The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle

Abstract

The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle Edward Barnaby (bio) It is often difficult to know precisely what one is discussing when the topic turns to realism. Some regard realism primarily from a technical perspective as a style of literary or visual representation. Others understand it in a scholarly context as a moment in the history of literature and art during the nineteenth century. Still others identify realism as an evolving critical discourse that has influenced—and continues to influence—cultural sensibilities toward the act of representation. To complicate matters further, there are critics within this latter group who credit realism with the ability to liberate the historical consciousness of its audience, while others disparage realism for naturalizing the present political order as a spectacle that strips the audience of its sense of agency. The coexistence of these contradictory claims regarding literary realism begs critical attention, not necessarily as a conflict to be resolved, but as an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the purpose and possibilities for mediating the real in fiction. The question takes on particular relevance at a time when technologies of visual representation seem bent on achieving greater and greater levels of literality. One must first distinguish between realism as a form of avant-garde consciousness versus mass-market "reality fiction" that, much like "reality television," participates in and reinforces the dynamics of consumption. To this end, I will clarify the realist project as making visible the dynamics of industrial society by bringing it into dialogue with the Situationist concept of "specta cle." [End Page 37] One must then distinguish between realism as a theoretical stance towards the world versus the various realizations of that stance in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. The failure to maintain this distinction allows more superficial categories of genre and period to fragment an otherwise coherent and evolving impulse towards literary realism in the novel. In this respect, I will consider realist consciousness in three novels by Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Salman Rushdie, placing into dialogue texts that are typically isolated within the discrete critical discourses of realism, modernism, and post-modernism. Woolf singles out Hardy's realism as worthy of praise in contrast to the naturalism practiced by his contemporaries, while defining her own work not as a modernist rejection of realism, but as a more authentic method for achieving it. Rushdie, who has been controversially received as an imperialist sympathizer and whose fiction has often been misleadingly exoticized as "magical" realism, is indeed a self-described realist whose essays suggest that his novels can be read in a broader context than the merely postcolonial. An uncritical use of the term "realism" has thus not only led to a misreading of specific texts and authors, but also perpetuated a muddled sense of literature's relationship to society, one that effectively dates to Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic for trafficking in representations of representations: reality twice removed. Certain critics have looked to the realist novel as a means of exposing the false consciousness of ideology, laying bare opportunistic constructions of history and stripping them of their compelling internal coherence. Written in the late 1930s, Georg Lukàcs' study of the historical novel praises Walter Scott for providing an alternative to the epic model of heroism, which tended to mystify social forces as the workings of the individual will in a manner that lent itself to various fascist cultural projects of the period (270). According to Lukàcs, the heroes of Scott's novels function in precisely the opposite manner by serving as a "neutral ground" on which social forces in conflict "can be brought into a human relationship with one another" with the "concrete historicism of all the details" (36, 151). Lukàcs regards the "full political effect" of realism as the "literary unmasking of the pseudo-hero of Fascism," which the novel achieves through its "social-historical and not merely individual-biographical standpoint" (341). Enlarging upon this idea of realist literature's ability to "unmask" ideology, Pierre Macherey later argues in A Theory of Literary [End Page 38] Production that although the substance of the realist novel is rooted in historical reality, the text is mediated...