Excerpt from Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto
That particular artist whom I wish to call the contemplative realist must, in Pieper’s words, “be endowed with the ability to see in an exceptionally intensive manner.” Meticulously, intensely, he stores up in his heart a fullness of perception which pours out on the page not what everybody sees but rather “what not everybody sees.” Here is no abstract art, indifferent to the contours of the concrete and visible world. Nor are we dealing with a “merely descriptive realism.” What Pieper applies to his ideal sculptor we would do well to aspire after in prose: “nothing in this affirming closeness to reality smacks of false idealization, nothing is embellished as if all reality were wholesome and without rough edges.” Only the loving gaze (ubi amor, ibi oculus) can contemplate fully, for “a new dimension of ‘seeing’ is opened up by love alone.” A lover can never “see enough,” Pieper writes—”the desire to ‘see enough’ is never satisfied.” It is an essential fact of contemplative realism that the desire to really see is necessarily unfulfilled.
If St. John Henry Newman was not wrong to define literature as the “study of human nature,” this focus on human beings ignores the painterly noticing that the novel developed—that inclination to pause and—more than merely “set the stage” for the characters—celebrate the beautiful background so fully that its significance becomes nearly as important as human action. This painterly attentiveness is a central attribute of contemplative realism.
Joseph Conrad gives a partial portrait of the contemplative realist when, in his famous Preface, he imagines an artist who reaches beyond the noise and struggle of existence into our “less obvious capacities,” knowing that there is a “vulnerable body within a steel armor. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring,” and he “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” He does by appealing to our “invincible conviction of solidarity” that binds “the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” He does so in prose that appeals to our senses but with an “unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance,” a feat the artist can only achieve “through an unremitting, never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences.” Only through this careful, contemplative devotion will the realist manifest that “light of magic suggestiveness . . . for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words,” words which have been “defaced by ages of careless usage.”
Conrad’s passage captures the hard fact that earthly contemplation is far from perfect. As Pieper puts it, “in the midst of its repose there is unrest. This unrest stems from man’s experiencing at one and the same moment the overwhelming infinitude of the object, and his own limitations.” Romano Guardini gets at this in “The Meaning of Melancholy” when he depicts the artistic temperament’s pained epiphany that what needs to be said and shown is past realization, revealing that “death is the neighbor of the beautiful.” Every little death, every phrase that falls short, every unwritten novel can tempt the artist to an evil melancholy consisting of the “consciousness that the eternal did not attain the form intended for it.” But they can also usher in undulating gratitude for whatever iotas have bespoke the eternal, in whatever necessarily elliptical way. By its nature, earthly contemplation spies a light whose surpassing eloquence blinds and graces us both.
What does it mean to say that the contemplative is also a “realist,” a realist who, per Dostoevsky, “does not fear the results of his study”?
In his mesmerizing classic Mimesis, Erich Auerbach argues that literary realism reached its apogee with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s realism breathes most meaningfully in an everyday scene of a commonplace meal: Charles and Emma sit at a table without a cloth. The smell of boiled beef brings her near despair. Her husband is a slow eater. Emma “would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table knife.” For Flaubert, the self-effacing artist could represent such a scene so “purely and completely” that “it interprets itself” far more realistically than if the author were to interfere with appended judgments or opinions. In place of a romantic writer’s “grandiloquent and ostentatious parading of the writer’s own feelings,” Flaubert exemplified the art of “self-forgetful absorption in the subjects of reality which transforms them and permits them to develop to mature expression.” On the one hand, Auerbach admits, realism could be considered “objective seriousness,” the effort to reach into the depths of human passions without the prose betraying the artist’s own arguments. On the other, in spite of his ambitions to avoid “taking of sides,” the assertions of Flaubert’s own style over unfiltered actuality leads to a “didactic purpose: criticism of the contemporary world.”
