Shakespear's Realism

7/27/2019 Shakespear's Realism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/shakespears-realism 1/13

This article was downloaded by: [117.201.98.223]On: 09 May 2013, At: 06:36Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

History of European IdeasPublication details, including instructions for

authors and subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20

Realistic convention and

conventional realism in

ShakespeareA.D. Nuttall

a

aUniversity of Sussex, UK

Published online: 03 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: A.D. Nuttall (1981): Realistic convention and conventional realism

in Shakespeare, History of European Ideas, 1:3, 237-248

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(81)90055-3

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liablefor any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damageswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material.


http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(81)90055-3




Hwory of European Ideas. Vol 1. No 3. pp 237-248. 1981 01914599/81/030237-12 $02 00/O

Pnnted m Great Bream 0 1981 Pergamon Press Ltd

REALISTIC CONVENTION AND CONVENTIONAL

REALISM IN SHAKESPEARE*

A.D. NUITALL

Can realism have anything to do with reality? I answer, yes, it can, but find that

this innocent response now needs a fairly careful defense. The critical essay

which praises George Eliot because she is true to life is likely to be received

nowadays with a slightly impatient, mildly indulgent smile. For we have all

been told that the great nineteenth-century mode known as realism is, no less

than any other mode, a tissue of conventions. After all ‘Look in thy heart and

write’ was a trope long before Rousseau contrived his confessions. As with‘expression of the real self, so with fidelity to the real world. This reaction

among educated people is commonly very swift -almost automatic in fact. As

long as we remain readers, automatic responses - or, at least, immediate

responses - have a kind of authority. But in the sphere of literary theory,

automatic responses are rightly held to be suspect. Here will be found the

prejudices as well as the insights of an age. I therefore propose to scrutinize this

particular theoretical response.

Let us take the argument step by step: it is tacitly contended that nineteenth-

century fiction cannot be true to reality because what we take for reality isreally a series of literary formulae, designed, perhaps, to evoke the illusion of

reality, but incapable of giving reality itself. We should begin by removing all

merely trivial occasions of disagreement or misunderstanding. For example,

we can presumably all agree at once that Middlemarch does not refer to actual

events (apart from the general historical context of the Reform Bill and so on).

Middlemarch was never offered as anything but fiction. But at the same time its

claim to realism included, evidently, a claim to some cognitive connexion with

the real world, presumably in terms of possibility and probability, rather than

actuality. These are the merest elements of mimetic theory, laid down byAristotle in his brisk distinction between the historian, who tells us ‘what

Alcibiades did’ and the poet, who tells us oia an genoifo ‘what would happen’.

Let us not linger oq thepons usinorum of our subject. Neither the great realists

themselves nor those who in criticism used such phrases as ‘true to life’ ever

intended literal reference to specific actualities, and surely, on the other side,

those who rebut such claims are scarcely engaged in a wholly vacuous act of

opposition.

No, it is the claim to be showing how the world itself may really be that is

resisted by those who point to the endlessly conventional character of theliterature. And their opposition rests on a single word: convention. In Middle-

march, they might say, we see an extended trope, crossing the categories of

fairy tale, in that the fair and beautiful girl proves wicked and the dark girl

proves good, a work whose every line is determined by the strangely powerful

yet abstract pressures of literary structure, and not by reality (poor shapeless,

lolling thing that it is) at all.

*This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Sussex Symposium on

Rhetoric and Communication, 25-26 April 1980.

237

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



238 A. D. Nuttall

How strong is this, considered as a ground for excluding that endless refer-

ence to the real which thousands of readers thought they found in Middlemarch?

Not strong at all. We will put the answer first in mild terms and then more

forcibly. The mild answer is. ‘a literary work can be conventional, and yet

employ those conventions in order to alert the reader to features of the real

world’. The more forcible answer is: ‘all language is a conventional system of

formulae (except. perhaps, for words like “ouch!“)‘. But if language cannot

represent or refer to reality our case is indeed desperate; for example, this

sentence says nothing about reality. Indeed the thesis destroys itself like certain

‘self-destructing’ works of contemporary art.

It takes a logician and a humourist to see at once the full absurdity of thinking

that one can rout reality by the simple demonstration of convention. It takes. in

fact, someone like Lewis Carroll. I quote from The Hunti ng of the Snark .

‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators.

Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

‘They are merely conventional signs.”

To be sure, there is no position in philosophy so untenable but that some

intrepid spirit will be found occupying it. I can think of writers who have

asserted in words (what else could they use?!) that words are all lies, absurdschemata which cannot reflect the real ungoverned flux and richness of reality.

Of course part of the trouble here is the word ‘reflect’ (as if language were to

include in its own structure everything which is present in the object, as if the

role of language were somehow to exhaust, rather than to demarcate or

sufficiently identify the object). Sometimes this impulse assumes the form of a

stunningly simple intuition: ‘language and the world are different’, from which

the conclusion is then joyously drawn, ‘therefore language (or linguistic propo-

sitions) cannot be true’. In fact, as Swift saw when he wrote Gull iver’ s Travels,

it is because language is conventional, because language is other than reality

that it can be used to refer, and then to do all the other things it does. You don’t

point at a dog with a dog, you use your finger or a stick. The philosophers in

Balnibarbi who conversed with things, not words. almost sank under their

burdens.’

Therefore the simple proposition: ‘The presence of convention precludes

reference to the real’ is false. Note that I have conducted the argument at the

level of linguistic structure but I might have conducted it at a level more

fundamental still, that is, at the level of perception. It is tolerably clear that a

selective grid, and thereby an element of interpretation is applied in our

perception of the world. This can be expressed. if you like, by saying that the

world-we-see is organized according to certain conventions of perception.

Here, once again, some philosophers may wish to draw the disabling and quite

unnecessary conclusion that what we see is unreal. It may be best, in a literary

paper like this, to cut short any such discussion by a simple application of ‘the

paradigm case argument’: the word ‘reality’ is most obviously used for what-

we-see (however that is arrived at). What-we-see is then the paradigm of the

real. It is then unsurprising that a systematic connexion should prove to be

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



Real i sti c Conventi on and Convent i onal Real i sm i n Shakespeare 239

feasible, between the human structures of language and the human structures

of perception and that both in turn should bear some relation to the free-er

fictive structures of literature. But I must come clean on this. The real force of

the paradigm case argument in this instance is to remind us how far weordinarily go in accepting something subjected to formal organisation as never-

theless real. We go so far as to found our universe upon it. The. use of the

argument merely to dismiss all problems is merely evasive. I employed it myself

as a sop to Cerberus. It usually keeps my enemies quiet for at least five minutes. In

fact I am more than willing to accept the more fundamental ontological

challenge and to retort that what we see may certainly be ‘really there’. Whales

may be aware of gradations in the nature of sea water of which we are unaware.

The fact that such perceptions are phallaenocentric doesn’t mean that they are

deluded. All seeing is perspective, but perspective seeing is still seeing.It could, however, be claimed that formalism can exist in both a strong and

weak form and so far I have dealt with the strong form only.The Strong-

Formalist holds that any proposition that is formally expressed is i pso fact o

incapable of being true or referring to reality. Since this dogma is itself formally

expressed, it in fact destroys itself, as I suggested, without any help from me.

But Weak Formalism may prove, because more pliant, less easy to break.

Weak Formalism is the doctrine implied in a phrase I used a while ago about

M iddl emarch. I said, putting the formalist case, that every line of M iddl emarch

was determined, not by the character of reality but by the abstract pressures ofliterary structure. Though literary works may refer to reality, they do so per

accidens. The necessity of a literary work, that which makes it what it is, will

always be formal. The short answer to this is that it is simply not true. George

Eliot again and again describes objects in a certain way, not because of any

formal pressure but because such objects are in real life like that. If the

Formalist comes back at me with the objection, ‘Yes, but all this reference is

itself determined by the formal decision to go for realism’ I merely point to the

immediate and necessary implications of such a ‘formal’ choice. By his choice

of realism the artist is at once involved in reference to the world, to genuinepossibilities and probabilities, not per accidens but by the very logic of the

formal stance adopted. Once again my opponent has confused a logical anti-

thesis (form as against content) with a practical opposition. In practice form

and content are naturally symbiotic and where content involves realism (and so

reference to probability) that symbiosis entails reference to reality. Quite

clearly, the decision to write in a realistic mode does not automatically prevent

you from referring to reality. On the contrary, it builds reference to reality into

the aesthetic essence of what you are doing. The fact that such things as

plot-shape and the counter-pointing of fair and dark may remain subject tomore abstract patterning (as can easily be done without violence to probability)

does not alter this central-if currently unnoticed - fact.

