This is a book about narrative realism as form and genre across several media – print, film, television, and theater – in American culture since the middle of the twentieth century. Its argument is that realism continues to be misunderstood under the influence of 1970s literary and film theory and its continuing import underrecognized in literary and cultural histories. These problems are long standing in literary and cultural studies, and, although since 2000 there has been a small but steady stream of articles addressing them, the disciplinary common sense remains unchanged. Thus, my argument is motivated primarily by what I regard as serious persistent errors in academic discourses.
These errors are in large measure the result of arguments within the Left, which was formerly known for a rigid, dogmatic assertion of its own diagnosis of social problems and solutions to them, claiming these were based on science. As I will argue in Narrative Realism, the critique of realism was to a significant degree a rejection of this way of thinking typical of international Communist parties from 1918 until at least the 1970s. The rejection of the claims of Marxism to science were part of a larger rejection of truth claims in general. Realist narratives didn’t claim to be factual in their details, but they had been understood to be accurately representative of social processes and conditions. In revealing these, they had been held to be politically progressive. Now, because they claimed to represent the world accurately, they were accused of deception. Where historically Marxism had regarded ideology as a systematic misunderstanding of reality promoted in the interests of the ruling class, the new approach treated it as an inherent state of the human mind manifested in truth claims themselves. By presenting themselves as accurate representations, realist narratives were now understood as inherently ideological. This shift in locus of ideology from content to form and the related attack on the very idea of truth has made it hard for the Left to propose its own vision. Recognizing that the attempt to represent accurately human social life is not inherently misleading is insufficient by itself solve this problem, but it is one step in that direction.
My goal in this book is not to restore realism to the place Georg Lukács once assigned it as the only politically correct kind of literature. I don’t believe that realism is inherently superior to other narrative forms either aesthetically or politically. I believe that it can do things aesthetically and politically that they cannot, but that other forms also offer affordances of their own. My main concern is to show the continued vitality of realism in late twentieth-century American culture, but in order to make that argument matter, I need to show that the prejudices against realism in literary and film theory are misguided.
My approach to realism is formalist in the sense that Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction is formalist: it is a “descriptive poetics” (xi). I have premised my account of realism on the features of those texts most identified with the term, especially nineteenth-century novels. I am interested in the specific features and conventions of realist works. This formalism is different from that recently theorized by Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh. For Levine, forms are broad, abstract categories that apply not just to texts, but to human experience broadly conceived (Forms). For Kornbluh, forms are also to be understood as having a broad reach, but she is especially interested in mathematical formalism and architectural models as ways of understanding literary forms (Order). These formalist approaches to realism are theoretically sophisticated, but they don’t seem to me to get at what distinguishes realism as a narrative mode. I hope that is what Narrative Realism does accomplish.
Chapter 1 directly addresses the critique of realism coming out of French theory in the 1970s, while also putting it in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism and the dominant version of American literary history. The chapter explores misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources. The first is the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form. The second includes general claims about language, representation, and knowledge deriving from theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, and Althusser that made it harder to see the validity of the realist project. The third takes up explicit attacks on realism by literary and film theorists. The chapter then offers a descriptive poetics of realism, identifying a set of conventions that emerge first in nineteenth-century fiction and that have been generally recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.
This account of realism becomes the basis for my exploration of American realist narratives in different media in the chapters the follow. Chapter 2 begins with a refutation of specific attacks on realism by 1970s and 1980s film theory. Film theorists rewrote the history of cinema by claiming that standard Hollywood products, long regarded as patently unreal, escapist entertainment, were realist. The chapter shows how and why they were wrong, and it argues that there are significant inherent limitations that the medium of the commercial fiction film places on any attempt at realism. In order to do this, I focus on the films of Howard Hawks, whose films have been said to best illustrate what Robert Ray called Hollywood’s invisible style. Finally, I look briefly at Italian neorealism and other films that are more properly understood as realist.
Chapter 3 takes up American literary history and the novel as a genre, arguing that the standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. This chapter uses John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy to explore how realism in the novel has persisted and developed in an era when it has been presumed dead. It argues that Updike’s representation of mass culture as a major component of Rabbit Angstrom’s reality provides an alternative to the influential Horkheimer–Adorno conception of mass culture as systematic deception.
Chapter 4 looks at realism on the stage through the lens of August Wilson’s Century Cycle. The confines of space and time limit realism in drama in ways similar to those that limit it in cinema. Yet realism has played a central role in American drama, and Wilson is an heir to that tradition. His Century Cycle takes this realism in a profoundly new direction, however, by taking account of the African American experience over the course of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, these plays represent something akin to the detail and scope of nineteenth-century realist novels. The chapter shows why Wilson’s plays must be understood as realist despite the fact that they involve spiritual or supernatural elements normally understood as foreign to realism.
The final chapter focuses on The Wire as an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where American broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth-century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. But the chapter also considers how The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print. In the Conclusion, I discuss affordances and limitations of the realist form, and its value in representing climate change when mixed with other forms.
