Realism and Unrealism

Insights from Samuel Johnson

Anonymous portrait of Samuel Johson, c. 1770.

"The works of fiction with which the present generation seem more particularly delighted," Samuel Johnson wrote in 1750, "are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind."

Authors of this new kind of fiction, which Johnson calls "the comedy of romance" and we call realistic or literary fiction, face several challenges unknown to previous writers. First, they must "keep up curiosity without the help of wonder" and are "therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch a lady away from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity;" a realistic story "can neither bewilder its personages in deserts nor lodge them in imaginary castles."

Second, they must focus on "accurate observations of the living world" because "they are engaged in portraits of which every one knows the original, and can detect any deviation from exactness of resemblance."

What can we learn from this essay published more than 270 years ago?

First, it helps clarify the unique excellences of "comedies of romance" such as those written by Jane Austen who, according to her brother Henry, considered Johnson her "favourite moral writer" in prose. In his "Biographical Notice" to the posthumously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Henry Austen echoes one of Johnson's famous comments on Shakespeare —"Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature" — by writing that his sister "drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals." Elizabeth Bennett, Mr. Darcy, Cathy Moreland and Anne Elliott have long outlasted their original context because we recognize ourselves and people we know in them.

Second, it reminds us in the 21st century that, rather than being some kind of default, literary or realistic fiction is a relatively recent development, something that had to be invented; Johnson is covering a new trend popular among a new generation. Johnson's most widely read work of fiction, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), is an allegorical fable that fits in much better with the old kind of fiction than the new.

As a thought experiment, make a list of a half-dozen or so pre-1750 books that we remember as canonical classics and study in school. My list is The Odyssey, Medea, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet and Paradise Lost, all of which have supernatural elements. Shakespeare, who Johnson justly praises for his "vigilance of observation," "faithful mirrour of manners and of life" and "just representations of general nature," also populated plays with ghosts, witches, fairies, Prospero, Ariel and Caliban. Even Geoffrey Chaucer, whose "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales exemplifies realism in Johnson's and our senses, had his pilgrims tell tales of fantastical adventures, talking animals and an encounter with the devil.

To write realistic fiction, in other words, is to write in a relatively new mode, and to use one’s imagination in a unique and challenging way: to both vigilantly observe the world and create a believable simulacrum of it, to create scenes and characters that somehow resonate with the reader’s personal experience.

Third, "the machines and expedients of heroic romance" have remained a viable, if sometimes unfashionable, option for writers over the 270 years since Johnson wrote about "the comedy of romance." The rejection of these tropes, like the invention of English-language realism, is also the product of a specific historical and cultural moment. Consider, for example, the German- and English-language Romantics who wrote in the half-decade or so after his death in 1785; a Romantic era Samuel Johnson would not have called Faust or "die Lorelei" or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" or Frankenstein "portraits of which every one knows the original." In our time, of course, no one can compare the literary or cinematic portrait of a Hobbit or a Wookie to the original; romantic machines and expedients can still be used, and used well.

In his essay, Johnson identifies one of the key joys of such a story, the escape to another world:

In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any application to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellences in common with himself.

This passage precipitates Johnson’s conclusion, in which he ponders the moral implications of this new kind of realistic fiction, especially their potential impacts on young, impressionable readers. This question — whether a commitment to literary realism can or should lead to representations of the darker sides of life — of course remains an open one.

For his part, Johnson is both optimistic about the moral value of literature — “these familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions” — and anxious about the potential consequences of realism, which in his mind requires a certain responsibility from writers (“greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness.”)

This is the essay’s last and perhaps most interesting insight: its insight into Johnson himself, Johnson the moralist, the man of letters and voracious reader with faith in the life-changing impact of books. And, of course, Johnson the vigilantly observant literary critic who saw and described a literary revolution in its earliest stages.