Myths about Literary Realism

Abstract

One of the myths about literary realism commonly subscribed to by theorists of postmodernism is that it is naive and uncritical. Michael Boyd, for example, maintains that

[a] contradiction implied by the aesthetics of realism is its failure to be concerned about the nature of reality. Although their characters may be uncertain about what is really real, realist novelists never are: reality is simply the given. … This attitude must create problems for modern antirealists when they read a realistic novel. Do they find themselves taking sides against the novelist with certain fictional madmen who dare to wonder if the world is real? Or dare to wonder what ‘real’ means?. … If the realist pretends that fiction is life, the antirealist knows that life is a fiction. (Antirealists are themselves involved in a contradiction here. How can they disavow all claim to reality and at the same time claim knowledge of that reality? Their one defense — which is at the same time their raison d’être — is that they know that they cannot know.) For the antirealist, reality is protean, a mental construct bereft of the certitude given by the belief in any universal laws of the mind. Everyone is a novelist.

(1983: 18)