The Pretension of the Literary Realism

Abstract

This article asserts that realism is a subject that calls for reflection concerning the vagueness of its nature and the relativity of its concepts. Any text that manages to convey to the reader an awareness of the everyday, factual world is an example of realism: converting it into an artistic work is a sine qua non of the creative process. An attempt is made to show that all realism is fictional, that regardless of the degree of verisimilitude a work aims at it nonetheless works within an atmosphere of extreme artificiality. Canonical works such as Aristotle's Poetics, and the contributions of contemporary thinkers including Jose Ortega y Gasset, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Paul Westheim are used to help throw light on the nature of this esthetic tendency, and to analyze the relationship between words and things, truth and lies, reality and literature. Treatment of the emergence of the novel is a genre eminently realistic from its inception forms the central point of the article.