Abstract
Challenging hostile characterisations of realism, this article argues that nineteenth-century realist fiction achieves a double loyalty: loyal to the subject matter of ostensibly mundane reality but loyal also to how life might be in the truer reality of a world in better shape—a world often hidden distortedly within this one, confined inside people too small and compromised to help re-shape it. As a consequence, the article seeks to show that, in its hidden or apparently tiny subtleties, realism has been more radically experimental with reality than it has been given credit for. Its immanent realist metaphysic, established in place of a lost or unattainable primary reality, demanded new formal agility to reach or express the “really real” not otherwise accessible to ordinary human perception or available to characters themselves. Yet realism’s technical innovations were so undemonstratively faithful to their medium as to risk being obscured and unacknowledged within it.
Highlights
In his preface to The American, Henry James concluded that the imperative to experiment in fictional representations of life belonged to “the art of the romancer” not that of the realist
In literary realism, intimations of unknown or other lives are not merely the creatures of romantic imagination operating in isolation from mundane, encumbered experience: rather they are often found to be implicit within ordinary reality, as lost, untriggered, yet still vital, possibilities that define the real beyond its mundane appearance
To denote the aspect of literary realism which comes closest to what is meant by ‘realism’ in life—the obstacles, that is to say, that constitute limitation as per the reality principle in Freud or as in the Fall. This is allied with the Jamesian view of the mundane reality we cannot possibly not know
Summary
In his preface to The American, Henry James concluded that the imperative to experiment in fictional representations of life belonged to “the art of the romancer” not that of the realist.
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