1c Section on Realism

7/29/2019 1c Section on Realism

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How to disappear up your own arse

The access to the real is dependent on language

Language is not the real

The access to the real is dependent on the unreal

The access to the real is blocked by language

The object of philosophy is not the real but language.

Although this will cause difficulties for idealist philosophy in its attempt to ground knowledge in

ideal forms and most directly phenomenology the most obvious casualty of this perspective is

materialism. What begins as a critique of phenomenology and specifically of Husserl thus widens out

into a much more general critique of materialism.

Realism

Watt in Flat Footed:

It is, I think, very easy to see why the term "realism" arouses no excitement in philosophical circles. Apart

from many specialized historical usages which need not concern us here, it denotes, very simply, the

acceptance of three general notions:

that the world and the people outside us are real;

that language enables us to communicate about them to others;

and that truth about them is verified through the assent of other observers.

This is the basic expression of common sense realism and it fails to the extent that our experience does not

necessarily give rise to the truth. We might assume, for intance, that the earth is flat and that the sun moves

around the earth on the basis of such common sense realism.

However, these assumptions are also built into the scientific as opposed to philosophical

understanding of reality. Indeed, after a period in which philosophy was institutionally and constituionally

associated with religion, the rise of science after, let us say, Galileo substantially modified the conception

of what it was to know something and of the type of individual that could do this knowing. Henceforward,

whilst philosophy might be idealist or materialist, science was resolutely materialist at least in its assumption


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that knowledge must be tested against experience.

The crucial reorganisation comes with the development of the mathematical sciences and the

consideration of their relation to the real. In this reorganisation, the relation between the subject and the

object comes to be considered as a function of the calculation.

Williams and Keywords

Before turning to Watt's study, something of the nature of realism as discussed by Raymond Williams

a critic that shares something of Watt's Weltangshung might be invoked.

The Real

For Williams

Realism is a difficult word, not only because of the intricacy of the disputes in art and philosophy to

which its predominant uses refer, but also because the two words on which it seems to depend, real and reality,

have a very complicated linguistic history.

~ Etymology of real. The online Etymological Dictionary suggests: early 14c., "real, actually existing,

true;" mid-15c., "relating to things" (especially property), from Old French reel, from Late Latin realis "actual,"

from Latin res "matter, thing," of unknown origin. Meaning "genuine" is recorded from 1550s. Real estate is first

recorded 1660s and retains the oldest English sense of the word

Williams builds on a comparable definition and suggests that the real could be distinguished from the imaginary

but also from the apparent.

~ Contrast of the real with the imaginary. Real, from the beginning, has had this shifting double

sense. It is from fw real, oF, realis, IL, from rw res, L - thing. Its earliest English uses, from C15, were in matters

of law and property, to denote something actually existing. There was a connected and persisting later use for

immovable property, as still in real estate. The sense ofsomething actually existingwas transferred to general use,from 1C16, in an implicit or explicit contrast with something imaginary: Ist reall that I see? (Alls Well That

Ends Well, V, iii); not Imaginary, but Reall (Hobbes,Leviathan, III, xxxiv). I

~ Contrast with the apparent. But at the same time there was an important sense of real as

contrasted not with imaginarybut with apparent: not only in theological arguments about the reall presence of

Christ in the materials of communion, but also in wider arguments about the true or fundamental quality of some

thing or situation - the real thing, the reality of something. This use is still very common, if often not noticed as

such, in phrases like refusing to face the real facts of his situation or refusing to face reality.

A Realist in the pre-C18 sense of the word took real in the general sense of an underlying truth or quality; in the


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post-eC19 sense in the (often opposed) sense ofconcrete (as from C14 opposed to abstract) existence. Similarly,

Williams offers another distinction between realism as a method and as a general attitude. In the latter sense: it

is distinguished from ROMANTICISM (q.v.) or fromImaginary or MYTHICAL (q.v.) subjects; things not of the

real world.

