I’m reviewing a German book again! Or maybe not so much reviewing as thinking with? We’ll see.
Moritz Baßler is one of the most prominent German Germanists, a claim I prove mainly through the fact that I’ve heard of him (and, in fact, now have read two books of his, the other being the equally enlightening Gegenwartsästhetik, with Heinz Drügh). I could have even seen him speak, but I forgot to make a calendar note. So it goes.
Populärer Realismus is a book aimed at the very least at a mixed audience: it’s not dry enough to be purely academic, but it’s also not chatty enough to be purely popular. Its starting point is an observation that the idea of “midcult,” originally coined by the critic Dwight Macdonald in Partisan Review (unless I’m mistaken), and later used extensively by Umberto Eco, is the best descriptor for major tendencies in contemporary (German, but also international) literature. It argues that “popular realism has developed into a global model of success under contemporary market conditions” (9—all translations are mine). Baßler discusses this thesis and its consequences over 400 pages, and, I’ll say, he persuades me. My reason to engage with him in writing then is not (as is so often the case on these virtual pages) to bitch and moan about other people’s terrible books, but to get a clearer sense of what I think. And maybe it’ll help you, too, possibly imaginary reader.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that Baßler does—the only “theoretical” thing, which isn’t a criticism—is his definition of realism. Realism, says Baßler, is a literary Verfahren, and the reason I’m not immediately translating the word here is that the concept of “Verfahren” is already at least slightly unclear to me. Strikingly, I should say—it’s not a particularly uncommon word, but it turns out I wasn’t entirely sure what Baßler meant. The thing is, in German literary studies, it’s a fairly frequent way to describe your research interest: “X als literarisches Verfahren.” A Verfahren is the ways and means of doing something, sometimes even a “method,” maybe, but also just an act, maybe a procedure, process, or technique. In the common parlance of Anglophone literary studies, we might say: form, but we would probably miss the point that it’s at least also a practice; not just a thing that emerges, but a whole becoming. Realism, says Baßler, is “a texture, a literary way of making [a style] that makes itself as it were invisible and transports us in our reading directly to the level that is important to it: the level of the story. We do not have to worry about the level of signification of the novel, the letters, words and terms, they are already chosen so that we do not notice them” (18-9). Realism, in Baßler’s terms, produces immersion by refusing complication and complexity on the level of language, and any immersive text (including computer games, films, or TV series) and any contemporary genre (from the thriller to fantasy to ordinary realism) can be realistic.
The definition is obviously important, because it replaces what amounts to an ontological question (literature’s relation to the “actual world”, the particular ontology of the storyworld) with a formal one (literature’s concrete way of writing about anything). It’s what allows Baßler to make the claim for realism’s contemporary dominance and also to think through carefully what “really” distinguishes (as in his examples) a Dietmar Dath novel from a Daniel Kehlmann one. And I like this definition to some extent! One of the ways in which it mashes with things that I also like is, for instance, to use it to center the idea of “genre” as far more of a marketing category, in the way Jeremy Rosen has understood it, than as a formal category. For Baßler, the ontological status of the narrated world, again, is not a concern: it’s only the way of narrating it that’s of interest. This move allows Baßler to usefully flatten the differences between different genres of narrative writing, and indeed between different media.
There’s a necessary and simply obverse “but” to this, of course. As with any change or perspective, this involves a loss of an idea that’s also pretty dear to me. I can’t really yet bring myself to ignoring the difference between, say, the historical novel of Kehlmann and the science-fiction novel of Dath (or, to use Anglophone examples, the historical novel of Hilary Mantel and the science-fiction novel of Kim Stanley Robinson) as more importantly different than similar, no matter how much they might resemble texturally a “popular realism.” And in the same digital breath, I will acknowledge that I do not fully know how I would defend this take. I’ll need to return to this a little later, when I also say something about what I find still puzzling about the book.
I will give comparatively short shrift, now, to most of the book, and not because it’s not worth dwelling on, but because it’s so well done and persuasive that I find myself unwilling to quibble with it. For the majority of the book, Baßler engages examples of popular realism, from Daniel Kehlmann and Sebastian Fitzek to Elena Ferrante and Sharon Otoo. Closely analyzed and exquisitely read, Baßler’s critiques of the novels he discusses are great reading, and it is entirely to his credit that the idea of popular realism helps elucidate how so many of these novels remain unable to genuinely produce insight, or conflict, or anything beyond the pleasure of reading. This is especially the case where Baßler quibbles with previous readings, and I’ll briefly single out here his discussion of Ferrante, which he reads in conjunction with the discussion in Chihaya et al.’s The Ferrante Letters. I find The Ferrante Letters interesting and frustrating (largely because I’m not sure how one would operationalize its method, or indeed if it has a method in the first place). Baßler shows rather pointedly how effortfully the four writers of that discussion of Ferrante seek to lift Ferrante to quasi-modernist literariness, as when Chihaya herself insists on the way the texts “becomes something of a surrealist assemblage” (44); Baßler responds by simply saying: “No! The Verfahren of Ferrante has nothing to do with surrealist textures at all.” (181) Not only is he, I think, correct about that, but also in his conclusion that literary studies has a problem with the recognition that virtually all contemporary literature, and at any rate all contemporary literature anybody ever reads, is insistently non-resistant, no matter how much we would like it to be. (Anecdote: I once presented on Jonathan Franzen’s absolutely terrible novel Freedom, essentially saying: this is a terrible novel because it utterly fails to understand what it itself is even about. And one of the questions I got was: maybe it’s subversive? No!, I said; it’s really just terrible. My interlocutor, I think, had the same impulse of trying to find the moment of resistance.)