Does all this mean, then, that there is no sense in the common accusation,

‘merely conventional’ (quite as traditional and time-honoured an expression as

the ‘true to life’ I was so anxious to defend at the beginning of this paper)? No,

there i.r sense in the expression, but notice its comparative modesty; it is

applied to some works but not all and (more crucially) it includes the differ-

entiating adverb, ‘merely’. A work is ‘merely conventional’ when our attention

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



240 A. D. Nuttall

is directed to the formal character of the conventions employed rather than to

the work they do. Please note that this can happen even with propositions

which are factually true. It seems likely that Euphuistic prose was heavily

conventional in this sense from the beginning. Other examples from theRenaissance period are somewhat trickier. Boccaccio3 saw in the paintings of

Giotto an astonishing illusion of visual reality where we see a fascinating and

quite unrealistic formalism. We may discern in this, as Gombrich does, the

effect of historical progress in naturalism; if you have been brought up on

Cimabue you will see Giotto as Boccaccio saw him; if you live in an age which

has seen the dubious triumphs of nineteenth-century realism succeeded and

swamped by the puny yet lethal triumphs of photography, you will see Giotto

as we see him. Yet, quite apart from this historical sequence, it may be that

there is a certain bias to formalism built into the very profession of the studentof literature. The formal character of convention becomes obtrusive partly by

mere repetition. The professional teacher of literature is artificially directed,

by the terms of his job. to elicit such repetitions, and then to differentiate

author from author, period from period by modifications in the formal charac-

ter of their work. Thus we come to a line like Sidney’s

Foole, said my Muse to me,

Looke in thy heart and write

with a predisposition to locate its precedents, and to place it in the web ofanalogical structure. I question whether even the most literary Elizabethan

readers had their attention channelled (for all their love of phrase and echo) in

quite this harshly exclusive manner. In fact, it seems to me entirely possible

that many of them read the line as I read it in my teens, as another exciting

foray, out of mere Petrarchan bead-stringing, and into the dense reality of love.

And with Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan sonnets, the intuition is stronger still.

Shakespeare’s sonnet xxi

So is it not with me as with that Muse

makes two things quite clear: first that the disparaging concept, if not the actual

phrase. ‘merely conventional’, did figure in his consciousness and. secondly,

that his own poem is not offered as merely an alternative convention. Of course

it is possible for experts to point out that anti-Petrarchanism is itself a repeated

formal posture and it is conceivable that Shakespeare may have intended some

such intuition to arise in his reader. But to admit the thought. ‘and this also is of

course just a convention’ is to turn the poem into a wry joke.

I have little doubt that this is just what is done in As You Like It, 1I.i.. Duke

Senior opens the scene with a set speech in praise of their new home m theforest, far from the pomp of court. Virgil in his Ecfogues praised the uncourtly

world as a place of lyric ease: ‘ Ti tyre. fu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagz .’

and in his Georgics he praised it on the opposite ground, that it formed

character through labour. The Duke’s praise rests on grounds more funda-

mental still. The uncivil world is alone real. When the wind blows till it bites,

Duke Senior tells us he can smile and say,

This is no flattery: these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



Realistic Convention and Conventional Reali sm in Shakespeare 241

But he says all this in an obtrusively formal manner, and at the end of his

speech, Amiens, the courtier, pronounces obsequious judgement:

Happy is your Grace,That can translate the stubbornness of fortune

Into SO quiet and so sweet a style. (1I.i. 18-20)

The Duke preaches realism and is then praised for his power to transmute

reality into style. Note that Amiens says ‘into’ where ordinary usage might have

led us to expect ‘in’. This almost imperceptible conceptual oddity is of course

anticipated in the Duke’s own imagery, which presents an almost surrealist

transformation of nature into various forms of language, stones into sermons,

running brooks into books. At the beginning of his speech the Duke reminded

us of Adam. Adam may have named the beasts, but he never thought to

translate them into their own names! And the Duke is in no way offended by

Amiens’ compliment. It does not occur to him that he might be annoyed. We

have here a clue to the Duke’s dislike (strangely intense for so happy a comedy)

of Jaques. The Duke is a fantasist ineffectively disguised as a realist, while

Jacques is a realist very effectively disguised as a fantasist.

