Raymond Tallis: In Defence of Realism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
For two generations and counting, literary studies in the universities of the West have been ruled by professors who have embraced ‘postmodernist’ doctrines intended to ‘subvert’ commonsense understanding of reality in the name of social and political egalitarianism. That there is no non-arbitrary limit to such subversion, that social and political egalitarianism can as easily be ‘deconstructed’ as social and political hierarchy, does not occur to many of these adepts of ‘Literary Theory’ although, among the more clear-eyed, it does not matter, since they have seen that Nietzsche’s will to power might best be satisfied by making a grand show of ‘social justice,’ even as its advocates enjoy the quasi-aristocratic privileges of tenure-based prosperity. And like the titled aristocrats of old, the new aristoi respond to their impudent critics either with serene shows of indifference, ignoring them altogether, or with a contemptuous back of the hand.
A professor of geriatric medicine, thankfully independent of the bad opinions of the academics he (how do you say?) critiques, Raymond Tallis wisely selects a surveyable portion of this barren landscape: the ‘theorists’ rejection of realist fiction. Against their literary lordships, he ventures to claim that, “understood as an attempt to do justice to, to express or to preserve, a piece of reality, realism is not the dead hand of the past but the challenge of the present and the future,” despite “the inextricable mixture of half-truths and whole falsehoods” on which the case against them has been argued or, perhaps more accurately, asserted. Although he acknowledges the malign social and political intentions of the literary academics—many of them leftover New Leftists who never smartened up—he is primarily concerned that these “current trends in literary criticism represent a real threat to the development of fiction”: “The republic of letters cannot be a more healthy place for being wrapped in a fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics and such a fog can only slow the appreciation of true worth.”
Lit-crit professors begin at turns by denying that “we” no longer have a “common sense of reality” but are restricted by “all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness.” But they further claim that they, somehow, see these structures for what they are, namely, excrescences of “contemporary capitalist reality,” whose “essence is unreality.” Modern reality is “more horrible than any that has gone before,” “more vast and complex,” “pre-digested” by imagery put up by commercial advertisers and political propagandists, dominated not by nature but by the human artifacts designed to conquer nature. “Can any thinking artist trust his own perceptions?” Evidently, thinking critics can (and is not Das Kapital subtitled, “A Critique of Political Economy”?). Mere novelists had better get in line.
Tallis demurs. “Revolting cruelty is not a twentieth-century invention; nor is the application of technical advances to bestial ends.” The American Civil War saw more American deaths than the wars of the twentieth century caused later Americans to suffer, and as for Tallis’s fellow Europeans, the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars devastated the old continent as thoroughly as any war in the twentieth century. “It is, therefore, no more a sign of moral or intellectual insensitivity to try to write a realistic novel in the 1980s than it was in 1922 or 1857.” The real change has been the change of expectations in the West: the more “recent horrors” “seem less excusable because we like to believe that the world is—or should be—more civilized than it was.” Should technological progress not be accompanied by moral and political progress? If, manifestly, it is not, don’t blame realism, Tallis writes; blame the unrealism of progressivism. This some ‘postmodernists’ have proceeded to do, but without abandoning their progressivist sentiments. Nature, according to postmodernist sensibilities, is a benign and generous Mother. Tallis, who treats the chronically decaying elderly, rather doubts this. And, in a supremely ‘insensitive’ moment, he suggests that persons who claim that X is unreal must believe that something else is. That being the case, the attack on realism loses its cogency, unless the ‘theorists’ can show why they are the superior realists. Which they deny anyone can do, even as they act as if they’re doing it.
Anti-realists often deny that the real world has an order or, more modestly, that the order seen in realist fiction “is alien to reality itself.” But how alien? Obviously, a story about a real event, and even more, a story about a made-up event that really could have happened, is not identical to the reality outside the ‘text.’ That doesn’t mean “that there is an especially pernicious distortion at work in the construction of realistic narratives.” Memories of events are not the events but that doesn’t mean “that all memory is false,” that “re-lived experience is a falsification of lived experience.” “Experience cannot of itself be true or false since truth values can be assigned to experience only when it is reflected upon and articulated into propositional form and made the basis of an assertion—as when, that is, it is recalled at a later date.” To say, ‘There is a dog in this room’ is not the experience of perceiving the dog in the room but it is a true (or false) statement, nonetheless. You can select a fact (choose to point out that there’s a dog in the room) but that doesn’t mean you made it up. Anti-realists confuse “the role of the subject as one who articulates reality into facts on the one hand and the truth-conditions of factual statements on the other; between what motivates the formulation of reality into statements and the reality that determines whether or not they are true…. Failure to observe this distinction will lead to a kind of idealism that holds that reality itself is created out of values—in short, to magic thinking.”
