The Conspiracy Novel: Structure and Metaphor in Balzac’s “Comédie humaine” by James W. Mileham (review)

L ’E sprit C réateur invitation to the reader: approach the text with Félicité’s simplicity and love it indivisibly as she knows how to love. In “The Figure in the Carpet,” the textual strategy is one of simul­ taneously distancing and involving the reader. Finally, in “The Dead,” one finds a commit­ ment to “noise” and writerliness expressed in a readerly manner. Chambers does much more than provide strong readings of canonical narratives as self­ reflexive transactional phenomena. As Wlad Godzich points out in his fine introduction, he tells the story of the nineteenth-century art-tale and of its increasing reliance on writerly rather than readerly conceptions and techniques. Moreover, he makes a number of fruitful distinctions, such as the one between narrative authority (derived from transmitting infor­ mation) and narratorial authority (derived from arousing interest). He also examines various modes of repetition, reflection and mirroring through which a text determines the way of reading applicable to it; he offers an interesting definition of fiction as “the name we give to the narrative moves that, in a given narrative situation, produce authority through seduction” (p. 219); and he characterizes a wide range of seductive textual strategies. Most importantly, perhaps, he shows that situational self-referentiality is a notable feature of readerly texts and demonstrates the narratological importance of making room for the contractual dimension of narrative. Of course, some of Chambers’ arguments are more problematic than others. I find, for instance, that he cannot quite decide whether the distinction between meaning and mean­ ingfulness should be maintained or abandoned (pp. 3, 8, et passim); I also think that he overstates the powers of fiction (is the capacity of fiction to theorize itself, to control its impact through situational self-definition, and to seduce fundamentally different from the capacity of language to do the same?); and I am not sure (neither is Chambers!) that nar­ rative’s manipulation of desire and reliance on seduction as a modus operandi is a modern phenomenon. What I am sure of is that Story and Situation constitutes an outstanding contribution to the development of a dynamic and context-sensitive narratology. G era ld P rin ce University of Pennsylvania James W. Mileham. T he C o n spir a c y N o v el : Stru c tu r e a n d M et a ph o r in Ba l z a c ’S “ C o m éd ie h u m a in e .” Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1982. Pp. 142. In this study focusing on 16 novels in the Comédie humaine—representing all five sub­ sections of the Etudes de mœurs and all chronological phases of Balzac’s novelistic produc­ tion—James W. Mileham closely examines a simple, recurrent narrative structure constitut­ ing the kernel of what he considers to be a properly Balzacian subgenre, the “conspiracy novel.” By stressing the structure of the conspiracy plot, Professor Mileham aims both to complement other scholars’ more phenomenologically, metaphysically, or mythically oriented considerations of the conspiracy theme in Balzac (he cites the work of Bardèche, Poulet, and Richard, among others) and to demonstrate the power of a minimal narrative program to generate relatively complex textual elaborations. The Conspiracy Novel is thus addressed both to students of Balzac and to those interested in applied narratology; ultimately, it may prove more useful to the former than to the latter. In novels as diverse as Les Chouans, Illusions perdues, Honorine, and Le Cousin Pons, Mileham discerns a simple, three-part, conspiracy structure whereby, in its most elemental manifestation: “One character influences a second character to act upon a third” (p. 16). This configuration, which by virtue of its very simplicity could apply to plots and subplots of eminently non-Balzacian texts ranging from Les Liaisons dangereuses to 108 Su m m e r 1986 Book R eviews Hérodias, is further schematized in a modified version of the actantial taxonomy of A. J. Greimas’ structural semantics: “Subject —Adjuvant —Object” (p. 17). This structure can be expanded: a) horizontally (with the first Adjuvant recruiting a second, and on on); and b) vertically (with the Subject designating multiple Adjuvants to...