Figures of Alterity: French Realism and Its Others

Abstract

Reviewed by: Figures of Alterity: French Realism and Its Others Denis M. Provencher Schehr, Lawrence R. Figures of Alterity: French Realism and Its Others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 251. In his latest book, Lawrence Schehr returns to the canon of French realism to examine discourses of alterity—what he defines as "the other" or "the previously unrepresented"—in the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Mirbeau, Proust and Gide (13). Following Lyotard, Schehr defines the "figure" as "the mark of the other that has not settled into a fixed textual structure," and examines various figures of alterity (women, Jews, homosexuals, among others) in selected works by these nineteenth- and twentieth-century French writers (30). In this study, Schehr illustrates how the realist project aims to incorporate figures of alterity into the dominant narrative fold, thereby normalizing them through a pre-existing representational system and literary convention. However, he [End Page 183] convincingly demonstrates throughout the book how these figures enter into the narrative space in ways that constantly destabilize the "male-centered...white, Christian, Western and straight" world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (ix-x). In his introductory chapter, Schehr establishes a formal definition of realism, by offering a sound review of various critical perspectives on the subject, including those of Marx, Freud, Jakobson, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Derrida, Baktin, and Foucault, among others. As Schehr considers language to be at the heart of realist praxis, he calls upon such scholars to establish a notion of realist narrative that emerges largely due to the creation of verisimilitude through mimetic language (7). He also considers the role of such literary techniques as ekphrasis, discours indirect libre, and the reemergence of the first-person narrator in the early twentieth century (largely in Proust and Gide), all of which bring some order to the realist narrative. In his first chapter, Schehr examines several novels and short stories in La Comédie humaine to illustrate how Balzac's use of poetic language and metaphor follow the universal laws of verisimilitude and realism (51). Nonetheless, this critic illustrates Balzac's ability to introduce the unrepresented into a narrative largely associated with "bourgeois society and its economies of meaning and value" (52). Schehr demonstrates how Balzac works within the discursive strategies and underlying historical, economic and psychological universals of the period—including notions of justice, propriety and exchange—while at the same time "blowing them up from within" to create a heterogeneous narrative in which figures of alterity emerge in meaningful ways (38-39). For example, Schehr illustrates how Balzac undoes gender and social roles in Eugénie Grandet by constructing Eugénie as an ambiguous female character who adopts a role equivalent to a "son" by running her father's business (41). While Balzac constructs Eugénie in relation to nineteenth-century laws of economic exchange, justice and propriety, this character sheds the passive (female) role of wife, mother and "reactor" to take on the active (male) role of business owner. Balzac depicts Eugénie's cousin Charles as a somewhat stereotypical effeminate and sensitive Parisian fop. However, this male character still builds a slave trade and embodies everything that uncle Grandet hopes to become in terms of business success. In short, Schehr illustrates how Balzac creates hybridized characters that embody difference by avoiding fixed identities and restrictive binaries. Although Balzac never inserts a code of difference in the language to directly reference these figures, he still creates a hetero-geneous narrative space that allows them to emerge through various discursive eruptions (95). Schehr also suggests that Balzac's narrative [End Page 184] strategies associated with difference serve as a representational precursor for later examples of the realist tradition. In his second chapter, Schehr examines the works of Flaubert, comparing and contrasting Salammbô with its predecessor, Madame Bovary. In contrast to chapter one, where Schehr emphasizes the heterogeneity of Balzac's realist project, whereby the dominant narrative mostly assimilates figures of the other, in this chapter he illustrates Flaubert's ability to "maintain the otherness of the other within the aesthetic of realism" (97-98). Furthermore, in contrast to his highly acclaimed Madame Bovary, which depicts an underlying nineteenth-century...