Real life, real mess: do we privilege realism in Canada?

Trapnel, like myself, understands naturalism to be much the same thing as realism: the attempt in fiction to portray existence as something empirical, without making comment or decoration, and, to borrow a theatre metaphor, without breaking of the fourth wall. No metafiction, no time travel, and for the love of God, no zombies, and no fallen angels who develop dementia. One might find in naturalism an additional emphasis on environment and its effects on the characters.

“Does realism guarantee the only path to connection is something greater than one’s own self?”

If we disagree with Trapnel that naturalism/realism is merely a tool and instead see it as a requirement and ne plus ultra for literary fiction, then what do we expect from realism? Does expectation then breed expectation, leading to an echo chamber for technique? Does realism guarantee the only path to connection is something greater than one’s own self? Is realism, then, not only a requirement for the coveted label “literary fiction” but its ne plus ultra?Jeff Bursey often discusses the ne plus ultra view of realism in his collection of essays and review, Centring the Margins. In one essay, Bursey objects to Pakaj Mishra’s comments on Salman Rusdhie’s Shalimar the Clown in the October 2005 issue of the New York Review of Books. Mishra: “Rushdie seems as aware as any writer of fiction that much of his task is to create and sustain an illusion of reality through well-chosen details.”Bursey: “[Mishra thinks] every writer of fiction should be in his or her study choosing details carefully because that results in the only kind of fiction that matters.” (81)I agree with Bursey’s pushback. Why is it much of a writer’s “task” — task? assigned by whom? — “to create and sustain an illusion of reality through well-chosen details?”Are we making the same mistakes here in Canada?I reviewed the list of Giller and Governor General’s Award for Fiction winners for the last ten years, from 2006 to 2016. One reason the 2015 GG judges admired Daddy Lenin and Other Stories by Guy Vanderhaege: “no pyrotechnics.” I’ve not read Daddy Lenin. The comment confuses me. Does it mean that the prose draws little to no attention to itself as prose, the fiction no attention to itself as fiction, approaches which are diktats of realism? I see nothing wrong with those choices in and of themselves; a writer must decide which strategies best serve her story. Yet, to my ears, “no pyrotechnics” risks sounding like an approval of conformity to expectation. Eleanor Catton, who won the GG in 2013 for her novel The Luminaries, describes her work as a “weird, sci-fi fantasy thing.” That sounds almost apologetic. Why? Kevin Baker’s review of 2006 GG winner The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens praises the author for teaching us that the past is “a very real place.” Is this comment also a signal that realism as a narrative strategy is the best way to convey history in fiction?Shortlists for the GG and Giller can overlap, and in 2016 both prizes went to the same novel. I wondered about additional overlap with the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. “Fantastic,” or, elsewhere in the Sunburst Award description, “speculative fiction,” covers fiction that, well, refuses to settle down and use only realism. (Disclosure: my novel Double-blind, a study of ethics, power, and deceit, made the 2008 shortlist.) The only year for which I could find Sunburst shortlist overlap with the GG or the Giller—and, as it turned out, overlap with a winner—was 2015 for Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle.I’ve served on several award juries, and I’ve adjudicated solo. It can be very difficult work. The Sunburst juries would have the same slog as the GG or Giller juries: a big box of books, maybe some by friends; a busy life outside of reading this box of books, books which need careful consideration; co-jurists to consult with, perhaps over great distances; and a deadline. The funding and very existence of writing prizes is fraught with uncertainty and risk. Yet the difference between the literary fiction prizes and the speculative fiction prize is startling. The bountiful Scotiabank Giller Prize now awards $100,000. The prestigious Governor General’s Award for Fiction means $25,000, still quite a chunk of money. The Sunburst: $1,000. A cultural signal?

“…I argue that all fiction is historical. Even if the fiction lacks a tangible setting, it comes out of the author’s time and so can function as something of an historical document.”

The question of privileging realism gets even more interesting in what gets called “historical fiction.” I struggle with the term, in part because, as any writing mentor, professor, or teacher unfortunate enough to encounter me will tell you, I can be quite dense, and in part because I argue that all fiction is historical. Even if the fiction lacks a tangible setting, it comes out of the author’s time and so can function as something of an historical document. Fiction with a setting—an expected part of realism—say, 1950s Quebec, 1970s New Brunswick, early 2000s Nunavut, or even a Present Moment Unnamed City That’s Really Toronto: does this setting, this fiction, not become, with even the briefest passage of time, a piece of history? Historical?For me, one of the appeals of reading what gets called historical fiction is the setting: not-Here, not-Now, not-Me. A tapestry of enormous events against which the author and reader might explore ideas? Delicious.One of my anxieties in writing This Marlowe (Goose Lane Editions), a novel based on Christopher Marlowe and his context: creating and sustaining a plausible fictive world. Whatever my devotion to realism or research, I could not re-create 1593 England. I could only tack up a version in miniature. To keep that version feeling whole so I could focus on ideas and themes, I relied on realism, including what Pakaj Mishra’s calls those well-chosen details. I met a fellow Christopher Marlowe fan at one reading. He told me he’d got a Marlowe checklist, and he’d checked off various details I’d gotten right. I am not mocking him. He had a good point: for a reader expecting realism in historical fiction based on a piece of history he knows something about, one little detail can break realism’s spell.