But in the case of Sonnet xxi all my instincts are against such an inter-

pretation. But, even if we differ over this particular example, surely we can at

least understand what we are differing about, we can all see what it means to say

that, while poem A obtrudes its formal character, poem B directs our attention

to the use it makes of available forms.

We now need a somewhat richer literary example. I propose the Second Part

of Henry N, II. iv. 226-284, the episode where Prince Hal and Poins eavesdrop

on Falstaff s dalliance with Doll Tearsheet. I offer this, in the first instance, as a

typically Shakespearean example of writing against the grain of convention. I

take it that the ‘given convention’ against which Shakespeare works is roughly

as follows: the physically superb young bloods must first eavesdrop on and then

expose the folly of the ageing boaster. Shakespeare first makes sure that we are

given enough clues to establish this convention in our minds. But then he turns

at once to the marvellous and subtle labour of its subversion. To begin with, he

gives to Falstaff a golden language but to the Prince and Poins a thin, sour

diction. Listen first to Falstaff:

What stuff wilt have a kirtle of? I shall receive money a’ Thursday, shalt have a cap

tomorrow. A merry song! Come, it grows late, we’ll to bed. Thou’t forget me

when I’m gone. (II.iv. 272-7)

And now listen to the Prince and Poins:

Prince Would not this nave of a wheel have his ears cut off?

Poins Let’s beat him before his whore.

Next he has a lute play softly throughout the conversation of Falstaff and Doll.

Next, while the absurdity of the love-making is in no way blurred, it seems that

Doll, who weeps to think of Falstaff’s passing, may really love the old fraud.

Auden, for once, went wholly wrong on this point. He thinks of Falstaff as an

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



242 A. D. Nuttall

opera bu#a character, a vainglorious boaster who imagines that he has great

power over women when really he has none. What Shakespeare shows us is -

typically - much more interesting than that: an old man who has very great

power over some admittedly pretty seedy women. In other words, Auden opts

for the obvious convention. And he has the main weight of modern critical

opinion, from &hi&king and Stoll to the Structuralists, with him. I personally

find Maurice Morgann, who knew how to move swiftly from genus to differ-

entia. better critical company. (Structuralists tend to move from genus to

sub-genus). Lastly, and most crucial of all to the subversion of the stereotype,

Shakespeare gives to Falstaff. not to Hal or Poins, a truly comprehensive

consciousness of what is happening.

Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says the almanac 10 that? (~63)

says the Prince, and we laugh, not very ~ff~~i~y, at the wit. Not happily,

because the purging force of the exposure of vice and folly is all lost, as soon as

we realise that Falstaff himself is fully aware of the ridiculousness of love

between those who will soon die. He sets that thought before us in words of

simple power.

Thou dost give me flattering busses

1am old. I am old. (268,271)

I have called this, naively, ‘working against the grain of a convention’. ‘But at

the beginning of this paper I agreed, for what it was worth, that all language is

conventional. I have offered a blunt working distinction between those pass-

ages in which the formal character is obtruded and those in which it is put to

work, allowing that many cases where ‘conventional’ is used as a distinguishing

(usually disparaging) adjective belong to the former category. How do we

apply these conceptions to what happens in the Boar’s Head scene?

One thing that I find I do not want to say is that here we see an obtrusive

convention whose formal character captures our attention opposed by an

unobtrusive working convention. To begin with we grant that. for the reader of

Shakespeare, there is nothing there at all but words and words are conventional

formulae. But we must now distinguish sharply between the merely linguistic

level and the level of artistic structure. It is repetition which most obviously and

most simpty stamps a given formula as ‘merely conventional’. Its likeness to

what has gone before usurps our attention, at the expense of its present

application. Now, although wurds, to be intelligible, need to be repeated in

varying but systematically related contexts, sentences may be wholly novel.

Words are susceptible of entirely original, fresh combination. To some extent

this is also true of literary structures. They admit innovation. are susceptible of

fresh combination with fresh meaning as a result, and there is no reason why

this meaning should not involve some exciting reference to the real. Indeed,

while an obviously formulaic passage can of course be just as true as one whose

conventional character lies unnoticed, (for example, ‘Death lays his icy hand on

kings’)” we are less likely to feel the shock of reality than in the case of a novel

proposition. because of the division of attention already described.

