Realisms & Naturalisms

A long read: treat yourself, or buckle up, whichever applies

[Image: Grapes, Joseph Decker (1853-1924), oil on canvas, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art via the Wikimedia Commons/Open Access project. From the collection of Mr. & Mrs. Paul Mellon; in the public domain.]

Last week’s conversation about literary realism got lively: is that a sentence you ever expected to hear outside the walls of a classroom, or maybe a conference session? I’m pleasantly surprised & excited to be writing it. Reader Alex Taylor suggested that we might expand on it by exploring all the various “irrealisms” into which literature sometimes delves, so as to better distinguish which forms of literature are in question when we talk about realism.

But I wonder if most readers ever really do have trouble telling the difference between broadly realist and broadly irrealist fiction. Under the heading “irrealist” I mean to include not only speculative works like fantasy, science fiction, and horror—which I appreciate, often enjoy, and am not at all discounting or devaluing.

While I might want to demur* from Merve Emre’s recent insistence in the New Yorker that “no reader needs literary works interpreted for her”—talk about sawing off the branch you are sitting on—I can cheerfully agree that no reader needs a criticism that merely flatters a sense of belonging to the in-group of those who read intelligently. Likewise, no reader needs to be told the difference between work that attempts to paint what an alternate reality, alternate history, or alternate universe might look like, and work that attempts to render aspects of bedrock common experience. That difference is evident enough.

Other differences are not so readily evident. Some species of “irrealist fiction,” I want to suggest,** can refer not only to conscious suspensions of common experience but to any fiction that gets its work done by intentionally narrowing or distorting its lens beyond the necessary artistic choice that serves the sense of felt life. Many a contemporary novel that purports only to hold the mirror up to convention is profoundly irrealist in this sense.

The more common literary false cognate for realism is neither conventional irrealism nor speculative fiction but naturalism. Naturalism, as I understand it, approaches narrative literature as though materiality were the only reality. It’s the aesthetic partner of worldviews that approach practical, ethical, and communal questions as though there were no more to human existence than the life of the body. Naturalism develops its constricting effect by degrees, even while it seems on the surface to do what I said literary realism typically does: “represent experience in a manner that gives the feeling of how we encounter it.” Yet most naturalisms fail to give the feeling of how a wide variety of humans have been known to encounter reality, insofar as they narrow their focus to the body, the senses, and the immediately felt currents of social forces. Naturalism lops down the tall poppies of human experience. It lowers the ceiling. It opens the door to a blind alley Jonathan Franzen has dubbed “depressive realism”: “You are, after all, just protoplasm, and one day you’ll be dead.”

Consider the following from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which embodies a flattened and peculiarly of-its-moment style I’d like to call sociological naturalism. Now Dreiser in this novel is very much a creature of his moment, the precise turn of the 20th century, and as such he can be both tedious and pompous. He seems to be after a Jamesian sweep of significance without the Jamesian breadth of mind. As such, taking Dreiser’s texts as test cases can be like the proverbial shooting of embarrelled fish.

But Dreiser serves us well as an example here because he does, in extreme, what other writers of his period do more subtly. In miniature essays at the heads of chapters, Dreiser lays out generalizations that are meant to serve us as background, though they are often more evocative of the shifting moralisms and ideologies than of the compelling visual panoplies of the Gilded Age. Listen to him hold forth (I will spare you the passage’s full length) on his characteristic naturalist conviction that human freedom is only an illusion awaiting its destruction in the full light of pure science:

We have the consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action, that the ideal is a light that cannot fail. He will not forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle of free-will instinct shall have been adjusted, when perfect understanding has given the former the power to replace the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and unwavering to the distinct pole of truth.

All this is mere sermonizing (which, as Virginia Woolf would hasten to tell us, often occurs in the fiction writer whose talents are really misplaced and who would have been better off as an essayist or, perhaps better still, some sort of researcher). Dreiser can do better, though. Elsewhere, see how he renders a lively sense of the eagerness of Carrie, a girl living in poverty, who, having been given some money under circumstances that place her in a compromising position, is waffling on whether or not to spend it:

The jackets were the greatest attraction. When she entered the store, she already had her heart fixed upon the peculiar little tan jacket with large mother-of-pearl buttons which was all the rage that fall. Still she delighted to convince herself that there was nothing she would like better. She went about among the glass cases and racks where these things were displayed, and satisfied herself that the one she thought of was the proper one. All the time she wavered in mind, now persuading herself that she could buy it right away if she chose, now recalling to herself the actual condition. At last the noon hour was dangerously near, and she had done nothing.

