Naturalism as a radical act

The previous entry explained how realism is not a central feature of fiction when the history of the novel is considered. However, the other side of this is that realism, or naturalism, when it appears in literature can actually be radical and avant-garde. By naturalism, I mean the representation of the everyday lives of ordinary people: not kings, heroes, saints, millionaires, or murderers, but people doing the quotidian tasks of growing or acquiring food and money, working, cooking, cleaning, relating to their family, colleagues, and complete strangers.

As mentioned in the previous entry, the novel began as a highly non-realist form. Early proto-novels such as Utopia (1516), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and Don Quixote (1605-15) were of a fantastical or mock-heroic quality, although all three works referred to contemporary society in different ways. Later, writers like Richardson and Austen embourgeoised the novel, although their upper-middle-class heroes and heroines were far from the median income or average life expectancy of the time.

While the social problem novel became a genre of the mid-19th century (North and South, etc), such works are little read today; the next big change was the development of French naturalism. This focussed on the lives of the urban poor, describing factory workers and miners, but finding a surer market with tales of prostitutes, pimps, and other petty criminals. Thus a genre which could have been unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday instead became sensationalist. French naturalism influenced American writers like Theodore Dreiser, who focussed on tragedy and a doctrine of social Darwinism, and Alfred Doeblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz treated the material of the French naturalist novel (pimps, whores, and drunks) in a highly unnaturalistic fashion.

With modernism, the search for a new form to portray everyday life meant that an increasing interest in the mundane was combined with greater formal experimentation. Novels such as Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and later BS Johnson's The Unfortunates portrayed a single day in the life of one or two characters, interspersed with flashbacks. Notwithstanding the difficulty of Ulysses, a novel covering a day brings reading time close to real time (it only takes a few hours to read Mrs Dalloway). This reduction of the novel's timespan reached perhaps its peak with Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, which covers three minutes of a man hovering between life and death, but despite its minute focus and deep interest in both science and human experience, can hardly be called naturalistic.

Beckett, a sort of follower of Joyce, sought to approach the essence of human existence from another angle: while he focused on disease, decay, and death, he stripped his novels of extraneous naturalistic detail in pursuit of a universality - his characters wandered through a timeless rural Ireland or were trapped in semi-abstract prisons. The French new novel emerged in the 1950s as one of the last threads of modernism, seeking to describe the world without recourse to plot or character. This never entirely caught on in the English-speaking world, although it influenced writers such as the already-mentioned Johnson and Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin. Quin's Three describes a not entirely happily married middle-aged middle-class couple picking through the papers of a dead young woman while going about their own lives in a quiet country cottage, the stillness and isolation of the location reflecting the lack of action.

Outside literature, the Mass Observation movement in Britain of the 1930s sought to record and measure every detail of British life; it later fed into the growing market research industry. Through the 20th century, genre literature increasingly engaged with the underclass, particularly in crime fiction which moved from the parlours of Agatha Christie to the streets of Iceberg Slim. The rebirth of naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s had a political context: identity politics and a growing interest in the socially marginalised, combined with systems of public education that extended university study to the working class, led both sociologists and fiction writers to focus on the poor, abused, women, gay, racial minorities, etc.

In this context, I would single out James Kelman's The Busconductor Hines. This is the story of a few months in the life of a bus conductor in the Glasgow area (Kelman wrote far away from the Scottish literary centre of Edinburgh). This novel includes not only lengthy descriptions of life on the buses and the staff canteen, but also detailed accounts of the preparation of mince and many scenes of childcare. Kelman has produced other, perhaps greater works (like A Disaffection in which a sullen schoolteacher reflects on Scottish culture and the futility of his job in a more political way) but Hines is the novel that will tell you how to make mashed potatoes.

Other planets

David Thomson has written an angry, passionate polemic calling for cinema about ordinary life. In particular, he defends Yasujiro Ozu against modern interpretations of the director as being essentially a formalist, and he attacks James Cameron's spectacular 3D science fiction movie Avatar. Thomson starts with a powerful but probably untrue statement:

Family is where we learn everything, including the sweeping urge to be done with family. Family is a basis of every narrative art, even if it offers us the humbling insight that our lives are all so ordinary and alike as to be worthless or without lofty significance. For most of us, family determines who will be at our funeral, and with what mixed feelings. Family asserts that we are higher than animals, and is the undertone and the consideration that leaves every one of us, if not afraid, then stilled, as we go to bed at night.

