Anti- and Neo-Realism in 20th Century Literature. ICLA/AILC Congress Hong Kong 2003: Abstracts

Ahn, Mun-Yeong: The Stories of Bak Ji Won(1737-1805). Pragmatic Realism Directed against the Confucian Nobility in 18th-Century Korea

The characters created by Bak Ji Won imply a biting satire on the hypocritical Confucian nobility of the late Chosen Dynasty period of Korea. Each protagonist of Bak's Stories has a unique personality and is intended as a kind of antagonist against the ruling class standing upon its dignity. The empty formality of this upper class is revealed by cutting criticism of these enlightened and enlightening protagonists. The severe contradiction between the descended priority and the social reality of a poor aristocrat for example becomes the target of bitter ridicule. In a comic story Bak describes that even the noble status is degraded, being purchasable by a rich plebeian.
From the sharp insight into the absurd reality he purposed to reform the society with his utilitarian ideas for the people suffered from the miserable conditions of life.
Although Bak wrote his texts in Chinese, his practical theme and realistic style of description were quite new and confusing for the conservative Confucianists at the time. Therefore it is understandable that Bak's significant innovation of literary style was misunderstood and rejected by his contemporaries, who were obstinately hanging on the old tradition. The inner distance of Bak from the obsolete tradition shows itself in his delightful play with the nuances of words. The pragmatic realism of this distinguished Korean writer reached its climax when he wrote a report in the form of a diary in which everything he experienced during his travel to China in 1780 is objectively registered.

Christine Baron: Réalisme et antiréalisme: une généalogie complexe

Le débat sur la littérature des années 80-90 semble s'être déplacé de l'opposition réel/fictionnel vers un autre type d'articulation entre monde réel et mondes possibles ou virtuels. Ces notions ont été particulièrement actives dans les interprétations de la littérature et de l'art proposées par Richard Rorty et surtout par Nelson Goodman.
Elles semblent avoir plusieurs finalités:

Reconnaître à la littérature une fonction cognitive dans sa capacité à formuler des hypothèses face à d'autres discours dotés d'une épistémologie interne forte, en particulier les discours scientifiques.

Mettre en question la notion d'unicité du réel et de linéarité du temps sur laquelle s'est fondée la science moderne

Enfin, poser une puissance propre à la fiction de multiplier les mondes, et lui supposer dans le cadre de discours philosophiques (l'herméneutique par exemple) une position centrale dans notre interprétation de la réalité.

Quelles conclusions pouvons-nous tirer de ce déplacement qui affaiblit la définition de la littérature comme fiction pour lui conférer un statut ontologique?

Sieghild Bogumil-Notz: »Laquelle est la vraie?« Quelques réflexions à propos de la réalité en poésie

Le terme de la fictionnalité est une notion de la théorie littéraire qui évoque d’emblée un vaste champ de termes métadiscursifs. Il est à penser à l’horizon de la réalité, de la référence, de la mimésis, de la signification, de la compréhension, de la vérité et du mensonge, de l’identification et de la distanciation, du sens plein, du jeu, de l’immatérialité et de bien d’autres termes encore. Créé dans son sens moderne aux aurores du métadiscours littéraire par Aristote, il a attiré au fur et à mesure des changements des positions théoriques de nouveaux termes opposés, correspondants et complémentaires. A présent, aucune notion n’est exclue de son champ magnétique de façon que ce terme théorique coïncide avec ce que la littérature est supposée représenter – la réalité. …Supposée représenter – l’idée de la mimésis qui s’exprime dans cette formule, réfère à une compréhension herméneutique traditionnelle de la réalité – et de la fiction, évidemment - que les théoriciens modernes, à commencer par les sémioticiens, contestent fermement. Pour eux, le littéraire est le réel, à moins qu’ils ne défendent l’inverse : la fictionnalité de la réalité. Ce rapprochement des deux mondes opposés montre la fragilité de cette opposition théoriquement instaurée, - une fragilité, cependant, qui se maintient solidement depuis plus de 2000 ans. Pendant ces siècles, on croirait entendre la réponse des théoriciens contemporains qui s’exclament devant une réalité non conforme à leur théorie : ’Tant pis pour la réalité’.

