Towards Defining "Postrealism" in British Literature

In spite of the death of the traditional realistic novel announced in the 1960s, some fashion of realism has continued to flourish. As David Lodge writes in The Modes of Modern Writing (1977),

There is . . . a certain kind of contemporary avant-garde art which is said to be neither modernist nor antimodernist, but postmodernist; it continues the modernist critique of traditional mimetic art, and shares the modernist commitment to innovation, but pursues these aims by methods of its own. It tries to go beyond modernism, or around it, and is often as critical of modernism as it is of antimodernism.

(220–221)

Indeed, many critics have noted the appearance of a new type of novel, one which seems to "blur the boundaries between postmodern 'experiment' and 'Realism'" (Elias 9). John Barth calls this genre the "Literature of Replenishment" because it takes up and transforms old forms. Malcolm Bradbury likewise insists on the coupling of self-reflexive parody and realistic historical reference, or of artifice and mimesis: "That double haunting does seem a familiar feature of quite a lot of our writing, seeking its new relation both with the fracturing spirit of modernism and with the ways of nineteenth-century vraisemblance" (54). This paradoxical novel is part of what has been named the "turn to ethics in the 1990's" (Parker 1), a sort of revival of a revised humanism in literature and in literary criticism. Linda Hutcheon has coined the now well-known term "historiographic metafiction" to describe this new literary form, which is both "intensely self-reflexive" and rooted in the "historical world" (Poetics x), while Susana Onega predicted its explosion as early as the 1980s.

Following Frédéric Regard in Histoire de la littérature anglaise, we can call this genre "postrealist" rather than "postmodern," for unlike the latter, it does not simply play autonomous language games. The term "postrealism" has the advantage of aligning this genre with the already established tradition of "realism," as it once again aims at commenting on and committing to the world after the avant-garde, formalist, and aesthetic concentration on abstraction, but finds new ways of doing so. If one distinguishes "modernism" and "postmodernism" as aesthetic paradigms, and "modernity" and "postmodernity" as historical epochs linked to an "attitude" or "world view," both "postrealist" and "postmodernist" literature can be considered categories of fiction belonging to a "postmodern" epoch dominated by the death of "modernity" as an ethos. Although Habermas construes "modernity" as referring to the historical epoch associated with the Enlightenment, the beginnings of which can be traced to the end of the fifteenth century, modernity can also be envisaged as an "attitude," a "mode of relating to contemporary reality . . . a way of thinking and feeling; a way too of acting and behaving" (Foucault 100). Thus, in the first chapter of The Rise of the Novel (1957)—entitled "Realism and the Novel Form"—Ian Watt implicitly takes the term "modern" as referring to both a historical epoch and an "attitude."

However, if one considers "postmodern" lucidity as just the prolongation and the exacerbation of "modernist" formalism, then realism and the subsequent modernist/postmodernist aesthetics would each be manifestations of modernity, representing two opposite sides of the same coin. Both remain trapped in a dualistic either/or way of thinking, in the binary Cartesian logic of the same and other. Modernity's "Western liberal humanistic" or "common sense" view of the subject and of reality is the philosophical foundation for literary realism, which the modernists rejected (Belsey 1–7). It makes the "autonomous Kantian subject" or the "reason-centered Cartesian subject," the transcendent index of human nature, the center of consciousness and of mastery, the origin and source of meaning, truth, and history—as Jacques Derrida has shown, this idea of self as center is founded on the presence of a transcendental signified ("La Structure" 411–416). It assumes a common phenomenal world, a stable reality, external to the subject, objectively grasped by the senses, and reflected by "the mind as a great mirror" (Rorty 12). This vision of the world is essentially dualistic, "the center functioning...