Introduction

the adventures of the real

pp. 3-10

in: John Orr, Tragic realism and modern society, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

Ten years on, the tone of this study appears to its author as ominously unique. It is euphoric and elegiac, and unfashionable. It makes a glowing plea for tragic realism-the term is Auerbach's-and laments its passing as if the end of an era had been reached. At times it verges on radical romanticism, or else lapses into an uncritical humanism. But it still retains the freshness of a clean driving tone and a commitment to the novel about which it speaks. It is unashamedly historical metanarrative since there can be no narrative of narratives without history. It could not have been written without Marx, Auerbach and the German historicist tradition. Its choice of subjects could have been wider, for it slices off a portion of the novel's complex history and elevates it onto a pedestal. It makes the particular author and the particular text the object of cult-worship or sudden assassination or both. But attempting to trace interwoven patterns of fiction and experience in history it finds them, and it still seems to me to have achieved its goal in a spectacular manner.