Tragic Realism and Modern Society : The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel

Nastasya Filippovna looked bewildered at the prince. 'A prince? Is he a prince? Fancy that, and I took him for a footman just now and sent him in to announce me! Ha! Ha! Ha! DOSTOEVSKY The IdiotTragic Realism and Modem Society both sides there are contrary resistances. At its worst passion dilutes into bourgeois romance and equally community is debased into the bloodless schemas of socialist or proletarian realism. This complex relationship between the residual and the emergent also invokes Williams' third category, that of the dominant structure of feeling in most bourgeois fiction which tragic realism tries and often fails to leapfrog, those structures of progress, ambition and compassion which link justice to monetary success. The displacement of passion into the sphere of capital is one of the achievements of the nineteenth-century novel in Western Europe. By contrast, tragic realism seeks to shortcircuit the dominant structure of feeling by moving fvom the aristocratic to the communal, a movement possible in the discourse of fiction yet not in the discourse of history. Yet it is also a movement which stands as an oblique and powerful comment on the Russian Revolution, on a transformation which occurred in a country that has been seen retrospectively as the weakest link in the chain of European nations warring over markets and territories.Tragic realism assumes a historic importance because revolution has not taken place in the most advanced capitalist countries in the world. The relationship between historical 'backwardness' and artistic excellence reminds us of the relationship between uneven development and social revolution. Tragic realism provides a commentary on the prophetic and historic drive towards socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which for the most part has failed to attain its goals. Within the novel itself, the quest to chart the passage from hierarchic passion to equal community is to engage with the process of 'desacralisation' which encompasses all modern literature. In their individually distinctive work, Auerbach, Frye, De Rougemont, Girard and Jameson all chart a passage from passion, or the romance, to a desacralised, disenchanted and desublimated structure of feeling in the modern novel. It is a movement from high to low, the ideal to the real, the romantic to the reified, the deceit of romance to the truth of the roman. The adventures of the Real cannot be extricated from this historical passage, a passage of social descent which cannot ignore its noble origins, a passage of material descent which cannot overlook its aspiration to the ideal. Yet sooner or later the noble and the ideal expire. The question then becomes: What is left? And what can take their place?1 Lukacs, Williams, Auerbach: Tragedy and Mimesis If one wished to be cruel, one might argue that, by and large, realism is a twentieth-century concept applied to a nineteenth-century phenomenon. 1 In actual fact, its terms of reference are very wide indeed.lt is an artistic phenomenon typical of the modern capitalist and industrial age as a whole. Even then, it appears historically time-bound compared with our idea of tragedy. For tragedy goes back to ancient Greece, to the origins of European culture itself. The real seems culturally conditioned, the tragic timeless. Yet the intersection of realism and tragedy has been one of the great events of literature since the middle of the nineteenth century. To sense the importance of this, one has to dispense with the commonsense idea of real. In everyday language, it is used to imply a constraint upon the imagination, the very opposite of visionary thinking. Cliches such as 'Let's be realistic', or 'He's not living in the real world' are of little use in discourse about art. For realism is about a particular form of artistic imagination. The link between tragedy and realism is vital. It involves the synthesis of a relatively modern and a profoundly classical sensibility. Nowhere are its effects more profoundly revealed than in the relationship between the novel and modern society.The three major literary critics to discuss this relationship have been Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams and Erich Auerbach. Lukacs and Auerbach have always been explicit about their representationalist aesthetics. Auerbach actually titled his most famous study Mimesis-imitation. For both, literary realism is the pinnacle of modern artistic achievement. Though not as explicit, Williams is almost as eq1:1ally committed to the virtues of realist fiction, and significantly analyses them in the very English