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Concepts Criticism

Rene Wellek Concepts of Criticism

Some Comments about All Realism, Ever

• Realism not just about Soviet Union realism, no just about French 19th c realism
  • Instead, relevant to all literary history, at least in realism’s “Wide sense of fidelity to nature” 223
• “Fidelity to nature”
  • Medieval flabliaux
  • Roman sculpture
  • Picturesque novel
  • Defoe
  • Restoration drama
• “All critical theory since Aristotle covers “imitation”
  • cf ancient Greek: Parrhasius tricking his rival by his intense trompe l’oeil that leads his rival to try to “pull” a curtain away from the painting…but that’s the painting
  • What is imitation? “often interpreted as literal copying, as naturalism”
    • Such as the three unities of neoclassical theory, incl. Diderot and even Johnson
  • Yet you can have “higher reality” of “a reality of essences or a reality of dreams and symbols” 224
• History of the Term
  • First “realism” is a term from philosophy, the mode opposite from nominalism (names are only ideas); that ideas are real
    • Kant, Schelling (“positing the existence of the non-ego” 225
  • Who applies it to lit? German romanticism, Schiller and Schlegel
    • They don’t agree on the meaning
    • Schlegel: philosophy is idealist, only poetry can be realist; poetry’s source is realism
    • Schiller: 1798 firs time applied to lit, French are better at realism than idealism; but it takes more than realism to make a great poet
  • France, At First
    • 1826 as a new literary genre “faithful imitation…of the originals offered by nature…the literature of the true” 227 as distinct from copying past masterpieces of art
    • 1833, anti-Romantic Planche: as materialism (minute description in historical novels)
    • 1834: Hugo is realism
    • The term just means a “Feature” founhd in Scott, Hugo 227; then applied to Balzac
  • France, Fifties
    • Courbet’s paintings lead to “crystllization” of the term 228
    • Novelist Champfleury has essays on realism and a journal, Realisme
      • “Art should give a truthful representation of the real world…by observing meticulously and analyzing carefully. It should do so dispassionately, impersonally, objectively” 228
      • Thus, we now get Realism not as description of any potential art but as particular movement
    • Who’s a part of it? Stendhal, Balzac as precursors; Flaubert, Goncourts, Dumas do it
    • Critique of it: the detail is excessive, the objective attitude just a mask for “cynicism and immorality” 229 cf trial for MAdame Bovary 1857
    • This discussion gets very repetitive, he says, says the same thing
  • England
    • No real realist movement till 1880s, George Moore, George Gissing
    • First mentions: article on Balzac 1853; Thackeray said to be “chief of the Realist School,” 1851
    • First systematic analysis: George Henry Lewes, “Realim in Art: Recent German Fiction” 1858
      • And that’s not a friendly review: he’s mad at German novelists
      • Says that “Realism is the basis of all Art.” qtd 229; a “Wholesome spirit”
      • He sees it in Thackeray, but Dickens as a Romantic
      • What is realism? “truth of observation and a dpiction of commonplace events, characters, and settings” which Wellek says are repeated in various Victorian criticism
  • United States
    • 1864: James tells a correspondent to be more realist in the French style
    • 1882: Howells calls JAmes the American leader of realism; and he later says he and James are the leaders and everyone should be realist
  • Germany
    • Occasional use of the term
    • 1850: Goethe has realism accdg to a critic
    • Another critic says Shax is realist
  • Marxism (I love how Marxism is the same thing as a country for him)
    • “term arrives very late”
    • 1882 Engels letter: complains to an author that her book isn’t realistic enough
      • “besides truth to detail, the truthful reproduction of typical circumstances” 231
      • Later Engels talks about “milieu” and “type”
  • Italy
    • 1878: Zola a cure for “phrasemaking and display” 231
    • Verismo
  • Russia
    • 1836: Shax and Scott both “reconciled poetry with real life”
    • Gogol: “the natural school” says Belinsky
    • Dostoevsky: 1863 attacks “photographic naturalism” in favor of the “fantastic and exceptional” 232
      • “My idealism is more real than their realism.” 232
      • “they call me a psychologist: mistakenly. I am rather a realist in a higher sense, i. e. I depict all the depths of the human soul.”
    • Critics would praise realism, but the major novelists kind of bucked at it, incl Tolstoy
• On Naturalism
  • “in constant competition with ‘realism’ and was often identified with it” 232; “the separation of the terms is only a work of modern literary scholarship” 233
  • First a philosophical term for materialism or secularism
  • Schiller says it’s bad: “everything is only a symbol of the real” in art 233 (doesn’t have to be so strictly denotative to refer to the real)
  • Only France uses it in a rigorous, stable way
    • “faithful adherence to nature” 233
    • Zola gets it: gets attached to his “scientific, experimental novel”
    • In general, France ends up seeing it as later stage of realism, Zola’s deterministic materialism
      • whereas “Realism” ends up being connex with a larger spectrum of attitudes
  • England: “the use of the term ‘realism’ as a period concept is still rare” 234 (remember he’s writing early 60s)
  • America: 1950, Norman Foerster: let’s replace “Victorian” with “realist”
    • 1930: _The Beginnings of Critical Realism” Vernon Parrington
    • “Realism, unlike naturalism, is not primarily engaged in social criticism…but concerns itself with the conflict between the inherited American ideals” and “mdoern science”
      • Naturalism as “the mixture of fervid exhortation with concepts of majestic inevitableness” qtd 235
• “commonplaces about life, truth, verisimilitude, and objectivity” 235
  • Wellek wants us to remember “imitation of nature, probability” and “pathos”

