H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 2 6Language like this lacks all thickness and texture. It is used purely
as an instrument. There is no sense of it being valued as a medium
in itself. Defoe’s prose is eminently consumable, drawing not the
slightest attention to itself. James’s style, by contrast, rubs our
noses in the fact that whatever happens in a work of literature
happens in terms of language. Tempestuous break- ups and tragic
breakdowns are just a set of black marks. From time to time, such
language may modestly efface itself, as it does in Defoe. By making
itself unobtrusive, it may create the effect of giving us direct access
to what it deals with. It may appear to dispense with artifice or
convention. Yet this is an illusion. The Defoe passage is no ‘closer
to reality’ than the passage from James. No piece of language is
closer to reality than any other. The relationship between language
and reality is not a spatial one. It is also true that Defoe’s prose
works just as much by conventions as, say, Milton’s Lycidas. It is
simply that we are more familiar with these conventions, and thus
fail to notice them.
While we are on the topic of realism, we might note an impor-
tant point about it. When we describe a work as realist, we do not
mean that it is closer to reality in some absolute way than non-
realist literature. We mean that it conforms to what people of a
certain time and place tend to regard as reality. Imagine that we
were to stumble upon a piece of writing from some ancient culture
which seemed curiously preoccupied with the length of its charac-
ters’ shinbones. We might conclude that this was some outland-
ishly avant- garde flight of fancy. Then we might come across a
historical account of the same culture and realise that length of
shinbone was what determined your place in the social pecking
order. Those with long shinbones were banished to the desert and
forced to eat dung, while those with the minimum of distance