The challenge and demands of realism

By Per Stounbjerg

As cruel as life itself…
It „will be cruel: ugly, beautiful, poetic, prosaic, senti­mental, raw, nasty, fair – exactly like life itself!“ This is how August Strindberg presented Giftas (Married) to his publisher in 1884. At the same time, he was describing a form of poetics – realistic literature, which justified its existence by resembling life. And it was forced to justify itself because it was controversial. Giftas cost Strindberg both friends and the esteem of his fellow citizens. It led to a court case which Strindberg won, but which restricted the freedom of his literary actions. The way in which the book debated issues of gender challenged not only the Swedish establishment, but also the radical opposition. For instance, only a few years after being included in the modern breakthrough, Strindberg ridiculed both Ibsen’s doll’s house and Bjørnson’s insistence that men and women should remain pure until marriage.
The challenge was both political and aesthetic. Among other things, the court case focused on the blasphemous reference to „The insolent fraud reflected in Högstedt’s Piccadon costing 65 öre per jug and Lettström’s corn wafers […], which the priest pretended was the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, a popular trouble-maker executed more than 1,800 years ago“. The description of cult objects as commodities with specified names and prices is characteristic. The Sacrament is reduced to a masque, in which people „pretend“ that objects are not what they seem. The attempt to be realistic here rests on a fictional criticism. The contrast to the „life“ in the introductory quotation above could be „literature“. Or to be more precise, the idealistic – which is supposed to be pleasant and poetic, and definitely not rude and raw. In order to be regarded as literature, material had to be purified, random features had to be suppressed, and universal features underlined. Measured on these terms, realism was an impure and challenging excess. To correct idealism, Strindberg had to be both ugly and cruel.

… or innocuous popular literature?
Realism is ugly, cruel and challenging. But only within certain limits. By contrast with free romantic imagination, which took the liberty of juggling with castles as if they were „Mere chattels“ (as described in 1805 in Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin) without the inconvenience of materiality, realism insists on the gravity of the world around us. As fiction it accepts the limitation of not being able to say all the things it might wish to say. It is true that its universe is invented, but this does not conflict demonstratively with the given facts. The world exists – not only physically, but also as a social, cultural and textual tradition – both before and independent of the writing subject; and realism refuses to reduce it to the status of private dreams or free language games. On the contrary, it admits people to conventions, structures and institutions that cannot simply be explained away.
In order to attain credibility, it is based on generally accepted ideas of what can be regarded as reality. Typically it deals with things which are acceptable within an empirical-material, secular world picture. The sense of plausibility is often reinforced by a variety of textual techniques: precise names, extensive descriptions, psychological motivation, a coherent narrative and a discreet literary language pretending to be devoid of rhetorical effects – something which merely serves to demonstrate that realism is also rhetoric, a particular type of literary presentation whose trick is to direct attention to the universe being presented rather than to the forms of presentation. In Maupassant’s words, the realists were illusionists: magicians reluctant to reveal the secrets of their trade. They were happy to reveal falsehoods in other forms of fiction, but rarely gave themselves away. In the preface to Giftas Strindberg could not resist a touch of self-irony. He boasted that he had used „at least thirty mariner’s terms taken from a nautical dictionary! Now that is surely realistic, wouldn’t you agree?“
However, in general the realists concealed their literary choices. Occasionally even to themselves, so their style could be regarded as neutral and natural. This led to a great deal of linguistic conservatism. The best realists were able to depict the familiar world with a disarming glance. Others were content to employ a lower common denominator, suppressing any alien and disturbing elements with a view to making their books more easily digestible. This reflection of boring, familiar objects in trivial forms proves that the self-imposed limitations of realism really did often result in stifling restrictions and aesthetic limitations. Many people forgot that you can be both ugly and poetic, raw and sentimental, fair and foul. However, the fact that they did so is not necessarily because they were realists.