Isabel Archer deliberating over what to do with her newfound inheritance this is not. Yet the urgency and the moral doubt come through clearly just the same. Notice, though, how Dreiser remains carefully on the exterior surfaces of his characters. Like James, he lays out quick-moving dialogue in scene, but unlike James, he refuses to allow us—through this dialogue or otherwise—a sense of his characters’ individual interiority. Dreiser assumes or presumes that, as long as he paints his characters in general outline, he can get away with using a broad brush. He isn’t really writing for the ages, that is for a value higher than immediate sociological interest, because he takes it for granted that his audience’s firsthand experience of the society he is describing, however meager, will sufficiently supply whatever detail is missing not only as to characters’ presence and appearance but as to their inner states as well.

Unlike James’ characters, who leave us with a sense of both their applicable suggestion and their unique unrepeatability, Dreiser’s are not so much individuals as types. They are stand-ins for tens of thousands of men and women like themselves throughout the city, having similar conversations to the one Dreiser is writing, at the very moment Dreiser is writing it, and driven along by the same blunt forces:

When Minnie found the note next morning, after a night of mingled wonder and anxiety, which was not exactly touched by yearning, sorrow, or love, she exclaimed: “Well, what do you think of that?”

“What?” said Hanson.

“Sister Carrie has gone to live somewhere else.”

Hanson jumped out of bed with more celerity than he usually displayed and looked at the note. The only indication of his thoughts came in the form of a little clicking sound made by his tongue; the sound some people make when they wish to urge on a horse.

Utterly absent, here, the fine-tuning of character comprehension that occurs with James in almost every character he takes up. Dreiser displays here a tendency to take people at face value, a tendency which in James (to his credit) is almost absent.

Another, harsher way of putting this might be to say that Dreiser tends toward snap judgment. He supposes that his common people, doomed to apparent insignificance by their lack of material wealth, are in truth as flat they seem to the casual glance. Whereas if James takes up characters who live at a parallel social level to Minnie and Hanson—like Monsieur and Mademoiselle Nioche in The American—he is not fooled by this into thinking that such characters are necessarily unrefined.

Rather, James sees the thousand subtle shadows thrown on experience by the project of having to navigate it without a lot of access to resources. So does Woolf, at least partially, in “An Unwritten Story.” Both James and Woolf see what Dreiser misses or ignores: the complexity and unpredictability of human action in the face of every circumstance that might seem to point toward a too easy conclusion.

For Dreiser, poverty adds no subtlety to a person’s life, it only turns the mind into a blunt instrument like a scythe, concerned with and capable of a single task: base gain. To be fair to Dreiser, this can happen to people—he, having grown up in poverty, likely saw it happen firsthand—but when it does happen, it’s precisely the loss of individual, internal character agency that constitutes the tragedy. Yet with Dreiser we are led to doubt that that agency ever meaningfully existed in the first place.

I spend all this time on naturalism now, and might spend still more later, because it seems to me to overlap significantly with the “materialist realism” Joshua Hren often brings up as a contrast to contemplative realism. In light of how distorting it can be, I am strongly tempted to insist that, despite naturalism’s literary genealogy in common with realism and even the possibility that we could interchange the term “materialist realism” with it, naturalism might in truth be a species of irrealism, not of realism. But this is certainly open to debate, or further exploration, or what you will.

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*Though that rather high-handed assertion (like, perhaps, others) is, in fine essayistic fashion, suggested only in order to be subverted or overturned on more mature consideration. Emre’s essay [on John Guillory’s new book Professing Criticism — an earlier version of this piece conflated the two, & I regret the error] is also exciting in that it, invitingly, suggests that there’s an opportunity to have high-level and engaging literary conversations precisely in nonstandard or unexpected spaces.

**At some risk—of which I’m aware.