A.’s words to the effect that man had discovered the scientific method and used it in his life, and that the method must be reflected in his literature.
Realism in art and literature was a new vision of the world following the transformation of material, social, and political conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specifically the industrial revolution. The writer no longer wrote to save mankind from its boredom, nor to help them pass the time. He aimed his discoveries at the darkness surrounding his field of vision. He was enriched by new movements in morality and politics, which left their marks on literary and artistic groups: partisan literature and realism → psychological realism, historical realism, social realism, materialist realism, socialist realism, revolutionary realism.
All these schools represented a persistent attempt to reach reality, as well as a quest for new forms. Surrealism was not a mode of pessimism nor escapism, as frivolous people suppose. It was another attempt, motivated by the nightmare of World War I, to discover reality, which had abruptly demonstrated the impotence of previous schools to articulate and uncover it. Socialist realism played this same role in the age of science. But it failed due to intellectual stagnation, Leftism, and an “unscientific” approach to reality (its neglect of contradictions, its gaudy picture-painting, and its commitment to a style and technique that were out-of-date). Scientific socialism is a science, not a method. There is no commitment. There is only the issue of the scientific method. Art is opposed to daily politics. It takes a long, comprehensive view. Trial and error. It is not a tool, but open to all newness. Lenin and the freedom of the imagination.
Life will have no meaning unless we stop at once and look at it and see all the things we have been blind to. unless we look at everything that lies below the surface, unless our curiosity is fired by the miracle of the everyday.
Toward a new movement in the novel and the short story. Why is there a crisis? We don’t have a long history in this art form. Our reality has changed in bewildering fashion; it’s no longer possible to represent this reality using the old methods. The development of this art form cannot happen in Egypt as it happened in Europe. We need a true leap forward.
“The directors of the New Wave face up to the absence of conventional drama. They put characters on display, but do not attempt to have them make sense. Their films are entirely free of the structure of conventional drama. So long as the camera is no longer constrained to tell a continuous story with beginning, middle, and end, it can represent what it sees, just as in life. For life is not orderly, its unity is incomprehensible, its one continuity is its principle character, the axis of life and its events.” Alexandre Astruc in Le Monde, August 12, 1959.
“Why Neorealism Failed,” Eric Rhode, translated by Ata’ al-Naqqash for al-Katib, April 1963: Moravia believes neorealism ended because it fulfilled its task, which was “to respond to the pressing need, after the war, to account for every kind of deficiency brought about by defeat and national disaster.” Neorealism offered more than merely spiritual succor. It was an attempt once again to go back to the beginning: What is man? What are his rights and responsibilities?
— “The reality buried under myths flowered once again. Cinema remade the world. Here was a tree, an old man, a house, a man eating, a man sleeping, a man screaming.” Cesar Zavattini.
— Principles of the movement:
1) An end to naïve clichés.
2) An end to imaginary and grotesque fabrications.
3) An end to historical narratives and the adaptations of novels and stories into films.
4) An end to the rhetoric that represented Italians in general as on fire with the same noble sentiments. making all of them equally aware of all the problems of life.
— Zola defined the naturalist writer: “His great concern is to gather material and to find out what he can do in this world he wishes to describe. When this material is collected, the novel will spontaneously find its form. The writer has only to gather the facts and put them into a realistic frame. The oddities of the story must not claim his attention. On the contrary, the more the narrative is shared and universal, the better. ”
— Umberto D is the closest Zavattini has come to his ideal of inserting 90 consecutive minutes from the life of man into a film. Here we are confronted with a paradox of neorealist film, which presents, at moments, a reality broken off from life and therefore as meaningless as the realism of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur. But this should not surprise us, because it is the logical development of Zola’s idea of collecting the facts and then seeing what significance or importance they bear in and of themselves.
— Georg Lukacs says of Zola: “Perhaps no one has been able to paint so precisely and suggestively the exterior trappings of modern life. But merely the exterior trappings. These constitute the enormous backdrop in front of which minuscule people come and go, acting out with random gestures their accidental lives. Zola was unable to discern what the great realists such as Balzac, Tolstoy, or Dickens, had achieved by representing social institutions as human relations, and social phenomena as composed of these relations. ”
— Description and analysis is substituted for epic situations and plots.
For realism, as for Aristotle, the characteristic procedure of art is its method of imitating an action.
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Van Wyck Brooks (Viking).
— “I believe that it is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated.” Pasternak.
— “I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” Eliot.
On Le Nouveau Roman
— “Only through writing can the writer uncover new artistic values.” Alain Robbe-Grillet.
— “The writer must distance himself from visible, known, and studied reality. He must focus on the interior world that is strange to him.” Nathalie Sarraute.
“He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew. I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
1964 January
Naguib Mahfouz in al-Katib: “When the novel was interested in life as such, the traditional style was the most appropriate. Human character appeared in all its details. When life becomes a problem, the human being cannot be a particular person but simply a human being. Details vanish, along with narrative, and dialogue dominates all the other aspects. When man stands face-to-face with his destiny, details lose their value.”
The only essential commitment of art is to the truth.
Sex and Morality in the United States, Time Magazine: