CHAPTER 1

Realism and Representation

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I THINK WE HAVE A THIRST FOR REALITY. WHICH IS CURIOUS, SINCE WE HAVE too much reality, more
than we can bear. But that is the lived, experienced reality of the everyday. We thirst for a reality that we
can see, hold up to inspection, understand. “Reality TV” is a strange realization of this paradox: the totally
banal become fascinating because offered as spectacle rather than experience—offered as what we
sometimes call vicarious experience, living in and through the lives of others. That is perhaps the reality
that we want.
More simply, we might ask ourselves: Why do we take pleasure in imitations and reproductions of the
things of our world? Why do we from childhood on like to play with toys that reproduce in miniature the
objects amid which we live? The pleasure that human beings take in scale models of the real—dollhouses,
ships in bottles, lead soldiers, model railroads—must have something to do with the sense these provide of
being able to play with and therefore to master the real world. The scale model—the modèle réduit, as the
French call it—allows us to get both our fingers and our minds around objects otherwise alien and
imposing. Models give us a way to bind and organize the complex and at times overwhelming energies of
the world outside us. Freud suggests that the infant’s play with a spool on a string—thrown out of its crib
and pulled back—presents a basic scenario in mastering reality through play. The anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss speculates that the hobbyist’s building of the scale model figures intellectual process in
general, a way to understand through making. And Friedrich von Schiller long ago argued that art is the
product of a human instinct for play, the Spieltrieb, by which we create our zone of apparent freedom in a
world otherwise constricted by laws and necessities.
Let’s suppose, then, that making models of the things of the world is a function of our desire to play,
and in playing to assert that we master the world, and therefore have a certain freedom in it. For a child to
push around a toy bulldozer is to imitate the work of the adult world, of course, and play with a dollhouse
can imitate the child’s entire environment. But the imitation brings with it the mastery the child otherwise
doesn’t have. Play is a form of repetition of the world with this difference that the world has become
manageable. We are in charge, we control its creatures and things. The mode of “let’s pretend”
immediately transports children into a world of their own making. It is a world that can be wholly vivid
and “real,” though there can be a coexisting consciousness that it is only pretend. And surely that continues
to be true of all forms of adult play, including that form of play we call literature, the creation and
consumption of fictions.
Wallace Stevens suggests that fictions arise from the need to build a space or even a shelter for
ourselves in an alien world. He writes in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:
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From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

If the world around us is not our own, more specifically if it is not human but rather a world of other
species and inanimate objects, then the “poem,” the artwork, becomes our counteraction, our attempt to
humanize the world—pursued by an artist as self-aware as Stevens of course in full knowledge that the
attempt is only fictional, carried on in a realm of the as-if. Fictions are what we make up in order to make
believe: the word in its Latin root, fingere, ficto, means both to make, as in the model builder’s activity,
and to make up, to feign. Making in order to make up, to make believe, seems a reasonable description of
literary fictions, and why we write them and read them.

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 Now, if what I’ve been saying applies to all fictions, in whatever medium, what may be specific to
fictions that explicitly claim to represent the real world—“realist” art and literature—is its desire to be
maximally reproductive of that world it is modeling for play purposes. It claims to offer us a kind of
reduction—modèle réduit—of the world, compacted into a volume that we know can provide, for the
duration of our reading, the sense of a parallel reality that can almost supplant our own. More than most
other fictions, the realist novel provides a sense of play very similar to that given by the scale model. There
is a novel from early in the tradition, Alain-René Le Sage’s Le Diable boîteux (1707), that offers a striking
image of the similarity. The benevolent devil Asmodée takes the novel’s protagonist, Don Cléofas, up to
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the top of the highest tower in Madrid, then removes all the city’s rooftops, to show what is going on in the
rooms exposed (fig. 1). It is very much like playing with a dollhouse or with a toy city. Yet of course it is
already a gesture from Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, seeing through the roofs and facades of the
real to the private lives behind and beneath.
