Notes on Realism and Naturalism

Literature was the most representative and the most widely influential art of the 19th century. It found new forms and methods and expressed the social and intellectual situation of the time most fully and memorably.

After the great wave of the international Romantic movement had spent its force in the fourth decade of the 19th century, European literature moved in the direction of what is usually called Realism. Realism was not a coherent general movement that established itself unchallenged for a long period of time, as Classicism had succeeded in doing during the 18th century. Exceptions and reservations there were, but still in retrospect the 19th century. appears as the period of the great realistic writers: Flaubert in France, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russia, Charles Dickens in England, Pérez Galdós in Spain, Henry James in America, Ibsen in Norway.

What is meant by "realism?" The term, in literay use (there is a much older philosophical use), apparently dates back to the Germans at the turn of the century--to Friedrich Schiller and August and Friedrich Schlegel. It cropped up in France as early as 1826 but became a commonly accepted literary and artistic slogan only in hte 1850s. (A review called Réalisme began publication in 1856, and a novelist and critic, Champfleury--the pseudonymn of Jules-François-Félix Husson--published a volume of critical articles with the title Le Réalisme in the following year.) Since then the word has been bandied about, discusses, analyzed, and abused as all slogans are.

The program of the groups of writers and critics who used these terms can be easily summarized. The realists wanted a truthful representation in literature of reality--that is, of contemporary life and manners. They thought of their method as inductive, observational, and hence "objective." The personality of the author was to be suppressed, or was at least to recede into the background, since reality was to be seen "as it is."

It is usually rash to explain a literary movement in social and political terms. But the new realist art surely had something to do with the triumph of the middle classes in France after the July revolution of 1830, and in England after the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832, and with the increasing influence of the middle classes in almost every country. Russia is somewhat of an exception as no large middle class could develop there during the 19th century. An absolute feudal regime continued in power and the special character of most of Russian literature must be due to this distinction, but even in Russia there emerged an "intelligentsia" (the term comes from Russia) which was open to Western ideas and was highly critical of the czarist regime and its official "ideology."

The program of Realism, while defensible enough as a reaction against Romanticism, raises critical questions which were not answered theoretically by its defenders. What is meant by "truth" of representation? Photographic copying? This seems the implication of may famous pronouncements. "A novel is a mirror walking along the road," said Stendhal (pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle) as early as 1830. But such statements can hardly be taken literally. All art must select and represent; it cannot be and has never been a simple transcritp of reality. What such analogies are intended to convey is rather a claim for an all-inclusiveness of subject matter, a protest against the exclusion of themes that were considered "low," "sordid," or "trivial" (like the puddles along the road the mirror walks). Chekhov formulated this protest with the usual parallel between the scientist and the writer: "To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line: he must know that dung heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones." Thus the "truth" of realistic art included the sordid, the low, the disgusting, and the evil; and, the implication is, the subject is treated objectively, without interference and falsification by the artist's personality and his own desires.

The realistic program, while it has made innumerable new subjects available to art, also implies a narrowing of its themes and methods--a condemnation of the fantastic, the historical, the remote, the idealized, the "unsullied," the idyllic. Realism professes to present us with a "slice of life"--heroes drawn from the middle and lower classes, was a real innovation of the 19th century. But one should recognize that it is an artistic method and convention like any other.

The value of realism lies in its negation of the conventions of romanticism, its expansion of the themes of art, and its new demonstration (never forgotten by artists) that literature has to deal also with its time and society and has, at its best, an insight into reality (not only social reality) that is not necessarily identical to that of science. Many of the great writers make us "realize" the world of their time, evoke and imaginative picture of it that seems truer and will last longer than that of historians and sociologists. But this achievement is due to their imagination and their art, or craft, two requisites that realistic theory tended to forget or minimize.

Definitions of Realism:

Rene Wellek: "Realism is the objective representation of contemporary social reality."

N.B.: But this isn't a satisfactory definition because: (1) fiction often "takes sides"; (2) "What is 'reality'"?; (3) "What is 'contemporary'"?

George Auerbach, Mimesis: "Realism is ordinary life rendered seriously and problematically."

N.B.: Here Realism deals with ordinary people; therefore, the "ordinary" is not ridiculed, nor is the "ordinary" merely good/bad.

Waldspurger's definition of Realism: "Realism deals with a subject matter that is distinctive; it is the 'average' in the contemporary experience of the writer and of his/her intended audience." (We shall see that Naturalism will aim below the average contemporary experience.)

N.B.: The subject matter must be average -- [Jackie Kennedy Onassis isn't "average"].

Methodology: the selection and presentation of an abundance of literary details -- characters, things, etc. -- in a physical space/place and time and social millieu; these are given as evidences of reality.

Ian Watts, The Rise of the Novel:3 tests for formal realism: (1) rendering of time, (2) rendering of place, (3) rendering of names.

N.B.: The use of details is extremely important.

Negative definitions of Realism: Realism defines itself AGAINST:

1. Classicism: the authority of classical categories is called into question; and Romanticism. Challenged are the use of Romantic imagination and the imaginative activity of the artist, insofar as these imaginative elements are "felt."

2. Realism denies: (1) the fantastic; (2) Romanticism; (3) the highly stylized; (4) myth; (5) world of dreams; (6) improbable events -- miracles.

3. Realism includes: (1) the ugly; (2) the revolting; (3) the low; (4) taboo subjects: (5) science [in place of metaphysics].

Attitudes of the 1850s:

(1) Rejection of Romanticism: Romanticism is finished; Realism is the real thing.

