KA-FAI YAU

 REALIST PARADOXES: THE STORY OF THE STORY OF THE STONE

I N MIMESIS ERIC AUERBACH CHARACTERIZES Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir as an unprecedented example of realism that “would be almost incomprehensible without a most accurate and detailed knowledge of the political situation, the social stratification, and the economic circumstances of a perfectly definite historical moment, namely, that in which France found itself just before the July Revolution; accordingly, the novel bears the subtitle, Chronique de 1830.”  Situated in a world in which “life is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated” and people “choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip,” Stendhal’s realism draws attention to a dimension of reality that people can see (and “believe”), yet do not want to acknowledge (and “represent”). This is not simply the outcome of self-deception. The intensity of change troubles people’s ability to align elusive selves with an elusive reality. Thus, Stendhal’s representation of reality is very much a moving picture, an evolution, “as is the case today in any novel or film.”

Because, for Auerbach, this “new and highly significant phenomenon”demands an evolving correspondence between representations and their contemporary historical circumstances, Emile Zola’s “decidedly pictorial vein” is nothing but “sheer rowdyism,” the "portrait of contemporary society as he—Zola—saw it and as the public was being urged in his works to see it too.”  In Auerbach’s eyes, Zola’s naturalism still assumes a division between representation and reality, while Stendhal’s version of realism is one in which “contemporary political and social conditions are woven into the action” (my emphasis) without any “preconceived rationalistic system concerning the general factors which determine social life, nor any pattern-concept of how the ideal society ought to look.”  Balzac’s “atmospheric realism,” on the other hand, presupposes, “without any proof,” a single “preconceived rationalistic system” structured as an organic unity, as, for example, when Madame Vauquer and her boarding-house reveal each other (“sa personne explique la pension, comme la pension implique sa personne”). Because he employs “but one and the same pattern for all organized creatures,” for Balzac, the novel is not a mirror limited to a correspondence between representation and reality. Sticking to fact is not the point, though the point is not to be contrary to fact either. “What it was” can be the benchmark of history, which has to do with the representation of reality, but not of the novel, which strives for the “beau ideal” (literally, ideal beauty). In terms of this distinction, Stendhal’s novelistic correspondence between a moving representation and a moving reality (what he calls “a mirror carried along the road”) is from Balzac’s perspective too historical and dualistic. No matter how correspondent they are, the division between the mirror and the road persists. Yet Balzac’s conception of the creator’s “pattern for all organized creatures” and his idea of “copying all society” remain a monism having a dualistic basis (copy vs. society).

According to Auerbach, it is in Flaubert’s “free indirect style” that Balzac’s monist attempt to overcome duality is achieved. With his “profound faith in the truth of language,” Flaubert treats languages and styles not as means to ends, but as ends in themselves. The author’s voice disappears—“We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language”—though to state matters thus still assumes a division between events and language, and a subject who can pick and choose. With Flaubert, the reader also ostensibly disappears. Every event “interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do.”  As a result, both Roman Jakobson’s division of realism into production and reception (“On Realism in Art”) and Darío Villanueva’s theories regarding “Intentional Realism” and “The Realist Reading” vanish. What remains is the text itself, a monism proceeding from a “mystical-realistic insight”:

.  .  .  [S]ubjects completely fill the writer; he forgets himself, his heart no longer serves him save to feel the hearts of others, and when, by fanatical patience, this condition is achieved, the perfect expression, which at once entirely comprehends the momentary subject and impartially judges it, comes of itself; subjects are seen as God sees them, in their true essence.

The “artist” thus no longer even “selects” and “translates” “events” into “language.” What matters is “mature expression,” the realist language. Style is a cognitive mechanism that we can by no means step beyond. We have access only to style, or different styles, not to unmediated reality.

If the idealized monist realist texts that Auerbach found in Flaubert discards, at least conceptually, both author and reader, can we still conceive of them as texts, a kind of authorless and readerless inscription in the air? Such exclusions extend to the allegorical level too. There is no longer an author who intends to mean or express something between the lines as in the case of allegory, nor is there a reader who deposits meaning into the text as in the case of allegoresis.