Removing housetops in order to see the private lives played out beneath them: the gesture also suggests
how centrally realist literature is attached to the visual, to looking at things, registering their presence in
the world through sight. Certainly realism more than almost any other mode of literature makes sight
paramount—makes it the dominant sense in our understanding of and relation to the world. The relative
dominance and prestige given to the visual in the human grasp of the world reaches back to Greek
philosophy, at least, and after that rarely is challenged in Western culture. Broadly speaking, Western arts
are representational: different styles from the reproductive to the abstract play off the notion of
representation. The claim of “realism” in both painting and literature is in large part that our sense of sight
is the most reliable guide to the world as it most immediately affects us. The claim clearly owes much to
John Locke and the rise of empiricism as a dominant, widely shared kind of thinking about mind and
environment. The visual is not necessarily the end of the story—hearing, smell, touch may ultimately be
just as or more important—but it almost of necessity seems to be the beginning of the story. Realism tends
to deal in “first impressions” of all sorts, and they are impressions on the retina first of all—the way things
look. It is not coincidental that photography comes into being along with realism, with the lens imitating
the retina to reproduce the world. It is on the basis of first impressions that the greatest realists will go on
to far more encompassing and at times visionary visions, ones that attempt to give us not only the world
viewed but as well the world comprehended.
Let’s say that realism is a kind of literature and art committed to a form of play that uses carefully
wrought and detailed toys, ones that attempt as much as possible to reproduce the look and feel of the real
thing. And this kind of fiction becomes in the course of the nineteenth century the standard mode of the
novels we continue to think of as great, as classics. Once a radical gesture, breaking with tradition, realism
becomes so much the expected mode of the novel that even today we tend to think of it as the norm from
which other modes—magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, metafictions—are variants or deviants. That
is, we eventually came to regard the styles of representing the world pioneered by such as Balzac, Dickens,
Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot as standard, what we expected fiction to be. The novel in the airport
newsstand will tend to be written from a repertory of narrative and descriptive tools that come from the
nineteenth-century realists. What they are doing, and their radical pioneering in the novel, has ceased to
astonish us. And yet when you go back to them, they are in fact astonishing, innovators seeking and
finding new and radical ways to come to terms with and convey a reality that itself was constantly
presenting radical new challenges.
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Fig. 1. Engraving of Asmodée and Don Cléofas from Alain-René Le Sage, Le Diable boîteux (Paris, 1707)

Playing with the world seriously—in a form of play governed by rules of modeling, one might say—is
a bold new enterprise for these novelists. They invent the rules as they go along and then refine them to the
point that subsequent generations of novelists can find them codified in writing manuals. One premise of
this serious play is that it includes dolls that are supposed to look and act like people—characters who
ought to be recognizable in terms of not only dress and appearance but also social function and, beyond
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that, motive, psychology. Marcel Proust remarks on the genius of the first writer to understand that readers
can be made to experience life through the eyes and mind of a fictional being. Whoever that originating
writer may have been, the realist writers had the genius to understand the importance of making characters
comparable to their supposed readers—situating them in ordinariness, as tokens of our own experience,
though perhaps then moving them through more than ordinary experience, in order to make their
adventures significant, even exemplary. Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke, Old Goriot and Nana—such
characters have taken on an imaginative reality in their cultures, they are referred to as if they were real, or
rather, more significant than the merely real, since they sum up and represent more fully certain choices of
ways of being. They offer, in the best possible sense, criticisms of life: instances that lend themselves to
discussion and debate, that pose important questions about our being in the world.
