What is Realism?

[rachelmanija]

I'm excerpting some comments from the discussion on my post about Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family series. Some context that's known to those of us in the subthread but isn't explicitly stated, is that Sydney Taylor's series about a Jewish family in turn of the century New York City is very autobiographical, to the point that the characters are not only based on her real family, but with one exception (the baby brother) keep their real names.

Lirazel wrote: "The writer of the autobiography talks about how much the children's market had changed between the 50s, when the first three books in the series were written) and the 70s, when Taylor wrote Downtown and Ella. Taylor's style and subject matter worked brilliant in the 50s, but by the 70s, publishers and children's librarians were looking for more issues-based fiction. Taylor's books had always kind of...smoothed over the uglier parts of growing up poor in early 20th century New York (in a way that reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's tendency to do the same), and that just didn't really fly anymore by the 70s.

So from what I remember, the publisher wanted her to write something a little grittier, but she didn't want to alienate all the readers who had loved the original books that were gentler. That's why Guido was introduced--he could be suffering from poverty in a more realistic way, but it wouldn't "taint" the characters that were already beloved. I think it was phrased more gently than that, but that's the impression I got of why Downtown is so different than the previous three books."

Rachel wrote: "It's funny how we think of realism. The first three books are classics because emotionally, they're incredibly realistic. I remember experiencing those same emotions as a kid, even though the details of the circumstances were so different. Taylor had to have been very faithful to what it felt like to be a kid, because so many of us find the books so relatable.

Downtown has more gritty poverty, but to me it feels less real/true than the books that were less realistic about social issues, but more realistic psychologically."

This reminded me of the endless debate over what's "realistic" in fantasy novels loosely based on medieval Europe. The rape and subjection of women is often considered a keynote of realism. But widespread premature death due to disease is not considered a necessary thing to include for the sake of realism, even though that was at least as much of a fact of life. (Imagine Game of Thrones if Cersei, Jaime, Joffrey, Arya, and Ned had all died of cholera or plague in book one.)

Or, going back to the original example, which is more "realistic," the events and emotions that stood out in Taylor's memory when recalling her childhood, or the dire poverty that was all around her, but wasn't how she personally experienced her childhood?

Comments

[swan_tower]

The disease angle is especially interesting because it's such a radioactive topic at this present moment. Alyc and I considered doing something with an outbreak of disease in the Rook and Rose books . . . but by the time we were actually writing The Liar's Knot, let alone the third one, we were in the middle of the covid pandemic. Suddenly that wasn't a kind of realism we wanted to include.

Even on the rape front: it drives me up the wall that the defenders of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire insist all the rape of women is "realistic" . . . but the Night's Watch is ABSOLUTELY the kind of context in which you'd get overwhelming problems with men raping other men, and it's completely absent. They all go off to the conveniently-provided brothel instead. Realism for me, and not for thee, apparently . . .

[rachelmanija]

Now that you mention it, that is one heck of an isolated brothel. Was the Night's Watch really a large enough customer base to support it?

This isn't for reasons of realism, but I also changed a plot point due to pandemic. I previously had a bunch of evil doctors and scientists as villains, which makes sense as I was doing the "evil secret human experimentation to create supersoldiers" trope and I wasn't shooting for realism.

Now that there's a mass movement of people who genuinely believe that doctors and scientists are evil, I'm not comfortable with that and am keeping the trope but emphasizing that it's an evil corporation and for profit, so they're basically evil investors and CEOs.

[sovay]

Realism for me, and not for thee, apparently . . .

I assume you have seen "The Rape of James Bond"?

[sholio]

I can't even tell you how much I regret making a pandemic with flulike symptoms a core plot point of one of my indy series romances pre-2020. At the time, I had the idea that I was going to deal with the fallout from it in some of the other books (it's a fantasy plague that affects shifters) but at this point ... hahaha, no, I am just quietly burying that book and scrapping the spinoff plans.

[osprey_archer]

The realism defense of GoT always drove me UP THE WALL because it was so unevenly applied. If realism had anything to do with the sexual violence in GoT, even the most convenient brothel in the world would not have prevented the Night's Watch guys from raping each other on occasion!

One thing I respect about fanfic is that people are often pretty up front that "the sexual violence is here because I'm kinking on it like whoa," tbh. It's honest and it doesn't involve the creator in the same contortions as "I've included the sexual violence as realistic social commentary!"

[karalee]

GRRM definitely brings disease into one of the GoT books. As usual, he spares no detail. Let's leave it at that ... which is to say that I personally think realism is overrated. Resonance is what is important and there are 10000000 ways to manage it, realism is just one of them. IMO, anyway!

[swan_tower]

Ugh, I remember that. If the book itself had been at all interesting to me, maybe I would have been more willing to roll with it . . . but when all the characters I liked are losing my sympathy, nothing of significance is happening, and the pages are being fulled with people pissing and shitting -- yeah, no.

[princessofgeeks]

This is a very good point. Sometimes realism means "what I'm used to reading in this genre" and it's actually not realistic at all.

