Fryeday - realism in literature

 

Another good one from Frye's essay "Literature as Context; Milton's Lycidas." It is not uncommon that readers treat literature as though it were a biography or a record of lived experience first and an imaginative spin on those things second, but that is not the case. Realism in literature is not realistic in the sense that it is an accurate portral of real life. It is just as much a literary convention as any other. In every literary work, the author is crafting an experience for the reader. We don't want realistic. We read because, as Frye says in another essay, literary structure imposes a shape on reality, not the other way around. Or, to quote Lewis speaking on tragedy and the writing of tragedies, "Nor do real miseries often end with a curtain and a roll of drums, 'in calm of mind, all passion spent.' The dying seldom make magnificent last speeches. And we who watch them die do not, I think, behave very like the minor characters in a tragic death scene. For unfortunately the play is not over... The real story does not end: it proceeds to ringing up undertakers, paying bills, getting death certificates, finding and proving a will, answering letters of condolence... The tragedian dare not present the totality of suffering as it usually is in its uncouth mixture of agony with littleness, all the indignation and (save for pity) the uninterestingness, of grief. It would ruin his play. It would be merely dull and depressing. He selects from reality just what his art needs; and what it needs is the exceptional. ...Each [literary form] chooses out of real life just those sorts of events it needs... It is selection, isolation, and patterning, not a philosophy, that make the two sorts of plays... They are constructions: things made *out* of the stuff of real life; additions to life rather than comments on it." (Experiment in Criticism)