The difference of literary play from play with toys lies in the sign system used for modeling in
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 literature: that is, language. Imitation in literature cannot, in the manner of painting or sculpture or film,
present visual images that are immediately apprehended and decoded by the eye. Its representations are
mediated through language. Language can itself be a thing or event in the world that can be literally
reproduced in literary imitation—as in dialogue, which we can reproduce in the novel—and this gives
what Plato would identify as the only complete form of mimesis. But this form of reproduction is fairly
limited, and even dialogue tends to refer outside itself, to events and settings once again mediated through
representation. Fictions need forms of telling and showing other than mimesis—what Plato labels as
diegesis, and later writers have called “summary” or “narration” or a variety of other things. Fictions have
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to lie in order to tell the truth: they must foreshorten, summarize, perspectivize, give an illusion of
completeness from fragments. Henry James said that of all novelists, Balzac pretended hardest. It is how
you pretend that counts.
But here of course is a source of objection to attempts at realist representation: Why bother with such
pretending, especially since we know that language does not coincide with the world? The lesson of much
criticism and theory in the last decades of the twentieth century seemed to suggest that notions of
representation, and especially representation that thinks of itself as an accurate designation of the world,
are naive and deluded. Representation in the realist mode seemed to depend on a faulty understanding of
the linguistic sign, which in fact does not transparently designate the world. Linguistic signs are used to
compensate for the absence of the things they designate—use of a word stands in for the absent referent of
the word, or perhaps creates the illusion that there is a referent for the word where some might doubt this
to be the case (for example, “god” or “soul” or perhaps “honor”). Signs are slippery as well as creative: as
Niccolò Machiavelli noted, language was given to men and women so they could lie. Realist fictions labor
under the burden of accusation that they are lies that don’t know it, lies that naively or mendaciously claim
to believe they are truths. For experimental “new novelists” of the 1960s and after, as for some
post-structuralist critics, the “Balzacian novel” became a kind of whipping boy, an example of blinded and
bourgeois novelizing without any sophisticated critical perspective on sign-systems and on the illusions of
the bourgeois society and its concepts—including the fully rounded and situated “character”—it was
dedicated to representing.
This was, I think, a blinded view of Balzac and the realist tradition in general. But it of course picked
up a very old line of critique of realism, reaching back at least to Plato. If to Plato art is an imitation of an
imitation—that is, of shadows, appearances, rather than true reality—then the art that attempts to be most
faithful to appearances, to surfaces, will be the lowest in value. And for many centuries of European art
and especially literature, imitation of the everyday, of the real in the sense of what we know best, belongs
to low art, and to low style: comedy, farce, certain kinds of satire. Erich Auerbach’s magisterial history of
the representation of reality in Western literature, Mimesis, tells the story of the emergence of a serious
attention to the everyday real. It is not that there haven’t been kinds of realism, and impulses toward
realism, throughout history—see Chaucer, see Rabelais, see Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or American
photorealism of the 1970s. The instinct of realist reproduction may be a constant in the human imagination
(though at times it seems to be wholly dismissed or repressed, as in Byzantine art). What seems to change
with the coming of the modern age—dating that from sometime around the end of the eighteenth century,
with the French Revolution as its great emblematic event, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then the English
Romantic writers as its flag bearers—is a new valuation of ordinary experience and its ordinary settings
and things. This new valuation is of course tied to the rise of the middle classes to cultural influence, and
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to the rise of the novel as the preeminent form of modernity. What we see at the dawn of modernity—and
the age of revolutions—is the struggle to emerge of imaginative forms and styles that would do greater
justice to the language of ordinary men (in William Wordsworth’s terms) and to the meaning of
unexceptional human experience.

Keeping a register of what happens every day, Rousseau once described his one novel. This means
finding a certain dignity in the ordinary, as in Wordsworth’s strange cast of peasants. But it can also mean
attention to the ugly, that which doesn’t fit the standard definitions of the beautiful. George Eliot in Adam
Bede famously compares her novel to Dutch genre painting, but even that kind of humble picturesqueness
seems too prettified for what such late realists—or “naturalists”—as Emile Zola and George Gissing seek.
