Writing an Apple

Literary art is an art form. In both art, like visual art for example, and literary art, the goal is to depict, define, describe, capture, characterize. The subject, in general, is life: human life, not any other plant or animal life, because we happen to be interested in humanity. Well, humanity is complicated. Let’s start with something simpler. What if you wanted to draw, depict, paint, visually, on a canvas, an apple?

From one side, it looks like a red, vaguely truncated heart, with maybe a little brown stem on top with a green leaf attached. A stereotypical apple, the Platonic form of an apple, if you will. To get an even better picture, we can paint the apple from several angles, several dimensions, to get the whole apple, because only then can you appreciate the whole 3-D delicious perfection.

However, apples aren’t really like this. There are so many problems here. First of all, this apple is ripe, at its prime, at its peak, but when you think about it, the majority of an apple’s life is not spent at its prime (since a peak is, by definition, one point in time or space), so the majority of the time we encounter apples, in real life, they do not look as delicious and perfect as this. Therefore, we add some blemishes and such to make it more realistic. We just said that it changes in time, so maybe to really capture the apple, we can add in that fourth dimension, time, perhaps using a succession of apple as it progresses through its existence. Finally, apples don’t even really exist like this, on a blank white canvas, anywhere but in our imaginations. How can this be the apple that you are going to eat if it does not exist on your table? To that end, we put it in its context, in a fruit bowl maybe, on a table. Part of the apple’s essence is related to these other things, like the person who’s going to eat it, and the other fruits in the fruit bowl, which itself becomes more aesthetically pleasing than the sum of its fruits of course. Now we proclaim that this, this is a realistic apple!

Yet perhaps, if the goal is to capture the essence of an apple, what we should paint is the inside of the apple, the inner workings. From this picture we have now, you can’t tell anything about the texture, the juiciness, the flavors, the sugars, the biological processes inside the apple. We should draw that instead. However, the chemistry and biology of an apple are horribly complicated, so we run into two problems. First, we have to discard our old canvas and think of a new way to describe the processes, because obviously we don’t have space on our canvas to focus on both. Second, even when we are just describing the inner workings of the apple, we still have to simplify them, because it really is complicated. We just show general mechanisms, and leave much out, because we have to focus on something.

Now, what does all this have to do with literature? Start again with that Platonic apple. It is idealized, romanticized. Think of Classical Romanticism, eighteenth, nineteenth century, pastoral life is perfect, it’s ideal, this is how life should be, you know? Maybe we don’t have flat characters; we might still paint them from multiple perspectives and show that they’re multidimensional and round, but they’re still idealistic.

Now think of the realists saying, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. This may or may not be how life should be, but it is certainly now how life is.” First of all, life isn’t perfect, so we get the styles that often make people think realist and cynic are synonymous. We put in imperfections; life isn’t all that great after all, it’s just ordinary. We put in the context, the society and surroundings in which life lives, because if we don’t have that we aren’t really describing human life as it exists in the world. We then we put in development, because people change, opinions change, life changes. We get a plethora of bildungsromans, stories of learning, like Pip of Great Expectations and Eugene of Pére Goriot learning about how imperfect society is. This is realism, classical realism. You can call it social or physical or empirical realism, perhaps.

Then the Modernists step in: “What have you done? You spent so much energy and time focusing on what surrounds life that it’s like drawing the house in which a person lives in order to describe the person, as Woolf says. You’ve lost sight of the person here!” What matters is not the surface, the superficial society; what matters is the psychology of the individual. That is the essence of human life. That is what we ought to focus on. Unfortunately, the human mind is even more horribly complicated than an apple, and we can’t write every single thought that flits through the head. We can’t record every atom as it falls upon the mind, so we have to simplify and choose what to include to make it easy for our viewer, in this context our reader, to understand what on earth we’re saying. We have to come up with new modes and experiment, because psychology is a new field, humans are attracted to the superficial, and thus it takes considerable effort and creativity to look inside the mind. Then we can see how the experimental aspect of modernism emerges. Moreover, it’s easy, if you’re lost in the confines of one mind, to end up with solipsism, because you can only see other minds through yours. Suddenly the world seems an existentialist-lonely place. Fortunately, Woolf shows that it is possible to focus on other minds, as long as we link them together; in fact, we gain some insight about society through that interaction. Fantastic! Yet we still don’t have space or time to focus on both this inner psychology and the outside, the society, the physical realism.

The exception is shown by Tolstoy, who was somehow insightful and skillful enough to overlay the two, laying psychological realism over empirical realism to discuss the real world through the eyes of psychologically realistic individuals. That’s the best you can hope for, and even that’s not perfect, really. Tolstoy still has to simplify Anna and Levin’s thoughts are still simplified, just like modernists, and however much focus he puts on Russia, he loses in focus on Anna and Levin.

We can’t paint everything in one picture; we can’t write everything in one book. If we focus on everything we have no focus, because focus implies some kind of specialization, some specificity. However, we still find that neither realism nor modernism is inherently superior. The first painter, with the Platonic apple, might come along again and say that “We’ve become so caught up in the real world that we’ve lost sight of the quintessence of human life! Can you imagine what state we’d be in if Pythagoras had never tried thinking about idealized triangles, and had stuck to imperfect real-world ones?” The realist reply is that “No, we want to describe life as it really is, we want to capture authentic life, and yes, that means imperfections, that means we deal with just shadows of idealized life.” The modernist says “Sure, but remember what’s important is not this superficial physical realism but the psychological realism, the mind. That’s where human life really is.”

They’re just different foci on looking at the same object, Life. It’s not that we’ve made progress from one to the other. Like Woolf says, we just move in circles on the same plain. You can say the relationship between realism and modernism is that realism is, in general, empirical realism while modernism is psychological realism, as well as the authors can manage, because the mind is a difficult thing to read as well as a terrible thing to waste. Moreover, while it may be impossible to account for all of them in one work, one painting, or one book, we can read and study these different ways of describing and understanding human life on so many levels, and learn different insights from each style. Even if every work fails to capture life completely, we are thankfully not limited to choosing only one.