Alves’ Appurtenances: Realism as Doctrine and as Imperative. Eça de Queirós, Alves & Co. and Other Stories. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus Books, 2012 [Book Review]

The critiques of realism in literature, and in the other arts, are familiar. Aesthetic claims to realism as a direct, true representation of reality seek to efface the ineluctable, specific material properties of the medium—this is the charge of aesthetic modernism. Realism is enunciated from a specifically bourgeois class perspective, which denies “reality” to those contradictions endemic to social life that are invisible to this perspective and which, in be-coming visible, would threaten to undermine it—this is the charge of certain Marxisms. Realism presumes a basic, centred rationality of the artist able to objectively and passively represent what is external to this individual, when in actuality the structure of subjectivity is deeply fractured, contradictory and decentred, and does not permit any such unmediated access to its outside—this is the charge of psychoanalysis.