This is an essay that I wrote as part of my university course, a little heavy-going perhaps, but it was something I enjoyed writing and I suppose some people may enjoy reading, so here it is:

Only one reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is¹ – John Fowles

‘Real’ is subjective, changing from person to person and with the passing of time. Because of this indefinite nature, the representation of what is ‘real’ both in literature and in other art, has always been difficult. While all novelists may “wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” absolute ‘realism’ has not been the primary goal of every novel ever written: Many seek only to create enough of an internal realism to sustain suspension of disbelief. For example, no one would mistake a fantasy novel such as The Fellowship of the Ring² or even a Magical-Realist novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude³ as reality because of the implausible and fantastic aspects of them. But there have been various movements and individual novels over the last century-and-a-half that have sought to represent the most ‘realistic’ real possible, to get as close to life as art can.

Three movements for which this has been the goal are Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, and three novels that typify the objectives of these movements are George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Each of these movements and novels has sought to be ‘realistic’ in a different way.

Middlemarch, a work of Realist fiction, aims to show an external realism: the reality of a community. Like any community the provincial town of Middlemarch is composed of individuals. Rather than focus on the stories of just one or two of these individuals, as many novels do, Eliot details extensively the stories of six or so major characters and around twenty more minor characters, as well as how they all fit into the whole of a society. This creates an ensemble cast where the actions of each character can affect events in another character’s story either directly or indirectly. As the critic Imraan Coovadia says “George Eliot treats large-scale social phenomena purely as the unintended aggregates of the microscopic transactions by which individuals unintentionally thwart or promote one another’s pursuits⁴.” There is an example of this on page 255 (see appendix 1) where Rosamond refuses to leave the house as her parents suggest when her brother becomes ill, causing her, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to have further contact with Mr. Lydgate, a man whom she eventually marries.

This is not presented as an isolated event however. Nor is it implied to be a necessary contrivance in order for the author to get two characters together. It is instead a small culmination of events up to that point: Fred’s illness, Doctor Wrench’s incompetence, Lydgate’s chance passing (each of which themselves has their own story). This presentation of a web of interrelated events is one of the tenets of Realism, a movement where there are no acts of God or of the divine author, only the acts of Man and how they relate to one another.

While the metaphor of a ‘web’ is the commonly used one to describe the myriad plot strands and society of Middlemarch, in chapter 27 Eliot also describes scratches on a shiny surface appearing to form “a fine series of concentric circles round a [candle]” as a parable where “the scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.⁵” This parable makes explicit what Eliot is attempting to do in showing the various unrelated actions of different characters as seeming to form logically around any single character when that character is examined individually. In real life we can see the same thing because, as we can only view events from our own perspective, we perceive only how they affect ourselves or those around us, as if they had been consciously directed towards us.

In this way, the way that Realism “rephrase[s] outcomes as the functions of unintentional, but structured, processes⁶” Middlemarch can be argued to be realistic. However, the ‘realness’ of Realism also had its critics, notably Leo Bersani who, according to Imran Coovadia, “criticizes the use of devices such as coincidence and implausible connections within the multiplot novel.” Coovadia goes on to say that “for Bersani, the problem with realism is that it projects an artificial shape onto experience that has no intrinsic form at all.⁷” While it is true that some of the ‘coincidences’ in Middlemarch are very convenient for the plot, some such concessions are necessary for the sake of Middlemarch being a novel because there will always be some conflict between representing that which is true to life and that which is readable, as can be seen both in Modernist work, particularly that of James Joyce, and Postmodernist work, which would later address the artificiality of the novel-form.

Of Joyce’s most famous work, critic Terrance Doody has said “Ulysses is at first hard to read because it is so thoroughly realistic; we are not prepared for an ordinary mind like Bloom’s to be so spacious, nor for a world as small as Dear Dirty Dublin to be so rich in significant detail.⁸” Indeed, the stream-of-conciousness technique popular with the Modernist writers that Joyce employs throughout much of Ulysses does require acclimatisation, for it seeks to replicate and follow the semi-concious processes of thinking. In this way it could be said that Joyce in Ulysses seeks to represent an internal real; the real of the mind and of perception, rather than the real of society.

What distinguishes Ulysses is its attention to detail in describing every aspect of the single day over which the novel occurs, creating a chronological, almost real-time narrative. This is shown by the way nothing is glossed over in Leopold Bloom’s journey around Dublin: We see him eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, we see him shopping, going to a funeral, the newspaper office, the beach, the hospital, the public house, and defecating.

This last act, occurring during Bloom’s introduction in the Calypso episode (see appendix 2), particularly emphasises the way Joyce approaches realism in his novel: everyone goes to the toilet, but very rarely in books or other art-forms, perhaps because the action is so mundane and familiar that it merits as little merit as the fact that the characters are breathing. Yet Doody takes Joyce’s position as “a human character is most himself not in any social relationship, but alone with his thoughts of the world.⁹” Showing Bloom on the toilet then adds a striking realism to his character as a person, as well as allowing the reader an uncommon intimacy with his thoughts.

