루트리지 서사이론 사전의 "리얼리즘" 관련 항목들

[sunanugi]

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005)

Edited by David Herman et al.

(* 당연히 링크는 깨어져 있음을 사전에 염두에 두시기를...)

REALEME

(** 재미있는 용어다.  "박진소(迫眞素)"라는 번역 용어를 제안한다.)

 

This term, analogous to the structuralist linguists' ‘phoneme’, ‘morpheme’, etc., was proposed by the *Tel Aviv cultural theorist Even-Zohar to designate ‘items of reality’ that a semiotic system recognises and admits to its repertoire. Not everything that is observable in the world is admissible in a given semiotic system, but rather only those that are ‘semioticised’ in that system. No discourse ever represents reality in the ‘raw’, relying instead on a preselection from the universe of potentially representable realities. Realemes form organised repertoires, which differ from culture to culture, and even from one genre or register to another in the same culture. Thus, French advertising texts avoid direct reference to children — children are not ‘realemes’ in that register — as becomes clear when such texts are contrasted with equivalent texts in Dutch translation, where children do appear (see ADVERTISEMENTS). Narrative *realism is an effect achieved sometimes by conformity to realeme repertoires, sometimes by their deliberate violation (Jakobson 1971 [1921]).

 

SEE ALSO: realist novel; reality effect; semiotics; structuralist narratology

 

References and further reading

 

Even-Zohar, Itamar (1990 [1980]) ‘“Reality” and Realemes in Narrative’, Poetics Today, 11.1: 207–18.

 

Jakobson, Roman (1971 [1921]) ‘On Realism in Art’, inLadislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds) Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Cambridge: MIT Press.

 

BRIAN McHALE

 

REALISM, THEORIES OF

 

Philosophical realism is a position affirming the real existence of an entity or a group of entities, including common sense objects of perception such as a tree, theoretically constructed entities such as a magnetic field, or abstract entities such as *truth (see EXISTENT). Realism in the literary or visual arts refers to an effect produced by a text or a visual *image, whereby these artistic modes are construed as being able to reflect and reproduce aspects of the real world (see REALITY EFFECT). Realism in narrative contexts refers to the capacity of narrative to portray people engaged in action-oriented situations (see ACTION THEORY).

 

These meanings of realism, divided disciplinarily, appear also to be divided conceptually, as they present fundamentally different conceptions of realism. The principal one concerns the ontological status of the object represented or perceived (see MODALITY); the other deals with the realm of effects produced by artistic and narrative modes of expression‎. Since Plato, however, the question of representation (immediate as opposed to indirect, demonstrated by the difference between the bed made by the carpenter and the one fabricated by the painter) has been tied to the nature of the object thereby produced. Counter to the apparent disciplinary divide between theories of realism, the question of representation has been recognised as both fundamentally philosophical and as carrying a range of implications for art. Varieties of the realist position in *philosophy can thus be shown to converge with aspects of realism in literary and art theory.

 

This convergence is also relevant to the study of realism in *narrative. In connection with narrative the meaning of realism can take both directions, referring to narrative as object or as *mode. It can refer to the objective existence of a specific narrative competence identified in human beings independent of differences of culture or inclination (see NARRATIVE UNIVERSALS), or it can refer to the transparency and naturalness of narrative modes in transmitting *events. Approaching the question of the realism of narrative in its full intricacy hence requires a consideration of notions that are tied to realism in various disciplinary contexts.

 

Realist positions and their convergence

 

To map the realist position, the following three realist claims can be distinguished (see Pettit 1991):

 

(1) Discourses with realist commitments posit their own distinct entities. For instance, *psychological discourse posits mental states, scientific discourse posits physical entities (such as heat) and unobservable theoretical entities (such as electrons; see SCIENCE AND NARRATIVE), and *Marxist discourse posits ideological superstructures (see IDEOLOGY AND NARRATIVE). These distinct entities are irreducible to entities posited by other discourses.

 

In connection with art and its realistic effects, this realist claim converges with the idea of a correlation between distinct modes of representation and the concrete settings evoked by these modes. For instance, a naturalist *genre of writing, such as Zola's, produces a picture of lower-class life; the use of linear geometry posits a distinct three-dimensional *space; the use of fragmented, emotive discourse posits mental entities such as the inner thoughts of *characters; radical metaphorical discourse (as in Surrealist poetry) posits impossible objects (see METAPHOR; SURREALIST NARRATIVE). The distinct entities posited by one mode of representation are irreducible to those posited by other modes.

