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8. Rhetoric and Realism; or, Marxism, Deconstruction, and Madame Bovary I The terms of my title suggest certain kinds of questions that are asked nowadays by serious critics of novels. These questions were not asked, or considered serious, in America when the premises of New Criticism still dominated the agenda, not even by critics like Harry Levin or Lionel Trilling , who resisted the most extreme claims of literary autonomy.1 For these questions detract from the formal integrity of individual works. They threaten both to disarticulate works internally and to open works to external relations, and they thus participate in that active unbounding to which this volume is devoted through its concern with impure worlds. Such questions might ask about instances, single or recurrent, of language that is not clearly under aesthetic control, that does not conduce to greater beauty or intelligibility when it is focused upon. Such inquiry, indissociable from the work of Paul de Man, may be related to further interrogations of the ways in which a work may be seen not to fit together, such as the ‘‘generic discontinuity’’ that Fredric Jameson has made a special focus for his thinking about the novel. Whether for Jameson or de Man, such unsettling of formal integrity will then be related to comparable cases in the worlds of thought or action; they turn from literature in itself to its relation with philosophy and history.2 For my present purposes, I am taking ‘‘deconstruction,’’ for which de Man is exemplary, in relation to questions of ‘‘rhetoric.’’ By ‘‘rhetoric’’ I mean here a system of relations within language that tampers with meaning in ways that have at least since Plato been considered antagonistic to the goals and procedures of philosophy. At the same time that it is deviant, however , rhetoric is not idiosyncratic, for as a systematic repertory it preexists the individual shaping of a single writer or work. That is to say, rhetoric appears literary compared to philosophy but mechanical compared to literature . For my second set of terms, I am relating ‘‘Marxism’’ to questions of 111 112 Language and Reality in the Age of the Novel ‘‘realism,’’ by which I mean, broadly, inquiries that relate literary works to history, society, politics, the economy. One advantage I find in the terms of ‘‘rhetoric’’ and ‘‘realism’’ is that in ordinary usage they form a pair whose relative evaluation is unstable. Realism is the stuff of life that saves literature from the mere artifice of rhetoric; rhetoric is the fictionality that saves literature from the quotidian banality of realism. Under the sway of New Criticism, following a process that had run through the whole nineteenth century, rhetoric was reduced to the vagueness of ‘‘paradox’’ and the catchall of ‘‘metaphor.’’ Such elements were understood as necessarily present in any successful work and thus became merely defining features of the literary, rather than allowing for the differentiation of one work or corpus or genre or period from another. For New Criticism, realism was simply banished in favor of autonomy. However disingenuously , the themes and imagery of literary works were understood to inhere uniquely within them, unrelated to other forms of knowledge or action. The realism that by the 1960s was less opposed than considered beyond the pale of discussion was taken as a servile, transparent copying of the world. The fate of the notion of representation in European theoretical debates of the twentieth century is too complex to address here, but it is worth noting that in the United States, too, a complex genealogy overdetermines the New Critical dismissal of realism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the question of realism arose polemically as part of a generational conflict within bourgeois high culture, with those we now call modernists opposing realism as part of a rejected ‘‘Victorianism.’’ Beginning at about the same time but coming to a head somewhat later, in the twenties and thirties, the question of realism functioned in a larger class conflict within American society: The agrarian conservatism of the New Critics stood against the populist democracy that V. L. Parrington’s work served intellectually to legitimize. In the thirties and forties, the question of realism was contested within the American left: The so-called Trotskyites of Partisan Review furthered modernism against the so-called Stalinist culture of socialist realism and the Popular Front.3 Thus the ‘‘Truants,’’ as William Barrett named the group around Partisan Review, joined the ‘‘Fugitives’’ along with the British ‘‘Bloomsbury’’ in...

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