Context
On Realism and Art
Roman Jakobson
The following essay first appeared in 1921. It is collected in Readings in Russian Poetics, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Until
recently, the history of art, particularly that of literature, has had
more in common with causerie than with scholarship. It obeyed all the
laws of causerie, skipping blithely from topic to topic, from lyrical
effusions on the elegance of forms to anecdotes from the artist’s life,
from psychological truisms to questions concerning philosophical
significance and social environment. It is such a gratifying and easy
task to chat about life and times using literary works as a basis, just
as it is more gratifying and easier to copy from a plaster cast than to
draw a living body. In causerie we are slipshod with our terminology;
in fact, variations in terms and equivocations so apt to punning often
lend considerable charm to the conversation. The history of art has
been equally slipshod with respect to scholarly terminology. It has
employed the current vocabulary without screening the words critically,
without defining them precisely, and without considering the
multiplicity of their meanings. For example, historians of literature
unconscionably confused the idealism denoting a specific philosophical
doctrine with a looser idealism denoting behavior, motivated by other
than narrow considerations of material gain. Still more hopeless was
the web of confusion surrounding the term "form," brilliantly exposed
by Anton Marty in his works on general grammar. It was the term
"realism," however, which fared especially badly. The uncritical use of
this word, so very elusive in meaning, has had fateful consequences. What
is realism as understood by the theoretician of art? It is an artistic
trend which aims at conveying reality as closely as possible and
strives for maximum verisimilitude. We call realistic those works which
we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitude. Right off
we are faced with an ambiguity, namely: In
other words, to the literary historians the realistic works of the last
century represent the highest degree of verisimilitude, the maximum
faithfulness to life. Let us now analyze the concept of
verisimilitude in art. While in painting and in the other visual arts
the illusion of an objective and absolute faithfulness to reality is
conceivable, "natural" (in Plato’s terminology), verisimilitude in a
verbal expression or in a literary description obviously makes no sense
whatever. Can the question be raised about a higher degree of
verisimilitude of this or that poetic trope? Can one say that one
metaphor or metonymy is conventional or, so to say, figurative? The
methods of projecting three-dimensional space onto a flat surface are
established by convention; the use of color, the abstracting, the
simplification, of the object depicted, and the choice of reproducible
features are all based on convention. It is necessary to learn the
conventional language of painting in order to "see" a picture, just as
it is impossible to understand what is spoken without knowing the
language. This conventional, traditional aspect of painting to a great
extent conditions the very act of our visual perception. As tradition
accumulates, the painted image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which
the object portrayed is linked by contiguity. Recognition becomes
instantaneous. We no longer see a picture. The ideogram needs to be
deformed. The artist-innovator must impose a new form upon our
perception, if we are to detect in a given thing those traits which
went unnoticed the day before. He may present the object in an unusual
perspective; he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his
predecessors. Thus Kramskoj, one of the founders of the so-called
realist school of Russian painting, recounts in his memoirs his efforts
to deform to the utmost the principles of composition as advocated by
the Academy. The motivation behind this "disorder" was the desire for a
closer approximation of reality. The urge to deform an ideogram usually
underlies the Sturm und Drung stage of new artistic currents. Everyday
language uses a number of euphemisms, including polite formulas,
circumlocutions, allusions, and stock phrases. However, when we want
our speech to be candid, natural, and expressive, we discard the usual
polite etiquette and call things by their real names. They have a fresh
ring, and we feel that they are "the right words." But as soon as the
name has merged with the object it designates, we must, conversely,
resort to metaphor, allusion, or allegory if we wish a more expressive
term. It will sound more impressive, it will be more striking. To put it in another way, when searching for a word which will
revitalize an object, we pick a farfetched word, unusual at least in
its given application, a word which is forced into service. Such an
unexpected word may, depending on current usage, be either a figurative
or a direct reference to the object. Examples of this sort are
numerous, particularly in the history of obscene vocabulary. To call
the sex act by its own name sounds brazen, but if in certain circles
strong language is the rule, a trope or euphemism is more forceful and
