Abstract
The vexed and vexing question of the overloaded term realism has been addressed to some extent; the specific issues of social realism were not broached. Surely, the latter stems from the former. To solve the excessive burden placed on realism, George Becker in Documents of Modern Literary Realism suggested employing other terms to denote new concepts fundamentally different from those defined as realistic by him and other major literary critics (4). In an ironic response to his call, later “critics” were reluctant to discard the term; instead, they added numerous epithets to the word “realism”. Grant, in his 1970 book titled Realism, identified about 26 such words: critical, militant, psychological, romantic and socialist, to name but a select few. The critical circle simply crowned “realism” with one qualifier after another; consequently, the key term has become indeed more disturbingly overburdened than ever. Further, as mentioned in the “Preface”, realism’s days are not over yet, despite the popularity of postmodernism in the academia. At least in some parts of the world, the newly coined term of neorealism signifies a movement that may be construed as a contribution to the realist enterprise (though it may turn out to be a deconstruction of it).
Action without theory is blind; theory without action, barren.
V.I. Lenin (Translation ours)
Theory, once grasped by the broad masses, will turn into a spiritual atom bomb the might of which knows no bounds.
Mao Zedong (Translation ours)
Time and again I am forced to the conclusion that if we want intelligent comment about writing and the temperament of writers, we are more likely to get it from writers themselves than from critics.
Robertson Davies La Litterature Engagee
Theory seems to me to be the very anathema of the novel.
Brian Glanville The Theory of the Novel
…this sharp polarity between “theory” and “life” is surely misleading. All social life is in some sense theoretical… And just as all social life is theoretical, so all theory is a real social practice.
Terry Eagleton The Significance of Theory
What I like very much about his [Eagleton’s] particular essay on theory was that he tried to talk about how everyone uses theory in their practical daily life, which is certainly what I’ve tried to stress in my work, particularly when speaking to…students who are questioning the significance of theory.
bell hooks Breaking Bread 35
I’m surrounded by those hybrid creatures who are both critics and small-“a” authors. But the first point I want to make, in fact, is the consequence of their dual identity… In their literary work they don’t separate theory from practice, and that’s why they are so attractive to us.
(Linda Hutcheon Future Indicative 242)
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- 1.
Here we treat realism as a literary movement initiated in European countries such as France and England in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (Damian Grant 47), but it has witnessed various manifestations in other cultures. It took roots in North America around the 1890s (Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 2–3). David Arnason provides an extensive study of the early stage of realism in Canada—rural realism—in his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, “The Development of Prairie Realism” (1980).
For scholarship on Canadian realism of different colours and kinds, see Note 22 in Chap. 2.
- 2.
Since there is a dearth of systematic criticism on social realism in the English-speaking world, we cite some of the definitions here for reference and comparison:
a. Social realism as defined by this study may be properly limited to a group of authors who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired in various ways by the Russian revolution, Soviet communism, international Marxism, and the need to respond critically and in a denunciatory fashion to the various mechanism of repression and the frustration of personal land collective aspirations during this period. (D. W. Foster Social Realism in the Arentine Narrative 14)
In Foster’s definition, the term is not capitalized the way Shapiro’s is. It points out the major factors, literary and non-literary, that give rise to social realism, but it is a bit limited in time and the problems social realism points up. Finally, it does not deal with systemic issues of different “isms”.
b. Social Realism and Socialist Realism are different from each other. Social Realism, opposed to the ruling class and its mores, predominantly selects as its subject matter the negative aspects of life under capitalism: labour conflicts, poverty, the greediness of capitalists, the nobility of long-suffering workers. Socialist Realism, as it has developed in the Soviet Union, supports the ruling class and the form of government. It selects as its subject matter the positive aspects of life under socialism: happy, cooperating workers, the beauty of factory and countryside, well-fed, healthy children, and so on. Mexican Social Realism, somewhere between these two, shows both the struggle of the people to gain control of the means of production and some the fruits of that power. The present volume is concerned with the first named, Social Realism, as it has developed in the United States. (David Shapiro Social Realism: Art as a Weapon 20)
The term is in upper case, as is the case with Socialist Realism; social realism is system or ideology related. The definition also contrasts the specific positive versus the negative aspects of life under two social systems with which the two schools are respectively concerned.
c. Social realism is a twentieth-century branch of realism. (9)… Social realism in [English-]Canadian literature is as much a critical approach as it is a mode of writing… Essentially, social realism is a realistic treatment of man [sic] in society, documenting man’s behaviour in groups. It accentuates the author’s power of observation rather than imagination, it is a documentation rather than a creation. (Gaskin et al. Social Realism: A Source Guide for the Teaching of Canadian Literature in English 13)
The definition has its first advantage over the earlier two in that it adds a critical or ideological dimension, one that we will take up; it shows an awareness of Canadian specifics, but its rather narrow and naive view of documentation remains suspect. Social, economic, political history or theoretical and ideological discourses are not included as one of the shaping forces or subject matters, though Marx is briefly mentioned, together with Freud and Darwin, as a major thinker changing the international as well as Canadian intellectual horizons, in subsequent pages not quoted here.