novels which the two German critics inexcusably overlook. But beyond that, all three have a sense of the intertwining of tragedy and realism in modern fiction. Their criticism produces different explanations of a common• theme-the inseparability of the decline of tragedy from the decline of realism. To separate their emphases, one could say that Lukacs is concerned mostly with realism, Williams with tragedy, and Auerbach with tragic realism. From each of these angles each has made a vital critical contribution, a starting point from which to look at the to Kafka's transformation of modern literature. The solitary catharsis of the bourgeois novel with its quest for the meaning of life is no longer possible. Those who read Kafka or listen to Schoenberg can expect only permanent discomfort and perturbation.Adorno's schema of modern literature contains three stages. The first is that of classic realism culminating in Flaubert. The second is that of aesthetic distance developed as a counter-response to Zola's cult of the documentary fact. The third is the literature of shock inaugurated by Kafka and developed by Samuel Beckett. It is the final stage which provides the fiction of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Society, whose historical parameters are the economic collapse of 1929, and the rise of fascism in Europe and of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Marcuse in fact attempts to reduce Adorno's three stages to a dichotomy between twodimensional culture and one-dimensional society. In the former pre-fascist period art is seen to be in opposition to bourgeois society. Latterly it becomes absorbed into the dominant culture of a totalitarian industrial world. Here the negating power of art is itself neutralised. Like Adorno, Marcuse is sensitive to the development of new forms of culture which challenge the influence of serious art. In their famous wartime essay on the American mass culture industry, 7 Adorno and Horkheimer had argued that late-capitalism's relationship to culture would henceforth be determined by the profitability of mass culture, and not by the legitimating potential of serious art. The audience for classic literature is not eliminated but its cultural significance is henceforth negligible. Because of the dominance of mass-culture, it can no longer play a significant role in people's lives. For Marcuse, this was evidence of the 'repressive tolerance' of the liberal order in the cultural sphere. The classics could be massproduced and consumed meaninglessly. In such a way their negative oppositional function was destroyed.Marcuse's vision of two-dimensional culture is significantly different from Adorno's 'aesthetic distance'. He sees classic art from a Freudian perspective as a form of creative sublimation. Whereas Adorno saw the artistic negation of the objective world in terms of cognitive reflexivity, Marcuse regards it as a psychic mechanism occasioned by the deferring of sexual gratification. Two-dimensional culture means both traditional realism and reflexive modernism-Proust and Thomas Mann as well as Goethe and Tolstoy. Marcuse reinterprets Benjamin's nostalgia for a lost world as sublimated romance, and sees it exemplified in the songs and poems of Brecht. Dominated by Freudianism, Marcuse's theory of culture lacks any criterion ofliterary evolution. It certainly comes to grief in a very ethnocentric dismissal of the treatment of sexuality in modern American literature. Having praised the sublimated art of the European classics, Marcuse goes on to write: Desublimated sexuality 1s rampant m O'Neill's alcoholics and Front Matter....Pages i-x Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Introduction: The Adventures of the Real....Pages 3-10 Lukács, Williams, Auerbach: Tragedy and Mimesis....Pages 11-23 Repudiations of Realism I: Critical Theory....Pages 24-32 Repudiations of Realism II: Formalism and Genetic Structuralism....Pages 33-48 Tragic Realism: The Passionate Political....Pages 49-65 Front Matter....Pages 67-67 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Passion and Russian Society....Pages 69-88 Dostoevsky: The Demonic Tendenz....Pages 89-102 Zola: Germinal and Tragic Praxis....Pages 103-114 Conrad: The New Meaning of Tragic Irony....Pages 115-130 Thomas Mann: Bourgeois Affirmation and Artistic Tragedy....Pages 131-148 The Severed Continuum: Soviet Realism and the Case of The Silent Don....Pages 149-158 Malraux and Hemingway: The Myth of Tragic Humanism....Pages 159-175 George Orwell:The Nightmare of the Real....Pages 176-187 Solzhenitsyn: The Permanence of Tragedy....Pages 188-203 Conclusion: Tragic Realism and Modern Society....Pages 204-210 Back Matter....Pages 211-225