Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘manifesto’ of the week. These are - very gentle - attempts to nudge the world in one direction or another.
Best,
Sam
WHY REALISM
When I was getting excited about writing plays and trying to understand how the marketplace worked, I read a few interviews and was really appalled to come across the idea, which seemed to be to taken as an article of faith, that everybody had gotten sick of realism, who knows, sometime in the ‘80s or ‘90s, that a prerequisite if you wanted to get your play produced was ‘anything but realism.’
There seemed to be a few stylish approaches within the theater world. There was a word theater that I associated with Will Eno and Melissa James Gibson; a meta-textual theater connected to Brandon Jacobs Jenkins; a digitized unreal theater associated with Qui Nguyen; and a fantastical international theater associated with Francis Ya-Chu Cowhig. They were all kind of interesting and cool, but the problem was that I just didn’t really like anything I came across. Everything felt sort of ‘hypothetical,’ everything seemed to be an audition for some other form, poetry or more often film, and got stuck in theater. Around that time Annie Baker came along and, as everybody sort of simultaneously realized, was so much better than anything else. And she hit the level of intelligence and pathos that she did just by being scrupulously, devotedly real. “Baker’s plays have actually realism from the aesthetic scrapheap,” wrote one typically starry-eyed critic.
That particular accolade struck Baker oddly. “It feels like we lack any terms for playwriting that come after 1890,” she said in an interview. “Realism, naturalism - are you talking about, like, Ibsen?” And part of what I find so compelling about Baker isn’t just the resuscitation of ‘realism’ but that she didn’t see it as a big deal - didn’t think that there had actually been any break in the realist tradition except in the minds of programmers of not-for-profit theaters; felt that realism was just a natural home for anybody writing.
Baker was specifically exploring a kind of heightened naturalism - a theater that was so slow and so room temperature that it really was a shock to theater audiences with their amped-up internal rhythms, their expectations of extravagance - and, almost accidentally, it served as an aesthetic revolution, a sort of aggressive realism that sought to turn daily life into an object of reverence.
But my belief is that realism doesn’t particularly need that sort of revolutionary impetus to be a viable project. As a teenager, reading voraciously, I had this feeling that the whole world could be captured by literature. And part of what made every activity I got involved in interesting was the idea of coming across its literary complement. Get interested in running? Well, there’s Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, John L. Parker’s Once A Runner. In baseball? There’s Mark Harris’ Bang The Drum Slowly, DeLillo’s Pafko At The Wall, etc. And at a more sophisticated level there was a kind of taxonomy of moods. Graham Greene was for “when you were feeling world-weary,” Kundera for a very particular kind of college-chic, and so on.
I find that to be a healthy and endlessly enthralling approach to writing - and it’s been a surprise in my life that so few people I’ve encountered see literature in the same way. This is maybe true above all in universities. The feeling there is that content is really secondary. What matters is form, and the writers, or artists, to be celebrated are always the ones who are formally innovative. This is what the ‘history of art’ turns into, a never-ending series of breakthroughs. In visual art in particular the breakthroughs are a linear chain - the impressionists shattering ‘realism’ and moving into subjective perception, the post-impressionists devising internal landscapes, the cubists breaking the cohesion of a single work of art, the abstract expressionists moving away from representation, and later post-modern generations breaking the conception of a ‘work of art’ altogether. A similar principle holds in literature - premium is placed on ‘greatness’ (that’s what makes works worthy of reissue and of inclusion on a course syllabus) and greatness is understood to be a function of, above all, formal innovation. That’s why writers like Rimbaud, Joyce, Faulkner, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and even an early ‘realist’ like Flaubert matter so much - because they discovered something new in literature. The feeling is of craftsman tinkering away and then at the right moment revealing an ‘invention’ to the world.
What is completely missing in that sensibility is anything connected to what I first found so arresting in literature - a movement that I think of as being more horizontal and spatial than temporal and vertical and which is about creating imaginative, fictional counterparts to as much of reality as possible. And the artists I found myself being drawn to were people like Pierre Bonnard or Annie Baker, people who seemed to be well outside of the reigning artistic spirit of their time. It seems to have occurred to Bonnard that he would have been much more at home in the 18th or early 19th century than in the heyday of modernism but he didn’t let that bother him, painted as he wished to paint, which was anachronistically representational and ‘realist’. Baker found herself stifled at NYU and the quick-twitch mentality of its playwriting program. She had a pivotal moment when she explained to her advisor that what she really wanted to write were fictional variants of the kind of profound, meandering conversations that old people had with each other. Not a sexy-sounding subject matter - and not very formally innovative either. But it turned out that what was very old - in line with how Ibsen or Chekhov were writing - could come back around into fashion; and Baker was hailed, as per the logic of literary ‘breakthrough’ as creating a different style of writing.
The emphasis on greatness and timeliness - a legacy of the modernist era - creates a series of very unfortunate distortions in how everybody, so it seems, processes art. That modernist sensibility played directly into the logic of the publishers’ catalogue with the explosive announcement (and quick disposal) of its products. Everything that’s published is done so with the prospect of being ‘a breakthrough.’ The industry is constantly championing ‘new voices,’ ‘new forms,’ ‘new directions.’ And then the overwhelming majority of those are discreetly dropped and a ‘winner’ is selected by popular acclaim whose ‘voice’ then becomes the new standard that everybody else must set themselves against or look to surpass.
All of that is a very different sensibility from what draws artists to art - which is, first of all, an urge to move beyond a logic of death and of time and into a dispensation that’s much closer to permanence (to move, to put it very crudely, from timeliness to timelessness); and, secondly, a life-long endeavor and craft which is really much more about habit and sustained energy than it is about some particular product.
It’s not as if realism is more in tune with some deep truth about the nature of art. Art, basically, is whatever artists make. But at the moment, given the propaganda of the publishing industry and the ways in which that propaganda has been internalized by the reading public at large, there seems to be an opportunity lost for writing that’s, in a way, very simple, that just inhales, honestly and observationally, different corners of ‘reality’ and of the writer’s lived experience. As Michel Houellebecq said of Les Inrockuptibles, a literary magazine he helped to found in the 1980s, “There was only one principle - a little reality, man! Show us the real world, the things that are happening now, anchored in the real lives of people.”
Houellebecq’s pet peeve at the time was a particular sort of stylization in high-brow fiction - he had it in especially for J. M. G. Le Clézio. At the current moment everything in literary fiction tends to be a bit fantastical. Complicated literary metaphors are very in, as descended from the Gabriel García Márquez style. Realism - when it’s attempted at all - tends to lean towards a kind of revolutionary politics, a certain amount of exaggeration and an attempt to explode the system-as-it-is. The hope, as broadcast from however many industry blurbs, is something incendiary, something that introduces a new way of writing, a dazzling new writer. I’m not arguing against that as an ambition. Formal inventiveness has its place. World-building has its place. But at this particular moment - just when everybody is losing touch with the real world and is looking desperately for some kind of connection back to it - we seem at the same time to have abandoned realism. Accept the logic of realism - that art exists in large part as a mirror to the world around us, that its aims have to do with timelessness, with a recording of the world as it is for future generations who happen to be curious about it - and the aperture opens much wider than for what currently constitutes an artistically viable project. It’s not really about what’s hip, what’s cutting-edge, what’s innovative. It’s about whatever happens to be true.
When I teach, as I am doing in https://marytabor.substack.com/s/write-it-how-to-get-started, I'ill soon, in an upcoming post, put your point this way, Sam, "Heightened reality" as the key to hitting one's own heart and the heart of the reader. I will likely use an example from James Baldwin.