- 3.
- 4.
John Moss is more appreciative of this novel than we are; see Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel (Toronto, 1977), p. 14. We cannot hope to exhaust the writers’ views here, but Earle Birney’s frontal attack on “the hypocrisy of Canadian political and sexual mores” indicates the general mind-set; see “The Writer-creator in Today’s World” in Earle Birney (Toronto, 1974) edited by Bruce Nesbitt.
- 5.
For a concentrated study of the use of mirror in critical theory or literature since Plato, see Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. For a comparison of East and West employment, see, for example, Yue Daiyun’s “Mirror as a Metaphor in Western and Chinese Poetics,” Desire and Vision – East and West, edited by Yue Daiyun (Nanchang, 1991).
- 6.
The mirror is of course an apt simile for Aristotle’s definition—“as it is or were”—we discussed in Chapter One; later, Durkin also borrows directly from another of the Aristotelian tenet “as it ought to be”. We may put this latter in the literary mode of romanticism, fantasy or in the ideologies of socialism, idealism and utopianism. On the last term, see in particular Fredric Jameson’s recent major work, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions (2007 [2005]).
- 7.
See “Sidown, Brothers, Sidown” by Baird, Laurentian University Review, p. 82.
- 8.
See Catholicism and Socialism on the issues concerning violence in social reform, the existence of God and altruism; the two converges only on the last point. The most detailed and informative study of Callaghan’s early interest in Marxist socialism would be Larry McDonald’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis, “Beginnings and Endings: A Study of Morley Callaghan’s Fiction”, Queen’s University, 1977. F.W. Watt’s “Radicalism and English-Canadian Literature” and “Morley Callaghan as Thinker” offer penetrating insights into Callaghan’s intellectual growth, particularly on the left side.
- 9.
Many of Hemingway’s works about hunting, bull-fighting and boxing, and James Joyce’s about individual, Odyssean quest of universal meanings, written after the First World War, are to Callaghan an “inscape”. See his criticism cited above; this comment proves also relevant: “Joyce in exile had gone deeply, too deeply into himself” (That Summer in Paris 230). Robin Mathews’s “Callaghan, Joyce, and the Doctrine of Infallibility” identifies with discernment the similarities and differences between the two in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1981), pp. 286–293. On the other hand, it is no small irony that Dorothy Livesay criticizes Callaghan’s They Shall Inherit the World on the same ground that Callaghan was on when he chided Joyce—for personalism or individual solution. See Right Hand Left Hand (Erin, Ont.: Press Porcepic, 1977), pp. 17–176.
- 10.
Grove’s whole creative or critical output remains an enigma to all of us; see some new findings, as well as a possibility of quarry not yet located, in the Introduction to A Stranger to My Time (Edmonton: NeWest, 1986), edited by Paul Hjartarson.
- 11.
Quite a few critics have touched on similar concepts, but, regrettably, without making totality a key issue. Besides Pacey’s comment on Grove’s effort at totalization (1945), see, for instance, Anthony Hopkins on Baird’s “creat[ing] an entire vision of society…” in William Toye (1983:38); Peter Aichinger speaking of Birney as “express[ing] the totality of Canada…” (1979:29); and Robert Weaver on Garner’s Cabbagetown as a “social novel” (Toye 1983:290).
- 12.
We found Bakhtin’s discourse of dialogism most encompassing and accommodating; see Sherrill Grace’s article, “‘Listen to the Voice’: Dialogism and the Canadian Novel”, for a pioneering project from this new angle. Similarly, though Rudy Wiebe’s by now canonized short story/essay “Where Is the Voice Coming From” (1974) plays with and focuses on narrative point of view, it can also be viewed—with necessary expansion—as a thematization of different ethnic, class, gender or professional perspectives in the Bakhtinian paradigm.
- 13.
There exists a hilarious and crowded gathering of Canadian writer under Dos Passos’s umbrella of photographic realism: besides Callaghan, Garner, Birney and, to a lesser extent, Baird, Alice Munro has also been critically acclaimed as a master in this. Garner’s Foreword to Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shade is an unqualified early compliment, but later critics continue to be interested in this technique of hers (see, for instance, W. Toye (1983:537)) and the essays that distinguish between what Munro calls the real and the true, in The Canadian Novel Here and Now, vol. 1, edited by John Moss (Toronto, 1978). See also John Moss’s conversation with Garner for the strong affinity between Garner and his “literary mentor”, Dos Passos (1972:54).
