Realism and Ideology

A century ago Realism was in its prime; today it is under attack. Contemporary critics, notably Foucault, Barthes, and Kristeva, have taught us to see Realism as a conspiracy: bourgeois because the novel of Realism, its principal mode of expression, was a bourgeois invention; a conspiracy, they say, because the literature of Realism restricts the imagination, fantasy, and the metaphorical possibilities of language, placates its readers with signs masking as truths, and thus affirms the commonplaces of a complacent society, especially those having to do with self-image, history, and human values. 'Realism, they allege, seeks truth only so that it may serve the powerful whose interests determine in advance what that truth will be. Serious allegations, these, against a literary tradition which has always prided itself on its commitment to the truth, the Whole truth, and nothing but the truth, wherever it may lead. They strike at the very heart of Realism; namely, its conviction that the truth about human life is to'be found in the relations between people and the world in which they live, and that people become what all the forces of society, including their own wills, make of them. Realism holds that the truth about the human world can be known by the same or similar means by which we know the natural world: common sense, observation, and analysis. Thus what it has to say about human life seems to carry the force and authority of a law of nature. Realism thus sustains our sense of living in a world that can be verified, provided only that all the pertinent data are made available. And the data Realism deems pertinent turn out to be precisely those which lend themselves to this, reassuringly empirical and democratic, method of verification: social class, wealth, law, conventions, institutions, family, politics, morals, and the ways in which these forces influence human behavior and individual destinies. The literature of Realism, whether it be fiction, criticism, or history, thus creates the impression that it is continuous with life itself; it proceeds as though it were so immersed in life that the gap between representation and experience, between text and context, and between signifier and signified seems to evaporate. But the contemporary opponents of Realism will have none of this. Reality, they contend, has no existence until prefigured by acts of the literary im

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  R F Berkhofer•Poetics Today•1988

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• The historiographical dilemma in Myrdal's American greed

  E Culpepper Clark, Elaine Clark et al.•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1987

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