Le passage sans difficulté d’un pôle à l’autre montre que le questionnement de la fiction et de la réalité ne doit partir ni du fictionnel, ni de la réalité, ni même du littéraire mais que c’est leur rapport qui est en jeu. La question est donc de savoir si l’on peut toujours supposer la simple polarité baudelairienne, ou s’il y a un rapport de transgression, ou plutôt une interaction? Ou devrait-on partir de l’hypothèse que la réalité n’est qu’une métaphore au sein de la littérature – si tant est que ce n’est l’inverse ; ou le réel ne serait-il qu’une fonction du littéraire – qu’il serait peut-être nécessaire d’appeler le fictionnel?

Les termes sont si enflés et si liés les uns aux autres qu’on a l’impression de se trouver dans une véritable jungle. Ce n’est que le regard sur la littérature qui pourrait aider à trouver un fil d’Ariane pour s’en sortir. La poésie, fait littéraire par excellence, et en particulier la poésie de Rilke servira de base pour se frayer un chemin dans la complexité du problème et essayer de trouver une réponse.

Nathan P. Devir: Representations of Social Action in Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ

In The Last Temptation of Christ (1960), Nikos Kazantzakis presents his credo of social action in what Prevelakis has termed "a clear transition from rootless aestheticism to a more real world". Utilizing the New Testament as a basis for his attack on the Western cultural tradition, Kazantzakis not only transposes the Nietzschean Übermensch into a decidedly 20^th century context; he, like Foucault (and, to a certain extent, Althusser) manipulates the ideological text in order to rewrite a "history of the present" in which the 'Ορθός ("the Upright one") will put into question the subjective meanings of history, knowledge, and above all, the essence of social struggle. This paper will analyze the poetic ego in the novel in question under the neo-realistic supposition that through ideology, the individual becomes an integral feature of the social world.

Gerald Gillespie: Trying to Be Real

There are prominent cases of authors of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century who proclaimed their allegiance to realism but who in their actual practice often (re-)discovered other important modes of writing associated with anti-realist Modernism, while a number of authors patiently ignored modernist currents because they felt convinced that certain laws of history and psychology were sound guides. Taking Galdós, Zola, Fontane, Levi, Forster, Wharton, Norris, Dos Passos, and T. Wolfe as examples, we can discern a powerful parallel pro-realist tradition alongside Modernism.

Alberto Hernández-Lemus: Deleuze's Account of Italian Neorealism: The Incursion of the Virtual

Italian neorealism plays a watershed role in the film theory of Gilles Deleuze. It is with this particular cinematic movement, according to Deleuze, that cinema begins to loosen the hinges that had kept its images attached to the firmly secured spatio-temporal coordinates of "realistic" chronological narratives unfolding in "recognizable" places. With Italian neorealism, a new category appears, the category of time as a variable independent of realistic space. In the process, this new cinematic style, with its ethically mandated respect for the real, uncovers a reality that is profoundly ambiguous, particularly with regard to time. Time is not sequential arrangement, as classic editing had accustomed us to believe, but rather a type of Bergsonian duration, i.e.: an attunement of protagonists with their world, and of the viewer with both.
The systematic introduction of real time, by showing the world more "as it really is", reveals a world which resists the facile application of ready-made conceptual translations of the kind "an image of x means y". In this sense, Italian neorealist cinema can be considered a kind of anti-realism. Its faithfulness to reality is a faithfulness to reality's ambiguity. Deleuze subverts the prevalent definitions of neorealism, both those that emphasize the content of those films (post-second world war social squalor) and those whose formal considerations focus on aspects of film production (natural lighting, use of non-professional actors). With neorealism, for Deleuze, the virtual makes its appearance in cinema, which D.N. Rodowick paraphrases as "the myriad unheard or unacted upon possibilities that reside in the interval of every passing moment".
Whereas Deleuze considers the images of neorealism "the embodiment of the crisis of the action-image regime" unable to overcome the parameters of "truthfulness" at the root of classic cinema, I consider them, just as those of the French New Wave, full-fledged members of the regime of time-images. Furthermore, I take issue with Deleuze's dismissal of Peirce's semiotics as unable to provide a non-linguistic account of the images of the time-image. On the contrary, I believe that Peirce's semiotic model of infinite interpretation, in which reality kick-starts the interpretive process, can be seen as paralleled by the innovations in time-representation introduced by Italian neorealism. In my view both efforts start from a debatable, constructed reality, and move into a virtual realm of interpretive possibility quite independent of any realistic actualization.