This criticism did not spare satirical portraits of subscribers to species of “enlightened” scientism, but the unsparing critique of all illusions hounded Flaubert’s depiction of religion also: Emma Bovary’s religious phases are simply another variety of subjective and romantic escapism; the Bovarys’ priest is an all-too-human pusillanimous man, blind to his pettiness and utter carnality because his clerical spectacles distort any chance to see things as they are. Flaubertian realism’s dictum that we must “take things as they are” (resisting “oughts” as wishful, delusional) assigns a circumscribed meaning to that as they are: What “is” is, for the materialist-realist, only that which can be seen; the unseen is taken to be unreal.
When Henry James called Flaubert a “Benedictine of the actual” he must have meant, in part, that actual Benedictines contemplate the unreal, whereas literary realists take that ascetical devotion and aim it at things “as they are”—as they can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, tasted—intuited, too, up to a certain point but not past it. Flaubertian realism treats of the spiritual aspects of human life with a skepticism that is, for the contemplative realist, needlessly restrictive in its diet.
Vladimir Nabokov exemplifies the consequences of this reduction in his dismissal of “all the fantastic tales as juvenilia”; as Richard Pevear notes, for Nabokov “the real Gogol” included only “The Overcoat” and other such stories which purportedly portray the “shadows of other worlds” as passing “like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.” For the real Gogol, on the contrary, “the fantastic and the diabolical were always essential dimensions of this world.” Boris Eichenbaum gets at this dynamic when he resists the supposed “incomprehensible intrusion of ‘romanticism’ into ‘realism’” at the end of “The Overcoat,” when the poor clerk Akaky Akakievich persists on the pages after his death, as policemen and nocturnal walkers see with their own eyes an indubitable phantom of the dead man, albeit “much taller now” and with “an enormous mustache.”
Notice the deadpan, seamless seriousness with which the comically realist face is rendered—specific details doing their duty to realistically portray the dead man. There is no clear dichotomy between the initial “realism” exploring the travails of a petty worker and the “fantastic” ghost-filled finish: rather, the end of the tale “emerges into a world of more usual concepts and facts, but everything is treated in the style of playing with fantasy.” To be clear, in its fullest expressions, contemplative realism, contrary to its cousin “magical realism,” distances itself from “fantasy” or “magic” altogether—distances itself in its own aesthetic execution while appreciating fantasy wholeheartedly as legit in its own right. As Matthew Strecher explains, magical realism is “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.” Whereas magical realism combines a fully-fleshed out mundane world with fantastical, magical elements that are at odds with the commonplace characters and their secular world, contemplative realism registers the supernatural as harmonious with the natural, a poetic extension of the Thomistic understanding that though it may feel as if grace grates against nature, in truth God’s movements build upon it.
Still more, whereas magical realism not infrequently relishes the ambiguous, contemplative realism favors mystery over ambiguity. In that classic tale of magical realism, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the great Colombian fictionist Gabriel García Márquez gives us a flurry of interpretations as to what the titular character might be, but resists a conclusive identification of his nature, seemingly in order to espouse a posture of skeptical uncertainty. There is no question that the universe is riddled with mystery. As G.K. Chesterton diagnoses it, “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.” Mystery as an element amidst other intelligible things is one thing; to foster ambiguity as a fundamental premise or “position” towards all of reality—this is something else entirely. Mystery invites intrigue combined with intensive musing ordered toward the real possibility of at least partial answers; when answers fail to arrive, the acolyte of mystery submits in humility. Applied as a principle, ambiguity projects twilight where truth can be told and suspends meaning by careful design; novels built on this foundation of quickening sand take ambiguous endings as their necessary telos. Contemplative realists may plant apparent ambiguities at the start of their stories, but as their arcs unfold these tales reveal meaning. There are plenty of ways in which ambiguities can be beneficially incorporated into a story as one device among many (unreliable narration, most obviously, or the ambivalent gestures of a character, or double-entendre dialogue). There is no reason why a story cannot end without every mystery having been solved; some suspension of meaning is merely a reflection of the straw-grasping limitations of being human. But even in cases wherein the truth is troubled, not fully tallied and divvied, the contemplative realist will always leave the reader firmly reciting the indispensable X-Files mantra: “The truth is out there.”