The recurrent challenge of realism
The fact that realists were anxious to describe their forms of presentation as objective reproductions of reality does not make either the truth or the idea of mimesis into the distinguishing feature of realism. Many different writing conventions, including a good deal of modernism, have claimed to be faithful to reality. The realists of the 19th century used tactical ideas of well-nigh scientific objectivity to justify their expansion of the language, material and forms of presentation of literature. They were happy to break aesthetic taboos. They wrote about sex, mental illness and social problems using a form that dared to be ugly. Unpoetic terms from the world of technology and colloquial language were given natural rights in the domain of literature. They did not achieve „reality“ by this route. But they did open up literature to new impressions and fields of experience. In controversies with idealism, they were able to defend this expansion by saying that they were merely reflecting the world in neutral tones: they were not ugly – the world was.
The tension between challenge and stereotypical trustworthiness does not belong to the past alone. Realism is not a finished standard – rather, it is a recurrent critical-polemical gesture. It did not simply occur once and for all back in the 19th century – it is reborn whenever subsequent realists invoke the world, locations, objects, sociality and the impure multiplicity of life in renewed confrontation with the beautiful appearance of idealism, literary formalism and subjectivism.
So the Danish neorealism of the 1960s was launched to correct the contrast between an isolated, aware subject and an overwhelming world as presented in the dominant form of poetry of the time. Henrik Stangerup proclaimed that confrontational modernism was intense first-person poetry with no interest in the rules applying to social interaction. It is worth recalling that the seriously underestimated emancipating, empirical literature of the 1970s was also interested in expanding literature – to include exceptionally private, autobiographical and intimate areas. Women’s literature and confessional literature contested both the abstract human subject of modernism and the conventional smoothness of neorealism. The aesthetic response of the 1980s to aliterary, left-wing redemption in the realism of the 1970s set up new taboos, which Jan Sonnergaard deliberately broke in Radiator (1997). Not only by talking about discount supermarkets like Netto and Fakta; but also by employing a raw, vulgar tone, by painting detailed portraits of recognisable environments, and by daring to be impure. Impurity is also aesthetic: a re-politicised social realism is mixed with fantastic and grotesque elements. The critical impulse of realism here leads via satirical exaggeration away from the probable and away from the average middle road.
This means that when current authors link up with realism, they do so not by consistently continuing a historical writing convention. The revitalisation of an impulse directed not least towards all kinds of idealistic cultivation of the abstract and the general is more important that the form employed. Interest in empirical detail, in the concrete and the particular, can be understood in this perspective. For instance, the humorous realism of banality and failure is presented in Thøger Jensen’s I vores familie kan vi ikke lide ubåde (We Don’t Like Submarines in My Family, 1998). The role of the anthropologist discovering strange elements in ordinary everyday life is still a preferred favourite.
Naturally, the fact that neorealisms are launched as corrections of other forms of literature does not mean that their dynamics are simply linked with developments within the institution of art. On the contrary: this trend is distinguished by its appetite for non-literary material. It reflects changes in social reality – the role of the white-collar worker in the social realism of the 1930s was handed on to the middle classes as the new bearers of culture in the 1960s and 1970s – and in the media picture too. The importance of the newspaper for naturalism became the montage technique of the film world in the 1930s. The inspiration obtained from depth psychology, phenomenology and other modern philosophies influences not only modernism but also the realism of the twentieth century. The authors of the past decade are also influenced by inescapable impulses from criticism of realism in the post-war era. Whether influenced explicitly or not, they have learnt from the nouveau roman, from post-structuralism, and even from Adorno’s idea that the realistic form produced a false dream picture of a post-Auschwitz world that was not exactly distinguished by ease of understanding and description. Consequently, this revitalisation also constitutes a revision of realism. Our trust in the coherent story, the stable statement and the reliable illusion of reality has been decimated. Instead, the focus is placed on the topoi of memory (for instance in Christina Hesselholdt’s Hovedstolen (The Principal), 1998), on places, the sporadic intensity of trauma, etc. The realistic form has become problematic: but efforts to achieve it are not.
On the contrary: modern poets frequently search for something that is irreducibly real. Realism’s hunger for the world, referentiality and sense of detail appear in new forms. Globalising aesthetics are rarely involved – instead, local efforts are common. Realistic tendencies in texts which also have room for avant-garde experiments of form, fantastic improbabilities and self-aware breaches of illusion. Many people hesitate to describe themselves as realists. But they respond to the challenge of realism in a multitude of ugly, beautiful, descriptive, polemical, poetic, prosaic and political forms.

Per Stounbjerg, associate professor in Scandinavian Literature at the Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus

Translated by Nick Wrigley