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"?

[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!

[rachelmanija]

I had not!

Men, if you’re feeling a bit queasy at the idea of so many beloved characters suffering rape – if you’re feeling creeped out by someone enthusiastically arguing in favour of them being raped because it’s too bad if it upsets you, it’s realistic… Well, hi. Welcome to the world of women.

Thanks, that was great.

[sovay]

Thanks, that was great.

You're welcome!

[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.

[swan_tower]

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?

And how do they pay? I don't recall the Night's Watch getting a salary. Plus a village that isolated probably doesn't operate much on a monetary economy anyway -- but it ain't like the men can barter for services, either. But they must have women to stick their dicks in, logistics be damned.

Now that there's a mass movement of people who genuinely believe that doctors and scientists are evil, I'm not comfortable with that

Amen, and thank you.

[swan_tower]

I had not! Though the underlying point, I have definitely seen made elsewhere. I honestly loved the fact that Silva threatened Bond in that fashion, because yeah, he would. So would other Bond villains have done. When men want to humiliate and crush their enemies, that's one of the first directions they look in.

And yet, it almost never shows up in stories.

(I will grant, in very small part, that one argument for it not showing up is that you don't want your audience conflating "sexual violence between men" with the "evil because gay/bi" trope -- as clearly happened with Silva. But that's part of 1) an insufficiency of non-villain gay and bi men in our fiction and 2) a profound misunderstanding of what really drives sexual violence.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[swan_tower]

I feel bad for all the authors whose books that came out in the last two years include epidemics. I can think of several off the top of my head.

[sovay]

I honestly loved the fact that Silva threatened Bond in that fashion, because yeah, he would. So would other Bond villains have done.

It's a great scene all round. ("What makes you think this is my first time?")

But that's part of 1) an insufficiency of non-villain gay and bi men in our fiction and 2) a profound misunderstanding of what really drives sexual violence.)

Agreed. At least I feel like the people I know are working on 1).

[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.

[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. :/

[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.

[telophase]

I bounced off the books, but if I for some bizarrely out-of-character-for-me reason were writing that sort of situation, I'd have the brothel be staffed by prisoners serving sentences, or prisoners of war or some such, brought there specifically to keep the intra-personal conflict down amongst the Night Watch. But, uh, no, I really don't want to explore the real-world dynamics in those situations, which have happened, so, not in my books.

(And from what I understand much prostitution throughout history is part-time anyway, people picking up some cash or barter on the side to help ends meet, or to indulge in some little luxuries, rather than formal brothels.)

[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.

[swan_tower]

Yeah, it's far more plausible, especially in a rural area, to have certain women that are known to offer their company in exchange for gifts or money, without it being their full-time job. And, I mean, maybe that's true of the women in Mole Town, too; it's been quite a while since I read the books, and also I don't recall the text giving a damn about what their lives are like outside of providing sexual release to a bunch of guys violating their oaths of celibacy.

[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".

[sovay]

I feel bad for all the authors whose books that came out in the last two years include epidemics.

I don't know what happened to my actual comment here. Trying again:

I still want to read Sarwat Chadda's City of the Plague God (2021). I have braced for the fact that in typical heroic fantasy fashion it villainizes a mythological figure whose reality is more complicated, but there just aren't that many novels that deal with the Mesopotamian underworld at all.

[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!

[swan_tower]

"What makes you think this is my first time?"

Yes! I loved that line, because in nine words it managed to provide a whole wealth of much-needed balance.

[rachelmanija]

I recently read a book that had aspects of extremely hard sf - a lot of the plot was about the impact of advances in 3D printing and how that worked in a society that was trying to do a closed-loop ecosystem as much as possible, at an incredible level of detail.

Several reviews called it FANTASY and said the SF aspects were handwaved, I guess because the female author and her female protagonist didn't provide the exact specs for technology that does not currently exist.