This effect, as accomplished in Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus, stretches like a tightrope between nature and supernature. Mystery in that novel gathers cumulatively, so much so that any single example can hardly do it justice. It may seem at first that we are reading a magical realist work when an early line explains that, in a forest beside the ruins of the main characters’ church centuries after the novel’s main action, “apparations chat up mushroom pickers from time to time.” Yet unlike the immersive peculiarities of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the singularities in Laurus gather slowly and consist mainly of matter-of-fact, doubt-free assertions that presence spiritual realities: angels, human spirits, the immaterial reality of death itself which at one point leads away a soul “by the hand” and pats it “on the cheek.” The soul in this scene is depicted as
small, almost childlike. Her response to the affectionate gesture was more likely fear than gratitude. This is how children respond to those who take them from their kin for an indefinite period: life (death) for them will, perhaps, not be bad, but it will be completely different from what they are used to, lacking the former structure, familiar events, and turns of speech. As they leave, they keep looking back and seeing their frightened reflections in the teary eyes of their kin.
Meanwhile the novel’s physical world hews closely to the naturalistic, never becoming itself fantastic but insisting that what cannot be seen is as realistic as what can, even if the former is “almost translucent and thus inconspicuous.” This presencing transcends the merely aesthetic. Though in the early stages of the novel a reader wishing for distance from Christofer and Arseny’s single-entendre faith may be able to hold aloof, saying that its expression is a mere function of their historical circumstance, by the conclusion it becomes undeniable that the reader needs to make a decision: How much uncomplicated credence can be lent to events such as those being presented for our acceptance? As Vodolazkin tiptoes across the uncanny tightrope joining the seemingly impossible and the narratively undeniable, the firmness of his grounding in nature and human nature permit us to hope, too, in his depiction of the unironically and unambiguously supernatural.
The contemplative realist aesthetic is analogous to the aspect of sacred Scripture St. Augustine examines in On Christian Teaching. Why, he wonders, did God admit so many apparent ambiguities—so many mysteries—into Divine Revelation? “I do not doubt,” he hazards, “that this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty.” Difficult passages in texts function as a sort of blessed puzzle, activating the intellect and imagination and rewarding contemplative exertion. Against the reams of unread dissertations the prosecution will haul out as testament, in spite of the fact that during certain decades Ulysses might just have had more peer-reviewed articles plumbing its pages than The Book of Job, fiction does not merit the degree of study Sacred Scripture does. Henry James’ story “The Figure in the Carpet” comically pokes fun at critics who take “supersubtle” fiction as a sort of Holy Book whose hidden meanings are arranged like “a complex figure in a Persian carpet;” the great “secret” drives the critics mad, and no “Eureka!” rescues them from their appetite for an Answer.
Other inhabitants of realism leave more room for the “supernatural,” so long as the story makes clear that what we name by that appellation is in fact the numinous depths of our own psyches: God, or the gods, Satan and the demons, phantoms of all shapes, are, under this view, projections. Even as Virginia Woolf distances herself from slavish realism (“Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?”), she set a limit to the terrain of what the modern reader would tolerate. Woolf defended even the ghosts of Henry James, another “founding father” of realism, because they “have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us.” Tempted at first to believe that the ghost in The Turn of the Screw is real, we sober up, but the startled state is still unnerving, for “We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light.” James, that courtly, delicate old soul, “can still make us afraid of the dark.”
The unresolvable numinous is the mood belief assumes in most modern fiction: supposedly spiritual happenings are rendered with a relativized suspension of disbelief, reflecting only a notional indulgence in firm, unironic, simple-hearted credulity. Ron Hansen’s lyrically beautiful Mariette in Ecstasy exemplifies this approach: the protagonist may be a misguided and unstable adolescent, or she may be an authentic mystic: the text will bear either reading equally well, so that while the conclusion satisfies on an aesthetic level, it leaves behind an aftertaste of craving for certitude. Although Hansen himself may have childlike faith in the realities of Christian mysticism, the reader is denied certainty about Mariette’s position with regard to those realities. The distance is only a stone’s throw from Woolf’s supernatural solipsism to this aesthetics of Christian subjectivism, even as the latter at least leaves room for union with a God not of our making.