Realism

Realism was a new word in C19. It was used in French from the 1830s and in English from the 1850s. It

developed four distinguishable meanings. The first two are no longer current.

a) as a term to describe, historically, the doctrines of Realists as opposed to those of Nominalists. For

Williams, this usage is now an isolated and specific historical reference. The earliest Realists, in English, were

at a great distance from anything now indicated by the term, for the philosophical school known as Realist was

primarily opposed by the Nominalists, who themselves might in post-mC19 terms be classed as realists of an

extreme kind. The old doctrine of Realism was an assertion of the absolute and objective existence of universals,

in the Platonic sense.

These universal Forms or Ideas were held either to exist independently of the objects in which they were

perceived, or to exist in such objects as their constituting properties. Redness, for the nominalists, was merely a

(confusing) name for a number of red things; for the conceptualists it became a generalizing mental idea; for the

Realists it was an absolute and objective Form independent of red objects or essentially constituting such objects.

It is very striking, and very confusing, that this Realist doctrine isn what we would now call extreme IDEALISM

(q.v.).

That use may be said to have faded. From eC19 quite different senses of realist, and the new word realism

in a more modern sense, can be said to have overlain and suppressed it. But this is not wholly true. Our common

distinction between appearance and reality goes back, fundamentally, to the early use - the reality underlying

appearances - and this has significantly affected many arguments about realism.

Watt might be called on in this context: (pages 11 and 12) By a paradox that will surprise only the

neophyte, the term realism' in philosophy is most strictly applied to a view of reality diametrically opposed

to that of common usage -- to the view held by the scholastic Realists of the Middle Ages that it is universals,

classes or abstractions, and not the particular, concrete objects of sense-perception, which are the true

'realities'.This, at first sight, appears unhelpful, since in the novel, more than in any other genre, general

truths only exist post res; but the very unfamiliarity of the point of view of scholastic Realism at least serves

to draw attention to a characteristic of the novel which is analogous to the changed philosophical meaning of

'realism' today (..)

b) as a term to describe new doctrines of the physical world as independent of mind or spirit, in this sense

sometimes interchangeable with NATURALISM or MATERIALISM (qq.v.). For Williams, for all practical

purposes this sense has been taken over by materialism. For the Marxist Williams, realism is understood as

involving the unearthing of underlying (historical) forces. This involves the notion that opposition to realism is

often also a term of blame or limitation, in these senses () that what is described or represented is seen only


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superficially, in terms of its outward appearance rather than its inner reality () the effect of lifelike

representation, the reproduction of reality, is at best a particular artistic convention, at worst a falsification

making us take the forms of REPRESENTATION as real.

This is contrasted with formalism and structuralism:

More often, however, the argument (against materialism) has been linked with the idealist modes of

FORMALISM and of STRUCTURALISM (qq.v.). In the latter, the emphasis is on the strength of attention

to the detailed practice of composition, and especially to the basic forms and structures within which

composition occurs. This accompanies or justifies an indifference to the forces outside of literary and

intellectual practice that the broader sense of realism sought to account for. The historical significance of

Realism was to make social and physical reality (in a generally materialist sense) the basis of literature, art

and thought.

Although it is difficult, at times, to understand quite what Williams is driving at his sentences are tortured with

manifold qualifications he would also seem to be operating a distinction between ideological representation and

authentic reality. He writes:

Realist art or literature is seen as simply one CONVENTION (q.v.) among others, a set of formal

REPRESENTATIONS, in a particular MEDIUM (qq.v.) to which we have become accustomed. The object

is not really lifelike but by convention and repetition has been made to appear so. This can be seen as

relatively harmless or as extremely harmful. To see it as harmful depends on a sense that (as in mechanical

materialism) a pseudo-objective version of reality (a version that will be found to depend, finally, on a

particular phase of history or on a particular set of relationships between men and between men and things)

is passed off as reality, although in this instance at least (and perhaps more generally) what is there is what

has been made, by the specific practices of writing and painting and film-making. To see it as reality or as

the faithful copying of reality is to exclude this active element and in extreme cases to pass off a FICTION

(q.v.) or a CONVENTION (q.v.) as the real world.