 

(2) Epistemic states, such as belief dispositions, do not influence the objective existence and properties of states of affairs. For example, for a modal realist a future possible state of the universe (see POSSIBLE-WORLD S THEORY) exists objectively, even if he/she is ignorant of how to predict possible states of affairs from the actual one.

 

In connection with art and its realistic effects, this realist claim would refer to the unvarying correspondence between certain texts or compositions and their objects, regardless of the reader's or observer's beliefs or epistemic disposition. *Verisimilitude, as a predominant form of correspondence, makes the reader/observer ‘see’ the object in the text or picture either because he/she is deceived into doing so or just because of the facile recognition the artwork allows. The observer sees the grief on the Madonna's face in the Pieta because her grief is objectively there, written on the face of the painted image (see PICTORIAL NARRATIVITY). This is the case even if the observer is fundamentally an atheist in belief, or a disbeliever in the power of art, or just suffering from a headache that prevents her from seeing the image clearly. Likewise, the inner thoughts of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse are made knowable to the reader even if he/she knows nothing about *free indirect discourse, or misses the point of how those thoughts contribute to the narrative unfolding, or holds the view that human thoughts are in principle inaccessible to others.

 

(3) Entities, held to exist realistically, do so even if the substantive claims of the discourse referring to them are erroneous. Thus the chemical composition of water exists objectively regardless of whether experts in the field of chemistry present this composition in an accurate formula.

 

In the context of art, a realistic mode of representation can be considered effective even if the model guaranteeing *verisimilitude turns out to be wrong or deceptive (based on illusion). From Alberti to Gombrich, linear perspective is attributed absolute realism although inquiry into its visual bases has proven that its geometry cannot produce an accurate image of visual fields (Panowsky 1991 [1927]; Ronen 2002). The minute *description of everyday, common objects is taken to produce realistic effects although this mode of description can also be recruited to portray the most fantastic reality (which has given rise to the somewhat paradoxical notion of *magical realism).

 

Realism: a question of epistemic/representational mode

 

How can one decide which theory, among equally valid ones, is true? How is a story most naturally told? How is the inner world of a character/figure visually or textually transmitted? These questions do not just indicate the convergence of philosophical theories of realism with the ones that aestheticians and narrative theorists produce, but also reveal that the problem of realism raises questions regarding the mode and structure of representation no less than questions regarding the existence of the object represented. Can facts and truth be independent of language, mind, and mode of signification? This question comes up in both philosophy and art, and in both disciplinary frameworks it concerns the vehicles of representation that make the world accessible to us no less than the ontology of the part of reality being represented. The coalescence of ontological with epistemic concerns holds both for philosophical and literary views of realism. In the context of narrative this coalescence can be demonstrated in a notion implicit in many narrative theories, that *events make a narrative only when rendered as story, that is, that a narrative mode of rendering narrativises its content (see NARRATIVISATION).

 

A typical realist is concerned with the extent to which modes of theorising and representing can be trusted regarding the distinct entities they posit. Most philosophers indeed argue that realism amounts to more than just a metaphysical position about the objective existence of reality (Devitt 1991); rather, it can be couched in valid terms only when it is identified with a set of epistemic consequences regarding such topics as truth, *reference, etc. Realism is often qualified in epistemic terms, as a limit on human error for instance, by claiming that under optimal epistemic conditions of inquiry, there is no reason to assume a possible incompatibility between the existence of entities and what we know about them (Putnam 1990).

 

Epistemic concerns are paramount in the context of art and narrative since often the stability of objective reality, or of a generally accepted picture of reality, outside representation, is not questioned. Realistic effects of storytelling hence rely either on the use of modes assigned absolute effectiveness (descriptions are generally taken to add realism to narrative) or on the use of modes given to cultural-historical modification but appropriate for a worldview (the master-representative of the latter view is Auerbach and his notion of *mimesis).

