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124 the minnesota review REVIEWS Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal. Zola, and the Performances of History by Sandy Petrey. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. 21 1 pp. Literary theory in the wake of deconstruction has been looking for ways to dam the flow of the undecidable and to anchor the floating signifier without, however, giving up the interpretive power of the disseminating flow or the abstracting power of the semiotic rise. Feminist theory, for instance, while it stresses the constructedness of gender, is also working to articulate the social and material determinations of female subjectivity. The new historicism, while granting the textuality of history, also suggests that historical events are not only rhetorical productions. Recent psychoanalytic readings, while acknowledging that Freud's texts double back within and against themselves, interpret their duplicities in the historical context of their production. These critical tendencies all reflect a lesson long central to Marxism, the determining role of the social and historical context in the interpretation of truth. In his new book, Sandy Petrey teaches this lesson brilliantly and forcefully by using Austin's theory of speech acts to demonstrate both the strength and limitation of the poststructuralist liberation of the sign from its referential ground. He shows that the liberation has revolutionary force, not just in its academic context but also in the actual linguistic practice of the revolutionaries of 1789, who overthrew "everything that had previously determined the correlation between the French language's propositional content and the French nation's reality" (p. 27). Realizing that this overthrow threatened to leave them floating in a situation where authority was undecidable, the representatives of the Third Estate decided the revolution's reality by declaring the performative function to their speech and having this function ratified by collective assent. The revolutionary reality of 1 789, Petrey argues, was constituted through the force of what Austin calls constative or performative speech (Austin collapses his own distinction), speech that constructs factuality and reference as a convention collectively agreed to. Petrey's thesis is that the creation of this socially constructed reality was the necessary precondition for the invention of the literary form we call realism. "Central to the realist enterprise," he writes, "fis] fictional representation of constative signification in the absence of referential specificity" (p. 74). Literary language that insists on its reference to a given reality is, in Petrey's historical scheme, typical of royalist discourse. Thus he finds that Zola's naturalist descriptions "make the same claim to all-inclusive jurisdiction as the king's decrees" (p. 177). The referential illusion having been exposed as such by the revolution, subsequent writers who allow themselves to lapse into its ideological blindness are expressing a regressive nostalgia. The overarching reach of Petrey's theory leads him to formulate a series of critical analogies that cites novelists, critics, and novelistic characters as equally exemplary. Zola's naturalism, in its conservative, reified aspect, thus becomes comparable to Pére Goriot's pathetic attempt to assert the natural basis of his paternal authority in a world where fatherhood is a nominal convention, which in turn is analogous to those passages in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis where the critic asserts the existence of a fixed, permanent reality, whereas elsewhere he shows the real to be the socialized function of conventional procedures. If the referential illusion is politically reactionary, so also is its semantic opposite, the free play of the signifier, "pure inscription without expression, pure textuality without reference, pure writing without authorship" (p. 144). Petrey offers a brilliant analysis in these terms of the discourse of the Restoration, especially as exemplified by Julien Sorel's mastery of its empty codes and inexpressive protocols. "Because signs that do not denote can only repeat," Petrey remarks, "expert repetition is the surest means of social advancement" (p. 140). Julien puts this insight to work throughout his brilliant career, for instance by copying Court Korasoff's already reviews 125 copied letters, which convince Madame dc Fcrvaqucs of Julicn's passionate sincerity. His expertise at exploiting writing's divorce from origin and reference might seem to identify Julien as a Dcrridcan dans la lettre. But Petrey makes an important distinction, crucial to his...

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