There is still another confusion, the assumption “that discourse can be genuinely ‘about’ something only if it is structured like it.” Just because language doesn’t have the same structure as (for example) nature doesn’t mean that language is a system closed off from nature. The reverse is also true: “an identity of form guarantees nothing,” inasmuch as Object A “does not count as a description of Object B just because it looks like it.” Thus, “isomorphism is…neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition either for expression or for truthful reference.” Just the opposite: “Only when there is a distance between what is said and the reality that is spoken of can a narrative, or any description, be ‘about’ anything.” Physical reality is, which means that “is not itself true or false.” Only a statement about reality can be true, in line with but not identical to the reality it describes or makes note of. “Truth and falsehood emerge as fully explicit categories only in relation to statements that formulate reality in order to present it as facts.” Yes, “telling transforms reality,” but “if telling were not different from living, it would be redundant.”
“When these muddles are cleared up, little of the case against realistic facts remains.” And when that case evaporates, “the radical arguments against realistic fiction that we have examined here” do, too.
What if the anti-realist were to concede these ‘epistemological’ points, but instead claim that realistic novels have been superseded by a more accurate medium, cinema? Are images not more accurate depictions of reality than words, precisely because they are depictions, pictures, especially moving pictures that track real-world activity? Indeed, no one could deny that a camera better “replicate[s] the visible surfaces of parts of the world” than a writer can do. But does reality “consist essentially of visible surfaces”? If not, then not. “At best, the camera renders sensibilia, not experiences or perceptions.” They cannot “depict the sense of visible things, in which experience and knowledge are dovetailed.” This is why people talk and write about movies when they try to understand them. Once again, “physical reality is in itself neither true nor false; neither are its representation.” One sees this whenever one notices “the usually dismal and sometimes downright embarrassing results of attempts to film great realistic novels,” when meaning gets squeezed out and only the spectacle remains.
More radically, and returning to epistemology, anti-realists may claim that “we get reality wrong not only when we report and remember it but even as we experience it.” In the neo-Marxist thought of Louis Althusser, for example, we are told that capitalist social structures and beliefs so distort reality, that the world as we now experience it is already so thoroughly artificial, that the realistic novel merely reports these distorted socially constructed experiences. “What counts as real” to the novelist is only “what is acknowledged by the group to which the individual belongs at a given moment or the group consciousness that is operating through him”—an “ideology” that has been “intersubjectively constructed.” The ideology claims to justify the rule of the ruling class in that society. The claim resembles the image of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, with the shadows of idols on its walls, except that in Marxism the idols’ movements are ultimately driven not by the rulers, and what contrasts with the artifacts, the idols, is not nature. It is instead the ‘dialectic of history’ that determines the conduct of the rulers. Historicism replaces naturalism. For Marxists, “what counts as ‘reality,’ then, is a privileged version of what is out there and is at least in part an outcome— of a struggle [the ‘dialectic’] between rival experiences of the world, related to competing needs and conflicting interests.” The ruling class uses its ideology to “naturalize social phenomena,” to make them seem real, “to confer upon them the objectivity of [the] material world, to make that which has been constructed by human beings seem to confront them as naturally given. “This is an illusion, sometimes deliberately conjured, sometimes shared by the rulers themselves.” (There can be little doubt that American slaveholders of the nineteenth century often believed the result of ‘race science’ or, to be unkind to, albeit honest with Althusser, that Marxists who have boosted themselves into positions of rule have often believed the claims of ‘scientific socialism.) According to him, “all ideology expresses a class position” while simultaneously concealing the reality of that position from its dupes. “Ideology,” Althusser claims, “is so potent and inescapable because it is invisible; because it does not consist of a set of ideas that can be debated, tested, opposed but is implicit in practices.” Realistic novels seem realistic only “because they do not question what is customarily taken for granted,” taking the side of the ruling-class ideology that prevails in their time and place. Proponents of ‘Literary Theory’ “imagine themselves as the somehow awakened”—Tallis writes decades before the term ‘woke’ replaced clunky, academic-sounding ‘consciousness’—persons “able to speak to readers who are still lost in the collective ideological dream.” Exactly how they achieve this heightened state of mind is often somewhat obscure, and the discrediting of Marxian ‘science’ might seem to have foreclosed that pathway to epistemological privilege. But so they have done, they insist.
