The Lie of Realism

    In C.S. Lewis’s essay “On Realism”, he mentioned that, “the demand that literature should have realism of content cannot be maintained”. It also cannot be maintained in our day to day lives.

     A decent amount of movies and books in recent years have been about "realistic" situations and most people recommend them because, as Lewis puts it, "they say, it prepares us for real life". But I can’t see how people can say that when realistic movies and books are full of situations that would never happen to an average person in the whole course of his life. For example, in the movie Ferris Beuller's Day Off, the three friends skip school and go to the city for the day. While they are there, the friends have lots of adventures, including pretending that they are rich and eating in a fancy restaurant even though they are rude and under dressed. Later in the film, Farris jumps on a parade float and begins to lip-sync to a song and the whole crowd goes wild. At the end of the movie Farris and his friends get away with a great deal of outrageous things with little to no consequences.

     When would these events happen in real life context? And when would we be able to get away with them like Ferris does? Lewis uses the example of Hamlet. When Hamlet is confronted with his father's ghost and reacts as if seeing the supernatural is completely normal. He’s not at all shocked by the ghost’s appearance like any of us would naturally be. By saying such strange and unimaginable things make more realistic stories, and insisting that as such they are more desirable, we are taught to believe a lie. That realistic stories show us what we should expect in life isn't true. If we thought everything “realistic” that we saw or read would just magically happen like it does to characters in books and movies, we would be constantly disappointed.