![]() ![]() Why is there so much gross stuff in great literature? ![]() It’s unpretty, unpleasant, painful, shameful, a cesspool best swept under the carpet, and at times just hella gross. I’m not saying that engaging novels should strive to be brick-sized tabloids, or that humanistic novelists are really just intellectualised paparazzi, but bottom line is that I can’t care enough to read on if the escapism in a book isn’t deeply rooted in real human experience.Īnd more often than not, real human experience isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. This is why a lot of Dickens and Eliot’s work tend to be quite heavy-handed on the moralism: right at the point when the authors could dish the juicy dirt on their characters, they get hoity-toity and jettison the whole ‘telling it as it really is’ agenda, instead opting to turn their writing into a sermonising soundboard about social ills and the State of Humanity and Faith and Science and whatever grand concept lionisable by a Capitalised First Letter Because This Makes Everything Look More Important.Īs such, Victorian realists often leave the skeletons in the cupboard to narrative oblivion, much to the nosy reader’s disappointment. This is what came up when I googled ‘British realism’: a scene from the 1962 film ‘Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’, a classic work of 20th-century social realism ![]()
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