Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (review) (1997)

REVIEWS 503 into a question of character and rationality, making crucial connections between property and biography" (p. 150), Fielding makes us wonder what will happen to characters such as Tom or Amelia in a drama revolving around the presence or absence of money. Frances Burney provides for Thompson an occasion to investigate debt and its relation to female protagonists. Burney's works "moralize, psychologize, eroticize and therefore gender the spending of money" (p. 164). Thompson notes in Burney's work a fire wall built between the world of money and the domestic space, seen as a precapitalist site of primitive accumulation so that "the fetish of commodity does not poison affective individualism" (p. 180). Finally, Jane Austen creates an ironic voice "capable of violating and then repairing the equation between love and money" that Burney seeks to avoid. Thompson must be thanked for opening our eyes to the role of money and political economy in the development of the bourgeois subject in novels. I have to agree with Kristina Straub's blurb on the back of the book when she writes, "it is hard to see how past discussions of the novel have managed to ignore the crisis in 'value' addressed in eighteenth-century concerns with money." That said, there are some areas in which I wished there were more discussion. Thompson tends to read his texts as allegories or as "compressions of capitalist narratives." He seeks in Defoe's work, for example, instances of monetary transactions. Although he does begin to theorize these instances into larger statements about character and narrative, one would like to see Thompson develop a unified field theory, of sorts, about the nature of representation, in all the senses of that word, in regard to novelistic discourse. Likewise, notions of reading, the investment of credit and credibility on the part of readers in the fictive representation on paper, need further amplification. Finally, a discussion of the notion of the bourgeois subject in relation to money would be of great benefit, as would a longer consideration of Austen amplifying Thompson's earlier insights about her work. These recommendations only point to areas that Thompson himself highlighted in his text. We look forward to future work in which Thompson reaps the investment he has made in this work, or in non-capitalist terms, in which he explores the dialectic between money and novels that he has set in motion and points it to some transformatory ends. Lennard J. Davis Binghamton University (State University of New York) Elena Russo. Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. vii + 225pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8047-2465-2. In the introduction to Skeptical Selves Elena Russo makes a case for her attempt "to construct a biography of the modern narrative self out of the examination 504 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 of highly particularized autobiographical narratives" (p. 1). Abbé Prévost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne (1740), Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816), and Louis-René des Forêts's Le Bavard (1946) all contain the focus and the structuring principle provided by "narrative failure" for the "shared notion that a particular experience cannot be reconciled with general language" (pp. 2-3). Russo examines the epistemological problem that emerges from the "failure these novels thematize" and the empiricist notion of the sign initiated by Locke's Essay on Human Understanding that can still be found in the contemporary novel and in current theoretical discourse: "the persistence of an atomistic and nominalistic model of the sign rooted in ... word-to-object correspondence " (p. 3). In Russo's view, the model of mimesis is the source of representational failure, presupposing the separation between experience and linguistic concepts, which these three narrators must resign themselves to. Russo proposes to offer a dialectical and less pessimistic vision of the relationship between language, experience, and reality for the project of representation. She finds in each novel a persistence of the same conception of narrative truth, of me self, of the longing for what lies beyond representation and expression in "a language that, paradoxically, would not be social but individual" (p. 4). The body of Skeptical Selves is divided...