Against Realism
Praise of something not written
How does one write realistic piece of fiction? Or paint one? When the boundaries of the frame, of the text, of imagination have gone from the world of perception to the world of the internet. In my last article, I’ve briefly mentioned the concept of to-be-looked-at-ness, introduced by Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and compared her ideas to the concept of emailing in the epistolary novel Gut gegen Nordwind by Daniel Glattauer.
Epistolary novels are nothing new - Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther is the prime example of this. It uses letters - actual written communication medium - to communicate the narrative. The exchange is, in narrative terms, predictable. One receives a letter and responds to it. A reader reads a letter as if they were the person opening it, but the real reading of the letter comes in response to it brought on by the narrative structure.
Gut gegen Nordwind (eng. The Space Between the Lines, lit. The Good against the North Wind) uses the new type of communication medium - the email. This eliminates a few things. One, the characters in the novel accidentally start a conversation when a typo in a recipient field is made and Emmi (or Emma, actually) makes contact with a professor Leo Leike.
Their conversation drifts from everyday life to fetish, from games where they avoid meeting each other, to profoundly erotic expression of love.
But the catch is that the author had added something that is known in the internet culture as seen. The email has been received. You know that the protocol works, unlike the post-office which tends to lose letters. You know that they have your email.
But the concept of seeing is not the sensory looked-at-ness. It’s a profound structure in the mind of the sender - you know that they know.
Literary Realism
Nowadays, writing realism invokes having this space of the internet inter-connect the characters and the storylines. It invokes not only the character’s internal state, but the state of existing in the parallel of the internet.
In Mr. Robot, Elliot googles himself to find - nothing. He does not exist, unlike the people he encounters. Their existence is documented in the vast space of the network, social media and “private” communications, much like the one Emma and Leo are having.
Literary realism has always been about descriptivist position - you accurately represent something so that the consumer can grasp the full image. Think of it as a thought experiment. You walk into a store and see a couch. Now, you see only the front, and the couch is behind a glass wall. So you can only see the front of the couch. Yet, your sense-data and your descriptive methods can give the idea of the couch as a whole. You don’t need to see it.
But the concept of the network is abstract, so abstract in fact that the question is how to represent it. Gut gegen Nordwind is using the idea of knowing that the other has received the message - but it doesn’t go beyond that. It stays within the boundaries of explaining the outside world through correspondence.
In Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island, a commentary of clones from distant future are made on emotions of the characters. Clones are enclosed in a network of sorts, dealing only with their ancestors’ messages and diary entries. This is not realism, but a semiotic reference that shows how signs - like a smile which clones cannot reproduce - function within the network. A smiley face is not a smile, it’s a representation of a smile through a semiotic network. We don’t know if, when you send an emoji, you’re really smiling.
So realism has to encounter the third state of existence. The one not attached to the character’s psyche or physique, but rather a medium where they convey emotions that might not be real. A smile in an Island might not be real - and is not reproducible in the reality that the clones live in - but it is a type of a smile.
So where does this lead?
For poetic realism
Realism in itself is not a lost cause. Many of the contemporary novels are, in fact, still a part of that tradition. But the thing is that realism cannot co-exist with the social context and the type of alienation that the characters should exist.1
What I’m advocating for is poetic realism. In the novel Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury uses techniques employed by poets - a bend of language to convey a feeling. Sarah Kane used violence to overshadow the true nature of her plays which are all about love, unconditional love. In Cleansed, a gay couple is being tortured. One expresses their love to the other by words, but loses his ability to speak. Then he uses his body and is crippled. Finally he is killed, leaving the love in the literal hands of his Other.
Poeticism is the future because it can blur the line between radical psychologism (like in the classics, such as Crime and Punishment) and gives the reader the lines that are not written.
In poetry, many things are concealed by the text, or, better yet, concealed by not being written. A poem’s language can contain stylistic figures, but can be written as a prose as well. The idea of a poem is to foreshadow what is there and give you what is not, to invoke a feeling it must be reducible to its own components.
Poetic realism is the same - but with a narrative. Narrative needs metaphors that one should enact upon:
[E]nactive metaphor is not really a different kind of metaphor; rather, it is a way of engaging with metaphor. Enactive metaphor is one that we enact; it is put into action or brought into existence through action. (…) We use art as a vehicle for clinicians and other readers to see how words might be received and as a way to facilitate a deeper level of reflection on the fluid and interpretive nature of pain-related metaphors. (Stilwell et al., 2020: 4-5)
In the realm of networks, a metaphor is much needed because it gives us a way to communicate with a piece of art. And a metaphor is constructed “understanding one kind of thing (often abstract or unfamiliar) in terms of another (more concrete and familiar)” (Stilwell et al., 2020: 3). As the network or our existing within it is abstract, we need metaphors to enact the act of being in the network, not only of us but also of others.
In phenomenology, this is where the Empirical I (lived experience) breaks because the modes of experiencing reality are now confined to virtual objects as much as to the objects in our immediate perception. That’s why we need metaphors.
What does this do to fiction?
Philosopher Graham Harmon wrote an essay titled The Third Table. In it, he argues that, much like our couch, there is a physical presence of a table, and our understanding of the table. But the third table is the real table.
Artists do not copy the world. They have a lens within which they can see the third table, give it abstract and real properties to enable us to see that there’s something indescribable by both physical and metaphysical properties - the third property where an object is real in itself (similar, but distinct from Kantian Ding an sich).
To reach this third object - distinct from physical and psychological reality, from description and perception - we need aesthetic experience.
Fiction can’t give arguments2, but it can give experiences. In the contemporary world where even the most basic phenomena are described by the scientific method, this leaves fiction in a position where reality is not enough. At list the first and the second one.
What we need is a third reality. And maybe, a new type of philosophy will emerge, a poetic philosophy.
Of course, I’m not saying that all types of realism are a thing of the past. A historical novel might use realism to convey the image of a historical narrative. Nevertheless, contemporary, slice of life novels do have to take into account the poetics, and not only the descriptive nature of the text.
There is a debate whether fiction can be philosophy, but it mostly boils down to a simple - no.