Zola proposed that every writer saw life through a certain kind of screen. Whereas the Romantic screen
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 gave rosy coloring to what was viewed through it, the Naturalist screen was plainly transparent—yet, Zola
admits, with a certain effect of graying, making more somber what was perceived through it. That is, Zola
recognizes that the realist, in reaction against more idealized forms of art, seeks to show us a
non-beautified world. Or perhaps more aptly: to show us the interest, possibly the beauty, of the
non-beautiful. When the painting of Gustave Courbet first appeared on the Paris art scene, critics notably
found it ugly. (See, for instance, in chapter 5, Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, fig. 5, and Bathers, fig. 9.)
“Vive le laid, le laid seul est aimable,” they wrote, in parody of the critic Nicolas Boileau’s famous line in
praise of truth. In their obtuseness, these critics were on to something: the fascination of the
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nonconforming, that one finds in our own moment, for instance, in the work of Lucian Freud. This painting
has the almost oxymoronic title of Naked Portrait (fig. 2): that it is a portrait makes a strong point, about
its individualization, particularization, as opposed to the generalizing and idealizing tradition of the nude.
Consider also Freud’s Naked Man with Rat (fig. 3), with its kind of raw exposure. Freud, like Courbet
before him, has claimed he can only paint what he sees; and the act of seeing is itself exposing, relentlessly
stripping bare to a self that is not allowed to hide from the painter’s gaze. Then there is Freud’s repeated
use of the huge model Leigh Bowery, as in determined violation of all the canons of beauty (see fig. 36, in
chapter 12). Documentation of the modern city, in writing, painting, and photography, will also find a
fascination in the ugly, as part of our created landscape (fig. 4). The ugly is often used here, as in Zola, as a
call to attention: look, see. And of course when you do look with the intensity of Lucian Freud, the ugly
ceases to be simply that, to become something full of interest. The discovery of the ugly is part of the
process of disillusioning in which realism deals, but then beyond the loss of illusions something else seems
to loom: something we find in Freud’s painting, or in Flaubert’s later work—the fascination of the banal
and the ugly. We will want to explore further this problematic question of the ugly and what you might call
its mode of existence.
Realism as the ugly stands close to realism as the shocking, that which transgresses the bounds of the
acceptable and the representable. Flaubert and Madame Bovary are put on trial in 1857 for outrage to
public morality; though acquitted, Flaubert is severely reprimanded by the presiding judge for exceeding
the limits permitted to literature, and for proposing a “system” that, applied to art and literature, leads to “a
realism which would be the negation of the beautiful and the good.” Zola translated into English—only
late and cautiously—becomes the target of the National Vigilance Association and the subject of a
parliamentary debate in 1888: “The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Matthews)
(Birmingham, E.) said, that it was beyond doubt that there had been of recent years a considerable growth
of evil and pernicious literature, and that its sale took place with more openness than was formerly the
case. The French romantic literature of modern days, of which cheap editions were openly sold in this
country, had reached a lower depth of immorality than had ever before been known.” Zola’s L’Assommoir
and Nana were followed by his novel about peasants, La Terre. Even though translated in a bowdlerized
version, that novel was the last straw for English middle-class morality—the word “bestial” keeps coming
back in the comments—and in that same year, 1888, Zola’s publisher, Henry Vizetelly, was made to
suppress all three novels and promise to publish no more, was fined one hundred pounds, and was then
sent to prison for three months. It is a curious reminder that the British, who had created the worst human
squalor in their industrial cities, could find representation of poverty, misery, and sexuality dangerous.
Being a realist or naturalist was risky business.