Althusser does so by distinguishing himself, and his fellow neo-Marxists, from everyone else. All “subjects,” including neo-Marxist subjects, are “socially and historically constructed,” as “the self is merely a set of social relations” existing in space, in time, in thought and in action. The self (and here Althusser departs from the Marxism of Marx) is constituted by language. The problem, Tallis observes, is that subjects seem to “pre-exist the system, however much they are bound up or shaped by it.” Althusser denies this, dismissing it as “a symptom of the false consciousness that is the work of ideology.” The supposedly “unitary, pre-social ‘metaphysical’ subject is in fact a social construct.” “In fact,” Althusser proclaims, “the State and its Apparatuses only have meaning from the point of view of the class struggle, as an apparatus of the class struggle ensuring class oppression and guaranteeing the conditions, of exploitation and its reproduction,” since “man is an ideological animal by nature.” But “in fact”? “By nature”? How does Althusser know what facts and nature are, if his ‘self’ is socially constructed? How does he know that his socially constructed ‘self’ sees deeper into the nature of things, perceives facts more clearly, than the benighted many? How does he know that his self is socially constructed, if it is socially constructed? To do so, he needs to exempt himself from his own strictures.
Nor does realist fiction necessarily endorse the existence of an unchanging self, unaffected by ‘History.’ Tallis remarks that on the contrary, “realistic fiction has done more than any other literary form to undermine the quasi-religious conception of the self as pre-formed, unfolding from within, kissed awake by crucial experiences”; realist authors “have been in the forefront of those who have discredited the essentialist conception of the self.” What Stendhal did with his persons caught up in the Battle of Waterloo, what Tolstoy did “to de-center history in perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century realist novel,” bear little resemblance to the caricatures of realism held up by the anti-realists. A realist novelist “does not have to subscribe to the beliefs implicit in liberal humanism,” beliefs from which Stendhal, and especially Tolstoy, are really quite remote. Are such men really incapable of ‘thinking critically’ about the world, or are they in fact guilty of failing to think Marxically?
If, as Marxists and many other thinkers ancient and modern contend, there is no such Person as God to provide a comprehensive perspective against which merely human perspectives must be measured, then the otherwise “inexplicable coincidence or dovetailing of literally millions of different viewpoints” in the establishment of, well, science among other things, requires one “to postulate that there are ‘social forces’ ordering the developing consciousness so that it may participate in, understand and operate within, the intelligible order that has been agreed upon by the collective.” Yet this does not mean that “the forces combing consciousness to self-intelligibility and socializing its world picture can be expressed entirely in narrow political terms or summarized so easily as Althusser seems to imagine.” His “critique” makes “ideology inescapable and his own critique impossible,” an instance of the paradox of the Cretan Liar. This is particularly “awkward” for “those who would condemn realism on political grounds,” grounds that the contemnor must somehow know, if he is to sustain his claim to rule those who do not know. And if “all discourse, inasmuch as it is intelligible, is steeped in ideology,” what then? How can Althusserians distinguish the regimes they endorse—the ‘peoples’ republics’—from the ‘bourgeois democracies” and, if they manage to do so, how can they claim one is superior to the other?
Moreover, “even if the ideas of the radical critics of realism were actually true, they would still not justify the welcome that is given to most of the existing brands of anti-realism.” By demolishing the criteria by which a literary work may be judged good or bad, they make literary work, including literary criticism itself, pointless. One is left with whimsicality authored by “whimlings.” “There is a highly advertised abdication of authorial control”—the celebrated ‘death of the author’—the claim that “chance or the unconscious dictates the work.” If so, who knows and why care? Tallis is so bold as to suggest that a main purpose of the whimling is to call attention to himself, like “a brilliant child dancing in the spotlight of an admiring gaze.” In the face of the alleged absurdity of bourgeois existence, play is the only serious thing left to do, especially if it can be presented as subversive of bourgeois existence.
Much of this was anticipated by the French surrealists—André Breton, Louis Aragon being the most prominent—who flourished in the aftermath of the First World War. The original surrealists “combined art with ‘direct action,’ writing with scandal in an anarchistic attempt to “undermine and possibly abolish bourgeois reality.” “There was a dream of transforming the world,” of a vast liberation of desires in the wake of destroying “logic and everything based on it” or in any way partaking of it, such as religion, morality, and the family. It wasn’t long before they were outdone by “madmen greater than themselves and a collective madness greater than anything than they could aspire to,” the fascist and Communist tyrants who “set about destroying religion, morality and family, with a degree of success greater than [the surrealists] had ever imagined.” Aragon distinguished himself by seeing this and going right along with it, embracing Stalinism. “The last prominent French literary figure to wake up out of the Stalinist dream,” he may be said to have anticipated the aging New Leftists and their students who now celebrate the genocidal intentions of mullahs. “The history of surrealism is not that of an undifferentiated, nameless Id but of certain large posturing Egos.”
