In Defence of Realism

by Raymond Tallis

In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary “effect.” He clearly demonstrates not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.

Genres: Philosophy

220 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

About the author

Professor Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. In the Economist's Intelligent Life Magazine (Autumn 2009) he was listed as one of the top living polymaths in the world.

Born in Liverpool in 1946, one of five children, he trained as a doctor at Oxford University and at St Thomas' in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. Professor Tallis retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer, though he remained Visiting Professor at St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London until 2008.

Prior to his retirement from medicine to devote himself to writing, Raymond Tallis had responsibility for acute and rehabilitation patients and took part in the on-call rota for acute medical emergencies. He also ran a unique specialist epilepsy service for older people. Amongst his 200 or so medical publications are two major textbooks - The Clinical Neurology of Old Age (Wiley, 1988) and the comprehensive Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology (Harcourt Brace, co-edited with Howard Fillitt, 6th edition, 2003). Most of his research publications were in the field of neurology of old age and neurological rehabilitation. He has published original articles in Nature Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. Two of his papers were the subject of leading articles in Lancet. In 2000 Raymond Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research; in 2002 he was awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Prize for his contribution to the medical literature on elderly people; and in 2006 he received the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society. In July 2007, he received the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing, and in November 2011 he was honoured with the International League Against Epilepsy's Special Excellence in Epilepsy Award. He is a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

Over the last 20 years Raymond Tallis has published fiction, three volumes of poetry, and 23 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art and cultural criticism. Together with over two hundred articles in Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and many other outlets, these books offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this work, Professor Tallis has been awarded three honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon. Causa) from the University of Hull in 1997; LittD (Hon. Causa) at the University of Manchester 2002 and Doc (Med) SC, St George's Hospital 2015. He was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Liverpool until 2013.

Raymond Tallis makes regular appearances at Hay, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and other book festivals, and lectures widely.

Raymond Tallis's national roles have included: Consultant Advisor in Health Care of the Elderly to the Chief Medical Officer; a key part in developing National Service Framework for Older People, in particular the recommendations of developing services for people with strokes; membership of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee; Chairmanship of the Royal College of Physicians Committee on Ethics in Medicine; Chairman of the committee reviewing ethics support for front-line clinicians; and membership of the Working Party producing a seminal report Doctors in Society, Medical Professionalism in a Changing World (2005). From July 2011 to October 2014 he was the elected Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD).

In 2012 he was a member of the judges' panel for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 2015 he judged the Notting Hill Essay prize.

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 1 out of 5]

In Defence of Realism is one of two books that Raymond Tallis published in 1988. The other, Not Saussure, is a critique of a tendency toward linguistic idealism in contemporary literature, a denunciation of the idea that reality is constructed in and through language. Not Saussure at least has the virtue of making some valid points about some of the more derivative (and stupid) versions of postmodernism, but then messes it up with woefully bad readings of Lacan's "mirror stage" and Derrida's notion of deconstruction.

It is in the context of that discussion that Tallis first advances what will be the core thesis of In Defence of Realism: namely, that the linguistic idealism of postmodern thought has caused literary authors to turn away from realism in favor of experimental meta-fiction that explores dreams, fantasies, alternative universes, magic, and so on. This whole phenomenon, he argues, is an attack on both our sense of reality and the principles of science that have enabled us to grasp that reality.

This thesis is, of course, simply nonsense. I am particularly annoyed by Tallis's argument because I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on this very topic. Derivative postmodern theory's denunciation of realism as naive and outdated, I argued, was historically blind and critically naive. I showed the sophistication of texts by French realists like Balzac and Stendhal, demonstrating that they are as meta-textual and experimental as any postmodern novel. But it was also clear to me that this anti-realism was a product mainly of a vulgar version of postmodern theory. Just look at Roland Barthes: when it came to his examples of "writerly" texts, it wasn't just Mallarmé and Proust and Robbe-Grillet. Two of his most famous texts on this topic, S/Z and "The Death of the Author" are in-depth commentaries on Balzac, the founder of French realism. Even as a raw youth in graduate school, I had a sense of nuance to my argument that is missing from Tallis's book. Yes, some postmodern theorists dismiss realism, but there is a range of thinkers and positions out there, many of which warmly appreciate the realist tradition.

