of Harold Bloom’s work have become more obvious, and his interest in the Kabbalah and the kabbalist Isaac Luria has caused him to introduce further terms of more general nature like zinzum being the first step in a kabbalistic dialectic series, signifying the divine contraction before the creation.
Bloom’s speculations are easily dismissed as poetic ravings; they are quite blatantly controversial. Göran Hermerén in his book Influence in Art and Literature manages to do so with the help of some elementary logic chopping. There is a hilarious but ultimately depressing primal scene of destruction in the confrontation of the extreme positivist and the extreme visionary. It seems unnecessary. Harold Bloom may sometimes go overboard in terminological frenzy, but he is an extremely learned and sensitive reader of poetry with a strong and passionate interest in the continuity of the poetic tradition. Unfortunately, his theory is very much confined to poetry and to romantic and post-romantic poetry in particular; it is not easily transferred to prose or the concept of realism or a more historical political context of dialectics but is squarely set on the Freudian-Nietzschean stage that Bloom occupies with such panache. Without any doubt some of his main observations have a general application.
4
Strindberg provides a prime example of the anxiety of influence; he is, of course, as he declared himself time and again basically a product—positively or negatively—of romanticism. Most of his comments on his relationship to his literary heroes, be they Zola or Dickens, Goethe or Balzac, are of great interest in this connection. In a late article from Tal till svenska nationen (Speeches to the Swedish Nation) he constructs his ‘map of misprision’ for C.J.L. Almqvist. He calls it ‘Urtjuva,’ using an ancient Swedish legal term:
Den som stulit annans boskap, men uppgiver sig ha hittat den, åligger att göra sig ‘urtjuva’ genom lysningsvittnen eller ed. Uttrycket är gott och kunde användas på de litterära kombandit-bolagen i vår nutid, då begreppen om den litterära äganderätten blivit så försvagade av okunnighet, ondska och dålig smak, att rätte ägaren stämplas som tjuv av tjuven. (107)
[‘Whoever steals another man’s cattle but pretends to have found it, is by law forced to make an ‘urtjuva’ in front of witnesses or by oath. This expression is a good one and may well be applied to the literary
bandit-publishers of our time, for our notion of literary property is so weakened by ignorance, evil and bad taste that the righteous owner shall be denounced as a thief by the thief.’]
Strindberg protests his innocence too much and must ultimately be condemned by the court of misprision: his misreadings of the poems of Atterbom and Heidenstarn in Tal can be seen as something less than creative misunderstandings in Bloom’s sense. But the general dialectical point made is broader than in any case Bloom has analyzed, as it is subsumed under the perennial confrontation of vacuous romanticism vs. detailed realism, of hazy poetry vs. level-headed prose. This is emphasized in the quotation from Tegnér Strindberg has appended to his discussion and condemnation of Atterbom, ‘pekoral-poesiens anor.’ [‘twaddle-poetry tradition’]. It is the same quotation which 28 years earlier concluded his polemical discussion ‘Om realism. Några synpunkter,’ [‘Realism: Some Comments’] first published in Ur dagens krönika 2, 1882: ‘Jag älskar prosan, livets verklighet / urformationen utav tingens väsen’ [‘I love the prose, the reality of life / ur-formation out of the essence of things’] (Samlade skrifter, vol. 17, 199).
In that same early essay Strindberg attempted a definition of realism which is an interesting version of the Principle of Redundancy:
Realism kallas den riktning inom alla konstområden, då framställaren söker att göra det åsyftade intrycket, det vill säga giva illusion, genom att utföra de viktigaste av den mångfald detaljer varav bilden är sammansatt. (191)
[‘Realism is that tendency internal to all areas of art wherein the creator attempts to create the intended impression, i.e. create an illusion, by way of chiseling out the most essential of the manifold of details of which the image is composed.’]
But Strindberg goes on to explain his views in such a way as to emphasize mainly the correct division in genus and species (now as much as 28 years later aiming evidently at Atterbom):
Författaren till dessa synpunkter kan, då han läser i ett gammaldags poem om en ros och en fjäril, icke se dessa abstrakta släktbegrepp; hans öga våndas innan det får välja ut arten.
Denna bild kan således icke heller klargöra symbolen, det inre, andliga, ‘det obeständiga i kärleken,’ ty där sensationen är otydlig blir tanken slapp.
När nu de ungas hjärnor blivit genom tränering annorlunda beskaffade än de gamles, så skall ett olösligt missförstånd uppstå. (193)
[‘When reading an old-fashioned poem about a rose and a butterfly, the author of these opinions finds himself unable to grasp such abstract generic concepts; his eye agonizes even before selecting the species.
This image will thus also be powerless to clarify the symbol, the innermost, the spiritual, ‘the evanescent within love,’ for wherever the sensation is vague thought grows flaccid.
Since the brains of the youth have now become differently formed by training than those of the old people, an insoluble misunderstanding shall arise.’]
Strindberg is quite aware that it is the poets who arrange our misunderstandings and that it is always a new poem that is the meaning of another poem, two Bloomian theses he has absorbed, par apophrade no doubt. He is, as it were, advocating a climb down the tree of classification, a realism which is popularly known as ‘scientific,’ but in fact ultimately derived from Plato’s conception of diairesis or division. This becomes the picture of the descent of realism as Strindberg’s career illustrates it, where the principle of redundancy, rigidly adhered to, at long last resolves itself in the absurdities of quotidian minutiae. The true heir to this original Strindbergian misprision is no doubt that latter-day master of philosophical PR, Samuel Beckett. It strikes me that this view of the misprized realist is very much like the oddly attired man the eponymous hero of his novel Watt encounters on Westminster Bridge:
It was blowing heavily. It was also snowing heavily. I nodded heavily. In vain. Securing me with one hand, he removed from the other with his mouth two pairs of leather gauntlets, unwound his heavy woolen muffler, unbuttoned successively and flung aside his great coat, jerkin, coat, two Waistcoats, shirt, outer and inner vests, coaxed from a washleather fob hanging in company with a crucifix I imagine from his neck a gunmetal half-hunter, sprang open its case, held it to his eyes (night was falling), recovered in a series of converse operations his original form, said, Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness, remember me to your wife (I never had one) let go my arm, raised his hat and hastened away. A moment later Big Ben (is that the name?) struck six. (36)
Groping for exactness we come up with the absurd. May that also be a warning to the literary critic—in that his misprisions of the complexities of terms may easily obfuscate the obvious.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. London: Allen Lane, 1973.
Arnold, Thurman. The Symbols of Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937.
Balakian, Anna. ‘Influence and Literary Fortune.’ Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature. 1962: 143–152.
Beckett, Samuel. Watt. New York: Grove, 1959.
Brecht, Bertolt. Über realismus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Ed. by Christopher Morley. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1951.
Jakobson, Roman. ‘Realism in Art.’ Readings in Russian Poetics. Ed. by Ladislaw Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1971: 38–46.
James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. New York: Scribner, 1953.
Levin, Harry. Contexts of Criticism. New York: Scribner, 1963.
Matthias, John. Reading Old Friends. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.
Schiller, Freidrich von, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Cottafchen, 1881.
Strindberg, August. Samlade skrifter. Vol. 17. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1919.
—. Tal till svenska nationen samt andra tidningsartiklar 1910–1912. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1919.
Wellek, René. Discriminations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.