Supernatural Realism

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2009 by Smajic, Srdjan

Realism Reloaded

Few key terms in the vocabulary of literary criticism, and criticism of the novel in particular, have consistently proven to be as indispensable yet elusive, unruly, or downright unmanageable as realism. "Realism," in Raymond Williams's understatement, "is a difficult word" (257) and, in George Levine's more sinister formulation, a "dangerously multivalent one" (Realistic Imagination 6). While most critics agree that "realism is the dominant style of the modern English novel" (Eagleton 11), the perilous multivalence of the term makes any kind of generalization about the nature or essence of literary realism a high-risk enterprise with dubious payoffs. Accordingly, the impulse to define the term has been tempered by caution and reserve. As Katherine Kearns puts it: "That for every generalization about the [realist] mode there is a disclaimer to be made and a contradiction to assert is the obligatory preface to any recent discussion of the field" (25). Critics who attempt to concretize the concept along stylistic, thematic, or other lines invariably make themselves vulnerable to the objection that their historical or theoretical visions of realism are myopic, their definitions, even when formulated open-endedly, too constricted to encompass the broad spectrum of its themes and expressive modalities. Erich Auerbach perhaps sensed as much when he left realism undefined in what remains one of the most influential critical treatments of realist fiction. The absence of a definition, however, is not necessarily something to brag about, and it is not until the epilogue to Mimesis that Auerbach confesses, and then only briefly and deflectively, that "[n]ot even the term 'realistic' is unambiguous" but that "to analyze it theoretically and to describe it systematically" (even when one limits realism, as Auerbach does, to works that fall into "[t]he category of 'realistic works of serious style and character' ") "would have necessitated an arduous and, from the reader's point of view, a tiresome search for definitions" (491). The decision to steer clear of definitions may very well be judicious in this case, but one suspects that Auerbach's justification for this move is somewhat disingenuous: it is not the reader but the critic who finds the task in question "arduous" and "tiresome."

Yet consensus builds itself around silences as much as definitions, and at least one feature of literary realism, at once thematic and methodological, seems so obvious that it barely deserves mention: whatever it endeavored to accomplish or, intentions aside, whatever it actually achieved, realism has historically had very little to do with the supernatural, occult, and paranormal. In fact, "we tend to think of [realism]," Peter Brooks has recently remarked, "as the norm from which other modes - magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, metafictions - are variants or deviants" (5). As literary ambassador for the Enlightenment, realism is thought to exemplify a mode of perceiving, comprehending, and representing persons, objects, and events in accordance with natural laws and rationally explicable causal relations. In short, realism is understood to be a kind of radical antisupernaturalism; "[supernatural intervention feels, in the context of realist fiction, to be something out of a different genre, the fairy-tale perhaps" (Levine, How to Read the Victorian Novel 95). When a ghost, say, makes an appearance in what is generally regarded as a realist novel, the predominant assumption is that the text is momentarily deviating from its guiding principles, bending or breaking its own rules of verisimilitude and plausibility: it is now doing something else, something contrary to its "nature." Alternatively, and in a formulation that conceptualizes the literary text as a conduit for channeling both dominant and dissenting cultural discourses, the supernatural element is said to have infiltrated the realist novel, subverting its narrative procedures, destabilizing its ideological programs, making havoc of its epistemological and ontological coordinates. In either case the figure of the ghost - a popular synecdoche for the supernatural as a whole - is regarded as that which does not belong in realism as it imagines and projects itself.

Correspondingly, supernaturalism's relation to realism has traditionally been theorized as oppositional, subversive, parasitic. Fantastic literature - for instance, in Rosemary Jackson's influential account - "introduces confusion and alternatives; in the nineteenth century this meant an opposition to bourgeois ideology upheld through the 'realistic' novel" (35). However, even when the target of subversion is conceived as monolithic and undifferentiated, as seems to be the case with Jackson's treatment of the ideology of the realist novel, subversion is hardly ever a matter of simple inversion or dismissal. "Fantasy re-combines and inverts the real," Jackson observes, "but it does not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic relation to the real" (2O).1 Troping on this reality-bending yet reality-bound parasitism, Julian Wolf reys argues that "the spectral is the parasite within that site, or, that para-site, which we call modernity" (2). "The haunting process puts into play a disruptive structure" (6) that defines, among other things, "the very possibility of the novel in the second half of the nineteenth century" (11).