ABSTRACT
Beginning with Cervantes, realistic novelists and painters as well as aesthetic theorists have seemed compelled to define "realism." The continuation of the effort indicates the continuation of the failure, for the term realism must always remain in philosophical bondage to the term reality. From about 1870 to 1920 the critical dispute over realism focused on the naturalism of Emile Zola. The indispensable substance of realism is observable phenomena; historically, the emphasized phenomena in both literary and visual realism are public activities and individuals in social situations. The irony of the aesthetic of silence may ultimately originate in the historical tendency of realism to undermine its own assumptions about the significance of ephemeral data in vast accumulations. The American practitioners of the aesthetic of silence have recovered in a kind of purity the old realist superstition that attributes a quasi-sacred eminence to "the mute things that surround us most closely.".