In Criticism

• Mimesis, Auerbach, 1946
  • Combines existentialism, “the agonizing revelations of reality in moments of supreme decisions” as well as French 19th c realism, “depicting contemporary reality, immersed i nthe dynamic concreteness of the stream of history” 236
  • These are contradictory, Wellek says: “historicism contradicts existentialism” (b/c existentialism is unhistorical: Man exposed)
    • coming from Kierkegaard on the one side and Hegel on the other
  • “realism must not be didactic, moralistic, rhetorical, idyllic, or comic”
    • thus there’s no Russians, no Germans, no English realistic novel; just Bible, Dante, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola
• Richard Brinkmann, Wirklichkeit und Illusion 1957
  • A reversal in which stream of consciousness in dramatizing the mind “achieved the most radical dissolution of ordinary reality…attention to the factual and the individual finally led to something as ‘unrealistic’ in the traditional sense as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner.” 237
    • Cool!
  • “the subjective experience…is the only objective experience:” i. e. impressionism AS realism
    • “turning it upside down” 237 by referring only to “exact notation of mental states of mind”
    • says Wellek, silly I’d say, “individualizing, atomistic, subjective realism that refuses to recognize an objective order of things…solipsism” b/c individual seen as “only reality” 238
• Germany: no critical agreement about realism; everyone has own version
• Italy: not significant for them
• Russia: “realism is everything” 238
• Germany: quarreling about specific types of realism
• Lukacs: “the most coherent theory of realism”
  • B/c literature should reflect life, it needs to reveal the contradictions of society and where it is leading historically (ie to classless)
  • Naturalism only cares about the surface and the average, so it’s stupid
  • Realism great b/c “types” are “both representative and prophetic” 239
    • Thus realism is better as it is more inclusive, representative, self-conscious, and prophetic
  • Critics have noted like Demetz and Wellek that his types are kind of like German idealist aesthetics
• Nonetheless, “we cannot limit ourselves to writers who called themselves realists nor can we be content with the theories developed at the time.”
  • Even while we don’t “lose touch with hte basic theories of the time and the acknowledged masterpieces” 239
  • his date: around July revolution 1830, which was felt of dawn of new era and in lit too
    • Heine, “das Ende der Kunstperiode” and Germany’s “poetry of life
    • France, “realisme” and “etre de son temps,” or even Saint-Simonian
    • England, Carlyle “Poem Reality”
    • Russia, Belinsky on later Pushkin and early Dostoevsky
    • What is this date? “universal feeling for the end of romanticism, for the rise of a new age concerned with reality, science,a nd this world”
      • Why by 1890s had run their course, realism and naturalism, leading to 1890s symbolist art

