Realist Vision (review)

A new book by Peter Brooks can expect to find a wide audience. Over the course of his career as Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale, and now as Professor and Director of the Program in Law and Humanities at the University of Virginia, Brooks has written books that typically explore a broad range of works from the French, English, and American traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a trajectory that runs from early classics like The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984) to more recent works like Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Brooks has continually extended his range, incorporating consideration of ancillary fields, such as visual art, psychoanalysis, and law, into his arguments. His work is perhaps better described as comparative than as interdisciplinary, however, in that he explores these disparate materials through a sensibility that remains primarily, and elegantly, literary. This is certainly true of his most recent book, Realist Vision.

Realist Vision examines selected English and French novels from the nineteenth-century realist tradition, as well as the works of several realist painters, including a few contemporary artists. This coupling of the two art forms illustrates Brooks’s opening assertion that realist literature “makes sight paramount—makes it the dominant sense in our understanding of and relation to the world” (3). Brooks argues throughout that realism is an inherently visual genre, and his comparison of nineteenth-century novelists to artists like Courbet, Manet, and Caillebotte suggests an affinity in their shared emphasis on “the observation and representation of persons and things” (71). Brooks describes the realist project as that of “modeling for play purposes,” creating a “parallel reality” (2) that, he suggests, “uses carefully wrought and detailed toys” (3) to create hypothetical worlds and see how they work.

This sense of play is examined in a chapter, “Balzac Invents the Nineteenth Century,” which credits Balzac with giving a tangible form to the spirit of the period through his depiction of Paris and its people. Brooks focuses on Illusions Perdue (Lost Illusions) as a central text for understanding the emergent capitalist economy of the period and its effect on representation, self-representation, and human character. In that novel, he argues, money becomes a linguistic sign without referent that creates illusions and obscures reality.

Dickens is seen as employing a kind of “nonrepresentation” (40) in Hard Times that plays with the novel’s most serious issues by “turning all issues, facts, conditions, into questions of style” (44). Whether it is a contrast between the eloquence of Stephen Blackpool and the bluster of Bounderby or between the world of the circus performers and the world of Gradgrind, contrasts are turned into metaphors and emblems that allow Dickens to stage conflicts without resolving them. In that sense, the novel’s “incoherences and failures of representation” make it stand apart in Dickens’s work as “a project not wholly mastered” (53). On the other hand, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is seen as a quintessentially realist narrative in its emphasis on tangible details, its “foregrounding of the thinginess of the world” (58). Brooks describes Flaubert’s novel as being like a Breughel painting in that “nothing is missing,” everything is complete within the world of the novel itself (70).

The sort of close reading that Brooks applies to these novels is exercised just as convincingly on several of Courbet’s paintings, specifically Burial at Ornans (1849), The Stonebreakers (1849), The Bathers (1853), and The Trout (1872). Brooks compares Burial to Madame Bovary in its “realist vision,” suggesting that Courbet’s “challenging and somewhat indecipherable composition and painterly style” are similar to Flaubert’s use of style indirect libre in their capacity to “make us pay attention without providing a firm orientation to our attitudes and evaluations” (77). He ends his chapter on Courbet with a brief discussion of photography and the way in which its unique ability to create a record created a sense of competition with realist painting.

Brooks’s discussion...