Literary Realisms*

Toward a shared understanding

Realism is any artistic style that seeks to represent the known range of human experience in a manner that gives the feeling of how we encounter it. We can meaningfully speak of “realisms” since there exist not one but several realist styles in art and literature.** Realism has, at least ostensibly, no prior commitments beyond rendering what is known by its characters and narrators, in a way that is more or less immediately intelligible to those who will receive the account.

(You will sometimes hear me refer to rendering or representation as “presencing”—that is, giving presence to—an external reality within the internal reality of the work. The act of presencing forms such an important feature of contemplative realist art that we can, and should, insist on the nonstandard usage of the word. This will be worth delving into later.)

Realisms are concerned with objectivity, but because of their commitment to fidelity to their characters’ experience, they are not limited to physical or observable realities if the characters experience these as real. However, realist art will always tend to examine a character’s subjective convictions as they relate to the empirically verifiable, even as realisms do not necessarily limit their conception of that which is real to that which is empirically verifiable. For this reason realisms are not strictly phenomenological but admit of treating the abstract, numinous, and improbable, as long as these can be made fictionally believable within a “vivid and continuous dream” (Gardner’s phrase) that resembles closely enough the parameters of the known world.

Along this same line, realisms admit of presencing and exploring strong emotion. Realist fiction and film in particular, with their foundations in classical forms of drama, are well known for tracing the effects of characters’ passions. Yet realisms in the main resist the idealized, the improbable, and the “romantic” or fanciful, such as the conceits and tropes of the Gothic novel or of what most publishers would classify as “genre” fiction. (Magical realism and its relatives make up a special case, also worth discussing in more detail sometime.)

Realisms are friendly to the idea of free will. They concern themselves closely with problems of character choice and agency. A determinist literature is more properly referred to as “naturalist,” or at most “materialist-realist,” since determinism declines to take seriously the possibility that characters’ individual, self-articulated experience of their motivation and self-direction might track directly to the deepest levels where we can place our fingers on why characters do what they do. For a naturalist, the deepest reason for a character’s action, the beating heart of motive, can be pinpointed within the web of biochemical and socioeconomic factors that act on that character without his conscious awareness—the more unconscious, the more “real” the impulse. That is as much as to say that the realist and the naturalist conceive differently of the very notion and nature of depth, as well as of choice and of agency.

Realisms acknowledge that the “way things are” can and does constantly change with respect to observable orders, especially orders of society and of technology. A contemplative realist will want to suggest that there is a more permanent way things are, a way that persists in the face of all the changes society can make to us or that we can make to ourselves. All of these “ways things are” reflect valid levels of reality, to the extent that they are, as Philip K. Dick would have put it, “things that do not change when we stop believing in them.” That which does change when we stop believing in it is still of fictional interest to the contemplative realist, as shifting ground under characters’ feet can be fascinating and—quite often—also uproariously funny. The comedy is not lost on us. Nor, when shifting becomes earthquake, do we forget the potential for tragedy.

Constructs exist and are real, but it does not follow from this that all realities are constructs. If what we are after is, in St. Thomas’ well-known way of stating it, “the adequation of the mind to reality,” then we need a solid enough understanding of that which shifts within and around us, along with an unswerving, unflinching receptivity to that which doesn’t shift. We relate differently to different levels of reality, especially as what remains real does not always appear under the same aspect. The recurring, continual task is to clean the window through which reality appears—and if that window should be broken, to rebuild it—as often as necessary. In this effort, the varieties of literary realism can help us improve our practice.

*Many of my readers may not strictly need this explanation, but I hope both specialists and nonspecialists may still find it of interest. I include it before we go deeper into the peculiarities of contemplative realism, in the hope that it serves to motivate some deeper considerations of what artistic realisms are, how they relate to other modes of thinking we might legitimately label “realist,” and why this matters for how writers and audiences approach the art of fiction—or, by extension, any narrative art. Trained to avoid sweeping claims and to acknowledge my analogies, I nevertheless want to risk the thought that unpacking “realism” might also suggest some helpful things about how we approach & comprehend our common experience of life.

**I am delighted & fascinated by the prospect of spending time delineating & taxonomizing other literary realisms—but I’d be happy to learn in comments if this is a project you’d find useful, desirable, &c. (or not) in this context. Either way, what would you like to read about next? There are so many directions we could go, worlds of possibility here. Do please let me hear from you.