Writing in Pain: Literature, History and the Culture of Denial (review)

Offering a sophisticated interdisciplinary critique of the relationship between language, history, violence and trauma, Vaheed Ramazani's study of three major texts – Au Bonheur des Dames, L'Éducation sentimentale and Le Spleen de Paris – shows how rhetorical structures such as irony, allegory, and the sublime articulate the experience of individual and collective pain. Taking Second Empire France as his case study, Ramazani explores the ways in which the dramatic and periodic violence of major historical traumas structures the discourses of jingoism, colonialism, warfare, and political or economic revolution. Moreover, Ramazani chooses texts in which these historical upheavals affect the individual on an everyday, structural level; it is, for example, on Zola's exploration of the triumph of Darwinist consumerism rather than, say, La Débâcle, that the analysis focuses. Chapter one draws convincing parallels between the discourses of national identity, war and consumer consciousness, analysing the importance placed on commercially useful shock tactics in twentieth-century sales manuals such as The Mind of the Buyer. Using theories of neuroanatomy and psychoanalysis to show how the nation-state is imagined anthropomorphically by writers such as Renan, Ramazani argues that this national body image is always ambiguous, plural, incomplete; indeed, the practice of war emerges as a core feature of state fetishism, as the patriarchal appropriation of birth metaphors to express military conflict helps to naturalize belligerent national ideologies. In opposition to this naturalizing discourse, Ramazani draws from his literary texts not a counterfetishistic irony, stable in its sense of counterhegemonic purpose, but rather an unstable irony, constantly oscillating between incompatible perceptions, unsettling and destabilizing the fetishism which the nation-state takes for granted. The analysis of Au Bonheur des Dames as national allegory focuses on the contrast between "feminine" tropes, such as consumption and biological reproduction, and the "virile" vocabulary of production and war, eroticized in Zola as the pleasure of power. By figuring the crowd as female, Ramazani suggests, masculinist discourses of competition and conquest succeed in marginalizing the feminine, dismissed by late-nineteenth-century neuropsychology as socially and evolutionarily low, despite Marianne's privileged position as symbol of the Republic. Chapter three focuses on the structural and modal affinities which irony and the sublime share with historical violence in L'Éducation sentimentale, arguing that Flaubert's novel may be read, in an intertextual dialogue with Michelet, as an allegory for the very possibility of writing history. A convincing parallel is drawn between Flaubert's psycholinguistic crisis over the inadequacy of clichéd language and the political crisis of 1848, which is presented as nothing more than a pale, toothless imitation of 1789. Finally, chapter four suggests that the iconic image of the Hausmannian boulevard may be read, in a detailed exegesis of Baudelaire's "Les Yeux des Pauvres," as the exemplary signifier of a new economic law. Hausmann's painful operation on the city's topography announces the death of the private interior and the shift towards a life lived in a public space where the economically disenfranchised, purged like a disease from the urban body, have no place. In this public space, the experience of shock and the parrying of violence appear as the coming-into-being of modern subjectivity. As a study of nineteenth-century French literature, this is a complex, and broad-ranging monograph, although the absence of a conclusion means that the central thread binding these different discourses together does not emerge as clearly as it could. In his introduction, though, the author draws comparisons between Louis-Napoleon's authoritarian politics and the American imperial project of the early twenty-first century, situating his analyses explicitly within the context of September 11 and the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans. Thus Ramazani provides compelling evidence for his thesis that modern consciousness repeats, but never exhausts, the experience of shock, a timeless trauma for which literary language, self-questioning and resistant to closure, is the natural mode of expression.