Multiplicities of Realisms

shall we gather at the river, or something

[Image: “River Landscape,” c. 1590 (! this looks MUCH more modern to me), Annibale Caracci, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection. In the public domain, as ever.]

One of the best things about the Depth Perception project so far has been the side conversations it has sparked with a lot of you, my readers: not all of whom by any means agree with everything I’m saying here, or with everything that the original text of Contemplative Realism said. That’s not a worry. I’m simply glad you’re here.

I’m especially glad if you’ve stuck around during my recent hiatus. There is much bustle behind these scenes. I am preparing, for you, what I hope you will find to be some wonderful things. You can get a sneak peek at a few of those behind the links. Others are still too much in progress to say a lot about yet.

And then, too, there’s rest in real time. Since school let out, my new address is Poolside, Fifth Table from the Right, Beside the River in the Rather Fancier Subdivision a Ways Down the Road, Watching the Swimmers and the Boats Float Past. Not so much bustle here. Not so much hustle. Much, much more chill. Wish you were here.

*

Anyway, as I’ve said and will keep saying, I don’t have a monopoly on contemplative realism as a concept. I didn’t originate it; I don’t control it. And yet to say I’m “incredibly grateful” for it—the phrase falls far too flat. I have found it so generative and transformative as a way to think about and to describe what I aspire to do as a writer that to spend some time explicating and reflecting on it is, in a real sense, the least I can do. It’s the smallest return I can make, a minor way of giving back some of what I’ve so overwhelmingly received.

So anything I say here is said in that spirit of liberation: expansive, not restrictive; descriptive, not prescriptive. In contemplative realism, I’ve found a constellation of concepts that help me understand my own project of seeing and describing experience. My hope is that tracing that constellation’s lines might help you better understand—something: whether the world or your reading experience or your own way of writing, whether that tracks with mine or not, maybe especially if it doesn’t. It isn’t the only constellation in the sky.

Reader and correspondent G.M. Baker, author of this recent Dappled Things feature, has been tracing the shapes and showing the value of some of those many other constellations in a recent, lively email exchange with me—so lively that I wanted to open up some of its many topics for conversation with the rest of you.

We’ve been thinking together about the value and possibilities of varieties of “romance,” meaning not merely “love stories” but rather in a broad sense various kinds of fanciful or quite obviously invented narratives, contrasted with the value of varieties of realism—materialist, literalist, gritty, cosmic, or “magical” (whatever we take that last to mean. It always ineluctably reminds me of Latino author¹’s observation that some readers of a piece of his once assumed it was “magical realist” because of the casually included presence of a tiger in the scene. They were stunned, though arguably they shouldn’t have been, to be told that the tiger in this case was a piece of literal realism—literal, but decidedly non-Anglo, realism).

Anyway, toward the end of a recent thread, Baker made such a resonant observation about what seems to him to unify various varieties of realism that I felt prompted to share it. He writes that he prefers “romantic” modes of storytelling because to his mind they provide a broader and brighter “palette” with which to work, they appeal more directly to the emotions than to reason, and they treat the “patient” of a wounded world with rather different methodologies than most realist works:

If the argument is that neon colors are used to tell lies and that therefore realists must paint only with earth tones, I reject that. You can lie with earth tones and you can tell the truth in neon. As a matter of personal style you may prefer one or the other. It is probably a virtue in an artist to stick to a palette that they know and understand well, as this will allow them to be more confident in their art. One palette is not more truthful than another. But the preference for one over the other may have a lot to do with whether one feels the world runs too hot or to cold, and also whether one prefers to explore the wound or to get the patient out of bed and send them on an adventure.

The question then is, and it seems like a fairly urgent question to me, do we unite around the set of things we believe to be true, or do we unite around our preferred palettes? It’s the kind of question that sounds like it should have an easy and obvious answer, but, of course, it is not as simple as that. Readers and writers both have their preferred palettes, and it seems that most people would rather read something in their preferred palette even if they disagree with its vision of the real, than read something with which they agree on the nature of the real but which is drawn with a different palette. … . 