In this discussion, it would then be necessary to determine to what extent and on what grounds it is possible for

the authentically realto emerge and to found the subsequent conception of the real as merely a set of imaginaryconventions or an ideology.

The solution here involves something of the status of Marxism as a science. The discussion runs into a

sense of realism that is extended to include or to emphasize hidden or underlying forces or movements, which

simple naturalistic observation could not pick up but which it is the whole purpose of realism to discover and

express. () Reality is here seen not as static appearance but as the movement of psychological or social or

physical forces; realism is then a conscious commitment to understanding and describing these.

Watt simply ignores this second aspect to the question of realism in his definition of terms although it

would appear to be incipiently present in the general sociological approach that he adopts (in the identification of

realist novel with the middle classes, for instance). Indeed, whilst Watt was most probably influenced by

arguments associated with Marxism (and more specifically the type of Marxism associated with Lukacs) he makes


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no effort, unlike Williams, to ground his text in explicitly Marxist terminology or method.

The next two aspects to realism stressed by Williams involve a nuanced description between realism

outside of the arts and realism within the arts.

c) as a description facing up to things as they really are, and not as we imagine or would like them to be -

let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen

or unseen, pervade and govern (Emerson, 1860). Williams comments that this sense Sense is still very

important in everyday use. In the Emerson example the familiar play of real is evident: the laws may be seen or

unseen. But the use has come through as facing facts, as in the characteristic new mC19 adjective realistic. (..)

though realistic (cf. reasonable) is an immensely popular word among businessmen and politicians, it has

acquired some consequent tone of limited calculation, and is then often contrasted, from both points of view, with

idealistic. If there is something of the distinction between the real and the ideal, in this, (albeit with the emphasis

now being on what is practicable rather than utopian), this sense of the term is not developed by Watt.

d) as a term to describe a method or an attitude in art and literature at first

~ an exceptional accuracy of representation,

later a commitment to describing real events and showing things as they actually exist.

Williams comments that It is not surprising that there should have been so fierce and often so confused a

controversy over the last in particular. In terms of a method to be found in literature and the arts, the use to

describe a method is often a term of praise - the characters, objects, actions, situations are realistically described;

that is, they are lifelike in description or appearance; they show realism.

From Williams to Watt

The discussion of realism as described by Williams has the advantage of providing a wider frame

from which to approach Watt. Clearly, Watt has jettisoned the explicit reference to materialism (which

would feature, if it features at all, in relation to a more Shopenhauerian pessimism as exemplified by Hardy)

He has concentrated, instead, on the first and the last of the elements in William's definition (to which he

couples a use of a notion of life of the sort found in Leavis).

As a result, the actual definition of realism adopted by Watt breaks into two related parts.

a) Realism would seem to be very much governed by conceptions extracted from the history of art

and used, anachronistically, to describe the rise of realism in the seventeenth century in the terms generated

in nineteenth century France. The terms of this discussion are curious and it is to be asked why Watt did not

examine the nature of realism in art and specifically the development of Dutch realism in the seventeenth

century when considering the the rise of realism and the formal realism on which the novel is said to


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depend.

b) Realism is understood in terms of an analogy between forms of representation (artistic and

literary), on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other hand. This involves the sense of realism a real that

underlies appearance but is understood in terms of ideal Platonic forms that Williams outlines in the first of

his definitions. The most curious element here is the insistence that the modern sense of realism in which

representation now refers not to an external set of a temporal formal properties but to the testimony of the

sense should be derived from Descartes.

Realism, Idealism and Romanticism in Art History

This is page 10 below

Briefly, they (novelists) have seen 'realism' as the defining characteristic which differentiates the

work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction. With their picture -- that of writers

otherwise different but alike in this quality of 'realism' --

one's initial reservation must surely be that the term itself needs further explanation,

if only because to use it without qualification as a defining characteristic of the novel

might otherwise carry the invidious suggestion that

all previous writers and literary forms pursued the unreal.