- 14.
For the realist, it is an illusion that a total severance can be made between art and society or life; even in this poststructural or postcolonial age, literary feminism and Marxism persistently cling to their union. See, for example, Helen Buss’s “‘The Dear Domestic Circle’: Frameworks for the Literary Study of Women’s Personal Narratives in Archival Collections”. Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1989, pp. 1–17.
- 15.
While George Woodcock gives Wordsworth his due for the espousal of simplification of language, he seems to be guilty of taking too literally Callaghan’s opposition to Wordsworthian poetic language and images for being “too literary”; see “Lost Eurydice” in Woodcock (1964, 1974:74).
- 16.
This realist notion of the transparency of language seems somewhat naive in the poststructuralist age, especially when we have what Jameson, after Lacan, derisively calls the “schizophrenic” use of language (1983:119) in postmodern literature—the play with an endless chain of signifiers let loose. The social realists, for the most part, did not hear about or heed the Sausurrean signifier and signified and referent; they viewed, rightly from the philosophical stance of the realist, the word eventually tied firmly back to the outside world, to the objects. Referenetiality is paramount and not yet problematized.
- 17.
See Laurence Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (New York: Harcourt, 1956), pp. 182–188, on point of view.
- 18.
Besides the essays in It Needs to Be Said, Grove’s effort to establish an interpretive framework remains evident the critical articles collected in A Stranger to My Time; see, in particular, pp. 67–82, for one of his three “interpretation” pieces; see also “A Writer’s Classification of Writers and their Work,” especially pp. 199–201, for a most clear articulation of this issue.
- 19.
See Louis Dudek’s critique of Pacey’s conventional approach to realism: “his realist assumptions – “life as it is lived here and now…” “recorded faithfully and accurately” – are lacking in any countervailing complexity. He is never knocked out of reality by the shock of creative wonder” (1978:303).
- 20.
See Northrop Frye on three different kinds of realities, modelled largely on the three Aristotelian mimetic modes, in The Educated Imagination (Toronto, 1963) pp. 4–11.
- 21.
See Ma Qingfu on Maxim Gorki’s formulation of Socialist Realism and its connections with Aristotelian credos (1986:27).
- 22.
According to John Moss, the breakthrough in Canadian literature dealing with sex and violence occurred in the mid-1920s; see his Sex and Violence in Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1977) on the significant of Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh in breaking the pernicious puritanical prohibitions on the matter of sex (13) and the impact of Grove’s boldness on Garner (14). Desmond Pacey’s designation of the date for the firm establishment of Canadian realism was 1925 (1976). The writer’s realistic attitude towards modern life and writing is thus confirmed with critical consensus.
- 23.
Auerbach here describes the method of Stendal, who influences Grove tremendously; see A Stranger to My Time (Edmonton, 1986), pp. 15, 199. Grove is particularly interested in another French novelist, Flaubert; see his article, “Flaubert’s Theories of Artistic Existence,” pp. 3–9 in A Stranger to My Time.
- 24.
They are, of course, not yet “the linguistic being” dwelt upon by Walter Benjamin in his “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1986:333–338) or examined microscopically by the poststructuralists, who posit language as the master/creator that decides human existence and consciousness (see, for instance, Chris Weedon’s Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Chap. 4).
- 25.
A partial recall of some of the titles of creative and critical works can show this point. Take, for instance, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes; Sheila Watson’s Double Hook; Catherine McLay’s poems, “Duality” and “Ambiguity” (Ice Rainbow 20, 24); Sherrill Grace’s Violent Duality, a phrase from Margaret Atwood herself; Victor Ramraj’s Mordecai Richler (Boston: Twayne, 1983), chiefly focussed on Richler’s “ambivalence” and “binary vision”; Robin Mathews’s dialectis—“communitarian” and “individualist”— in The Canadian Identity (1988); and, most recently and crowning all, Ambivalence: Studies in Canadian Literature (New Delhi, 1990) edited by Om P. Juneja and Chandra Mohan.
- 26.
