Once upon a time all our stories were myths and fables. We have always been enchanted by the fantastic, the incredible things that could not possibly happen - but what if they could?
The storyteller's job is to make that could so interesting, and so carefully drawn, that we get caught in the tapestry, and forget that it's impossible. If God flooded the earth, how did man and all the animals (besides the lucky fish) survive? OK, then tell us exactly how big this ark was, and where all the animals fit in it.
This diary is a look at the development of realism in novels. I'm examining how realism and fantasy work together, but this diary is the realism part; we'll dive into more of the Weirdness Within next Friday. How do mad science and weird magic come to life inside a skin of realistic facts and logical laws? How can lightning, devices and genius turn a sewn-together corpse into a living Frankenstein?
Ages of Fable
We're relatively spoiled these days, for freedom, material wealth, and entertainment. Throughout history, most people lived far more boring, repetitive, onerous lives than we do today. They wanted stories to be marvelous escapes. Myths, fables, epic poems and romantic ballads offered stories that were exotic, or larger than life, or more meaningful than their listeners everyday lives.
The engines of these stories were fantastic, but we wanted them adorned with realistic details, which allowed us to grasp the texture of the fictional world. We wanted to know what Valhalla, or Priam's Troy, or Arthur's Camelot looked like; we wanted to hear the hero's sword clang against the villain's shield. We only needed handholds to climb into the fable - we didn't expect the whole thing to make sense, or be credible. If the plot was riddled with coincidence, and the characters lacked depth and consistency, we just soaked in the action and the magic.
I can't pinpoint exactly why readers started asking for more and more realism in our favorite books. It happened gradually, over the last four centuries; more than half of it happened in the 1800s. Among other factors, I'd connect it to the rise of the middle class, the Age of Empiricism and, especially, the birth and development of the novel.
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Novels Learn to Walk
Don Quixote (perhaps the first novel) was the crash that occurs when the age of chivalry rides headfirst into a massive, very real, windmill. That's what the book is about. Don Quixote has read so many fantastic romances that they've rotted his brain, and he can no longer see things as they really are. He believes his skinny nag is a brave charger; he falls in love with a peasant girl, and sees her as a fair lady; and he jousts against some windmills, convinced that they're evil giants.
Cervantes packed a lot of realistic detail into his great work. We feel the dusty roads and the hot Spanish sun; we taste his modest meals, which are delicious after a long day's toil; and we start to care for the very human Don and Sancho Panza.
What constitutes Realism? What are the elements that convince us to fully inhabit the world of the novel? The first three are: coherent, credible but surprising plot; consistent but flexible, complex characters; panoramic sensual texture.
Don Quixote was ahead of its time in these respects, but it was still just a first stab towards Realism. For example, Don Quixote wanders into an inn in the middle of nowhere. By an astronomical coincidence, more than a dozen other major characters, singly and in groups, turn up at this isolated inn, the same evening.
Over the next two centuries more and more books were published, writers built on each other's advances, and novels grew more convincing in all dimensions. In the 1700s Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and various French writers worked more realism into their tales.
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The Age of Realism
In the 1800s the novel grew up. In 1800 the novel was a callow, gangly youth, fresh out of high school; by 1900 the novel was ready to write a symphony, run a parliament, or discover a new continent.
The first half of the century was dominated by the French and English, with Russians coming up from behind. Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas, Austen, Scott and Dickens each wrought many advances in all aspects of the novel. Publishing developments made the novel much cheaper than before, and brought a huge new middle-class readership. Writers could achieve money and fame like never before.
in 1857 Flaubert released Madame Bovary, which took realism to a higher level, and changed the game. Novelists across Europe, into Russia and America, aimed to match or surpass Flaubert's perfectly crafted and detailed work: Zola; Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray, Collins; Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; Melville and James, among others.
Balzac, Dickens and Tolstoy brought whole cities to life, they painted worlds. This cinematic approach introduced a richer sensuality, a more granular texture, to the novel. When we speak of realism in novels, this vividly drawn external world is what we think of first. But there is just as much reality to be discovered inside the human mind, heart and spirit.
Austen, Eliot and Dostoevsky dove further within, exploring our inner worlds. This was not virgin territory. St. Augustine, Dante and Richardson, among others, had probed these deeps. Dostoevsky, like Dante, sought the limits, where the human shaded off into angels and demons. But authors in the 1800s looked into all the inner nooks and crannies, and also put them all together into complete and fully human personalities.
The most ambitious authors at the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s looked so far and so minutely, outwards and inwards, that their worlds broke down into myriad dots of the subtlest hues, an impressionist portrait of a world too rich to fit into a photograph. These authors wove all the threads of the physical world, and portrayed our ever-changing stream of consciousness: Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
That's just the beginning of the Weirdness Within. Next week we'll look at how SF and Fantasy infect mainstream literature, and how these fantastical elements and Realism can work together to create a larger whole.
On Sunday I'll be filling in for quarkstomper at the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club, with an orthogonal view of the fantasy/realism divide, in Ugly SF Ducklings that grew into Literary Swans.
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What authors create a world so realistic and convincing that it completely sucks you in, and you feel as if you were there?
There are hundreds of facets in our experience of reality. Dickens, for example, has a particular knack for describing meals so well that we can almost smell and taste them. Are there any authors you can think of, who nail down one facet of reality just perfectly for you?