The Writing or Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism by Ross Chambers (review)

L ’E s p r it C réa te u r Ross Chambers. T h e W r i t i n g o f M e l a n c h o l y : M o d e s o f O p p o s itio n in E a r l y F r e n c h M o d e rn is m . Trans. Mary Seidman Trouille. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993. Pp. 239. With The Writing o f Melancholy Ross Chambers continues the important new work he began in Story and Situation (1984) and continued in Room fo r Maneuver (1991) of devel­ oping a theory for reading modern fiction which recuperates the “ oppositional” or changeproducing force of these texts from the forms of indeterminacy that constitute their being. Modernist texts, he argues, are not purely self-reflexive, nor are they primarily determined by their socio-historical context. Rather, through complex transformative figurai opera­ tions they invest that context with meaning that appeals to an implied, future reader whose animating, interpretive act carries them beyond their contemporary moment. Chambers, who is just such a reader, grounds his theory of the “ self-situating” nature of literary texts in a rich group of profoundly conceived, finely tuned readings of post-1848 texts by Nerval, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. He believes that it is in the “ gap” of indeterminacy opened up between the “ narrative function,” which depends upon immediately available social codes, and the “ textual function,” with its more disguised figures of ironical self-knowledge, that a properly interpretive reading must take place. He analyzes the opening scene of Madame Bovary to demonstrate his point about reading between narrative and textual functions to discover the “ novelty” of these texts and their methods for outmaneuvering the official and unofficial censorship of Second Empire France. Contemporary social codes allow us to identify Charles, a nouveau, as a bumpkin and a misfit when he enters the classroom dressed in his ill-fitting bourgeois clothes. But the very idiocy that soon makes him indis­ tinguishable from the others, his sponge-like emptiness and adaptability also take on the unsettling characteristics of Flaubert’s own book, his “ livre sur rien,” which “perturbs a narrative reading” (20) as the narrator insidiously removes himself from the agreed upon “ nous” of the bourgeois order. Chambers sees Flaubert’s complex use of irony in the treat­ ment of Charles’ dog-like loyalty or Emma’s desire for love as a demand for the kind of interpretive reading that both distances the reader from the bêtise of the characters by its lucidity, and reminds one of the kinds of emotion that one must never become too cynical to reject. Reading in the gap that irony opens up between mimetic and self-reflexive levels of the text creates a fruitful “ communicational uncertainty . . . that brings together the character, the text, and the reader in the same possibility of error” (204). Chambers calls these early modernist texts “ melancholic,” not because they describe their characters’ alienation from a social reality, but because they take on, in their own selfcensoring discursive practices, the loss of identity, the crisis of differentiation, that this mind-numbing reality has produced. By devoting two chapters to Nerval and Baudelaire (the beautifully wrought chapter on “ Sylvie” is new, replacing the one on “ Angélique” and “ Aurélia” in the French version), he points to important differences in oppositional practices within these individual writers’ works as well as differences amongst the three writers chosen for his study. All three o f these early modernist writers, whom Ross Chambers calls his “ heroes,” denounce indifference. All three show the modern subject to be implicated in the society they oppose, experiencing truth through their own alienated condition. Chambers’ demon­ stration of the theory of “ oppositional” practice, the concept for which he credits Michel de Certeau, in this valuable collection of inspired close textual readings is compelling testi­ mony to the ongoing, perception-altering force that distinguishes aesthetic signification from all other forms of social discourse. S u z a n n e N a s h Princeton University 126 Su m m er 1994 ...