Alleluia, He is risen! Happy Easter to all! As you may have noticed, I went off of blogging for Lent, but now I'm back to the blogosphere. (Goodness, what a horrifically dull introduction... My oratory skills are going to be stunning today...)
Anyhow, I've come back to get right to business. I'd like to discuss a rather more big-picture concept in writing: the concept of realism and depicting things realistically or fantastically in general. In short, how realistic should fiction be? What side of reality should it portray and how much?
Now, before we begin, I'd like to make a bit of a disclaimer. These are only my own thoughts and my own philosophy. I do not claim to have all the answers, and there have great, virtuous, admirable writers on both sides of this debate and everywhere in between. I myself enjoy and love many works on all places in the spectrum. So, going through my thoughts here, just take them with a grain of salt.
In the usual way of things, my mind starts clattering with ideas and long freight trains when I'm supposed to be paying attention to something else, and my most recent rabbit hole was no exception. In my music history class, the topics were first Romantic Age grand opera, and then Romantic Age realistic opera. Now, without going too deeply into either of those things, they essentially boil down to this: earlier stories in opera were about larger than life figures with somewhat fantastical, romanticized stories and great questions asked and explored, while later opera stories were about more real, relatable people with sometimes hard or decrepit lives and more direct, tangible morals to the story. If you're at all familiar with opera, good examples would be Verdi's Nabucco and Bizet's Carmen respectively. Some classic literature parallels would be Beowulf and Little Women, or The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Great Gatsby. There are many more parallels too: Oedipus Rex and Our Town; Ten Commandments and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Les Miserables and West Side Story; Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams; the list goes on and on. (For the sake of clarity, from here on out, when referring to the philosophy as opposed to the usual meaning of the adjective, I'll capitalize "Realistic," and, while both things I'm referring to are sort-of Romantic, I'll refer to the non-Realist style as "Romantic.")
The idea behind the change in storytelling was simple on the surface, but I think it merits a closer look. As the theory goes, we should depict real life more closely to how it is because audiences will connect with it more and be more engaged by it. They will be more moved by it and understand it better if it relates to them closely. While it's true that depicting certain things will not be pretty, neither is real life. Suffering is such a real part of life that neglecting to depict it, or depicting it in a way that is surreal and unrelatable, makes the work difficult to read/watch/hear without skepticism. Additionally, if what's being depicted as ordinary contradicts the everyday experience of the audience, then they may dismiss the work - setting, theme, and all - as unbelievable or untrue.
It has been countered that some things should never be portrayed. I agree wholeheartedly, and many people who wrote in a Realistic style also did. While later modernist writers took the philosophy to a whole new level, I don't think the intention of Realism is to simply shock the audience with vulgarity, bleakness, or depravity. While it came out that way sometimes for the sake of delivering the moral of the story - as in The Great Gatsby depicting the alcoholic, abusive life of the rich class to tell us that this world and all things of it are vanity - most Realist stories are not meant to be sensationalist for the sake of it, per se.
That said, I believe Realist stories are deeply sensationalistic. The comment is often leveled against Romantic stories that they are larger than life and don't depict reality accurately. Now, the problem with this criticism is that Realist stories don't either. I'll come back to that in a moment. On a shallower note, we really don't want them to. Any story that depicted reality exactly as we experienced it would be dull as paint. If I started reading a novel wherein the heroine wakes up early every morning, goes to school, works, and then goes home and does homework, I would lay it away pretty quickly.
When consuming works of art, we want something bigger than ourselves. While it's good for us to be reminded from time to time of the flaws in our patterns and lifestyles, we become desensitized to it if we hear it all the time. If all novels in the 1920s had been oratories on the upper class's dissipation and emptiness, the message would have been thoroughly ignored. As it was, Gatsby made an astonishing effect because it was unique in its depiction. While other writers glorified the '20s glitz and leisure, F. Scott Fitzgerald tore away the glitter and beads and showed it as the lost, restless culture that it was. And that is the real point of Realist stories. The point is not as much homogeneousness as it is homily. Realist stories have to be a little harsher, a little more familiar, and a little more down-to-earth because their point is to deliver a quick, hard, simple message that people need to hear.
It's extremely effective whenever it's been used. Sometimes people remember the characters and the settings, and sometimes not, but they remember the bottom line of the story. I probably couldn't tell you the names of half the characters in West Side Story, but I remember vividly the visceral repugnance at the gang violence that I was meant to feel. A Realist story is like someone in a speech saying "listen up" - it catches your attention and lets you know that this last thing is really important.
The problem with saying "listen up" in a speech too many times is that is loses its power. It becomes monotonous and signifying of nothing. You've probably listened to a speaker before who uses the same potent phrase or comparison too many times and loses his audience's engagement as a result. Realist stories are very much like this. They serve a good purpose in a crisis, but they become desensitizing in large doses. If we take in too much of the hard, direct, and the gray - especially the morally gray - then we can come to accept it as normal and tune it out. If we're constantly fed things we're supposed to relate to, then we tend to come to see it as being indeed everyday, and thus mundane and ignorable.