Gert Hofmann: "Alle Asche ist Blütenstaub". Romantic Commotions between Anti-Idealism and Meta-Realism

Focusing on Friedrich von Hardenberg’s philosophical fragments and reconsidering recent developments in the philosophical discourse on subjectivity (e.g. Levinas and Agamben), we are trying to evaluate contemporary theoretical repercussions of a genuine romanticist concept of aesthetic subjectivity. Significant features of this concept are, that on one hand it defies the idealist getaway from the antagonisms of sensual reality into an intellectual sphere of sublime identity, and on the other hand it is inspired by a genuinely transfiguring potential of material reality, replacing the transcendental subject of idealism (i. e. the subject of categorical and absolute cognition) with the corporeal subject of an infinitely metamorphic perception of reality, thus blazing the trail for a motion of aesthetic realism. The core matter of this subject is Asche or Staub, understood as the ultimate reality itself, but also as the Universaltropus of its metamorphoses within the poetic subject, whereas Shakespeare has often been a favourite literary object and paradigm (to Hardenberg as well as to e. g. Goethe, Schiller, Herder) of this realistic aberration within the idealist discourse on aesthetics.

Lois Marie Jaeck: "Internal Realities" in Marcel Proust's A la recherché du temps perdu, Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de Soledad and Manlio Argueta's Un día en la vida: from Anti-Realism, to Magic realism, to Neo-Realism

In Le temps retrouvé, Marcel Proust denounced "realistic/naturalistic" literature of the nineteenth century ("la littérature qui se contente de 'décrire les choses', d'en donner seulement un misérable relevé de lignes et de surfaces", 245) as being "la plus éloignée de la réalité" (245). He proposed that reality, in its true sense, is a certain rapport between things, that is suppressed by a simple cinematographic vision (cf. 250). He declared that truth, the essential nature common to dissimilar phenomena, is revealed in literature only when a writer establishes a rapport between different objects by reuniting them together, outside of time and space, in a metaphor.
In Marcel Proust and the Text as Macrometaphor (1991, University of Toronto Press), I showed how Proust's theory of metaphor was the underlying structure of his literary masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu, which revealed itself in characterization, geographical locations, recurring symbols, etc. It presently is my contention that Marcel Proust, one of the foremost "anti-realists" of the twentieth century, also was the undeclared "spiritual father" of Latin American "magic realism" in the fifties and sixties, and of "neo-realism" as it emerged in the eighties. To illustrate my contention (and possibly also to break down barriers between what is described as "magic realism" and "neo-realism'), I will analyze Gabriel García Márquez's Cien ãnos de soledad as a illustration of magic realism and Manlio Argueta's Un día en la vida as an illustration of neo-realism, with a view to showing how the play of recurring images in both works reveal "internal realities" in a way that only could be described as Proustian.

