Neurosis and Narrative: The Decadent Short Fiction of Proust, Lorrain, and Rachilde by Renée A. Kingcaid (review)

264Rocky Mountain Review through which Dillard seeks to understand her life, to live in the natural world, and, to use Burroughs phrase, to "accept the universe." Most importantly, throughout the study, Johnson implies that epiphanies and mystical visions of God, self, and eternity are hard facts, events with a real historicity rather than human acts of interpretive faith, need, and desire . Only once in the entire book does she admit that the author must be honest about such mystical experiences, which implies that some authors might lie and manipulate the conventions of literary art for purposes of enunciating other truths or for simple embellishment and literary effect. Johnson seems unwilling to view epiphanies skeptically as possible false points of reference for believers who fear falling into a Heraclitean world of vertigo. Yet in the conclusion she temporizes and writes that "language [including the language describing epiphanies] itself might be all there is" and that perhaps "language and any art piece, is, in fact, the only god, a simulacrum , an entity created out of the human need for significance, which arises from truly insignificant and accidental drifts of time" (195). The notion that there is an actual referent behind, above, beneath, or beyond the language of epiphany—call it God or eternity—is an act of faith that is too easily accepted by Johnson (and I suspect by Dillard) and is only questioned critically in the conclusion. This one sophisticated skeptical paragraph, however, saves the entire book from being an intellectual and theological anachronism. Yet, to be scrupulously fair, Johnson never claims to travel with the passport of a theologian, a semiotician, or an epistemologist. Her area ofinterest and competence is as a technician and connoisseur of the epiphany. And no critic writing today understands the stylistic intricacies and the chronological maneuvers of the Dillardian epiphany better than Johnson. She has changed Dillard criticism forever by intellectually situating Dillard's writings in the literary poetic tradition ofthe British romantics and by giving us the first meticulous book-length analysis of the illuminated moments in Dillard's ecstatic poetic prose. STAN GOLDMAN Trinity University RENEE A. KINGCAID. Neurosis and Narrative: The Decadent Short Fiction of Proust, Lorrain, and Rachilde. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. 210 p. As Renée A. Kingcaid explains in the last chapter of Neurosis and Narrative, she was "tempted ... by the temporal coincidence of two discourses —Freud's and the Decadents'—that share a common interest in neurosis and that express this interest in narrative, whether or not they set out explicitly to do so" (146). Her excellent study greatly enhances the comprehension and the aesthetic reaction of the reader of those texts she analyzes. Book Reviews265 Her constant concern is to enlighten, not dazzle or confound her reader with obfuscating jargon, at least not any more than is necessary in a text in which Lacan's name is mentioned. Kingcaid's professed goal is to offer "something new to our understanding of neurosis and Decadence: that is, that narrative technique, and not just Decadent language or its themes, substantiates the claims of this literature to plunge its roots deeply into neurosis" (150). And this she does succinctly and convincingly. Although her discussion, especially of Rachilde, is tinged with feminist critical attitudes, her work remains resolutely literary and apolitical. Kingcaid's book is divided into six chapters on: 1) Principles and Strategies; 2) Freud and the Decadence; 3) Proust's Pleasures and Regrets; 4) Lorrain's Masked Figures and Phantoms; 5) The Hysterical [female] Body: Dora, Simone de Beauvoir, Rachilde; and 6) "Decadent" Desire, a concise and satisfying conclusion. In order to "make this study as widely accessible as possible" (ix), Kingcaid provides translations of all original French sources, either her own or other published translations. She also offers the French original of her own translations of primary sources in the Notes. A more than ample bibliography and a thorough index complete this work that is almost totally free of misprints. Kingcaid begins her analysis of the texts in question by stating that the book was originally to be about Dora, Freud's "wily heroine" who refused to "tell where she had learned about sex...