Abstract
In dialog with Situationist critic Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Barnaby argues that literary realism advances a critical perspective called “meta-spectacle” which responds to the spectatorial distance from the real that is produced by industrialized visual culture. He distinguishes “realist” fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from “realistic” fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. This introductory chapter traces an ethos of realism across critical writings of the authors treated in the study and explores a history of competing critical claims about whether realist fiction estranges or naturalizes social transformations. Barnaby highlights certain limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages their iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures.
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Notes
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Quotations from Society of the Spectacle are from Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation. Citations refer to the numbered paragraphs in the original as opposed to the page numbers of the 1995 Zone edition, in order to facilitate comparison across various translations and editions.
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Debord attributes this association between ideology and schizophrenia to the French Marxist sociologist and philosopher Joseph Gabel, particularly his 1962 work titled False Consciousness.
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Other than Bulson’s brief discussion of the Situationist practices of dérive and psychogeography to describe how fiction orients and disorients the reader through its production of space (2007, 121–4), I am not aware of explicit applications of Debord’s concept of spectacle that comprehend literary realism as a critique of visual culture. Olson’s work on the depiction of the ordinary in modernist fiction alludes to Debord and the Situationists, but she maintains that their perspective is not relevant to fiction before the Second World War (2009, 13–4). Dewey uses the term “spectacle realism” to describe a strain of American fiction in the 1980s that re-enchants the reader’s experience of the everyday by “co-opting”—but not critiquing—the dynamics of spectatorship (1999, 15, 29). Although they do not establish a particular connection to Debord, Shonkwiler and La Berge advance a framework called “capitalist realism” that, like my concept of “meta-spectacle,” considers whether fiction is a suitable medium to “interpret and historicize” our experience “as consumers, producers, as debtors, and as spectators and as casualties” (2014, 7). In addition, Morris’ (2013) category of “metonymic realism” to describe fiction that critiques “normative universalism, imposed uniformity and closure of identity” intersects with my claims regarding the realist critique of spectatorship.
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Kuhns uses the phrase “museum as habitation” to describe the social condition of the contemporary city primarily as place to exhibit and be exhibited (1991, 261).
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This impulse to identify an ethic of realism that transcends the particulars of aesthetic form is echoed in literary criticism. Tallis identifies a “persistent tendency to confuse the aims of realism with certain techniques used to achieve those aims,” noting that the narrow understanding of realism as a set of aesthetic conventions incorrectly defines modernist and postmodernist literary experimentation as external to it (1988, 3). Levine identifies a “strong moral impulse” among realists to replace “false representations with authentic ones” that renders the aesthetic practice of realism “ambivalent and often self-contradictory” (2008, 188). He regards realism as ethically “consistent in its determination to find strategies for describing the world as it was” by performing “close observations of the details of society and the context in which characters move,” but aesthetically “inconsistent […] because every artist’s conception of what the world was differed and the world changed from moment to moment, generation to generation” (208). Feldman invokes William James’ philosophy of pragmatism to affirm the ethical constancy of realism in light of its aesthetic variability, contending that realism is “not so much a method of finding the truth as an openness to various methods, a reactive tendency; a pluralist and changing set of positions” (2002, 5). This ethical pragmatism among realists is borne out by Arata’s study of the extensive critical and public response to realism by the close of the nineteenth century, which, as Arata demonstrates, “tended to move rapidly away from […] narrative strategies and conventions in order to take up the more general question of literature’s role in effecting social change” (2007, 181).
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Brecht regarded his initial “alienation effects,” such as displaying the titles of scenes on stage, as a “primitive attempt at literarizing the theater” ([1931] 1964, 43). Brecht abandoned his theoretical terminology when he sensed that it was distilling into formal aesthetic concepts ([1956] 1964, 276; Willett 1964, 281) and warned those who pursued epic theater that “temporary structures have to be built, but the danger is that they will remain” ([1949] 1964, 215).
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Olson makes a similar observation that Woolf is “sometimes stylistically less radical than her essays on the modern novel would have us believe,” suggesting that Woolf “transforms, but does not reject, the literary realism of the past” and that Woolf’s “most successful works render ordinary experience and do depend upon facts and fabric” (2009, 66).
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Studies of realism are often muddled by an interchangeable use of the terms realist and realistic and would benefit from a consistent terminological distinction between what one might call “serious,” “high” or “literary” real-ism and “pulp” or “mass-market” realist-ic fiction. Arata points to Oscar Wilde’s distinction between works of “imaginative reality” and “unimaginative realism,” although Wilde might be gesturing more toward the difference between realism and naturalism as opposed to the difference between literary fiction and derivative commercial fiction (2007, 183). Smith invokes the unsatisfyingly vague phrase “influential realist novels” in reference to literary realism, which fails to account for the fact that non-literary realistic fiction can itself exert a powerfully normalizing influence (1995, 2). Dewey gets closer to the heart of the matter when he describes “realistic” consumer literature that “invoke[s] the trappings of realism” but “deliberately dispense[s] with the unsettling nuances of the immediate,” pointing to the example of “disposable realistic narratives brought to our living rooms by cable technologies” (1999, 28). Shonkwiler and La Berge develop particularly precise language around this issue, distinguishing between fiction in which “struggles of representation” are “informed by the literary” versus fiction that is “an aesthetic afterthought to a political and economic ideology” and “a localized application, in the literary realm, of the more generalized market-driven ‘realism’” (2014, 7).