That, and one other thing that I worry about, which is that readers are increasingly confining themselves to particular genres and subgenres. This strikes me as fundamentally unhealthy for the culture. Part of a commitment to the real should be a commitment to breadth and variety, because the real is vast and varied. Every lie, every illusion, is cramped and small compared to the vastness and variety of the real. And part of developing an eye and an appreciation for the real is seeing the real in all its variety. Variety is one of its hallmarks. And when we find the hallmarks of reality in diverse places, we learn to recognize the real wherever we find it. Thus a realist should be committed to the breadth and variety of the real, and to its many palettes and colorings. If we are going to be realists, we should be whole-of-the-realists, but being a part-of-the-realist is yet another form of romance.

Baker’s extended comment sent me flying back to the texts of Erich Auerbach, who, we might want to say, traced the development of both realist and “romance”-inspired traditions of storytelling and found that what united them was a commitment to figural representation. What Auerbach means by figura is complicated and robust and beyond me at present; I don’t pretend to fully grasp it. But it has a lot to do with mimetic representation of that which recognizably exists or can be conceived to.

Auerbach, to the extent I understand him, seems to have felt that the various figural styles at play within both romantic and realist traditions arose from various ancient literatures and then were fused for a short but glorious while in Dante before splitting off again into two streams that haven’t really run together since. Could they ever run together again? If they did, what would we want to call that? Would it be “contemplative realist”—or Baker’s preferred term, “enchanted realist”—or something else?   

My impression of “romance”—in the sense that a piece like Henry James’s The American, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful,” is a romance—makes me associate that category with the self-conscious deliberate invention of that which recognizably departs from common human experience.

The romance, as a category of story, evokes our delight because it is deliberately fanciful. It deliberately makes a departure from what we experience or ever anticipate experiencing in the daily world.

By contrast, realism in art, when it is functioning well, returns delight (or at least liveability, acceptability, contentment) precisely to the experience of that which is commonly found either in our daily world or in that of others. To my mind,² if it doesn’t do this, it is more properly termed naturalism than, meaningfully, realism: it is one of those cases in which, to quote Joshua Hren quoting Roland Barthes, “realism does not refer to reality; realism is not realistic.”

In that sense, I can get behind acknowledging the “diversity of the real… its many palettes and colors,” and behind a need for art that re-enchants experience. My correspondent seems to want to say, though, that re-enchanting flavors of realism are not meaningfully distinct from the literary tradition of the romance, at least not anymore? or maybe they never were thus distinct, at least not when compellingly practiced?

Yet it seems to me that they should be recognizable as distinct, though we might want to say many things about what makes a particular work distinctly expressive of a given current in the realist river: what gives it its temperature and pace, composition and shade, identifiable as against others, though still part of the same river. It becomes difficult to extrapolate, here, unless we have concrete examples: which is one reason I want to spend some time here, this summer, doing close readings of texts that seem to drift in the direction of contemplative realism or of reenchanted realism. I think that might do more to move our conversation forward faster, at its present stage, than any amount of further abstraction.

Of course, Contemplative Realism in its original version also warns against being too strict in our efforts to taxonomize the various realisms that already exist, because “instantiations … will inevitably—and often blessedly—depart from [their] foundational features.” The minute you pin a name on a piece of art, the piece of art, if it merits its salt, shifts and shows you another side of itself. It challenges your categories. It prods you to reexamine your settled structures. It stirs you to some sort of effort for the better.

My question for you all, then, or the direction of the effort I’d like us to stir ourselves toward, is this: What might it mean for various “flavors” or types of literary/artistic realism to coexist simultaneously alongside one another, in the first place? Is this a necessarily combative or oppositional coexistence, or can they all flow together, tributaries to the same gulf? (My metaphor is telling you which way I tend, here, but I might be wrong.) Still more: When else might realisms make room for re-enchantments? When, if ever, have you seen this happen? How might this relate to the ways that various “palettes” deal with the darker sides of reality: suffering, pain, sin, destruction, bodily death, spiritual evil?

Feel free to discuss below, at any length you like; I’m taking my crew for another swim. I will respond, though as the tortoise, not as the hare.

1. Okay, I devoutly believe this to be a line I read from Carlos Eire in a piece online, while preparing to speak with him in an upcoming seminar. But in the way of contemporary digital life, I’ve now lost the link and can’t find it again. If this is an error on my part I would hope to be forgiven, would be grateful to be put right, and would swiftly make any needed correction.

2. Which is, Lord knows, incomplete.