The main critical associations of the term 'realism' are with the French school of Realists. 'Ralisme' was

apparently first used as an aesthetic description in 1835

to denote the 'vrit humaine' of Rembrandt

as opposed to the 'idalit potique' of neo-classical painting;

it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of Ralisme, a journal edited

by Duranty.1

The mention of Rembrandt early in the discussion of realism suggests that Watt was aware of the

connection between realism in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century and the realism that he finds

in the novel. However, there is also a sense in which Watt seeks to impose the theoretical apparatus

developed in France to justify realism one that involved a sense of the identity of the need for a renewal fo

French society on the grounds of the political philosophies of Proudhon and Comte on the earlier forms of

Dutch Art.

The result here is that the link between Protestantism and Dutch art is lost and the explanation for
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the rise of realism in the seventeenth century is derived, first from the Cartesian philosophical tradition and,

secondly, from the principles of Comtean positivism and Proudhon's socialism.

Association of Realism with Political Perspectives

One of the difficulties with realism was that it took on different meanings in relation to the political

attitudes of those that used the term. Realism meant social progress and antipathy towars the lingering

elements of the Old Regime (the monarchy and the Catholic Church to the fore) to be found in French

nineteenth century for the most positivistically and socially inclined socialists. For the conservative

tradition, however, it involved atheism and a descent into the merely humdrum and experiential, point at

which it embraces the world of the thief, the hypocrite and the fornicator.

Paradoxically, of course, this is actuallyvery much the sense that realism has for a Defoe and moregenerally for a Protestant tradition of the novel that runs from Bunyan to Richardson and beyond. This time,

realism is the immersion in the empirical as it slides towards the sensual, the materialist as it involves the

materialistic. The novel's form in seventeenth century England is not the simple expression of empirical and

materialist attitudes, it is also the expression of a necessary reaction against them, a narrative of the

discovery of grace, of the need for moral regeneration.

Unfortunately much of the usefulness of the word was soon lost in the bitter controversies

over the 'low' subjects and allegedly immoral tendencies of Flaubert and his successors.

As a result, 'realism' came to

be used primarily as the antonym of 'idealism', and this sense,

which is actually a reflection of the position taken by the enemies of the French Realists,

has in fact coloured much critical and historical writing about the novel.

The

prehistory of the form has commonly been envisaged as a matter of tracing

the continuity between all earlier fiction which portrayed low life:

the story of the Ephesian matron is 'realistic'

because it shows that sexual appetite is stronger than wifely sorrow;

and the fabliau or the picaresque tale are 'realistic'

because economic or carnal motives

are given pride of place in their presentation of human behaviour.


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By the same implicit

10

premise,

the English eighteenth-century novelists,

together with Furetire, Scarron and Lesage in France,

are regarded as the eventual climax of this tradition:

the 'realism' of the novels of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding is closely associated

with the fact that Moll Flanders is a thief, Pamela a hypocrite, and Tom Jones a fornicator.

This use of 'realism', however, has

the grave defect of obscuring what is probably the most original feature of the novel form.

If the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side,

it would only be an inverted romance;

but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience,and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective:

the novel's realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it.

Realism in Literature

This, of course, is very close to the position of the French Realists themselves,

who asserted that if their novels tended to differ

from the more flattering pictures of humanity presented

by many established ethical, social, and literary codes,

it was merely because they were the product of

a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before.

(Page 11) It is far from clear that this ideal of scientific objectivity is desirable, and it certainly

cannot be realised in practice: (?)

This is a strange comment given that Watt's sociological method would seem to be predicated on the


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possibility of achieving scientific objectivity. The key element is perhaps the notion of life (a term that

Watt inherits from Leavisite criticism where it is invested with a mystical vitalism derived from D.H.

Lawrence). If this is correct, Watt would seem to be arguing for a conception of life that cannot be reduced

to scientific objectification in line with the tradition inherited from Leavis.

