Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
The Real McCoy
By Denis Donoghue
Essays on Realism
by Georg Lukács, edited by Rodney Livingstone, translated by David Fernbach
The MIT Press, 250 pp., $19.95
The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley
by George Levine
University of Chicago Press, 357 pp., $25.00
Many readers still believe, despite much dissuasion, that serious fiction is bound to be realistic. Not real, but realistic: they know it is fiction, but fiction taking a particularly affirmative attitude toward common sense and the sense of reality sustained by observation and communication. They know when a sentence is realistic. 'Buttoned to the throat in a long, soft overcoat, dark green, Clarence Feiler got off the Hendaye Express in the Madrid station.' Realistic, because it gives the impression that other people got off the same train, and that reality is made up of many similar gestures and presences. 'The moon rocks whistled 'Finlandia,' by Jean Sibelius, while reciting The Confessions of St. Augustine, by I.F. Stone.' No, not realistic; because the sentence (from Donald Barthelme's story 'A Film') does not give the impression that the subject is separable from this account of it and is in some sense independent of the account. So the sentence is read as a joke, a conceit, a verbal flourish effected by virtue of the fact that you can make sentences say what you can't make moon rocks do.
Review, 4527 words
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