American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS Barrish, Phillip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. 213 pp. Cloth: $54.95. This is an important and impressive book—ambitious in its claims, wideranging in its literary and theoretical scope, and sophisticated in its prose. Barrish focuses on works by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Abraham Cahan, and Edith Wharton, and he argues that the realism ofthese works is linked to their representation of intellectual authority and cultural prestige. Realist fiction, he suggests, offers a self-reflexive commentary on its own authority, an authority located either in particular characters or in the novels' voice and address to readers. This is abook, then, that at its most specific aims to reexamine the literary-historical category constituted as realism. But it also unfolds to a reassessment of contemporary theorists who either analyze or themselves exemplify issues ofintellectual prestige, including Pierre Bourdieu, Paul de Man, and Judith Butler. The hundred and fifteen-year span in the book's subtitle marks, in effect, a concentrated focus on two moments a century apart—the rise of literary realism and the rise of contemporary poststructuralist theory—and Barrish's flexibility in working with both moments yields dazzling insights throughout. Barrish begins by distinguishing his project from recent historicist work on realism. Such work has fruitfully analyzed realist texts in relation to contemporary social discourses (for example, ethnography or social work), often using Foucauldian frameworks that reveal policing or managerial imperatives at work in literary and non-literary writing. In contrast to these approaches, Barrish wants to identify a tension internal to realist fiction: its claim of access to "the real," however defined, which forms the basis for its own cultural authority. The book, then, implicitly extends the project ofunderstanding what Amy Kaplan has termed "the social construction of American realism," but while some scholars have extended this project outward to link realist literature to its contemporary cultural discourses, Barrish wants to delve inward to see this social construction deconstructively (and anxiously) at work within realist texts themselves. Barrish advances this approach through a rich set ofreadings. Howells is a logical point of departure, as the preeminent professional man of letters in late nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, and the figure who most overtly promoted what Barrish terms "realist taste." Howells's advocacy ofthis taste, which Barrish traces through The Rise ofSilas Lapham and other works, had an instrumental purpose: "Realist taste, with its polemically democratic scaffolding , would enable some members ofthe middle and upper classes still to invoke rigorous aesthetic discernment as the guarantor oftheir cultural superiority even as they simultaneously reaffirmed their American disdain for 252Reviews aesthetic pomposity" (19). He then turns to The Wings ofthe Dove to show that James promotes a converse but complementary version of realist taste, exemplified in Merton Densher's empathetic yet inactive sensibility; for Densher and for James, "realist prestige depends not only on displaying a powerful grasp of the real, it depends on attaining the arduous discipline to ward it off (71). Cahan's The Rise ofDavid Levinsky, the focus ofBarrish's next chapter, shows the high stakes of cultural prestige in a novel of immigrant experience; Cahan's narrator, Barrish argues, both invokes and distances an "ethnic real" (92) to build his own cultural prestige. The last literary chapter is on Wharton's little-known novel Twilight Sleep (1927). Centered on a youngwoman, Nona, immersed in aNew York society world ofdivorce, birth control, movies, and other markers ofmodernity, the novel is most visibly an "insider's grasp of . . . jazz-age American culture" (99), a grasp that functions as its form ofrealistprestige. More ambivalently, Barrish suggests, it also shows a plunge into psychosexual possibilities of an affair between Nona's father and his daughter-in-law Lita. Like other texts by Wharton (Summer and the Beatrice Palmato fragment), Twilight Sleep turns on an incest plot, and incest functions as the novel's "real real of internal violence and desire" (1 14). Barrish's final chapter applies questions about realist taste and cultural prestige to five critics: one exemplary ofan earlier generation (Lionel Trilling ) and four contemporary poststructuralists (Paul De Man, John Guillory, Joan Copjec, and Judith...