CONSTRUCTING REALITY:
REALIST TECHNIQUES

When our mind or our art represents the real world, it constructs this world in a way that appears real to society and to ourselves.  We construct what appears to us to be a "whole" of reality:  all that we see, a whole situation, a whole world.  This act of construction creates a realist effect, which is why we think we are seeing the world as it is or that a narrator is representing it as it is, rather than constructing it.

We construct reality and create a "realist effect" by using some of the following "realist techniques."  Realist techniques are the means by which our mind constructs what we call the real world and convinces us that we are seeing the real world as it is.

By means of "realist techniques," we and narrators not only construct a world that appears real to us, we and they create the impressions of our own credibility as objective observers.

Realist techniques cannot guarantee that words or perceptions are objective.  Nothing can.  They are only means of constructing a realist representation that we call objective.

Some realist techniques are words and thoughts that:

a. represent a scene that is typical of what we generally believe the real world to be. Our mind automatically organizes our sensations, no matter how bizarre, into a whole that we can recognize, one that is typical of what we already understand the world to be.  Authors do the same thing in constructing reality.

b. say or imply that we, a narrator, or a character has actually perceived (witnessed) the objects being described or the actions being narrated.  We use verbs like "to see," or "to hear," in order to suggest that our words or a narrator's words refer to reality as it is, because we or he have objectively perceived this world through one of the five senses  -- sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.  Basing our constructions of reality on the senses, empirical observation, is the very basis of scientific description.  We tend to assume that the images produced in our minds by the senses are not modified by preconceived ideas (which is of course an illusion).

c. describe or narrate a lot of sensory detail  -- using many nouns, adjectives, and adverbs that signify details that are seen, heard, etc.  Multiple sensory details also imply that we or the narrator's representations are grounded in objective sensations that are not modified by preconceived ideas.  They are also fundamental to the way sciences constructs its vision of reality.

d. construct the overall scene by generalizing the relations between the detailed parts of the scene and the whole scene. We can never perceive and an author can never represent a whole scene, but our mind and the author's words interpret the relation between the parts we represent and the whole scene.  This gives us a general concept of the whole scene and gives us the sense that we are really seeing reality.  Like all generalizations, it is a simplification. 

e. generalize from the overall scene to society as a whole -- by using proper names identifying places and things historically associated with a particular place and era, by representing common human and social actions or situations, by naming a real historical period, by representing common periods of life, and by interpreting the similarities and differences between the scene and society, we construct what we believe to be contemporary reality as a whole.  We say "Americans are X, but Germans are Y."  Again, this generalization is a simplification, but it is the only way that we can construct what we call the reality of contemporary society.

f. link events within a continuous narrative of actions or events.  Or mind and authors stories link details of actions and events in a seamless story, as if we are seeing the chronological flow of time.  But we are in fact smoothing over quite separate perceptions according to our preconceived ideas of how events change.

g. provide details of our own or a character's thoughts that suggest a complex, rather than a two-dimensional mind.  We do this all the time in representing ourselves and others.  When narrators describe characters or themselves in two-dimensional terms, we tend not to believe that they are real.