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Fig. 2. Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait, 1972–73, oil on canvas. Tate, London. © Lucian Freud. Photo: Tate Gallery, London / Art
Resource, NY
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All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Fig. 3. Lucian Freud, Naked Man with Rat, 1977–78, oil on canvas. Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. © Lucian Freud
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All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Fig. 4. Lucian Freud, Factory in North London, 1972, oil on canvas. Private collection. © Lucian Freud. Photo: © Christie’s Images
Inc. 2004

Realism as we know it, as a label we apply to a period and a family of works, very much belongs to the
rise of the novel as a relatively rule-free genre that both appealed to and represented the private lives of the
unexceptional—or rather, found and dramatized the exceptional within the ordinary, creating the heroism
of everyday life. Ian Watt’s story in The Rise of the Novel remains, despite critiques and modifications,
generally accurate: the rise of the novel tracks the rise of the European bourgeoisie, it is tied to a new
phenomenon of middle-class leisure time—especially for women—and a new concern with private lives
and the psychology and morality of individual choices. Tied, too, of course to the expansion of printing,
and the diffusion of multiple copies of the same work that, whether bought or rented from the lending
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library, can be read alone, at home, to oneself. Privacy is both the subject and the condition of the novel,
though with this paradox that both subject and condition repose on an invasion of privacy, a promiscuous
broadcast of the private. And tied also to the remarkable increase in literacy, perhaps most dramatically in
France, where in 1820 about 25 percent of the population is literate, then by the 1860s, 65 percent, and by
the end of the century around 90 percent. When Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in the preface to their
novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), spoke of a “droit au roman”—a right to the novel of all social sectors
and classes, including the proletariat—they were demonstrating one logic of the novel and of realism: that
it was inevitably tied to a loosening of hierarchy and a spread of democratized taste.
With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and
Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age
where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history

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 come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the
present. It is the time of industrial, social, and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics
of any realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable
“industrial novel,” one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its
“roman social,” including popular socialist varieties. Some English novelists address the issue Benjamin
Disraeli, novelist as well as politician, labeled that of “the two nations,” the owners and the dispossessed.
If the Industrial Revolution comes to England far earlier than to France—and more visibly—political
upheaval becomes a French specialty in the nineteenth century: the revolutions (and counterrevolutions)
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that punctuate modern French history starting in 1789 and its long aftermath concluding in restoration of
the monarchy in 1815, then 1830, 1848, 1851, 1871—and one could refine on the list. Perhaps because
modern French history is so well demarcated by the rise and overthrow of various regimes, it seems to
have offered particularly grateful territory for the novelist who wanted to be the historian of contemporary
society. Balzac and Zola, for instance, both write their principal works following a revolution that has put
an endstop to the period they are writing about, and this gives them valuable perspective, enables them to
see an epoch in its entirety. And it confronts them with the stark question: To whom does France belong?
The nineteenth century in the Western world is of course a time of massive change, much of it resulting
from the industrial transformation of work and production, the creation of complex heavy machinery, the
coming of the railroad—a true revolution in the experience of space and time—and the formation of the
modern city, bringing with it the perception of glamour, entertainment, the variety and excitement of the
urban crowd—but also the perception of threat from a newly constituted urban proletariat. The population
of Paris doubles during the first half of the century, and similar changes occur in other major cities, even
more dramatically in the new industrial cities such as Manchester. Such rapid urban growth strains the
relations of social groups one to another—it makes class warfare something of a daily experience. It also
makes the city a total environment that writers concerned with the contexts of life must come to terms
with.
The nineteenth century also marks the emergence of the cash nexus as possibly underlying or
representing all social relations. If Old Regime wealth was principally expressed and undergirded by
ownership of land—the feudal, aristocratic model of wealth and of identity—this will be replaced by
money in ways both liberating and terrifying. You inherit land, you make money: and the emergence of the
cash nexus tracks a transition from inherited identity to achieved identity, that of the self-made man, or the
speculator, the capitalist, the gambler—or the destitute genius—all familiar figures in the
nineteenth-century novel. Marx noted that capitalist industrial production typically creates objects that are
transitory, quickly used up and cast aside in the forward movement of progress: “All that is solid melts into
air.” Money represents the fluidity and vaporousness of things in an economy that can swiftly move from
boom to bust and then recycle. Money indeed comes to represent representation itself: a system of signs
for things. It’s no accident that the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, often compares
language as a system to money: meaning in both systems depends on exchange value, what you get in
return for what you are offering. And the great realist novelists come to understand that words, like
shillings or francs, are part of a circulatory system subject to inflation and deflation, that meanings may be
governed by the linguistic economies and marketplaces of which they are part.