Rose Hsiu-li Juan: Beyond Anti-Realism and Realism: The Tribal Imagination in Louise Erdrich's Novels

This paper argues that the distinction of realism and anti-realism does not suit the contemporary Native American fiction since magic is integral to Native American culture, and to support this argument an exemplary reading of Erdrich's novels, esp. The Bingo Palace, will be given. In Native American fiction we find a magic realism of its own kind, coming out of cultural necessity as well as a conscious poetic choice. In Erdrich's works, the unforced fusion of realism (real-life Indians and mixedbloods in 1980s and 1990s) and fantasy (tall tale, ghost story, shape shifter, trickster character, mythic vision, spiritual experience) bespeaks a tribal imagination commanding the contemporary Native American literature, not for avant-gardist experimentation, nor even for the purpose of challenging realism, but to confront our limitedness and habitualness in recognizing tribal reality, both realistic and fantastic.
A brief comparative view from the emergent indigenous literature and discourse in Taiwan will also be considered. The fact that non-fiction and realism prevail in contemporary Taiwanese indigenous literature while non-indigenous writers write in magic realism on indigenous subjects bears witness to the complicated issue that modern literature and its practice has to do with a long way of learning before it can accommodate tribal imagination.

Timo Kaitaro: Le Surréalisme comme réalisme ouvert

L'intérêt philosophique du surréalisme consiste surtout dans le fait qu'il a réussi, comme son nom indique, à s'échapper à la fausse alternative entre le réalisme (naïf) et l'anti-réalisme. Comme les anti-réalistes, les théoriciens du surréalisme, notamment André Breton et Paul Nougé, ont insisté sur le fait que ce qu'on nomme communément la réalité est une invention humaine créée par nos habitudes langagières, une fonction du «dit et le redit». Et selon Breton on peut, conséquemment, en brouillant l'ordre des mots, attenter «à l'existence apparente des choses». Mais au lieu d' utiliser cette constatation pour prouver qu'il n'a pas de réalité objective «hors texte», les surréalistes ont voulu utiliser la déréalisation du monde objectif du sens commun pour créer des autres réalités. Et en fait, du point de vue phénoménologique cette ouverture du monde aux autres perspectives que celle qui nous est donnée, ne constitue pas une preuve de l 'irréalité du monde ainsi représenté mais de sa réalité: le monde est réel justement parce qu'il nous promet toujours «autre chose à voir» (Merleau-Ponty).

M. Logan: Representing the "Other": Myth or Reality?

"To go to Ol Doinyo Lengai is to take a journey not just in distance, but in time. Stand at Ol Doinyo Lengai and you stand at a strange pause, millennia ago, when the earth began to cool and the spittings of molten earth began to die away. . . In all the millennia, life has not come to her slopes. . . A world that has changed little in thousands of years. A world of magic and ancient savagery where life meant little" (Campbell 1996, 77-78).
This paper proposes a reading of Eric Campbell's Papa Tembo (1996) as a fin-de-siècle version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1901). This young adult novel, Papa Tembo, is an adventure story set in Tanzania, and as the above quote indicates, the colonial representation/image of Africa of Conrad's epoch has remained essentially the same even in the so-called postcolonial age. To wit, the colonial past still haunts us, and the myths, stereotypes and misconceptions of that era have yet to be debunked. As Edward Said has pointed out, interpretations of the present include appeals to the past in order to determine "whether the past is really past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms" (Said 1993, 1). What, then, is the role of history/representation/interpretation in postcolonial studies?

Tumba Shango Lokoho: La Littérature romanesque d'Afrique subsaharienne francophone: entre réalisme, post-colonialisme et postmodernisme

L'intention première ici est de montrer naïvement et imprudemment - naïveté et imprudence épistémologiques naturellement assumées - comment le roman négro-africain subsaharien francophone peut être décrypté du point de vue de ces trois «doctrines». L'intention ultime est de démontrer que l'œuvre littéraire transcende les théories et peut être comprise et interprétée de différentes manières selon les époques et les courants critiques ou les tendances théoriques du moment. Par-delà, on essaiera de mettre en lumière les limites épistémologiques de ces théories par rapport à l'indécidable des mondes romanesques négro-africains. On entend par là que la dimension anthropologique et herméneutique critiques de ces mondes romanesques peut servir au dépassement et à la tentation de leur réduction au modèle critique et théorique réaliste, post-colonial et postmoderne exclusivement.

