What is the Meaning of Realism?
On Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age; the nature of reality; and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower
He added, what is the meaning of the blue flower?
Karoline saw that he was not going to answer this himself.
—Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
Some working definitions of realism
Realism is ‘a treasure house of details but it is an indifferent whole’. It is ‘a vague and overflexible term applied by indiscriminate minds to the minute description of detail rather than to a new method of literary creation’. Realism is the softening of political or other principles. Realism is the belief that the things of the world exist independent of their being thought by us. Realism is demystification. Realism is ‘structurally superfluous notation’. Realism is bedsheets hanging out to dry.
Suppose, for instance…
I was trying to explain to a friend, a while ago, why I don’t care about reading nonfiction. I find it almost impossible not to be annoyed by both the absence of stylisation and the attempts at stylisation that you find in works of memoir, biography, popular history, etc. What it comes down to, I think, has something to do with the question not of reality, but of realism.
A number of years ago, when I was a student, people were writing books about the turn away from fiction, about Reality Hunger. This also coincided with the rise of Anglophone autofiction, and we were often told that what people wanted was some sense of the factual, the real, the fact that this happened, some sense in which the whole thing wasn’t just a pointless game. And saying “there’s this man here and you’re all going to identify with him” didn’t seem right to me anymore. It didn’t seem real.
I like autofiction. Not all of it, but I’m not against it in principle. Even though, there is, in some sense, no meaningful distinction between reading autofiction and certain kinds of literary memoir, I feel it differently. There’s something in the question of realism that makes it different for me, that allows me to enjoy fiction, even if it seems to be moving away from fictionality.
And I don’t just mean realist fiction in the sense of the classic Victorian novel, though I love this inordinately All of fiction seems to me to need something that is both not factual, not connected to reality, and yet which attempts to move us closer to reality. It is like reality, realistic, and not real. I don’t just mean fictionality, though, or if I do I feel that realism makes a stronger claim as a word. Realism, I think of, for better or worse, as a soft and asymptotic fall towards reality—I mean you get the feeling of going towards the real, but you can’t get there. Otherwise, splat.
This distinction is probably not super clear. But there’s a recent, interesting argument about fiction, from a work that I found about as stimulating as academic literary criticism can be—and which I have tried to read in snatches when not too baby-brained to grapple with its heavy theory armature—that may shine a light on it.
As far as I understand it, the argument in Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, works somewhat aslant of what I mean about realism. Bewes’s book is about attempting to think of the novel, especially the very contemporary novel, your Hetis, Lerners, Smiths both Zadie and Ali, etc, not as expressing some person’s views or ideas about life, but as containing a kind of impossible thought at the ‘interstices’ between text and world.
That means a thought it would be impossible for a subject, a single person to think, and a thought that cannot be extracted from the novel itself. In this sense, it’s is very important to Bewes that an idea is not the same as a thought.
Novels themselves really work precisely by not being connected to reality, Bewes argues, at least not in the logical ways we tend to make connections. In fact, the logical ways we make connections do not themselves work, he thinks. Bewes generalises several cruxes in philosophy under the rubric of the logic of instantiation to prove this.
Instantiation means something like the way that one particular is an instance of a universal or a quality or what have you. An example would be that a red apple is an instance of redness. But how do we get from the redness as a property of the apple to the idea of redness? Well, we say that they are related. The apple is related to redness by instantiation. But then, you might ask, how is that relationship itself related to these qualities?
To be honest, you probably wouldn’t ask that. But the late Victorian idealist philosopher FH Bradley among others, asked this, and the formal version of this question is sometimes called Bradley’s regress. I’ll try and frame it as non-formally as I can:
If the relationship between apples and redness does not emerge out of any quality of apple or redness, i.e. does not have its own relationship to these two terms, how can it connect them? And, if there is a relationship that connects the relationship to the quality and the object, what connects that relationship to all three terms? Can we do the same thing again and again?
