2 - Is This Really Realism?

Summary

I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representations through the real objects.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid.

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

I

In the last chapter I suggested that our understanding of narrative voice – that fundamental formal property of the novel – is now entering a transformative phase. To understand how the novel works today – to understand what we mean by the value of the novel – we need to develop a new way of thinking about the novel voice, a new way of hearing it. If this is true, then it is so to the extent that the broader formal apparatus of the novel, of which the voice might be thought of as only one element, is also entering a crisis, in which its most essential attributes have to be rethought. I mean, of course, the formal category of realism, the mode which is so closely associated with the novel that the two – realism and the novel – have sometimes appeared mutually to define one another. It is the novel that allows us fully to conceive of realism, and it is the urge towards realism that has shaped the passage of the novel, from its earliest beginnings. As Georg Lukács has put it, ‘realism is not one style among others’, but, rather, ‘all writing must contain a certain degree of realism’. ‘All styles’, he writes, ‘(even those seemingly most opposed to realism) originate in it or are significantly related to it’. There is a ‘tendency’, Fredric Jameson has recently argued, both ‘to identify realism with the novel itself’ and to think of the ‘history of the novel’ as ‘inevitably the history of the realist novel, against which or underneath which all the aberrant modes, such as the fantastic novel or the episodic novel, are subsumed’.