The thoughts of characters are of great importance in Ulysses as it is these that drive the narrative. Since the novel is chronological and takes place within a single day, it is left to the characters’ thoughts to jump between the past, present and future, revealing the characters’ relationships to each other, their hopes for the future and their memories. For example, between pages 80 and 85, Bloom thinks briefly of his daughter away at school, his dead son, dressing with his wife, his plans for the garden, a funeral he will attend, and the magazine he is reading, among other subjects. While some of these are more significant than others, all are given only a line or two each before Bloom moves on to the next thought. They are not presented in any particular order, except that which would seem logical to the character, and many make little sense until the reader learns more, piece-by-piece later in the novel.

While this makes the novel challenging to read, and the fact that the almost total lack of events other than the mundane activities of the characters day-to-day to lives eschews the idea of a traditional plot structure, there is a realism and believability to this novel: People’s lives, particularly in their own heads, are not laid out as a clear-cut logical plot, they are established by the minute and recurring events of every-day life, and by their memories and their hopes for the future. By showing this, and by trying to bridge the gap between thought and language, Joyce has brought the novel closer to a different, though equally valid, idea of ‘real life’ than that in Middlemarch, but in the process of doing so, has made his novel obscure. The same can be said of his final work, Finnegan’s Wake (1939) in which Joyce attempts to replicate the experience of sleep through an idioglossia. This work has been called both “the most realistic novel ever written¹⁰” and “unreadable¹¹” by different critics.

By contrast, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, is a highly readable novel, drawing the reader effortlessly in with the first line “you are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.¹²” (See Appendix 3) Referring to the reader directly with a second-person personal pronoun and having the reader as a character within the novel they are reading represents another level of reality, an extra-textual reality. This is an approach peculiar to Postmodern technique: making the text self-aware so that it can reference not only that which is outside the text, in this case the reader, but the position of the text itself within the outside world, as can be seen in the first line of the first incipit: “The novel begins in a railway station.¹³” (See Appendix 4).

Traveller continues in much the same way, and although the path of the Reader in Traveller becomes distinct as a character separate from the actual reader of the novel, frequent interjections from the author, who calls himself ‘Italo Calvino’, constantly remind the reader that they are reading a work of fiction. In an interview Calvino stated “Brecht’s conception of the epic theatre is one in which the drama must not make the audience believe in the reality of its world but instead must declare itself openly as theatre, in order to arouse the audience’s critical powers¹⁴.” This is important because Calvino wants to address the artificiality of the text, which was the problem Bersani raised with Realistic novels such as Middlemarch.

The difficulty for Calvino in doing this is treading the line between “the traditional novel, in which the reader identifies with more or less realistic characters” and the “postmodernist self-concious novel in which the author strives to lay bare the mechanics of literary production¹⁵.” However, we are encouraged not to believe in the “traditional novel” aspects of Traveller because the author references them from outside and leaves them incomplete, representing them as nothing more than fiction. Similarly, the divergence of the Reader character from the actual reader causes the reader to question how the second-person personal pronoun can any longer refer to them. If these are taken away, little is left but an essay on the act of reading.

Unlike Middlemarch and Ulysses, rather than create a society or a character in a fictional world that seems real, Calvino in Traveller has created an artificial narrative in the real world. He has not solved the problem of the novel-form’s artificiality, only acknowledged its limitations. Even the real-world reader he references is, as Brian McHale argued about The French Lieutenant’s Woman in his essay Postmodernist Fiction¹⁶, another level of fiction made to seem more real than the one below it: Rather than being real, the Reader (character) within Traveller is only more real than the novel-beginnings he is reading.

It is tempting to say that there can be no definitively realistic novel because what is ‘real’ is subjective; because Jacques Lacan describes the Real as that which is outside of language; because Nietzsche says “Realism in art is an illusion, all the writers of all the ages were convinced they were realistic.¹⁷” If this is true, then no novel can be said to be more ‘realistic’ than another, nor for that matter, can any art-form be more realistic than another. Middlemarch is ‘realistic’ in its depiction of human action and reaction, just as Ulysses is ‘realistic’ in its depiction of mundane familiarity, just as Traveller is ‘realistic’ in its self-awareness as a novel. None could be said to be the most ‘realistic’ or the closest to ‘real life’, but what separates them is their perception and representation of what is ‘real’, or not so much what is ‘real’ as what is important to that depiction of reality.

Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception “Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner¹⁸.” He is disparaging towards art for not being real, and yet that is what art, and words, are: symbolic. When art approaches too closely ‘real life’ it runs the risk of entering the uncanny valley, or, as in the case of a novel such as Finnegans Wake becoming inaccessible. These three examples of Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism, it can be argued, come as close to ‘real life’, each in their own way, as it seems advisable for a work of art to come.

Footnotes:

Tags: Aldous Huxley, essay, Finnegans Wake, Fredrich Neitzsche, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Eliot, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino, James Joyce, John Fowles, Lord of the Rings, Magical-Realism, Middlemarch, Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism, The Doors of Perception, Ulysses

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