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Once upon a time, back before the novel was an art form, art was unrealistic and nobody expected it to ever be anything else.  This is not to say that all art was downright fantastic: rather, there was an acknowledged artifice in the style and production of art that emphasized form over mimesis.  For instance, nearly all of the literary arts, be they poems, plays, epics, or otherwise, tended to be written in poetry, not prose.  And even when a work of prose was written (say, Malory), emphasis was not on internal consistency (Malory famously recalls the death of several knights multiple times) but on the arc and craft of storytelling.  Let us pause, then, for a moment, and consider the change between this outlook and the one we bear now, which often aspires to realism far over the artistry of a work.

At the time of my writing, my reading list has become very strange.  In my usual habits of reading one short story collection and one novel simultaneously, I have moved from reading P.K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and William Gibson’s collection Burning Chrome to reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and David Foster Wallace’s wonderfully-titled Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  Now anyone familiar with David Foster Wallace’s work will know that he is always very conscious of his dealings with this realism/artistry tension: Infinite Jest is arguably a book that places this compositional decision center stage: every line bounces with enthusiasm and the plot is often absurd and fanciful, but the two characters he spends most of his time following represent these two poles of artistic delivery fairly strongly.  In the story collection I’m reading now, the stories are broken up with interludes – the titular “brief interviews” – written in conversational prose so closely attuned to our normal speech as to be almost impossible to read and understand at times.

Let me take a step back for a moment.  Speech – that is, dialogue – is probably one of the most difficult things to portray in a novel or story.  Speech necessarily slows down the flow of one’s story.  Even a master of detailed description like Hawthorne or Conrad, with their careful depictions of a single instant or view or character, which one would think would slow down a story (and, indeed, it does) are noticeably stalled when characters turn to one another and open their mouths.  Dialogue fixes the pace of a story in a moment where it normally flows freely according to the level of description, prose style, rhythm, and action.  It is necessarily jarring, and extended periods of dialogue can quickly turn a story into drudgery.  Take, for example, Agatha Christie’s use of preceding dialogue tags with colons: her prose reads as if it is a police report – calculating and detached.  Or the prose of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s second novel The Angel’s Game, which incorporates many long discussions between the two main characters, but despite the wit of the banter the pacing becomes dull and methodical.

Some writers solve this problem by doing away with dialogue altogether (Hawthorne and Melville often use this strategy); others, like Conrad or Twain, tell whole novels or stories in monologue; while others rush through dialogue without tags (Steinbeck, in The Winter of Our Discontent); others make all the prose, dialogue or narration sound equally detached (Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy); and others still will unrealistically elevate the prose of the dialogue to match the narration (Tolkien, Faulkner).  Indeed, the most memorable dialogue I’ve ever read or encountered tends to be unrealistic: the powerful lines of Shakespeare or Tolkien, or the frenetic character-revealing dialogue of Dostoevsky or Faulkner tends to be much more powerful and less banal than any writer who tries to faithfully represent the speech patterns of the day.

But more than dialogue, this issue often extends to structure and subject as well.  Post-modernism, for good or ill, has tended to de-emphasize the artistry of art, which has led us from the masterful allegories of Melville and parables of Poe through the tales of Conrad and Chesterton and Shaw, into the inconclusive, constipated musings of Joyce, Beckett, and Hemingway, and are now reaching the extreme artistic antipathy recognizable in writers like John Barth, Ben Marcus, Milan Kundera, or others.  Post-modern writers and other artists have eschewed “pat” endings or taut story structure to the point that where they begin or end their work often feels arbitrary (often intentionally, or to make a point – take Joyce and Wallace’s cyclical structure in Ulysses and Infinite Jest respectively).  Rather than drive a narrative with clear character conflict, these writers tend to yank all agency from their characters and permit the story to drift, unmoored (as in Lowry’s Under the Volcano).  And they often receive a great deal of praise for these decisions.

Art necessarily challenges its own boundaries, and artistic conventions should and will be undermined.  But as Chesterton pointed out a century ago – what we call realism has become unrealistic.  Life, indeed, is often filled with grey areas, rarely ends pat, and does not normally proceed in definable structures.  But people can and do make conscious decisions, they are motivated by greed or lust or idealism, and their actions have determinable consequences.  Life is not simply one large, muddled confusion of activity, and writers who fail to see (or represent) the order among the chaos are more diseased than those readers disinterested in the fruits of their labors.  Nihilism – or, for our purposes here, the inability to find meaning in life – is inimical to art: if everything is meaningless, then meaning certainly cannot be distilled or abstracted from artistic representation.

I respect and admire the artists who work against the structural conventions of their form.  Some of my favorite contemporary authors are experimental writers – like Mark Z. Danielewski or Salvador Plascencia.  But there is no shame in artifice: especially now that it has become a rarely-used tool.  Carefully-employed structures like those used by Gogol in Dead Souls or Calvino in Invisible Cities bring greater focus to a work, and permit creativity in other areas.  Using high, formal prose, even in dialogue, permits the splendid insights of Shakespeare or Faulkner, and does not detract from the value of a work, even if it is ostensibly “realistic”.  What is realistic about realism is not the speech patterns (which, as Brief Interviews demonstrates, never manage to fully convince), but the setting, the characters, the plot, and the conflicts.  The stark realism of a Vonnegut or Salinger or Hemingway is no more real than the stream-of-consciousness writings of Faulkner or Joyce or Malcolm Lowry – they just emphasize different aspects of our reality.  Faulkner draws attention to internal life while Hemingway draws attention to the external.  Even Dickensian turns of fortune or Tolstoy’s high drama or Melville’s heavy symbolism or Alexandre Dumas’ adventures are not strictly unrealistic – they simply represent, in larger scale, what may not be obvious to us in mundane lives.  Even fantasy writers teach real truth in unreality.

To conclude, then, “realism” is a misnomer, and no virtue.  Its conventions are just that, conventions – an effort to convey real truth through careful analysis and depiction of the relatively mundane occurrences in contemporary life.  Faithful adherence to these principles and just as often yield a trivial, meaningless work as they do an insightful and memorable one.  Realism is a tool, and should never be used – either by writers or critics – as a strait-jacket.  Like any form, it has no greater or lesser value than its fellows, and its merits and weaknesses should be properly understood before use.

-Zeke