So what is real?

“Shall vain words have an end?” -Job 16:3

Some lawyers spoke up the other week in New York state’s highest court and argued that dancers at a local strip club should be entitled to the same tax benefits as the Bolshoi Ballet or any other “artistic” group. Given the prevailing moral fog surrounding “artistic expression” and what constitutes pornography, they will probably win. Thus far at River’s Edge, we enjoy a much simpler set of rules that are uncluttered by the delicate discernments of elite legal minds. We still manage to know evil pretty much when we see it.

Yet there is a strong groundswell movement particularly in literature that began back in the 19th century and has vexed Christians for some time and still continues to be a source of debate, even here at RECA. It is simply called “realism.” It began as a reaction in the art world to the romantic idealization or dramatization of the previous era. Soon spilling over into the literary world, it focused on portraying “objective reality” of life as it really was even if it was sordid or ugly. Thus, we soon saw portrayals of the evils of industrialization and could read about the lives of common people be they high or low. It was as natural as night follows day that profanity and vulgarity of every kind should eventually find its way into artistic works of even the highest order.

It doesn’t take too much of a literary scholar to recognize that the wheels have come off this buggy of “realism” that we have been riding proving once again the old adage that what one generation tolerates in moderation the next will indulge to excess. If one wants to write “realistically” today, all you have to do is lace your manuscript with a rich assortment of profanities and vulgarities. It is your proof or prima facie evidence that you have been faithful to real life. Anything less than this is obviously a sanitized Hallmark-channel piece of fluff that merits no serious respect. This is nothing but flawed logic at several levels.

Modern portrayals of army life, especially, require navigating some of the most profane passages known to man; a steady barrage of expletives that continues with machine-gun rapidity. But I was in the army once; with real soldiers, real people. Shocking as it may seem, many did not talk like that. In fact, those whose vocabulary seldom included words of five letters or more were in the minority. So what is really real?

False also is the notion that one cannot write “realistically” without being offensive. The Bible contains some of the most realistic narratives ever put to paper. Biblical heroes are never perfect. There is always that mixture of ecstasy and agony such as is common to man. In fact, we see villains converted, the saintly fall, and plenty of just average people called to live out extraordinary lives in spite of themselves. Yet the Bible does not stoop to rubbing our noses in graphic detail we would just as soon not know. The scriptural authors all understood that our nature can be titillated by evil as well as repulsed by it and attempt to strike a wholesome balance.

If one wishes real “realism,” go to the book of Job to hear him cry out in the midst of his pain, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust him.” Go to Shakespeare where his distraught Hamlet broods, “now could I drink hot blood, and do such bitter business, as the day would quake to look on.” Go to Melville as he takes you inside the mind and heart of the ever vengeful Ahab who “sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.” By contrast, these reveal much of the coarse literature of our day to be mere collections of the cheap, the tawdry, and the gratuitous; the lipstick of pseudo realism upon the pig of shallow thinking and writing.