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The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Abstract

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 2 , March 1981 , pp. 224 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Douglas Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (London: Longman, 1972), p. 45. Hewitt proceeds to an analysis of the realistic narrator, good in itself but sidestepping the issue raised here. A more extended example of the subjective circle may be found in Christian Metz's essay “A propos de l'impression de réalité au cinéma,” Essais sur la signification au cinéma, i (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 13–24.

Note 2 J. P. Stern, On Realism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 174–75. Two recent examples of the objective circle: George Levine, “Can You Forgive Him? Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and the Myth of Realism,” Victorian Studies, 18 (1974), 5–30 (realism is conformity to social norms); Claude Duchet, “Une Ecriture de la socialité,” Poétique, No. 16 (1973), pp. 446–54 (a realistic novel is one “that borrows materials from contemporary reality” [p. 451]). See Jean Ricardou's critique of the “realistic complicity” between novel and world in Problèmes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 23–43. Ail translations from foreign texts are my own unless otherwise noted.

Note 3 Emile Faguet, “Le Réalisme des romantiques,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 6th ser., 8 (1912), 694–708. For an egregious modem instance, see Alfonso Sastre's definition of realism in Anatomia del realismo (Barcelona: Seix Barrai, 1965) as a “negation of negations” (p. 121), ideally combining antipossibilism, antipopulism, antiobjectivism, anti-avant-guardism, antinaturalism, and anticonstructivism (pp. 121–24).

Note 4 Proudhon, Du principe de l'art et da sa destination sociale, Ch. iii, in Œuvres complètes, ed. C. Bougie and H. Moysset, xi (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1939), 60; George Becker, Documents of Modem Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963); Emile Zola, Mes haines, Œuvres complètes, ed. Maurice le Blond, xl (Paris: François Bernouard, 1928), 33–34. On “constructive” realism see also Lorenz Dittmann, “Courbet und die Théorie des Realismus,” Beitriige zur Théorie der Künste im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Helmut Koopmann and J. Adolf Schmoll, I (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1971), 215–39, and, for Germany, Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, i (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), 257–84.

Note 5 Commenting helpfully on this essay, Eric Rabkin objects that my original phrase, “major works of considerable sophistication,” “skews the argument against …, quite specifically, Marxist analyses.” He continues, “One cannot help recalling that Doyle's stylistic distinction is usually said to reside in his ‘realism’ and his evocation of period London, yet he produced no generally regarded ‘major work.‘ ” “Stylistic distinction” gives the chief point away. We do, routinely, use the term “realism” to praise artistry. Even (especially?) Marxist analysts use it in this way.

Note 8 Roland Barthes, “L'Effet du réel,” Communications, No. 11 (1968), pp. 84–89; Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell Univ. Press, 1974). See also John Romano, Dickens and Reality (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), which is astute in its interpretations but ignores Maupassant's warning about confusing the pêle-mêle of mere existence with the real “logique … des faits.” “The first fact of realism” is not “dependence on the real world” (Romano, p. 50) but, rather, dependence on the experiential structure that constitutes reality.

Note 7 Demetz, Formen des realismus (Munich: Hanser, 1964).

Note 8 On the word “realism” see René Wellek, “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship,” Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 222–33, and his History of Modern Criticism, iv (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 1–3. On “real” see Fritz Schalk, “Positif als Modewort,” Romanische Forschungen, 71 (1959), 138–59. Two important earlier loci for “real” that do not seem to have been adequately recognized are Henry Home, Lord Karnes, Elements of Criticism (1761), Ch. ii, Pt. 1, Sec. 7, and Hugh Blair, “Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian” (1762).

Note 9 A. David-Sauvageot, Le Réalisme et le naturalisme dans la littérature et dans l'art (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1889), p. 170.

