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Maccabe On The Classic Realist Text

The document discusses Colin MacCabe's analysis of classic realist texts. It defines classic realism as texts that present a hierarchical relationship between discourses where the narrative is seen as having direct access to reality without being recognized as its own articulation. It also discusses how classic realism cannot deal with contradictions in reality and ensures the subject is in a position of dominant observation rather than investigation of contradictions.

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69 views2 pages

Maccabe On The Classic Realist Text

The document discusses Colin MacCabe's analysis of classic realist texts. It defines classic realism as texts that present a hierarchical relationship between discourses where the narrative is seen as having direct access to reality without being recognized as its own articulation. It also discusses how classic realism cannot deal with contradictions in reality and ensures the subject is in a position of dominant observation rather than investigation of contradictions.

Uploaded by

DaveShaw
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Maccabe on the classic realist text

this is a great essay that i think drives home the need to really centre marxist analysis
throughout the project. not only is that something that you should want to do, its also kind of
the most systematic. you already sort of get the lukacs stuff and there’s a direct through line
from him to jameson.

the classic realist text (explicitly derived, for maccabe, from 19th century realist novels)
"A classic realist text may be defined as one in which there is a hierarchy amongst the discourses which
compose the text and this hierarchy is defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth.”(8)

For MacCabe, the classical realist text can be characterized by an overarching tendency to resolve the slippage
between some fixed notion of the real and its representation as such. As he describes, “[w]hereas other
discourses within the text are considered as material which are open to re-interpretation, the narrative discourse
simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation” (9).

"No discourse is allowed to speak for itself but rather it must be placed in a context which will reduce it
to a simple explicable content. And in the claim that the narrative prose has direct access to a final
reality we can find the claim of the classic realist novel to present us with the truths of human nature.”
(10)

Classically realist texts can be and in fact often are discursive. But as MacCabe describes, the discourse is
inherently hierarchical, and have what MacCabe terms a “relationship of dominance” (10): any discursive
tension will be resolved by the text itself.

the narrative discourse

The narrative discourse cannot be mistaken in its identifications because the narrative discourse is not
present as discourse - as articulation. The unquestioned nature of the narrative discourse entails that the
only problem that reality poses is to go and look and see what Things there are. The relationship
between the reading subject and the real is placed as one of pure specularity. The real is not articulated
— it is. These features imply two essential features of the classic realist text:

1 The classic realist text cannot deal with the real as contradictory.

2 In a reciprocal movement the classic realist text ensures the position of the subject in a relation of
dominant specularity. (12)

Classic realism as a “closed discourse"

'All this by way of explaining that the classic realist text (a heavily ' closed' discourse) cannot deal with
the real in its con- tradictions and that in the same movement it fixes the subject in a point of view from
which everything becomes obvious.” (16)

AH GOOD ONE: realism is for libs because it is unable to meaningfully “investigate contradiction”

"What is, however, still impossible for the classic realist text is to offer any perspectives for struggle due
to its inability to investigate contradiction. It is thus not surprising that these films tend either to be
linked to a social-democratic conception of progress — if we reveal injustices then they will go away —
or certain ouvrieriste tendencies which tend to see the working class, outside any dialectical movement,
as the simple possessors of truth.” (16)

the classic realist text can still contain moments of subversion, or discrete moments where contradictions
in the otherwise unified voice of its narrative discourse become visible but they do not give way to
anything. they’re fleeting. what is needed (and i think this is where stuff like “peripheral realisms” come
into play) are ongoing strategies for subverting that normative discourse in a more sustained fashion.

"Over and above these moments of subversion, however, there are what one might call strategies of
subversion. Instead of a dominant discourse which is transgressed at various crucial moments we can
find a systematic refusal of any such dominant discourse. “ (19)

" The whole problematic of inside and outside which preoccupies the classic realist text is transformed
into a series of relationships in which word, dress, action and gesture interact to provide a never-finished
series of significant differences which is the character.” (20)

realists and materialists

" To deal with the facts of the world is, in itself, not only a realist but also a materialist viewpoint. The
materialist, how- ever, must regard these materials as ordered within a certain mode of production,
within which they find their definition. And it is here that one could begin to isolate that element of
realist ideo- logy which does figure in Rossellini's films as a certain block. If the reading subject is not
offered any certain mode of entry into what is presented on the screen, he is offered a certain mode of
entry to the screen itself. For the facts presented by the camera, if they are not ordered in fixed and final
fashion amongst themselves, are. ordered in themselves.” (20)

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