The Persistence of Realism

Ulka Anjaria (bio)

Against the myriad negative definitions of realism advanced by scholars—realism as not naturalism, romance, modernism—Fredric Jameson suggests a dialectical model in which realism emerges by means of its opposites: at one end, from récit, “the narrative situation itself and the telling of a tale as such” (10) and, at the other, from “the realm of affect,” in which the present overshadows other temporalities “with impulses of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment” (11). These antagonistic forces—narrative and affect—are constantly at play in the continuous production of realism, not reconciling in individual texts but appearing as contradictory pressures productive of meaning. This provocative approach proceeds beyond the analysis of individual texts to grasp realism as a whole, a level of theorization often absent from readings specific to one place or historical period.
 
In Part I, Jameson elaborates the nature of these opposing forces in more detail. Récit, he reminds us in Chapter 1, is not only a naïve reliance on a Barthesian preterite, but any acceptance of underlying narrative motivations such as destiny or fate, “the mark of irrevocable time, of the event that has happened once and for all” (21). Yet even when realism appears indebted to this narrative logic, time past begins to shift to time present in the course of its telling. As this shift occurs “from tale to daily life” (27), we see realism distinguish itself from its narrative predecessors; however, the pressure to fall back into the preterite—to make destiny operative in the narrative sense—continues to haunt the mode, and is thus constitutive of realism itself.
 
Chapter 2 initiates a discussion of the other side of realism—its perceived dissolution into modernism, or the “perpetual present,” which Jameson sees more productively for its affective rather than solely temporal dimension. This is affect as opposed to emotion; while the latter can be named, affect “somehow eludes language” (29). The tension between “the system of named emotions” and “the emergence of nameless bodily states” (32) is visible in Balzac and Flaubert; thus Jameson offers a refreshing new perspective on the Lukácsian distinction between realism and naturalism by rewriting it as between an allegorical and an affective impulse. (Although Jameson does not engage extensively with Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher seems to be his primary interlocutor throughout the book.) Jameson’s focus on intensity rather than essence is also useful for thinking about music and the plastic arts.
 
The discussion of affect leads to a compelling rereading of Zola outside the general disdain of his writing in studies of realism following Lukács. When read in light of the antinomies of realism, Zola’s “sensory overload” is not a rejection of realism but a consideration of “the temporality of destiny when it is drawn into the force field of affect and distorted out of recognition by the latter” (46). Zola’s description, unlike Balzac’s, does not stand outside of time but is subject to it, compiling an aesthetic critique of the affective nature of capitalism. This makes him closer to Tolstoy than Lukács is willing to allow—Tolstoy whose “anti-political” novels revolve around a variety of moods, a “ceaseless variability from elation to hostility, from sympathy to generosity and then to suspicion, and finally to disappointment and indifference” (85). For Jameson, these moods are not contingent elements of War and Peace’s narrative but constitute its very realism, particularly as they surface in tension with the novel’s inordinate number of characters who, despite Tolstoy’s realist promise, do not function as a unity but as a heterogeneity, “held together by a body and a name” (89). It is as if Tolstoy found himself constantly distracted, eager to move from one character to another—and this movement ends up forming a new aesthetic that “effaces the very category of protagonicity as such” (90).
 
The depletion of protagonicity becomes central to the realism of Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, whose protagonists constitute the background of his novels, and “whose foreground is increasingly occupied by minor or secondary characters whose stories (and ‘destinies’) might once have been digressions but now colonize and appropriate the novel for themselves” (96). This is the inverse of classical realism in which, as Alex Woloch (2003) describes, the protagonist emerges from the mass of minor characters, all potential protagonists themselves; in Pérez Galdós, “even the protagonists are in reality minor characters” (108). This diffusion of narrative attention is also visible—more counterintuitively, perhaps—in George Eliot; for Jameson, what appears to be Eliot’s incessant moralizing is in fact her “weakening the hold of ethical systems and values as such” (120). Immorality, for Eliot, is not to be found in one or more loci of badness, but in potentially anyone and everyone, in the network of relations that constitute community. Thus a more melodramatic evil dissipates into a mauvaise foi, which rewrites malevolence as ill will—arising in positioning rather than essence—and allows characters to transform themselves in what amounts to a radically democratic worldview.
 
The last three chapters in Part I point to a number of ways realism collapses into itself as it struggles to maintain its integrity in the face of the ever-increasing pressures of melodrama, modernism, mass culture and the journalistic fait divers. Cataphora—an unnamed or unidentified narrator—is the realist novel’s response to the tension between first- and third-person perspectives; the style indirect libre resolves the blocked dialectic and constructs a new relationship between reader and character that avoids the pitfalls of subjectivism on the one hand and straightforward récit on the other. The affect-less anecdotes of Alexander Kluge, which mark a seeming return to pure récit, devoid as they are of irony or any other means of interpretation, concern the Coda of Part I. Jameson reads them as “the result of the dissolution of both realism and modernism together” (192)—but in a direction that offers little in the way of literary futurity.
 
