Much has been made of the -ics and their various -isms in the past few centuries. The romantics had their romanticism, the rational-ics with their rationalism and the unoriginal-ics with their derivatism.
As skeptical as I am of intellectual dogmas, of labeling myself with a rigid philosophical or artistic position or tying myself to a forgotten historical moment, I find myself particularly partial to the realists.
By the realists, I don’t mean those sopping duvets, those wingding defecators who pass off their cynicism as pragmatism, who claim disillusionment as evidence of their heightened practicality. By realists, I mean such literary giants as Pushkin, as Balzac, such artistic behemoths as Courbet, who focus on the everyday subject in literature and the art that democratized their disciplines. No longer did novels have to be about hunchbacks at football schools in South Bend, Indiana; now, they could be about quadrilles at aristocratic balls or breakers of stones — far more relatable subjects for the 21st century’s consumers of art.
My biting sarcasm aside, literary and artistic realism’s impact on our conception of modern fiction is undeniable: why else are we as compelled by television shows about angsty high schoolers as we are by superheroes and British royalty? No subject is unworthy of representation. The floodgates of highbrow art, now opened more than two centuries ago, can never be closed again. Realism, then, like sliced bread, is a wonderful thing — as evidenced by its seismic impacts on our modern conception of art.
However, a skeptic might wonder if realism can ever complete the task it endeavors to complete: can it ever represent even the silhouettes of reality? Or as Barthes might argue, is it doomed to fail — losing itself in the artifice and pretense of its own illusions?
Before I proceed, let me first admit my lack of sympathy for what one might term documentary realism. Painters who think that blindly recreating a photograph onto canvas, writers that serially list every object in a room that the main characters walks into, are perhaps the most deluded of all. The abyss between art and life is often insurmountable, and to think that uninflected, impersonal words or brushstrokes are an even remotely satisfactory substitute is a dangerous mistake. The shadow of interpretation is ineluctable and even a realist cannot escape the residue they leave on their work.
But is that not a logical incompatibility? How can a mode that claims to be realistic admit to being interpretive, to being constructed? How can a form that implies its own objectivity reveal its subjective underbelly?
The way I see it, there is only one solution to this intractable problem that seems remotely fair — a shared acknowledgement of fallibility. Yes, artists can certainly meld their pseudo-objective illusion with self-aware indicators of the personal bias, the hand of the artist that created their work. But we consumers, too, should admit our own narcissism, our own tendency to filter reality through our own egocentric ideologies. Perhaps, there is nothing more realistic, then, than the desire to be objective but the failure to do so, of the desire to immerse ourselves in a reality greater than ourselves, only to be confronted by the inability to escape our own perceptions.
Perhaps, then, our manifold realisms are best represented by works that pair realism with modernism, combining a convincing rendering of reality with a self-reflexive reminder of their own construction: movies and books that are unafraid to reveal the works they themselves are based on, that rise above quotidian realism to reveal transcendental messages about love and human connection. And yet, works that don’t tantalize themselves so much with the idea of revealing their technical processes lose any substance, any illusion of reality and fall prey to the cynical comedy of meta-irony.
If artistic humility is the answer to the problem of reality in a complex world, then maybe reality isn’t so inscrutable after all.