Behind this may lie the assumption that people in the overworld are as conservative as they are only because they donвЂ™t know about the sordid lives which others are forced to lead, which is far too charitable a view of them. Nor is it easy to see why Zola and the Naturalists thought that telling it like it was, taking the lid off the social underworld and exposing its squalor, was somehow inherently subversive. What, in any case, is so precious about an art which portrays life as it is? Why do we take delight in an image of a pork chop which looks exactly like a pork chop? No doubt we admire the skill which is needed for such acts of mimesis, but it is hard to feel that this is the whole story. For the Modernists, this is a problem which is resolvable only by irony вЂ“ by representing and pointing to the limits of your representation in the same gesture. The human subject becomes the blindspot at the centre of the picture, the absent cause of the worldвЂ™s coming to presence. It is the dynamic power behind the whole process, but one which it is hard to figure there. In picturing the world, the self risks falling outside the frame of its own representations. If the source of representing is the self, it is doubtful whether the self can be captured within its own view of the world, any more than the eye can be an object in its own field of vision. We can only compare artistic representations with non-artistic ones, a distinction which can itself be a little shaky.Д«esides, representationalism has its limits. We cannot compare an artistic representation with how the world is, since how the world is is itself a matter of representation. But there are a variety of such modes in any culture, and вЂin accordance withвЂ™ conceals a multitude of problems. Literary critics in the distant future would not be able to tell that Endgame was non-realist unless, for example, they had historical evidence that putting old people in dustbins was not standard geriatric practice in the mid-20th century.ДЄrtistic realism, then, cannot mean вЂrepresents the world as it isвЂ™, but rather вЂrepresents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing itвЂ™. In which case the text might shift into the category of realism. We might categorise the work as non-realist, until further archaeological research revealed that the civilisation in question regarded nose-size as an important index of male fertility. Suppose we discovered a piece of writing from some long-vanished civilisation which we knew was in some sense fictional, and which paid inordinate attention to the length of menвЂ™s noses. You cannot decide whether a work is realist simply by inspecting it. If realism is taken to mean вЂrepresents the world as it actually isвЂ™, then there is plenty of room for wrangling over what counts in this respect. вЂIf one wanted an aesthetic,вЂ™ Brecht writes, вЂone could find one here.вЂ™ Realism, in this view, is a matter of what the audience or readers get out of the thing, not what you put into it. Verisimilitude вЂ“ showing a dockyard on stage, say вЂ“ is not necessarily realistic in a politically and artistically evaluative sense of the word. One personвЂ™s realism is anotherвЂ™s fantasy. According to this theory, realism is a relationship between the artwork and its audience, in which case your play can be realistic on Monday but not on Thursday. Walter Benjamin considered that BaudelaireвЂ™s poetry reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work.Д«ertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a workвЂ™s effects, not of whether it recalled something familiar. Life can be a good deal more surreal than AndrГ© Breton. Jane AustenвЂ™s novels are realist, but you could claim that the spooky Gothic fiction she disliked so much reflects more of the anxiety and agitation of an Age of Revolution than Mansfield Park does. Conversely, Jeffrey ArcherвЂ™s novels are representational but unconvincing. You can have a work of art which is non-realist in the sense of being non-representational, yet which paints a convincing picture of the world. вЂUnrealisticвЂ™, for example, is not necessarily the same as вЂnon-realistвЂ™. Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms.

Erich auerbach mimesis