The Politics of Realism by Thomas Docherty (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Realism by Thomas Docherty Charlotte Jones The Politics of Realism. By Thomas Docherty. London: Bloomsbury. 2022. 288 pp. £90. ISBN 978–1–350–22853–5. The 'unreality' of contemporary politics has become something of a truism, but what does it mean for politics to 'keep it real'? Thomas Docherty's wide-ranging, spirited account of the role played by a contested aesthetic weaves examples from literature, visual arts, and film in a discursive, even meandering, manner. There is a deftness of touch that makes such breadth of reference feel light but tangible. What I am less convinced by is whether all of the vignettes Docherty brings together fit coherently under the narrative about realism he offers. Part i begins in 1857, with Flaubert and Baudelaire in legal difficulties over alleged indecency and a new Obscene Publications Act in England. Docherty suggests that the way 'censorship was used to divert attention from real conditions of human [End Page 585] life, to banish these conditions from representation and from easy availability to a public assembly or society' (p. 228) is linked to the operations of realism, an aesthetic vested in control over what constitutes reality, in the sense of giving credence to what is 'realistic' or established as non-controvertible. Gustave Courbet, to take one instance, challenges conventional notions of propriety by identifying the real with irreducibly material conditions of the human body: labour, sex, death. Realism's 'mimetic adequacy' (p. 165) thus obtains a political charge, though as Docherty engages with more examples it should become clear that nineteenth-century realism involves more than mere verisimilitude. In Chapter 4, realism in Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times 'operates as a mechanism for calling into question the idea of a single authoritative account of what constitutes reality itself' (p. 98). In Part ii, an opening interlude on Henry James gives way to discussions of Zola, Turgenev, the documentary film-maker Jane Anthony Grierson, Anatoly Lunacharsky's Soviet Socialist realism, and the ways in which realism seeks to catalyse change, which Docherty frames in terms of a reader's 'education'. Docherty's characterization of realism unfolds heuristically as the book advances, which allows readers to feel themselves into his train of thought. In one way or another, we are told, all of these works 'orient us towards indeterminacy, and away from the certainties that are grounded in any fundamentalist belief-system' (p. 228). In Part iii, Docherty explicitly pitches realism against fascism, wherein 'the reality that we seek lies hidden under a fictionalized or mythic account of what constitutes the real world' (p. 228). Chapters parse the abolition of theatrical censorship in England in 1968, shadowed by Mary Whitehouse's moral purity campaigns, and cast realism as 'resistance' in Italian neo-realism and against Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda, where reality exists literally as an effect of the aesthetic. Despite its anti-fascist convictions and clarion call for realism's anti-establishment ethos, The Politics of Realism is perhaps best understood as a left-liberal intervention orienting close readings of a European aesthetic corpus around familiar arguments about a constellation of contemporary political issues: populism, censorship, the nature of truth, the politicization of the law, the politics of identity. According to Docherty, the book aims to show how 'the State actually creates the norms that it says it wants to defend, and then ascribes the validity of those values by attributing them to a co-opted general public and by underpinning them with theological certainty: reality itself' (pp. 110–11). Docherty's primary interest is in how aesthetics can be used to manufacture consent and foreclose possibility, what he calls 'the new realpolitik' (p. 231). What is at stake in realism is 'control over the opinions of the public in the face of the defiant and recalcitrant material facts' (p. 230). That Docherty centres realism's refusal of narrative totalization and its structurally self-reflexive interrogation of the world as it is (with its contingencies and openness to change) alongside our sense of what the world is (that is to say, the world as we know it, narrate it, visualize it) is a welcome reminder...