To be sure, though materialist realism retains many adherents, it has also roused some formidable discontents. Dostoevsky called himself a realist “in a higher sense.” J.K. Huysmans, the decadent convert to Catholicism, coined the term “supernatural realism.” In The Damned, Huysmans’ thinly-veiled messenger Durtal muses on Grünewald’s paintings of Christ, calling the painter “the most uncompromising of realists”:
but to regard this redeemer of the doss-house, this God of the morgue, was an inspirational experience. A gleam of light filtered from the ulcerated head; a superhuman expression illuminated the gangrened flesh and the convulsed features. This crucified corpse was truly that of a God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with only the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns for accoutrement.
In his own tormented and sensory-spiritual prose, Huysmans does for the novel what Grünewald did for painting: he “extracted the very essence of charity and despair” from the “triumphant depths of squalor,” and ushered in an art “ordained to render the invisible and the intangible.” This aesthetics has a name: “supernatural realism.”
In Huysman’s characterization we sense the subtext of realism-as-gritty-underbelly, an affiliation of the horrible as the somehow “more real” brought to bear on Christ himself, especially in the illumined gangrene. Here, the supernatural exists in a sort of antagonistic tension with the real rudeness of nature. We find an urban analogy to this tension in Mikhail Bakhtin’s description, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, of Dosty’s organic, fantastic manner of combining “a mystical-religious element with an extreme” and even crude “slum naturalism,” wherein the “adventures of truth on earth” take place in dens of thieves and taverns, marketplaces and prisons. Other artists settle for naturalism that is both starved of the supernatural and eager to rub harsh realities in our rapt faces. Dietrich von Hildebrand calls out the formal and spiritual poverty of art that “breathes out upon us all the depressing triviality of this milieu.” In such works, the wretchedness of the earth is wrought with the “intensive effect of barrenness being diffused.” Whereas genuine art “transposes” even the harshest parts of reality in a way that resists oppressive and restrictive characterization, in naturalistic depiction the “metaphysical ugliness of that which is depicted destroys the true artistic beauty.” This insistence that the real is most honestly congealed in the overbearingly ugliness of being amounts to a denial of nature’s irrevocable goodness. But nature is not all that is lost in such literature. “The real” here is taken to exclude the supernatural shattering instantiated through those same slums, those “dark holes of the poor” where St. Teresa of Calcutta prayed her Hail Marys beside the deathbed gutters.
But for materialist realists truth is not something that adventures through the mire and the muck: it is the yuck that we’d prefer to pretend away. The association of realism with the ugly and unpleasant but accurate truth finds a political parallel in the realpolitik of Machiavelli, who considered it sensible to “go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life,” for his predecessors, with their predilection for imagined republics, promise fantasies and deliver pain. Why? Because “the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.” In practice, however, Machiavelli executes a severely limited depiction of what counts as reality—in political life or outside of it. As Pierre Manent points out, Machiavelli convinces us to “fix our attention exclusively, or almost exclusively, on pathologies. He wants us to lose what, after having read him, we shall be tempted to call our ‘innocence.’” He cultivated suspicion strategically in order to persuade us that whatever “good” we possess is premised upon necessary evils.
Transposed into a psychological key, Manent comes close to narrating what Jonathan Franzen calls “depressive realism”—that supposedly sobering reminder that “You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead.” We can share Franzen’s applause of this realism’s radical critique of “therapeutic society,” while remaining, as he does, discontent with the depressive’s dubious divination that the world is really rotten. In his essay “Why Bother?”, Franzen wonders whether this sort of realism isn’t merely a “mask” for depression’s true essence, which is “an overwhelming estrangement from humanity”—and, the contemplative realist can’t help but add—from the felt presence of God. In an effort to overcome the immobilizing tyranny of depressive realism, Franzen fosters what he calls a “tragic realism,” which “preserves access to the dirt behind the dream of [political-theological] Chosenness—to the human difficulty beneath the technological ease, to the sorrow behind the pop-cultural narcosis: to all those portents on the margins of our existence.” The contemplative realist concedes Franzen’s claim that “improvement always comes at a cost” (though we call this the lie of “cheap grace”), and that unalloyed goodness is rarer than badness and evil—at least in the heart of man. Franzen finds a philosophical foundation for his aesthetic in Nietzsche’s powerful work The Birth of Tragedy, which accuses Christianity of dealing death to the Greeks’ glorious embrace of Dionysian darkness: “From its very outset,” he chides, “Christianity was . . . a feeling which merely disgusted, hid and decked itself out in its belief in a ‘another’ or ‘better’ life . . . a Beyond, invented in order better to defame the Here-and-Now.” The contemplative realist concedes Nietzsche’s central insight that narratives bless us by granting Apollonian beauty, clarity, and form to human hardships that are anarchic, dark, Dionysian. He nods his head fervently to Franzen’s assurance that “the formal aesthetic rendering of the human plight can be (though I’m afraid we novelists are rightly mocked for overusing the word) redemptive.”