 

Theories of realism can hence be mapped according to the element to which the role of mediating reality is assigned. What is known as naive realism attributes objective validity to sense perception in transmitting information about the world; modal realists trust modal operators in transmitting information about possible realities; scientific realists assign to modes of scientific iquiry the capability of discovering entities that objectively exist; realists within the philosophy of language believe language obeys a mechanism of meaning-production independent of linguistic contingencies because they trust meaning-theories to describe this mechanism accurately; realism within aesthetics means that art can represent parts of reality by employing a variety of artistic modes transparent/verisimilar enough not to interfere with the reality represented.

 

Thus realism is a position that attributes to the object or state of affairs represented a status independent of representation itself, because the mode of representation is considered the only one appropriate to the task. Realism in art refers to art's capacity to raise in its recipient a sense of approximating the true nature of the represented object by means of the appropriate representational modes.

 

The paradox of transparency

 

Realism assumes that mode of representation is tied so intimately to a represented entity that the former goes unmarked, and indeed a central issue raised regarding realism relates to the efficiency of representation itself. A realistic effect in art as well as a realist position in philosophy assumes a non-problematic relation between a set of signs and things in the world, as signs refer to objects that belong to another order without being noticed as different or as not wholly congruent with the things represented (see SEMIOTICS). The similarity between sign and represented content is addressed by realists through a series of concepts like transparency, verisimilitude, naturalness, iconicity, resemblance, correspondence, and so forth.

 

It was shown above that despite what seems like realism's exclusive commitment to the existence of represented entities, there is no way of separating the entity represented from the mode of representing it. This inseparability, however, results in a paradox since realism relies on transparency and verisimilitude for its effect and efficiency, whereas in principle the represented object and the mode of representation cannot be totally reduced one to the other. Transparency is always conditioned and limited; yet transparency stipulates the very possibility of realism. This paradoxical nature of transparent representation characterises the dilemma around the problem of realism. The paradox of realism can be found in accounts of the success of theories in physics and in interpretations of the success of a meticulously drawn self-portrait.

 

This paradox explains why discussions of realism in various disciplines actually aim at the endless array of cases where representation includes more than the object represented or subtracts something from it. While transparency in representation is shown through the similarity between sign and its represented content, the effect produced in the recipient (life-likeness or illusion of reality in the case of art, trustworthiness in the case of science) has to be accounted for by overcoming the irreducible distance between mode and object, the two participants in the dualistic domain of realist representation. The paradoxical nature of realism manifests itself when, despite stressing the dependence of realism on transparent signification, literary-artistic realists as well as philosophical realists formulate problems that arise from the irreducibility of sign to represented content — in order to prove that this content is unaffected by the materiality and lacunae in the mode of signification.

 

Realism and narrative

 

Realism in relation to narrative can refer to two different things: (1) The naturalness of narrative representation of events and actions; (2) the distinct existence of a cognitive or cross-cultural narrative competence (see COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY). While the first version of realism stresses narrative's representational transparency, the second stresses the innateness or universality of narrative competence, i.e., its ontological status.

 

Realism vis-a-vis the narrative mode typically relates to the transparency of the narrative recounting of facts, of causal relations, and of action (see CAUSALITY). The naturalness of narrative for these representational purposes is complemented by securing other modes of representation, like description, for other purposes (e.g., for creating a world of objects around human action) (Hamon 1991). Models of narrative often distinguish narrative modes according to one dominant criterion: that of the facile deducibility of narrated content. For instance, impersonal language is more transparent than the personal language of an individuated *narrator; the interpretive involvement of a third-person heterodiegetic narrator interferes with deducibility more than comments made in first-person because of the authority of the narrator (Doležel 1998; see AUTHENTICATION); iterative narrative modes interfere with transparency because they can result in grouping events irrespective of their ‘real’ succession (Genette 1988; see NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES). The demand for transparency is as overriding and paradoxical as in other contexts of realism: narrative is a natural form for particular contents because the realism of this content depends on its remaining unaffected by *narrativity.

