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Book Reviews the hypocrisy of all society. Again, Baron underlines the positive value lies can have, and shows that they form part of the novelist's own bag of tricks. Having shown how the world of the Comédie is peopled by characters displaying these four characteristics, Baron moves to psychocriticism, unveiling hidden patterns in the structure of the novels that point to Balzac's unconscious fantasies. Baron identifies as the fundamental myth that of the Minotaur, fruit of adultery, fathered by a bull. The chapters in which she traces the echoes of this scenario, and even of the name Minotaur, are the most compelling of the book. This penetrating study leads naturally to reflections on Balzac's "realism," a way not only of disguising the original impulse, but of producing a credible substitute for the reality that has betrayed him. Master of his craft, Balzac is able to create a world whose vastness and power is a function of the depth of the psychic wound. Anthony R. Pugh University of New Brunswick Lawrence R. Schehr. Rendering French Realism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997. Pp. viii + 268. Reading Lawrence Schehr's Rendering French Realism, one might well assume that nineteenth -century French fiction was nothing less than a disaster zone. What interests Schehr about literature are its gaps, holes, ruptures and places of slippage; its misreadings, misappropriations, interruptions and improprieties; its dyslexia, discomforts and failures; its deformations, instabilities , contradictions, crises. Through his close readings of novels by Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval, Dumas fils, and Flaubert, Schehr aims to investigate "the point that defines realism ... the point at which the processes of representation break down ... the black hole of textuality" (17). His analyses add to the literature of traditionally deconstructive readings which seek to downplay the importance of the "book" in favor of an ideally liberating sense of "textuality." Thus, Stendhal's De l'amour (which Schehr calls Stendhal's first novel) offers the reader "a radical critique of novelicity " (27), while what is interesting in Balzac are "the glossed-over holes and gaps in the writing " (90), and, in Flaubert, "the locus of discomfort [and] the site of textual rupture" (210). Rendering French Realism is a compilation of previously published articles, but its connecting thread is a sustained critique of the idea of wholeness, of the novel as an authorial commentary on the search for and the representation of truth, and of "old-fashioned (critical) strategies of recuperation " (216). Schehr writes, for instance, that "one might posit that the art of Flaubert consists less in the revealing of the truth than in the multiplication of surfaces: after all, Salammbô's veil reveals nothing less, or nothing more, than absence. Flaubert's writing resembles, avant la lettre, the Cubist idea of juxtaposed surfaces; his work announces the fractal surface as Mandelbrot will describe it" (202). Here Schehr opposes "truth" and "absence," as if a revealed absence could not constitute a deeper reflection of truth, while the passage's loose comparison—between the tension of concealing surfaces and empty depths, a Cubistic vision of brokenness and bricolage, and the endlessly patterning repetitions of fractals—does not stand up to close analysis. Schehr is at his best when digging into the details of the texts. The section on a little-read book by Dumas fils, Diane de Lys (1855), for example, is excellent. While Schehr may be making his point hyperbolically —Diane de Lys constitutes "a sketching out of realist writing's space of production," "quite astonishingly several years before Madame Bovary" (148)—his close reading of the novel's uses of space is convincing and clear. Unfortunately, for this reader Schehr's writing style typifies a kind of academic language that obscures more than it enlightens. I did not mind the numerous multiplicities and semioticities, but iconicity, scientificity, triplicity and novelicity stretched my patience. And while I understand that the almost obsessive repetition of the word "radical" in the introduction (31 times in 21 pages) relates to the subtext of Schehr's work— Vol. XXXIX, No. 2 87 L'Esprit Créateur namely, that deconstructionist criticism represents a form of cultural rebellion, against, presumably , literature itself and its apparently conservative positions—a more...

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