While all human life will ultimately be judged according to Christ, in fiction it would be dishonest to force eucatastrophe out of every complication: some genuine goods can sear through our encounter with decent but flawed people, with troubled, imperfect characters of good will whose self-destructive decisions and dire situations draw them close to hell’s gates. Artists who render this trajectory for us do us a great service—often purging us, through catharsis, of temptations which we share with their protagonists. Sins can lose their lure when we see characters act out immoralities we only imagined.
In Christ and Apollo, William F. Lynch helpfully discriminates between a “dishonest” tragedy, which gloats and even demonaically guffaws over our helplessness, and a mode of tragedy that holds in tension the noble potentialities of humanity with the depths of pain and loss to which we can descend. When tragedy “is really achieved” through the “great tragic texts,” we are brought to an “experience of deep beauty and exaltation, but not by way of beauty and exaltation.” Catholic writers can employ a tragic key insofar as tragedy is “rooted in mystical conquests of the human spirit over pain, in the emergence of godlike strength and qualities in man in the very midst of tragic defeat.”
True, on the deepest level of existence, the Christian must unite his agonies with those of the all-sufficient Master, knowing with St. Paul that we can “fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church” (Cols 1:24, DV). And yet, as fiction that tracks conversions can help us grasp, the human spirit frequently dies “in real helplessness,” to use Lynch’s language.
However, this “really tragic level of existence,” he explains, “is the region of the soul into which Christianity descends in order to operate its unique effects. . . . There is a point to which the mind must come where it realizes it is no match for the full mystery of existence, where, therefore, it suffers a death.” Often it is only fully here, from this posture, that we fully consent to put on the mind of God—to surrender to Christ’s redemptive suffering—“and thus rise to a higher knowledge and insight.” Here, at this point, death and life coincide in a single act, and “in this sense Christian faith has the tragic at its very core”; it is always “an extremely complicated mixture of dying and living; at no stage in the whole life of faith can death be screened out.”
Franzen cites Flannery O’Connor, who argues that “People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them,” but when the tragic realist countenances the most abysmal shades of darkness, what will give him the necessary hope to surface again and tell the tale? One of the tasks, then, of the contemplative realist, is to loosen tragedy from its inner-ressentiment, its prospective disgust and cynical gloating over our infinite absurdities—its “depressive realism.”
Any number of literary realisms dramatize and induce a wariness that is one part Machiavelli, one part Nietzsche, and one part Freud. As Jorge Luis Borges argues, the reader of detective fiction (a type of reader Poe “created”) approaches stories “with incredulity and suspicions.” Not only is nothing as it seems, but what seemed to be good turns out to be filled with nefarious secrets and motives. Admittedly, detective fiction is populated with these perils so that, as Borges puts it, “in this chaotic era of ours” the “classic virtues” can be maintained: such stories are “safeguarding order in an era of disorder.” True as this may be, is it not most frequently the case that “realistic” detection (as opposed to the “urban romance” of Chesterton’s Father Brown) trades on the terrible truth that the criminal can only be caught if the soul of the detective is as corrupt as his own—a variation on evil as safeguard of goodness. Even if the good guys don’t use malignant means, the genre still concentrates our attention so completely on crime and criminals that the avid reader of it (the addict, especially) might come to conclude that “life” is a mobster’s paradise, and that it would be “unrealistic” to think otherwise.
