152
ROGER SHATTUCK
from tracing clearly the circularity of his subject-how illusion fuses
into reality and vice versa.
The chapter on Flaubert, though twenty pages longer than any of
the others, fails to bring into focus why Flaubert is the pivotal figure
of both the century and of the movement in question. For it is through
the densely interwoven fabric of Flaubert's fiction-"scientific" beauty,
the intensification of objects into heightened significance, the demoniac
motifs, the musicality of the prose-that we can find our way across
the artificial gap to Symbolism. Mr. Levin's broad institutional approach
to literature never does come to grips with the question why the
opportunistic bourgeois society of nineteenth-century France nourished
both Realism and Symbolism, two powerful and apparently opposed
literary currents. The examination of the matter in the last chapter
is all too brief and oblique. The marxist critic Lukacs, who is quoted,
does not constitute final authority; he could not explain just why
bour,geois Realism established the writer as a man who lives, and
sometimes lives well, by biting the hand that feeds him. This anti–
establishment status might have been clarified by a scrutiny of the re–
lations between the mobility that characterized society and financial
circles and individual careers, and the dazzling versions of mobility pro–
vided by Stendhal, Balzac, and Proust. Several such lines of investigation
(for instance, the pertinence to human behavior of Claude Bprnard's
milieu interieur,
which Zola chose to neglect even though he modeled his
semi-manifesto
Le Roman experimental
on the great
physiologist'~
scien–
tific work,
Introduction
a
la mPdpcine experimpntale)
might have led
Mr. Levin to examine more closely the substance of Realism
if
not its
outlines.
The style and format of the hook call for comment, if only because
future scholars may heed its powerful example. Mr. Levin has not
sullied his pages with a single footnote, nor with a single superior or
inferior number linking the text with the sixty packed pages of sources
and references at the back. This great purge of apparatus shows an
extreme case of reform measures being applied today in the house of
schol;uship. As a rule they are wp.1come. They reqllire. however. that
the text alone carry the full burden of information. hypothesis. example,
counter-example, and proof. Mr. Levin's resourceful style, though
marred by a tendency toward symmetry and antithesis, shows up well
after something of a struggle in the opening pages. But the perpetual
allusiveness of the writing borders on a form of elusiveness, for Mr.
Levin never settles down to sustained textual commentary that would
assemble and operate on one site the well-engineered machinery of his