This infinite regress, to me, is not totally convincing for reasons that are too dull to get into here. Nevertheless, it’s cleverly used by Bewes to tease out a tendency in contemporary fiction that is in fact a basic potential of the novel form itself.
People think of autofiction, for example, as anchored in the real, the life of the author, but the point is that in fictionalising its particular connection, it raises something like this problem of regressive instantiation. Normally, we read a novel as saying something about the world, instantiating some truth: this (say, person) is a type of a real thing (people are like this). This is the principle of most fictional representation, if you like, its justification—there is a connection between this fictional character and the world, and the connection is made by somebody, the author, the god outside the text, for example. But what is the relationship between “The relationship between the world and fiction” in the autofictional novel, or the novel of Sebaldian pondering, or the Cuskesque or whatever, and the world? How is the former relation an instance of the world itself?
Here’s Bewes:
Whereas novel criticism has been defined by the effort to forge interpretive links between the content of the work and the world, and whereas novel theory proposes theoretical explanations for the same relation, what the novel of our time does unceasingly—in works by Jesse Ball, Teju Cole, Dennis Cooper, Rachel Cusk, Renee Gladman, James Kelman, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Valeria Luiselli, Patrick Modiano, W. G. Sebald, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith (to mention only the few writers touched on in this work)—is effect the dissolution of all such links. A twenty-first-century theory of the novel must acknowledge and do justice to this enigmatic, little-studied, in fact barely noticed, technically untheorizable, yet insistent quality of the literature of our period: a quality of not only refusing to connect the work and the world but of thinking, inhabiting, even forging the space of their disconnection.
Bewes thinks that this dissolution is the purest essence of the novel, at least the contemporary novel:
As a principle that is latent within any writing that connects a subject and an object—any truth claim, any statement of point of view, any assertion of commitment to a cause or struggle, any avowal of solidarity, any confession of guilt or claim of innocence, any interpretive or theoretical proposition—fiction is capable of hollowing it out, of breaking the connection in the very act of making it. That capability is what I am calling “postfiction”: an element in the practice of fiction that unthinks or deauthorizes the very claims made by the work, whether direct or indirect, rhetorical or aesthetic, forceful or subtle, overt or implicit, conscious or unconscious
This means that the novel is a solvent form, an antiform. It does this not simply to the ideas in a novel, but to the instantiation relation itself. There is something in the way a novel works, which militates against reading it as giving form to experience, embodying or instantiating certain kinds of worldly ideas.
Think of it like this—a conventional novel instantiates its idea, or claims to, by not mentioning it. So no character in Madame Bovary, and certainly not the narrator, needs to say look at this idiot, she reads too much romance fiction. And a big part of the reason why you don’t and maybe even can’t do this is because once the idea enters the novel, you get a kind of regress—the idea is dissolved in the fiction. The novel no longer instantiates the idea, it simply contains it. In postfiction, Bewes thinks, we arrive at :
A literature that would neither affirm nor regret the “fundamental dissonance of existence”[…]—that would live it, which is to say, think it directly: be it, rather than “resolve” it through “formal” means…
This is the point of contemporary fiction, which often seems to be less interested in various formal innovations than 20th century writing was. It devours all ideas and forms in the service of being with the absence of ideas in the world:
For the task of theorizing a world of discontinuity, a world in which the most pressing theoretical undertaking is not to try to wrest the fragments into a semblance of unity but, on the contrary, to think disconnection as such—to think, as Foucault put it, “the relations between chance and thought,” think the “absence” of theory—such a task is no longer that of the theorist or critic but of the novel.
It’s really important here that form is rejected . Form, which Bewes seems to think is having a moment in literary criticism, is simply one of many ways to try to connect the novel to the world. The conventional writer would use some of the things we tend to call form when discussing novels—images, patterns, plot symmetry, etc, to instantiate the bigger idea—capitalism is bad; don’t do immoral thing x; it’s hard to live with trauma; only connect, etc.
