Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

76 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
Ibsen is also called to task for his use of the “contrivances” of the wellmade
play. Such objections are utterly irrelevant. Ibsen was no more interested
than Shaw in creating superficial photographic illusions of life—
Candid Camera realism. He was exploring consciences, desires, and the
conflict of human wills. The revisionist criticism that seeks out the “contrivances”
of the “well-made play” in the work of turn-of-the-century realists
is fallacious as well as irrelevant because it is based on two dangerously
erroneous assumptions. In the first place, all plays, like all other
works of fiction, are contrived. They are consciously put together to create
an effect or to convey a message or both. This is true even of the most
extreme “slice-of-life” naturalists, who are often so intent on creating the
illusion of reality that they sacrifice honest observation to popular prejudice—such
as the assumption that the nastier and dirtier something appears
the more real it must be. Second, well-made plays were not contrived
to appear contrived: they were crafted to create the illusion of reality, an
illusion fabricated from the expectations of the audience. They appear
“contrived” to us because we do not share those expectations, but we
should not imagine that whenever something in a play by Ibsen or Shaw
reminds us that we are indeed in a theater, that we have discovered a flaw
in their realism. If it is a flaw, it is a lapse in illusionism, something often
incompatible with critical realism.
We need to suppress the temptation to apply the rule of commonsense
realism to the plays of the realists, including Shaw, and to seek a more
rigorous, as well as more appropriate, standard. The difficulty is that
commonsense realism pervades our thinking about realism, and for good
reasons. It is easy to slip from talking about the purposes of realism into
discussions of its style, and when we think about a naturalistic style we are
all too apt to think in illusionistic terms. So the confusion arises inevitably,
in no small part out of the efforts of the most rigorously scientific realists
themselves. Realism is first of all a way of viewing the world; it declares,
like all serious artistic movements, that the function of art is to tell the
truth, and it has definite ideas about the nature of that truth. So the heart
of literary realism is a philosophy, but that philosophy must generate new
artistic forms or styles. Unfortunately, the new illusionist style favored by
the realists actually obscured the ends to which it was presumably only a
means.