Telling Stories
'Savage Reprisals: Bleak
House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks' by Peter Gay
Reviewed by Lorraine Adams
Sunday, September 1, 2002;
Page BW13
By Peter
Gay
Norton. 192 pp. $24.95
Cultural historian Peter Gay argues in his new book that the great realistic novelists have done history a great disservice. He indicts Charles Dickens for being dumb about judicial reform, Gustave Flaubert for misjudging the bourgeoisie and Thomas Mann for ignoring Germany's successful families.
Gay is a Yale historian who over the past four decades has written more than 20 books of cultural history, including Schnitzler's Century and "The Bourgeois Experience," a multivolume study of the Victorians. One habit of mind has sustained his prominent career: He likes to gather together contradictory facts that make monolithic eras into ambiguous complexities. He won the National Book Award in the 1960s for his study of the Enlightenment, then turned to the Victorians, saying that they, too, were more variegated than previously thought. It took five volumes for Gay to disprove their reputation as priggish philistines.
One problem with this approach is that all eras become less homogeneous the closer one looks. And so, too often, Gay has propped and kicked straw men, instead of marshaling hard-won facts into original ideas.
Savage Reprisals is based on lectures Gay delivered in 2000 as director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He begins with Bleak House, written when Dickens was about 40 and celebrated ever since. In it, Dickens uses the serpentine muddle of the 19th-century British chancery court system as an opportunity to write about a blank disregard at the heart of things. For centuries, chancery law was dispensed by royal advisers (called chancellors) who screened subjects petitioning the monarch to settle disputes. Chancery law was highly contingent, and unlike common law it was invented on the fly by men partial to certain parties and causes. They were, in Dickens's words, "oversleeping Rip Van Winkles, who have played at strange games through a deal of thundery weather." Though it fails to delve sufficiently into the minds of its characters (as does all of Dickens), Bleak House transcends its supposed subject. It is not about the case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, British law or even The Law, but about any human-made system of indifferent inhumanity.
Gay never touches on these biographical and historical particulars or the temperature and feel of the novel. Instead, he bears down on Dickens's ignorance of British juridical reforms like a grammarian proofreading Faulkner. "In 1851, a year before Dickens published the first installment of Bleak House," Gay writes, "the Court of Chancery underwent its first significant reforms, even though a few cases rather like Jarndyce and Jarndyce were still being heard. It was a brave effort at reorganization to which Dickens's novel gives no space."
Gay also harrumphs that Dickens's convictions were purely personal: Dickens was victimized in chancery himself; hence his outrage; hence Bleak House. Although Dickens did sue one of his publishers in chancery court, he prevailed in the case. More likely, his experiences as a law clerk (in a law office rather than in the chancery system) informed his ideas.
Although Gay paints himself as a myth toppler, his observations are old and well-circulated. In the 1940s, Vladimir Nabokov alerted Wellesley undergraduates that Dickens's "information on legal matters goes back to the 1820s and 1830s so that many of his targets had ceased to exist by the time Bleak House was written." "But if the target is gone," Nabokov added, "let us enjoy the carved beauty of his weapon."
Gay, determined to point out the misleading omissions of others, makes plenty of his own. He neglects to mention, during his chapter on Madame Bovary, that his five-volume study of the Victorians disagrees vehemently with Flaubert on the 19th-century middle class; in Gay's view, the bourgeoisie was horribly maligned by Flaubert and the high modernists who idolized him. Gay does allow that his intellectual nemesis's novel is "absorbing." But he cannot brook the "considerable injustice" Flaubert did to the citizens of Rouen, caricaturing them as "unfailingly crude, avaricious, materialistic, practically interchangeable." Flaubert should have told us that Rouen "was a lively hub of trade and industry, and home to high-ranking government and ecclesiastical officials."
Moving on to Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, Gay sees the author as a "mutinous patrician" and the book as a 26-year-old's revenge on his class. Mann's father was a German senator and well-to-do grain merchant; he died when Mann was 16. In his will, he dissolved the family business, not trusting his sons to run it. It is true, as Gay says, that Mann expressed guilt in letters and in conversation about disappointing his father. "But his feelings of guilt ran deeper than having let his father down," Gay writes. "He was haunted by anxieties about his homoerotic appetites." Gay argues that Mann's sexual ambivalence created animus in the author against the privileged class. Hence Buddenbrooks is "an act of retribution." Mann could have made the Buddenbrooks family prosper instead of falter over four generations, according to Gay. "There were, in those days, middle-class German families less obviously doomed than the Buddenbrooks."
Gay chooses to ignore that in the years before Mann's father died, the Mann family business had fallen on hard times. Most close readers of Mann see his first novel as autobiographical. Most plausibly, the Buddenbrooks clan declines not because Mann wanted vengeance but because his own family had suffered.
As he has been prone to before, Gay builds up "the spectacular career of literary realism in the nineteenth century" in a vain effort to make more dramatic his banal finding that novelists are not historians. But underneath these atmospherics, he is doing something simple: issuing his own savage reprisals against novelists. "Their prized imaginative powers liberated them in ways barred to scientists of society -- sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians -- for whom facts and their rational interpretation remained paramount." Why, oh why, this unimaginative man seems to be asking, does imagination matter to so many? •
Lorraine Adams reviews frequently for Book World.