Scott Carpenter
Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire
University Park: Penn State Press, 1996. Pp. 172. $35.00 $16.95
Reviewed by Raylene Ramsay
Battles over signs become particularly significant at times of political, social, and epistemological shift. In such periods, symbolic constructions serve to renegotiate the new uncontrollable or undesirable social realities and restructure the relationship between the individual and the world. In Acts of Fiction, this language problem is seen to parallel the disintegration of the aristocracy in postrevolutionary France (1795-1869). Scott Carpenter investigates the means by which Sade, Balzac, Nerval, and Baudelaire react to the disintegration of classical models of transparent literal language and to the appearance of the “deceitful” language that will signal modernism.
Carpenter, then, traces the demise of classical models which paid homage to the literal and truthful nature of language and the institutionalization of the modern where signs have become unreliable and words may no longer fix meaning, and situates this in the postrevolutionary period-that is, before Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Nietzsche, considered by Barthes and Foucault to be the precursors of modernity. Carpenter argues that the latter marked not so much the advent of the modern but its institutionalization. Well before the turn of this century, the restructuring of the calendar, of titles, and of money after the Revolution, the restitution of names at the Restoration, the Second Empire’s physical reconstruction of Paris were so many signals of the conventional and contextual (non-absolute) aspect of the relationship between signifiers, signified, and referents based not on nature but on an implicit contract between reader and writer to agree on particular meanings. The central scene of Les Liaisons dangereuses,, in which Valmont writes an oath of undying allegiance to the President on the naked body of his mistress, Cécile, symbolizes a period in which libertinism is accompanied by the rhetorical devices of irony and ambiguity to signify that oaths taken and words spoken are false. Libertinism, rhetoric, and desire, for Carpenter, reveal the impotence of the classical imagination and the failure of the literality of language and represent what escapes the control of eighteenth-century and Enlightenment thinking.
For Carpenter, collusion, denial, reconstruction, and subversion are the four major modes of narrative reaction to these disintegrations. The apparent naturalness or literality of cruel desire, then, is a pretext behind which Sade conceals the figurality of language and the anarchy of meaning with which his work attempts to infect the social body. Balzac, on the other hand, also uses nature as a pretext, but in the case of this conservative to deny loss and attempt to recover a lost semiotic integrity. His work will resist the breakdown of codes becoming, as contemporary critics have argued, negotiable, erasable, or arbitrary, by unmasking figures of aristocratic imposture and attempting to recover elements of continuity with origins, literalness, and the Old Regime. In Nerval’s Aurelia, Carpenter finds a figure of the “lost letter” that would provide fullness if only this primitive tongue could be found and this mythically rich language reconstructed. But what is discovered behind madness, behind the veil, behind reconstruction is the peregrination of meaning or nothingness. From behind “Baudelaire’s aesthetic mask,” it is the invisible rifts in the ordinary world, contaminated by the fantastic, that become visible. In what is argued to be an often ambiguous and multiple-register text, the malicious demons of the perverse again come to subvert literality.
The nature of the work of the four writers studied is not immediately recognized as symbolic construction according to Carpenter, for narrative efficiency requires readerly misrecognition. Once readers detect the mechanics of a construction, he argues, they extract themselves from its control. For this reason, the most compelling works and those that best resist “critical onslaught” do not reveal their symbolic function in its entirety.
Acts of Fiction is a theoretically informed and very readable reflection on significant writing in this period and its relation to its historical contexts. The different modes of response to loss of classical certainty identified, from resistance to search for resolution and the rethinking of the roots of modernism (a term that is less self-evident than this study admits and that might have been more clearly defined), are convincingly argued and cast the period in an interesting new light. (One wonders whether a similar approach to the preceding century might not discover that modernism has even deeper roots again.) Apart from a few minor typographical or punctuation errors, Acts of Fiction is an impressive scholarly endeavor.