رئالیسم

The Critical Idiom

by Damian Grant, حسن افشار (مترجم)

نام کتاب رئالیسم
ترجمه حسن افشار
نویسنده دیمیان گرانت
نشر مرکز

Genres: Literature

106 pages, Unknown Binding

First published May 1, 1970

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiny old books can be useful, just like tiny old people can. Don’t take my word for this – find a tiny old person and see for yourself.

In this 80 page essay Damian Grant, a handsome 30-something professor, finds himself in a fight to the death with with a many-tentacled beast from 5000 fathoms called “realism” – hence the name of the book. He was writing in 1970 and that's a long time ago. Long enough for us to ask - was being real in 1970 the same as being real in 2014? I'd say we're a lot more real nowadays (all the pop stars like to say they're keepin' it real).

One thing this essay does do is assemble a wonderful lucky bag of quotes about artists and what the hell they think they’re doing. Here are some good ones.

1) We have no common sense of reality. We are saddled with all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness. We do not believe in there being one reality “out there”, as undoubtedly Tolstoy did. (Bernard Bergonzi)

2) Human kind cannot bear very much reality. (T S Eliot)

3) Man neither merely makes nor merely encounters the world he lives in. (Merleau-Ponty)

4) If there is any truth in a work of art it is not generally found to be in its correspondence with or imitation of actual fact. (J W Purser)

5) I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s. (Blake)

6) Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into. No fact is a bare fact. (Wallace Stevens)

7) Every one of us simply creates his own illusion of the world… and the writer has no other task but to reproduce faithfully this illusion with all the art he is master of… The great artists are those who force us to accept their own illusion. (de Maupassant)

8) It is as difficult to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south. (Henry James)

9) Realism is a corruption of reality. (Wallace Stevens)

I was scouting around for a newer book on realism in fiction and I couldn’t find it. What’s true and what’s a pack of lies told to us all to lull us into a pleasing acquiescent sleep is, of course, the thorn in our readerly flesh which no doctor can withdraw.

On tv you have The Wire and there was a great series of British gritty-working-class dramas called The Street (how do they think up these names?) and I was interested in how “realistic” creators of fiction think they can now be. We have television which does not censor language ; we now have movies like Nine Songs and The Brown Bunny which show actual sex on screen; yet we also have this thing called “reality tv” which is anything but realistic. Fiction on the page long ago was able to portray various aspects of reality unflinchingly, from Leopold Bloom’s morning defecation onwards; & yet my reading of Raymond Carver’s scrupulous stories showed very clearly that fiction inexorably tends towards the metaphorical and even the symbolic – think of the dead girl in the river in “So much water, so close to home” or the repeated wrong number caller in “Whoever was using this bed” or the useless birthday cake in “A small good thing”. And metaphors and symbols represent greater truths standing behind the small truths of the particular moment. This is a condition of language.

But anyway, I think there’s a lot of mileage in exploring the question of whether we, now, in the early 21st century, have enough artistic freedom to be able to represent “contemporary reality”, to “tell the truth” about our own world, or whether as old TS said, we still can’t bear very much reality.

[Emad · Rating 5 out of 5]

سوّمین کتابی که از مجموعه کتاب‌هایِ مکاتب، سبک‌ها و اصطلاحاتِ ادبی خواندم.

کلّاً این مجموعه کتاب‌ها خیلی مفید و به‌دردبخور هستند و خصوصیّتِ بارزشان اختصار و بیانِ لبّ مطلب است.

و این یکی از آن دوتایِ دیگر (کلاسی‌سیسم و رمانتیسم) به مراتب بهتر بود. البتّه قطعاً کتابی نیست که با یک بار خواندن بتوان همۀ جوانبش را به‌طورِ کامل گرفت. درکل می‌توان ان را چکیدۀ نابی از انبوهِ مراجعی که از رئالیسم گفته‌اند نام برد.

[M&A Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

با این که 90 صفحه بیشتر نبود و فکر می کردم خیلی زودتر باید تمامش کنم اما طول کشید. از مزایای کتاب گلچینی از آرای نویسندگان و فیلسوفان پیرامون موضوع رئالیسم بود و گاهی آنقدر این نظریات با آنچه که آموخته بودیم و فهم کرده بودیم تفاوت داشت که نیاز به زمان زیاد جهت هضم موضوع بود.

[Atefe Dtr · Rating 4 out of 5]

خب موضوع اثر که از عنوانش مشخصه. این کتاب به نظرم مطالب رو خوب دسته‌بندی کرده بود و جوری نبود که با موضوعات مربوط به هم تو بخش‌های مختلف پراکنده باشه. سعی کرده بود تا جایی که می‌تونه نظریات و دیدگاه‌های مختلف رو بگه و اکثر متن هم نقل قول از هنرمندان مختلف در باب همون موضوع مورد نظر بود. متن پیچیدگی خاصی نداشت که قابل فهم نباشه و در کل دید خوبی نسبت به «رئالیسم» می‌ده و اگه خواننده در آخر گیج بشه به نویسنده ربطی نداره و به خود مبحث این مکتب مربوطه:))
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