Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869

Dr Rosa Mucignat is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London, UK.

• Introduction; Chapter 1 Making Worlds; Chapter 2 Our Daily Adventure; Chapter 3 Space and the Symbol; Chapter 4 Space and the Map; Chapter 5 Space and the Field; conclusion Conclusion;

Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869Rosa Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies (Oxford:Routledge 2013) 192 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409450559The title of Rosa Mucignat's Realism and Space in the Novel 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies only palelysuggests the nature of this careful, well documented, and very pertinent literary study. Mucignat's bookreflects the hybrid nature of the novel in which multiple factors and vectors come to influence its delicateeconomy. In the play of forces establishing the solidity of characters in the realist novel, space emergesas a newly significant element, rather than a mere backdrop. Striving for an effet de réel – as it will beduly interpreted and called by Barthes – and finally attaining that objective, a spatial dimension isconstituted which is consistent and meaningful and alters the reader's perception of the construction ofthe characters and, obviously, the narrative logic. Mucignat’s work seeks to analyze the strategies that thewriters use in order to create a textual cartography, symbolic, conscious of and representative ofEuropean realism, from its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century, up to its most pure andcritical form in the work of Gustave Flaubert.Based on the conviction – introduced in the first page – that the insertion of a geographic space,imagined or real, 'gives texture and feel to a story' (1), Mucignat develops a convincing analysis of herchosen texts over the five chapters. The first chapter, 'Making Worlds', is concerned above all with theunderstanding of the transformative power of the physical agent (also psychological and phantasmatic)called space, utilizing the different perspectives previously analyzed by critics like Barthes, Auerbach, and,in an idiosyncratic way, Bakhtin: visibility, depth, and movement. Following the concept of the chronotopedeveloped by Bakhtin, as well as the Barthesian observation that detailed description changes thenarrative code of understanding, Mucignat shows that space contains in itself a more profound andrelevant meaning than merely a symbolic, decorative, or representative function: made visible by vividand accurate descriptions, space comes to play 'a role in the general economy of the diegetic-mimeticunity of the text' (5). Consequently, it constitutes an element that is able to materialize the story that itsets out to tell. In the same way, the depth reached by realist description allows the reading of novelisticspace along a vertical axis, capable of traversing the lives of the characters, which previously wereimpenetrable. With respect to the construction of this new verticalized dimension of the fictionaluniverse, Mucignat evokes the influence of other scientific knowledges that interfere with it,reverberations of the natural world in the very discursive context of the novel: from geological andarcheological metaphors to the manifestations of the nascent biological sciences, distinct spheres ofthinking that converge in the production of a modern episteme that echo freely in the countryside, aswell as in the urban centers portrayed in realist literature. This spatial dichotomy (rural versus urban) isused by Mucignat to develop a fruitful analysis of movement, that kind of movement which can beemployed in order to dictate the tempo of the narrative/narration (22), but which can also refer toimmobility and displacement, an opposition serving as material for the creation and destiny of diversecharacters, such as Frédéric Moreau, Pip, and Julien Sorel.