For most critics, the idea instantiated in the text doesn’t have to be that of the author, but it is still important that the form of it does some work. Behind the author’s back, there might be a form that speaks an idea through him or her: Frederic Jameson, for example, tends to discuss the novel in terms of its form as an imaginary solution or exploration of a real social problem, instantiating it. Jameson would see Balzac’s Cousin Bette (a fantastic read that I urge on anyone) as the embodiment of real tensions in 19th century French culture. The way that chivalric values both were and were not recuperable into emergent bourgeois society plays out in the relationships between the characters. Lisbeth, Crevel, Valerie, Steinbock and the Hulots, instantiate their social classes or positions. The plot they create together is an instance of a social problem, formalised.
But underneath that tension, we might say, waiting a hundred odd years to be drawn out by purer works of fictional thought, by postfiction, is only the chaos of writing itself. A postfictional novel doesn’t just represent a system in a clever intentional pattern. Instead it drags the thought into the novel, where it is just another piece of writing, without any privileged relationship to the truth.
What you end up with, when you drag this kind of thought into the novel, Bewes thinks, is a newish, freakish kind of thought, not thinkable by anyone, or by any possible individual. Indeed, that is simply what writing is, it is itself, an assemblage of thought that rejects the idea that it merely gestures towards some person’s idea:
It is about a logic of novel thinking that reaches its fullest realization in the continual emergence of a thought that is not verifiable or falsifiable, a thought that barely registers at the formal level, a thought that may not even be subjectively inhabitable but in which the novel’s refusal of prevailing ideologies is located.
For Bewes, accepting this unthinkability is the pure possibility of resistance to what he calls an artistic regime, the kind of logics that govern how we perceive art’s connection to life. Indeed, once it is sort of noticed in fiction, it emanates out into the condition of writing in general:
Once the element of “represented speech and thought” enters such non-fictional discursive spaces, the stability of those spaces and of their orienting categories is thrown into doubt.
In the book, then, this kind of argument ultimately just becomes poststructuralism redux. What is good and resistant is that which casts the subject who might enunciate a sentence into doubt. So rather than assess the politics of novels, we see that the thought of the novel is at the most basic level resistant to a current ideology which manifests both in market preference and “identity politics”. For Bewes there is a necessary connection between big data, racial profiling and the philosophical idea of the subject—ie the person who thinks and knows and is one coherent entity
The conventional reading of a novel and its ideas is that it pins a thought to a person, relativizing the thought. But Bewes says rather that what is interesting, is that like free indirect discourse, it is not the thought, but the person that is relativised.
Lots of this, I think is really useful for thinking about a particular kind of problem that is clearly visible in contemporary fiction. Writers do seem to endlessly worry the idea of relatedness, and indeed to attempt to destroy it at the level of fictional ontology. But the poststructuralism redux aspect of his work, all that French philosophy that was big for Gen X literary critics (Deleuze, Ranciere) is obviously the real centre of his interest, however much he turns novels into the great unspeakable truth. The fact that what Deleuze thinks about cinema gets like 100 times the analysis of any novel is not just because, as he argues, you can’t extract ideas from novels. It’s clearly because he cares way more about Deleuze than he does about Zadie Smith.
The resistance he envisions, then, the noninstantiation of fictionality, which he takes great pains to detach from any sense of artistic form or conventional aesthetic achievement, seems to me to become kind of weightless as he does. I’ll discuss that in more detail another time, maybe, because it’s a good and important book and I should probably produce more content anyway.
But my main disagreement, I guess, is that Bewes’ insistence on this antiform aspect of the novel ignores what I was trying to explain to my friend about why I want to read fiction in the first place. For him fiction is itself a way of getting close to the the truest kinds of thought, the impossible, impersonal thought. But he doesn’t seem to me to take this anything like far enough.