In a direct and literal way, the coming of modern modes of production will transform literature in the
nineteenth century, propelling it toward what the French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve called
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“industrial literature.” Sainte-Beuve was reacting in particular to the creation of the roman-feuilleton, the
serial novel running in daily installments on the front page of the newspaper. This was a French invention
from the 1830s and 1840s that then caught on worldwide (and continues in some parts of the world today),
and was an example of fiction financing fact. The serial novel allowed newspapers to reduce their
subscription rates dramatically (there were no singleissue sales at the time) and increase their circulation
three- and fourfold. The novelists who succeeded in the new form learned to segment melodramatic plots
into short episodes with cliff-hanging endings, followed by the sacramental line: “La suite à demain”:
Continued tomorrow. But the serial novel is only the most flamboyant instance of literature in its industrial
transformation, tied to the development of the steam press, cheap paper, the bookseller, and the lending
library. Writers now can attempt to live from sales of their works—and sometimes succeed at it—rather
than from noble or royal patronage. We have the beginnings of an uneasy relation between high culture
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 and the mass market, with the novel hovering ambiguously between: a socially mobile form that can go
popular, in an age of expanding readership, or upscale toward increasingly alienated artistic milieux, or in
rare cases appeal to the whole population.
“The age of property,” E. M. Forster called the nineteenth century, and there is much in these novels
about property of all sorts, there are lots of things, clutter, an apparent fear of emptiness. In Dickens’s
Great Expectations, the law clerk Wemmick delivers to young Pip homilies on the importance of “portable
property.” To Wemmick, anything of value is potentially portable property. It should not be lost,
squandered, allowed to slip away. It needs to be accumulated, stored in one’s home, considered as one’s
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castle (and Wemmick’s home in the Walworth suburb of London, a miniature gimcrack castle, literalizes
the metaphor), turned into wealth. Balzac’s usurer and miser, Gobseck, probably appears in more novels of
the Comédie humaine than any other character: he is at the still center of the turning earth, trading in
property, lending money against things. By the end of his life, he can’t get rid of things fast enough: at his
death his house is stuffed with decaying things and rotting produce. At a time of nascent capitalism (which
comes earlier in Britain than in France), there is a fascination with investment, accumulation, wealth—and
of course their collapse in bankruptcy. If wealth and poverty are, very explicitly for these novelists,
questions of money—the ultimate portable property—their overt expression most often is visible in
objects, things, bought and sold as part of one’s declaration of success or failure. Careers are played out
between the gambling house and the pawnshop. The property noted by Forster clutters up many of these
novels, precisely because it tells us so much about those who have accumulated it, in self-definition.
Balzac left us a remarkable unpublished non-novel: the inventory he laboriously wrote of the furnishings in
his newly acquired, overstuffed house in Passy. It is more Balzacian than Balzac.
“Things” will in fact be a main theme in my exploration of the realist vision. Things, first of all,
because they represent the hard materiality that one cannot get around in any non-idealist picture of the
world: things in the sense of the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked in refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism.
You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and
acquire in order to define themselves—their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed
part of the very definition of “character,” of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things
in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the
concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and the
noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world
of phenomena and a detailed report on it—a report often in the form of what we call description. The
descriptive is typical—sometimes maddeningly so—of these novels. And the picture of the whole only
emerges—if it does—from the accumulation of things. In fact, to work through the accumulation of things,
of details, of particularities, could be considered nearly definitional of the realist novel. If lyric poetry,
according to the linguist Roman Jakobson, typically uses and best represents itself in the figure of
metaphor, narrative fiction of the realist type uses and represents itself in metonymy, the selected parts that
we must construct sequentially into a whole.
Thing-ism, then, is our subject, in the context of the world looked at. For realism is almost by definition
highly visual, concerned with registering what the world looks like. We tend to believe—and centuries of
philosophical tradition stand behind the belief—that sight is the most objective and impartial of our senses.