The Reaction against Romanticism

If one side of realism was the revolt against idealism in art and specifically the orientation of art

towards the neo-classical the other side of the revolt was against romanticism. Romanticism was

understood as offering a dream like haze, a sort of soft focus of the sort easily associated with phantasy.

This is also the romanticism of romance, as a result, and the positive valorisation that the term had

received at the end of the eighteenth century (in relation to a cult of the rural, the Medieval and the Gothic

that inspires Walter Scott, for instance). Watt writes: Stendhal andBalzac, on the other hand, admit no

dreams and present life in a grim nakedness without poetic drapery.

The discussion leads, somewhat curiously, from a discussion of the rise of realism in French art in

the nineteenth century to realism in Balzac, Flaubert and Stendhal. From there it leads on, seemlessly, to

Eliot and Hardy, the latter representing a grim and deterministic form of realism (linked to Darwin and T.H.

Huxley). Finally, existentialism and war novels are evoked in what might be taken as a history that is

appropriate to determining the attitude of the twentieth century critics attitude to realism but hardly an

understanding of its rise in the seventeenth century.

Certain major novelists of the 19th century, particularly in France, reacted against romanticism by

eliminating from their work those softer qualitiestenderness, idealism, chivalric passion, and the like

which

seemed to them to hide the stark realities of life in a dreamlike haze.

In Gustave Flauberts works there are such romantic propertieshis novel Salammb (1862), for instance, is

a sumptuous representation of a remote pagan pastbut they are there only to be punctured with realistic

irony. On one level, his Madame Bovary may be taken as

a kind of parable of the punishment that fate metes out to the romantic dreamer,

and it is the more telling because Flaubert recognized a strong romantic vein in himself:

Madame Bovary, cest moi (Madame Bovary is myself).

Stendhal and Balzac, on the other hand, admit no dreams and present life in a grim nakedness without poetic

drapery.
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Balzacs mammoth fictional workthe 20-year succession of novels and stories he published under

the collective title La Comdie humaine (The Human Comedy)and Stendhals novels of the same period,

The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839),

spare the reader nothing of those baser instincts in man and society

that militate against, and eventually conquer, many human aspirations.

Rejecting romanticism so energetically, however, they swing to an extreme that

makes realism a synonym for unrelenting pessimism.

Little comes right for the just or the weak, and base human nature is unqualified by even a modicum of good.

But there is a kind of affirmative richness and energy about both writers that seems to belie their pessimistic

thesis.

~ George Eliot. In England,George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch (187172) viewed human life

grimly, with close attention to the squalor and penury of rural life. If nature in works by romantic poets

like Wordsworth connoted a kind of divine benevolence, only the red in tooth and claw aspect was

permitted to be seen in the novels of the realists. George Eliot does not accept any notion of Divine

Providence, whether Christian or pantheistic, but her work is instinct with a powerful moral concern: her

characters never sink into a deterministic morass of hopelessness, since they have free will, or the illusion of

it.

~ Thomas Hardy. With Thomas Hardy, who may be termed the last of the great 19th-century

novelists, the determinism is all-pervasive, and his final novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), represents the limit

of pessimism. Behind him one is aware of the new science, initiated by the biologists Charles Darwin and

T.H. Huxley, which displaces man as a free being, capable of choice, by a view of him as the product of blind

mechanistic forces over which he has little control.

Realism in this sense has been a continuing impulse in the 20th-century novel, but few writers would

go so far as Hardy in positing mans near-total impotence in a hostile universe, with the gods killing human

creatures for their sport.

~ Existentialism. Realism in the Existentialist fiction of 20th-century France, for instance, makes

man not merely wretched but absurd, yet it does not diminish his power of self-realization through choice

and action. Realism has frequently been put in the service of a reforming design, which implies a qualified

optimism.

