The Demands of Realism
Some thoughts on plot-centric approaches to fiction, and a world against meaning
This morning I read Mattie Lewis’s post about necessity in fiction, aptly titled “On Necessity.” I think necessity is an important question, especially in the short story form, where the inquiry manifests as how best to wield a sharp knife. The short story’s unity is a single, incredibly dense point, rather than the web of the novel’s. But if you read Lewis’s post, you’ll note that the question of necessity isn’t used that way.
I don’t have much to add onto her re-framing of the question, but I noted that the questions of necessity are ones that are worried about relevance not to the story, but to the plot. An over-obsession with “what happened” undergirds this misconception, along with hand-wringing over sex scenes, and even spoilers (which I’m mostly indifferent to, except in stories that are reliant on a particular kind of tension). The mode of literary criticism that weighs up a character’s flaws and sins, looks at where the story leaves them at its end, and decides whether the story was romanticizing or approving or normalizing or celebrating those flaws is, too, wrapped up in the ending. In the plot-centric worldview, the climax of the story is an enormous tree, and the rest of the story has only the responsibility of providing nourishment for its roots.
In Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel, he posits that the reason why the epic form gave way to the novel was the transformation of the world around the art: for the ancient Greeks, meaning was evident and certain in the world around them, for those in the time of the novel, meaning was absent and so the novel had to create it. What, then, for a world hostile to meaning? Since Lukacs’s time, community and the sense of self have been hollowed out, and replaced with consumption. Criticism– of literature, of art, of film– has been oriented away from its dual roles as the guide of social interpretation and the construction of the sophisticated audience. Instead, it is now largely a marketing concern. There are exceptions, there are nuances, but if you walk out your door looking for meaning, you’re more likely to find someone trying to sell you something for twenty dollars.
Without meaning, there is only one question left by which we evaluate the world: what happened? And that is the core of the plot-centric worldview, the parasitism of the climax when engaging in a realism that has to mimic the world against meaning. The readers must be assured that this story is something that happened, or could happened, or would have happened in this world with these rules– for all that sci-fi and fantasy get lost in world-building, it is realism that leads them into the maze. Otherwise, what happened is irrelevant.
There are a couple worthwhile responses. One is to persist in realism that rejects the climax as king. Stories that achieve richness in character interactions, thematic depth, where what happens in the end isn’t so critical. Another response is to embrace falseness: characters that don’t talk to each other quite like people do (e.g. Joy Williams) or works that call attention to their own fictionality like The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (the First Good Novel), in which the author-narrator meets with his characters throughout the 50 prologues that begin the novel. If we refuse to speak the language of the world as it is, we will find that we can say much more than we thought.
Your point about dialogue hit close to home for me as I have a personal aversion to naturalistic dialogue both in literature and film (Richard Linklater is torture for me). I'd love if, in future posts, you would go beyond the (necessary) negative first step of embracing falseness (which still reads as rejecting what mainstream advocates) to explore concrete possibilities on how to do so. In the dialogue case, for example, my choice tends to be for elevation: every single line must have a meaning and a purpose, unlike real life dialogue. I feel this approach, however, tends to clash with your perspective for being too functionalist?