REALISM AND MODERNISM 99 theless,"... meant as ^ moment of vision and token of better times to corner Creative Reversal of Kitaj Kitaj's method changes as well. The collagcd information is now unravelled and the images are related to each other through discernible clues in a narrative sequence. And one sees him retrace his steps to a point where, in an amazing act of creative reversal, he turns the wheel and vindicates Frederic Jameson's thesis on the relevance of realism today. Kitaj has called himself "the grandchild of Surrealism and many other aspects of modernism that have ruined me."15 Atoning for the temptation for ruin, he now says that " . . . it seems to me atleast as advanced or radical to attempt a m3re social art as not to. ... No one can promise that a love of mankind will promote a great art but the need feels saintly . . . and we shall see. . . may be it will never happen.9'16 It may never happen, but he likes the idea "that it may be possible to invent a figure, a character in a picture the way novelists have been able to ... like the people you remember out of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy."17 The selection of the authors suggests an obvious partiality towards realism— not scorning even the more orthodox definitions elaborated all along the line from Bslinsky to Lukacs, where there is a moral commitment to restitute the unity of subject and object, the individual and society. In recent years Kitaj has shown many drawings of "ordinary people55, but the ordinary people too are so damaged by our age that their characterization, if at all possible, must put together living persons who have gone so far even beyond Dostoe-vsky's attenuated characters. Kitaj must get under the skin and assume the persona of the battered souls—exotic phantoms, im-posters, eccentrics and intellectuals like himself—all touched by the malaise. The portrayals are gnawing in the way they expose the viewer to others' pain, to his own bad conscience, to a shared neurosis. But for all their signed appearance these people survive, and not the least by the masterly assurance of the draughtsman himself, who can at last extract the menace from where it crouches and allow it a tragic dimension. 1 Raymond Williams, Keywords'. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Glasgow, Fontana/ Groom Helm, 1976, p 219. 2 Picasso, cited in Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Object, New York, Toronto, Mentor/New American Library, 1966.