ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three novels which mediate Realist conventions through visual art and film. Alasdair Gray's Lanark, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and John Fowles's Daniel Martin, the presentation and subversion of Realist conventions is explored in the tension between visual and verbal images. In Lanark, these visual images are both textual and textualized. In Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai uses cinematic language and images to give an illusion of continuity and coherence, and in Daniel Martin, Daniel pits film and novel against one another in order to see which one will best communicate his "real" self. In all three novels the allusion to visual images is an attempt to create a similar authority and Realism in prose as is apparently created in film and other specifically visual media. If Realism exists today at all, it does so most visibly in the media of the popular novel and film as well as in advertizing, television shows, and music videos.
