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HUMANITIES 141 and trickiest questions raised by Freud and by those who reflect on Freud. O'Neill's collection shows the force, range, and variety of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking at its best. (GUY ALLEN) Margaret Anne Doody. The True Story ofthe Novel Rutgers University Press. xx, 582. us $44.95 cloth, us $25.00 paper The title of this critical analysis of the endurance of novelistic tropes from earliest Greek and Roman stories through the permutations of Western fiction is not ironic, despite the insinuation of being a 'true' history in the maImer of the eighteenth century. Doody argues that 'whatwe know ofthe Novel of antiquity affects and redefines novels of a much later date,' and this revaluation of the origins of the novel 'may disturb our vision of the Western novel altogether.' In an attempt to show the continuity of ancient and modern, Doody argues that the novel owes little debt to Christian myths and is not the product of emergent capitalism in the modern period. Although Doody tells a version of novelistic discourse, it is not 'true' in so far as the novel deviates time and again from the 'stories of erotica pathemata,eroticsuffering' represented by Chariton's Chaireas and Knllirrhoe, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, or other ancient works. The patterns set forth in Greek and Roman fiction (apparitions of goddesses, letter scenes, portraiture, and so forth) bear some resemblance to latter-day novels, and Doody's wide-ranging references bring out surprising and unexpected cormections between forgotten and familiar texts, but The True Story ofthe Novel levels differences among hundreds oftales and frequently makes the twentieth century and other periods seem oddly like the ancient world. A passion for stories - why people invent consolatory, allegorical, or romantic tales- underlies the numerous interculturalreferences of The True Story of the Novel: J Any culture that needs to deal with cultural pain, multiplicity, and confusion may have to employ allegory of some kind, if only to make its needs and pain known to itself.' Doody claims 'We defy death for story - which is the secret of the openings of all novels.' Despite these passing observations about the psychological inevitability ofstorytelling, the method here is structuralist,notpsychoanalytic. The True Story ofthe Novel, divided into three parts, deals in turn with ancient novels, their influence from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, and recurrent tropes of the novel. The final section, brilliantly allusive, draws connections among Longus, Tatius, Proust, 20la, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare , and Lampedusa - allin a matter of a few typical pages of discussion about ekphrasis. The extent and deftness of these references act almost as a jeu d'esprit, except that Doody grounds this study in novelistic topoL Structural similarities are found in such tropes as marshes (suggesting liminality and 142 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 uncertainty), caves (signifying death and recovery), eros (caprice and redemption), paintings (representation an9, possession), dreams (augury and illness), and food (normalcy and realism). It comes as no surprise, then, that Doody, by demonstrating the persistence of these tropes across time, feels a scholarly affinity with 'Northrop Frye, who made evident his own relation to Jung, and to Jessie L. Weston who was an influence on Frye.' By defying historical and cultural determinants- the specificityofwhy novels were written in the first place - this structuralist methodology produces discomfiting sameness. For instance, in passing references to Madame de LaFayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), we learn that the novel builds on the romances of Madeleine de Scudery and indirectly Ion the work of the ancient novelists/ yet no mention is made of the peculiarities of court life at Versailles in which de Lafayette participatect nor of her acquaintance with Madame de Sevigne and the Due de La Rochefoucauld, nor the cultural parallels with the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose memoirs offer a blistering expose ofLouis XIV'S court. De Lafayette might compressancient tropes into her novel, yet she also writes in response to a cultural milieu that valued style, delicacy ofemotion, and political intrigue, in a uniquefashion. One of the running arguments of The True Story ofthe Novel concerns the narrative possibilities for women and marginal people. Women are 'at or near the center...

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