Note 10 On the affinities of realism and romanticism in France see Hans Robert Jauss, “Nachahmungsprinzip und Wirklichkeitsbegriff in der Theorie des Romans von Diderot bis Stendhal,” Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. H. R. Jauss (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 157–78; in England, George Levine, “Realism; or, In Praise of Lying: Some Nineteenth-Century Novels,” College English, 31 (1970), 355–65; in general, Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 3–27.

Note 11 Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre Citron, II (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 217 (the italicized sentence “All is true,” the subtitle of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, appears in English in Balzac's text); Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Gamier, 1966), p. 526; Maupassant, cited from Becker, p. 89; Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1925), p. 3.

Note 12 Indeed, Raymond Joly has persuasively argued that the weakness of Diderot's plays results in large measure from the dramatist's naive refusal to confront the problems entailed by a doctrine of the petit fait vrai: see Deux études sur la préhistoire du réalisme (Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1969), pp. 96–110.

Note 13 Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1974–79), n, 680; i, 572. Crime and Punishment, Pt. i, Ch. 5: “In a diseased condition dreams are often distinguished by unusual prominence, vividness, and exceptional resemblance to reality. A monstrous picture is sometimes created, but the setting and the whole process of the entire performance nonetheless remain so believable and with such fine details, so unexpected yet so artistically consistent with the entire fullness of the picture, that this very same dreamer could not think them up when awake, be he so much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev.”

Note 14 On “real language” see Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 16–18.

Note 15 Francis Hart, “Loose, Baggy Monsters,” a lecture delivered at Boston Univ., Oct. 1970. This view is a major theme of Richard Brinkmann's often underrated Wirklichkeit und Illusion (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1957), esp. pp. 312–16. See also Hermann Kinder, Poesie als Synthese (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1973), pp. 29–62. Dickens' epistemological skepticism—recently illuminated by Richard Maxwell in “Dickens's Omniscience,” ELH, 46 (1979), 173–92—is exemplary; perhaps this is why so much recent discussion of realism in England has concerned Dickens even though he was hostile to the term, as Richard Stang documents in The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850–1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 155–59.

Note 16 Henry James, The A rt of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York: Scribners, 1934), pp. 31–33; Thoreau, cited in F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 116–17; André Gide, Romans, ed. Yvonne Davet and Maurice Nadeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 988; Walther Killy, Wirklichkeit und Kunstcharakter: Neun Romane des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 1963), Ch. vi.

Note 17 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785), ed. Esther M. McGill (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), i, 111; Friedrich Blanckenburg, Versuch über den Roman (1774), ed. Eberhart Lämmert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), pp. 257–61 (a far more systematic treatment of “reality” in the novel than Reeve's); Philippe Hamon, “Un Discours contraint,” Poétique, No. 16 (1973), pp. 411–45; loan Williams, The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development (London: Macmillan, 1974); see also Richard Pearce, who identifies realism with the self-contained economy of works like A Doll's House (“The Limits of Realism,” College English, 31 [1970], 335–43); on Dickens' antirealistic conclusions see Northrop Frye's approving analysis in “Dickens and the Comedy of Humors,” The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 218–40.

Note 18 On “drama” in Balzac see Pierre Laubriet, L'Intelligence de l'art chez Balzac (Paris: Didier, 1961), pp. 120–39.

Note 19 On verb tenses see the fundamental study by Harald Weinrich, Tempus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), esp. Chs. vi and vii. Weinrich associates realism with a preference for backgrounding (imperfect) over foregrounding (preterit) narration (pp. 164–66, 209–10), but it follows from his examples that preterit forms become increasingly emphatic in the nineteenth century in compensation for their decreased frequency. The two aspects—Weinrich prefers to call them Aktionsarten—are inextricably linked in realist fiction; only in weaker examples do they tend toward partial dissociation, as he elegantly demonstrates (pp. 175–81). For a good case study see R. G. Durand, “Notes sur le système verbal et le ‘point de vue’ dans le récit,” Modem Language Notes, 85 (1970), 490–95.

