Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (review)

L'Esprit Créateur more justly treated must be made, the injunction to unconditional hospitality prevents us from ever being complacent about them. In the course of these reflections on hospitality, Derrida opens up our thought once again to new and unexpected ideas and relations—that is, to genuine quests for thought. Of Hospitality should find a welcome audience not only among faithful readers of Derrida but among all those who are open enough to hear the knock at their borders or their doors. Pascale-Anne Brault DePaul University Janell Watson. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Pp. χ + 227. $64.95. Janell Watson's essay, centered around the notion of the bibelot, weaves a complex and fascinating story about certain dimensions of the rise of bourgeois consumer culture during the nineteenth century. She begins with a brief historical overview of the bibelot, the decorative object that increasingly came to characterize the bourgeois interior as the century progressed. The bibelot is ambiguous from the start. It is tied to the act of collecting and is thus linked to erudition , to a fascination with the past, to the exclusiveness of a small group of experts, who could authenticate objects dredged up from bygone eras. On the other hand, however, it quickly became the representative object of the cluttered interior of the nineteenth-century bourgeois home, an industrialized copy of a past or exotic object, whose value was predicated on the dictates of fashion . These two tendencies correspond to the two spaces of the bibelot: the collection (eventually the museum) and the domestic interior. It rums out that tracing the trajectory of the bibelot during the nineteenth century allows one to construct an interesting perspective on the logics of material culture, certain aspects of which Watson analyzes in a key chapter of her argument. Using Pierre Bourdieu and Fredric Jameson as theoretical touchstones, she explores the notions of imitation (the motor of the development of fashion), accumulation (borrowed from the Marxian vocabulary , this concept allows an approach to what we now perceive as the "cluttered" aspect of Victorian decoration), and mobility (both of people and objects). The nearness of Watson's theoretical approach is that it allows some very perspicacious readings of certain key novelistic texts. Works by Balzac, Flaubert, Huysmans, the Goncourts, and Proust punctuate her analysis, not simply illustrating it, but directing it in fundamental ways. Perhaps the key moment in the series of readings she proposes is the encounter with Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (the fact that it falls precisely at the halfway point of her book is not without symbolic importance): "Whereas post-structuralist readings situated the text in the dehistoricized context of the production of language and discourse, a post-historical reading would situate the text in the radically historicized context of the production of culture" (89). Decrying the ahistorical bent of arguments that follow in the post-structuralist wake of Eugenio Donato's famous "The Museum's Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard et Pécuchet" (in Josué Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, 213-38. Cornell UP, 1979), Watson seeks to reinterpret Flaubert's presentation of the museum. If Bouvard et Pécuchet has been viewed as the quintessentially modem novel in its staging of a chaotic and fragmentary epistemology in which language is detached from its "realist" and positivist functions, Watson wants to demonstrate that there is a cultural logic in Flaubert's presentation of Bouvard and Pécuchet's museum, one that follows directly from the development of collecting within the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century. She seeks not simply to reject the Donato argument (for which she retains a certain nostalgia), but rather to rehistoricize Flaubert's text in a different way by inserting it into the series she constructs to illustrate how the museum might be conceived in the context of a rising consumer culture. Rich and suggestive readings are proposed by Janell Watson throughout her essay. Inspired by and building on the domain of museum studies that has developed within the past two decades. 140 Spring 2002 Book Reviews but colored...