What is realistic?

Many a story is alleged by those who read it to be ‘unrealistic,’ for all sorts of reasons. Some of these complaints are perfectly correct, in theory, if not always in application. Characters can strain past the audience’s ability to accept them as people; plots can bust through rules firmly established as to how the mechanics of the world work. But there’s a school of ‘realism’ complaints that is in concept invalid, even if sometimes the complaint is leveled at a target deserving of real criticism. The complaint that equates ‘realism’ with the grimy, the anti-ideal, the all-gray, the complaint which rejects greatness or virtue or black-and-white, that complaint is an illegitimate complaint, however weak its target.

See, the world is not grimy. It is not without the ideal. It is not a gray blur of merely-circumstantial preference morality.

The world as God made it is bright and grimy—but God made man in His image (and the rest of the world as His communication, in a way (Rom. 1:18-20). In any story with a man or in His creation (i.e. any story with truth), the potential of brightness must be allowed through, or the story is basically false. (The question of how brightness ought to appear I leave to another point.)

The world is not capable of becoming understood except by the ideal. The ideal—the ideal hero, the ideal righteousness, the ideal landscape—is the standard and definition. In this world, these ideals are blurred and broken, save for the good’s final reference in Him, in Christ. But only by sight of the ideal through the imperfect can we understand the truth of the thing we deal with. We do not know a man’s nature until we understand what a man ought to be; we do not know a mother’s excellence until we compare her, even in her shortcomings, to what a mother ought to be; we do not know a politician’s vileness (or, very, very rarely, the opposite) until we compare him to what a civil magistrate ought to be. Then we learn why we call them ‘politicians’ instead of something complimentary.

The world’s morality (integral to the person) is black-and-white entirely, however much men paint themselves in zebra-stripes (stripes which, in the eternal reckoning, at black entirely (Is. 64:6), unless God bears the sin (Is. 53:10-12)). ‘Gray’ and a narrative’s refusal to live in a moral universe are lies, falsehood of men who deny God (Ps. 53:1), all the time knowing His sovereignty.

These objections are based on a false definition of morality, on the definition produced by modernism, by autonomous man, by sin. They are the definitions of a man who has determined himself lord of the cosmos, whether by asserting materiality the entirety or by more mystical routes, who therefore refuses (hates) righteousness when it appears before him (Luke 16:31), making the world grimy, who therefore cannot abide the ideal, knowing it leads him towards God, who smears everything into shades of gray because that is all the certainty his self-based morality can produce. The sort of realism they demand is a lie.

But there’s another point: though grime, alienation from ideal, and apparent grayness are parts of life in a still-being-sanctified world, stories need not and ought not imitate the full breadth of the world. Stories are (by necessity) smaller than the world they’re written in, and stories have individual purposes. As the world-story’s purpose is to glorify God (in which is our joy!), so each story man secondary-creates has a purpose. This purpose is not the inculcation of a oft-complex proposition (unlike didactic works (even didactic art, for the didactic is not inimical to the artistic)).

The purpose of narrative, when narrative it central, is that the reader should experience (live through) a particular part of His world, a particular reality reflected in the fictional image (Gen. 1:26). The particular part of the art which the reader is called to live through is the particular purpose of the narrative—and the integration of that purpose with God, with man, and with the rest of reality is the beauty of the work (though that description of ‘beauty’ is insufficient). And if that purpose does not include the sight of God—the beautiful, the ideal, the definition of righteousness—that purpose is evil.

God bless.