American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (review)

Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. x + 213 pages.

In American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, Phillip Barrish seeks to move beyond both the epistemic and historicist approach to realism through close readings of four American novels: Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham, James's The Wings of the Dove, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, and Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep. What Barrish examines is neither the venerable and overworked question of how we can really know the real nor the more fashionable question of how realism comes to be constituted and valued as a discursive practice. Rather, his purpose in turning a subtle and nuanced focus on these stories is to uncover the way in which the recognition of reality becomes a form of cultural capital within the text itself. The theoretical framework for the four readings is first developed in the introduction, where Barrish invokes Bourdieu's notion of distinction, which, when applied to what counts as "the real," paradoxically makes its cultivation a form of prestige that signals the subject's liberation from the necessities of vulgar material concerns. As one rises into the newly formed middle class, a special type of connoisseurship becomes possible which hinges on the selective retention and valorization of the habits, speech, and food of the world left behind.

At first glance, such discrimination might be taken as nothing more than a simple case in which nostalgia for the old order has been retroactively constructed in order to reify the power and authority of a new class formation. Barrish certainly does not deny the role of reification as a political trope, but his readings show that something far more complex is also happening in the psychic economy of the text: ultimately these novels' central characters find themselves having to fend off the direct experience of the very realities they have cultivated as symbolic capital because the polysemic character of reality cannot be easily contained. It transgresses all racial, class and gender boundaries and suffuses every symbolic formation and relationship. In The Wings of the Dove, for example, Merton Densher gains social status from his privileged relationship with Milly Theale's illness even as he struggles to shut out her suffering, a not so unconscious defense which reappears in Densher's need to master the attraction of Kate Croy's body as a form of "feminized materiality" (71). The issue at stake in this double perspective on reality is how both character and writer first encounter and then inevitably refigure the real. As Barrish shows, what James leads us to see in Densher's actions is of a piece with James's own realist stance, articulated in the preface to The American, towards "the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later."

In the last chapter of the book, Barrish uses this same double focus to extend his readings beyond the four literary texts and identify a parallel use of the real as symbolic capital in three 20th-century critical arguments: Trilling's attack on Parrington's naïve realism, de Man's deconstruction of Riffaterre's semiotic reductionism, and finally, in the debate most relevant to current theory and most critical to Barrish's own claims, the argument between Judith Butler and the "New Lacanians," Joan Copjec and Slavoj Zizek, regarding the ontology of desire. Far from being something added on to bolster the book's theoretical credentials, this final critical turn offers a substantial pay off because it resituates Barrish's readings as case studies in how the real can be invoked to measure the validity of interpretation. Though Barrish never makes the claim overtly, I would argue that his explications of Cahan and Wharton in particular also constitute a remarkable and original model of textuality which effectively supplies exactly the evidence needed to show that a Lacanian version of the Real, contrary to Copjec...