José Manuel Lopes
Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction: Five Cross-Literary Studies
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Pp. 183. Cloth $45.00
Reviewed by Patrick O’Neill

José Manuel Lopes’s book deals with the nature and function of description in literary narrative, more specifically with “foregrounded” as opposed to “backgrounded” description. While the latter may function (or be read as functioning) as little more than a decorative and incidental frame for the narrative events it merely accompanies, the former, as Lopes very successfully demonstrates, can play a strategically crucial and functionally variable role in the economy of literary narrative discourse. After an opening chapter devoted to setting up a “framework for the analysis of description in prose fiction,” Lopes thus sets out to demonstrate the range of descriptive forms and functions by applying the model developed here to five fictional narratives that foreground descriptive techniques. The resulting five studies are “cross-literary” in that the texts they interrogate, spanning the century from 1878 to 1978, come from three different languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese), several literary-historical periods, and four different cultural contexts (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian).

Lopes’s book sets out to redress a systemic “bias against description” that has persisted in formal analyses of literary narrative from Russian Formalism through Anglo-American New Criticism to present-day narratology. The opening chapter first reviews what for its author are the inadequate attempts of twentieth-century critics and theorists to do justice to the role of description in literary narrative, then proceeds to outline an analytical model capable of generating better results. The model firmly rejects the traditional view that the narrative presentation of events is always primary while the “setting” in which those events occur is always secondary. It posits instead a binary and interdependent opposition of “description” and “narration” as equally important “text-types” constituting “the two most basic modes of structuring any prose fiction text” (19). The model focuses on the distinction between “descriptive” and “narrative” textual elements on three main levels of enquiry, described respectively as stylistic (the level of sentences and parts of sentences), discursive (the level of larger textual segments involving a paragraph or a few pages, and “contributing primarily to the building of either fictional characters or fictional spaces” [22]), and functional (the level of the text as a whole, focusing on the overall interactive functioning of elements classifiable on the stylistic and/or discursive levels as “descriptive” or “narrative”). On the functional level, as Lopes proleptically observes, the French nouveau roman and much postmodern fiction presents us with “narrative segments that have functions similar to description, or with a type of narration constructed from a set of descriptions” (25).

The model is presented as flexibly heuristic rather than rigidly prescriptive. In illustrating its workings Lopes offers five detailed analyses of individual literary narratives. Emile Zola’s Une page d’amour (1878), a novel that has received little critical attention, is analyzed as an early and radical experiment in the possibilities of foregrounded description: its five parts each contain five chapters, the first four of which in each case are predominantly narrative, while the fifth in each case (presenting a panoramic view of Paris reminiscent of impressionist paintings) is not only ostentatiously descriptive but is shown to function as a narrative mise en abyme of the preceding four. In Claude Simon’s Histoire (1967) the narrative incorporates multiple and highly detailed descriptions of postcards, postage stamps, banknotes, paintings, and photographs that are “narrativized” as illustrating the memory processes of the narrator. Benito Pérez Galdós’s La de Bringas (1884) serves to illustrate satirical and parodic uses of description, its lengthy opening description of a fanatically detailed model cenotaph constructed of individual human hairs presented as at once arguably satirizing both its builder and contemporary social conditions in Spain, parodying the descriptive techniques of literary naturalism, and functioning as a humorous mise en abyme of the novel’s own textual workings.

The relationship between narration and description is radically problematized in the final two texts. The Brazilian writer (and painter) Cornélio Penna’s A menina morta (1954) provides an example of a novel in which “what could be considered as a plot … is merely a mechanism to facilitate and motivate the inclusion of long descriptive segments” (92), while lengthy descriptive passages may in turn be read as suggesting an “implied narration” (109). The Portuguese writer Carlos de Oliveira’s enigmatic Finisterra (1978), finally, offers Lopes an example of foregrounded metadescription, the text portraying not only the development of its protagonist from childhood to adulthood but also “the ways through which a main narrative/descriptive voice tries to recollect various life-moments through a range of texts and documents belonging to different media and genres” (116). Penna’s and Oliveira’s texts thus offer something close to the opposite of the traditional relationship between foregrounded narration and backgrounded description. Or rather, as Lopes argues in his Conclusion, the traditional distinction between narrative and description simply breaks down. “In a text such as Oliveira’s Finisterra, the terms ‘description’ and ‘narration’ become a pair of abstract labels no longer relevant to specific textual traits” (147).

José Manuel Lopes’s meticulously argued book appeared in the University of Toronto Press’s Theory/Culture series. Wladimir Krysinski provides a Preface that stresses the book’s position in the still vibrant tradition of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. Krysinski justifiably observes that the most valuable characteristic of Lopes’s work is its judicious overall balance between the theoretical, critical, and comparative approaches. While this densely argued book is by no means easy reading, it handsomely repays detailed attention. Lopes’s study further illustrates the complexity of literary narrative discourse by systematically and convincingly illustrating the functional relationship between narrative in the narrower sense and a variety of forms of foregrounded description. It is a considerable achievement and a significant addition to our understanding of the complexly layered functioning of literary narrative as a semiotic system.