SubStance

Smyth's beautifully written, many stranded theoretical book explores the problem of the incorrigible lability (instability; inconstancy; vulnerability to error or to sin) of meaning that he first addressed at length in A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard, and Barthes. Years of reflection have enriched his philosophical background and deepened his pervasive sense of the problematic of human communities. Here his analyses of Defoe's much studied Robinson Crusoe and of Beckett's trilogy of novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (studied in Beckett's English translations of himself—which contain a few Gallicisms) are [End Page 160] strikingly original in applying the concepts of lying and of sacrifice to these works. The chapter on Stendhal—Smyth's apparent Girardian starting point (Girard's own starting point was Dostoevsky)—is more predictable, but certainly well worth reading.

One might wish for more contextualization and detailed analyses of the two key concepts—lying and sacrifice—both separately and together. Take contextualization first: Smyth provides fictional examples aplenty of lying and sacrifice. But how are they worked out in terms of characterization and of plot? Who sacrifices whom, and why? Implicitly or explicitly, does the implied author or a surrogate pass judgment on the outcome? Stendhal's Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et le Noir provides an unequivocal example of scapegoating—from the protagonist's point of view. From ours, however, the protagonist brings his fate on himself, and forfeits many opportunities to escape. He seems to court destruction. Maturing to the point of becoming a Decadent avant la lettre, Julien comes to believe that the only sure way of demonstrating one's superiority to the common herd in society is to depart from it. His execution appears to depend on a melancholic self-sacrifice, fueled by suppressed rage. Traditionally, ever since Achilles, Westerners have found the sacrifice of one's life for a transcendent cause to be sublime. But Achilles's and Julien's cause was their own glory. Julien's situation is more equivocal; he has only one other true believer in that cause—Mathilde. He dies nobly, but Stendhal emphasizes that he might not have done so, that he "happened to be in a courageous mood on that [particular] day." Ironically, Mathilde memorializes his death in an affected way that he would have abhorred. His true love, Madame de Renal, honors it by dying in sympathy three days later, presumably leaving no lasting memories of him behind. Earlier, Stendhal had insisted that although her children had adored Julien, their tutor, they have nearly forgotten him when he returns after an absence. The petty motives of the ostensible persecutors of Julien further devalue the sublimity of sacrifice. In a word, Stendhal's novel functions as an irony machine for deflating Julien's pretensions. Stendhal hardly speaks of sacrifice again in his later novels.

In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the major focus seems to be rescue (including self-rescue), the inverse of sacrifice; and in Beckett, on endurance. Smyth resolves this difficulty triumphantly with Beckett, shifting the problem to the metanarrative level. He demonstrates that for Beckett, writing is performing a sacrifice by literally cannibalizing the characters. The narrator of L'Innommable loses the use of one body part after another. However, Smyth does not seem so successful in arguing [End Page 161] that sacrifice is essential in Robinson Crusoe. His very brief discussion of it (75-76) depends on invented conceits far more tenuous even than Foucault's Panopticon or Ship of Fools. Conversely, he does not strongly establish that Beckett's crafty elaboration of paranoid-schizophrenic narratives is lying. Beckett overtly bares the device of the unreliable narrator, motivating him both by misperception and by instinctive self-protection.

Although Smyth searches many of Defoe's other fictional and non-fictional writings (omitting the letters and several satiric writings) to discover how he frequently but insincerely equates fictionalizing with a dangerous, equivocal sort of lying, he expends much...