Or rather, let me put it this way:
Maybe contemporary fiction’s idealess thought as Bewes describes it is the urge for realism turned upon itself. Even in its leaps away from Victorian realism, the contemporary novel as Bewes describes it seems to me to retain the most basic function of realism as a discourse: the critique of romance, the demystification that has been regularly identified as the function of the modern novel, since Don Quixote. The giants are really windmills. A writing that tears apart its connection to a person, a speaker, a subject, is just extending that debunking logic to its own operative procedures—it gives you reality effects and critiques the romance of those reality effects. Bewes maybe admits this:
The difficulty of reality is not a form but an experience of the limits of form. Like the “fundamental dis- sonance of existence,” the difficulty of reality is not a form—until, that is, it becomes one, until it is “resolved” or deflected.
If formlessness is a thought, as Bewes thinks it is, and if it is nevertheless not subjectively inhabitable, what makes it a thought must be that it is in some sense true. Bewes compares Heidegger’s claim that science is not a thought, to his point that the novel is a thought. And surely the point there must be that science is formal—not in dialogue with an object but following its own unthinking, unrealisable process. Life itself is not like this, science is deadening. So is form, the pattern imposed by the creator, who is a subject, unlike the subjectless assemblage that is the novel.
I sort of agree with him about the limits of most of the critical approaches he rejects. But I still want to force his ideas about reality back into confrontation with the formal completion of a book. In the end Bewes’ book seems to me to be written in the service of a reality he believes in. It is the reality that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe like this:
Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on their compositions of speed. Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to the plan(e) of organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence and univocality
For Bewes, I think, what matters is getting to this reality. Novels allow us not to think this thought, which clearly can be thought in theory, but to be it. I, on the other hand, think this is a flat and uninteresting vision of reality. I think we need something a little less real. I also think my objection has something to do with poetry, a form of literature that he all but totally ignores. Bewes, for all his claims isn’t really writing from the standpoint of literature at all.
On this level the solvent quality of contemporary fiction is simply part the ongoing debunking, dissolution, and then the stepping back from this, that is at the core of realism. Maybe what I mean, or my dissent from Bewes, is that I am also, if anything, more interested in the stepping back. The formal mastery of certain kinds of novels seem to me to be far more interesting than some generic shimmering immanence. The gesture of relativisation that he sees in the novel as its truth, I think, doesn’t have to be put in the service of reality at all. We do not have to accept any truths about the way things are.
There is a kind of black hole in the logic of the novel, for Bewes. I agree with him. But that itself is not interesting unless you want to worship the black hole in the same way that other readers might worship their own ideas of truth. I don’t. Instead, I think what ideas are fed into the black hole in what order matters. The specificity of particular novels, their particular untruths matter more.
I’ll try to illustrate this by talking about a specific novel that raises some of these same questions in its handling of the gestures of realism. The example is precisely what Bewes wants to reject, because his view of reality says that everything is specific and does not exemplify an idea. But isn’t exemplification, instantiation, an edifying fiction? Suppose for instance, there was a novel that really might exemplify, not realism, but the meaning of realism.
Mere details
Realism is ‘a treasure house of details but it is an indifferent whole’. It is ‘a vague and overflexible term applied by indiscriminate minds to the minute description of detail rather than to a new method of literary creation’. Realism is the softening of political or other principles. Realism is the belief that the things of the world exist independent of their being thought by us. Realism is demystification. Realism is bedsheets hanging out to dry.
I repeat this passage, because it is a list that I find useful. All of these things tell us something useful about what the world’s most useless and yet inescapable term is doing for us when we read novels.
The last definition in the paragraph is my description of the opening of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. The novel is a fictionalised account of an important incident in the early life of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis—his courtship of Sophie von Kuhn, a 12-year-old girl he fell in love with, proposed to, and who died of tuberculosis at age 15, before they could be married. He was 25 by the time she died.
Fitzgerald, notably, doesn’t make a big deal out of the problematic age gap. History didn’t either, just as it didn’t for Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura. Sophie didn’t become a victim, she became an idea, the dead and unattainable beloved. Her absence is the presence behind Hymns to the Night, one of the major poetic sequences of German romanticism. In taking a nonjudgemental approach, Fitzgerald goes along with history, rather than portraying Novalis as some kind of monstrous Humbert Humbert figure, though this might also have resulted in an amusing novel. She treats him as a man of his time.