Where a literary structure is genuinely original, it seems to me inappropriate

to speak of it as conventional at all. It will be linguistically conventional in the

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



Reali stic Convention and Conventional Reali sm in Shakespeare 243

absolutely rudimentary sense but that I have set aside. At the level of literary

structure it will not be experienced as formulaic. Thus my first response to the

Boar’s Head scene is to stick very closely to my nive phrase and say that

Shakespeare opposes to a given literary convention something which is new

enough not to be experienced as a counter-convention at all .

But some may insist that, in so far as the subverting elements I find are

capable of being described in general terms, they must be admitted to be in a

minimal sense conventional, or at the very least ‘conventionalizable’. And

indeed such things as the pathos of old age, the terror of death, the value of love

are not so much too novel to be counted as tropes, as too general, too familiar.

With this I have no quarrel. Although I have said that, more than anything else,

it is repetition which produces that usurpation of attention which in turn invites

the description ‘merely conventional’, I must allow that in certain areas of life a

sort of running, endless repetition is easily tolerated, becomes once more

unnoticeable, so that the mind is freed again to engage with meaning. The word

‘and’ is not a cliche. The sadness of old age is not a literary trope.

What emerges from all this is the need to drop ‘conventional’ and ‘realistic’

as mutually exclusive terms and to concentrate instead on the manner in which

the reader’s attention is directed and engaged. It is here that we are as literary

experts confronted with real work (something which we seem hardly ever to

do). What are the mechanisms, what the hints and nudges, by which a skilled

writer will deflect attention from form to content and back (remember thatboth form and content will in some manner always both be present)?

I have noted the tendency in teachers of literature, confronted with a literary

opposition of convention and nature, to react in a reflexive manner, to cry out,

in joyous consciousness of their own erudition, that the so called ‘Nature’ half

of the antithesis is itself a conventional trope. And in some highly conscious

artists this balletic movement of the sensibility is anticipated, producing a work

of ironic self-reference. This, indeed, seems to mark the point of maximum

strenuousness in much modem criticism. In Shakespeare it represents an early

and (for him) undeveloped phase of his art which he effortlessly outgrew.The young man who wrote Love’ s Labour’ s Lost could turn anything into

dapper verse. Where others begin with a problem of poverty, Shakespeare

began with a problem of wealth. Love’ s Labour’ s Lost is in part about the vice

of premature articulateness, of the too-swiftly-available formula. The lovers

must repent their falsely conventional professions of love, and then subject

their very professions of repentance to a fresh purgation:

Berowne Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed

In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.

And to begin, wench, so God help me law!

My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.

Rosaline Sans ‘sans’, I pray you. (V.ii. 412-6)

Love’ s Labour’ s Lost is a ‘happy comedy’ and yet it is laced with something like

hysteria. The infinite regress of reflexive consciousness whereby each new

profession of sincerity can be reduced to its too-expert formula becomes a kind

of abstract avenging spirit, creating below the surface an accelerating panic in

the natural festive process of the comedy, until at last Shakespeare must

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



244 A. D. Nuttall

mortify his own comic conclusion with news of a death and the separation of the

lovers, before escaping, through a kind of literary miracle, into the final,

immemorial songs of Spring and Winter. This avenging spirit pursues him in

other early plays. notably in those which Schlegel called ‘the tragedies ofthought’. Richard II is plagued not so much by Bolingbroke as by his own

capacity for conceptual anticipation: Bolingbroke does not force Richard from

the throne; he moves into spaces successively vacated, with elaborately con-

scious art, by Richard. Hamlet is oppressed by a consciousness which cannot

any longer connect with natural events or even natural emotion. Thus, Shake-

speare’s first recourse was to build his problem of articulacy into the objective

emotional economy of the drama; to set the dog which had been hunting him

upon his hero.

