Literary “Realism” Mistaken for an Argument

“Authors, restrained by our laws against obscenity—rather silly laws, it may be—from using half a dozen monosyllables, felt as if they were martyrs of science, like Galileo. To the objection ‘This is obscene’ or “This is depraved’, or even to the more critically relevant objection ‘This is uninteresting’, the reply ‘This occurs in real life’ seems at times to be thought almost sufficient” (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, p. 61).