Jameson - The antinomies of realism

First published by Verso 2013
Fredric Jameson 2013
The Experiment of Time first appeared in Franco Moretti, ed.,
Il Romanzo, Torino: Einaudi, 2004
War and Representation was first published in PMLA
124:5, October 2009

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-133-6
eISBN (US): 978-1-78168-191-6
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-502-0

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v3.1

For Kim Stanley Robinson

I have observed a curious development which always seems to set in when we attempt to hold the phenomenon of realism firmly in our minds eye. It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and the attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution. Much great work, indeed, has been done on these lateral topics: on the former, for example, Ian Watts canonical Rise of the Novel and Michael McKeons monumental Origins of the Novel; and on the latter, any number of those collections entitled problems of realism (in which Lukcs deplored the degeneration of realistic practice into naturalism, symbolism and modernism), or towards a new novel (in which Robbe-Grillet argued the unsuitability of Balzacian techniques for capturing our current realities). I will later explain how these slippages determined the form of the theory about to be presented.

First, however, we must enumerate a number of other possibilities which are not explored here (but which this particular theoretical exercise is by no means intended to exclude). Thus, the most ancient literary category of allmimesisstill inspires work and thought, enshrined as anthropology and psychology in the Frankfurt Schools idiosyncratic notion of the mimetic impulse; and provocatively worked out, following Lenins reflection theory (Widerspiegelung), by scholars like Robert Weimann.of prose; nor are we taking theatrical practice into account in the present book (so much the worse for it!); and indeed, my suspicion is that later discussions of this term tend to be contaminated by those of the visual arts, and to be influenced either in the direction of representationality or abstraction (in painting) or that of Hollywood or the experimental in film.

This is the moment at which to assert the inevitability, in the realism debate, of what has just been illustrated by the turn to visuality, namely the inescapable operative value, in any discussion of realism, of this or that binary opposition in terms of which it has been defined. It is this, above all, which makes any definitive resolution of the matter impossible: for one thing, binary opposites make unavoidable the taking of sides (unless, as with Arnold Hauser, or in a different way, Worringer, one sees it as some eternal cyclical alternation Most of these binary pairs will therefore arouse a passionate taking of sides, in which realism is either denounced or elevated to the status of an ideal (aesthetic or otherwise).

The definition of realism by way of such oppositions can also take on a historical, or periodizing, character. Indeed, the opposition between realism and modernism already implies a historical narrative which it is fairly difficult to reduce to a structural or stylistic one; but which it is also difficult to control, since it tends to generate other periods beyond its limits, one of postmodernity, for example, if some putative end of the modern is itself posited; or of some preliminary stage of Enlightenment and secularization invoked to precede the period of realism as such, in a logic of periodization bound to lead on into the positioning of a classical system or a pre-capitalist system of fixed modes and genres, and so forth. Whether such a focus on periodization necessarily leads out of literary history into cultural history in general (and beyond that to the history of modes of production) probably depends on how one situates capitalism itself and its specific cultural system in the sequence in question. The focus, in other words, tends to relativize realism as one mode among many others, unless, by the use of mediatory concepts such as that of modernity, one places capitalism uniquely at the center of human history.

For at this point another combination comes into play, and that is the tendency to identify realism with the novel itself as a uniquely modern form (but not necessarily a modernist one). Discussions of either concept tend to become indistinguishable from the other, at least when the history of either is invoked: the history of the novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel, against which or underneath which all the aberrant modes, such as the fantastic novel or the episodic novel, are subsumed without much protest. But by the same token, chronology is itself equally subsumed, and a Bakhtin can argue that novel-ness is itself a sign, perhaps the fundamental sign and symptom, of a modernity that can be found in the Alexandrian world fully as much as in the Ming dynasty.

Indeed, Bakhtin is himself among the major figures for whom the novel, or realism as such, is both a literary phenomenon and a symptom of the quality of social life. For Bakhtin, the novel is the vehicle of polyphony or the recognition and expression of a multiplicity of social voices: it is therefore modern in its democratic opening onto an ideologically multiple population. Auerbach also invokes democracy in an analogous sense, even though for him the opening is global and consists in the conquest and achievement of a realist social life or modernity around the world.appropriation of syntactic forms capable of holding together multiple levels of a complex reality and a secular daily life, whose twin climaxes in the West he celebrates in Dante and in Zola.

Lukcs is more ambivalent in his reading of the novels formal and historical record: in the Theory of the Novel, the form is essentially distinguished by its capacity of registering problematization and the irreconcilable contradictions of a purely secular modernity. The latter becomes reidentified as capitalism, in the later Lukcs, and the novel with realism, whose task is now the reawakening of the dynamics of history.

But in all three apologists for the realist novel as a form (so to speak), it is never very clear whether that form simply registers the advanced state of a given society or plays a part in societys awareness of that advanced state and its potentialities (political and otherwise). This ambiguity (or hesitation) will characterize the evaluative approaches to realism I want to outline in this initial survey, and which grasp the problem in terms of form and content respectively.

Realism as a form (or mode) is historically associated, particularly if you position the Quijote