Some critics or theorists tend to depoliticize Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalization or scatology in search of mere formal or rhetorical similarities; see, for instance, Neil Randall’s “Carnival and Intertext: Humour” in What the Crow Said and The Studhorse Man in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1989). Of great interest is Richard Cavell’s “Bakhtin Reads De Mille: Canadian Literature, Postmodernism, and the Theory of Dialogism.” So far, the best Canadianization of Bakhtinian discourse would be Sherrill Grace’s article, “‘Listen to the Voice’: Dialogism and the Canadian Novel”, which envisages the vast applicability of dialogism not only in literary studies but also in critical discourse and canon formation. These two are featured in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature edited by John Moss (Ottawa, 1987), to be followed by Gabrielle Helms’s Challenging Canada (2003). Our key contribution here lies in dialogism in the ideological realm, as well as an appropriation of Bakhtin’s other concepts beneficial to a study of Canadian novels.
- 27.
There are two issues involved here. First, we must, of course, differentiate the Marxist ideas from the Cartesian notion of thinking as being: the former sprang out of concrete European socialist experiments especially since the French Revolution and the Paris Commune; its theories are avowedly and actually practice oriented; pure reason or abstract ideas have no currency here, pace some critics who presented Marxist socialism as mere pipedreams or Utopianism. Second, that Canadian criticism in general avoids theories of any kind but the literary and/or psychological until the mid-1980s can be testified, for example, in John Moss’s discussion of Atwood (1978:9–10) and in M. Stobie’s criticism of Grove (1973:188–9). But we do spot a relieving sign in the publication of Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature (Ottawa: U. of Ottawa P, 1987). The title may be deceptive to traditional literary theorists like Frye, for what is meant by “literary theory” here includes feminist, psychoanalytic, linguistic, political, semiotic and philosophical theories.
- 28.
A similar event took place in French-Canadian literature with the introduction of joual into social realist writing; see W. Toye (1983:401–02).
- 29.
It also helps to borrow Booth’s (1983) more traditional terms, the author and the implied author, to mean, respectively, the ordinary, living, full-blood person from that who assumes certain roles or even persona at the time of writing. The two may sometimes coincide, but the distinction is often necessary.
- 30.
Ours is not an essentialist position; for more discussion of Kristeva’s definition and the thorny issue of female/feminine writing and writing in the feminine, see our paper, “Theorizing about New Modes of Representation and Ideology in the Postmodern Age: the Practice of Margaret Atwood and Li Ang” in the special issue of “Postmodernism and Feminism” in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature; see John (Zhong) Ming Chen, Vol. 21.3 (Sept. 1994), 341–54.
- 31.
As far as we can see, Socialist Realism as a concept or literary practice is not popular in Canada; Carter’s conscientious writing (in Fatherless Sons and other novels published mainly by the Progress Press) inline of this doctrine may be the sole exception. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, Carter has not made any literary criticism calling for Socialist Realism, either. For these reasons, we exclude any full discussion of Socialist Realism in the text proper at this point. We shall treat Socialist Realism at greater length in conjunction with our analysis of Carter’s work in a later chapter.
An additional remark is due. Though there was a dearth of literary criticism on Socialist Realism as such in Canada, some writers or poets like Dorothy Livesay and of course Earle Birney strove to introduce Marxist criticism into Canadian literature. For example, Livesay, in essay after essay, expounded the concept of class and of class struggle, of economic exploitation and political oppression under capitalism in her criticisms of T.S. Eliot and Morley Callaghan (Right Hand Left Hand). Birney is equally dedicated and sophisticated for the most part. His pieces in the Canadian Forum show that he was quite adept in Marxist criticism by the standards of the 1930s. In his “Proletarian Literature: Theory and Practice” published in 1937, he was able to repudiate the then prevalent notion that literature should serve party lines and insisted on the artists’ own “creative achievements” (60) and their ability to “philosophize” (58). Also, he criticized the so-called proletarian novelists for the “stock types” in their works—“the Villainous Boss, the Idealistic Intellectual, and the Good Striker-Leader” (58). However, Birney showed his one-sidedness or prematurity when he called for a proletarian literature without the cultural baggage of the bourgeois tradition: he seemed to favour an overnight establishment of a new literature which is well-nigh impossible anywhere. Such a cultural nihilism or iconoclasm may be viewed as an unfortunate aberration from Marx’s more wholesome attitude to Western culture from the Greek antiquity to his contemporaneous bourgeois literature (see Morawski’s “Introduction” to Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, 1973). Since Livesay’s and Birney’s views were derived more from their own readings of Marxist literature than from the orthodox former Soviet Socialist Realism, again, we do not include them in the category of the former Soviet Socialist Realism. Other Marxist literary views are given similar treatments when we discuss social realism in English-Canadian criticism.
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Chen, J.Z.M., Ji, Y. (2015). Theorizing English-Canadian Social Realism. In: Marxism and 20th-Century English-Canadian Novels. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46350-5_4
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