Later he learned to convey action and passion without this convulsiveintervention of formal consciousness. Often he will avail himself of ancient

tropes and deep-laid conventions but without that early restless impulse to

register his own consciousness of what is formally involved. The two Henry IV

plays mark the new found freedom. In both Richard II and the Henry IV

Part I I we have an extended comparison of the state of England to a ruined

garden. The first is conducted in measured language, which draws attention to

its own formal nature, by two emblematic gardeners; the second is (quite

properly) not even noticed by critics as an example of the metaphor; I mean the

Gloucestershire scenes, broken, discontinuous, almost Chekhovian, inShallow’s decaying orchard, wrinkled apples, old men and the sweet smell of

death in the air. He has moved from a mode in which the form is emphatically

patterned and asserted to a mode in which the fonn is broken. And it seems to

me wholly appropriate to say that with this fracturing of the more obtrusive

symmetries comes an intuition of reality. For- to descend to the utterly simple

- people do in fact talk in discontinuous sentences. The fact that an obtrusive

discontinuity can become, as it has in the hands of the epigoni of Harold Pinter,

an obtrusive formal device, should not blind us to the way it is used by

Shakespeare, which is to convey the taste of reality.Merely to reverse an obvious formula will not of itself produce an impression

of truth-or at least it will not do so for very long, since the mechanism is itself

so simple as rapidly to force itself on our attention. There are dramatists - I

think of Bernard Shaw - who labour after an endless novelty by a sustained

iconoclasm, but the effect is finally one of proliferating epigram rather than of

truth. In the Boar’s Head scene Shakespeare avoids this ‘novelty by negation’

partly by pace and partly by a sort of tenderness in the witholding of wit. The

Prince and Poins are given all the epigrams. Falstaff. as long as he is discussing

either them or Pistol, is allowed extravagant invective, but in his discourse withDoll he is really very simple. and the tempo of his tune is, so to speak, slower

than that of the Prince. In this way Shakespeare avoids the tick-tack effect of

oppositions contrived for formal rather than substantial effect.

But it is time to turn back to the issue with which I began. Has realism

anything to do with reality? I began with a firm ‘yes’, but it may not have

escaped your attention that I have been talking most recently, not of truth. but

of the artfully produced impression of truth, and certainly this will offend few

modem formalists. To them I now turn.

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



Reali stic Conventi on and Conventi onal Realism in Shakespeare 245

It may be suggested that the technique of discontinuous asymmetry is, no less

than highly patterned writing, a techni que. You should not be surprised by now

if I at once concede this in the rudimentary meaning of the term ‘technique’.

But I ask, why does the discontinuous seem more real than the patterned? Theanswer is blindingly simple. Because real human behaviour is discontinuous

and only lightly patterned (certainly ordinary human speech is phonetically less

patterned than, say, rhymed verse). Some conventions actually are more

closely related to the real than others. The poles and meridians so despised by

the Bellman are systematically related to the point round which the terrestrial

globe actually does revolve. Conversely, it is in patterned repetition and echo

that the formal aspect of writing can assert its separate existence. (Here we

must not forget how much patterning there is in nature, patterning of days,

seasons, tides, birth and death and the like-but, that said, the detail of humanintercourse is manifestly less patterned than the detail of a scene by the early

Shakespeare, say). The schemata of Albertian perspective, the classical per-

spective of Renaissance art, were naturally and correctly interpreted by the

first observers as conferring visual truth. And the reason is again simple; our

visual field really is organized on something very like (not quite like) Albertian

perspective. In Ar t and I llusion Gombrich quotes a story told by the Japanese

artist Yoshio Markino of his father. To follow this story it is necessary to

understand that in the art practised by Markino’s father, a rectangular object

would be shown by means of parallel, not converging lines. Apparently, whenthe father was first shown a picture which employed the converging lines of

classical perspective, he thought that the box in the picture must be irregularly

shaped. Gombrich (who in this is part of the great movement of formalism I am

striving to arrest) seizes on the story as illustrative of the conventional or

arbitrary character of classical perspective. But in fact the latter part of the

story suggests a somewhat different state of affairs. I quote: ‘I used to think this

square box looked crooked, but now I see this is perfectly correct’.

Of course he may mean only that he has adjusted to a different visual game

with different rules. But the phrase ‘now I see’, together with the amusedattitude he assumes towards his first reaction strongly suggests that he noticed

how classical perspective actually approximates better to the facts (yes, facts,

no apologetic inverted commas) of visual perception. When an image appears

on the sensitive plate of a camera it appears in something like Albertian

perspective. And indeed the whole history of trompe-l ’ oeil painting confirms

this view. A perspective view of a further room painted on a wall could never

deceive the eye, were it not that we do indeed see in a perspective fashion. It

may be said that it deceives our eyes merely because we are so habituated to the

graphic convention that we project it back upon the ordinary world, and that aJapanese would be similarly deceived by an axonometric representation.

