Realism and the Drama of Reference: Strategies of Reference in Balzac, Flaubert, and James (review)

Book Reviews 87 is necessarily to do her an injustice. As literary criticism, Advertising Fictions is a remarkable essay, in the etymological sense of the word: a trying out of new interpretive strategies. Very much like its subject the book stimulates but does not satisfy one's craving to know more. Because of it we shall know more—eventually—when other readers start to ask the kinds of questions that Wicke urges us to consider. Michael Anesko Harvard University H. Meili Steele. Realism and the Drama of Reference: Strategies of Reference in Balzac, Flaubert, and James. University Park: Pennsylvania State U P, 1988. 133 pp. $18.75. This ambitious study sets itself four imposing tasks: it proposes to examine the fate of representation and referentiality in the context of post-modernist and deconstructionist theories of language and knowledge, to develop a new theory of literary realism, to outline the development of realism from Balzac to Flaubert to James, and to perform a "close analysis" of three "individual texts," Balzac's Illusions perdues, Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, and James's The Golden Bowl. No work as brief as this one could do equal justice to all of these projects, but Steele provides at the very least a stimulating introduction to the subjects he raises. In a brief introduction, Steele sets his work in the context of Barthes, Culler, Rowe, de Man, and Derrida, and declares (a little late, in 1988?) that "it is time to engage in a new kind of dialogue with the referential strategies of texts" (2). His intention to "define realism in terms of linguistic strategies" sets his thinking in a direct line of descent from Barthes' influential "L'Effet de réel" (1968), Genette's "Vraisemblance et motivation" (1969), and Stephen Heath's The Nouveau Roman (1972). The first part of Steele's book is devoted to parallel discussions of Illusions perdues and L'Education sentimentale. A chapter on setting moves effectively beyond "the modernist reading, in which Flaubert violates the generic patterns of the classic realist text" (19), towards a post-modem reading in which the use of real names and places serves not to validate the text by reference to the unassailable reality of history, but rather to undermine the truth-claims of history by inscribing it in the fictive text. A chapter on "Speech and Knowledge" looks rather hastily at the complex interrelations of language, representation, and reference in the two novels, and concludes quite properly that Flaubert's purpose was not merely to expose the "stupidity" of society, but rather to "resituate the subject's relationship to language and the world" (34). A chapter on the narrator in the two texts makes fine use of the techniques of close reading to show how Flaubert's narrator uses clichés, enumerations, summaries, and references as means of refusing the role of authoritative center in the discourse of the novel. Finally, a chapter on Frédéric Moreau and the Bildungsroman draws original lines between Flaubert and Samuel Beckett while developing a convincing theory of Frederic's "consciousness" as a site for linguistic and rhetorical events rather than a representation of an integral, centered human subject. The chapters on Balzac and Flaubert skillfully reformulate the familiar oppositions between those two writers for the purpose of elaborating a post-modern theory of "realism " that would account for UInnommable and Happy Days as well as for L'Education sentimentale. The chapters on James use this theory to "free the text [The Golden Bowl] from . . . psychologism and empiricism and bring it into a dialogue with contemporary criticism" (72). The individual readings of James that this project entails are often brilliant. Steele makes excellent comments on the conspicuous absence of topical reference in The Golden 88 The Henry James Review Bowl and the consequent sense of temporal and spatial disconnectedness (ch. 5). He provides incisive readings of the discussions and the deployment of referentiality in the text (ch. 6). The chapter on narration uses the techniques and the vocabulary of structuralist narratology to support the "argument that the text challenges a realistic ontology, an ontology that valorizes a perceptual denominative vocabulary for regulating the interaction of subject and...