Dialectic of Realism

Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism continues the argument he made a couple of decades ago in Signatures of the Visible. In that earlier book, Jameson argues that realism depended on “prolonging and preserving – rather than ‘resolving’ – [a] constitutive tension and incommensurability.” 

That tension is inherent in realism’s attempt to render reality raw, but to do it through the artifice of fiction. As Ben Jeffrey, the TLS reviewer of Antinomies, puts it, it’s a matter of “artists striving to produce ever more finely grained representations of reality, compulsively hunting for uncultivated subject matter, discarding any methods that have become ‘artificial,’ until the process can go no further and collapses into the era of modernism with its own set of contradictions and propulsive forces. . . . artists striving to produce ever more finely grained representations of reality, compulsively hunting for uncultivated subject matter, discarding any methods that have become ‘artificial,’ until the process can go no further and collapses into the era of modernism with its own set of contradictions and propulsive forces.”

Recent experiments with non-narrative fiction are not so much the “exhaustion” of realism as the manifestation of the tension inherent in realism from the outset.