(For an opposing viewpoint, recall the Gen X/slacker emphasis on friends as a new family, which reached its apotheosis on the incestuous TV show Friends, or Tim's remarks from the final episode of Ricky Gervais's The Office: "The people you work with are people you were just throw together with. You know, you don't know them, it wasn't your choice, and yet you spend more time with them then you do your friends or your family. But probably all you've got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hours a day.")

He is sharply dismissive of Avatar - a spectacular film that has been occasionally lauded for its political theme (by George Monbiot and by opponents of the Chinese government) while being attacked by others for its simplistic storytelling, numerous plot holes, and resemblances to FernGully: The Last Rainforest or Dances With Wolves. Thomson insists on the importance of Ozu's domestic subject matter and plain style in opposition to the 3D extragavance of James Cameron's film, and points to the basic flaw of all computer graphics movies:

I will not dispute the level of spectacle in Avatar. And I am nostalgic enough about the engineering of prolonged battle scenes to concede that James Cameron has not lost the touch with armed struggle that he displayed in Aliens and the Terminator films. But Avatar is garbage, too, and that can only be pinpointed by stressing its abject subject matter and its inability to see that the most spectacular thing the movies ever had to offer (see Renoir, Ophüls, Ozu, Bresson ... well, just keep seeing) is the human face as its mind alters or saddens.

You may say, don't be so solemn, don't pose the history of the movies as that blunt choice – Ozu or Avatar – when clearly there is room for so much more. But I think the cultural dilemma is as acute as this awkward choice suggests, and I fear that a culture – especially a culture of the young – will forget the existence of Ozu, and those whose films were always the fullest engagement of movies with this awkward but irresistible subject matter.

In defending the centrality of family, he launches a rather unfair attack on Paul Schrader: a double failure as a sensationalistic filmmaker who can't even get funding these days - nobody would deny that Schrader's filmography as writer or director is variable, but anybody whose credits include Taxi Driver, Mishima, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Light Sleeper, and Affliction stands not only as a talented film artist but someone who has pinpointed many of the obsessions of his age while dealing with timeless themes of redemption, art, sacrifice, and even occasionally family. There is no reason why a sensationalist film cannot deal with real themes - just as Elizabethan and Jacobean drama did despite the murders and swordfights - though it is true that many filmmakers put in far less effort than Schrader into articulating a personal vision and following it to extremes (perhaps Thomson thinks film should be less personal and more social - although curiously he has in the past championed James Toback, a second-class Schrader if ever there was one).

Thomson's final version of his point is fairer, focussing not on theme (he concedes Avatar addresses many themes) but referring perhaps to the texture or surface of film rather than its depths:

More and more of our movies – I am thinking of mainstream, English-speaking cinema – bear very little reference to life as lived.

Science fiction or realist drama can equally well explore many of the same themes, and surely even Thomson would agree that not all art should be realist (there is surely space in film for Michael Powell or Robert Bresson). But representing life as it is lived, as it is experienced by individuals, looking at family, work, the day-to-day quotidian basis of getting out of bed and keeping going till you can sleep at night, is not a priority for British or American cinema. The recent mumblecore movement seemed to be an attempt, but one which made no attempt to represent lives other than those of its filmmakers, and thus failed to say anything about most people's life. There are filmmakers capable of making this work, but few people seem to go see their movies, and fewer give them money to make new films.

Readers' comments on the article included many accusing Thomson of snobbery and saying ordinary people want escapist nonsense or alcoholic inebriation after a day at work; those saying that many people enjoy depressing small-scale family drama on TV, e.g. Eastenders; and someone pointed out that far from being an honest depiction of modern family life, Ozu's films were right-wing propaganda encouraging women to remain in the family and defending the traditional Japanese order after the turmoil of 1945.