That's a bit of a problem with writing stories in general. While we want to relate to our audience, like I said above, too much relatability creates predictability or boredom. We don't want our stories to perfectly reflect real life, and I think there is a deeper reason for that. Life in this world is never perfect - quite the opposite - and if we are only fed with the ugly, the commonplace, and the familiar, then we feel unfulfilled and lacking. We feel a distinct need for something more - some sort of resolve to our suspended existence.
This leads to my other problem with Realist writing. Like I said above, I think that Realist writing is quite profoundly sensationalistic. It's always an exaggeration. Realist writing is by its nature stuck in this world, and, while that may offer us a lot of wisdom on how to (or how not to) conduct our daily lives, it doesn't give us anything more universal to look to. What's more, much (not all, but much) of Realist writing is stuck in a sort-of incomplete version of this world. It's true - suffering, hardship, and immorality exist, but they are only a piece of our nature and existence. In fact, they are a small piece, like a parasite on an independent body. Poverty, sickness, and depravity are true in daily life, but so are other more beautiful, good things like marriage, children, humor, health, and simple everyday love. Most Realist stories focus on those former, uglier qualities and forget that the beautiful part of everyday life exists. And in a sense, that can be a good thing. It's hard to deliver a tough message without cutting to the quick and focusing on one thing. But nobody likes to listen to a fire-and-brimstone preacher all the time, and that's why these stories can be dulling to our senses even more than any other Realist stories. It's easy to see why we go to Realist stories more like Little Women or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when we want something lighter - while they do focus more on this world and its issues, they're uplifting because they present us with both the ugly and the beautiful sides of life. Even if they don't pack quite as much of a gut-punch when it's needed, they are good reminders in a more regular way.
Now to get to the meat of the matter. I believe that a more Romantic worldview is the superior one when it comes to writing stories. While it's true that it doesn't match up to real life, as I demonstrated above, no stories really do - that's rather the point of stories. We tend to ignore things that are too familiar to us. Romantic writing also can't come to arms in a crisis the same way a hard Realist story can, but, again, hard Realist stories are best to have in crises and not as the standard. Because Realist stories are stuck in this world - whether they present its good or not - they are always incomplete and imperfect. They may be splendid works, they may be some of history's masterpieces, but they never quite reach the thing that is most beautiful in them: the transcendental.
In any reaching for virtue, either by criticizing its lack or by encouraging its daily practice, a work touches on something universal. In Realist works, we only get these universal values through a human lens, but we yearn for a better look at them. Everyone wants the answers to the wide, vast questions of life, and this world can't give them to us. Nothing touches the heart and inflames the mind and soul like a work that explores a great question or some transcendental good. After all, one of the transcendental goods, beauty, is the basis of all art, including writing. Without it, there would be no good writing at all. Many love to read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, but most Christians I've talked to agree that the books that captivate them the most are books like Psalms, Lamentations, and Revelation: the books of mystery and of the great, universal ideas.
As immortal beings, we are designed to love and be drawn to the immortal. Things that mystify and go beyond our senses are what interest and benefit us most. Mysteries are not relatable; if they were, they would not be mysteries. That's precisely the beauty and the attraction of them to our nature. Fiction should reflect that truth, that ultimate Reality: that we are not alone in this immense world, and there is so much more to know than what we see and experience. Beowulf sacrificing himself to slay the dragon is Christ on the Cross; Nabucco's people exiled in a foreign land are the Church, the New Jerusalem, chosen to suffer through this world; Jean Valjean in his struggle against the world to become a truly just person is Fallen Man on his path back to God. In that sense, Romanticism is really the true realism because it depicts and hints at the Reality that is more real than anything on this earth: the Reality of goodness, truth, beauty, and of God, who is all these things and Being Itself.
Grand scale characters and plots exploring questions that are perennial and maybe seem obvious to us can be overdone like anything we human beings do. However, I think that they communicate the vastness of this universe and this existence much better than stories trapped on this earth do. Because Romantic works give us such a huge view to look at, they force us to actively consider and choose what our focus is. We can't passively take in a good, Romantic work; we have to internalize the ideas presented or else we can't understand it. There is no way for us to simply let it be. On that note, this can often be why many people profess not to enjoy grand, Romantic works as much. They take more intellectual effort to appreciate and cannot be taken in without engagement. Oftentimes, it's easier to have a moral handed to us without further ado, like Christ giving us parables in the Gospels. (And there's nothing wrong with that.) Remember, though, Christ also gave us Revelation. We're not meant only to be pushed towards Heaven and the transcendental goods, but also to push ourselves, to make a constant, real effort to ask the questions we must answer and pursue the goods we must acquire. For those reasons, we need the challenges in our stories to look not down at the earth, but up to the Heavens, and to ask What lies within.
Well, that's my two cents, anyhow. What are your thoughts? Do you prefer to read more Romantic or Realistic works? Which do you prefer to write? Share your thoughts, if you have any, and, meanwhile, have a wonderful Easter season! (And give Megan some extra applause if you enjoyed this post... Some parts were inspired by an old post of hers about language in writing, but I can't find the post anywhere to link to it anymore... [EDIT: Thanks to Megan, it's now linked in the comments below.])