At first sight such a suggestion might be thought parallel to a similar conten-

tion made with reference to the paintings of El Greco. El Greco, it was said,

painted elongated figures because, through a defect of vision, he actually saw

people that way. This claim soon proved vulnerable to an elegant disproof: if El

Greco actually saw vertical forms elongated he would have seen vertical marks

on a canvas elongated but we, meanwhile, would see them as normal. Thus the

picture, to a normally sighted person, would not appear distorted. In this way it

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



246 A. D. Nuttall

was demonstrated that the elongation of figures in El Greco’s painting is not

perceptual but is stylistic. May we dispose in a similarly brisk fashion of the

claim that the Japanese ‘actually see’ axonometrically?

Let us try to state the parallel argument: if Markino’s father actually sawno gradual diminution in the objects we see as converging as they recede, then,

when he saw a convergent shape on a piece of paper, he would see that also as

axonometric; thus what would appear convergent to us would not appear so to

him and the difference between his perception and that of others would never

‘show’. As soon as the argument is stated its inadequacy is apparent. It was

never suggested that a person who saw axonometrically could perceive no

shapes at all except those bounded by parallel lines; as long as he is concerned

with a single plane such a perceiver can see any shape at all, the shape of a

butterfly or the shape of a sickle. The presumed peculiarity of vision comes intoplay only when convergence is the signal of spatial recession. Thus a tapering

shape presented on a plane surface would, in the first instance, be seen as just

that. Therefore the difference between his vision and that of a person who sees

in terms of convergent perspective would indeed become apparent.

But if the ‘El Greco argument’ is not available to us, are we then powerless to

show (other than by a faint appeal to the words ‘now I see’) that axonometric

perspective is a stylistic rather than a perceptual system? At this point we may

draw a kind of comfort from the fact that the ‘El Greco argument’. for all its

elegance, was never really watertight: El Greco’s supposed defect of visionmay have operated only on objects more than five feet away. in which case,

since his canvas was less than five feet away. it would after all have showed in his

paintings. But we really need to attack from a different quarter. Let us ask

again. ‘What would it be like to see axonometrically?’ If one draws a picture

with Albertian perspective and then attempts to draw the same picture with

axonometric perspective. one clear difference emerges at once; in the second

picture more of the background is occluded by the foreground. In the first

picture nine little trees show in their entirety; in the second only six show.

This implies that a person who saw in this way would in the real world find the

background occluded in a similar fashion. Do the Japanese see only six trees

where we see nine?

At this point we may notice that if we are to be really strict the trees should

not be small in the second picture since the law of diminution by distance is

precisely what is denied in axonometric perspective. The full application of this

austere denial has extraordinary implications. We could not see trees against a

background of distant hills since if the hills were represented on the same scale

as the trees we should not see the hills at all, but only a portion of one of them.

It is, perhaps, very revealing that Japanese or mediaeval pictures which

approximate to axonometric perspective do so in piece-meal fashion treating

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



Reali stic Convention and Conventional Reali sm in Shakespeare 247

particular objects axonometrically but subjecting the recessive planes of the

picture to a brisk series of summary reductions in scale. Once again one

suspects that they are compelled to do so because perception does so systemati-

cally and continuously.

Here it might be argued that my distinction between stylistic and perceptual

organization is much too cut and dried: an ambiguous drawing may be seen as

either an overhanging cornice or a flight of stairs; if another person extends his

hand towards my face I do not see it as a ‘correct’ perspective photograph

shows it, that is, as five times the size of the person’s face; obstinately it remains

no bigger than a hand as ordinarily seen; in the same way, the Japanese may,

availing himself of the active element of interpretation which plays no small

part in perception, have subjected different parts of a diminishing presentation

(especially where objects known to be rectangular were involved) to an uncon-scious revision, so that they momentarily ‘looked axonometric’ to him. If so,

we now have a phenomenon which lies somewhere between the systematic

distortions of art and the ‘visual field’. With this suggestion I would not quarrel