Reading In Defence of Realism, therefore, comes across as a vitriolic exercise with two aims. The first is simply a matter of Tallis's literary taste - or rather, distaste - for the trends of post-war fiction. Tallis hides behind an epistemological critique, but really this is mainly a question of aesthetic difference. He doesn't like contemporary literature much, which is his right, but his logical premise for attacking it in this way is absurd. The second aim, the true impulse from which this critique springs, is Tallis's hatred of "post-Saussurean" literary theory, as he calls it. As noted above, his main engagement with that topic takes place in Not Saussure.

Nonetheless, it is this second aim that keeps poking through in this book, and leads to a lot of misreadings. Tallis is hopelessly unsophisticated when it comes to distinguishing what separates the various thinkers from each other - in Not Saussure, for instance, he repeatedly characterizes Lacan and Derrida as being essentially in agreement with each other, even though they were famously antagonistic toward key aspects of each other's ideas. Rather than carefully measuring where his own critique aligns with or departs from the critics he is dealing with, Tallis instead makes the hysterical claim that literature has been "raped" (p.ix) by postmodern ideas, whose "mighty Amazon of theorrhoea" (p.v) ("theorrhoea" being Tallis's oh-so-clever and sophisticated portmanteau of "theory" and "diarrhoea") has not a single good point to make.

This blanket condemnation leads Tallis to multiple own goals, such as this attack on Baudrillard's "high-profile stupidity" (p.vii):

"Baudrillard's assertion that the Gulf War had not happened was only one of many damaging instances of the inadequacy of Theory to reality - in particular the political reality to which its exponents had claimed to bring special insights." (p.vii)

Why is Tallis attacking Baudrillard here? My understanding of Baudrillard's work is that he shares many of the same core concerns as Tallis, in particular the way that the virtuality of postmodern life is eroding our sense of reality. Baudrillard is not an advocate of this phenomenon, he is a vehement critic of it, and in this way he logically ought to be seen by Tallis as an ally. But no, Tallis is not making an argument from logic here, but from sheer anger - a fact that he admits in his preface to the reissued version of the book.

There is a similar perversity in Tallis's choice of literary targets. Donald Barthelme and Alain Robbe-Grillet get a thorough dressing-down - but were they really the forefront of contemporary literature in 1988? Doris Lessing gets a serve for turning away from her realistic (but "boring") earlier novels to write science fiction - too bad she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Iris Murdoch is dismissed because The Sea, the Sea is much too unrealistic - too bad it won the Booker Prize in 1978. And wasn't Murdoch's chief source of philosophical inspiration Plato, rather than Derrida? I found myself wondering why Tallis didn't take on, for instance, Don DeLillo's White Noise, one of the most famous novels of the 1980s, and a penetrating examination of the loss of reality in postmodern society? How about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which weaves together postmodern themes with scientific rationality? The answer probably lies in the fact that they don't fit the aesthetic and critical narrative that Tallis is trying to build, and so he left them out. You know, like good critics and scientists do when they encounter something that doesn't fit their hypothesis.

Indeed, when one considers realism in the larger history of the novel, Tallis's argument falls apart completely. Yes, the British novel in particular emerged out of the development of Lockean empiricism in a predominantly realist manner, but alongside that there is a long and honored tradition of "unrealistic" writing that stretches from Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Shelley's Frankenstein to Stoker's Dracula. It would be ridiculous to denounce, say, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an attack on reality and science: its concern, as with so much of the history of the novel, is not epistemological but ethical.

