Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of
the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined
(as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has
referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or
defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis
that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes
of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a
rent in the tissue.
The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability,
of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological
shift--or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or
absent--all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself.
Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we
should look at places where the texts do not continue the
representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an
abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author
argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation.
After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of
textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early
state as a precursor to the later realism to "La Chartreuse de
Parme," which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is
always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then
reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the
praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the
works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic
Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly
unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the
ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that
produced Balzac.
The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert
incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most
perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the
permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.
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