~ War novels. War novels, novels about the sufferings of the oppressed (in prison, ghetto, totalitarian
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state), studies of human degradation that are bitter cries against man-made systemsin all of these the

realistic approach is unavoidable, and realistic detail goes much further than anything in the first realists. But

there is a difference in the quality of the anger the reader feels when reading the end of Hardys Tess of the

DUrbervilles (1891) and that generated by Upton Sinclairs Jungle (1906) or Erich Maria Remarques All

Quiet on the Western Front (1929).

In Hardys novel, pessimistic determinism, reducing human character to pain, frustration, and impotent

anger, wasparadoxicallyappropriate to an age that knew no major cataclysms or oppressions.

At the point at which Watt turns to his philosophical definition of realism clearly presented in

terms of a correspondance theory of the real we are aware that the realism that is associated with French

naturalism and that is captured in Thomas Hardy the decentring of the individual in a deterministic

universe in which physical and biological laws apply without possibility of escape suggests a differentphilosophical tack. This would be the reaction of Schopenhauer to a post-Kantian world in which the ego

struggles to find security in a world that is defined in opposition to the underlying, noumenal world of Wille.

Base Realism

I have suggested that Watt's description involves a number of exclusions, exclusions that are linked

to his narrowing of the canon of novelistic fiction to realist authors. One of these distinctions is the category

of base realism and the dialogical approach associated with Bakhtin as this is ruled out as belonging to a

traditional category of realism.

Distinguishes Realism from Naive Empiricism Page 12 But the view that the external world is real,

and that our senses give us a true report of it,

obviously does not in itself throw much light on literary realism;

since almost everyone, in all ages, has in one way or another been forced to

some such conclusion about the external world by his own experience,

literature has always been to some extent exposed to the same epistemological navet.

All of these features of philosophical realism have analogies to distinctive features of the novel form,

analogies which draw attention to the characteristic kind of correspondence

between

life and literature


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which has obtained in prose fiction

since the novels of Defoe and Richardson.

Cervantes

On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary

work: and the reason for, this seems to be that

since the novelist's primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience,

attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success.

What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably

follows from this: the poverty of the novel's formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for

its realism.

Page 14: and by the time that Edward Young

in his epoch-making Conjectures on Original Composition ( 1759)

hailed Richardson as 'a genius as well moral as original',1

the word could be used as a term of praise meaning 'novel or fresh in character or style'.

The novel's use of non-traditional plots is an early and probably independent manifestation of this emphasis.

The result of the above emphasis on originality simply excludes the possibility that the novel is a

pastiche or parody of other language forms, including forms of prose fiction that has preceded it. The novel

is here contained within a solipsistic act of creation of the sort that emerges with the romanticism of a

Wordsworth less than it is a matter of comedy, satire and laughter.

Life Literature

Referent Sign

In place of the examination of base realism, of the world seen from below from the point of view of a

Sancho Panza rather than a Don Quixote
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The conception that Watt has of realism is one that he distinguishes from base realism. The difficulty

with base realism as a means of assessing the nature of prose fiction in the eighteenth century is that it

immediately allows for a sliding back to an ancient and hence ahistorical opposition between the low

and the high genres, between the base and the elevated.

However, it is precisely here that the sort of development that was associated with Bahtin

admittedly unavailable to Watt is missed.

In the process, the possibility of including Swift in the category of novelistic prose fiction Swift

writes a form of grotesque realism in which the Carnival elements appear as nightmarish emanations of

dissolute court life is also excluded.

Themes of debasement, the mock-heroic and satire will similarly disappear from the account (on the basis of

the same prejudice against naturalism mentioned above).

Indeed, it is a curious feature of the early modern novel that the debasement of the hero to purely

brutal determinations, his reduction to his species being and hence to biological determinism (as this

anticipates Darwin) is not the effect of the Whiggish defenders of experimental science, Protestant morality

and incipient Parliamentary democracy but rather of the conservative critics of Whiggish progress. A

greater understanding of the articulation of these forces in the novel can be had from reading Swift's

polemical tracts from A Tale of a Tub to A Modest Proposal than is to be found in Watt's essentialist

definition.

