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would have the reader believe. To counter the melodrama's tendency to
label complexity of detail as simply evil, the realists loaded their stories
with detailed description and information in order to force the reader to
recognize that attendance to the massive detail of modern life was essential
to an adequate understanding of that life's meaning . And against the
tendency to simplify a normal lifetime by reducing it to a scheme of
salvation, the realists worked to make the reader aware of the neutral
passage of time in itself, to awaken him to the accumulating quantity of
moments lived one after the other over the years . Thus, the realists took the
form of popular melodramatic stories and so burdened it with additional
quantities of information about things and additional, apparently insignifi–
cant , episodes or moments, that they all but transformed the story struc–
ture . As a result, realistic fiction is often perceived to contain such masses of
information and petty actions that the story , like life itself, has no certain
shape, arrives at no certain conclusion .
But what an early realist like Howells did not realize was that the form
of these melodramatic fictions and the coherence they suggested were
indivisible. When the realists tried to correct the form and modify the
vision inherent in it, they found no clear scheme to replace the one which
they had apparently transformed . And because they found no such alterna–
tive scheme to replace the one which fell apart under the pressure of their
modifications, their own work now seems tentative, open-ended, uncer–
tain . Since they could imagine no meaningful end, they could make no
sense out of time, and could not achieve a unified vision . As a result, things,
details, quantity without any qualitative meaning , became the very expres–
sion of pointlessness .
The source of realism's dullness and its enduring intrigue, then, lies in
the realists ' efforts to create a literature that had, for lack of a better term, a
healing power , a power to discover and convey a sense of unity among
things. Howells and Garland desired to create literature that would extend
the literate community to such an extent that the creation and appreciation
of art would become an ongoing organic activity maintaining this sense of
unity . Caught up on occasion in aspirations to prophecy , the realist writer
hoped that his perception of reality would not only become the vision
shared by the culture as a whole but that as a consequence of it the world
would change .
And yet to heal the community whose sense of purpose had been
fractured by rapid cultural change, a community which had lost any
coherent vision of its own destiny, the realist writer had to provide an
eschatology. And as the simple but coherent quasi-religious vision of the
melodrama dissolved under the weight of the realist 's corrections, the
