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.

Fiction and realism

Fiction has always had a problematic relationship with the truth. The reader with only a loose conception of literature may believe the story that from the first days of the novel, fiction has been essentially realist and naturalist and neutral, only waylaid into experimentalism and reader-bamboozlement in the early 20th century by a few foreigners: an alien influence that can easily be driven out (by agencies such as the Betty Trask Prize, awarded each year to work of "a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style").

However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.

Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.

Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.

Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.

For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.

Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.

After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.

Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.