but would merely insist (in what has become a most unfashionable manner) on

the identifiable and separable reality of the un-interpreted datum. With the

example of the hand held near the face the underlying persistence of conver-

gent perspective may be checked by the method (already used) of noticing what

is and what is not occluded. One then finds that the presentation is in fact fully

perspectival and the phenomenon of mental modification of what is presentedthus emerges as something of peculiar and distinctive interest. Similarly. the

very demonstration of the way we actively interpret an ambiguous drawing (the

cornice/flight of steps) would not be possible without a secure awareness that

the drawing itself remains the same under either interpretation. If the drawing

were fluid and changed from moment to moment then we would not be able to

infer special modifying activity in the perceiver. To invite people to attend to

the presentation and to set aside their interpretations is not a vacuous request

to attempt the impossible. The early history of Albertian painting might indeed

have been the first great essay in the art of ‘the innocent eye’; Alberti mighthave said, ‘I know you know that house is square. but, wait a moment, check

what you actually see’, and in reply they might have said, as Markino’s father

said, ‘Now we see what you mean!’ In fact the great painters of the Renais-

sance did not press their claim so hard, but instead tactfully accommodated the

unconscious modifications normal in perception. This accommodation is evi-

dent in, for example, their refusal to present foreshortened recumbent figures

in full convergent perspective.

Trompe-l’oeil art flowered with the discovery of convergent perspective. It is

not characteristic of cultures employing other visual systems. Of courseBorromini’s diminishing colonnade in the Palazzo Della Spada is not, so to

speak, literally true. Of course Middlemarch is fiction. But only a language

capable of veracity can be used to deceive. Only structures capable of referring

to truth can generate an impression of truth. To be sure realism is not reality.

Who ever supposed otherwise? Once more we are confronted by a bogus

target. Language was blamed for pretending to be the object when it proffered

only demarcation, reference, sufficient identification, all of which would have

been impossible had language actually been identified with the object. In like

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3



248 A. D. Nut tal l

manner realistic art is triumphantly convicted of not being real, but if it had been

continuous with ordinary reality it could never have been realistic. Only false

teeth can be realistic. Others are merely real. Unde vera pictur a esset, si falsus

equus non esset .T5But , as for realistic art, whether its aim is actual deception orsome more ingenuous representation of the world, some genuine fidelity, some

tenderness for the actual, is required and has indeed been achieved. Thus we

need no longer be embarrassed by the awkward chasm which seemed to yawn

between the readers, delighted by the lifelike quality of what they read, and the

experts who were at hand to explain that what they had taken for life-likeness

was convention. There is no chasm because the readers and the poets are after

all perfectly right, and not absurdly deluded. We really should know better, for

in a way we have been through all this before. Once upon a time people used to

think that when they saw a red book they

is sometimes said that the only genuine realists are the pastoral poets, since, by

honestly emphasizing the artificiality of their poetry, they make it realistically plain that

dream is dream and. by implication, that reality IS something else. The effect of my

argument is to reduce the scope of this paradox, or, if you like, to remove the word

‘only’. Where the world presented in a poem is markedly different from reality there is

indeed a kind of secondary honesty in drawing the reader’s attention to the forms

employed; but not all poetry is of this kind. Auden’s ingenious poem, ‘The Truest Poetry

is the Most Feigning’, illustrates my argument very neatly. If the major thesis were true,

ostentatiously artificial poets would be the only honest people, since all poetry isdreaming, and Auden’s own poem (since it does not dream but on the contrary itself

formally asserts the major thesis) would destroy itself. If on the other hand some poetry

may indeed address reality directly, Auden’s poem may belong to that class and there-

fore be free to pay a compliment to poetry of the other kind.

University of Sussex

A.D. Nuttall

NOTES

1. The Hunting of the & ark, Fit the Second, 9-12.

2. G& li ver’ s Travels, Part iii, chap. 5.

3. Decameron, Day VI, Novella 5; See E.H. Gombrich. Art and Ill usion, 1%2, p. 53.

4. James Shirley, Song from The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses.

5. Augustine, Soliloquies, 11.x in fatrologia Latina, ed. J.-P Migne. Paris, 1845,

Tomus XxX11, column 893.

D o w n l

o a d e d b y [ 1 1 7 . 2

0 1 . 9

8 . 2

2 3 ]

a t 0 6 : 3 6 0 9 M a y 2 0 1 3

Documents

Shakespear's Realism