Table Of ContentThe Politics of Realism
ii
The Politics of Realism
Thomas Docherty
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For the University of Glasgow
vi
Contents
Introduction 1
Part I Controlling the real and its representations
1 Assembly: Reality and the commerce of censorship 23
2 A present and private reality: Labour, sex and death in Courbet’s
painting 48
3 Grotesque Realism: Flaubert, Baudelaire, impropriety and decorum 70
4 Legislating reality: Law, religion and education 87
Part II Making the real
5 Science and modernity: Vision, force, Turgenev and Russian
Formalism 119
6 Realism changes reality: Revolution, documentary and socialist
realisms 149
Part III Making the unreal
7 Naked propaganda: ‘The intimate things of common life’ 175
8 Neorealism: The real as resistance 197
9 The politics of fact, and the danger of totalitarian Realism 227
Bibliography 265
Index 274
viii
Introduction
1
‘What happened? . . . No; what really happened?’
The history of criticism is written into the relation between these two
phrases. It is the critical intellectual who interjects the ellipsis here, as the space
of a fundamental scepticism or doubt about the constitution of reality. That is
accompanied by a further doubt: the critical intellectual is disinclined to believe
what she or he is told, disinclined to accept the world as presented or represented.
This is perhaps especially true of the contemporary critical intellectual. At an
earlier stage in the institutional formation, history and development of literary
criticism, the critical act was primarily an act of judgement. ‘Criticism’, we knew,
was a term derived into English from the ancient Greek, ‘krinein’, meaning to judge
or to decide. More recently, however, and no doubt because of a historical political
culture in which the laboratory sciences have been deemed to be more ‘realistic’,
more useful in real and material terms than poetry, criticism has concerned itself
with questions of evidence. The critic operates increasingly as a forensic detective
– sometimes as a political paranoiac – seeking out ‘what really happened’ or what
is really going on in a work of art; and this in turn provokes a curiosity (the word is
cognate with ‘care’) about the conditions in which the art itself exists. The critical
intellectual, we might say, is fundamentally curious about the real conditions in
which we engage with a text or other cultural activity. In short, our work is always
conditioned not just by the realities of politics but also by the politics of realism.
This attitude opens criticism to a world beyond the aesthetic, and, indeed, it
insists that the aesthetic cannot be isolated from the conditions of its existence.
In The People’s Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim tells the story of Chen Guang.
Chen was born and raised in Shangqiu, in Henan, but now lives in Beijing. He is
a painter, but ‘he creates whole collections [of paintings] that he knows cannot
be shown in mainland China’.1 The paintings cannot be shown because Chen
is a former soldier in the Chinese military, whose duties in that role included
1 Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2014), 8.