 

Against the idea of a natural compatibility (TRANSPARENCY) between the narrative mode and a specific set of entities (particulars, not universals; time-based events, not exclusively timeless properties, etc.; see TIME IN NARRATIVE), an objection can be raised. It can be argued that narrative modes are partially indifferent to narrated content on two counts: first, narrative content can be inferred from many types of representation, including the most subjective, personal, intensely interpretive account; that is, transparency cannot work as a prevailing criterion in correlating narrated content with natural narrative rendering. Second, the naturalness of narrative rendering is applicable to any content; the supposedly natural compatibility between narrative and distinct entities like events and actions has to be revised since Einstein's concept of relativity can be rendered as story, and narrative content can be rendered by means of non-narrative modes. Thus entities constructed by narrative discourse are not as distinct as realism in narrative theory may assume. Many modes of rendering can be described as narrative in the broad sense and applied to a wide variety of contents, from sports commentaries (see SPORTS BROADCAST), through *epic poetry, to a scientific report. The distinct set of entities that suits narrative naturally is hence to be defined in very broad terms, as reflected in the wide range of fields to which narrative conceptualisations have been imported (see INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE; NARRATIVE TURN IN THE HUMANITIES).

 

A second objection to the naturalness of narrative arises from attempts to stress the belletristic nature of narrative discourse. In other words, it is the literary rendering of narrative that makes things, both actual and fictional look real. Thus the grammatical past used in narrative (both historical and fictional) and third-person *narration signify creation, the order of a literary domain of plausibility. Narrative introduces nothing of the naturalisable but an ambiguous form located between sincerity and falsehood (Barthes 1968). Narrative puts forward fabrication more than a naturalised reality (see FICTION, THEORIES OF; NATURALISATION).

 

Both objections can be met if beyond defining narrative in formal terms (as pointing to a distinct set of necessary action-oriented properties that enable the rendering of material as story), the overall purpose of narrative is theoretically grounded. Thus conceptualising narrative in terms of a meaning organisation may motivate the structuring of narrative *plot more than the mere presence of particulars engaged in action (seeNARRATIVE STRUCTURE). Similarly, psychoanalysts have suggested that narrative is an imaginary organisation of every fantasmatic material that aims to camouflage the true, unconscious question every particular fantasy posits: ‘what does the other want of me?’ Such suggestions hint at the distinctness of narrative and hence at the limits of narrative rendering.

 

The attempt to naturalise narrative forms to the point of utmost transparency is linked to the notion of narrative as a natural competence transcending cultural varieties of world-organisation. Narrative is fundamental to human ways of representation and as such is cross-cultural and transhistorical.

 

Against this realist view of narrative as independent of modes of belief or of cultural dispositions, one might object that narrative is man-made, fabricated for specific interests. People from distant cultures may not find the narrative mode as natural to decipher as we assume it to be because narrative forms, even if born with human history itself, are not innate; their cultural origins cannot be denied. Thus, even if narrative is a widespread way of manipulating the facts of history, one can point to other, non-narrative ways of organising facts in either history or fiction (see White 1987; see METAHISTORY). There is nothing more innate, or of a deeper cognitive reality, in narrative, than in other ways of reporting events. Whether narrative is seen as a universal pattern transcending cultural differences, whether narrative is taken to be a basic mode among others at the disposal of all known cultures, or whether narrative is taken to be a widely shared convention of the Western world — it is apparent that a realist position toward narrative is not easy to sustain.

 

The realism of narrative manifests the same paradoxical character as one finds in realism at large. The naturalness of narrative modes depends on their transparency yet also on the irreducibility of these very modes. The universality of narrative competence depends on its being sufficiently widespread, yet, in order not to lose the specificity of narrative vis-a-vis other modes of meaning organisation, narrative has to be restricted in accordance with what may turn out to be culture-dependent coordinates.

 

Realism, narrative, and truth

 

Linking the naturalness of narrative to its universal status may appear to be supported by narrative's indifference to reference and to truth value. Fictional and factual content lend themselves equally well to narrative modes of representation. We can, says Peter Lamarque, read all narratives as fictional, as pretending to have a truth-telling power; we then direct our attention to the literariness of narrative. While many literary readers of narrative realism will endorse this indifference to fact and truth and claim that narrativity is an overall quality of discursive practices, a different position can be defended from a philosophical point of view. Lamarque himself opposes the idea that philosophers, scientists, historians, and novelists equally fictionalise reality through storytelling and points at the importance of differentiating between types of commitment to truth and reference. Furthermore, when narrative introduces discrepancies with the real world (in the form of omniscient narration or of *fantastic elements), these may facilitate the reader's acquaintance with fictional truths but compromise the realism of narrative (see Walton 1990). The realism of narrative is hence stipulated, according to such views, by different degrees of commitment to referents and to truth in different kinds of narratives.

