Victor Brombert
In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. x + 168. $29.00
Reviewed by Jerry A. Varsava

Victor Brombert is currently the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton. Over the course of his long and distinguished career, he has written extensively on nineteenth-century French literature, especially fiction. For its part, In Praise of Antiheroes is more wide-ranging than the earlier work, and collects eleven, mostly short essays-all of which, but the one on Camus, appeared independently from 1991 to 1996-that cover a broad gamut of European (and mostly narrative) literature drawn from the last two centuries.

Flaubert provides the epigraph for the introductory chapter: “No monsters and no heroes” (1), but the latter can serve Brombert’s book as a whole. In an age of realism, philosophical as well as stylistic, moral agency has drifted from the perimeters of (postulated) possibility toward the middle, where reside neither saints nor arch-villains, but rather characters firmly bound to their humanity. For Brombert, there are myriad examples of antiheroes and, consequently, he offers here not so much a taxonomy-or “definitional scheme” (9) as he says-as a personal canon of this character type. Prominent exemplars of the antiheroic include, for him, among others, not only familiar figures such as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Gogol’s Akaky Akakyevich, and various Camusian protagonists, but also less discussed characters like Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and Max Frisch’s Stiller and Gantenbein.

Brombert’s essay on Büchner is one of the more rewarding here. Though he died prematurely in 1837 in his early twenties, Büchner managed to write-or nearly to write, for Woyzeck remained unfinished at the time of his death-three works of considerable philosophical and political import. Along with Woyzeck, as Brombert convincingly demonstrates, The Death of Danton (1835) and Lenz (publ. 1839) use rhetorical and structural experimentation to reveal such things as the falsity of “culture” and the tragic consequences of political zealotry. Like many twentieth-century writers who followed, Büchner understood fully not only the limits of language but also the capacity of what Brombert calls “antirhetoric” to unmask the dangers posed to individuals and society alike by philosophical idealists and revolutionary demagogues.

The essays on Max Frisch and Primo Levi are the two longest here and, along with the Büchner piece, provide insights into the work of writers who, if not quite ignored, remain on the periphery of the canon of modern European literature. Frisch’s fiction remains some of the most idiosyncratic, most formally varied of the post-war period, but it has not received the attention it deserves. In a wide-ranging and insightful essay, Brombert examines the works Stiller (1954), Gantenbein (1964), and Man Appears in the Holocene (1979), all of which present language as fundamentally intransitive while, at the same time, they examine various important aspects of twentieth-century life. Similarly, Brombert offers a sensitive and thorough reading of Levi’s ever-evocative depictions of life in Auschwitz and of the emotional and spiritual aftershocks Lager survivors endure.

Victor Brombert is a traditional comparatist, and his essays here exhibit certainly the strengths of such a bias, though arguably also some of the limitations. His mastery of a variety of European idioms is readily apparent; indeed, appropriately enough in an age of diminishing emphasis on access to texts in their original language, he tells us at the outset that his interpretations here have avoided translations. Similarly, he moves comfortably through the great intertext of canonical European literature, outlining etymological links, motifs, allusions, figures, themes, and symbols of all sorts.

Yet, while there is little, if anything, here that will strike a reader as misplaced, there is at the same time a constrained view of what constitutes modern literature and what constitutes hermeneutic insight into it. There are frequent references to universal themes and values, without any attempt to establish the necessarily contingent status of such cultural “universals.” At the same time, such universalist rhetoric serves to decontextualize historically works that not only fall within some “great tradition,” but which also bear a socio-cultural specificity that “modern” and “European” unduly gloss over.

Brombert begins his essay collection with a claim that seems a little anachronistic: “To write in praise of antiheroes could seem ironic, if not downright perverse” (1). Actually, European literature of the last couple of centuries has seen few enough heroes in the classical sense; indeed, the prospects of achieving some sort of transcendent moral agency have pretty well evaporated altogether. Antiheroes of one sort or another are all we have left to talk about, though it remains our challenge to place these figures not only within some expansive diachronic domain called Western/European Literature that reaches back to Homer, via Goethe, Pascal, and Shakespeare, but also within narrower, more tightly focused contexts such as we find in the more interesting of the essays collected in this articulate and erudite volume.