His Real Topic: Description of 19th c Realism

• Realism: “a regulative concept, a system of norms dominating a specific time, whose rise and eventual decline it would be possible to trace and which we can set clearly apart from the norms of the periods that precede and follow it”
  • Thus his definition WILL be a period definition, bound in a certain historical moment
  • a period concept, not a description of a stle used in all times
  • distinguished fro mromanticism and classicism
  • can’t be too specific so that it excludes the major folks
• Opening Salvo: “the objective representation of contemporary social reality” 241
  • how can this mean anything at all, sounding so empty? by its exclusions: “rejects the fantastic, the fairy-tale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly stylized, the purely abstract and decorative..no myth…no world of dreams”
  • no improbable, no “pure chance” or “extraordinary events”
    • why not? at that time reality conceived within 19th c science as “cause and effect, a world without miracle, without transcendence”
  • what does it include? “the ugly, the revolting, the low…sex and dying”
    • a result of mixing of genres that hadn’t happened in neoclassical regimes that reserved the low for the satiric and the comic and the burlesque only
• Didacticism: “implied or concealed”
  • In theory, a truthful representation wouldn’t be propagandist
  • Yet this is realism’s theoretical difficulty: “tension between description and prescription…which cannot be resolved logically but which characterizes the literature of which we are speaking” 242
    • So that Socialist realism isn’t an exception but merely a frank admission of the truth about realism
• Type: bridges the truth and the prescription, the real and the ideal
  • Replaces “character” and archetypal patterns
    • We have SOCIAL types
  • George Sand: type is a “social model” you should imitate
  • Gogol: artists should create types, that’s their job
  • “fictional figure quite apart from the overt intentions of the author” 245
  • Vigorous Russian conversation about types esp in relation to revolution, action
  • its own “problem of universality and particularity” 245
  • Type: a discussion in nearly ALL work about realism: everyone mentions it
    • Some said it’s the character drained of individuality
    • Always related to conversation over “objective social observation”
• Objectivity
  • “the other main watchword of realism” next to type
  • “a distrust of subjectivism, of the romantic exaltation of the ego: in practice often a rejection of lyricism, of the personal mood” 247
  • Requires from author “impersonality, the complete absence of the author from his work, the suppression of any interference from the author” 247
    • Flaubert, James: cannot “comment” or “tell us how we are to feel about his characters and events” 249
      • James says Trollope has “suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make-believe… Such a betrayal of sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime.”
      • James says Turgenev is the model for avoiding such explanations and apologies from author
      • James says “Vision and opportunity reside in a personal sense and a personal history” and that’s the only way to get there 249 (but of course that’s not the same thing as narrative intrusion, I’d like to point out (Wellek points out that the Goncourts, Flaubert, and Zola DID find shortcuts: “exact notation,” “impassabilite,” and scientific method
    • models were Homer, epic
  • Schlegel: objective v subjective poetry
    • ancients are “objective, disinterested, impersonal” while the moderns are “subjective, interesting, personal”
    • Novel should have subjective mood; drama and epic the impersonal mood
  • Schopenhauer: objective poets best (Shax, Goethe); second rate poets are “ventriloquists” who speak through characters (Byron)
    • me: similar to Hulme
  • Hegel: epic and classical art is objective
  • Coleridge: also uses objective-subjective
  • Hazlitt: subjective Byron and Wordsworth compared to objective Shax and Scott
    • author shouldn’t “eclipse the sun of truth and nature”
      • Scott is good at avoiding that, Goethe, Carlyle, too
  • Stendhal: “famous epigraph” to The Red and the Black: novel is “a mirror walking down the road” 249
    • “Is it the fault of the mirror that ugly people have passed in front of it? On whose side is the mirror?” 249
• Disappearance of the author?
  • Sterne, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Eliot: intrude
  • Whereas Flaubert and James say No, we can’t have the author intruding
  • No, disappearence of author NOT “indispensable criterion of realism” 250 says Wellek
    • Why? Couldn’t bring in Eliot, Thackeray, Tolstoy, etc
    • Follows Kate Hamburger in saying that these interruptions don’t always ruin illusion of reality
    • We don’t get more realistic as the author disappears b/c we mean by realism “the faithful representation of social reality” 251
      • rather than say a narrative texture that must be consistent
    • He notes that as narrative convention disappears, say in the inward turn, “actually dissolve outer reality” 251
      • neat: here we have an explanation for how realism could branch off into modernism, b/c of diff understandings of realism
• Realism as historic
  • Eric Auerbach on Stendhal: “embedded in a total reality, political, social, economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving” qtd 251
  • Flaubert’s Education around 1848, Balzac around changes post Napoleon
    • And remember Balzac did begin by copying Scott: so that Balzac is merely Scott (plus a few historians like Michelet) “applied to contemporary society” 252
      • me: opposite of what science fiction does—getting at present by way of representing future
  • Why might not historicism be a good term for realism? b/c Austen or Tolstoy won’t count, he bizarrely thinks (caught in a narrow def of history)
• So, his “disconcertingly trivial conclusion”
  • “an ideal type which may not be completely fulfilled by any single work and will certainly in every individual work be combined with different traits, survivals from the past, anticipations of the future, and quite individual peculiarities”
  • what is this type? we’re back to “the objective representation of contemporary social reality” 253
  • “all-inclusive” subject; “objective” method despite its didacticism
  • historicism is in some of them (“social reality as dynamic evolution” 253
• As an Historical Break
  • Anti Romanticism: “exaltation of the ego, with the emphasis on imagination, the symbolic method, the concern for myth, the romantic concept of animated nature” 253
  • Anti classical: “types” are not universal types as classicism has it, but instead social types; no belief in dignified subject mater only
  • In England, 18th c and 19th c more continuous literarily than in other countries so to distinguish, must say Fielding and Richardson just don’t have “consciousness of the upheavals at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (I R, bourgeois, etc 254
    • as a result of historical events, they now have “far greater consciousness that man is a being living in society rather than a moral being facing God” 254
    • as a result of change from deistic, mechanistic yet purposeful 18th c to deterministic 19th c science
    • tho’ says that stylistically we can still count Fielding and Richardson as realists
• Realism: “only one method, one great stream”
  • “has its set conventions, devices, and exclusions” that make it fail of being perfectly realistic
  • its big pitfall: may “lose all distinction between art and the conveyance of information or practical exhortation” b/c reportage is “bad art” 254
    • “in its lower reaches, realism constantly declined into journalism, treatise writing…” 255
    • but in its highest “created worlds of imagination” 255
• ” The theory of realism is ultimately bad aesthetics ecause all art is ‘making’ and is a world in itself of illusion and symbolic forms.” 255
  • WOW, what a statement to make!
    h2. Notes

• Jane Eyre, I can say that the Lowood portion of it is realist