Psychological realists and their stream-of-consciousness cousins not infrequently incarnate similar truths on the level of the psyche; either every apparently good aspiration is mingled with self-serving machinations, or—at best—what moves characters is, has been, and always will be woefully ambiguous and anxiously unknowable. Dostoevsky has called his own form of psychological realism “higher” because “I portray all the depths of the human soul.” In part he was distancing himself from the great Balzac, whose realism required pages and pages devoted to describing the furniture his characters sat on with verisimilitude. External physical realities, Dostoevsky alleges, are less real than the soul. But what, in the soul, is most real? His fiction has a proclivity to concentrate our eyes on the darkness of those depths: the refined revolutionary Stavrogin and suicidal Kirilov of Demons; Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov with his murderous resentment masked in noble motives; “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” who corrupts the innocent inhabitants of a distant planet, to name a few. True, Brothers Karamazov contains the prospect of sanctity, even as it professes our proclivity toward depravity. Dmitri may confess that the “cruel insect had already grown strong in my soul,” accentuating the fact that he is “filled with low desires,” but Alyosha (an acolyte of holiness if there is one in their family) blushes at his brother’s admissions because “The ladder’s the same. I’m at the bottom step, and you’re above, somewhere about the thirteenth. That’s how I see it. But it’s all the same. Absolutely the same in kind. Anyone on the bottom step is bound to go up to the top one.” Whenever I have taught Dostoevsky a contingent of students will chide the novels for being so fantastical and unreal; “People don’t act or think like this,” they say. After class, as if sheepish to say so, others who have known broken families and hard times have been at the point of tears: the realist in a higher sense has read their souls.
Realism’s tacit-or-telltale insistence that reality is more convoluted and chaotic and corrupt than we would wish to imagine seems, at first glance, to be a welcome imitation of our inevitable concupiscence. Even the romantic comedic Jane Austen, that inheritor of a kind of Christian Aristotelian account of the virtues, populates her novels with far more surrogates than genuine articles of goodness. As Alasdair MacIntyre has it, she is “preoccupied in a quite new way with counterfeits of the virtues”—those who equate being virtuous with appearing to be so. This concern with virtue is married to a kind of nascent realism in that she “sees the telos of human life implicit in its everyday form.” But if Austen had the stirrings of realism in her bones (everyday mundanity is her territory; unhappy marriages far outweigh happy ones when the fates of her novelistic corpus are tallied), many deny her admission into the realist school, citing the sense of unreality her novel’s incubate on account of their lack of physical description and detail. Whereas Alastair Duckworth contends that Austen subscribed to the realist dictum that “that the novelist should describe things that are really there, that imagination should be limited to an existing order,” even as she enunciates that what is most “really there” are the psychological states of her characters and the social consequences of the same. Marilyn Butler, on the other hand, forbids Austen the realist badge because the novelist so strongly disapproved of “the sensuous, the irrational, [and] the involuntary types of mental experience” that, “although she cannot deny their existence, she disapproves of them.” Given the aforementioned unhappy fates of so many Austen characters, it is hard to wholeheartedly concede this point; she may not imitate the darker depths familiar to Dostoevsky (Elizabeth Bennet could never have a brother like Raskolnikov), but she plays out the sad consequences of these irrationalities via plot and action.
Being a novelist, Flannery O’Connor contends, is synonymous with being “hotly in pursuit of the real,” although the “realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.” In her well-known formulation, it is the “realist of distances” who is most prophetic, most profound, for she moves away from mere social patterns and dead conventions of what constitutes reality and reaches “toward mystery and the unexpected.” Prophecy, she clarifies, “is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up”—a phenomenon we find in the “best modern instances of the grotesque.” Here again what is most real is associated with something “generally described in a pejorative sense,” as something gross or defiant of propriety. But in the good grotesque of the realist of distances “we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.” By necessity, then, this sort of realism will be “wild,” “violent and comic” because it combines discrepancies, keen to hit on “one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.” Not all moral vision is moralism. Not all spiritual vision is oversimplified false piety. An artistic vision that is richly moral and daringly prophetic, far from being unreal, picks up on the registers of actuality that pack the most being.