 

The correspondence between narrative representations and human action is difficult to prove. Yet, even if naturalness is objected to, this does not lead necessarily to a view of realism in narrative as a purely conventional matter. Even if one rejects the idea that the status of a reality is independent of the modes of its presentation and representation, the problem of realism is not resolved by opting for the view that realism amounts to no more than a familiarity with a given mode of representing or structuring a set of beliefs. Conventions cannot explain the unequally realistic effects achieved by a Vermeer and a Van Gogh; conventions cannot account for the shared sense of realism left by a meticulous description of everyday objects, a description that serves no meaningful purpose (see JAKOBSON 1962), or for the fact that ‘the photographs in Time magazine seem more “realistic” to us than Egyptian wall drawings in the “frontal eye” style’ (see Carroll 1999). The issue of realism involves not only the changing modes of representing but also the irreducible presence of an object.

 

SEE ALSO: realeme; realist novel

 

References and further reading

 

Barthes, Roland (1968) Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang.

 

Carroll, Noel (1999) Philosophy of Art, London: Routledge.

 

Devitt, Michael (1991) Realism and Truth, Oxford: Blackwell.

 

Doležel, Lubomir (1998) Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fried, Michael (1987) Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

 

Genette, Gerard (1988) Narrative Discourse Revisited, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

 

Gombrich, Ernst, and Didier Eribon (1993) Looking for Answers: Conversations on Art and Science, New York: Harry N. Abrams.

 

Hamon, Philippe (ed.) (1991) La description litteraire: Anthologie de texts theoriques et critiques, Paris: Macula.

 

Jakobson, Roman (1962) ‘On Realism in Art’, trans. Karol Magassy, inLadislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds) Readings in Russian Poetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

 

Lamarque, Peter (1990) ‘Narrative and Invention: The Limits of Fictionality’in ,Christopher Nash (ed.) Narrative in Culture, London: Routledge.

 

Panowsky, Erwin (1991 [1927]) Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood, New York: Zone Books.

 

Pettit, Philip (1991) ‘Realism and Response-Dependence’, Mind, 100, 587–626.

 

Putnam, Hilary (1990) Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

 

Ronen, Ruth (2002) Representing the Real, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

 

Walton, Kendall L. (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

 

White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

RUTH RONEN

REALITY EFFECT

 

The notion of the ‘reality effect’ (effet de reel) was introduced by Roland Barthes in an article published in the journal Communications in 1968. Barthes was led to this idea by the observation that in most (if not all) ‘classical’ literary texts, one comes across certain descriptive details which seem to have no logical, narratological, or aesthetic necessity (see DESCRIPTION). For Barthes, when the *narrator of Flaubert's ‘A Simple Heart’ notes that in the room occupied by Madame Aubain ‘an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’, the specific evocation of the ‘barometer’ indicates first and foremost that the description is ‘true to life’ (see REALISM, THEORIES OF; VERISIMILITUDE). Hence, what the reader of *realist novels takes for a reproduction of ‘real things’ is no more than a *rhetorical effect associated with a specific *genre.

 

The power of the ‘reality effect’ stems primarily from a complex of signs which stimulates the reader to transform reality into a ‘naturalised’ *storyworld. According to Barthes this operation of *naturalisation is achieved through a radical historical shift from an ‘ancient mode of verisimilitude’ to a ‘new verisimilitude’ which emerges with the advent of realism in literature. Before the realist sea change, one tended to consider things ‘only in relation to what is known of them by those who read or hear’; by contrast, the realist mode functionalises ‘all details, to produce strong structures and to justify no notation by the mere guarantee of “reality”’ (Barthes 1986 [1968]: 147). For Barthes, each time a signifier is obscured ‘to the advantage of the referent alone’ (148), the ‘reality effect’ is produced as a phenomenon which is ‘the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all standard works of modernity’ (148). The concept of the reality effect is thus a powerful analytical tool, throwing light on how fictional narratives can promulgate a sense of the real through the strategic, code-based use of verisimilar details.

 

SEE ALSO: semiotics