1
Ghosh
Debates on Realism and the English Novel: A Brief Survey
It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regards himself as a historian and his novel as history. It is only as a historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempts the backbone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real.
─ Henry James, “Anthony Trollope”
Since the publication of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel in 1957, realism has come to be identified, in varying degrees of certainty as to what it should mean, as the core formal characteristic of English novels written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to Watt, many commentators and critics had written about realism but more as a kind of artistic attitude to reality rather than as a set of formal practices guiding the creativity of writers as diverse as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. The biggest influence on Watt was perhaps Gyorgý Lukacs, a Hungarian philosopher, who had previously tried to historically situate Realism as a critical method of art that arose simultaneously with and derived from the corresponding emergence of the Bourgeois Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment Rationality. In his Studies in European Realism, Lukacs had written: “the method of Realism is a method of discovery, not of representation of pre-established realities” (47). Hence, in his book, Ian Watt had set out to identify and scrutinize the practical elements of formal realism.
The philosophical underpinnings of formal realism were, in Watt’s suggestion, to be found in the new epistemology of doubt, skepticism and empirical verification argued for in the writings of Descartes, Locke and Hume. These philosophers rejected ideal forms of consciousness like religion and saw, in an individual’s social experience, a legitimate basis for knowing and understanding reality.Reality itself came to be designated as objective, i.e. as autonomous and outside of consciousness, ideas and conventions, yet as a series of facts observable or knowable in time and space. One can argue that this kind of empiricist philosophy had much in common with the new changes registering in European societies in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Namely, the growth of a secular public sphere and literacy, representative government and practices of mass media like newspapers and periodical journalism helped in redefining reality as something accessible, mundane and ordinary and yet, as something that engages the responses of a multitude of people rather than a select and privileged few.
At best, however, such a philosophical tradition can be seen to have simplydefined the climate of thought within which formally realistic literature tried to communicate its importance and appeal to its readers. Far more useful is the recognition that the Form itself was a set of patterns commonly emerging from a new clutch of prose fictions that were trying to describe the present and changing world to the people who cared to know.The objects of this world, its new urban spaces and improved rural sights, the transforming property relations, refining sentiments, latest fashion: all this strove within the novels to create the collective fears and suspicion as well as hopes and desires that render human the idea of a society. At the level of abstraction, such an inventory revealed a tendency towards the particularization of reality. Reality seemed to lay in small things and their interrelations. The earliest generation of English novelists is shown to have made great purchase out of detailing and characterization. The plots of their stories are stretched to include long rambling accounts of insignificant incidents marked by detail. The locales are specific and each character is etched out as a plausible being of this world with a distinct proper name and presence. Like newspapers and periodical weeklies, novels could be hypothetically relied upon to tell us the news of the world.
Another formal feature of this realism is revealed through the novels’ preoccupation with time. Time, like any other concept, appealed to the novelists’ minds as something that could be known experientially. Time, i.e. in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. Visibly, time was responsible for setting the motion in people’s lives and time also became the factor that linked one set of events in the novels to another. Cause and effect became evident through time. To quote Watt here: “the novel’s plot is [also] distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action…the novel’s closeness to the texture of daily experience directly depends upon its employment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previously been employed in narrative” (23). This view of the past, not as a spectacular dream, but as a really experienced moment of life that relates to the present, qualifies as History. The function of history is change. Hence the novelists saw their own writings as signs of change. Established conventions of storytelling were casually broken in order to capture a sense of this change. Watt reminds us that the older conventions of prose narrative were largely the epics and romances operating in a world of time closed to our authentic experience and judgment. Their serious and sober plots conveyed the mystical aura of ideas that were absent from the novelists’ world of experience. In return, the novels used parody, burlesque and other comic pleasures to take the weight off these ideas. If not out rightly resisting romance and chivalry, novelists like Jane Austen broke the spell of romances by mooring them in the conditions set down by a practical world (cf. esp. Northanger Abbey). The tragic-comic predicament suffered by characters as a result of disillusionment became a central experience in most novels, especially novels about growing up and mock-heroic adventures: bildungromans and picaresques.
Feelings, i.e. emotions experienced by characters also became responses to change.Their growing complexity compelled the novelists to lend a psychological depth to their characters. As a result, the novels also included detailed depictions of the private worlds of individuals. Yet the private and public worlds of people were never considered autonomous or independent of each other in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, letters, diaries, almanacs, conversations and personal memories became objective registers of storytelling in these novels.Moreover, they helped build up different kinds of chronological series through which the changing plot could be easily and plausibly communicated.In order to make time and change even more experientially palpable, the novelists created multiple points of view and narrative voices. Watt had noted that all these practices amounted to the wholesale discarding of the conventional literary imagination in favor of something new or ‘novel’ and as such, he went on to explain the name of the genre.
