ABSTRACT
The exploration of realism is, as Harry Levin admits, ultimately subsumed in the larger question of the relationship between life and art. The sanest position, then, would seem to be one that admits the separate categories of art and life and accounts for the relationship between them, and the kind of ‘realism’ attainable in achieving this relationship, with a conscious and deliberate awareness of the possibilities and impossibilities involved. The theory of realism has been discredited; and Robert Scholes writes of those who ‘continue to write frantically’ in the realist-naturalist tradition as ‘headless chickens unaware of the decapitating axe’. The word has been variously redefined by a new theoretical initiative, which sees it as representing ‘the sine qua non of literary significance’. But it is the old definition that governs the word in common usage unperturbed by the collapse of the theoretical understructure.
