Introduction

The Introduction sets synthetic realism in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture and aesthetics to show why literary realism needs to be grasped in metaphysical terms. Ranging across contemporary periodical culture and works of literature, philosophy, and science, it examines the ways in which realist theory and practice grapples with the recalcitrance of ‘reality’ as a shifting referential cipher. The Introduction also considers previous critical approaches and suggests that the effects of these encounters between realist aesthetics and philosophical discourse were more various, ambiguous, and complex than we might have thought. It concludes with brief overviews of the book’s five main chapters and elucidates the overarching arguments that are developed within them.

May Sinclair

Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relationship between realist aesthetics and figurative language as it might be oriented towards an unimaginable term—an unknowable, noumenal category—by considering its collision with what May Sinclair posits as its psychological equivalent, the unconscious. Sinclair combined a career as a novelist with philosophical research, mounting a vindication of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. For Sinclair, idealism’s impetus for thinking about immaterial and unseen realities led to the intangible and unseen realms of the mind, and a metaphysical absolute becomes the conduit for her early realist novels to begin to imagine a form for the uncertain boundaries and contours of consciousness. Both lack a verifiable content and are therefore apparently beyond the power of language to define or accommodate. This chapter suggests that the models of subjectivity presented in her fiction seek to integrate a revelatory encounter with an idealist absolute with the incontrovertible material evidence of alternative forms of consciousness being presented by the ‘new psychology’.

H. G. Wells

This chapter shifts attention from reference in space to reference in time, in order to extend the argument about realism and metaphysics to a consideration of genres as ideological formations which must both engage with recognizable circumstances and possess an innate desire to defamiliarize, even contravene, the givens of the cultural symbolic world. The social problem novel highlights this paradox, because it can only imagine possible futures through extrapolation from present conditions. The future acts as another boundless context against which realist representation must be pivoted. Chapter 4 explores this temporal paradox in the novels of H. G. Wells, whose background in evolutionary biology and investment in performative socialist politics means he depicts contemporary society as already, in a sense, prescient. The conclusions drawn about the operation of temporality in Wells’s fiction—particularly his use of tenses and the odd, recurrent topos of metanarrative intrusion—are used to think through some of the implications for ‘condition of England’ writing as an oracular and dialectical tradition within realism.

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad famously declared a desire ‘above all, to make you see’, but he also repeatedly deploys abstract nouns—truth, beauty, the universe—to denote his representational ambitions. Discussing Conrad’s use of the idea of the real as an anchor for his fiction, this chapter works across literature and philosophy not by recourse to the model of a ‘lens’ or influence study, but instead examines the ways in which the particularly metaphysical dimension of the representational capacities and incapacities of language reveals the contradictions inherent in our desire to place the objects of our experience in a clear, vivid scheme. What demands do realities beyond our sensory experience make upon us for shape and conceptual clarity? In new readings of Nostromo and The Secret Agent, this chapter explores how Conrad’s use of metaphor and analogy fractures the metonymic chains through which realism moves between the known and the unknown.

Ford Madox Ford

This chapter seeks to educe the forms of truth that impressionist aesthetics wants to elicit from representation by re-approaching the relationship between particular impressions and universal categories of experience, in order to ask what happens when realism, a mode premised on the production of consensual knowledge, encounters the contingencies of individual vision. Ford insists upon a holistic axiom of literary impressionism in his critical writings, insisting that a thing conceived apart from its relationships would not be a thing, since all language is a matter of relating some things to other things. Yet Ford’s narrators seek a kind of knowledge that is not discursive—that does not rely on the choice of a particular linguistic formulation, and that one cannot be argued out of. Ford stages this descriptive limit by exploiting a set of non-descriptive terms—everything and nothing. The indescribable here means not so much a sublime beyond comprehension but rather the particularities of individual feelings.

Conclusion

The conclusion brings together the book’s major findings, summarizes its arguments, and underscores the significance of its contributions by speculating about the potential afterlife of synthetic realism as it finds its way into critical discourse. It highlights intersections with affect theory and critical realism, drawing particular notice to the way that realist gestures towards totality have frequently been seen as requiring ideological solution. Finally, the conclusion calls for a different kind of attention to the relationship between realism and wholeness which, it is argued, has important implications for our understanding of realism as one mode of response to capitalist modernity.

Arnold Bennett

Virginia Woolf’s accusation that ‘Life escapes’ from the aesthetic horizons of Bennett’s fiction has long haunted his critical reception. Chapter 3 therefore turns to the function of description within realism, arguing that Bennett does not conceptually prioritize either the particulars, as Woolf argued, or the aggregated scene, as in Barthes’s ‘reality effect’, where the specificities of detail are secondary to its ideological function. The solid superficies for which Bennett has become infamous never constitute individual atoms of meaning, for he insists on both the particularity of a given scene and its transient coherence as a totality. This stereoptic effect mobilizes a searching scepticism as to reality’s appearances, which makes Bennett aim at what is at once both a more abstract and a more concrete notion of truth, one whose material manifestations carry with it the mark of its relation to a whole range of universal truths of which it is part. In this, Bennett acknowledges a debt to the ‘synthetic philosophy’ of Herbert Spencer. By examining more closely the influence of Spencer’s metaphysics on Bennett’s realist aesthetics, and focusing on Bennett’s novels together with his numerous critical writings, this chapter gives long-overdue attention to an often neglected figure in modern British literature.