This is the second part of my undergrad thesis on John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy. 

The first part can be found here.

This was a "minor thesis" - if you wanted to get the (Hons) in BA (Hons)  in the English faculty at my university, you had to spend an extra year doing four subjects - three that revolved around literary theory, and one that involved writing a 15,000 word thesis.  Obviously it's a far cry from what you'd have to manage for a PhD, and much less was expected. 

 

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1. Realism and its descendants

 

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.

John Updike, "The Importance of Fiction"

"Realism" is an easy term to use, but a difficult one indeed to define. J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms has this to say of "realism":

An exceptionally elastic critical term, often ambivalent and equivocal, which has acquired far too many qualifying (but seldom clarifying) adjectives, and is a term which many now feel we could do without.

That the term "realistic" should be elastic should not really surprise us. Consider what Erich Heller has to say in his essay "The Realistic Fallacy":

A mere index of the term "realism" in literature would render the belief that, say, Balzac, is closer to "reality" than Homer highly improbable. For the confused history of man is largely the history of conflicting senses of reality, and the scope for bewilderment becomes infinite if we include the history of literature.

Writers, it seems, always believe, have always believed, themselves to be presenting a kind of reality, at least an aspect of it. Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac - Heller shows that all of these writers were seen as "realistic" at one time or another. Conversely, we can easily imagine each of these being criticised for a distinctly unrealistic quality to their work. "Realism" is an elastic term because it takes us to the very heart of human subjectivity; "conflicting senses of reality" are the order of the day not merely from time to time but from individual to individual.

Reality, of course, and realism, are not the same thing. Realism, let us say, is the attempt at a presentation of reality, so that "conflicting senses of reality" mean differing forms of realism.

But there is a particular branch of realism to which Updike is alleged to belong. Charles B. Harris pointed to such writers as 'John Updike or Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any of a number of other contemporary realistic novelists who... rush "back into the arms of nineteenth-century middle-class realism as if the first half of the twentieth century hadn't happened"' and so we may restrict our attention to this tradition, the tradition born from the "nineteenth-century middle-class". And since Updike is so often said to belong to such a tradition, we might expect some light to be shed on his work by a consideration of the supposed conventions of that tradition.

What, then, are the main conventions of this realistic tradition? George Becker has compiled a collection of essays on the topic, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, and in his introduction writes:

Let us say of Tolstoy and Flaubert that, whatever their incompleteness as realists, they broke new ground for prose fiction on a basis of observation and objectivity. They more consciously photographed the life around them than did their predecessors, and they took pains that the lens they used should not distort - at any rate not in the old ways.... we will do well to remember that for the writers who followed Flaubert that book was a touchstone by which to assess the new literature.

The Realist preoccupation - with "photograph[ing]" life, and taking "pains that the lens... should not distort" - had its origins in

the ferment of scientific and positivist thinking which characterised the middle of the nineteenth century and was to become... the major current of the age. Realism really did constitute a fresh start because it was based on a new set of assumptions about the universe. It denied that there was a reality of essences or forms which was not accessible to ordinary sense perception, insisting instead that reality be viewed as something immediately at hand, common to ordinary human experience, and open to observation.

These origins are the key to an understanding of Realism, for it was informed by nothing so much as by the scientific revolution that began Johannes Kepler as early as the sixteenth century and, built upon by Galileo, and most notably Isaac Newton, was in full swing by the middle of the nineteenth. The scientists of this period tackled their world with a new, empirical method, disdaining notions of ideals or the excessively systemic approach of most who preceded them. It was truly believed by the scientists of the eighteenth century that the universe functioned more or less like an enormous, and enormously complex, piece of clockwork, and that if they could only know enough of present conditions, they could predict anything. It was thought that by the end of the nineteenth century physics would be a dead subject - everything well established, its study would be a curiosity. Essentially, these scientists - physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, anthropologists - looked at the world and strained to see it objectively, looked at the world around them and attempted to describe it accurately. They differed from the scientists before them by their efforts to remain free of presupposition.

The literary realists, sensing that in the works of these scientists there was a new truth, sought to apply this same method to their own work. Their creed, so far as they had one, declared that the writer should not say so much as present, that the realist writer should be able to say, truly, "I am a camera, merely."