effective. Such is the verb utilizirovat [to utilize] of the
Russian hussar. Foreign words are accordingly more insulting and are
readily picked up for such purposes. A Russian may use the absurd
epithets gollandskij [Dutch] or morzovyj [walrus-like]
as abusive modifiers of an object which has nothing to do with either
Holland or walruses; the impact of his swearing is greatly heightened
as a result. Instead of the infamous oath involving copulation with the
addressee’s mother, the Russian peasant prefers the fantastic image of
copulating with the addressee’s soul—and, for further emphasis, uses
the negative parallelism: tvoju dusu ne mat [your soul not your mother]. The
same applies to revolutionary realism in literature. The words of
yesterday’s narrative grow stale; now the item is described by features
that were yesterday held to be the least descriptive, the least worth
representing, features which were scarcely noticed. "He is fond of
dwelling on unessential details" is the classic judgment passed on the
innovators by conservative critics of every era. I leave it to the
lover of quotations to collect similar judgments pronounced on Pushkin,
Gogol, Tolstoy, Andrei Bely, and others by their contemporaries. To the
followers of a new movement, a description based on unessential details
seems more real than the petrified tradition of their predecessors. But
the perception of those of a more conservative persuasion continues to
be determined by the old canons; they will accordingly interpret any
deformation of these canons by a new movement as a rejection of the
principle of verisimilitude, as a deviation from realism. They will
therefore uphold the old canons as the only realistic ones. Thus, in
discussing meaning A of the term "realism" (i.e., the artistic intent
to render life as it is), we see that the definition leaves room for
ambiguity: The concrete content of A1, A2, B1, and B2 is extremely relative.
Thus a contemporary critic might detect realism in Delacroix, but not
in Delaroche; in El Greco and Andrei Rublev, but not in Guido Reni; in
a Scythian idol, but not in the Laocoon. A directly opposite judgment,
however, would have been characteristic of a pupil of the Academy in
the previous century. Whoever senses faithfulness to life in Racine
does not find it in Shakespeare, and vice versa. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, a group of painters struggled in
Russia on behalf of realism (the first phase of C, i.e., a special case
of A1). One of them, Repin, painted a picture, "Ivan the Terrible Kills
His Son." Repin’s supporters greeted it as realistic (C, a special case
of B1). Repin’s teacher at the Academy, however, was appalled by the
lack of realism in the painting, and he carefully itemized all the
instances of Repin’s distortion of verisimilitude by comparison with
the academic canon which was for him the only guarantee of
verisimilitude (i.e., from the standpoint of B2).
1. Realism may refer to the aspiration and intent of the
author; i.e., a work is understood to be realistic if it is conceived
by its author as a display of verisimilitude, as true to life (meaning A).
In the first case, we are forced to evaluate on an intrinsic
basis; in the second case, the reader’s individual impression is the
decisive criterion. The history of art has hopelessly confused these
two interpretations of the term "realism." An objective and irrefutable
validity is ascribed to individual, private local points of view. The
question as to whether a given work is realistic or not is covertly
reduced to the question of what attitude I take toward it. Thus meaning
B imperceptibly replaces meaning A. Classicists, sentimentalists, the
romanticists to a certain extent, even the "realists" of the nineteenth
century, the modernists to a large degree, and, finally, the futurists,
expressionists, and their like have more than once steadfastly
proclaimed faithfulness to reality, maximum verisimilitude>—in other
words, realism>—as the guiding motto of their artistic program. In
the nineteenth century, this motto gave rise to an artistic movement.
It was primarily the late copiers of that trend who outlined the
currently recognized history of art, in particular, the history of
literature. Hence, one specific case, one separate artistic movement
was identified as the ultimate manifestation of realism in art and was
made the standard by which to measure the degree of realism in
preceding and succeeding artistic movements. Thus, a new covert
identification has occurred, a third meaning of the word "realism" has
crept in (meaning C), one which comprehends the sum total of the features characteristic of one specific artistic current of the nineteenth century.
2. A work may be called realistic if I, the person judging it, perceive it as true to life (meaning B).
A1 : The tendency to deform given artistic norms conceived as an approximation of reality;
Meaning B presupposes that my subjective evaluation will pronounce
a given artistic fact faithful to reality; thus, factoring in the
results obtained, we find:
A2 : The conservative tendency to remain within the limits of a given artistic tradition, conceived as faithfulness to reality.