Part II brings together three chapters that cover a wide range of textual material and demonstrate how the approach outlined in Part I might be put to use in understanding the recurrence of particular plots or genres all the way up to the contemporary. Thinking through the role of the providential allows Jameson another entry point into realism as constituted by its putative others—in this case the novel of fate. Covering Robinson Crusoe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Our Mutual Friend, Middlemarch and finally Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, Jameson argues for “the form-generating and form-producing value of the providential within realism itself” (202). The subsequent discussion of war narratives suggests that despite their appearance across high and “low” literatures and in a number of generic variations, war plots insist on the unrepresentability of war. Thus “acts and characters” cede to the representation of space. Reading Kluge’s “The Bombing of Halberstadt” allows Jameson to identify the tension between “abstraction” and “sense-datum”: “these are the two poles of a dialectic of war, incomprehensible in their mutual isolation and which dictate dilemmas of representation only navigable by formal innovation, as we have seen, and not by any stable narrative convention” (256).
 
The final chapter takes on the problematic of the historical novel and traces its permutations as it moves away from its narrow Lukácsian apex. For Lukács, the difference between Walter Scott and Balzac is a difference of epochs: while Scott perfected the historical novel as such, his most significant contribution was to become “the vehicle for the historicization of the novel in general” (264)—whose master is Balzac. Balzac marks a moment “in which the present can itself be apprehended as history” (273). This reading of Lukács allows Jameson to consider the fate of the historical novel in periods beyond those of Scott, Balzac, and the post-1848 writers—for whom, according to Lukács, facts about history come to stand in for true historical engagement, resulting in “the extinction of the historical novel as a form” (275). Jameson, by contrast, goes on to discuss the epic historical realism of Tolstoy, the modernist historical novels of John Dos Passos, Hilary Mantel, and E.L. Doctorow, and the postmodernist “historical novel[s] of the future (which is to say of our own present)” (298), such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and other science fiction texts. Cloud Atlas is “historical” in counterintuitive ways: in its use of pastiche, in which “historical periods [are] grasped as styles” (307), and in its representation of the materiality of reading in the different “apparatus[es] of transmission” (309) that constitute each narrative segment.
 
This last chapter is a fitting end to an impressive discussion, as it is here that Jameson most vividly demonstrates—through insightful readings of texts rather than more abstract philosophical rumination—the stakes of his analysis in dismantling the rigid oppositions between realism and its seeming antitheses. Lukács’s limitations are evident here; by reading naturalism and modernism as the breakdown of realism, he leaves no frame for understanding those forms or the worlds from which they emerge. For Jameson, by contrast, postmodernism reflects the unbalancing of realism’s constitutive tensions in a way that is entirely continuous with realism’s own struggle to maintain those tensions, sometimes at significant political and epistemic costs. Postmodernism is neither a triumphant escape from the shackles of mimesis nor a dismal failure of the revolutionary political program, but a continuation of the realist project in a changed world. We see this throughout the book in the deft way Jameson incorporates readings of Zola, Faulkner, and Kluge among discussions of Balzac and Eliot; the breakdown of realism at its later endpoints is not, for Jameson, the end of the story but precisely where a new story begins.
 
Antinomies will interest scholars of realism, modernism and contemporary literature and film—as well as critics looking for language to dismantle the walls that have separated our discipline into neatly bounded sectors: modernism, the twentieth century, American, British, and so on. Add to that a nuanced reinvigoration of the dialectical method, which continues to be misconceived in some literary criticism as vulgar class analysis. In a scholarly environment fraught with increasing alienation between scholars interested in cultural studies and those dedicated to close analysis of texts for aesthetic and formal qualities, Jameson’s work continues to set the standard for rich, theoretical engagement within a larger historicist paradigm.
 
That said, the pervasive Eurocentrism of this book is startling, particularly considering the span of the author’s scholarly reach. It remains unclear what interpretive thread binds England, France, Russia, Spain, Germany and the US—the national origins of the writers discussed—that could not include writers from the non-white world. (“Europe” is a problematic justification at best.) China and Latin America are briefly mentioned but with no discussion of authors or texts by name. The reader is left to imagine how truly expansive this analysis could have been, and how the questions of historical representation, genre, and mass culture could be enriched by an analysis of the unique pressures put on these terms by the surprising aesthetic forms and imagined futurities to which the reshuffling of the world-system has given rise. Jameson’s afterword to a recent special issue of MLQ on the topic of Peripheral Realisms begins to address this concern, indicating that it is not entirely outside the author’s formidable intellectual range. Despite this shortcoming, Antinomies will generate significant excitement, not only because it is written by one of the foremost literary critics of the day but, more importantly, because it pushes beyond the quagmire in which studies of realism seem stuck—a quagmire largely born of Lukács’s rigidness, which has left its traces on the term “realism” even for those for whom Lukács was never a significant interlocutor. Jameson’s book is an open-hearted gesture toward the futurity of the field.