‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth <i>‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth</i> . By R <scp>ajeshwari</scp> S. V <scp>allury</scp> . (University of Toronto Romance Series). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 234 pp. Hb CAD $67.00; £43.00.

‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire applies a refreshing combination of critical approaches — while predominantly psychoanalytical, the work also makes reference to detective fiction and critics ranging from Luce Irigaray to Jean-Joseph Goux to Deleuze and Guattari — in order to offer a feminist rereading of four nineteenth-century works by white, male, middle-class authors, namely Maupassant's Pierre et Jean, Balzac's Sarrasine and Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, and Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (the study also refers briefly to Woolf's Orlando and A Room of One's Own by way of conclusion). Rajeshwari S. Vallury examines these works through the optic of four mythical paradigms that have been central to feminist criticism's endeavours to analyse the textual relationships between male authors and their female characters: Oedipus, Narcissus, Pygmalion, and androgyny. ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire argues that the content of these literary texts should not be understood as a ‘repressive system of representation that is either despotic or doomed to lack and failure, a victim of its illusions and dupe to its falsehoods’ (p. 5). It is the work's objective to move beyond restrictive and simplistic binaries of masculine and feminine models of desire, of dialectical thought and its foundation on the negation of the feminine, by focusing instead on the ‘exceptional’ moments in these works that exceed such presuppositions and thereby allow for the expression of feminine difference. This work traces each myth's chronological trajectory and the different emphases or misreadings accrued, thereby nuancing many current interpretations and engaging critically with both the theories and mythic paradigms themselves, as well as previous textual readings. Vallury productively reads against the grain, whether viewing the Oedipal plot in Maupassant's Pierre et Jean as highly accommodating — if not actually proto-feminist — in its perceptions of feminine difference, or perceiving Balzac's Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu as representing a radical ‘break with a specular mode of reflection and representation, participating in a mode of signification in which feminine materiality is no longer subjugated to idea or spirit’ (p. 79). While ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire, because of the eclecticism of its approach, could be seen as spreading itself too thinly, it always remains a challenging and thought-provoking work that wears its breadth of erudition lightly: its various theoretical expositions are judiciously applied to produce illuminating and innovative close readings of these nineteenth-century texts. Whatever the cursory connotations of the gerund in the title of Vallury's work and the book's own professed desire to renounce ‘the coordinates of depth and height in favour of a “thought of the surface”’ (p. 136) and to advocate a politics of superficial multiplicity rather than dualistic stasis, this is an in-depth, excavationary study. ‘Surfacing’ the Politics of Desire renders present and material — brings to the surface — previous lacunae in both theoretical criticism and literary analyses in order that literature, rather than be constrained by interpretations anchored in pre-established binaries, might affirm ‘an aesthetics of the possibility of difference, of difference as possibility’ (p. 182).

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