REALISM – LECTURE HANDOUT

The only thing accessible to us is to create

an illusion of the world.
Guy de Maupassant

I.INTRODUCTION TO THE TOPIC:

VISUAL ARTS examples: Gustave Coubert The Stone Breakers (1894)
Peter Paul Rubens The Judgement of Paris (1597-99)
John William Waterhouse The Lady of Shalott (1888)

II.REALISM: FROM LATIN RES = THING,

realistic = mimetic, mimesis = „imitation‟ („representation‟ not simple „copying‟).

III.REALISM IN HISTORY
Aristotle in Poetics (4th c. BC): derives the birth of art from THE HUMAN INSTINCT TO
IMITATE the things around.
Three main forms of artistic imitation:

The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three
objects, - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to
be.

Three basic tendencies in literature:

1. idealization of reality (things as they ought to be)

2. tendency towards mythicization of reality (things as they are said or though to be)
3. tendency towards realism (things as they were or are)

the word realism – first applied to literature by Germans (the „minute description of costume
and custom in historical novels‟)

VI. 19TH CENTURY - THE RISE OF REALISTIC NARRATIVE

In 1850s – realistic representation of reality becomes a part of a major intellectual

movement

factors that motivated the rise of the realistic approach to the world: industrialisation +
development of science + dominant position of middle-class people (bourgeoisie)

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Formation of a new system of beliefs and values: the world perceived as a big laboratory –
the rise of the importance of empirical knowledge in the explorations of reality

Society started to favour realistic literature that

a) rejects the fantastic, the fairy-tale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly
stylized, the purely abstract and decorative.

b) focuses on the 'true' picture of reality conceived as the orderly world of nineteenth-
century science, a world of cause and effect, a world without miracle, without
transcendence.

c) The main subject matter: the ordinary, the everyday, and the unheroic.

central role of philosophical positivism in 19th – century intellectual thinking

- developed by Gustave Comte (1874- 1932),

puts the scientific method at the centre of philosophical thinking

reduces philosophy to science – claims:

a) scientific knowledge is the only valid knowledge

b) facts are the only possible objects of knowledge

in literature the positivist tendency achieved its peak in the 19th-century French novel: creates
realistic narrative with the „highest degree of organisation‟-

V. THE FRENCH REALISTIC NOVEL

Major representatives:

- Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola: authors of realistic narratives + theoretical essays on
the nature of realistic mode of writing

Two tendencies: a) subject matter realism

b) formal realism

A.Subject matter realism

Stendhal, Balzac - early subject matter realists:

a) rejection of the Romantic movement

b) focus on objective, mirror-like representation of the world:

Stendhal: „Yes, monsieur, a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway. Sometimes it reflects the
azure of the heavens, sometimes the mire of the pools of mud on the way, and the man who carries this
mirror in his knapsack is forsooth to be accused by you of being immoral!‟

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Balzac: Ah! believe me, this drama is no fiction, no romance. All is true, so true that you may
recognize its elements in your experience, and even find its seeds within your own soul‟

Zola - the major proponent of naturalism (a tendency in the realistic mode of writing)

strong influence of natural sciences on literary creation:

naturalist novelist‟s „should be the photographer of [social] phenomena, his observation

should be an exact representation of nature. . .‟

main methods: experiment and observation:

naturalist novel: a laboratory,
characters: objects of the author‟s experiments
main subject matter : depiction of human being as a „social animal‟
naturalistic text/world relation: texts functions as a ‘window’ to reality

subject matter realists‟ approach based on 3 assumptions:

1.the naive realist belief: the world exists in exactly the same form for everyone
2.human language directly represents images of objects and things
3. human beings can draw a clear line between subjective (or personal) and entirely objective
perceptions of reality.

The authors were convinced that they could create „a faithful reproduction of a univocal
reality which precede[d] the text, owing to the transparency or thinness of the literary medium
(language) and to the artist‟s sincerity‟.

Major problem of this approach: the actual relations between language and the world:

words are not „mirror images‟ of the things that they represent:
Shakespeare: „that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet‟

B.Formal realism
Flaubert, Maupassant
rejected the possibility of an objective representation of the world in literature:

Maupassant: How childish it is, anyway, to rely on reality when each of us carries his mind and body.
Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, our taste, all different, create as many realities as there are
people on the earth...So every one of us simply creates his own illusion of the world.... And the writer
has no other task but to reproduce faithfully this illusion with all the art he is master of and which will
be of use to him...The great artists are those who force us to accept their own illusion.

mimetic illusion: tried to construct an artistic picture of the world similar to the general
perception of how things were

relied crucially on formal literary conventions: such the principle of verisimilitude (verum =
truth, similis = similar) or the impersonal style of writing ( Flaubert: „an author in his work
must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere‟ ).

ideal novel = a purely stylistic creation- „formalistic quest for pure art‟

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the novel Madame Bovary: result of Flaubert‟s attempt to prove the power of style to
„transform basely inartistic subject matter into a superlative work of art‟

ordinary, provincial bourgeois life is turned into a literary masterpiece.

the central concerns of the novel: the relationships between art and life, the human mind and
the world, illusion and fact

the novel combines : almost a perfect illusion of objectivity in the representation of its subject-
matter with the focus the constant presence of the unbridgeable gap between the subjective
reality of the human mind and the objective reality of the world.

VI. FLAUBERT’S STYLE:

Impersonal style effect achieved through the combination of several narrative techniques:

„the passages of “objective” or “impassive” descriptions, brief interludes of quoted dialogue or

interior monologue, and significant use of so-called “free indirect style”‟

free indirect style (style indirect libre): „maintains the third person reference and past tense
of narration, but like the quoted monologue, it reproduces verbatim the character‟s own
mental language‟

Examples from Madame Bovary (not included in the textbook):

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But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never
had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something
subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover!
a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.
So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness
of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all
would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed
her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary
existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the
interspaces of these heights.

2.
He sat down again.
How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed
herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had
she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her
instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of
marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded
swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself,
all that she might have had! And for what? for what?
In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending
cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her
brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this
creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he
was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name
would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love
him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another!

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