MODULE: English Literature in the 20th Century

TUTOR: Prof. dr. Sanda Berce

L6a. Realism and Modernism: the Attack on Realism

(From the Construction of Realism to the Attack on realism:

THE ARNOLFINI WEDDING, Jan van Eyck (1434)

1) This work is a portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, but is not
intended as a record of their wedding. His wife is not pregnant, as is often thought, but
holding up her full-skirted dress in the contemporary fashion. Arnolfini was a member of
a merchant family from Lucca living in Bruges. The couple are shown in a well-
appointed interior.

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2) The ornate Latin signature translates as 'Jan van Eyck was here 1434'. The similarity to
modern graffiti is not accidental. Van Eyck often inscribed his pictures in a witty way.
The mirror reflects two figures in the doorway. One may be the painter himself.
Arnolfini raises his right hand as he faces them, perhaps as a greeting.

3)Van Eyck was intensely interested in the effects of light: oil paint allowed him to depict
it with great subtlety in this picture, notably on the gleaming brass chandelier.

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4) The Arnolfini Portrait is an oil painting on OAK PANEL Early Netherlandish painter
Jan van Eyck dated 1434 . It is also known as The Arnolfini Wedding, The Arnolfini
Marriage, The Arnolfini Double Portrait or the Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his
Wife, among other titles. The painting is a small full-length double portrait, which is
believed to represent the Italian merchant GIVANI di NICOLAO ARNOLFINI and his
wife, presumably in their home in the Flemish city of Bruges.

It is considered one of the more original and complex paintings in Western art:

(a) because of the iconography- the unusual geometric ORTHOGONAL

perspective;

(b) the use of the mirror to reflect an inverted reflection of the space;

(c) Topic: the portrait is considered unique by some art historians as the record of a
marriage contract in the form of a painting;

(d) For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the
truest sense of the term: Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434; a simple corner of
the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic;

Van Eyck used the technique of applying layer after layer (to blend colours
by painting WET-IN-WET to achieve subtle variations in light and shade to
heighten the illusion of three-dimensional forms;
This helped to highlight the realism ( i.e to show the material wealth and
opulence of Arnolfini's world);

[It has been suggested that he used a magnifying glass in order to paint the minute details
such as the individual highlights on each of the amber beads hanging beside the mirror].

(e) The ILLUSIONISM of the painting: (1) for the rendering of detail; (2) for the use
of light to evoke space in an interior

Illusionism in ART HISTORY means:

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 the artistic tradition in which artists create a work of art that appears to
share the physical space with the viewer;
the attempt to represent physical appearances precisely also called
MIMESIS.

The theoretical term for illusionism in art is referential illusion.

II. Referential illusion realism.

(1) Realism and the novelistic tradition :

In the novelistic tradition the dominant ritual practice is realism
which is itself a problematic category.
1.a. Definition of Realism
Roman Jakobson (Realism and Art) : there are three possible meanings of
the term Realism:
(1) Realism may refer to the aspiration and intent of the AUTHOR, i.e. a
work is understood to be realistic if it is conceived by its author as a display
of verisimilitude, as true to life ;
(2) A work may be called realistic if I , the person judging it, perceive it as
true to life ;
(3) Realism is one which comprehends the sum total of the features
characteristic of one specific artistic current of the 19th century.
Raymond Williams ( Realism and the Contemporary Novel, 1965:
(1) any new realism will be different from tradition and will comprehend the
discoveries in PERCEPTION and COMMUNICATION.
e.g. the old, nave realism is dead because it depended on a theory of natural seeing
which is now impossible;
(2) Realism ceased to be a simple recording process, from which any deviation
was voluntary. We literally create the world we see (and such human creation of
the world is a discovery of how we can live in the material world we inhabit). The