The new scientific method was one of the key circumstances of the realist movement. The other was the already existent literary environment in which it found itself, and the key to this environment was its emphasis upon ideals. Indeed, the principle controversy which initially surrounded realism stemmed from its denunciation of these ideals: "So deeply rooted was the idea that it was the function of art to represent the ideal that discussion of the new literature often got no further than an anguished cry that the ideal had been banished." It must always be borne in kind that the realist writers were not merely adopting (or attempting to adopt) the approach of the scientists but were also very much writing against the traditions which immediately preceded them.

The realists wished to describe what they saw around them, because this is what the scientific method told them to do. The scientific method also told them how to do it: objectively. The realists also wished to describe what they saw around them because it had not been described before. They would write not of cavaliers and maidens, not of great heroes, but of the humble men and women of Paris, London, Moscow, Chicago, wherever. The realists wished to describe what they saw around them, and since they were mostly middle-classed, the middle-class world was what they saw and described, at least at first. Madame Bovary began to appear serially in October of 1856, the same year that Tolstoy's Sevastopol was published, and it was at this time - the 1850's - that realism can really be said to have appeared. Other key works appeared in this period - the early George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. In the same decade, Darwin's Origin of Species appeared, perhaps the most broadly influential text of a century, and one which shares with literary realism many tenets.

The Realistic Fallacy

Of course, however the realists attempted to be objective, they were not. Just as nineteenth century science, while not exactly discredited, has had to be reassessed in the face of twentieth century scientific innovations that question the very possibility of objectivity, so too has literary realism had to be examined in the light of the corresponding cultural change. Cameras, we now see, show not the truth but a part of it, and indeed a part of it as seen from a particular angle, and the novelist who declares, "I am a camera" is not so much saying, "I am objective" as, "I show what I choose, for my own reasons, to show, and I show it how I want to."

No doubt, though, the realists tended to aim for something like typicality in their choices, to show the ordinary man rather than the extraordinary man. But the literary backdrop against which they wrote - dominated as it was by idealism - provoked them into showing something like its opposite. Quite soon the realists began to depict not the middle class but the lower class, the destitute, the suffering, society's victims. Less objective than selective, this theme has a prevalence in the realist works which shows the extent to which they wrote not precisely of what they saw around them, but what they saw to be neglected in the prevailing literature. The realists were no less reactionary than objective.

This does not, of course, point out a problem with the works of the great realists - Zola, Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, perhaps Stendhal, Chekhov, Gorky - but it does point to a flaw in the term realism. It returns us to Heller's warning: man's history is a history largely of conflicting senses of reality. The great realistic works were not exactly realistic because they showed only part of reality.

The part they showed was the one that they felt was not being shown enough in the literature of the past. The nineteenth-century realists looked around themselves and observed that the wicked did not always suffer, that the virtuous were not always rewarded, that a typical life was less adventure than drudgery, and that happy endings were rare indeed. Their themes, therefore, were chosen to open their readers' eyes to these observations. They had no need to write any happy endings, for happy endings abounded in the literature of their forebears. They hadn't even any need to write tragic endings, for these too abounded. Seeing an indifferent universe, with a careless God, they wrote of one.

Of this nineteenth-century middle-class realism, then, we might say that it is distinguished not so much by its reality - in our contemporary view of things there is no reality but only conceptions of it - but by its commitment to reality. For it was committed, and when we read its great works we do feel, often, that we are reading truths, seeing in our minds' eyes something very close to (say) nineteenth-century Paris.



Naturalism: the American Realism

Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbour over, the neighbour knocks over the next brick - and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life... nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end.

Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger"

Some time after realism had reached its greatest heights in Europe, it arrived in America. There had been some fitful stirrings of it earlier, but it could only really be said to have arrived in 1900 when Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie was abortively published. Becker tells us:

Whether Dreiser won the battle for American realism, or it was won for him and others by the rapid social changes following the first World War, the dam broke about 1920 with the publication of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Lewis's Main Street, and Dos Passos's Three Soldiers.

Realism came to the United States when it had already spent its force abroad, came at exactly the time when Proust, Mann, Joyce and Kafka were demonstrating that there were other and more subtly revealing ways of writing.

