On Realism and Genre

Abstract

The points at issue between Mr. Pritchard and myself can be brought to a useful focus around one key phrase in his review of The Fabulators [NOVEL, Winter, 1969]. It appears twice in this short review and seems to constitute for Mr. Pritchard a kind of touchstone for fictional excellence. He approves of novels that convey reek of the human. To me this phrase suggests a set of attitudes that might loosely be called naturalistic. It suggests an assumption that life is mainly a matter of reeks-a rather nasty affair that can be documented through the rendering of physical sensations. Now I would argue that the humanity of our great works of fiction has never resided primarily in their documentation of sensations or physical details. This is a useful but minor dimension of the story-teller's art. But the greatest fictions of all ages have derived their value from the way that in them certain highly individualized characters and situations have also functioned as with a validity beyond their context. All great fiction has been allegorical in the sense that the instances presented in it reverberate in a more general world of types. In the work of the masters of realistic fiction these types have been mainly psychological and sociological, and these writers have schooled us to see reality in their realistic way. But now has become a system of perceptual conventions which prevents us from seeing our existence clearly, and which can be exploited mechanically by inferior writers to trigger stock responses in unthinking audiences. We encounter a reek-and we say, O, yes, humanity, or that's life. Until a new master of fiction comes along and shows us that truth and humanity have really ebbed away from conventional realism. I have, in a way, been paraphrasing or re-stating the view of developed by Harry Levin in the opening chapters of The Gates of Horn, but I would push that view farther than I believe Mr. Levin does. It seems to me that the whole phenomenon known as has been governed for some centuries by empirical assumptions and attitudes about the nature of reality, and that these assumptions are now beginning to lose their force just as the theological assumptions that governed what Auerbach called figural realism lost their force with the waning of the Middle Ages. We are at an ideological watershed, with a great view backward and nothing but fog ahead. In this fog I believe I see in the writers I have called fabulators the way toward a new reality, a new truth. Works like The Lime Twig, The Unicorn, and Giles Goat-Boy help me to understand and feel myself and my