Realism and Philosophy

A Philosophical Definition of Realism

nevertheless it is very significant that,

in the first sustained effort of the new genre

to become critically aware of its aims and methods,

the French Realists should have drawn attention to an issue

which the novel raises more sharply than any other literary form --

the problem of the

correspondence between the literary work


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and the reality which it imitates.

I

This is essentially an

epistemological problem, and it therefore seems likely that the nature of the novel's realism,

whether in the early eighteenth century or later,

can best be clarified by the help of those professionally concerned

with the analysis of concepts, the philosophers.

Realism and Nominalism

(Page 12)

the novel arose in the modern period,

a period whose general intellectual orientation was most decisively separated

from its classical and mediaeval heritage by its rejection -- or at least its attempted rejection --

of universals.1

The argument that modern realism is determined by its rejection of universals follows on from the discussion

of French realism in the arts and remains, it would seem, determined by the characteristic oppositions set up

during the period.

Realism and Descartes and Locke

Modern realism, of course, begins from the position that truth

can be discovered by the individual through his senses:

it has its origins in Descartes and Locke,

and received its first full formulation

by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century.2

It is surely problematic to claim that Descartes stands for the notion that meaning can be achieved

through the senses. The main drive of Cartesian philosophy is to provide for the certainty of deductive and

typically mathematical truths in opposition to the lures of unreliable subjectivity. Certainly, for this

problem to emerge, there must first be the characteristically modern sense of a disjunction between sense

experience and reality (one that is undoubtedly produced in partial relation to the disjunction between
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scientific truths the heliocentric vision of the universe, for instance and traditional, religious principles.

Indeed, this somewhat convoluted and dramatically condensed history of philosophy as it skips

form Plato to Descartes and Locke without distinguishing the particular character of empiricism is

perhaps better understood in terms of the rupture between the ancients and the moderns

(however, as has already been suggested, this must also disappear from the description given that the novel

form is derived exclusively from the moderns).

However, if some consideration of the difference between rationalism and empiricism might have

been desirable, Watt would seem to be arguing although once again in a form of shorthand that the

realism that the English novel develops is best represented in the mid-eighteenth century writing of Thomas

Reid.

~ Thomas Reid. Thoms Reid is a part of the Scottish school of Common Sense realism.

Watt pursues a somewhat problematic argument to the effect that the realism of the novel is an anticipation

of Reid's common sense philosophy in the middle of the eighteenth century. It would be necessary to argue

that the novel form is already the expression of a position that could only be expressed at a later point in

philosphy.

In so doing, Watt simply neglects the passage that leads from Hobbes and Locke to Berkeley and

Hume a passage that is far from being a simply matter of linear progress and instead opts for a vision of

realism that is detached from the empiricist tradition and understood, instead, as anticipating Thomas Reid.

Further, the distinctive tenets of realist epistemology, and the controversies associated with them, are for the

most part much too specialised in nature to have much bearing on literature . What is important to the novel

in philosophical realism is much less specific;

it is rather

the general temper of realist thought,

the methods of investigation it has used

and the kinds of problems it has raised.

The general temper of philosophical realism has been critical, anti-traditional and innovating;

its method has been the

study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator,

who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs;


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and it has given a peculiar importance to semantics,

to the problem of the nature of the correspondence between words and reality.

Watt's argument which is far from being philosophically sophisticated amounts, it can be seen, to the

eminently Leaviste claim that what is found in literature is life. However, this involves shifting Leavis's

focus of attention backwards from the Great Tradition to establish an earlier great tradition, one that is

made up of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson (and which is characterised by a removal of the purely formal

mechanisms with which literature works.

If allusion to classical literature or to the Bible, for instance, is understood as a filter through which

the real is perceived and hence as a means by which access to the real is transformed into a process of

allusion or allegory, it follows from this that the removal ofthis filter will allow for a more transparet use of

language, a language that now opens up onto contemporary experience and hence onto the matter of history.

1c Section on Realism

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