Thus any honest accounting for the real, in the sense of the appearances of the world, needs to call upon
visual inspection and inventory. It needs to give a sense of the thereness of the physical world, as in a
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still-life painting. In fact, realism as a critical and polemical term comes into the culture, in the early
1850s, to characterize painting—that of Courbet in particular—and then by extension is taken to describe a
literary style. It is a term resolutely attached to the visual, to those works that seek to inventory the
immediate perceptible world. And then: to show that the immediate perceptible world and the systems it
represents and implies constitute constraints on human agents attempting to act in the world, hard edges
against which they rub up. And here we return to the importance of money, of the cash nexus, in realism:
money becomes the representation of representation itself, of the systematic need to acquire things in
self-definition. As Balzac’s usurer Gobseck puts it, money is the lifeblood of modern civilization.
Visual inspection and inventory of the world mean, I noted, a large deployment of description, in what
sometimes seems to us a misplaced faith that verbal pictures of the world are both necessary and sufficient
to creating a sense of place, context, milieu that in turn explain and motivate characters, their actions and
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 reflections. To understand how and what people are, and how they have become such, you need to
understand their environment. There is a naturalist or zoological premise in realism, made explicit early on
by Balzac, theorized by Taine in his famous “race, milieu, and moment” as the vectors of human history. It
is what we might call the Bronx Zoo principle: you need to see the animals in their native habitats to
understand them. Their adaptive mechanisms, their character traits, come from the need to hunt on the
plains or seek refuge in the trees—and this applies to industrial Manchester and the beaux quartiers of
Paris as well.
We may at this point want to recall Virginia Woolf in her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
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(retitled in one of its versions “Character in Fiction”) on the practice of the novelists she calls “the
Edwardians”: “I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s
character? And they said, ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent.
Ascertain the wages of the shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe
cancer. Describe calico. Describe—’ But I cried, ‘Stop! Stop!’ And I regret to say that I threw that ugly,
that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window.” As readers of Balzac and Dickens we well know
the kind of impatience with description that makes Woolf throw Arnold Bennett out the window—and may
have provoked similar reactions in us. The invasion of narrative by this kind of discourse, what Roland
Barthes would call the “cultural code” of the text—heavy in referential material, in names of places,
people, things, in sociohistorical explanation—constitutes a kind of babble typical of the realist text, what
can often seem most dated about it, least accessible. The descriptive imperative points to the primacy of
the visual in realism, and for Woolf there is a need to go beyond the register of appearances. As Woolf also
says in her essay, Mr. Bennett “is trying to hypnotise us into the belief that, because he has made a house,
there must be a person living there.” She rejects the premise that description of the habitat is the royal way
to understanding persons. With the great modernists—with Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and
Proust—the conception of character itself has undergone modification, in a inward turn of narrative that
has often been described, perhaps most succinctly by Woolf herself when she says, “On or about
December 1910 human character changed.”
It seems to me that “postmodernism” has allowed us to relax a bit from the Woolfian strictures and that
the history of the world since the high modernist moment has suggested that the inward turn of the
European novel, its overriding concern with the workings of consciousness, had certain limitations—that
the “environmentalism” of the realists matters in trying to understand alien cultures, for instance. We are
perhaps more confused in our aesthetic appreciations than the high modernists, certainly more eclectic. As
postmodernism in architecture may best illustrate, we have come to appreciate decoration, ornament, a
certain elaboration of surfaces, not solely the sleek or stark functionalism of modernism. Our age is once
again intensely visual, nourished on the museum and the media, and attuned to the enduring popular forms
of fiction making—such as melodrama—that the media perpetuate as if they were platonic forms of the
imaginary. And in literary studies, the renewal of an attention to historical and cultural context has made it
possible, and important, to rethink what realism was up to. Behind cultural poetics in literary study stands
the Annales-inspired history of the ordinary and the everyday: for example, the multivolume French
undertaking, the History of Private Life, in which historians invade what had traditionally been the
province of the novelist. Not only do such historians often turn to the novel, especially to Balzac, for their
documentation, but they tend to write as novelists: for instance, the chapter by Alain Corbin in the
nineteenth-century volume of the History of Private Life entitled “Backstage,” which is about everything
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ostensibly hidden from sight by bourgeois society: about what the butler knew, or the washerwoman. This
is precisely the world of the great realist novelists.
Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, Zola, Gissing, James, Woolf, along with Courbet, Edouard Manet,
Gustave Caillebotte: this is essentially the selection I will use to make the case for realism. There are
omissions, of course, and disputed cases: Why have I left off Stendhal, consecrated as the first realist by
Auerbach and possibly my favorite novelist? Too witty and worldly, too uninterested in the descriptive and
the conditions of life, to be a true realist, in my view. I’ve actually sacrificed with more regret such
novelists as Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Arnold Bennett—though they have not held up
as well over time as the ones I’ve chosen. Gissing may appear distinctly of a lower rank than the other
classics I’ve picked—but his claim as the only true English “naturalist” makes him interesting. Since I
have with each writer chosen a single novel, there is further room for contest about the selections made.
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 For all its shortcomings, the list has the advantage of including both French and English novels, which I
would see as principally representative of the realist tradition—though a bit later the great Russians make
their claim.
The two national traditions are not the same, in large part because of the greater self-censorship of the
English novel, as of English culture in general. The French novel in the nineteenth century is well into
adultery, casual fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, and all varieties of sexual obsession, tragic or
kinky, at a time when sexual relations could barely be alluded to in the English novel. James, that
American cosmopolitan who nourished himself on French just as much as English fiction, often objected
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that the English novel needed to grow up, to come out of its protracted adolescence, to break out of its
“mistrust of any but the most guarded treatment of the great relation between men and women.” The result
of this mistrust, he says, has been “an immense omission in our fiction.” Walter Scott and Dickens, for
instance, represent fiction with “the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out.” James, writing in 1899—a
decade after Zola had been banned in Britain—believes that things have changed. “The novel is older, and
so are the young”: the young are demanding fiction no longer wholly anodyne. For James, the English
novel has failed to acknowledge sufficiently the elasticity and freedom of the novel form. “There are too
many sources of interest neglected—whole categories of manners, whole corpuscular classes and
provinces, museums of character and condition, unvisited”: the Goncourts’ droit au roman has been
singularly unused. And James goes on to notice in particular “the revolution taking place in the position
and outlook of women”—with the result that “we may very well yet see the female elbow itself, kept in
increasing activity by the play of the pen, smash with final resonance the window all this time most
superstitiously closed.” Prophetic words—except that James as admirer of Eliot, in particular, surely
appreciated that windows had been broken before, even if not with the fracas of the French novelists. In
fact, James more than anyone sees as well the strengths of the English tradition that may in part derive
from its constraints: the more meditative and indirect approach to “the great relation.” James in any event
may be the best argument in favor of including English and French novelists as both indispensable.
Studying, in this case, a single national tradition would be inadequate.
I think that we postmodernists (as I suppose we inevitably are) have come to appreciate again a certain
eclecticism of styles, in which the realist discourse of things—its interpretation of realism in the
etymological sense of res-ism, thing-ism—can again be enjoyed and valued. Of course as we pursue the
works of such consummate fiction makers as these, we discover that any label such as “realism” is
inadequate and that great literature is precisely that which understands this inadequacy, which sees around
the corner of its own declared aesthetics, sees what may make its house of cards come tumbling down.
Reading these novelists we are ever discovering both what it is like to try to come to terms with the real
within the constraints of language, and how one encounters in the process the limits of realism, and the
limits to representation itself. For these are among the most intelligent, inventive, aware—as well as the
most ambitious—novelists in our history. And they are still—they are more than ever—part of our history,
part of how we understand ourselves.
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