Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel 1730-1830 by Patrick Coleman (review)

Abstract

MLR, 96. I, 200 I MLR, 96. I, 200 I as she is with detailed textual and historical analysis, reacting refreshinglyagainst fashionable approaches whose achievements she nevertheless respects, and achieving originalityby reminding us of a few old truthsbased on well-established common sense. It would perhapsbe excessive to talkof a paradigmshiftfor the new millennium in our awarenessof eighteenth-centuryfiction, but this study certainly forcesus to takea freshlook at the texts of thisperiod and genre. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM RICHARD A. FRANCIS Reparative Realism: Mourning andModernity intheFrench Novel1730-1830. By PATRICK COLEMAN. (Histoire des idees et critique litteraire, 370) Geneve: Droz. I998. I59 PP. This is quite a shortbook on a very ambitious subject,and as a resultit constantly verges on the cryptic and the elliptical. It is made up of an introduction, and chapters on ManonLescaut, LaNouvelle Hiloise,Adolphe, Corinne and LaPeaudechagrin. In hisbriefbutdenseintroduction,PatrickColeman sketchesout a broadconceptual framework. In literary-historical terms, his aim is to rehistoricize realism by showing how it developed out of sentimental or pre-romantic fiction. This is an importantproject. What lies at the heart of the continuitywhich Coleman seeksto trace is the concept of mourning as a response to the experience of loss, death, powerlessness and melancholy, an experience which provides the thematic or structurallink between the five texts analysed. The exact status of the concept of mourning, or more preciselyof the sense of loss to which mourningis a response,is not made clear:Coleman at times seems to be suggestingthatthe workof mourning is for the loss of previouslyaccepted literaryforms,while elsewherehis claim seems to be the more far-reachingone thatthe lossin questionis the lossof certaintywhich is brought about by disenchantment, secularization and cultural change. If this reading is correct (butwhy can't he state it clearly?)then the textual enactments of imaginary loss, constructed through the language of character and plot, should be understood as pointing towardsa symbolic level. It is here that Coleman is closest to speakingof thepublic or socialrole of literature:realismis reparative in the sense that its function is to help readersto function in a disenchantedworld, by modelling the workof mourningwhich will continue, beyond the act of reading,in the realworld. There are certainlyinterestingideas here for those interestedin a reception theory of the relationbetween text andsociability.Moreover, Coleman is surelyrightwhen he points to the limits of disenchantmenttoday, and suggeststhat there are lessons to be learntfor us today in the 'culturalfoundationsof modernity'(p. 17). Apartfrom a meanderingstylewhich made it hardalwaysto follow exactlywhere the argumentwas going, the majordifficultywith the book seems to me to lie in the problematic relation between thematic and formal approaches to the notion of mourning. On the one hand, I would have welcomed more on mourning as an anthropological given subject to historical transformation, as well as greater development of what Coleman cites as major theoretical underpinnings:Kleinian psychoanalysisand the political philosophy of authors such as Charles Taylor and Claude Lefort. (Ross Chambers's work on melancholy should also have been mentioned.) On the other hand, the treatment of the five chosen texts is quite heavily weighted in favour of a kind of analysiswhich is essentiallyformal, in the sense that it concerns aspects of emerging realism such as the modes of representation of subjectivity, the undermining and transformation of inherited genre assumptions, and authors' attempts to anticipate and deal with reader as she is with detailed textual and historical analysis, reacting refreshinglyagainst fashionable approaches whose achievements she nevertheless respects, and achieving originalityby reminding us of a few old truthsbased on well-established common sense. It would perhapsbe excessive to talkof a paradigmshiftfor the new millennium in our awarenessof eighteenth-centuryfiction, but this study certainly forcesus to takea freshlook at the texts of thisperiod and genre. UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM RICHARD A. FRANCIS Reparative Realism: Mourning andModernity intheFrench Novel1730-1830. By PATRICK COLEMAN. (Histoire des idees et critique litteraire, 370) Geneve: Droz. I998. I59 PP. This is quite a shortbook on a very ambitious subject,and as a resultit constantly verges on the cryptic and the elliptical. It is made up of an introduction, and chapters on ManonLescaut, LaNouvelle Hiloise,Adolphe, Corinne and LaPeaudechagrin. In hisbriefbutdenseintroduction,PatrickColeman sketchesout a broadconceptual framework. In literary-historical terms, his aim is to rehistoricize realism...