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George Eliot and the fetish of realism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville
Such is the case in the realist novel. The rise of realism in philosophy is a familiar story in which classical generality yields to realist particularity.28 In the epistemology of realism, particulars are significant in their relation to an assumed overarching general design, and so particulars become meaningful as a way to access that larger general truth. Ian Watt's definition of formal realism, for example, holds that the novel "works by exhaustive presentation" in order to "make the words bring [the] object home to us in all its concrete particularity" (30, 29). Through this generous heaping of particulars, fiction produces the illusion that "the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience" (32). The realist use of particularity thus encourages the reader to attribute a kind of life to the narrative, to imagine that behind or within this inert body of words resides a living spirit. Major critics of realism in Watt's generation insisted that the critical assessment of realism hinged on the extent to which a novel succeeds at becoming "an imitation of life" (Hardy 5). Novels "must give us a sense that what is being conveyed across to us by the words on the page is life ..." (Kettle 13). Such phrases refer to the mimetic capabilities of representation, but the same words describe an object that succeeds only by coming to life. Thus, Harvey, whose criticism centers on "the question of mimetic adequacy," writes that "Dreiser ... still has the power of deeply moving the reader because the life he has imagined is indeed alive" (28, 30). As an aesthetic criterion of evaluation, this requirement ties the success or failure of the object to a form of hypostasis. Critics avoid the problem of fetishism by retaining the distinction between representation and represented object. But it is the business of realism in the novel to obscure that distinction, through its heaping of particulars, so that a "report of human experience" can become "full and authentic," even when there is no historical experience to report. Realism in the novel thus works by creating an illusion of life, and in this function we can say that the realist object always strives to attain the status of the fetish.
While the language of fetishism is implicit in twentieth-century appraisals of realist novels, it is more emphatic in the theory of Victorian realism to which George Eliot and her contemporaries subscribed. In Modern Painters, John Ruskin insists on the importance of particularity. "Nearly every other rule applicable to art has some exception but this. This has absolutely none" (65). Neither fuzzy nor hazy, art is to have a crystal clarity in its treatment of details, and thus "all great drawing is distinct drawing" (62). Students of erotic fetishism, from Alfred Binet forward, have defined the obsession with detail as a form of fetishism.30 However, in Ruskin's own writing, the detail is not valued as an isolated particular. His theory describes an aggregate effect of accumulated details rather than isolated ones. He argues, for example, that an artist's selection among available details is made by choosing "the most necessary first, and afterwards the most consistent with these, so as to obtain the greatest possible and most harmonious sum" (60). As his argument develops he consistently emphasizes the accumulation of details; from this aggregate perspective, detail takes on a new importance. Rather than being individual representations details become presentation in the "sum" that they make. Ruskin talks about details as if they were units of embodied Truth (now with a capital T), Truths so concrete that one could actually count them: "great art ... includes the largest possible quantity of Truth ..." (60). Thus, he continues, "the difference between the great and inferior artists ... may be determined at once by the question, which of them conveys the largest sum of truth?" (62). That sum is not only quantitatively greater but qualitatively greater than its parts, and the key element in that qualitative distinction is the hypostatization of art: through their aggregation, realist particulars take on an illusion of concreteness that transforms them from representation to an embodiment of truth.
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