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Ermarth’s (1983) Realism and Consensus in the English Novel and Armstrong’s (1999) Fiction in the Age of Photography are versions of Jameson’s critique of realism as a “containment strategy” that warrant similar scrutiny.
Ermarth transforms the familiar trope of emotional “sympathy” between novelist and reader into one of rational “consensus” that forces the reader into a “middle distance” from the real. This homogenized and flattened sense of time is coordinated by the narrator in the same way that the idealized focal point of a realist painting is coordinated by an “implied spectator” (25, 37–40). This consensus, Ermarth argues, falsifies the real by implying “a unity in human experience which assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone […] however refracted [they] may be by point of view and by circumstance” (65).
Armstrong similarly inverts realism’s mimetic relationship to the real, arguing that “visual culture supplied the social classifications that novelists had to confirm, adjust, criticize or update” (3) and that “fiction helped to establish [visual representations] as identical to real things” (3, 5). She faults realist fiction for concealing the reader’s spectatorial distance from a “so-called material world” which was constructed “chiefly through transparent images” that reinforced the reader’s illusion of “conceptual and even physical control” of the real (4–5). Armstrong contends that “together fiction and photography produced a spatial classification system specific to their mutual moment and class of consumers,” with fiction “pointing to certain images as if they were chunks of the world itself” in a self-affirming tautology (28).
This Jamesonian perspective, however, “demotes the powers of the reader,” according to Shaw, by reducing the encounter with realist fiction to the “contemplation of the already achieved typicality of figures” instead of “an evolving participation in a set of mental processes that promises to help us grasp the typical determinants of the historical situation” (1999, 19, 35). As Novak has argued, far from colluding with photographs to objectify the world, realist fiction was scrutinized alongside photography by the nineteenth-century reader-viewer as image-texts that exhibited “anonymity, interchangeability, and abstraction” and which relied on “the effacement of particularity” for their claims to reality (2008, 30). Byerly also notes a Victorian-era obsession with preventing the artwork’s representation of reality from substituting for the reality of the artifact (1997, 2).
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A number of critics have disputed the generic separation of realism from modernism and postmodernism . Shaw argues that merely because an ethos of realism “reached maturity during the nineteenth century in close association with the rise of historicist thinking,” one need not adopt the expression of realism in the nineteenth century as a “universal yardstick” by which to measure subsequent fiction as anti-realist (1999, 7). Baker similarly recommends “reading, in relation to realism, texts often seen as the others of realism”—such as “magical-realist or postmodern works”—in order to “recognize the ‘mixed conditions’ of the realist texts as inclusive of modernist and postmodernist revisions of the form” (2010, x, xi, xii). Rignall traces the figure of the flâneur across realist, naturalist and modernist fiction (1992, 6–7), and Olson connects nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernism through their mutual representation of “ordinary experience” and “everydayness” (2009, 17–9). Others blame the false distinction between realism, modernism and postmodernism on a misleading critical travesty of realism that portrays it as the attempt to achieve a total and direct reproduction of reality. Armstrong contends that modernism was “no less dependent on a visual definition of the real than Victorian realism,” but merely attempted to “lay claim to […] greater realism beyond the conventional” by advancing a “caricature” of realism as “a futile attempt at documentary fidelity to the object world” (1999, 11). Commenting on contemporary trends in “experimental realism” and “meta-realism,” Julia Breitbach observes that what is now being touted as a “new realist mode” only appears new in relation to the “straw man of nineteenth-century bourgeois representationalism,” which prompts the common disclaimer that contemporary realist fiction is not a “regression into a ‘naïve’ or ‘innocent’ realism” (2012, 8–9).
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The issue of realism’s recuperation as spectacle is central to the concept of “capitalist realism” advanced by Shonkwiler and La Berge, through which they seek to theorize the “point at which realism simultaneously records and undergoes the economic processes of commodification and financialization” (2014, 16). Recognizing that “‘capitalism’ as a system cannot exist apart from modes of representation” and that “the realist mode (however else it is defined) is invested in an economically situated conception of history,” Shonkwiler and La Berge seek to ensure that literary realism is not afforded a “naïve authority to demystify capitalist processes of accumulation, or to de-reify the real” (17). Rignall points to the figure of the flâneur —itself a consumer of visual commodities—as a trope that allows realist fiction to explore “imaginatively and critically this central aspect of contemporary culture in which it is itself so deeply implicated” (1992, 4). Smith’s discussion of the “life cycle of the realist paradigm” during which realism variously “occupies both traditionalist and innovational roles” is also useful in parsing “the relation of individual works to a system of literature” and analyzing the novel’s status as a commodity vis-à-vis its capacity to “defamiliarize” the culture of commodity (1995, 7–9).
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Barnaby, E. (2018). Introduction: Literary Realism as Meta-Spectacle. In: Realist Critiques of Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77323-0_1
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