What happens when you ‘destroy’—i.e., abandon—logic is that you end up saying nothing, rather as I do when I tell you I have in my possession a square circle. You don’t know what I mean, and neither do I. And so: the anti-realist text must be “free of all the usual trappings of realism” but at the same time somehow “reflect the unreal nature of contemporary reality”; it should “criticize, not collude in, the prevailing ideology” yet “reflect the dehumanized face of contemporary reality” all while resolutely opposing ‘humanism’; it should be “self-reflexive to the point of infinite regression,” since an aversion to infinite regression only worries a logical mind, and it should be “non-referential,” never ‘about’ anything, “‘writable’ but not ‘readable.'” Somehow, this farrago of incommensurables will change the world for the better, although no one can say (or everyone equally can say) what ‘better’ would be. Ultimately, “a text that ceased to be a communication emanating from a writer and received by a reader would simply cease to be a text.” Which, in many of these cases, wouldn’t be such a bad thing, were it literally the case.
Meanwhile, what one ‘literary theorist’ has called “the golden age of criticism” chugs along, thanks to the institutional inertia of the universities; “it would be only a small exaggeration to say that the syllabus, rather than the open market of the book trade, was the economic space of postmodernism.” That the New Left continues to control academic institutions has given the movement a lifespan far exceeding its intellectual deserts, as the ideologues run the show. That show addresses literature only peripherally; “critics still take sides—but the objects of their most explicit advocacy tend to be critical theories rather than works of literature,” very much at the expense of “literary or aesthetic judgment.” Nor is the show especially difficult to put on; given the prevalent egalitarianism, lit-crits need not work too hard, once they’ve mastered the jargon. One “does not prefer ‘good’ works over ‘bad,’ the canon of ‘literature’ over the rest: literature is merely ‘what gets taught’ and is therefore defined not in terms of its intrinsic properties but on the basis of the purely extrinsic accident that it serves someone’s (ideological) purpose to have it valued and therefore taught.” As usual, in practice this means that the egalitarians have ensconced themselves in a hierarchy, with ‘stars’ pulling down substantial sums of money in exchange for their none-too-burdensome labors. Non-referentiality seems not to interfere with successful careerism in the rotten bourgeois society. This leads to some amusing paradoxes, as when the plays of the avant-garde Marxist Bertolt Brecht become what even one admirer calls “classics of the bourgeois theater.” (“Their revolutionary impact,” Tallis remarks, “may be judged by the almost total absence of the proletariat from their audiences in the free world and the Arts Council funding necessary to mount them.”) And so, “behind ‘theory’ is a dream of unmasking literature and society at large and in this way contributing to the revolution that will lead to a better future. Exactly how this is going to come about is a little unclear.” It is likely to remain so. This more or less must be so, since “if language, for example, were essentially non-referential, then all fiction—not merely realistic fiction—would be impossible; and so too would all literary criticism.”
“All of this is so obvious, the reader may wonder why critics have managed to maneuver themselves into such absurd positions.” It helps not have had any serious “experience of continuous, logical or critical thought,” to have avoided the task of “advocating ideas that are put to the test of logic or of experience.” Institutional insulation provided by the universities enables the literature professors to concentrate their attention on the politics of academia itself, where rhetorical gestures and petition-signing suffice when it comes to consideration of politics beyond the university walls. The fact that “experimental art and progressive politics” do not necessarily “go together” in the lives of artists outside academic confines may be safely ignored.
Against all this, Tallis asserts that “realistic fiction remains the great unfinished aesthetic adventure.” As the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, a realist need not attempt to write like Tolstoy (or Flaubert or Dickens). The Red Wheel experiments with a variety of literary techniques: “the task of letting reality into fiction will always demand a questioning attitude to the language and assumptions of one’s own life and of the world one knows and will require the author to be as experimental as any of the more obtrusively experimental anti-realists.” Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Russian and Communist revolutions invites “a response to an invitation to draw part of what we now; or to use what we know to imagine into what we don’t.” Since “man is the only form of matter that is astonished at its own existence and capable of conceptualizing its own mutability in the terrifying idea of death,” realistic fiction “is, potentially, the highest achievement of man,” and can serve as a rebuke to tyrannies political and intellectual, alike. As for anti-realism, it would be a mistake to try to get rid of it, were that possible. “The anti-realist critique, keeping realism on its toes by continually questioning the received version of the nature of reality and mocking the fictional conventions by which reality is captured for the printed page, is an essential goad, an irritant driving the realistic novelist towards a more self-critical and conscious confrontation with reality, a greater willingness continually to compare what he writes with the world he is experiencing outside of his moments of writing. It forces realism to notice itself.” But for that to happen, “realism, however, remains central.”
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