It's like fanon taking over an entire genre! For decades!

I am much more forgiving of factual realism errors than I am of character psychology that makes no sense.

[yhlee]

Yes: I'm reminded of all the bleating about hard sf factual scientific realism yet (for example) all the characters have cardboard personalities and the women never get any important roles. Selective realism. :/

[sovay]

But widespread premature death due to disease is not considered a necessary thing to include for the sake of realism, even though that was at least as much of a fact of life.

See also: infant mortality. If the Starks have six living children in a fifteenth-ish century, they should have buried a lot more on the way to adulthood. No one in those books as far as I can remember (and as far as I managed to read them) has lost significant children except for the Targaryens and it's treated as a factor of their inbreeding, not, like, all the things that can kill a child in the centuries before improved sanitation/germ theory/vaccinations/antibiotics/etc./etc. It's great for the cast of thousands, but even the royal family should be missing a couple of twigs. Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, dead of typhoid at eighteen.

Or, going back to the original example, which is more "realistic," the events and emotions that stood out in Taylor's memory when recalling her childhood, or the dire poverty that was all around her, but wasn't how she personally experienced her childhood?

I don't know if I consider one more inherently realistic than the other—I agree they have different valences in memoir or roman à clef than in less personally drawn fiction—but they are different modes and Taylor was almost certainly right that switching the All-of-a-Kind Family from one to the other mid-series would have given her readers whiplash, also probably herself if it would have required her to write against her own emotional focus. If I have to play a thought experiment and pick one, I always want emotional realism. You can carry an audience very far with people behaving like people. If the world is meticulously recreated and the people aren't real, whatever you have may be very pretty, but it's dead.

[rachelmanija]

That's a really good point. There's that one epidemic that other commenters mentioned, but not the high level of infant/child mortality that ought to ~realistically~ exist in that setting. They don't have vaccinations, they don't have magic except in rare and isolated instances, and a big deal is made of how filthy everything is.

[adrian_turtle]

What's realistic for a small child is different from what's realistic for an older child, or a teenager. The first 2 books are very solidly kids books, and Ella feels like it's stretching towards YA. It's realistic for families to shield young children from a lot of problems. Though of course if things go completely to hell you can't shield them from all of it. But "things going completely to hell" is not the only kind of realism there is. (Ramona's family does not become destitute and homeless when her father loses his job. Thinking of another realistic book written in the 1970s.)

The scarlet fever chapter does not mention any fear that a child might die, for instance. It would have looked very different from the parents' perspective. It's perfectly realistic to not tell the children about that worry! To just tell them about the immediate problems of being sick and miserable in bed.

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, I think it was probably very true to how Taylor experienced things. Her family also didn't have any of the kids die (I mean, in real life they all lived long lives), they had little money but they had enough to eat, etc. She most likely didn't experience her life as gritty poverty because to her it wasn't.

I also grew up in circumstances where I did not have a lot of stuff and my parents didn't have much money, but as a child that didn't bother me at all. I had other problems but being poor didn't affect anything I cared about. I only registered it as a kid at all because we had to take in a roommate and sometimes our electricity got turned off. If I were to try to write a grittily realistic child's POV novel about being poor in Hawthorne in the late 70s, I wouldn't even know where to start. Subjectively that wasn't how I experienced that part of my life. If I were to write about how I perceived it, I expect it would seem like I was glossing over the harsh reality.

[starlady]

I had scarlet fever as a kid and so reading the book a bit later, that chapter really resonated with me. I have no idea whether my parents had any fear for my survival in 1989, I should ask.

[duskpeterson]

"What's realistic for a small child is different from what's realistic for an older child, or a teenager."

I apparently lived through the Vietnam War, the assassinations of three beloved Americans, and Watergate. I remember Watergate, because I got bored quickly watching the hearings. But all the Really Awful Current Events that took place during my childhood just weren't on my radar. Being teased by my classmates for my imaginary friends was very much on my radar.

[legionseagle]

The one that never bobs up as something promoted by the realism cheerleaders is "terrible teeth." I think I was about eight when my sister (who was seven years older and believed in Not Shielding Children From Harsh Reality With Comforting Lies*) pointed out that about the fourth commonest cause of death in the mediaeval and early modern period was blood poisoining as a result of gum abcesses.



*Which is probably why I had about seven or eight years advance on the nightmares about atomic warfare and radiation sickness which the rest of my age cohort only got once Threads and When the Wind Blows hit the public consciousness.

[swan_tower]

Soooo many characters ought to smell worse than they do . . . though admittedly, early modern Europe may have been the filthiest culture the world has ever seen. Pre-modern doesn't have to mean literally throwing your shit into the streets.

[sholio]

I have multiple, not entirely related thoughts on this, but one of the things I keep thinking about is that, as someone who did actually grow up poor, though in a different era, I find the whole idea that kids' fiction about poor people MUST be full of misery and can't ever be fun and escapist is pretty classist all by itself.

