Realism in Western Narrative and the Gospel of Mark: A Prolegomenon

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)) Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search for reality is as momentous as the search for god." -Wallace Stevens1 I define "realism" as the way objective reality (i.e., what meets us "out there") is portrayed in literary narrative. I define "reality" as the way each individual perceives society and nature. Society and nature exist over against us, but only as each individual perceives them. In other words, our perceptions constitute what is real to us. Thus, one person's reality is not necessarily what others perceive.2 In the final analysis reality is subjective, although clearly a commonly perceived reality does exist "out there" and most of us in the twenty-first century, as heirs of the science and learning of Western culture, do share a similar view of reality. To be sure, what we in the twenty-first century consider real may differ remarkably from what people in previous centuries considered real, since reality is subjective. In general, modern human beings conceive of reality in three dimensions in common, practical, everyday ways and, hence, describe the world using identical conceptual categories. For example, we describe things by color and size (viz., height, depth, width, length, and weight) and in terms of distance, speed, and time; we conceive of the necessity for rules; we share the idea of a past and future. These conceptual categories seem common to diverse societies past and present and to some extent form something of common ways of conceiving of objective reality. This suggests that we are not completely misled by what is "out there," since in general we interact with it in similar ways. But the "core of reality" that human beings encounter "out there" clearly can be shaped in many different ways by different individuals on the basis of the inferences they make. Our individual inferences are much less uniform and far more significant for shaping individual views of reality. In a sense, if one believes it to be so, it is so-at least it is for the one believing it! The personal inferences we make are the result of our particular social engineering and shape the realities we experience. My aim in this article is to describe how the "realities we perceive" have been portrayed as "realisms" in Western narrative and to examine Mark's "literary realism" in that context.3 In general, literary realism is "an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity."4 It "aims at conveying reality as closely as possible and strives for maximum verisimilitude."5 This article is something of a "trial balloon," as it were, since so far as I know no one has ever attempted such a synthesis.6 I. REALISMS IN NARRATIVE Roland Barthes describes "realism" in literature as a "reality effect" that a narrative has on a reader; it is caused by the author's including things in the narrative that have no significance beyond themselves. These features are essentially insignificant to the author's plot. Beyond the fact that they enhance a reader's visual imaging of a scene, they contribute nothing to the plot or the narrative's progress. Like so many things in life, they are just there and incidental to the activity around them.7 Eric Auerbach describes realism in literature as mimesis of everyday life. The title of his book suggests his aim: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (first published in 1946).8 He examined selected narrative scenes ranging from Homer to Virginia Woolf to see how closely they imitate everyday life. Auerbach never addresses the difficulty of defining an actual objective reality, or the problem of different perceptions of reality. He never even defines realism in literature, as such,9 although two general statements in Mimesis help me to understand what he seems to mean by "realism": 1. [Realism] is "a serious representation of contemporary everyday social reality against the background of a constant historical movement" (p. …