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NEW REALISM is the process constituted by a dynamic and active observer whereas
the OLD [i.e traditional REALISM] is a convention of a static, passive observer.
(3) Man lives through his perceptual world ( i.e a human representation of the
material world outside him.
Art is more than perception ; it is a particular kind of human active response and
human communication REALITY is that which human beings make common
by (a) work and language (b) by practical interaction of what is personally seen-
interpreted-organized and socially recognized and (c) by inheritance and forms of
culture;
REALITY is continually established by common
effort, and art is one of the highest forms of this process.
Roman Jakobson : from a formalist point of view not only is the definition
of realism unstable but the entire concept is dubious ( verisimilitude in a
verbal expression or in a literary description makes no sense whatsoever ;
one can speak of " a higher degree of verisimilitude" of this on that poetic
trope )
an artistic ideal realism is an utterly unrealistic venture because no matter how
true to life a novel may seem, it can only be a representation of reality ;
Boris Tomachevski : It is sometimes difficult to decide whether literature
recreates phenomena from life or whether, in fact, the opposite is the case :
that the phenomena of life are the result of the penetration of literary clichs
into reality
a study of the conventions of literature ( and of its discourse) is also a
study of the ways in which our lives are molded by convention (i.e. It is
like fractal geometry: a way of describing, calculating and thinking about
shapes that are irregular and fragmented.

(2) Realism and the literary writing:

it has an aesthetic and cognitive dimension (neither of which can be
separated one from the other);

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 aesthetically: it refers to certain modes and conventions of verbal and visual
representation (conventions that can occur at any historical time);
cognitively: it is associated with the secular and rational forms of knowledge
that constitutes the tradition of the Enlightenment (stemming from the
growth of scientific understanding in the 18th century;
it expresses an optimistic belief that human beings can reproduce, by means
of verbal and visual representations, both the objective world(exterior to
them) and their own subjective responses (to that exteriority);
such representations are assumed to be recognizable by fellow human beings
and form the basis of knowledge about the physical and social worlds;
accuracy, adequacy and truth are fundamental to this empirical view and
its representational form: Realism;
knowledge acquisition of the actual social and physical worlds by means of
observation of factual details, behavior and events;
the omniscient narrator expresses the sense that the world can be
truthfully reproduced and communicated in verbal form;
the perspective unites generalizations with empirical specificity
the literary modes of writing identified as realist: (1) present themselves
as corresponding to the world as it is; (2) using language as a means of
communication rather than verbal display; (3) offering rational, secular
explanations for the events of the world represented;
the literary genre closely associated with realism is the novel;
the most secular mode of human existence associated with realism is
capitalism;
aesthetic evaluations of realism are closely tied/entangled with views on
the development and expansion of capitalist production and the
emergence of mass culture.

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(2) Modernist experimentation with traditional realism (and narrative form):
* failing to acquire knowledge; knowledge in any traditional way is replaced by the
subjective continuum of personal thoughts, memories, sensory responses,
speculations and emotions;
* absence of objective perspective;
*focalization (or narrative perspective) remains entirely within the subjective
consciousness (the only way of knowing things);
* the past is evoked but there is nonsense of progressive, rational self-
development over time;
* the novel refuses closure: nothing is summed up in the writing as a coherent
truth that can be known.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): part of the early 20th century avant-garde movement
for whom realist narratives were obsolete and trite.
(a) Mr.Bennet and Mrs Brown (1924): she attacks the realist tradition of novel
writing (i.e the documentary inventory of social aspects; the fictional
characters in whom essence of personality escaped the writer);
(b) Modern Fiction (1925): reality as actually experienced by each of us is
compared to a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent with the
sharpness of steel:
Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display,
with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?[Woolf, 106];
opposition between the realist absorption of the materiality of things and
the uncircumscribed spirit as artistic consciousness of subjective reality-----
---a reaction of the modernist writers against consumerism and mass
production if their culture;
modernist art was new and aimed to shock bourgeois tastes;
Woolf is against the orderly pattern imposed on life by realist fiction
whereas Conrad (experimenting with narrative form) developed his

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 modernist techniques in the service of literary art defined as a single-
minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe
by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every
aspectThe artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth
and makes his appeal(1897).
Joyce (1930) explained that his aim in Ulysses(1922) was to present a hero as
a complete human being seen from all sides, in all human relationships, an
anatomical human body that lives in and moves through space and is the
home of a full human personality.

(1) Modernist writers wrote out of a troubled sense that reality (whether
material or psychological) was elusive, complex, multiple and unstable;

(2) The modernist artist believed that the aim of their art was to convey
knowledge, by some new aesthetic means;

(3) Their quarrel with realism is predominantly an epistemological and
an aesthetic one.