The European Novel
Realism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
The ideal is gone, lyricism has run dry. We are soberer. A severe, pitiless concern for truth, the
most modern form of empiricism, has penetrated into art. Charles Saint-Beuve (1857)
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the presentation of real and
existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible
objects; an object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.
Gustave Courbet (1861)
Let us imagine that impersonality is the sign of force. Let us absorb the objective, let it circulate
in us, let it reproduce itself on the outside without anyone being able to understand anything
about this marvellous chemistry. Our heart must be good only for feeling that of others. Let us
be magnifying mirrors of exterior reality. Flaubert, quoted in Roe (1989)
[Realism] was a type of literature that aimed to integrate the external world into the text –
breaking both with the visionary impetus of the romantic writer and with his confidence in the
primacy of self […] the central tenet of the Realist aesthetic: its concern for verisimilitude, for
probability, and for ‘close observation and the careful reproduction of minute detail and local
colour’ (Honoré de Balzac), but also the modest theoretical nature of its artistic ambit: the world
is simply there; we need only open our eyes to see and describe it […] The operative terms of
Romantic literature: ‘imagination’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘dream’ […] found their equivalents in the
infinitely more passive mechanisms of ‘reflection’, ‘mirror’, and ‘reproduction’, terms which
appeared whenever Realism required a theoretical defence […] reservations regarding the
Romantic mind, with its tenuous grasp on the world of recognisable reality, were shared by all
the major Realist writers. Martin Travers (1998)
For many centuries of European art and especially literature, imitation of the everyday, of the
real in the sense of what we know best, belongs to low art, and to low style: comedy, farce,
certain kinds of satire. […] The instinct of realist reproduction may be a constant in the human
imagination […]. What seems to change with the coming of the modern age – dating that from
sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, with the French Revolution as its great
emblematic event, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the English Romantic writers as its flag
bearers – is a new valuation of ordinary experience and its ordinary settings and things. This
new valuation is of course tied to the rise of the middle classes to cultural influence, and to the
rise of the novel as the preeminent form of modernity. What we see at the dawn of modernity
– and the age of revolutions – is the struggle to emerge of imaginative forms and styles that
would do greater justice to the language of ordinary men (in William Wordsworth’s terms) and
to the meaning of unexceptional human experience. Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (2005)
As it was I was somewhat interested in the scene; it sometimes lulled, although it could not
extinguish my grief. During the first day we travelled in a carriage. In the morning we had seen
the mountains at a distance, towards which we gradually advanced. We perceived that the
valley through which we wound, and which was formed by the river Arve, whose course we
followed, closed in on us by degrees; and when the sun had set, we beheld immense mountains
and precipes overhanging us on every side, and heard the sound of the river raging among rocks,
and the dashing of waterfalls around. Shelley, Frankenstein, Vol II, Ch I
The little town of Verrières could pass for one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté. Its white
houses, with their pointed red-tiled roofs, are spread along the slope of a hill whose every
undulation is marked by clumps of healthy chestnut trees. The river Doubs flows a few feet
beneath fortifications built long ago by the Spaniards but now in ruins.
Verrières is sheltered to the north by a high mountain, one of the spurs of the Jura. The
ragged summits of the Verra become covered in snow after the first cold days in October. A
torrential stream dashing down from the mountain runs through Verrières before discharging
into the Doubs, and supplies power to a large number of sawmills – an industry which is
extremely uncomplicated, but which provides a certain well-being for the greater part of the
inhabitants, who are more like peasants than townspeople. But it is not these sawmills that have
made the little town rich. It is owing to the manufacture of a painted cloth, known as Mulhouse,
that, since the fall of Napoleon, a general affluence has allowed the refurbishment of nearly all
the facades of the houses in Verrières.
Hardly have you entered the town than you are deafened by the racket of a noisy
machine of terrible aspect. Twenty massive hammers, falling with a boom that makes the street
tremble, are raised up in the air again by a wheel driven by the torrential current. Every day
each of these hammers makes I don’t know how many thousands of nails. Fresh, pretty young
girls feed the gigantic hammer blows with little pieces of iron that are promptly transformed
into nails. This crude looking industry is one of those that most surprises a traveller penetrating
for the first time into the mountains between France and Switzerland. If, on entering Verrières,
the traveller asks who own that fine nail factory which deafens people who ascend the main
street, someone will drawl in reply: Oh! That’s M. the Mayor’s. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
There are three main doctrines enunciated by Flaubert: First, subject is not important. Second,
the author must withdraw from his work, maintaining rigid objectivity and impassivity. Third,
literature does not preach but shows. There is a fourth doctrine, that of making a beautiful work
out of nothing, or as nearly nothing as possible.
