Realism Elsewhere

Realism in the study of US literature has long functioned mainly as a period rather than as a form. Fitted in between the twin peaks of the American Renaissance and literary modernism of the 1910s and 1920s, realism has named what has been typically regarded as a valley. Not only is the fiction of the late nineteenth century, with the great exceptions of Henry James and Mark Twain, not regarded as achieving the aesthetic success of preceding or succeeding periods, but it has also long seemed not entirely representative of US culture. Richard Chase’s claim in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) that the romance rather than the realist novel was more typically American may have lost currency, but it has not been repudiated. Part of the reason Chase’s conception may have been eclipsed is the low repute realism in general fell during the moment of high theory. It is true that this moment produced some significant revisiting of American realism by the likes of Amy Kaplan and Walter Benn Michaels, but this attention did not bring about a general reevaluation of realism in US literary history. However, lately scholars have begun to recognize that despite the advent of modernism and postmodernism, realism did not disappear but has continued to be practiced alongside these other fictional forms.

The two books under discussion here have very little to say about US realism, but their treatment of realist fiction elsewhere could provide a starting point for a serious reevaluation of its practice in the US. The two books complement rather than compete with each other, Frederic Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (2013) being primarily formalist in its concerns, while Franco Moretti’s The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013) uses fiction to try to defamiliarize the historical bourgeoisie. The authors are both among the world’s leading literary scholars, and one is struck in each case by the enormous breadth of their reading. These books are worthy additions to their highly influential bodies of work, yet they are also unexpectedly different. Jameson, known for his explicitly Marxist stance, has little explicit to say about his novels’ politics, and Moretti, most familiar these days for his quantitative studies of fiction, has written a book, which he calls “a partisan essay,” about history based on “only a handful of possible examples” (22, 12). Since I will be arguing with them, let me make it clear at the outset how firmly I believe that, despite my differences with them, both are worthy of the attention of Americanists interested in the novel and especially its realist incarnations.

Realism has been understood in two different relations to the history of the novel. On the one hand, it is held that the emergence of the genre—which is usually traced back to Cervantes—is defined by its realism relative to earlier narrative romances. In English, this means that we find realism as early as the eighteenth century, and Moretti begins by focusing on Robinson Crusoe (1719). On the other hand, literary historians have regarded the nineteenth century as the period where realism is fully developed in England, France, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere, and that century is Jameson’s focus, in taking up novels from all of these nations and more.

The association of the novel with the bourgeoisie goes back at least to the nineteenth century, but it became particularly strong in Britain and the US starting in the 1970s with the rise of poststructuralism. The key figure behind this, though he was not often recognized as such, was Lucien Goldmann, whose Toward a Sociology of the Novel (1965) made an explicit theoretical case for the novel as an expression of capitalism. Goldmann’s work treats the bourgeoisie analytically, in terms of their role in the relations of production, and ideologically, as exponents of individualism. Poststructuralist theory added another dimension to this interpretation, insisting that it was the realism of the bourgeois novel that was responsible for its ideological work. Rather than examine the content of bourgeois...