Lynne Tillman and the Illusion of Realism
Lynne Tillman. Photo: Craig Mod.
Realism disturbs me.
For indeed fiction, if realistic, is a manufactured veil through which we train our gaze in order to obtain a pattern that organizes dots and squiggles into something legible, “an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop,” as Terry Eagleton writes in the London Review of Books. Realism is paradoxical: a lie that reads true. We take two pet rocks, name one “Reality,” the other “My (Mimetic) Attempts to Write About It,” and smash them enthusiastically together. What survives is combed into a neat pile, carefully labeled, set out as a sort of snack.
Figure 1.
Mimesis is imitation, and when Aristotle talks about it in his Poetics, he means for it to do one thing: Imitation isn’t a faculty poets deploy to represent the world solely for the sake of skillfully representing the world. Imitation is deployed with the specific aim of inspiring recognition—of evoking, in a somewhat distant audience, a feeling of pity. (Aristotle: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ ”) We are brought to tears when someone on stage pokes out his eyes; safe in our chairs, we’ve confused him with ourselves. We’re deceived, yet in awe. Perhaps we resolve not to kill or have sex with our parents (or, failing this, not to get married—regarding which topic, more later).
Ideas about imitating reality have spiraled up through Western civilization with different, though perhaps related, political ends. The realists of nineteenth-century France weren’t exactly Aristotelian in their outlook, but they definitely had ambitions re: mimesis. They wanted to understand the structure of society and, along with the Russians, took great pains to offer precise depictions of things and persons. Balzac may be the paradigmatic example, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about : “In the corner behind the door, shining hobnailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth.” (This old translation by Ferdinand Brunetière and Robert Arnot is interesting for the way in which it names old-fashioned things, e.g., hobnails. More recent translations tend to replace outmoded words with more familiar, if less specific, ones.) It’s less the elaboration of a world or a social system that fascinates me here than the skill in representing an item that seems purposeless, if classed. I do occasionally cling to this kind of seemingly pointless vivid materiality in prose. It produces not recognition, foremost—though that, too—but surprise. It makes me think for a moment, Aristotle, that it might be possible to have a world without psychology, maybe even, Hugo, without fate. (In , the Greek term , meaning “fate,” is, bizarrely, carved on the side of the cathedral. There seems to be no reason for this, other than that Hugo wanted to imply that fate is an indelible feature of human history. As you see, I find him to be an extremely annoying writer.)
