GARY STEPHENS
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us on . For all of its failure something about the fiction of the realists
succeeds in conveying their faith in art . The question is how the realists ,
compromised as they were by their own tendency to yield to attitudes which
had little tolerance for "Art ," proceed to make fiction which , at its best,
reflects their dilemma and serves as the only adequate expression of their
complex faith in art .
The realists' approach to making fiction was to begin with the simple
stories which people believed about themselves, "typical" stories of cliched
pattern of the kind found in newspapers, pulp novels , relig ious tracts , and
dramatized on the popular stage . The realists took these stories and care–
fully, conservatively , corrected them to make them more " real," refining
their melodramatic form in order to make the democratic ideals reflected in
them more durable.
The ideology at the heart of these melodramatic stories can be summed
up as
3
desire for success . Superficially this success seems monetary, social ,
and to some extent religious , but it also seems to imply some need for a
deeper security , a need to make reality knowable and predictable and
manageable for man's benefit. Within these stories one finds reflected the
faith that any person , ifhe is fundamentally moral, can obtain the truth by
consulting his own heartfelt feelings, and the basic truth which he finds in
his own heart is that life in America is proceeding steadily toward some
ideal state . Thus , although things might seem to be changing in such a way
that morality counts for little , and the concentration of commercial and
industrial power might be putting a few people into what might appear to
be untouchable positions of power, while others seem locked into their
poverty-all of this simply represents the normal quotient of evil in the
world. It is to be expected , and does not contradict the view of the nation as
a place where Providence insures the happiness of people if they are just ,
moral, and good . One need not involve oneself in competitive struggle now
any more than in the benign rural past or in one's own happy home which is,
after all, the real heart of national life. This distortion of complex human
problems into a simple, paradigmatic form had the effect of keeping the
public's moral faith strained but intact.
The realists accepted the assumption reflected in these melodramatic
fictions that there was an essentially coherent meaning in the life of the
common man in America. But because these simple stories distorted social,
commercial, and political complexities, representing them as aspects of a
simple idea of the evil that had to be tolerated in the world , and because
they reduced the complex patterns of personal life lived in chronological
time to a schematic story of salvation , the realist felt that he had to show
that life was a great deal more complicated than melodramatic formulae
