The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination

Abstract

Sotirios Paraschas' study of The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination begins with a fascinating observation that gives birth to the central conceit of his book: the “gradual semantic attenuation” of the idea of the author in the twentieth century coincides with the moment at which “the concept of realism” also “becomes a problem and an object of contention” (1). Paraschas goes on to explore the vexed relationship between the realist author and the realist text, and a number of productive questions emerge. If realism is held up as a mode of writing based on mere “observation,” to the “exclusion of the imagination,” then what exactly can be the status of the author of a realist text? (2). How did realist authors navigate this dilemma, and which means did they employ in order to engage it and reassert their presence within their texts? Finally, in an era that also saw the increased codification of intellectual property rights for authors as producers and financial beneficiaries of their works, how is the problem of copyright inflected into or produced by the tension between the supposedly disappearing author and the realist text? In a study whose literary terrain ranges from E. T. A. Hoffmann's Prinzessin Brambilla (1820) at the early end to André Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925–1926) at the later, Paraschas offers substantial and compelling readings of key works by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and George Eliot. The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination argues that these authors “operat[e] with … a ‘screened presence,’” which allows them to engage problems of authorship and representation through the subtle construction of authorial figures in their fictional works. The book itself traces the rise and fall of this presence from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, and the implications for our understanding of realist authors and realism (9).Indeed, the main avatar of the authorial figure Paraschas develops here might be this monograph's most important and impactful contribution to the study of realism. While one could easily identify the narrator of a novel as an “authorial presence,” or the use of “fictional characters who are authors,” Paraschas reveals the importance of a more subtle trope that he calls the “authorial double” (9, 13). The authorial double is a “character who can enter the minds of his fellow-characters through a process of imaginative identification, who can manipulate their actions and shape the development of the plot”—in short, a character who possesses the same capacity for “sympathetic imagination” necessary to a realist author. Paraschas first elucidates the centrality of such imaginative powers in Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1834–1835) and Eliot's “The Lifted Veil” (1859), demonstrating the extent to which the faculty of sympathy is intimately connected—often explicitly by the novels themselves—to the power of representation. Sympathy is shown, here and in contemporaneous philosophical and aesthetic thought, to have a “cognitive dimension” on par with that of realistic representation itself, yet such identification also endangers the sympathetic subject, who risks being subsumed into feelings of and feeling for others (33). If Goriot represents this sort of succumbing to sympathy (“sympathy as a moral sentiment” rather than as an intellectual tool), Vautrin instead embodies the more detached use of sympathetic power to author situations and to exert authority over others. Paraschas' readings of such authorial doubles, whether Vautrin in Goriot and other novels or the flâneur in Baudelaire's prose poems or Mordecai in Eliot's Daniel Deronda, are flat-out revelatory. Expert unpackings of even well-traveled passages in these works allow Paraschas to anchor his arguments about sympathy, authority, and representation firmly in the texts themselves; these same passages turn out to be simultaneously so invested in notions of property and ownership, especially in the case of Eliot, that they offer ample support for the book's extension of its arguments to these authors' preoccupation with the status of the author in terms of the legal ownership of creative productions. As someone who works primarily on realism and teaches these authors frequently, I know that Paraschas' work will affect my rereadings of them.There are a few aspects of The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination that give me pause, and the title itself indicates one reservation I have: the generalization of these arguments to the “realist author” writ large. For, if the depth permitted by Paraschas' primary focus on three realist authors is a tremendous asset to his analysis, the general restriction of the discussion to those same three authors ought also to make one cautious in extending the claim so broadly to realism in general. One might add that this should particularly be the case where one of the Eliot texts, “The Lifted Veil,” is hardly an unproblematic exemplar of her realism, and where one of these three authors (Baudelaire) is hardly unproblematically realist (and certainly not realist in the way that Balzac and Eliot are, as the author notes). I found myself wondering whether I was convinced that this argument—brilliant as it is around Balzac, Baudelaire, and Eliot—could be as fruitfully or fairly applied to Brontë or Flaubert, in whose novels one can often discern apparent authorial doubles; or to Trollope, whose concerns about copyright infringements against him were quite vocal. What feels like a certain narrowness of scope here might have been mitigated by more attention to the construction of a larger pattern, even if only through more brief gestures toward other realist authors or works in which these same mechanisms operate. To be fair, there are a few quick, often passing references to figures like Dickens, Gaskell, and Dostoevsky, but perhaps not as many as one would want, or as substantial as one would want, in order to buttress claims made about the realist author broadly, or about realist narrative or representation generally. At a more local level, too, there are a few moments where assertions feel unnecessarily out of measure with the evidence, as when Paraschas writes that a list of words related to domination—such as “superiority,” “inferiority,” and so forth—“are among the most frequently recurring words in Daniel Deronda” (131). This is just statistically untrue, even though Paraschas' parsing of pivotal passages does show remarkably well how important such words are in the novel.If there are, then, moments at which some of the claims of The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination feel heavier than the evidence presented might bear, Paraschas' book is still a noteworthy and compelling contribution to work on nineteenth-century literature. With a sophisticated framework conversant in both twentieth century and contemporary theory and the critical and philosophical tradition surrounding representation, sympathy, and the idea of the author, The Realist Author and Sympathetic Imagination advances several insightful new arguments. Those interested in the particular authors on which Paraschas focuses will gain much from this book, as will scholars invested in considering the author, sympathy, and the persistent and fascinating problem of realism and its boundaries.