This is the last text that I will read by Tallis. Not only does he write from a perspective that is skewed by his own prejudices, but he writes in an openly arrogant way that I find abhorrent. Even if you detest someone else's writing and ideas, it is a sign of maturity to write about those things without having to resort to derogatory names, personal attacks, ungrounded accusations of corruption, and constant sarcasm to get your point across. Tallis is the rudest, most immature critic I have encountered in this respect, someone who shows utter contempt for anyone who dares not to share his tastes or critical views.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another quite sensible book by Tallis. I was inspired to read this upon finishing my Joyce seminar, where the questions of whether Ulysses was realist or not, modernist or postmodernist, came up pretty frequently. Personally, I'm inclined to see Joyce's project as being both realist and modernist, although I heard a few voices from the other side.

In this book, Tallis seeks to defend literary realism, or the attempt to accurately render reality, against the assaults of the anti-realists—primarily, the post-structuralists, or those he calls the "post-Saussureans," for whom language has no reference to the external world, but only revolves around itself.

In the first part, he criticizes three claims for anti-realism—namely, that (1) 20th century reality is uniquely unrepresentable; (2) the very fact of narration falsifies experience; and (3) movies do the job of literature better. I won't go through all of his arguments, but I think he adequately demonstrates that the mission of literary realism is very much alive and can contribute valuably to our exploration of existence.

In the second part, he takes on the Marxist claim that realism is complicit in oppression, and shows how this only leads to incoherence.

Then, in the third section, he takes merciless, direct shots at the "criticism" industry, showing how anti-realism is a failed project and how criticisms of realism, in which language becomes autonomous, flounder in self-contradiction. Here's an illustrative example:

[I]f I pay careful attention to my choice of words, I must be conscious of language and this consciousness must eclipse my consciousness of the world. Language used or generated by such a consciousness must [the argument goes] be self-referring. This is of course absurd. Admittedly, there is a sense in which by searching for daring metaphors to capture the precise feel, the precise sense of the real, I am exploring the possibilities of language; but this exploration is always preliminary to employing it to report, or make sense of, extra-linguistic reality. (177)

Finally, in the last part, Tallis clarifies his conception of realism in a rather inspiring way, outlining how it's been misunderstood, the difficulties it must face, but also its virtues.

I could go into more detail about the specifics of his argumentation, but I'm rather lazy. While Tallis is generally quite reasonable throughout this book, directly engaging the arguments of his opponents and subjecting them to rational analysis, this book is also quite polemical, with him taking some cheap shots at books, novelists, and thinkers he dislikes, calling them stupid, talentless, etc.—he does acknowledge this at the end and attempt to be more cordial, though I'm not sure how convincing this is, especially if one doesn't make it that far! In any event, he's entitled to be polemical.

[Liam Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A conservative defense of the classics and an indictment of academically-favored literary trends and the French literary theory behind them post-WW2. Despite being unread, it is entirely correct. Were one not to be familiar with the strange ideologies at work then and now in the academic world, this book would seem to be demolishing straw men arguments than could not ever have been seriously held, however the arguments made, not only in the name of criticism but in the name of deepest reality and moral rectitude (left wing morality, of course) really were this childish, and have grown yet more childish. Written in 1988, this book remains indirectly relevant to the identitarian movements currently coming out of the academy, stemming as they do from the same intellectual tradition.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first three quarters of this books are an in depth analysis of literary criticism and theory of the postmodern, deconstructionist variety, and in particular the claim that the realist novel is an artifact of the past that serious writer have moved beyond. In the last part of the book Tallis offers his own assessment of the strength and weakness of the realistic novel, and why he believes it should and will remain the primary, most essenmtial genre of fiction, of which other forms are variations. This last part was fascinating and I wish there was more of it. His criticism of 'Theory' in the first part is quite engaging and very effective, as he demonstrates how the claims oF these thinkers are exaggerated and based on flawed ideas in the philosophy of language and cognition. In fact his attacks are so effective that after the first 2 or 3 chapters his point has been made convincingly, and I was ready to move on to his own analysis of realism in fiction. So the middle part of the book became somewhat repetetive as he attacks the exponents of ‘Theory’ from many slightly different angles. Despite this I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the philosophical issues raised by fiction.