B1 : I rebel against a given artistic code and view its deformation as a more accurate rendition of reality;
In the latter case only those artistic facts which do not
contradict my artistic values may be called realistic. But inasmuch as
I hold my own values (the tradition to which I belong) to be the most
realistic, and because I feel that within the framework of other
traditions my code cannot be fully realized even if the tradition in
question does not contradict it, I find in these traditions only a
partial, embryonic, immature, or decadent realism. I declare that the
only genuine realism is the one on which I was brought up. Conversely,
in the case of B1, my attitude to all artistic formulas contradicting a
particular set of artistic values unacceptable to me would be similar
to my attitude in the case of B2 toward forms which are not in
opposition. I can readily ascribe a realistic tendency (realistic as
understood by A1) to forms which were never conceived as such. In the
same way, the Primitives were often interpreted from the point of view
of B1. While their incompatibility with the norms on which we were
raised was immediately evident, their faithful adherence to their own
norms and traditions was lost from view (i.e., A2 was interpreted as
A1). Similarly, certain writings may be felt and interpreted as poetry,
although not all meant as such. Consider Gogol’s pronouncement about
the poetic qualities of an inventory of the Muscovite crown jewels,
Novalis’s observation about the poetic nature of the alphabet, the
statement of the Futurist Krucenyx about the poetic sound of a laundry
list, or that of the poet Xlebnikov claiming that at times a misprint
can be an artistically valid distortion of a word.
B2 : I am conservative and view the deformation of the artistic code, to which I subscribe, as a distortion of reality.
Meanwhile, those art historians who, as we have already indicated, were primarily associated with the later imitators of "realism" by virtue of their aesthetic code (the second phase of C), arbitrarily equated C and B2, even though C is in fact simply a special case of B. As we know, meaning B covertly replaces A, so that the whole difference between A1 and A2 is lost, and the destruction of ideographs is understood only as a means of creating new ones. The conservative, of course, fails to recognize the self-sufficient aesthetic value of deformation. Thus, supposedly having A in mind (actually A2), the historian of art addresses himself to C. Therefore, when a literary historian brilliantly declares that "Russian literature is typically realistic," his statement is tantamount to saying, "Man is typically twenty years old."
As the tradition equating realism with C became established, the new realist artists (in the A1 sense) were compelled to call themselves neorealists, realists in the higher sense of the word, or naturalists, and they drew a line between quasi- or pseudo-realism© and what they conceived to be genuine realism (i.e., their own). "I am a realist, but only in the higher sense of the word," Dostoyevski declared. And an almost identical declaration has been made in turn by the Symbolists, by Italian and Russian Futurists, by German Expressionists, and so on and on. These neorealists have at various times completely identified their aesthetic platforms with realism in general, and, therefore, in evaluating the representatives of C, they had to expel them from the ranks of realism. Thus posthumous criticism has periodically questioned the realism of Gogol, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Ostrovski.
The manner in which C itself is characterized by historians of art, especially historians of literature, is very vague and approximate. We must not forget that the imitators were those who decided which characteristics typified realism. A closer analysis will no doubt replace C with a number of more precise values and will reveal that certain devices which we indiscriminately associate with C are by no means typical of all the representatives of the so-called realist school; the same devices are in fact also found outside the realist school.
We have already mentioned the characterization of progressive realism in terms of unessential details. One such device>—cultivated, incidentally, by a number of the representatives of the C school (in Russia, the so-called Gogol school) and for that reason sometimes incorrectly identified with C—is the condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity, i.e., the use of the normal designative term. This "condensation" is realized either in spite of the plot or by eliminating the plot entirely. Let us take a crude example from Russian literature, that of the suicides of Poor Liza and Anna Karenina. Describing Anna’s suicide, Tolstoy primarily writes about her handbag. Such an unessential detail would have made no sense to Karamzin, although Karamzin’s own tale (in comparison with the eighteenth-century adventure novel) would likewise seem but a series of unessential details. If the hero of an eighteenth-century adventure novel encounters a passer-by, it may be taken for granted that the latter is of importance either to the hero or, at least, to the plot. But it is obligatory in Gogol or Tolstoy or Dostoyevski that the hero first meet an unimportant and (from the point of view of the story) superfluous passer-by, and that their resulting conversation should have no bearing on the story. Since such a device is frequently thought to be realistic, we will denote it by D, stressing that this D is often found within C.
