CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Contemporary Society

Contemporary Society

Contemporary Society in Matthews

Definitions of realism have tended to revolve around the question of generalized experience. Traditionally the realist work should offer its reader an opportunity to infer general principles about the society in which it is set from the specific cases it describes. In the work of the Marxist critic Georg Lukács, realist texts are valued for the facility that they offered to move from identification with the specific experiences of their characters to a more general understanding of the social and economic conditions which produce those experiences. Furthermore, for Lukács, realism is a political category as well as an aesthetic one, as the realist text - whatever the ideological commitments of its author - is by definition a progressive one. Modernist literature - which to Lukács seems designed to block any such generalisation - was viewed as an outgrowth of an aberrant naturalist tendency to fetishism the specific.

Lukács category of critical realism insists that literary texts should serve this consciousness by revealing the specific nature of the 'mutual interdependence' of individuals within society. Even the novels of a conservative realist such as Balzac do this - in Lukács's view - and for this reason, like all great literature, they make manifest the 'general will', or revolutionary consciousness. It would be futile to take on Lukács on his own terms and reclassify Beckett as a critical realist. That the two narrators of Molloy, or those of Malone Dies and The Unnamable, provide no firm ground on which to build an accurate general picture of contemporary society, or any other society, is surely a part of a deliberate authorial strategy. The narrative constantly insists on its dependence on the extremely unreliable memories of its narrators:

Persons overtake too, hard to differentiate from yourself. That is discouraging. So I saw A and C going gradually towards each other, unconscious of what they were doing. It was on a street amazingly bare, I mean without hedges or ditches or any kind of brim, in the homeland, for dairy cows were chewing in tremendous areas, lying and standing, in the night silence. Possibly, I'm creating a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the entire that's the way it was. They chew, swallow, and then after a short pause effortlessly bring up the next mouthful. A neck sinew mixes and the jaws begin to grind afresh. But possibly I'm recalling things. (Beckett 1959: 9)

The form of a work must assimilate the general contradictions of the society in which it is produced, and this can be done only when it asserts its absolute autonomy from the base corruption of the culture industry. This, Adorn believes, is in practice impossible, but it is the great value of bourgeois art that it simulates this autonomy. Only thus can art become more than just a byproduct of society, and begin to reflect, or to manifest, the general concrete conditions of which realism is a mere symptom. What is more, the distrust of 'content' and the insistence that the ...