Note 20 Elsewhere Galdós uses the grammatical diminutive as a realistic trait of style (as do authors in other languages, such as Dostoevsky and Verga), as Kay Engler points out in The Structure of Realism: The Novelas Contemporáneas of Benito Pérez Galdós (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 62. (Dare one link this verbal phenomenon with the diminutive subject matter favored by a certain sentimental strain of realism: Little Dorrit, Le Petit Chose, Piccolo mondo anticol) More generally, see Michael Nimetz, Humor in Galdós (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968). A collection of essays in English on Dona Perfecta and an annotated bibliography appear in Anales Galdosianos, 9 (1976).

Note 21 The Spanish word for dawn here is the prosaic madrugada, associated with privation and transience. Spanish has a separate word, alba, for resplendent, hopeful, or poetic dawn. See the entries on these and related terms in the Diccionario de autoridades of the Real Academia Espanola (1732; rpt. Madrid: Gredos, 1964).

Note 22 Martin Price generalizes on this mechanism of realistic style in “The Irrelevant Detail and the Emergence of Form,” Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 69–91.

Note 23 See S. Bacarisse, “The Realism of Galdos: Some Reflections on Language and the Perception of Reality,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 42 (1965), 239–50, for a good analysis of another representative paragraph. Bacarisse identifies realism with atomistic impressionism. But to do so he must dismiss certain expressions in his chosen passage as stylistic lapses. My contention is that if even the most representative passages are not free from such stylistic discontinuities, then these characteristics should be regarded as intrinsic aspects of the style and not as aberrations. Unlike Gustavo Correa, I find the dialectical interplay of individual and type prominent throughout Galdós' career, not only in his later works (see Correa, Realidad, ficciôn y simbolo en las novelas de Pérez Galdós [Bogota: Caro y Cuervo, 1967]).

Note 24 See, e.g., Jacques Neefs's remarks on the necessity of a “diegetic frontier” (i.e., of internal boundaries, discontinuities, and oppositions) in realistic writing: “La Figuration réaliste: L'Exemple de Flaubert,” Poétique, No. 16 (1973), pp. 466–76, and Eric S. Rabkin's homologous analysis of realism as “anticontextual bisociation with a residue,” Narrative Suspense (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1973), pp. 126–39. On foreground and background in Macaulay and Thackeray see Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), Ch. v, esp. p. 135.

Note 25 Order, or hierarchy, is crucial. When, instead of order, indeterminacy is perceived, a deconstructive reading results, of which an instructive example is J. Hillis Miller, “The Fictions of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank's Illustrations,” Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), pp. 85–153. Realism is in the mind of the reader, and often both “realistic” and “deconstructive” readings seem legitimate, though usually one reading strategy will seem more normal and the other bolder. Miller's deconstruction of Boz is bold; he repeatedly denies the validity of the hierarchical ordering in what are clearly intended to be foregrounding and backgrounding effects. Similar issues are raised with respect to French realism in Jean Paris, “Notes sur Balzac,” Univers parallèles II: Le Point aveugle (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 99–133.

Note 26 Page numbers in the text refer to Hegel's Wissen-schaft der Logik, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Mar-kus Michel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). For the best literary analysis along comparable lines see Georges Blin, Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (Paris: José Corti, 1954), pp. 5–16. The three sections of Blin's analysis (which never mentions Hegel) can be shown to parallel the three stages in Hegel's dialectic of the real. (Likewise the three central chapters of Brinkmann's Wirklichkeit und Illusion, which mentions Hegel only in passing and which concerns forces causing the gradual dissolution of realism, follow Hegel's dialectic in reverse order.) On silhouetting, see Blin, pp. 148 and 179.

Note 27 For present purposes I prefer the more literal and idiomatic rendering of Wirklichkeit as “reality” to the standard rendering “actuality,” which Hegel's translators have chosen in order to preserve a one-to-one correspondence of German and English throughout the Logic.

