Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (review)

REVIEWS 79 the imagined Paris of the future. He is on safer ground, however, with Louis Geoffroy's extraordinary Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1836; revised as Napoléon apocryphe in 1841), in which Napoleon, having succeeded in his Russian campaign, goes on, in the space of a mere twenty years, not only to conquer Europe, but to establish French domination over almost the whole planet, convert all Protestants, Jews, and Muslims to Catholicism, and sponsor an amazing series of geographical, archaeological, technological, and scientific discoveries. A fascinating link with one of the best-known of modem uchronias, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (in which the Axis powers have won the Second World War and have occupied the United States), is provided by the existence within Geoffroy's book of a novel based on the "ridiculous" premise that Napoleon was forced to retreat from Moscow and was then defeated at Waterloo and sent into exile. In Dick's book a novel within the novel presents the fantastic premise that it was in fact the Allies who won the War. The degree of technical sophistication displayed in this toying with alternative and multiple fictional realities lends some credence to Alkon's attempts to endow most of the books he discusses with a greater degree of metafictional selfawareness than his summaries of their often bizarrre and confusing contents might suggest. Even if this aspect of his study is not totally convincing (fake and multiple prefaces, introductions, and commentaries being standard features of much literature of the period and not necessarily evidence of premonitions of post-Modernism), he has performed a valuable function in describing and analysing them so carefully and in fitting them into what is overall a coherent and satisfying framework. Most of his readers, however, will probably remain content to know about these works at second hand, rather than attempting to struggle with the originals which, for all their undoubted historic interest, seem unlikely ever to regain a widespread audience on their own merits. Graham Pétrie McMaster University Terry Castle. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. ? + 395pp. US$37.50 cloth; US$14.95 paper. "I have been lucky in my subject," Terry Castle tells us early on in Masquerade and Civilization. But she is not lucky in the way winners of cash lotteries are lucky. Lucky subjects do not so much happen to critics as critics and scholars happen to them. Masquerade in Castle's book serves not only as a compelling subject but as a metaphor for the way she works, combining the energies of narrative analysis with an almost anthropological instinct for the nature of social institutions. Castle is attuned, like Lévi-Strauss (as important for her book 80 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION as Foucault, whose work is masked in its title), to the structures of cultural expression. Before I comment on what is in Masquerade and Civilization I would mention very briefly another mode of criticism to which it appears allied, New Historicism, though I think "new" before any "ism" is more promotional than substantive, like "new" before "improved." In Castle's case, as is true for much New Historicism, history is arriviste, a remembrance of things once found by historians whose legitimate and sustained training made the discoveries possible in the first place. Castle, to her credit, is less a historian than a critic and a reader. Despite a brief review of secondary work on the history of masquerade and a generous set of plates and illustrations, the mark of this book's distinction is the way Castle presents what she calls the phenomenology of the masquerade as a resource for reading eighteenth-century fiction. Castle knows how to build a literary argument. In one of those engaging constructs that are part of Castle's lively and intriguing style, the masquerade acts out in a social arena what is already implicit in the novel. She has seized on to masquerade as a network of licensed illegitimacies. It harbours mannered forms of desire, displays lives lived at high frequency, contains rituals of reversal and inversion where...