But it is in this historical treatment, generous, tender, but in a certain sense merciless, that Fitzgerald asserts the prerogative of the novelist, or of what we might call realism. Dreams, ideas, poetry—these things don’t get to exist independently of the prose world of lives themselves, those gatherings of details.
This might sound different from the kind of breathless fantasy of a thought without a subject that Bewes is talking about, that I have also lumped under the heading of realism. But it’s not. We’ll get to the specifics in a second. That has to do with bedsheets. But the principle, gestured to or instantiated is to do with fiction.
The whole process of thought and its connection to the world in fiction seems to me to be an endless rotation, the pole of romance and the pole of debunking switching places. One day realism, as a logic, serves to promote bourgeois Cartesianism or whatever, and then the next day it promotes Deleuzian transcdentenal empiricism. I tend to think of it as like an hourglass. When the sands of the realistic run out at any given historical moment, you flip it over and begin falling towards the opposite end. But Fitzgerald’s novel, I want to suggest, contains the hand that turns the glass.
For Fitzgerald, Novalis, obeying the conventional logic of realism, is not an idea, but a historical man. This also obeys the conventional logic of Bewes’ noninstantiation. The idea is not extractable from the instance. Friedrich von Hardenberg, an aristocrat of restricted means, who ends up working as an administrator for a salt mine is Novalis. His non-transcendence of historical contingency is embodied most clearly, perhaps, in that opening scene. Jacob Dietmahler, the young Von Hardenberg’s friend, has returned with him to the family home.
JACOB Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday. They should not have arrived anywhere, certainly not at this great house, the largest but two in Weissenfels, at such a time. Dietmahler’s own mother supervised the washing three times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse, he could tell from the great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where grave-looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them into giant baskets, that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth, in fact he knew that in this case it didn’t, but it was certainly an indication of long standing.”
I love this opening. Was not such a fool that he could not see. This formulaic phrase could almost be a slogan for what it means to be a realist. The fool, like Emma Bovary, or Effie Briest, does not see. The novelist, if not her characters, sees the reality of things, which tends to include foolishness. Don Quixote, for example, who is a fool, and perhaps the first hero of realism, sees giants where he ought to see windmills.
If we squint, perhaps we might see Dietmahler playing the Sancho Panza role to Hardernberg’s Quixote. The two companions in the life of the mind are on their way to visit Hardenberg’s family and they see something that is both embarrassing, and drags them back to reality.
Novalis himself responds with a joke about Fichte. “Gentlemen! Look at the washbasket! Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought the wash-basket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!” The point of this joke, the reason that Novalis makes it is that there is a certain felt incongruity between the idealism (as in the belief that the things of the world do not exist independently of the mind) and the laundry. I can’t go into more detail here than to say that the ‘I’ in Fichte’s thought sort of makes itself, posits itself, prior to all experience, you have yourself and your freedom. There’s no necessary contradiction between this and the sight of some laundry, and yet we feel the irony there.
That irony has something to do with realism. It has something to do with the kind of generic conventions that Fitzgerald knows that we know (or thinks we ought to) as we read her novel. When Sancho Panza corrects him about the giants, Don Quixote replies that Sancho is clearly not well-versed in adventures. Sancho Panza is not well versed in the literature of chivalric romance, like Quixote is. But most readers are well versed in the conventions of realism, taken as the cutting of idealism (in all senses) down to size. Even Dietmahler has internalised a certain realism.
We might be inclined to think then, that that cutting down to size is what is happening here. The great Romantic poet’s house is opened up, and his family’s (cleanish) laundry is on show. This laundry is then metonymic, (and metonymy is itself according to Roman Jakobson, the master figure of the realist novel) of the class position of the Hardenberg family. We, who are not familiar with the laundry customs of 18th century Germany, are told what it means, subtly, through free indirect discourse.