The rather abstract discussion of realism as a form in The Rise of the Novel, however, has since provoked intense debates among scholars of the English Novel: partly because, since then, cultural perceptions of reality have changed and scholars have felt the need to redefine realism; but mainly because Watt himself suborned realist literature to a set of rules dictated by philosophers. In the main, Watt fallaciously argued that formal realism had become a cliché, a thing fossilized in its own formal conventions:
Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention;
and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented
by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through the very
different conventions of other literary genres. The novel’s air of total
authenticity, indeed, does tend to authorize confusion on this point: and
the tendency of some Realists to forget that the accurate transcription of
actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring
literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread
distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today. (33)
Taking realism’s own commitments seriously, Raymond Williams has tried to argue that even as referential, the world of the novels did not seek to inscribe the unlimited or ultimate reality but rather pointed towards the always flawed (not ideal), changing andquotidian one. In The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970)Williams has offered a continuous perspective on realism from the middle of the nineteenth century to the time when Watt would have begun to formally study the novels. According to Williams, novels enclosed fictions of “knowable communities” within dynamic currents of history that lead directly up to our times. The appeal of such fictions lay in their common and comic gestures that were understood and empathized with by a large and diverse population of readers. They were fictions of common empathy in an increasingly alienating world. Therefore they must be tested for value by keeping in mind the bitter world of altering relationships, alienation and insecurity, mechanically developing environments and a general faithlessness that seems to have characterized the social sufferings of the oldest industrial society in Europe. From such a point of view, realism does not seem to be a strict set of rules that helps literature pose as life. It begins to look like a creative process of negotiating with reality, engaging with it in all seriousness and trying to come up with cultural strategies of survival. Even with realism’s steady focus on social experience, the idea of society itself ceases to be self-evident; it only serves to open up the possible range of changes that can take place in people’s lives. Referring to the novels written during the most productive phase of English Realism (1847-48), Williams has argued:
Society from being a framework could be seen now as an agency, even
an actor, a character. It could be seen and valued in and through persons:
not as a framework in which they were defined; not as an aggregate of
known relationships; but as an apparently independent organism, a character
and an action like others. Society now was not just a code to measure, an
institution to control, a standard to define or to change. It was a process
that entered lives, to shape or to deform; a process personally known but
then again suddenly distant, complex, incomprehensible, overwhelming. (13)
Since realism is seen by Williams to be formally open to the mutating demands of the social, it becomes a dynamic and historicizing impulse that cannot be codified into a static set of formal rules as was sought to be done by Watt. It does not stay a structural phenomenon anymore; it becomes a dialectical process where the self consciousness of form is put to use in its interactions with history.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, Williams’ reasonable intervention came to be suspected as old-fashioned and too certain. European linguistic philosophy had forcefully questioned the representative or referential status of all language, including literary language. Meaning itself was proved to be conventional and arbitrary and then considered as suspect. French philosophers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida had persuaded scholars to quit looking for meaning in texts and instead see language as self-referential, i.e. as non-representative of anything objective or outside. Words, by implication, seemed empty forms, not in natural way related to the things or objects that they claimed to be representing. By extension almost, language became a masquerade of empty words, an infinite game of creating and undoing virtual meaning. This is the intellectual world we inhabit today, and it would seem from this point that Watt’s initial unease with the realist ambition of novelists stands vindicated again. Such a context surrounds the second most important intervention in the debate on realism. In his book The Realist Imagination (1981), George Levine reread realism’s wide oeuvre in the light of current theories and carefully took issue with Watt. Levine’s basic argument is that the arbitrary enclosures of meaning in language and the pose of authenticity in literary texts had very much been a part of the realist recognition. Realism, he suggests, was a response to the basic irresolvability of reality. Again, it was not a structural mediation or ‘form’ in the pure sense of the term; rather it was a creative desire set at odds with the philosophical, legal and political institutions of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that tried to regulate or fix the meanings of language. Realism’s world of objects was not a solid and hard world; on the contrary it was a world of dissolving objects and constantly remapped horizons. It was not merely a world bound by the pages of a novel but a world that constantly readjusted itself in the novel’s relationship to its masses of readers.The deliberate breaking of the unity of time and space, as is evident in so many of the digressions in the novels of Fielding and Sterne, or the novels of flashback undercut by a changed consciousness of the present like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, or even Dickens’ caricatured urban monstrosities, all refer to worlds far more disorderly and chaotic than our own. In underlining this, Levine urged us to see realism as reality’s other but a necessary other. He defended the realists against charges of arrogance and smugness by recasting realism as an exercise in critical belief:
With remarkable frequency, they are alert to the arbitrariness of the
reconstructed order toward which they point as they imply the inadequacy
of traditional texts and, through self-reference and parody, the tenuousness
of their own. But they proceed to take the risk of believing in the possibility
of fictions that bring us at least a little closer to what is not ourselves and
not merely language. (12)
Both Williams and Levine, despite their obvious differences, converge on one point. That realism’s decisive factor lies in its deliberate interactions with its anti-thesis, reality. Therefore its function is not merely structural with regard to language; it is dialectical and historical. As distinct from a common set of practices, or rules defining the shape of the English Novel (the point at which I began my discussion), realism has now come to be seen as the force or desire governing the historical tendencies in novels.
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Saikat Ghosh