Which brings me to what might be my major, and only partially fair, complaint about Baßler’s book. One of the projects I currently am working on is concerned with the lack of interdisciplinary exchange among the literary studies disciplines—which is to say, the national language disciplines. Baßler’s book reminds me of why I was interested in this. Much of his argument recapitulates things that have been discussed in American and English literary studies for some time: the question of the role of genre, the capacity of TV series to react more swiftly than other forms of cultural production to the demands of the viewers (in Baßler: 136), but also the very foundational (really important!) question of what constitutes “literariness” today. I know, because I’ve dabbled in this stuff myself (much of The Novel as Network is devoted to these questions, as is my forthcoming Habilitation). Is this a diss? In a way, I suppose, it kinda is? I mean: Nicholas Brown, whose praises I sing somewhat regularly here, spends a chapter in his Autonomy discussing The White Stripes, a band which Baßler also occasionally mentions positively (as in: that might still be art). There seems to have been the opportunity for something fruitful here (or in Jeremy Rosen, or in Jim Collins). But also, no, it’s not a diss: it’s just how things are. Baßler’s argument would have profited from more Anglophone insights, as no doubt Anglophone insights would profit from Baßler. It’s not that Baßler is not familiar with parts of this discussion—not only does he discuss The Ferrante Letters as well as Amy Hungerford’s annoying 2016 Making Literature Now, for instance, he is also comparatively well-versed in contemporary Anglophone fiction. But that there’s been a vast array of discussion of the state and status of contemporary literary writing goes too unremarked given Baßler’s rightful insistence on the point that his popular realism is also explicitly an “international style.”
I want to end this review on two more question-quibbles that I have already briefly broached above. I’ll preface this ending by saying: I’ll need to think more about this, and I have not got a good sense of the validity of my points here as criticisms, exactly. The first regards the use of “realism” here. Baßler opposes “realism” as a formal feature of a text to “Realistik,” which appears to be the noun form of the word “realistisch,” perhaps best envisaged in such familiar constructions as “es wäre besser, hier realistisch zu bleiben” (it would be better to remain realistic here): “Die Realistik der Außenpolitik Kissingers,” as it were. It’s an unfamiliar word in German, I think, and I’m not entirely enamoured of Baßler’s choice here. I’m not sure what actual good it does to call this particular sense of contemporary literary form realistic while holding its ontological commitments in abeyance. Baßler’s point, as I understand it, is to stress how the ontological uncertainties or divergences from the world-actual remain unable to shift our perception of our world while we are, by way of the Verfahren, caught in the simplicity of understanding popular realism. This, at least, is towards the end of the book, in the absolutely persuasive chapter on popular realist texts that nonetheless are “good” (my second quibble!), what actually constitutes “good literature” today: “exploring spaces of possibility” (335) even if those spaces are spaces of content, rather than of form. Texts which Baßler suggests are positive examples are those which “go forward” (342) (he dubs these, with Dietmar Dath, “Kalkülromane;” another difficult-to-translate term, derived by Dath from formal logic and so, properly “calculus,” it suggests in Dath a sense of logical axiomatic derivation—a science-fictional thinking-forward from the present, as it were). For Baßler, good realism produces “paradigmatic comparisons and reflexions that remain open to the future” (377). This kind of levelling move is useful, I agree, and in many ways a better version of the ideas of genre amalgamation, genre turn, and cross-generic alliance that I have used to describe something similar about literary value. But on the other hand, I still find it problematical to reduce fantasy and science-fiction to the level of content. Dietmar Dath, whom I have mentioned several times, insists in several recent essays, interviews, and his expansive history of science-fiction, Niegeschichte, on the peculiar constitution of that genre as a machine to think with, a technology distinct from other literary forms. I think I still agree with that assessment, and would prefer Baßler’s book to pay more attention to the specific ways in which the literary Verfahren works differently in science-fiction and in Realistik. I suppose Baßler just does not agree that it does; if so, I would probably call that an only partially, or selectively, useful shorthand.
The second thing I would have liked to have more insight in is Baßler’s stance towards what his diagnosis that this form, whatever name it would take, is dominant in the contemporary means. It’s perfectly possible I missed this, but between the insistence that there is no more formal avant-garde and formal complexity in contemporary literature (by and large) and that we find good, useful literature thus largely in the content of literature, there seems to be a bit of a missing joint. Baßler’s point, to a large extent, seems to be that some texts, such as Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti, are “good” because they refuse easy moralizing, simple identification of themes, “correct” stances and morals. In other words, they produce “difficulty” thematically, where modernist novels tended to produce it formally. They raise more questions than they give answers to. I think Baßler retains the modernist commitment to difficulty as the hallmark of “good” literature (and by the way, “good” is a word used repeatedly, so the scare quotes here are more marks of my own concern with the word), but shifts it to the level of content, rather than form. What remains elusive to my mind is an outright statement of why difficulty is good. It’s not that I don’t tend to agree with his assessments—it’s more that I would have liked to see him spell out why “difficulty” is more useful than, say, a morally supportable, straightforward moral. This is, to be sure, a fundamental question, but precisely because so much else in the book is fundamental, I had hoped this fundamental question would also be touched, if for no other reason than to also place literary studies more properly in this new constellation of literary production. Again: I have my own answer to the question of my ambivalence and a lack of a straightforward moral are desirable; I don’t mind this idea here. But I would have liked to see Baßler spell out why they are; and, at the highest order, I would have liked him to reaffirm what it means in this context to call a particular work a work of art.
I’ll close this here. Suffice it to say that I will re-read this soon, as it touches on a number of ongoing research interests, and possibly I will work out an answer to my questions. In the meantime, I repeat what I said in my last review here: if you read German, buy and read this book; if you don’t, get someone to publish it in English.
Hand Me the Platonic Monkey-Wrench! 