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266Rocky Mountain Review Lorrain involves a study of the repetition and the return of the repressed (75). The repressed (unpleasant) is conjured up in order to master or control it. In Lorrain, the repetition is "riotous" (80); he has a compulsion to hide, repress, mask ugly things about characters and then repeat the ugliness (85-86). Rachilde's reaction to her own (hysterical?) writer's body is the focus of the chapter entitled "The Epithalamic Horror," suggesting woman's desire/non-desire for sex. Kingcaid also takes on Simone de Beauvoir's assumptions about the female as being "by nature a hysterical body" (116). The difference between Rachilde and de Beauvoir is that de Beauvoir, like Freud, sought to repress hysteria by describing it; Rachilde, like Dora, knew that "hysteria is a discourse that must be allowed its say" (121). Kingcaid concludes with the statement that "Decadence is child's play . . . of the highest and most serious order" and that she firmly and carefully tucks her own child's feet in at night just in case the "monsters get out" (152). Her confession that she also "tucks [her] own in later, just in case" (152), demonstrates that she has read the texts she analyzes both for a pleasurable frisson and for insights into the human psyche. Neurosis and Narrative enticingly invites the reader to approach the fiction of Proust, Lorrain and Rachilde in the same way,just in case. KATHRYN E. WILDGEN University ofNew Orleans J. HILLIS MILLER. Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. 280 p. JVLiller belongs to the grand tradition of narrative theory in the United States, with a series of important contributions that antedate even the invention of the category of narrative theory. It is a tradition that has prized the centrality our culture assigns to narrative, and it has tended to see in narratives complex representations of the major designs of our society. Necessarily this tradition has tended to focus on a traditional canon, to the point that certain works have been overwhelmed by the mass of critical attention they have attracted in the last fifty years. Finally, the tradition sustains something like the institutionality of Literature: at least the works it examines and the criticism it generates always contain a subtext centered on the privileged place of art. Ariadne's Thread, which is based on the very literary metaphor of the instrument one carries into the labyrinth in order to find the way out, focuses on the notion of the narrative text as a labyrinthine construct, something that is an imposing presence, forbidding in the challenge of access to it, bewildering and even terrifying in the complexity of its internal design, and resistant as regards a suitable exit from its snares. Often the reader is unnerved by the challenge of getting into a text and often completes the reading only to wonder ifit has made any sense at all. The sensation of hav- Book Reviews267 ing missed something is, in this conceit, a reflex of not having successfully found the way out of the labyrinth of the narrative text—and it should be immediately apparent that the metaphor of the thread is inextricably intertwined with the underlying etymon of text itself. Miller's monograph is a demonstration of the proposition that narrative texts be viewed as dense weavings, in that the elements of fiction (to evoke one of the paradigmatic subsets of the grand tradition) are nothing more than collaborative strategies for carrying out the action of narrative construction . Certainly, the grand tradition has always seen narrative events and characters as somehow "real," submitting them to assessment on the basis of the texture of their reality. Yet the metaphor involved in this instance cannot help but allow one to hear resonances of the counter-tradition of narrative semiotics, with its emphasis on the elements of fiction as signs that produce a "reality effect" but have no reality in themselves. Needless to say, Miller has no time for Barthes, Greimas, Jameson, or Todorov, but anyone with a global familiarity of narrative theory will often think of them. Borges, however, is never far away: he has some of the most extensive references...

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