That’s one of the other beauties of this novel, by the way. It is full of little details, each of which must have required deep reading, but which do not show up as context or explanation. They’re often just little scraps of information, floating like snowflakes across the novel’s field of vision. Again this seems to me to be realism. We get the sense that we are not trying to grasp the period, as history—as an idea that we call history, but to convey it realistically, as particular experiences that do not add up to some coherent whole.
But is that broken coherence like Bewes’ thought? In his lengthy discussion of Deleuze on cinema, he hones in on what Deleuze has to say about the image of the hand in Robert Bresson’s films:
The image of the hand is a mode of thought, but one predicated upon disconnection rather than connection, exteriority rather than interiority, the event rather than interpretation. For Deleuze there is no thought in general.
This image is of a connection that is only embodied in the hand, is therefore only embodied, not an idea. Bewes connects this idea to Dostoyevsky and then later to what Jacques Ranciere has to say about the aesthetic regime—the mode of attending to every object in the world as fit for art which he argues began, coincidentally with the German romantics of the 18th century, including Novalis. For him, all of these are potential ways of trying to get at the thought that is not extractable, not connected. You might call this the real thought.
And this real thought, could just as easily be the destination of the conventional logic of realism. On the one hand, to show the great poet confronted by domestic details, and the individual confronted with the flotsam of history, is part of the critique of romance, the demystification that has been regularly identified as the function of the modern novel, since Don Quixote. It is also the belief that details are real in and of themselves, no longer ideas or romantic notions. The giants are really windmills. The beloved ‘philosophy’, as Novalis calls Sophie, is really a little girl who doesn’t understand what is going on.
Fitzgerald achieves a tremendous pathos from this critique as she highlights, everywhere, the lives of women in the novel. Confined to supporting roles, they come, in a sense, to be in much closer contact with reality than Novalis, lost in his own thoughts. From his mother and sister to Sophie, and the neglected Karoline Just, we are given a demystifying view of Novalis’ dependence on these women. If we might metonymically associate washing with domesticity and therefore with women, in the image economy of the novel, then that opening again makes an image of its project of bringing the transcendental down to earth, and putting the man back in touch with the women’s lives that have been forgotten or idealised.
But what does it mean to see all of this demystification in an image? Indeed, it is an image that not only opens the book, but which helps to close it. Sophie’s illness requires a surgery, and the doctors demand that she has linen to hand.
“The room reserved for the purpose must be kept ready at all times,’ he went on doggedly. ‘And there must be a good supply of old, clean sheets and old, clean undergarments of the finest linen.’
‘Ready at all times, when we don’t know when it will be wanted!’ said the Mandelsloh [Sophie’s sister]. ‘We have two rooms here, and only two. This is the sitting room, and my sister is asleep at the moment in the bedroom. You may leave the inspection to me.’
Dietmahler hesitated. ‘And the other things?’
‘Do you think we travelled here with piles of old, clean, cast-off undergarments of the finest linen?”
And during the surgery itself, Sophie covers her face with a piece of muslin.
This image, then of washing clothes, becomes not simply part of the realism of the project, but a kind of rounding out of it. It provides imagistic closure, and connects the beginning of the novel to Sophie’s death. It is an image of the underneath, of the real, and, in being that, it becomes an image of the ultimate underneath, death itself.
Another way of putting this is that when you get right down to the question of what is real, you find death. Nonexistence provides no room for doubt, or error. It is undeniable. That’s part of the message of Novalis’ Hymns to the Night, his sequence of poems about longing to be reunited with Sophie and the mother of night, with death.
So to say that Fitzgerald critiques that project, debunks and demystifies it in the name of realism isn’t quite fair. In a certain sense, her project aligns totally with his. It does not merely reveal the underneath of his ideas, but transposes his own search for underneath into a different key. Artistic coherence, which we might call the ism bit of realism, ends up purifying reality into an idea, death, just as much as philosophical idealism and Romantic poetry do. There is no pure demystification.
