Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History by Sandy Petrey (review)

Book Reviews Sandy Petrey. R e a l is m a n d R e v o l u t io n : B a l z a c , S t e n d h a l , Z o l a , a n d t h e P e r f o r m ­ a n c e s o f H is t o r y . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp. 211. In this reconsideration of nineteenth-century realism, Sandy Petrey succeeds in recon­ ciling continental linguistic theory, with its insistence on textual closure, and the emphasis traditional socio-historical criticism places on the literary work as a reflection of extratextual reality. He does this through selective use of J. L. Austin’s theory of the performa­ tive, stressing language’s ability to reinforce accepted social conventions or to create new ones. In his introductory chapter, the author situates Austin in relation to a philosophic tradi­ tion that includes Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and distinguishes his own approach to Austin from those of Derrida, Felman, and Searle. Petrey’s primary focus is on the per­ formative as a social phenomenon whose effect is determined by the consensus of a given community functioning according to its particular dynamic. Petrey argues in the following chapter that the French Revolution of 1789 effected a radical revision of the Ancien Régime’s system of reference by refusing the meaning of old signs and replacing them with new ones, thus foregrounding the ideological basis of all representation. The rest of this study is devoted to close textual analyses of four masterworks of nine­ teenth-century French realism, their realism redefined in terms of reactionary and revolu­ tionary verbal performance. In a persuasive response to Barthes’ S /Z , Petrey differentiates constative reality from any objective, immutable extratextual referent, noting that the constative is according to Austin a subset of the performative; it is therefore produced through the process of signification and does not precede it. The castrato in Sarrasine can “ in fact” be a woman at one moment and later a man because truth depends, in Austin’s terms, on the “ felicity” of verbal performance, that is, on the community’s consensus that a given signifier represents a particular referent. Petrey’s reading of Le Père Goriot demonstrates that identity itself, like the distinction between fact and fiction, depends on social conven­ tion. Petrey’s argument is subtle and insightful; he effectively engages Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson and Stanley Fish as he shows, without ever denying the free play of the signifier or the importance of interpretive practice, how concrete referents are produced from arbitrary signs. Through Balzac’s texts he underscores how constative language was used under the Restoration to create the illusion of a complete referential stability that had been destroyed during the Revolution. Petrey points out “ the inverse correlation between language’s referential ability and performative force in Restoration society” (145) in his discussion of Le Rouge et le noir. The novel presents a mise en abîme, for it problematizes social representations that mirror its own textual strategies in a construction of reality founded on linguistic repetition. Speech act theory enables Petrey to work a convincing rapprochement between Jakobson’s “ Realism in A rt” and Auerbach’s Mimesis, two works on realism that at first appear diametrically opposed. Auerbach’s interpretive practice reveals that historical reality in Stendhal’s text is a social construct which, as in Jakobson, is produced by an arrangement of semiotic material whose conventions make it appear referential; social reality is seen to be a verbal performance, always already represented, but no less substantial for it. Petrey’s study moves smoothly through realism’s development from Balzac and Sten­ dhal to Zola’s naturalism, where, once again, the author contests canonical readings of Zola (Lanson, Lukács) which focus on the excessive material detail in his descriptions. VOL. XXX, NO. 3 81 L ’E sprit C réateur Rather than emphasize referentiality alone, Petrey turns to the social function of reified ob­ jects which act as signs of the dominant bourgeois ideology, an ideology in which things signify more meaningfully than people. He...