FREDERIC JAMESON. The Antinomies of Realism. London and New York: Verso, 2013. 326 pp.

The “historic emergence of the bourgeois body” is the ultimate fact that explains the evolution of the realist novel. That literary form strives to restore feeling that has hardened into systems of named emotions and commercial genres. Yet realism seeks an everyday whose static ontology inhibits radically new possibilities from opening. Jameson introduces a new antinomy to probe this dialectical tension at the heart of the realist novel form : tale (récit) versus affect (scene). The Introduction and first two chapters explicate these two incommensurable temporalities and hash out issues of naming. “Affect” panders to that so-named wave of contemporary scholarship without concentrating on the subject. Here he means embodied feelings as opposed to reified ‘named emotions’. The realist novel emerges as a new apparatus for registering the nuance of the modern sensorium, comparable to Wagner’s chromaticism. Shifts from allegory to observation, from hero to multiple minor characters, and from villain to bad faith (mauvaise foi) all relate to a bourgeois body whose being-in-the-world is constituted primarily through Stimmung or affect. The book focuses on four writers in realism’s second phase : Zola, Tolstoy, Galdós, and Eliot. Flaubert marks a break from Walter Scott’s original form, but it is Zola whose naturalist model could be widely imitated. Overwhelming lists of details and the sliding point of view in Le Ventre de Paris liberates sensory material and bodies from name and character. Tolstoy’s “practice of affect” accounts for his fascination with multiple characters and his striving for the scenic present, even in War and Peace, whose episodic structure and gratuitous scenes resist a driving plot. Pérez Galdós epitomizes the shift from protagonist to minor character, where the affect of accent and dialogue prevails over identification and drama. Meanwhile George Eliot’s Romola dispenses with a true villain and the old ethical binary of good and evil. For certain characters multiple guilty motives veil each other from self-awareness, illustrating perfectly Sartre’s theory of mauvaise foi. Jameson adds two chapters that rethink genre and free indirect discourse in realism. He identifies four sub-genres (Bildungsroman, historical, adultery, naturalist novel), and asserts that the naturalist novel’s trajectory of decline and failure expresses bourgeois anxiety over its own hegemony. The main point is that realism belongs to a reifying cycle of genres, and can be understood as this process more than as a particular set of conventions. It grew a new hybrid form upon stale genres like the romance or the letter novel, bearing the fresh fruit of the everyday; until these new models eventually rotted into flat gray ash that fertilized modernism, and possibly something new. One part of realism’s process is the ‘swelling’ of the third person with multiple subjectivities. Free indirect discourse dissolves the stable storyteller’s point of view in parallel with the decline of classical protagonists and melodramatic plots. Faulkner inaugurates a third phase of realism with mysterious pronoun usage and in medias res structures, which disguise the scenic present as récit. All realist forms invent new ways to synthesize tale and affect, but this process of reification has progressively drained affect from literature. The 20th century initiates a third phase with an ‘existential novel’ type that eventually devolves from stream of consciousness into stream of stuff, becoming a facile mass cultural form churned out by MFA programs. A coda posits the postmodern afterlife of realism in Alexander Kluge, whose tales respond to the decline of expressiveness by an intentional void of affect around a skeleton of pure récit. The book’s second part ruminates on the providential happy ending, war, and the historical …