How Fiction Works Discussion Review: “Realism” in Fiction
By Natalie Bakopoulos
The chapter/essay of How Fiction Works I found most intriguing was the last one: “Truth, Convention, and Realism”; the issues touched on within could easily be the subject of an entire book. What I find the most perplexing is coming to a definition of “realism” in the first place. Is realism truth? Mimesis? Traditional narration?
Wood begins the section by citing the novelist Rick Moody, who says that contemporary literature has become dull and needs “a kick in the ass”; his disapproval seems to be aimed more at structure and style than content. Yes, sometimes a novel’s conflict-climax-resolution check mark form can be predictable, or too neat, or too expected; I’m not arguing against this. But as humans, don’t we crave build-up, and, well, climax? I don’t mean to drag our conversation into the gutter, but am I traditional for still wanting, after hours of fun and interesting, creative foreplay, some sort of release? Then again, I don’t believe that it’s the artist’s duty to give the people what they want, but I do think even the artist, too, finds some satisfaction in this model.
That said, this “satisfaction” doesn’t have to come in the traditional sense of conventional dramatic arc or narration. Perhaps experimental fiction is arguing against convention (and realism finds comfort, tradition, art, in a sort of convention) or against holding as the truest form something simply because it is the predecessor to something else. What I don’t like about the Experimental school’s criticism of the Realist is that it somehow seems to imply that experimental fiction is imaginative, realistic is not; experimental fiction is artistically innovative while realistic is just plain lazy.
Ben Marcus writes about the role of experimental fiction, and what he sees as its eclipse by “narrative realism,” in his Harper’s essay “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It” (October 2005). While this essay, Franzen’s ideas to which he’s responding, and Cynthia Ozick’s response to both (”Literary Entrails: The Boys in the Alley, the Disappearing Readers, and the Novel’s Ghostly Twin”) are enough to inspire a separate discussion, I couldn’t help but think of them all while reading this chapter by Wood.
While I don’t quite follow Marcus’s definition of realism to begin with—he seems to be contradicting himself a bit—I do like his words here: “It is arguably sublime when a text creates in us desires we did not know we had, and then enlarges those desires without seeming desperate to please us.” But it seems this surprise, this satisfaction, can come in many forms: through simple or ornate language, familiar or unexpected shape. A text whose language is lyrical can still have narrative; a text whose content is so-called experimental can still some sort of dramatic convention, and a text that is not plot driven can still have causality.
Wood also paraphrases the idea Aristotle brings up in his Poetics: the questions fiction should be concerned with is not did it happen, but could it have happened. I’d like to add that perhaps art is not really concerned with what something is like, but what it feels like. A Rothko or a Rivera or a Vermeer does this. Perhaps this is why a writer like George Saunders, with his hyper-real, satirical portrayals, is still able to imbue his work with such emotional resonance. Maybe Wood is a proponent of realism not perhaps in the sense of tradition (though I agree he is quite comfortable with tradition) as much as he is an advocate for the simple authenticity of art. I love the last few lines of the book: they seem to rise up from the page:
Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry….The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.
I, too, found the final chapter of How Fiction Works one of the most interesting portions of Wood’s book. For here is one of the few moments in the text where he actually engages the rest of the fiction community. Though I must say I was rather surprised that he mentions neither Jonathan Franzen nor Ben Marcus in this essay-chapter, to say nothing of Cynthia Ozick who–to my mind–so eloquently shifted the literary conversation from a turf war about whose fiction “matters” more to a broader and more important question: Who will step back to connect and make sense of the work being produced at this moment in history? The reason certainly can’t be because he’s not willing to name names; after all, he points quite quickly to Rick Moody and Patrick Giles, and soon after Barthes and Gass. So perhaps it’s simply the fact that Cynthia Ozick dubbed Wood as one of the most important and influential critics working today in this essay Natalie refers to, and for the sake of decorum he felt obliged to circumvent the conversation entirely.
Too bad, in my mind. Because it seems quite obvious that Wood is trying to argue that there really isn’t that huge a difference between the camps as one might think. Thereby, to more directly address Marcus, who’s accepted the job of representative by throwing the gauntlet at Franzen’s feet, would seem to make his argument even stronger. And I think ultimately that this is perhaps what should matter most. As Natalie so rightly describes, we really do read principally to understand what it feels like to be alive, what it feels like to live. And though it is somewhat a trick of semantics on Wood’s part to replace “realism” with “truth” as a means to subvert this argument, I applaud his move. For as a reader who’s equally content (and enthralled by) reading Saunders or Tolstoy, Marquez or Steinbeck, I’ve never seen the need to delineate or divide fiction by “types.” Ironically, of course, this is exactly what both Marcus and Wood are arguing for–neither wants what they love to be shit on. So perhaps by calling it “truth,” and judging the effectiveness of work on that alone, we can get beyond the need of validation and back to the business of making art.
Yes, “truth” works better than “realism” in this discussion…and I’ll add that truthiness doesn’t fly so well in fiction as it does in the news.
Perhaps what Wood argues for best in this book is how fiction feels, or how it works to evoke (rather than dictate) feeling; both this post and Jeremy’s (12/21) suggest this conclusion from different angles, and I agree.
That particular realist vs. experimentalist lit-brawl drove me crazy! Everything always seems to come back to defamiliarization (I like Wood’s discussions with Shlovksy–though Baxter’s are even more enticing)…the best writers always straddle or defy such categories, making the familiar strange (Tolstoy) or the strange familiar (Saunders – perfect example…the worlds in his stories, regardless of their tone, feel true)–and these writers each do both, really. Re: the aforementioned scuffle, I do understand frustrations with work that seems experimental only for its own sake, as with the idea that doing something innovative is more important than doing something well or interesting. But for every piece written backwards from a chicken’s POV, there’s a traditional “realistic” novel that seems to have been painted by number.
The biggest trouble with the Franzen vs. Marcus shouting match is that it fixates on what’s wrong with fiction today, and there’s so much wonderful and right with it that I wish writers and critics would talk more about what is good and why. Oh, and how we can get people to read more of it? Part of that question is how it works when it’s working well, and part of that question is why readers (both writers and non-writers) respond to it as they do. How does fiction work to inspire that glorious feeling that Wood experienced, that Natalie experienced, that I experienced reading that divine passage by Marilynne Robinson?