All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (review)

Lilian Furst’s All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction is a comprehensive study of the artistic practices of realism. Bringing to bear the tenets of contemporary critical theory on realism, Furst offers a refreshing and original re-examination of the literary mode. All is True illuminates the constructs behind realism’s “air of reality,” and goes far in highlighting the unique complexion of this provocative novelistic form.

Furst is interested in the ways in which realism achieves its “illusion of life.” As she queries in her preface:

To unmask realism as illusion or deception—or, more broadly, as a literary artifact—does not detract from, much less explain, its capacity to haunt readers through its strange power of making absent objects not only present but credible. On the contrary, when its intrinsic masquerade is accepted, the mystery of how it attains its effects is heightened. If realist fiction is an illusion (or a deception), what disposes its readers to pretend to believe in its semblance of veracity?

(viii)

The bulk of All is True is devoted to answering the question raised here.

Written from what Furst calls a “reader-oriented perspective,” All is True examines how fictive frames are used to generate the suspension of disbelief requisite to the realist novel, thus providing a long overdue critique of realism’s literary strategies. Because the last few decades have witnessed prominent “unmaskings” of realism as a deceptive mode with a hidden agenda (analyses that, themselves, were necessary at a particular point in time), Furst adds to these earlier critiques by pointing to the sophisticated and ingenious aesthetic strategies employed in the realist text. In so doing, she re-positions realism in a new and intriguing light.

All is True focuses primarily on five texts: Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zola’s L’Assommoir, James’s The Bostonians, and Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Offering a wide-range of nineteenth-century writers, therefore, All is True compares and contrasts various literary devices common to realists and demonstrates how the authors utilized and built upon particular aesthetic conventions. She foregrounds the tensions inherent in any realist dramatization when she notes:

The realists walk a tightrope as they overtly profess to be giving a true representation of life as it is lived on “the dusty streets and the common green fields.” Their heavy emphasis on truthfulness comes to appear as almost a decoy to distract readers from the artistic processes involved in the weaving of the textual web. For the narratives are representations, products, and as such they must be shaped by the eye and mind of the writer. . . . The enframing, indeed transforming “I” (and eye) is an ever present filter in the form either of the perceiving narrator or of the experiencing protagonists.

(189)

Concomitantly, then, as Furst draws attention to the literary artifice of realism, she also explores its creative and inventive conventions, and offers an important contribution to the study of realist aesthetics. Since these aesthetics are all too often forgotten by those seduced by the picture and forgetful of the frame, All is True is pivotal in its claims for the artistry of the realist novel.

While Furst examines realism as a whole, she is particularly interested in the role of place in the realist text. She asserts that place

assumes supreme importance in realist fiction because it is so intimately implicated in both the formation of personality and the course of events. . . . It amounts to far more than an insistently acknowledged background, or an omnipresent context for the action. Background and foreground come to constitute a single powerful entity when locale is not a passive, static situation but an active, dynamic set of circumstances. The interaction between the perceiving, feeling, reflecting self of the protagonists on the one hand and the consensus of their particular material and social world on the other is the...