I also think the level of "realism" that people want is driven at least partly by stereotypes that we have about the era and the kind of people who live in it. I'm curious if there would be the same emphasis on realistic fiction about the time having to deal with disease, starvation, and inequality if we were, for example, talking about a farm family in upstate New York in the early 1900s, instead of an urban working-class family.

[sheron]

I have multiple, not entirely related thoughts on this, but one of the things I keep thinking about is that, as someone who did actually grow up poor, though in a different era, I find the whole idea that kids' fiction about poor people MUST be full of misery and can't ever be fun and escapist is pretty classist all by itself.

OH GOD YES.
We've talked about this but I couldn't agree more!

[sholio]

I also find the idea of Taylor doing a 1970s-style Gritty Urban Update with the same characters conceptually hilarious and definitely the kind of thing that you (generic reader you) would remember all your life as that profoundly WTF moment when excited 11-year-old you picked up a new book in your favorite series and found half the kids dead of cholera, another pregnant at 14, and the entire family about to be evicted.

[rachelmanija]

I just commented on that. Not on the classism aspect, which I totally agree with, but on what having a poor childhood actually felt like.

[sheron]

Rachel wrote: "It's funny how we think of realism. The first three books are classics because emotionally, they're incredibly realistic. I remember experiencing those same emotions as a kid, even though the details of the circumstances were so different. Taylor had to have been very faithful to what it felt like to be a kid, because so many of us find the books so relatable.

THIS.

So much of life is about how we view it. The same person even changes how they view things based on circumstances and context -- can't walk into the same river water twice kind of situation. So to me, it's not any more "realistic" to focus on the grittier aspects or to tackle issues. It just has a different focus.

Sort of like you could write a fanfic where a character gets knocked out and have it be hurt-comfort fluffity fluff or a gritty exploration of what internal bleeding can do to someone's brain. Neither is "more realistic".

[sholio]

I really love your description of whatever it was we were watching at the time (Flash, maybe?) as "plot-stupid but emotionally smart," because - while I don't think these specific books are plot-stupid at all - it's a really good capsule description of a particular type of thing, and it made me realize that emotional realism (meaning: these are relatable emotions being had in ways that I think real people would have in this situation) is BY FAR the greater factor for me in whether I'll enjoy something or not.

[sartorias]

The realism debate goes back to Samuel Johnson in the Rambler--in fact, there's some of it in Spectator in the very early 1700s. There seems to be a strain of puritanism about the arguments for it. But I've read enough primary source material to not want to read any fiction about people helplessly watching their kids die of internal worms, or taking them to get the enamel filed off their teeth for "health" etc. I've read the letters and diaries where this stuff, and worse, gets dishes. I don't see any enlightenment there.

[naomikritzer]

The "child's-eye view" reminds me of a picture book (board book, actually) called "Peek-a-Boo" that I checked out of the library, then bought a copy of, when my kids were tiny.

The text is things like:

Here's a little baby, one-two-three. Stands in his crib, what does he see? PEEK-A-BOO!
He sees his father sleeping in a big brass bed
And his mother too with a hairnet on her head
He sees the shadows moving on the bedroom wall
And the branch at the window, and his teddy, and his doll

(I may be misremembering that slightly.) Anyway, you're supposed to encourage your kid to pick out the things in the pictures, which means as you read you're also looking at the pictures very closely and here are a bunch of things I noticed:

* A picture of Winston Churchill, with crossed US and British flags
* An old-style gas mask in a corner
* Barrage balloons
* Some buildings along the street that appear to be partly destroyed

The book is taking place DURING WORLD WAR II in the UK. (Not London, although it's clearly a good-sized town.) But the baby's world feels entirely normal: here are his parents, here are his sisters, there's his teddy, everything is fine.

(The authors are better known for "Each Peach Pear Plum," which I also like.)

[rachelmanija]

Oh, wow! That's so neat.

I notice that the vast majority of books and movies written now and set in the present day are essentially in a no-covid world, which makes sense as even apart from lots of people don't want to read that, everything's changing so rapidly that anything you put in now is liable to be dated, like, next Monday. It is something I've been wondering about though. Will we hit a point where movies casually include masks?

[cahn]

Huh, so, what this whole discussion makes me think of is the semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It's always been a favorite book of mine because I felt like Betty Smith really captured what it was like to be a kid, and they had a lot of fun being kids a lot of the time.

At the same time, there's also this strain of "my dad was a ne'er-do-well alcoholic and my mom had to become a super nag just to deal with life and every so often you get something pretty awful happening" which Francie is maybe not always super aware of but which the (omniscient third) narrative is always aware of, and which Smith didn't want to erase (there's even a bit where a teacher castigates alt!Betty for writing things that aren't whitewashed enough).

...and at the same time as that, there's clearly a bunch of wish-fulfillment in there too, and sometimes this leads to the book not making a whole lot of sense (the whole subplot with Lee is super WTF).

...anyway, I am not quite sure where I was heading with this, but it's an interesting juxtaposition, I think.