Note 28 I refer to Barthes's essay “L'Effet du réel,” which sees realism as pure disorder. In S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), Barthes turns to a conception of realism as the superimposition (I would say silhouetting) of distinct “codes”; see esp. Sec. 25.

Note 29 The Science of Logic does not make explicit that the governing category here is action; see the parallel section in the Encyclopedia (Sec. 147).

Note 30 For a particularly fine and influential account of realism as myth emerging from appearance see Albert Béguin, Balzac visionnaire (Geneva: A. Skira, 1946); rpt. in Balzac lu et relu (Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 19137. Straightforwardly heterocosmic or Promethean accounts of the realist as world creator are also related to this stage of the dialectic; see, e.g., Robert Alter, Partial Magic (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1975), Ch. iv, and Miguel de Unamuno's Prologue to his Tres Novelas Ejemplares.

Note 31 Demetz, “Uber die Fiktionen des Realismus,” Neue Rundschau, 88 (1977), 554–67; see also Morse Peck-ham's essays on realism, esp. “An Explanation of ‘Realism,‘” Denver Quarterly, 13 (1978), 3–10; Balzac, La Comédie humaine, pp. 219, 128; Eliot, Adam Bede, Ch. xvii. See further J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 80–84. Eliot's mirror is misread as a clear window in Walter M. Kendrick, “Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel,” Victorian Studies, 20 (1976), 15–17.

Note 32 Francesco Fiorentino, “Le figure di stornamento in un racconto di Balzac,” Strumenti Critici, 9 (1977), 31–49. On Balzac as a “mythmaker” see Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman (Paris: B. Grasset, 1972), pp. 247–91, and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Realidad y fantasia en Balzac (Bahia Blanca, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Sur, 1964), pp. 575–98 and passim.

Note 33 Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 30; Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 11. Jean Rousset, in the course of an excellent discussion of the “realism” of the epistolary novel, quotes one of the few mid-eighteenth-century uses of the word “real” that I have seen, but the highly un-Flaubertian passage denies the very realism of presentation that is being asserted: “the pleasure consisted in the eternal contrast between the real things and the singular, new, or bizarre manner in which they were perceived” (Montesquieu's “Réflexions” on the Persian Letters, cited in Rousset, Forme et signification [Paris: José Corti, 1962], p. 73). For a warning against the abuse of the term “realism,” see Paul-Gabriel Boucé's chapter “La Représentation du réel,” in his Les Romans de Smollett (Paris: Didier, 1971), pp. 309–10.

Note 34 Edinger, Samuel Johnson and Poetic Style (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), Chs. ii and iii. Marshall Brown, “The Urbane Sublime,” ELH, 45 (1978), 236–54.

Note 35 See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), and Gerald Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 89–91.

Note 36 Hans-Georg Gadamer has a helpful interpretation in “Hegel—die verkehrte Welt,” Hegels Dialektik: Fünf hermeneutische Studien (Tubingen: J. B. C. Mohr, 1971), pp. 31–47. The recuperative bias of Gadamer's hermeneutics, however, leads him to reassert simple continuities and to gloss over the discontinuity essential to my conception of realism; though he warns repeatedly against ignoring the force of the prefix in verkehrt, he ultimately succumbs himself, substituting gekehrt and es verhält sich for verkehrt (“es ist gegen sich selbst gekehrt oder, wie wir sagen: ‘es verhált sich’ ” [p. 46]).

The history of the “inverted world” topos has yet to be written. Ian Donaldson gives a fine account of its employment in stage comedy in The World Upside-Down (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), though he stops before two of the most systematic exploitations of the topos, Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and Tieck's Verkehrte Welt. See also Gérard Genette, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 9–20.

Note 37 Caserio, Plot, Story and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 59. Caserio attacks Barnaby Rudge for being deficient in peripety. In fact, his argument shows only that the novel is a poor example of realism; I happen to find it a masterpiece in a two-part allegorical mode that is quite exceptional in its period.