Literature and Desire

90 RICHARD TELEKY ordered social totality and the uncompromising uniqueness of the event or character' with which they are centrally concerned, and thus make a highly significant contribution to our understanding of the social experience of their times. Written in full awareness of recent developments in criticism, the theoretical part of Swales's book is argued brilliantlyI but will not, and is probably not intended to, carry full conviction in itself: it must be read in conjunction with the intezpretive essays on seven Novellen that form the second part. The choice of these Novellen - Goethe's Novelle, Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, Buchner's Lenz, Grillparzer's DerarmeSpielmann, Stifter's Granit, Keller's Die dreigerechten Kammmacher , and Meyer'S Die Leiden eines Kl1aben -is inevitably subjective, but, given Swales's decision to restrict himself to the nineteenth century, it is representative , and no one will quarrel with him for having chosen stories on which he had something new to say and which tend best to vindicate his emphasis on the importance of narrative perspective in the Novelle. Three of his essays have been published previously and a fourth is about to be published elsewhere, but it is not merely convenient to have them available in book form: they need to be read in succession if one is to appreciate the full force, originality, and cohesion of Swales's interpretive vision. Swales insists that the nineteenth-century Novelle has something important to say to the modem reader, and he probably makes as good a case for this conviction as can be made. I am left with the nagging question, however, why this body of works has never caught on outside Germany, and why even in Germany it does not have the devoted readership outside the schools and universities which Jane Austen, Dickens, or Trollope still have in the Englishspeaking world. Is it simply a question of scale? Oris it that all too many of these stories, whatever their artistic merit, make their point too subtly and timidly? (No doubt, a first reading of Conrad's Heart ofDarkness is likely to be a superficial reading, but the impact of the tale is strong and immediatei for most people a first reading of Goethe's Novelle merely evokes puzzlement.) Or is there, despite Swales's denial, something local and provincial about these stories after all? There is no one whose answers to these questions I would welcome more eagerly than Swales. Meanwhile, however, it should be said that his book is not only a splendid introduction to its subject, but essential reading for the expert, whom it cannot but stimulate, enlighten, and occasionally provoke. Literature and Desire RICHARD TELEKY Leo Bersani. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature Boston: Little, Brown 1976. xii, 338. $15.00 Though Astyanax (the son of Andromache and Hector) never appears in Racine's Andromaque, his fate is 'nothing less and nothing more than the value of pure LITERATURE AND DESIRE 91 possibility' for Professor Bersani, whose difficult but brilliant new book traces the stages in the deconstruction of the integrated or whole and fixed self in literature since the seventeenth century. Bersani's argument for psychic mobility , a state of continual metamorphosis where the self never achieves a final resting-place, pivots on his examination of desire ('an appetite of the imagination ' based on the experience of a lack) in two distinct traditions: the realism of Racine, Balzac, Jane Austen, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Flaubert, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence, which affinns the integrated self as the writer confronts images of fragmentation while often adopting his characters' psychology from the sOciety contested in his writing; and literature of the fragmented self, where desire is not sublimated according to society - Emily Bronte, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Artaud, Genet, contemporary theatre'Oerzy Grotowski, Joe Chaikin, Robert Wilson, and Peter Brook), and erotic fiction such as L'Histoire d'D. Bersani is critical of the reductiveness in most psychoanalytic criticism - which generally reinforces the concept of the integrated personality - but he does not deny the value of psychological approaches to literature. His own study gained part of its impetus from Freud's later work such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and...