John Mc Allister: The "Unreal" Other. Illustrating the Exotic in Colonial and Post-Colonial Travel Literature

We often call something unreal to indicate not that it is non-existent but to emphasise its difference from "normal" reality. This metaphor captures a fundamental ambivalence in the discourses of the Other which have dominated Western representations of the non-Western world since the beginning of the Age of Exploration, and which continue to provide the conceptual underpinnings of globalization.
The Other surprises and shocks by being real despite inviting disbelief: "This cannot be, yet is". The power of Western narratives of the exotic depends on the literal reality of their subjects' metaphorical unreality. For reasons that are as naïve as they are obvious, drawings and photographs are crucial components of this peculiar form of realism. However they are also disruptive; the more "unreal" the image, the more likely it is to undermine the confidence in "our" normative reality on which the meaningfulness of the feeling of strangeness depends. Using a sequence of illustrations from colonial and post-colonial travel texts, this presentation will explore some of the ironies of exotic realism, in particular its potential to subvert the othering it is meant to enhance.

David Midgley: Berlin - Myth and Reality

The division and reunification of Berlin have provided the material for many attempts by German writers to depict social and political life in broadly realist terms, with or without a polemical dimension, and often with provocative elements of the grotesque. The publication of Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel La Reprise in 2002 provides an interesting counter-example, which uses the uncertain terrain of occupied Berlin in the late 1940s as a quasi-mythical setting for psychic fantasy and intratextual allusion. I should like to take this publication as an opportunity to re-examine the respective assumptions underlying the practice of realist and anti-realist fiction, and to examine the difficult, introspective, but nevertheless arguably realist narrative technique of Wolfgang Hilbig as a test case.

M. Luis Carlos Pimenta Gonçalves: Écrivains portugais du XXème siècle sous le signe de Flaubert et de Zola?

Alors que la question du réalisme était en grande partie centrée, avec la génération de 1870 et tout particulièrement Eça de Queirós, autour d'une esthétique nouvelle sous l'influence de Flaubert puis de Zola, le mouvement que l'on s'est plu à désigner sous le nom de néoréalisme portugais va obéir davantage à des préoccupations politiques que littéraires. Exit donc ces modèles français entre les années 1930 et 1950? Peut-être pas autant qu'il peut paraître à première vue. C'est en tout cas ce que nous nous proposons de faire lors de cet exposé.

Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa: Writing in the Oneiric Mode. Anti-Realism in the Fantastic Writings of Alfred Kubin

At the beginning of the 20^th century, various ideologies of anti-realism referred to the dream as a key-concept. One of the pioneers to develop an explicit aesthetics of dream was the writer and painter Alfred Kubin. His anti-realistic "Traumkunst" (dream-art) includes drawings claiming to be representations of dream images as well as the fantastic novel Die andere Seite (1909) which describes an imaginary "city of dream", where the distinction between dream and reality does not apply. This city, where the narrator perceives life like a dream, finally proves to be the product of its emperor's dreams. Kubin´s essays as well as his artistic and literary works are based on eclectic concepts combining elements of the major dream theories being discussed at this time: psychoanalysis, magnetism, romantic philosophy of nature, and the "cosmological" theory by Ludwig Klages. The paper will demonstrate the importance of the dream for concepts of anti-realism at the threshold of the 20^th century, and reconstruct features, sources and intentions of Kubin´s contributions to an aesthetics of dream.

Monika Schmitz-Emans: À la recherche de la réalité perdue. Ambiguous Alliances between Literature and Photography

Roland Barthes' essay "La chambre Claire" has been of formative influence on the theoretical discussion about photography in the past decades as well as on contemporary literary narrations referring to photos and photographers. The question at stake is not whether and how to take Barthes' ideas concerning the "punctum" of each photographical picture literally. His concept indicates, however, to a common way of looking at photographs as if there was a true reference beyond the visual representations - a truth to be revealed. As a consequence, literary narrators have used photographical pictures and their interpretations as devices which point metaphorically to the searching for realities as such. One of the possible consequences, however, is the dissolution of all notions of the real as such when photographs turn out to be unreliable, ambiguous, or even faked. To give examples for the remarkable range of metaphorical reflections about realities and representations connected with photographical pictures several literary texts will be presented: Peter Haertling, Der spanische Soldat; Cees Nooteboom, Hotel; Manuel Vargas Llosa, El hablador; Marcel Beyer, Spione.

