Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities by Richard Handler and Daniel Segal (review)

80Rocky Mountain Review Griffiths and Rabinowitz are not the first, of course, to approach the topic of Dead Souls and the epic. Gogol himself pointed to the connection with his subtitle Poema (meaning in Gogol's time, as it does today, a long narrative poem, including but not limited to the epic), by his high praise of Homer, eind by his hints that he had in mind a trilogy along the lines ofthe Divine Comedy, in which what we know as Dead Souls (Part One) would correspond to the Inferno. And the influences ofHomer and Dante on the novel have been studied elsewhere. Griffiths eind Rabinowitz, however, eire less concerned with stylistic influences or borrowing of motifs, on which the eeirlier studies tend to focus, as in Carl Proffer's TAe Simile and Gogol's Dead Souls and A.A. Asoyan's "Zametki o dantovskikh motivakh u Belinskogo i Gogolia." Instead, they focus on the tradition ofthe epic as "national narrative," eis the book's subtitle has it, or, to use the terminology preferred in the text, eis "monumented literature," that is, literary works whose aim is to establish national identity eind direction, especially in relation to the international cultural heritage. From this point ofview, the authors make a convincing case that Gogol's primary aim in Dead Souls was not, as has traditionally been assumed, to satirize provincial Russian mores, but to ask (and, in the continuation, to answer?) the question that is explicitly raised only in the famous concluding passage, "Whither Russia?" They argue that Gogol's literary model was not the more apparent one of the picaresque novel, but that ofthe epic, in particular the Christian epic as created by Dante. The authors write ein elegant, clear, eind witty prose, eind show impressive erudition and feimilietrity with the releveint literature, reflected in a nine-page bibliography (Griffiths is a classicist, Rabinowitz a Slavist, and they have collaborated previously on comparative studies of Russian literature and the epic). On the background of the general knowledge and understanding of Russian literature evinced here, one small factual error stands out sharply: a reference to "several [emphasis mine] unfinished chapters" ofEugene Onegin that recount the hero's "trip to Odessa and other points south" (76). This trip is partially described in one unfinished and discarded chapter, traditionally titled, when it is appended to the canonical text, "Onegin's Journey." It has nothing to do with the so-called tenth chapter, an abortive continuation ofthe novel. But this very minor cavil cannot detract from the overall excellence of this important study. EARL D. SAMPSON University of Colorado at Boulder RICHARD HANDLER and DANIEL SEGAL. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. 175 p. Having survived the rabid attack on the so-called "white Eurocentric canon," Jane Austen has been certified as politically correct by a number of Book Reviews81 special-interest groups, each claiming enthusiastically (in the neoclassical sense) that its own reading is exclusively valid and that all others are anathema. It hets remained for Richetrd Handler and Daniel Segal, two anthropologists (at Virginia and Pitzer College, respectively), to submit Austen's novels to crosscultural analysis. Their aim is "to explore correspondences between Austen's texts and anthropological theories ofkinship, social organization, and culture . . . both as a means of reading Jane Austen and as a means of opening anthropological theory to alternative strategies of narration, interpretation, and translation" (1). The result is some grim and painfully tough reading. In nine chapters Handler and Segal explore the relationships between Jane Austen's work (even the Juvenilia) and anthropology to demonstrate how she develops the problem common to her fiction: "the eventful, though conventional, process by which men and women medie an exclusive and mutued choice of a partner" (2). In her "fiction of culture," social conduct is not regulated by social rules, nor does it reproduce the established social order; instead the rules "give significance and value to pragmatically pursued social action" (3). But Handler and Segal realize that such an anthropological approach is not easy: "the problem of using her works is one ofa multitude ofintertextual relatione...