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  • The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature by Ilya Kliger
  • Emma Lieber (bio)
The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature. By Ilya Kliger. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. x + 246 pp. Cloth $78.95, paper $32.95.

This work takes three notoriously labile concepts—truth, time, and the novel—and asks what they have to do with one another. Given the difficulty of defining even the most indisputably solid of these categories (whatever our ideological positioning, we all at least agree that novels exist, if only as prose works of a certain length that sit in bookstores, though this latter truth may be time-limited), one wonders whether Kliger ever considered making it easier on himself by eliminating at least one of these cans of worms. He could not have, certainly, since his thesis rests precisely on their inextricability. In the nineteenth century, he claims, after Kant’s quintessentially “modern breakthrough in the relation between truth and time,” the novel [End Page e-3] form underwent a “veridictory mutation,” transforming itself from a genre in which truth is independent of time and its vicissitudes to one in which truth is thought of as “immanent in a temporal shape” (14). The modern European novel, in other words, is both a product and a marker of a new understanding of the relationship between truth and time—a sea change also documented by developments in the history of philosophy (primarily in the thinking of Kant and Hegel) and one launched by the French Revolution as the progenitor of modernity. The novel form itself is then examined in the context of four authors—Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—from two countries whose cultural environments—the Bourbon Restoration in France and the era of the Great Reforms in Russia—saw “veritable explosions in ideologically charged temporal multiplicity” (36) and thus were especially fertile ground for narrative confrontations with time: its shapes, its capacities, and its limits as a host of truth.

These pluralities are key to Kliger’s work. At no moment does he purport to characterize, in any reductive way, the confraternity between truth and time in the modern novel; rather, he claims only that there is one, and that each work to which he turns his attention both poses and answers common questions—“How is truth to be told in time? What is the truthful arrangement of events in time?” (33)—in its own way. The authors do have proclivities by which they can be aligned and contrasted, though somewhat perversely given their more obvious national allegiances: Balzac and Dostoevsky share a heritage as authors who see “a fundamental affinity between truth and narrative emplotment,” while Stendhal and Tolstoy both “cast … truth as the enemy of plot” (41). If the latter two thus seem to resist the very veridictory mutation that Kliger makes a case for, they do so “no longer innocently” (150), resurrecting the eighteenth-century disjunction between truth and time with the knowingness produced by mounted revolt. But the privileged truth-in-time configuration—the behavior or event or image or experience by which truth and time are conjoined in a narrative universe, and the site at which truth emerges into the temporal flow of the text—is particular to each author, deeply entwined with his individual aesthetics and metaphysics. For Balzac, “magic time” is the locus of truth, while for Stendhal it is “the time of dutiful action” and for Dostoevsky “the time of accident”; in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina two veridictory principles are at work, with Anna’s truth consisting in the “unfolding of a foretold fate” (40) (as represented by the image of the railroad) and Levin’s consisting in a meandering temporal framework embodied by the picaresque country road (in this chapter Kliger frequently invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope). But whatever their privileged constellations, all of these works [End Page e-4] similarly stage a confrontation between competing temporal principles as embodied by different characters, plotlines, behaviors, ideologies, and the like: “The serial, mechanical temporality of industrialization, the cyclical premodern time of the land, the step-by-step time of career, the leap of...

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