George G Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, Princeton, (1963)
What strikes me as beautiful, what I should like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without
external attachments, which would hold together by itself through the internal force of its
style….a book which would have practically no subject, or at least one in which the subject
would be almost invisible, if that is possible. Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852,
cited in Becker (1963)
Form: Style Indirect Libre and the Impersonal Author
I think you can have no idea of the kind of book I am writing. In my other books I was slovenly; in
this I am trying to be impeccable and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no
comments, the author’s personality absent. It will make dreary reading; it will contain atrocious
things of misery and sordidness.’ Letter to Louise Colet, February 1, 1852, cited in Becker (1963)
Madame Bovary contains nothing from life. It is a completely invented story. I have put into it
nothing of my feelings, or of my experience. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary,
from the impersonality of the work. It is one of my principles that you must not write yourself.
The artist ought to be, like God in creation, invisible and omnipotent. He should be felt
everywhere but not be seen.
Flaubert, Letter cited in Becker (1963)
Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also
through the author’s eyes and language, too. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A
gap opens up between author and character, and the bridge – which is free indirect style itself –
between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance. This is merely
another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged
to see more than the character can see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person
narrator’s.)
James Wood, How Fiction Works, p.10
MORE MISCELLANEOUS QUOTES….
At first glance, Madame Bovary can seem to be a commonplace story with a simple, unoriginal
plot, featuring characters who are without exception, flawed or downright unpleasant […] this
was all intentional on Flaubert’s part. Although he was himself, thoroughly bourgeois in his
background and way of life, valuing comfort, stability, and wealth, he nevertheless detested
bourgeois ways and bourgeois values […] besides this, it was Flaubert’s conscious intention to
write an experimental novel, experimental not so much in its plot or characterisation as in its
style and its handling of the details of everyday life; a novel, even, in which style was the
essential quality, a work of art that was therefore largely concerned with itself.
He laboured heavily over the language […] then, in describing dryly and realistically the facts and
objects of daily life in a country town, he sought to transform the ordinary by bringing together
its beauty and ugliness and finding aesthetic value in their combination […] This aspect of
Flaubert’s style was revolutionary, showing up the unreality and melodramatic modes of other
contemporary fiction; and it accorded perfectly with the subdued irony he displayed towards his
characters, raising them from being merely ridiculous or despicable to being figures of pathos or
tragedy. Phillip Gaskell (1999)
Realism is no more than one kind of technique for selectively representing one way of looking at
‘reality’. It reacts against previous traditions that chose the fantastic, the idealistic or the
exceptional, and sets out to create the illusion of observing impartially the ordinary events of
average life. It need not logically imply insistence on the sordid, though in reacting against
abstract and idealised presentations it may come to stress this side of things. Fairlie (1962)
The hatred of realism is a hatred of the reality it represents […] The paradoxical force of
Flaubert’s writing is then that realism, development and critique of romanticism, is itself equally
subject to critique; the movement of disillusionment from romanticism to realism is also for him
just as much a refusal of any of the illusions of the latter, of any of realism’s social, progressive
purpose: realism is as execrable as the reality it knows and depicts, is caught in the surrounding
stupidity, the general fetidness. Flaubert is the anti-realist at the heart of realism, with
romanticism as the impetus and the edge of his critique, as the term for all the strength of
desire negated by this bourgeois reality and by what is, for Flaubert, its realism. It is the distance
from the given reality, exactly the execration of the ordinary life enacted in Emma’s story, that
counts and that produces the lack of value for which the novel is brought to trial: romanticism
has become demoralisation, remaining nevertheless as an aspiration in reaction against this
world whose reality it seeks to expose, to set out as it really is, with no concessions to any of its
fictions of itself […] For this duality of realism/romanticism, the very situation of his writing,
Flaubert, then, has his resolution, a resolution by displacement to another value: Art. Reality is
to be set out as it is, but also transformed, is to serve as a springboard for style, for the work of
art. Those who most powerfully claimed Madame Bovary as a realist-naturalist model found
themselves at the same time obliged to acknowledge that something did not quite fit […]
Realism in Flaubert is platitude, the platitude of the reality and the platitude of this realism
which is part of that reality: art alone can offer – can be – something else. Heath(1992)
The concept of impersonality therefore, has nothing to do with the development of some third
person voice, some voice of knowledge […] a sort of witness to things who guides our reading
and decrees meanings, some supposedly –God-like narrator. God in Flaubert’s version is
everywhere present but nowhere in particular, nowhere visible; impersonality, again, is
immersion, circulation. It is not a question of an ‘objective’ position in the work but of a play of
visions, perspectives, perceptions across the characters and their doings and their world, of a
tissue of discourses, ideas, orderings of meaning; leaving the reader deprived of any given
grounds as to ‘what to think’, not taken in hand by some privileged voice. Impersonality is
accompanied by uncertainty; nothing is sure, nothing definitive. Flaubert’s truth is that there is
no concluding truth other than the conclusion that there is no such truth, and art is true as the
recognition of that; with impersonality as its mode of recognition, against the stupidity of
conclusions. Heath (1992)
To Flaubert himself the writer’s business is to create the illusion of life and leave the reader to
draw his own conclusions. Fairlie (1962)
I think we have a thirst for reality. Which is curious, since we have too much reality, more than
we can bear. But that is the lived, experienced reality of the everyday. We thirst for a reality
that we can see, hold up to inspection, understand. ‘Reality TV’ is a strange realization of this
paradox: the totally banal become fascinating because offered as spectacle rather than
experience – offered as what we sometimes call vicarious experience, living in and through the
lives of others. That is perhaps the reality that we want.
Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (2005)
In Stendhal and Balzac we frequently and indeed almost constantly hear what the writer thinks
of his characters and events; sometimes Balzac accompanies his narrative with a running
commentary – emotional or ironic or ethical or historical or economic. We also very frequently
hear what the characters themselves think and feel, and often in such a manner that, in the
passage concerned, the writer identifies himself with the characters. Both these things are
almost wholly absent from Flaubert’s world; His opinion of his characters and events remains
unspoken; and when the characters express themselves it is never in such a manner that the
writer identifies himself with their opinion, or seeks to make the reader identify himself with it.
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; and this is done in the
conviction that one is able to express it purely and completely, more than any opinion or
judgement appended to it could do. Upon this conviction – that is, upon a profound faith in the
truth of language responsibly, candidly and carefully employed – Flaubert’s artistic practice
rests. Auerbach (1953)
Bibliography – There’s a huge amount of material on Realism, French Realism and Flaubert.
This is just a selection. Feel free to explore other texts and resources.
General
Birkett, Jennifer, A guide to French literature: from early modern to postmodern (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997)
Finch, Alison, French Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)
Gaskell, Phillip, Landmarks in European Literature (Edinburgh: EUP, 1999)
Travers, Martin, An Introduction to Modern European Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998)
General Realism
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (California:
Princeton University Press, 1957)
Becker, George J, Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1963)
Ermath, Elizabeth Deeds, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983)
Furst, Lilian, Realism (London: Longman, 1992)
Grant, Damian, Realism (Critical Idion)
Kearns, Katherine, Nineteenth-century literary realism: through the looking glass (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Larkin, Maurice, Man and society in nineteenth-century realism: determinism and literature
(London: Macmillan, 1977)
McCabe, Colin, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979)
Stern, JP, On Realism (1973)
Tallis, Raymond, In Defence of Realism (1988)
Tanner, Tony, Adultery in the novel: contract and transgression (NY: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1979)
Turnell, Martin, The Rise of the French Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979)
Williams, D. A. (ed), The monster in the mirror: studies in nineteenth-century realism (Oxford:
Oxford U.P., 1978)
On Flaubert
Bloom, Harold (ed) Gustave Flaubert (NY: Chelsea, 1989)
Curry, Biazzo, Description and meaning in three novels by Gustave Flaubert (New York: Peter
Lang, 1997)
Fairlie, Alison, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (London: E. Arnold, 1962)
Fairlie, Alison, Imagination and language: collected essays on Constant, Baudelaire, Nerval,
Flaubert (Cambridge: CUP, 1981)
Heath, Stephen, Flaubert: Madame Bovary(Cambridge: CUP, 1992)
Nadeau, Maurice, The Greatness of Flaubert (Manchester: Alcove Press, 1972
Porter, Lawrence (ed),Critical Essays on Gustave Flaubert (Boston: G K Hall, 1986)
Roe, David, Gustave Flaubert (London: MacMillan, 1989)
Schehr, Lawrence, Flaubert and sons: readings of Flaubert, Zola and Proust (New York: Peter
Lang, 1986)
Sherington, R. J. Three Novels by Flaubert (Oxford: OUP 1970)
Starkie, Enid, Flaubert: the making of the master (NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967)
You might also want to check out sections on MB in Roland Barthes (1967) ‘The Reality Effect’
and Writing Degree Zero