Realism in literature: characteristics, description and evolution of a literary genre that decides to tell reality.
Realism was born as a counterpoint to the spiritualistic tendencies of Romanticism and wanted to provide an objective picture of reality, avoiding the idealization of stories and characters, typical of Romanticism . Realism is characterized by a renewed interest in the conditions of the most disadvantaged classes and socially marginalized people.
This movement broadens the themes covered in novels and artistic representations, embracing a variety of contexts and living conditions, and showing particular attention to every level of society. In addition, there is an intense denunciation of the injustices perpetrated by the system and the existing inequalities. The character of the realist novel loses every heroic and exceptional aspect that characterized the romantic characters. And in its description of reality, in the search for an objective and rigorous description, the novel is seen as a tool for social intervention.
Among the main exponents of Realism are Stendhal , Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert . Realism flows into Naturalism – the scientific variant of Realism – which takes up its essential characteristics.
From Realism to Naturalism
Naturalism established itself in France in the second half of the nineteenth century (starting around 1870); it finds its foundations in Positivism , a philosophical movement that expresses the thinking of the new bourgeois society and provides theoretical support for the second industrial revolution . Positivism believes in the progress of science and that it can promote human happiness. This philosophy is called “Positivism” because positivist thinkers believe only in positive facts, or those that can be scientifically demonstrated, while they are not interested in anything metaphysical or spiritual. Science therefore becomes the tool for knowing and improving reality for the benefit of man , for explaining it objectively and dominating it.
One of the major positivists is Taine . He proposes to apply his own philosophical and scientific concepts to literature, hoping that it will take on the task of a scientific analysis of reality. Naturalism is based on the assumption that literature can analyze and represent the nature of man and human society with the same objectivity with which the sciences treat natural phenomena. The novel must reproduce reality and its author must behave like a scientist: personal feeling must not intervene to change the reality of the narrated facts. Literary models of the naturalist school are the realist novelists: first of all Balzac and Flaubert , authors respectively of the Human Comedy and Madame Bovary ; secondly the brothers Edmond and Jules de Gouncourt , who dedicate particular attention to the lower classes, to phenomena of human degradation and to pathological cases (in the novel Germinie Lacerteux they analyze the physical and psychological degradation of a hysterical servant).
The Naturalism of Emile Zola
The most important French naturalist, considered the true founder of Naturalism, is Emile Zola . He summarizes the movement almost entirely in his work. The concepts that form the basis of his narrative are set out in the essay The Experimental Novel of 1880 .
In this work he argues that the novel must apply the scientific method to the analysis of reality: as man has passed from the study of physics (inorganic reality) to physiology (organic reality), Zola wants to study spiritual and passionate reality, determined by fixed laws such as those that regulate physics and biology; therefore the task of the novelist is to discover such laws.
These concepts are put into practice in his fundamental work, “ The Rougon-Macquarts ”, a cycle of twenty novels in which the author analyses the descendants of a family placed in various social strata, starting from the lowest classes towards the highest, providing an overview of French society at the end of the 19th century. He reconstructs in a precise and detailed way spaces, customs and ways of life, concerning various types of environments: social, aristocratic, political, artistic, literary, theatrical, journalism, the suburbs, the Stock Exchange, the countryside and the mines. Zola researched with extreme care and had a polemical and critical attitude towards the corrupt and rich ruling classes and the lower middle class, while he was interested in the lower classes (artisans, workers, peasants), but always with the scrupulousness of a scientist: he did not idealise popular environments, indeed he reproduced even their most repugnant aspects and it was this that ensured him fame and wealth, even if through scandal.
For Zola the writer has a useful function in society ( progressive vision ), because with his study he allows legislators to know society better, so that they can improve it by making laws more suitable to it. Zola is an optimist because the French society of the second half of the 19th century is in continuous growth, therefore he is also confident in the improvement of the conditions of the lower classes. His attitude, decidedly progressive, evolves towards openly socialist positions.
From French Naturalism to Italian Verism
French Naturalism had vast repercussions in Italy where Francesco de Sanctis , in his essays on Zola and Darwinism in art, already felt the need to arrive at a new, more pragmatic and positive method of dealing with reality. Italian Verism was therefore born from the encounter between the objective needs developed in France with Naturalism and the romantic concept of truth. Italian Verism mainly recounts regionalist literature based on the need to make the truth appear without any superimposition by the author. In the 1860s and 1870s, particularly in Milan and Florence, attempts were made to establish the limits and forms of this type of literature, which however found its maximum expression in writers such as the Sicilians Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. Naturalism and Verism are part of the more general and generic sphere of Realism .
Verism in Art: The Macchiaioli
The need to objectively represent reality, to tell social issues, to describe the most disadvantaged classes, the toil of everyday life… also finds expression in art and, in our country, in particular in the painting of the Macchiaioli .
The Macchiaioli were a group of artists who came from all over Italy and who met at the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence in Via Larga, a meeting point for the artists of the academy between 1855 and 1867. The Macchiaioli advocated an anti-academic painting that told the truth, aimed at capturing the meaning rather than the appearance of things, through the abbreviated and direct technique of the stain. In 1856 Domenico Morelli and Saverio Altamura arrived in Florence and joined the most active frequenters of the Caffè Michelangiolo such as Borrani, D’Ancona, Buonamici, Mochi, Morricci, Lega, Fattori and Telemaco Signorini. The art of these painters, as defined by Adriano Cecioni, theoretician and critic of the movement, consisted of: ” rendering the impressions they received from reality by means of stains of light and dark colors .”
In Florence, a group of young people passionate about a genre almost unknown in the Tuscan tradition was formed: landscape . Painting outdoors , in contact with nature, was another of the watchwords together with a type of representation of reality aimed at underlining the everyday and authentic aspects of life, in contrast to the academic and emphatic rhetoric of genre painting. The combinations of color-shadow and color-light created effects of great luminosity and suggestive atmospheric rendering, and simplified the landscape to its essential structures. Having definitively established itself at the National Exhibition of Florence in 1865, around the seventies the movement began to run out of steam after having tried in vain to overcome regional boundaries to become the new figurative language of the Italy of the Risorgimento .