Dreiser, in the main, was a realist, but other writers, notably Frank Norris, Jack London and Stephen Crane, took the tenets a little further. Where the French realists had taken from their contemporary scientists a faith in objectivity as method, these other writers - who are often called naturalistic - accepted moreover the highly mechanistic, Newtonian notions of that early modern science, believing only in action and reaction. The naturalistic writers, adopting still more whole-heartedly the notions of the scientists of the time, the "naturalists" who believed man to be no more or less than a hairless ape and the universe to be a basically mechanical, if complex, machine, began to see people as nothing but products of evolution, of nature and society. Ultimately, these writers, taking to a logical conclusion the reductionist nineteenth century view of the universe as a giant clockwork mechanism - saw human beings as essentially devoid of free will, "victims" of nature, of reality.

`Naturalism', wrote Malcolm Cowley in 1947, `has been defined in two words as pessimistic determinism and the definition is true so far as it goes. The naturalistic writers were all determinists in that they believed in the omnipotence of abstract forces. They were pessimists so far as they believed that men and women were absolutely incapable of shaping their own destinies... man was, in Dreiser's words, "the victim of forces over which he has no control."' Cowley points to a tradition of naturalistic writing in the United States:

I should say that those works, in fiction, were Maggie and George's Mother by Stephen Crane, with many of his short stories; The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic; Vandover, McTeague and The Octopus (but not The Pit) by Frank Norris; The Call of the Wild, which is a sort of naturalistic Aesop's fable, besides The Sea Wolf and Martin Eden by Jack London; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, as far as the page where Jurgis is converted to socialism; Susan Lenox by David Graham Phillips; all of Dreiser's novels except The Bulwark which has a religious ending written at the close of his life; all the serious novels of Sinclair Lewis between Main Street (1920) and Dodsworth (1929) but none he wrote afterward; Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.; James T. Farrell's work in general, but especially Studs Lonigan; Richard Wright's Native Son; and most of John Steinbeck's novels, including In Dubious Battle and all but the hortatory passages in The Grapes of Wrath.

French naturalism, which preceded the American, represented most notably (for Cowley, at least) by the works of Emile Zola, was relentless in its application of "natural laws" to human life. `The principal laws, for Zola, were those of heredity, which he assumed to be as universal and unchanging as the second law of thermodynamics... "Vice and virtue," he said, "are products like vitriol and sugar."' Cowley continues: "Norris offered the same explanation for the brutality of McTeague... Others of the naturalistic school, and Norris himself in his later novels, placed more emphasis on environmental forces." In either case, the naturalists inevitably see their protagonists as "pawns of circumstance" or "pawns on a chessboard"; `men are "human insects" whose brief lives are completely determined by society or nature.' It might be said, indeed, that men are no more than rabbits in a rabbit run.

Modern Science

But recall Heller's words: our history is mainly a history of conflicting senses of reality. Since literary naturalism and realism appeared and flourished, our view of reality has changed. The idea that "each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end", once thought to be true of all things, certainly of all merely material things, is no longer held to be true by our most respected scientists. What now seems clear is that nothing is certain. Our powers of discovery have extended so deeply, so minutely into existence that we have learned that there are some things we cannot know. "[A]t exactly the time when Proust, Mann, Joyce and Kafka were demonstrating that there were other and more subtly revealing ways of writing" - when realism, in Becker's view came to America - Heisenberg, Einstein, relativity and quantum physics were putting paid not only to the notion of a clockwork universe, but to the very notion of objectivity. Twentieth-century science poses enormous challenges to human consciousness. There are some things, it tells us, that we cannot know. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that the more we know about a particle's position, the less we can know about its velocity - if we know where it is know, we cannot guess where it will be in an instant. Our twentieth-century science tells us that what we see is affected by our seeing it; observation is intervention. "Observer-dependent realities" is a phrase actually used by physicists. The magnitude of the shift in scientific consciousness bears emphasis:

It is meaningless to talk about the physical properties of quantum objects without precisely specifying the experimental arrangement by which you intend to measure them. Quantum reality is in part an observer created reality. As the physicist John Wheeler says, "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." This is radically different from the orientation of classical physics. As Max Borne put it, "The generation to which Einstein, Bohr, and I belong was taught that there exists an objective physical world, which unfolds itself according to immutable laws independent of us; we are watching this process as the audience watches a play in a theatre. Einstein still believes that this should be the relation between the scientific observer and his subject." But with the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world.

That naturalism in Malcolm Cowley's definition - men are "human insects", "pawns on a chessboard" - is metaphysically and scientifically naive is clear; a man's life is unpredictable, and not because it is complex, but because nature is unpredictable. And realism, with its preoccupation with objectivity, of course, emerges as equally naive in our more modern view - seeing is interpreting.