A pupil is asked to solve a problem: "A bird flew out of its cage; how soon will it reach the forest, if it flies at such a such a speed per minute, and the distance between the cage and the forest is such and such?" "What color is the cage?" asks the child. This child is a typical realist in the D sense of the word.
Or, an anecdote of the type known as an Armenian riddle: "It hangs in the drawing room and is green; what is it?" The answer: "A herring.">—"Why in a drawing room?">—"Well, why couldn’t it hang there?">—"Why green?">—"It was painted green.">—"But why?">—"To make it harder to guess." This desire to conceal the answer, this deliberate effort to delay recognition, brings out a new feature, the newly improvised epithet. Exaggeration in art is unavoidable, wrote Dostoyevski; in order to show an object, it is necessary to deform the shape it used to have; it must be tinted, just as slides to be viewed under a microscope are tinted. You color your object in an original way and think that it has become more palpable, clearer, more real (A1). In a Cubist’s picture, a single object is multiplied and shown from several points of view; thus it is made more tangible. This is a device used in painting. But it is also possible to motivate and justify this device in the painting itself; an object is doubled when reflected in a mirror. The same is true of literature. The herring is green because it has been painted; a startling epithet results, and the trope becomes an epic motif. Why did you paint it? The author will always have an answer, but, in fact, there is only one right answer: "To make it harder to guess."
Thus a strange term may be foisted on an object or asserted as a particular aspect of it. Negative parellelism explicitly rejects metaphorical substitution for its proper term: "I am not a tree, I am a woman," says the girl in a poem by the Czech poet Sramek. This literary construction can be justified; from a special narrative feature, it can become a detail of plot development: "Some said, ‘These are the footprints of an ermine’; others reported, ‘No, these are not the footprints of an ermine; it was Curila Plenkovic passing by.’" Inverted negative parallelism rejects a normally used term and employs a metaphor (in the Sramek poem quoted earlier: "I am not a woman, I am a tree," or the following from a play by another Czech poet, Capek: "What is this?>—A handkerchief.>—But it is not a handkerchief. It is a beautiful woman standing by the window. She’s dressed all in white and is dreaming of love."
In Russian erotic tales, copulation is frequently stated in terms of inverted parallelism; the same is true of wedding songs, with the difference that in the latter, the constructions using metaphors are not usually justified, while in the former these metaphors find motivation as the means by which the cunning hero can seduce the fair maid, or as an interpretation of human copulation by an animal incapable of comprehending it. From time to time, the consistent motivation and justification of poetic constructions have also been called realism. Thus the Czech novelist Capek-Chod in his tale, "The Westernmost Slav," slyly calls the first chapter, in which "romantic" fantasy is motivated by typhoid delirium, a "realistic chapter."
Let us use E to designate such realism, i.e., the requirement of consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices. This E is often confused with C, B, etc. By failing to distinguish among the variety of concepts latent in the term "realism," theoreticians and historians of art>—in particular, of literature>—are acting as if the term were a bottomless sack into which everything and anything could be conveniently hidden away.
This objection may be made: no, not everything. No one will call Hoffmann’s fantastic tales realistic. But does this not indicate that there is somehow a single meaning in the word "realism," that there is, after all, a common denominator?
My answer is: no one will call a "key" a "lock," but this does not mean that the word "lock" has only one meaning. We cannot equate with impunity the various meanings of the word "realism" just as we cannot, unless we wish to be called mad, equate a hair lock with a padlock. It is true that the various meanings of some words (for example, "bill") are far more distinct from one another than they are in the case of the word "realism," where we can imagine a set of facts about which we could simultaneously say, this is realism in the meaning of C, B, or A1, etc., of the word. Nevertheless, it is inexcusable to confuse C, B, A1, etc. A term once used in American slang to denote a socially inept person was "turkey." There are probably "turkeys" in Turkey, and there are doubtless men named Harry who are blessed with great amounts of hair. But we may not jump to conclusions concerning the social aptitudes of the Turks nor the hairiness of men named Harry. This "commandment" is self-evident to the point of imbecility, yet those who speak of artistic realism continually sin against it.
—Translated from Russian by Karol Magassy
