What is Realistic Fiction?

Realism is an aesthetic mode which broke with the classical demands of art to show life as it should be in order to show life “as it is.” The work of realist art tends to eschew the elevated subject matter of tragedy in favour of the quotidian, the average, the commonplace, the middle classes and their daily struggles with the mean verities of everyday existence — these are the typical subject matters of realism.

The attempt, however, to render life as it is, to use language as a kind of undistorting mirror of, or perfectly transparent window to the ‘real’ is fraught with contradictions, Realism in this simplified sense must assume a one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the word, tree for example) and the thing it represents the actual arboreal object typically found in forests). Realism must, in effect, disguise its own status as artifice, must try and force language into transparency through an appeal to our ideologically constructed sense of the reader must be addressed in such a way that he or she is always, in way, saving. “Yes. That’s it, that’s how it really is.”

Realism can never fully offer up the world in all its complexity, its irreducible plentitude. Its verisimilitude is an effect achieved through the deployment of certain literary and ideological conventions which have been invested with a kind of truth value. The use of an omniscient narrator who gives us access to a character’s thoughts, feelings and motivations, for example, is a highly formalized convention that produces a sense of psychological depth, the characters seem to have ‘lives’ independent of the text itself. Read More

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