Holger Schulze: Realism as Efficacy. On the Tectonic of Texts in the Web

Unlike the common notion of "literature on the web", there are new forms of textual genres in the Web that are beyond a merely experimental state. Those texts try to achieve a wider efficacy - outside the field of art or literature or even the realm of the purely digital. Their authors - who mostly refuse to this designation - put themselves decidedly in opposition to recently "re-animated" topoi of art-related utopias as Cyberspace or Technotimes. They claim that their texts have direct effects on reality - whether in so-called weblogs, in collaborative networks or in interventionist, even commercial projects.
This presentation will show some examples of this not mimetic but interventionist form of realism. It will analyze how these projects struggle with their ambition to take effect outside the web - and how they try to insert an efficacious textual entity into the existing tectonic of texts in the web.

Micéala Symington: Anti-Realism and the Image: from Symbolism to Surrealism

In 1936 in Au-delà de la peinture, Max Ernst writes:

"One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic demonstration. There I found brought together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absordity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep."

Ernst describes here a process whereby the juxtaposition of extremely realistic images produces an effect of anti-realism, the effect of "love memories" or "half-sleep". Ernst, like other Surrealist writers and painters realised that an excess of realism leads to its opposite effect: the loss of the "effect of the real" (Barthes). The importance of the livre de peintre (the Artist's Book) which represents a joint artistic undertaking, comprised of both image and text, at the beginning of the 20th century is partly the consequence of this realisation. It is not surprising therefore that the first livres de peintres date from the Symbolist period, the period in which writers sought not to represent reality, but to evoke a state beyond real objects.

This paper intends to examine anti-realism through the prism of the relationship between text and image at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.

Jüri Talvet: "The Magic Border". Notes on "Magic Realism" in Modern Latin-American Prose Fiction

The purpose of the paper is to discuss some basic aspects in one of the most influential phenomena of world literature in the second half of the 20^th century, the Latin American fantastic prose fiction. As some literary researchers have seen the work of Jorge Luis Borges as a direct fore-image for postmodern intellectualism and, at the same time, Gabriel García Márquez' narratives have often also been included in the postmodern canon, a renewed discussion on the complicated interaction of the telluric and the intellectual in Latin American modern prose fiction could shed light on the (generic) fate and future of contemporary prose fiction, as a whole. In analyzing the phenomenon, I shall rely on some theoretical ideas of Yuri M. Lotman (1922-1993) - the core figure of the Tartu School of Semiotics -, especially those forwarding the idea of the "semiosphere" - the large "border zone" or intersection area of the biological-telluric and the intellectual-rational in which, according to Lotman, culture reveals its most fertile semiotic potentiality, leading by "explosions" and "leaps" to new and unpredictable qualities in artistic creation. The canon under discussion will include the work of such Latin-American writers as J. L. Borges, G. García Márquez, J. Rulfo, A. Carpentier, J. Cortázar, J. J. Arreola, C. Fuentes, and others. I shall discuss the varied sources of the "magic" in modern Latin-American narrative, i.e. the philosophic and aesthetic impulses behind it (mythical-folkloric elements, the narrative art and philosophy of the past - the Spanish late medieval novels of chivalry, Cervantes, Baroque aesthetics and philosophy, Quevedo -, Western symbolist-modernist narrative and philosophy, as well as the philosophic current of "tellurism" (telurismo), intrinsic in modern Latin-American artistic creation. As the current of modern Latin-American narrative under discussion has predominantly been qualified as "magic realism", I shall try on the one hand to demonstrate its basic divergence from what has been traditionally considered as narrative realism and, on the other hand, its uneasy adaptability to the framework of anti-realistic narrative. It is a "border" phenomenon speaking in both languages, a narrative dialogue that has in a most gratifying way broadened the perspectives of the contemporary novel genre.