however, they don't get to my real concern, which i hesitated to express because i didn't want to immerse us too much in issues of literary theory.
where i agree w you is in the aspiration of realism to bring us closer to reality.
where that fails is in 2 ways: i signaled, one, the notion of ideology. i am following althusser, with the notion that realism is a mode of interpellation of the reader, and the interpellation is always in ideology. let me not turn this into a lecture, with more explaining of that point. it is simply there, how ideology marks all communications: some, as you note, are self-reflexive. realism is the least self-reflexive since its aspirations to mimesis blind the reader to the implicit ideology it embraces in presenting the world as it does.
that is the second point: the world is perceived by us, always,through the mediation of language. that mediation is, let us say, coded.
we decipher codes in structuralist analyses, or, really, following barthes, in poststructuralist analyses. codes in literature are constructed in the way language is used, in the forms or genres, like realism.
my favorite analysis of realism is in an older work by catherine belsey whose book, Critical Practice, has been my bible for teaching literary theory to students for many years. her point about realism is that it is a genre that reinforces dominant codes by presupposing them at the outset of the text. they come to be challenged, and reinforced by the end. they state, as bj was implicitly stating, "this is the way things are, or were," not, "this is how we construct this understanding of how things are, or were."
so, you can be a reformer like zola, and simply use the dominant tools of understanding values and perceptions to make your case: you are replicating those underlying values that normalize dominant modes of comprehension, and that is the key: you are normalizing a way of seeing the world, and the values that undergird that way of seeing the world, as you present it as if it were "just there," "just the way things are," rather than, in fact, constructed.
achebe is a key example of this.he wrote, early in his career, of his desire to present the world as seen clearly, through a pane of glass, not distorted through rose colored class. he was opposing the distortions of colonialist discourse.
he did not see that he was, also, presenting a vision of the world, rather than the world itself.
he thus viewed himself as an educator.
i love his work; but i oppose this role of educator for us;
i view that role as similar to that of the old-fashioned teacher in europe who stood on a podium and lectured to students, giving them the truth.
aside from my innate distaste for "truth-tellers," i dislike even more "masters" who give us this magisterial structure of those who know and those in need of the truth given by those who know.
i prefer the kick 'em style of this forum, where we debate rather than kowtow, we argue, don't defer.
and sometimes we say, "you have a good point," but also, did you think about....
ken
On 12/29/12 11:58 PM, OLUWATOYIN ADEPOJU wrote:
I think, though, that you overstretch the possibilities of that perspective in arguing that realism, with particular reference to the phrase I highlight, " is a genre, a construct, like all others; no closer to "real facts" than other genres, but ideologically presented to the reader as if it were an imitation of reality. in that regard, it is more immersed in ideology than other genres that make more obvious their constructions of "reality."
Jeyifo is describing his understanding of a vision represented by realism as fidelity to reality. Some writers such as Emile Zola are described as aspiring towards that goal.
We may contextualise their efforts by describing them as representing another ideological position but that will not detract from the fact that a writer pursuing such an ideal is operating on a different point of the continuum dramatising the relationship between art and lived experience than a magical realist/fantasy writer, for example.
In the light of such an ideal as demonstrated by the writer's work, one may expect certain possibilities from that writer as different from other possibilities more in keeping with other kinds of writing that writer is not known for.
Perhaps Jeyifo ought to have qualified his understanding of realism in art against the background of the understanding of all constructed forms as ideological constructs mediating the perspectives of reality that they privilege as opposed to other possibilities they downplay or exclude.
Even then, Jeyifo could be understood as describing realism as an artistic ideal that tries, within the form of the transformative character of art, to demonstrate historical actuality.
-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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