(Read part 1 here).
Realism is frequently identified with the literary work of writers such as Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Theodor Fontane, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain and many others; and also in the theatre with Ibsen and Chekhov; in the visual arts with Courbet, Daumier, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Whistler, and others. In music, realism was theorized much later than in other arts, above all by the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus in the 1980s, after a few rather half-baked earlier attempts by other scholars. Dahlhaus recognized realism as a much less prominent movement in music than in other arts, and framed it in terms of music’s ability not only to imitate non-musical sounds and indulge in instrumental “word-painting” of texted music, but also to represent spatial movement and speech intonations. Dahlhaus also pointed to the wider notion that music presented an image of nature as a whole. Operatic composers in particular grappled with the issues of representing of reality in such a non-realistic medium, leading to bizarre experiments such as Aleksandr Dargomyshkii’s Rusalka (1848-55), essentially written throughout in a type of recitative (a slightly stylized form of declamation with instrumental accompaniment, traditionally used to communicate plot detail, and in contrast to song). Or, take for example Modest Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera Marriage (1868, after Gogol’s play), in which the composer attempted to render the inflections and rhythms of speech through musical notation, as exactly as possible.
Both works eliminated some of the elements most valued in opera, in particular melody, whereas later attempts at “realist” opera, such as Bizet’s Carmen (1875) or the verismo tradition ushered in by Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) are distinguished more by the prominent presence of lower-class characters and milieux, (portrayed in a larger-than-life fashion with exaggerated emotions) than through musical verisimilitude—athough attempts to create musical languages which mirror aspects of vernacular speech continued in various 20th century operas, such as those of Léos Janáček or Benjamin Britten.
Realism is not easily contained within a narrow historical period. The greatest theorist of literary realism, Erich Auerbach, in his magnum opus Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), located realist elements in literature as far back as Homer (through the attention to multiple levels of detail in the portrayal of the scar on Odysseus’s thigh, as seen by Eurykleia in book 19 of the Odyssey), through Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes, right up to idiosyncratic readings of Proust and Virginia Woolf , all of which could be considered at least part of a continuum with the more familiar “realist” writers Auerbach surveyed—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and the Goncourts. Similarly, art critics have located precursors of 19th century realism in the circles around Caravaggio or the painters of the Dutch Golden Age, while in music precedents can be found in the stile rappresentativo of the late 16th century.
Gradually a range of modernist or proto-modernist artistic movements which emerged towards the end of the 19th century—symbolism, aestheticism, decadence, futurism, cubism, and others, as well as the advent of photography—are thought to have displaced realism in the visual arts, while new approaches to narrative, psychology, the relationship to myth, and more, did the same with literature, at least for a period. Heated debates ensued amongst leftist intellectuals in the West in the early 20th century as to the value of these developments. Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971) emerged as the most eloquent defender of a type of realism, including that of Balzac, Walter Scott, and Thomas Mann. Like Engels before him on conservative royalist Balzac, Lukács framed his analysis somewhat independently of the conscious politics of the authors. He argued that their potential to open a window onto social forces and processes rendered their work of much greater progressive value than what Lukács saw as the petty individualism and narcissism of many modern movements, not least Expressionism.
Film, which can be said to be both the most and least realistic of the arts, was of course born in roughly the same period. Whilst much early work took a hugely creative approach to the medium, whether Eisenstein’s revolutionary montages or the surrealist creations of René Clair and Jean Epstein, that tradition came to inhabit a position ever more on the fringes of mainstream cinematic production, as both technology and a film industry developed. Non-realist genres such as fantasy, science fiction, horror or animation have continued to flourish to the present day, but they differ from other mainstream work in terms of content rather than cinematic style. In contrast, some filmmakers of the left, from some of the post-war Italian neo-realists to the likes of Ken Loach (and other British directors who developed their craft initially through television) have doggedly pursued an earnest and often visually, aurally and dramatically narrow approach to film-making, as if to erase their own creative role.
This is a ruse. Anyone who has been involved in the business of filmmaking knows just how many conscious creative decisions are made at every stage of the process, and could well have been made otherwise. Loach’s pseudo-documentary style is just as contrived and “cultural” as that found in any work of Maya Deren or Peter Greenaway, and serves to obfuscate the intensely politically manipulative strategies of the director. Parallel arguments, albeit somewhat milder, can be made about a good deal of mainstream cinema and television which, if not exactly hiding its stylization, nonetheless still presents itself as in essence a representation of reality.
Loach’s pseudo-documentary style is just as contrived as that found in any work of Maya Deren or Peter Greenaway and serves to obfuscate the intensely politically manipulative strategies of the director.
At the heart of the issue, and at the heart of many contemporary “culture wars” launched by some self-styled progressives against a good deal of culture, is the assumption of culture's subsidiary role, primarily as a representation of a wider society. I disagree profoundly: while culture can draw upon empirically observable phenomena and social facts, its fields of activity are themselves social facts and a fundamental part of society, deserving in themselves of cultural and sociological study. Instead of simply reflecting experience, culture adds to it, creating something not available elsewhere. The types of hypnotic, deindividualizing experiences created through house, techno and other electronic dance music traditions constitute a supplement to other experiences and forms of reality, not simply a mirror (as one might imagine the sometimes-reductionist Theodor Adorno claiming, on the basis of his views on Stravinsky and much popular music, especially its static and repetitive nature).
At the heart of many contemporary “culture wars” launched by some self-styled progressives against a good deal of culture, is the assumption of culture's subsidiary role, primarily as a representation of a wider society. I disagree: culture itself is a part of society.
Shklovsky, in 1917, identified defamiliarization of reality (ostranenie) as a defining quality of art, and this conception was taken in other directions in the critique of realism and naturalism by Bertold Brecht, ostensibly seeking to reveal the contingency of so much which when rendered in realist terms was made to seem inevitable. The explicit use of artifice in the films of Jean-Luc Godard or the television plays of Dennis Potter (one of the few working in the medium who rejected the realism favoured by Loach) have roots in this tradition.