In the novel, Novalis shows people the unfinished manuscript of his book Heinrich Von Ofterdingen. It concerns the quest for a blue flower. Characters puzzle at it in incomprehension. In real literary history it became a symbol of romanticism and of poetry itself. In Fitzgerald’s novel, the blue flower is tied to the reality of Sophie von Kuhn. The symbol is thus demystified. It is reflected onto realistic characters and lives, small needs, nontranscendent longings and irritations. But its petals do not blow away. The blue flower maintains its connection to the absolute truth of death.
Much of the long, endless, literary critical argument about realism concerns the historical worth of particular demystifying practices. This goes back, I think to my previous post on poetry and truth. To be a realist, in the pejorative sense one applies to the 19th century novel, is to take some image of reality for reality itself. Novels pull down certain idols and raise other ones up. Realism is a disenchantment, but conventional realism is, for many critics, a disenchantment that leaves us with the kind of reason I was talking about in my last post, the truth of instrumental reason, and of capitalist social relations. In tearing apart the illusions of romance, and of knightly chivalry, as Don Quixote does, for example, the realist novel leaves intact the illusions of the 19th century bourgeoise, for whom chivalry got in the way of money making.
One reading, which is teleologically drawn from the developments of modernist fiction and its more disjunctive techniques, then suggests that a kind of return to the unreal of the poetic, offers a potential escape from the delusions of realism. To other, like Lukacs, it represents a deluded doubling down on the subjectivism of the bourgeoise.
To Bewes, what matters is the freakishly inhuman thought of the novel, which is not subjective. In each case, then, the untruth of subjective experience is seen more truly from some particular angle. To caricature: The less subjective, the better the politics: resistance comes when you depart from subjectivity.
But I don’t know. I think of the point of fiction as being not to provide the unthinkable thought, the inhuman assemblage of writing, which Bewes points out exists everywhere, but to allow us a way to subjectively inhabit it. We have to have something that we can pit against reality. That’s what literary form is for, the artifice or organisation. When I read The Blue Flower, it seems to me that its realism is subordinated to a formal necessity that is more important to it than reality itself, even as it is in the service of reality, of revealing the thoughtlessness of Novalis as he interacts with other real people. It’s hard to explain this, but I go back to the point that the realest reality is death.
The form of a novel, or any other work of art, I guess, can serve to express this, but also resists it. The charm of the illusion itself, its momentarily felt perfection is not in the reality it conjures but in the way reality seems to crystallise into something better, some perfection that feels distinct from the deathliness it is nevertheless obliged to model its sense of the real on. Some world other than the world of death. That is the subjective world. The question of thinking impossible thoughts in the novel is less important than the formal resolution that cheats death.
I think sometimes of the famous and weird aside about human life in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It is a statement of our need to cultivate our sympathy for the everyday, the small and the ordinary, for which realism might serve:
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
The vision here of reality is poetic in several senses. It draws on Wordsworth for one thing (‘In me the meanest flower that blows do give/ thought that often lie too deep for tears’). It also suggests something as beyond even the human collective sensorium. We could see it as a thought beyond perspective, gestured to in the voice of an authorial intrusion. That unthinkable thought is both deadly and, it seems, about death, about life’s culmination in death. But the thought here is partly to be held at bay, to be contained. That’s what form is for. This is why we need the stupidity of subjectivity, and of art. You can’t get beyond that.
Middlemarch is nothing if it is not a realist novel. It is the ‘indifferent whole’ that Henry James criticised in my first definition of realism. But the reality it tries to capture, here, is not just the tensions constitutive of collective life, or the disintegration of our sense of it. It is not even the mere uninhabitable thought that it describes. It is the justification for trying to inhabit the thought, and it is the breaking of that thought into human sized chunks.
It is something that we want to experience that is other to life. And yet, it is also the illusion we have in art of surviving that experience. To turn the inhumanity of reality into something human. A roar on the other side of silence.