A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Ninety-Two

I tend to think of realism as being more about conventions in the use of language to depict the world than as having to do with the world itself.  For example, I know that many will speak of certain kinds of qualities in a story's plot or character's, or certain levels and types of details, as being important elements of realism.  In similar ways, the logic of the world itself, the way that events interconnect and unfold, how the world responds to the character's actions and what and why those characters chose to do in the first place.  To me, though, a piece can be realistic or unrealistic while including any of these elements, depending upon whether the telling is itself conventional.  The elements of the fictional world are not what defines realism, at least for me.  For me, realism is a set of conventions, as I said.  I can point to works that have the kinds of characters and interactions mentioned above, but depicted using non-traditional means, and that alters the perception of the work and the world it presents.  I do not know what is, for example, unreal within the novel Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet.  The work focuses on the scene of an assumed character observing their lover and another man interacting, and the suspicions of the narrator about an affair between the two.  This is all done in a rather unconventional style, and so it is not classed as realistic, but the truth is that the method of telling the story is only lacking realism because of the mode of the telling.  What is being shown is a complicated character responding to the world in ways that are not illogical or inconsistent with what can be observed between genuine people outside of novel, and there are many small details, the kinds that make a world feel lived in.  I do not think it lacks for the qualities of a realistic portrayal in most regards.  But the telling is a looping back and forth through the same scene, with the uncertainty of what the character is experiencing, what they are remembering, and what they are embellishing or even just imagining.  The narrator only exists as the space at the center of the story, is never directly acknowledged, not even in the privacy of the narration itself.  But how odd is that?  Is it unrealistic that a character not think of their own self in their own mind, or that they might only reflect consciously upon what is observed around them?  Of course, I am not defining Jealousy as realism in the sense we mean it most often, but am pointing out that what is often thought of as realism is often fails to reflect that it is not about the content but about how that material is represented.  Many works of fantasy and science fiction are considered to be realistic, despite existing in overtly and intentionally non-real worlds, so we know this on some level, but it is still something that I find myself wanting to explore and consider.