(2) Rejection of the Ideal: insistence that the "anti-ideal" has value in literature. This led to an emphasis on the contemporary. H. Taine noted an indifference to beauty; an attraction to monstrosity. There was a new appreciation of science: science = Natural; it isn't "Ideal", nor is it moral or consoling.

(3) Glorification of science, especially medicine: Claude Bernard, Experimental Medicine (1865). Literature was viewed as a form of science. Fiction can perform experimental operations and diagnoses. Fictional methodology developed: observation, objectivity, accuracy.

 

Realism and narratology:

Realism does not want even a single refelection of the author to surface in the writing, resulting in the removal of the author from the fiction (indirect free style and "showing"). As far as the author is concerned, there should be a lack of emotions and a distancing of oneself. The Realist author must follow the methodology: be "attentive observationof the dullest details," and be attentive to minute, meticulousness in describing exhaustively ordinary life. Simplicity in language is required.

Naturalism:

As a specific literary term, naturalism crystallized in France. In French, as in English, naturalist means, of course, simply student of nature, and the analogy between the writer and the naturalist, specifically the botanist and zoologist, was ready at hand. Émile Zola, in the preface to a new edition of his early novel, Thérèse Raquin (1866), proclaimed the naturalist creed most boldly. His book, he claims, is "an analytical labor on two living bodies like that of a surgeon on corpses." He proudly counts himself among the group of "naturalist writers."

The naturalist program, as formulated by Zola, was substantially the same as that of the Realists, except that Zola put greater stress on the analogies to science, considering the procedure of the novelist as identical with that of the experimenting scientist. He also more definitely and exclusively embraced the philosophy of scientific materialism, with its deterministic implications, its stress on heredity and environment, while the older realists were not always so clear in drawing the philosophical consequences.

Emile Zola crystalized his views of Naturalism in his treatise, The Experimental Novel (1880), which was based on the scientist Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865). Bernard was a determinist who believed all could be reduced to natural laws for nearly every occurrence. There is only physical nature; there is no metaphysics in Bernard's views. Both Bernard and Zola based their investigations on the questions "how" something happened, not on "why" it happened.

In The Experimental Novel, Zola asked: "How does an author apply the experimental method to a novel?" He answered this by deciding to set up a hypothetical experimental circumstance and to set it in motion. His role as author would be only to record data. N.B. his data is NOT scientific. Bernard dealt with experimentation on LIVING things; Zola does experimentation on the INTERNAL, WORLDLY society. Using this experimental method, Zola created a distinction between the observer (records conditions that already exist) and the experimenter (creates circumstances for actions). In this way, his naturalistic literature would be similiar to a science. Furthermore, accepting the discoveries of recent science, Zola emphasized the interaction of heredity and environment on his subjects; for him, humanity was animalistic, insofar as Darwinianism maintained that humans were part of the evolutionary chain.

Zola realized that even purest naturalism requires personal artifice in its re-creation of the world as a reflection of the author's image. Zola writes in the Experimental Novel:

A stupid reproach made against us naturalist writers is that we wish to be merely photographers. In vain have we asserted that we accept temperament and personal expression; people go right on answering us with imbecile arguments about the impossibility of the strictly true, about the necessity of the arrangement of facts to make any work of art whatever. Well, with the application of the experimental method to the novel all argument comes to an end. The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of modificaiton. We begin certainly with true facts which are our indestructible base; but to show the mechanism of the facts, we have to produce and direct the phenomena; that is our part of invention and genius in the work. Thus without having recourse to question of form and style . . . I state right here that when we use the experimental method we must modify nature without departing from nature.

According to E. Diez-Echarri and J. M. Rocha Franquesa, Historia General de la Literatura Española e Hispano-americana, (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), Naturalism does the following:

(01) protest against academic tyrany and an abolition of classical rules,

(02) an imitation of Nature as the supreme norm of art,

(03) extreme description: art is a photograph,

(04) realistic description: observation and presentation of life according to the temperament of the author: "A novel is reality seen through a particular temperament,"

(05) super-appreciation of the pathologic and morbid; elevation of of the dogma of the laws of heredity,

(06) negation of the spiritual elements of human nature, as they are subjected to the deterministic forces of the material world,

(07) pessimism: a preference for the lower elements of society and for anormal types,

(08) popular langu age and uncareful style: absence of lyricism,

(09) negation of moral and social principles and an apology in favor of instinct,

(10) pseudoscientificism: gives a novel a doctrinal character; it doesn't desire to entertain, but to teach.

Naturalism--General Notes and Summary:

Post-Darwinian: "free will" is only a product of heredity or a reaction to the environment. People are animals.

Deterministic: because of heredity and environment, a novel unfolds under the effects of determinism; a character's conduct is governed by natural laws--cause and effect. People behave mechanically.

The novelist is taxonomist and scientist: In a Naturalist novel, people only experiment upon each other.

Contrasts: Realism vs. Naturalism

REAL: (1) deals with the average in contemporary experience at the time of the author.

NATU: (1) deals with the below average (either socially, morally, or psychologically.

REAL: (2) is not deterministic, nor does it necessarilly exclude metaphysical reality.

NATU: (2) is deterministic and always asummes only a materialistic world.

REAL: (3) endings are not necessarilly pessimistic because of Fate.

NATU: (3) endings tend to be pessimistic because of Fate.

REAL: (4) characters can take charge of their own lives.

NATU: (4) characters tend not to "think" very much.

REAL: (5) personal themes.

NATU: (5) social themes.

REAL: (6) "non-experimental"

NATU: (6) scientific, post-Darwinian