Discourse/Counter-Discourse. The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France by RICHARD TERDIMANReview by: PETER SCHOFERNineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring 1987), pp. 351-352Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23532140 .

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Reviews 351

TERDIMAN, RICHARD. Discourse ¡Counter-Discourse. The Theory and Prac tice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, New York:

Cornell University Press, 1985. 362 pp.

This book is a vast undertaking which ranges across the nineteenth century from Balzac to Daumier, Flaubert, Marx, and Baudelaire, to name the major

figures covered. The book proposes a theory of discourse for the nineteenth

century in which culture is a "field of struggle." Because it is so rich in ref

erences to major theories, most notably those of Marx, Foucault, Kristeva,

Bakhtin, Derrida, and contemporary Marxist writers, and because the basic

argument is both subtle and extensive, any attempt to condense it entails

oversimplification and distortion.

However, the title provides an apt summary of the book's approach. Dis

course here means the dominant discourse of the nineteenth century, which

unfortunately is impossible to identify empirically in any given society. While

true, such an assertion is disquieting in light of the large definition given to

the word "discourse": "Put simply, discourses are the complexes of signs and

practices which organize social existence and social production" (55). While

a later quotation suggests that "discourse" falls more within the boundaries

established by Foucault, this definition could encompass practically any and

all social practices. In fact, the dominant discourse is treated in a limited way

according to the author or question under examination. "Counter-discourse"

refers more specifically to most literary writers of the century and to artists

such as Daumier who practiced what is called "symbolic resistance." Thus the

nineteenth century is studied within a binary system, albeit a very complex

one, of dominance and resistance, where the dominant discourse shifts and

changes, and the counter-discourses react.

Individual chapters of the book map out basic strategies of resistance. A

lengthy introduction is followed by a chapter on the discourses of initiation, with emphasis on Balzac. At the beginning of the century the roman d'édu

cation emerges in order to understand and to recontain the new codes of a

changing society, but as characters try to dominate the codes, they are im

mersed in the very structures they seek to contain. Chapters II and III treat

the newspaper, the "first" consumer commodity, the "quintessential figure"

( 120) of the new society as seen by the disenchanted intellectuals. This dom

inant discourse, where one finds the fragmentation of daily life, is played off

against the discourse of satirical newspapers, with emphasis on Daumier and

Le Charivari. Daumier's work is an example of the difficulty, if not impossibil

ity, of being subversive and different without being neutralized and absorbed

into the dominant discourse. Chapter IV provides a stimulating reading of

Flaubert and Marx as humorists, where Flaubert's strategy of "re/citation" of

received language acts as counter-discursive subversion. Chapter V brings fresh

light on Flaubert's fascination with the Orient, recasting it as "dis-orient-ation," or a failure to create a counter-discourse out of orientalism. The final two

chapters (VI and VII) deal with the prose poem as absolute counter-discourse,

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352 Nineteenth-Century French Studies

relying heavily on Mallarmé and Baudelaire. The prose poem is represented as

a revolutionary type of writing that sought (futilely) to "establish a distinc

tion internal to prose [to serve] as the ground of a strategy to recuperate the

prose apparatus for contestatory expression" (298). A strong case is made

that the prose poems, with their inner conflicts and tensions, can only be

understood and made readable if they are historicized and placed in the con

text of dominant prose discourses of the period.

Discourse/Counter-Discourse stands as a fresh and salutory union of liter

ary theory and the study of historical context. More important, it expands

"intertextuality" to include non-literary texts which have been relatively

neglected. And the book argues very strongly for reading nineteenth-century literature as a form of symbolic resistance.

However, the book is not without its faults, some relatively minor, such

as the poor editorial job done by Cornell University Press, which let slip by too many sentence fragments, repetitions, and run-on sentences. More serious

is the heavy reliance on secondary sources. Reference to Zeldin, Duchet, Pas

seron, et al., is understandable, but when secondary sources are used almost

exclusively in the chapters on newspapers and heavily in discussions of major writers such as Mallarmé and Lautréamont, an uncomfortable distance sets in

between the theoretical apparatus and the textual immediacy which the book

seeks. This leads at times to overstatements and erroneous assertions, such as

the reference to Fourier's Phalanstery, with no mention of his language and

subversive metaphors (70), or the general discussion of nineteenth-century feminism where no specific feminists are mentioned since they are all lumped

together as "a still-assimilable, recuperable form of dissidence" (73). The fact that theory and generalizations often appear to overshadow close

textual analysis points to what might be called the synecdochal strategy or

vision of the book: it often works from the general to the particular, where

the particular acts as the absent part of the trope or the minor part of the

figure. Such is the case, for example, in the short analysis of "Assommons les

pauvres," which, it is asserted quite rightly, "thematized the historical dialec

tic" (315). Yet we are given a partial and questionable reading of the text, where Proudhon is slipped into the text (taken from the notes of the Œuvres

complètes and from Louis Chevalier) and where the actual presence in the

middle of the prose poem of two important founders of the new (dominant)

psychological discourse, Lélut and Baillarger, is overlooked.

For some readers the synecdochal strategy may be frustrating and even

infuriating at times, but it is perhaps the best one for a book which is provoc ative and which is itself counter-discursive, "beyond fixity, beyond closure."

A strategy of assertion and generalization does in fact offer movement, flux, and gaps. Taken seriously, the book challenges its readers to rethink and to

rewrite the spaces opened to them by their reading.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

PETER SCHOFER

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