“My break with historical fact in a historical novel otherwise practising realism: does it make the novel less valuable?”

Later in This Marlowe I break the spell. By choice. Christopher Marlowe was the second child born to his parents, John and Catherine, after a daughter called Mary. My character Kit has a loving relationship with his older sister, whom he calls Manna. In the novel’s timeline, Kit and Manna are separated. Manna writes Kit a letter, discovering where to send it only after suffering another man’s brutality; Kit writes back to her, though never to his own satisfaction. Kit imagines how Manna might comment on his present situation, giving nuance to his motivations. Manna herself shows how difficult life could be for women in this setting. My deviation? The real Mary Marlowe died when Christopher was four. While I discovered this fact late in the writing process and considered it one of those errors which can defy a checklist and break a spell for some readers, I decided to leave Manna intact. Kit needs her. The story needs her.My break with historical fact in a historical novel otherwise practising realism: does it make the novel less valuable?A metaphor I’ve encountered in discussions of both fiction exploring history and fiction exploring identity (the two can overlap) is “mining the past.” On the surface, the metaphor seems handy: stake a claim, dig it up. Mining, in Canada, has involved the imposition of external will and sometimes disrupts the lives of people living near the mine. It can also disrupt the lives of people brought in to work the mines and the new economic environment that grows around them. Mining has been a destructive way to obtain and exploit a resource.I’m going to make up a novel. Let’s call it Veins and Rocks. Historical fiction that uses realism, Veins and Rocks is inspired by a small town the author happened to visit. She heard of an event that happened fifty years ago: a widowed housewife defied the mine boss on a matter on principle and, as punishment, through suspected but unproven dirty deeds, lost her husband’s pension. The housewife then struggled to look after her children. Our author, sensing a story, perhaps even wishing to ensure this widowed housewife is never forgotten, mines the history. She researches the family, the mining company, the people involved. For the sake of realism, she keeps her fiction close to fact. She may let the story structure suffer for the sake this closeness, this pursuit of truth. After all, she’s gone to the trouble of mining all this detail; she wants to use it. When the novel appears, people in the town are upset. The author neglected to consider their feelings about seeing this history turned into fiction, fiction which must, to obey the perceived demands of realism, stay close to the history. The townspeople feel exploited. The author, claiming license, reminds everyone that her work is fiction and maintains that she doesn’t understand why people are upset. Yet she has imposed her singular will on these people and their past. She staked a claim and dug it up. Without questioning realism as a strategy, instead accepting realism as the only path to serious fiction that matters, she has behaved in the manner of a colonizer.Is this the sort of fiction we risk privileging when we privilege realism?Realism as an approach is not to dismissed. Employed with skill, it can help create affecting fiction. Ian Colford’s Perfect World is well served by realism as a narrative strategy. Still, Ian Weir’s “hybrid” novel Will Starling gets called a “romp” or described as “rollicking” so often that I worry these terms might signal unconscious belittlement. Will Starling, marketed as literary and historical fiction, made the shortlist for the Sunburst, not the GG or the Giller.

“The attempt to portray objective reality: who defines objective? Whose reality is it?”

Unquestioned realism, like unquestioned empiricism, can lead to the colonizing approach I illustrated with the hypothetical novel Veins and Rocks. These failings are a part of Canada’s past, and its present. As a novelist, I have an aesthetic responsibility to understand the tools of my art and deploy them with thought, purpose, and care. Echoing predecessors for the sake of But This Is How Good Fiction Works will not suffice. As a novelist who is a descendant of white settlers, I also have an ethical responsibility to question my inheritances of empiricism and realism. The attempt to portray objective reality: who defines objective? Whose reality is it?If a writer of fiction eschews realism, allows pyrotechnics, breaks that fourth wall, re-defines reality through characters, ignores the “task to create and sustain an illusion of reality,” then is the writing simply careless, not literary? Or might there be excellent reasons for the writer’s choices, reasons which are the beating heart of the story—the art—itself?Powell’s X Trapnel complains “Human beings aren’t subtle enough to play their part. That’s where art comes in.” Later, long after his death, Trapnel still haunts the narrator: “Perhaps at the base of it all, is the popular confusion of self-pity with compassion. What is effective is art, not what is ‘true’—using the term in invented commas.”So, literary fiction— art —via more than realism: heresy?* * *One of Canada’s most courageous and original literary voices, Michelle Butler Hallett was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, has been praised by Books in Canada for “economy and power,” while The Globe and Mail notes that “demons are at work—the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality.” Her first novel, Double-blind, was shortlisted for the 2007 Sunburst Award, while Sky Waves was praised as “both raucously funny and deeply troubling” and  “a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling.”  Butler Hallett lives in St. John’s.