The Pleasures of Realism

And we’re back! (Sort of). No promises, but I’m hoping to start writing here a little more; primarily, shorter posts that will form a sort of commonplace book of stray thoughts for me. Now that I’m done with my PhD (and, at the moment, on summer break), I want to give myself a little more structure for thinking and writing about what interests me. This format might end up looking like a lot of posts like this one: short reflections on something I’ve been reading. We’ll see. I’m also planning to use this space to cross-promote (or at least cross-think) for The Readers Karamazov, the podcast on literature and philosophy which I help host.

One of the most stressful, yet oddly pleasurable, seasons of grad school for me was the qualifying exams stage. Given the quirks of my program, situation, and adviser, I ended up doing the equivalent of an English department exam in about half the usual time; with the result that I read about 180 texts related to 20th Century British literature (as well as “Global Contemporary Catholic literature,” my comparative subfield) in about 6 months. This meant lots of cramming, to be sure, but also a whittling down of my reading list to the barest bones, with the result that there were a number of fairly important books I had to leave off. 20th Century British literature is such a grab bag, encompassing not only modernism and post-colonialism (the two towers of the discipline) but also my chosen but oft-ignored subfield, the nebulously named “mid-century literature.” This field comprises a few well respected authors (including my number one queen Muriel Spark), but also a number of authors who have fallen into obscurity (hello C.P. Snow), disgrace (what ho, Kingsley Amis), or both. Many of these authors, often the men, have been tarred with the label “conservative,” either for their political views, their aesthetic views, or some combination. In the capsule retelling, these nogoodniks took up the mantle of “realism” to beat back the dual dangers of literary experimentation and social liberation.

I have little interest in addressing the political aspect of these criticisms, other than to say that it should be possible for someone to hold, for example, the two following convictions without experiencing much internal angst: a) Kingsley Amis was a bigoted ass but also b) a screamingly funny novelist who could write the hell out of a sentence. But the first charge, the aesthetic, sticks in my craw, for a few different reasons. I want to address these reasons briefly, with reference to what is, to me, the biggest gap I had on my reading list, one that I’m just beginning to fill: Anthony Powell’s expansive 12 novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve only just picked the series up, having finished the first novel and started the second (Side note: I’m reading them in the wonderfully tacky edition available through my institution’s library: a quartet of trios, three novels in one, marketed seasonally [Volume I: Spring] and bedazzled with the sort of nature photography you’d see in a glossy magazine ad for Newports).

A Dance to the Music of Time perfectly embodies these mid-century stereotypes. The novels follow a small coterie of young British men through the interwar period in Britain. A consummate work of realism, it is well crafted, almost painstaking in its sentence construction. But at the level of plot it’s relatively sedate (at least for now — the plot may pick up as we approach World War II). And, while very interesting and well written, it can hardly be described as experimental (again, at least so far). And, of course, politically it’s hopeless, judged by the usual metrics literary critics apply: centered on wealthy or wealthy-adjacent men with ample leisure time to explore themselves and the world they inhabit.

Part of the problem in evaluating realism, I want to suggest, lies in scolding it for what it is not, rather than appreciating what it does well. So, no, you won’t find rhapsodic flights of fancy in Dance, either of the daring modernist sort or the preciously aesthetic sort favored by the MFA style. And you won’t find revolutionary politics, either. What you will find is a scrupulous, hesitant exploration of concepts of human motivation and relationship — you know, the boring stuff.

The poet W.H. Auden liked to refer to art as a mirror. Against the purgative notion of art, which insists that it must elicit strong emotions, good or bad, from the spectator, Auden figures art as instead “a mirror in which the spectator sees reflected himself and the world, and becomes conscious of his feelings good and bad, and of what their relations to each other are in fact.” For Auden, art is “transformative” only in this very narrow sense: that the reader or watcher or listener learns to see himself or herself more clearly in the reflected light of the artwork.

Good realism provides something of this mirror effect in the way in which it shows us the the reality underlying the surface of human motivation. The other day I posted the below image of an excerpt from A Question of Upbringing (the first novel in the series) on my Twitter feed, and joked that it described perfectly the character of many graduate students:

This is the great advantage of the realist tradition, especially in a novel written in the first person (and with a narrator who hopes to become a writer, to boot): the text can act as a gradual sussing out of motivations and characters. Sometimes omniscient realist novels — especially, perhaps, Victorian ones — are accused of being too neatly worked out, but I find this generally to be a gross slander. Dickens, Eliot, et al are also interested in gradual discovery, not proclamation from on high. Part of what makes good realism good, then, is the sense of discovery it enables, in the reader no less than the narrator. Jenkins, our narrator here, thinks he understands the character of his collegiate peer Quiggins, but realizes after further investigation that he mistook one character trait (academic seriousness) for another (a sort of aimless chatter).

This investigative sense can elicit derisive laughter, as in the example above, but it can also draw forth more complex emotions. Take this brief excerpt from the beginning of the second book, A Buyer’s Market, where Jenkins describes the relationship his parents had with a Bohemian artist:

”Although no doubt they rather enjoyed his occasional visits, my parents legitimately considered Mr. Deacon an eccentric, who, unless watched carefully, might develop into a bore, and it would not be precisely true to say that they liked him; although I believe that, in his way, Mr. Deacon liked both of them.”

So much delicate emotion comes packed into this sentence. On first pass, the reader might merely laugh at what is, after all, a humorous mismatch of emotions. But dig deeper and you experience a rush of sadness: who has not experienced the devastating situation of realizing an inequality between how much you like someone and how much they like you? Seeing from the outside lets us clarify our own experiences because we feel that pang less acutely when it happens to a character than when it happens to us — but feel the pang we still do.

I want to end this brief essay into realism by swerving from Anthony Powell back a century to Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, a book Friedrich and I discussed in great detail in the final episode of Season 1 of The Readers Karamazov. The Warden is another book that perfectly captures the unexpected pleasures of realism. It’s a book where the big conflict centers on the scintillating matter of the possible misuse of church funds. I can hear your heart racing from here. Furthermore its central character, the Rev. Septimus Harding, has none of the charisma or bravado of a typical literary hero. He is a meek man, a cautious man, a scrupulous man. But because Trollope so skillfully applies his literary vision to the story, we dig deep into Harding’s inner life and see crystallized there a perfect example of internal struggle.

Worried that he gets more money than he deserves from his sinecure as “warden” of a retirement home for poor men, Harding struggles with what he must do in the face of public mocking and private doubts. He knows that his son in law, the blustering Archdeacon Grantly, could make his external troubles go away by pursuing the case with overbearing zeal, but Harding demands something harder: the ability to clear his own conscience. Considering the Archdeacon, Harding knows that “He would find no sympathy there for his doubts, no friendly feeling, no inward comfort.” I love this sentence to death, in large part because it shows us, in real time, the investigative process of realism. Notice how Trollope gradually drills inward to deeper feelings: “sympathy” is a relatively distant emotion, “friendly feeling” closer in, “inward comfort” the most intimate of all. Trollope subtly guides us to the heart of what matters to Harding: that the people around him would know his innermost states and support him in his goodwill.

Like every genre, realism has its good examples and its bad examples. Bad realism gets caught up in useless minutiae, or else presents inner states in a way that purports to be real, but in fact distorts that reality. But good realism, of the sort found in Powell and (at least this) Trollope, carefully excavates the inner workings of the heart and mind. In a world that sometimes threatens to reduce each individual to the bluntest summary, it’s useful to have works of literature that reveal to us the multiplicity, the play of human inwardness.