Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (review)

Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot, by Harry E. Shaw; pp. xiv + 280. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, $35.00.

This is a powerfully integrative book--by which I mean not only that in it Harry Shaw has generously incorporated a wide range of work in philosophy, narrative theory, and practical criticism of the novel, but that his methods as a critic are responsive to those he finds at work in the historical realism he studies. Narrating Reality is in this way as much a dramatic exercise in critical self-scrutiny as it is an analysis of a literary tradition. These two lines of interest, in critical and fictional practices, converge when Shaw positions Eric Auerbach as at once a model precursor for Shaw's own writing--developing from Mimesis (1946) "implications and conclusions to answer concerns and questions that were not altogether his" (263)--and the inheritor from the historical realism of the nineteenth century of the "supple hermeneutic practice" (123) that Auerbach then made his own.

This integrative critical method places unusual demands upon the author. These demands are in part conceptual: Shaw takes it as a point of principle to make evident for his readers the historical situation of his own argument, the workings of various traditions of literary criticism within and against his own critical address. Much of Shaw's argument about realist representation is thus backward-looking, assuredly surveying decades of criticism. Narrating Reality understands itself to emerge at the end of a period of relative critical coherence, within which the standard case against realism has been consolidated in two related claims: that realistic prose is callow in its belief in transparent representation; and that it is totalistic. Shaw develops the best case to be made for these claims, extracting what is most enduring and instructive in them, before arguing that even in their best forms they are misguided, directed against a slack conception of realism. The effect of this way of arguing is remarkably astringent, and it powerfully supports the book's concluding claims that the critical rewards of a thoroughgoing hermeneutics of suspicion are declining: "This book," by contrast, "is largely concerned with imaging what it would be like to encounter realist fiction in an atmosphere of uncoerced speech" (266). Shaw is thus committed to thinking with (and beyond) rather than against the novels he studies.

Although his revisionist review of novel criticism is masterfully assured and convincing--I'll recommend it to my graduate students as a place to begin their survey of such criticism--the greatest strength of Shaw's commitment to novels comes after the theoretical underbrush has been cleared away and he turns to his more positive characterization of realism. "Attempts to theorize different kinds of realism," Shaw argues, "must specify the field of mundane phenomena that have the potentiality to be revealed as participating in or constituting 'the real.' They must also specify a larger structure that has the potentiality to confer reality on those phenomena. Finally, they must specify the nature of the link between the larger structure and the mundane phenomena" (93). Such a picture of realism's general form makes incoherent the concern that realism is naively transparent; it grants consequence to the mundane and concrete matter represented (not just any phenomena will serve); and it also, perhaps unsettlingly, makes an ontological claim (these things are real). What then further distinguishes realism in the nineteenth century, Shaw claims, is that both the phenomena and the structure that confers reality on them are resolutely historical and social (rather than transcendent), linked by what he calls a "historicist metonymy" (104). In historical realism from the period--and in criticism which shares the method of such realism--the course of our reading moves associatively through "a web of causality informing our situations in history, [insisting] that we are a part of our time in a sense that is concrete, specifiable, and representable," giving to such texts "whatever vitality and interest they possess. [. . .] At its most...