[In the following review, Folks regards Figural Realism as “an eloquent effort” in defense of poststructuralism.]

Building upon his previous studies Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), White's latest book, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, is an eloquent effort to defend an earlier tradition of poststructuralism that has come to seem less and less relevant to the social and historical issues that occupy contemporary critical practice. Drawing on the mid-century criticism of Auerbach, Barthes, Derrida, de Man, and Ricoeur and aligning himself with modernist literary culture, White defends a perspective that has been challenged by New Historical, neo-Marxist, and social agenda critics.

From a historicist perspective, a major difficulty with poststructuralist theory lies in its inability to make distinctions between historical events which, in and of themselves, are significant and those which are not, and in its obscuring of the grounds for historical causation and development. For those who attempt to understand the astounding scale of human destruction in the Holocaust, for example, does that event's “meaning” rest only in its incomprehensibility, or does its meaning lie in the literal events themselves? In attempting to refute the arguments of those, such as Berel Lang and George Steiner, who regard the Holocaust in the terms of realist historiography, as an event that requires our scrupulous attention to literal truth, White resorts to a familiar poststructuralist argument, but one that seems inadequate in a discussion of historical events of such a great order. Since the historical event itself can only be expressed in language, its “reality” is linguistic rather than literal, and thus only a figural presentation of historical events—no matter how “real” they may seem—can add to our understanding of history. The aesthetic or intellectual value of such “figural realism” rests in its self-conscious and inventive use of form and language rather than in its probing of the “reasons” for historical events. For example, White posits as “much more critically self-conscious” a work like Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale “which presents the event of the Holocaust in the medium of the (black and white) comic book and in a mode of bitter satire” (31–32). Maus exemplifies “the modernist version of the realist project,” that is, a questioning, obscuring, or rejecting of the grounds of “objective reality” and obliterating of a sense of purposeful or “linear” development of historical chronology (40).

Maus may or may not be more self-conscious than historical accounts and memoirs by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and a host of others, but the weakness of White's position follows directly from the assumption that, given the absence of meaning and order within experiential reality, only narrative that in its form embodies this absence is significant. Narrative that “only” adds to our knowledge of facts or which proposes causes for historical events fails White's standard of self-consciousness; narrative that achieves a self-conscious level is meaningful, even if, as a realistic account, it is trite or highly speculative (as is Oliver Stone's JFK, a film White finds more appropriate to our postmodern sensibilities than nineteenth and twentieth century works of classic realism).

White's most detailed application of tropological theory occurs in a chapter on “Narrative, Description, and Tropology in Proust.” Focusing on a paragraph from Sodome et Gomorrhe in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, White attempts to demonstrate that “all genuinely interpretative discourse” involves a “play” of tropological figures and “an allegorization of the act of interpreting itself” (128). The paragraph in question describes (but in describing also interprets the surrounding text) the fountain by Hubert Robert in the Guermantes's palace garden. Proust's description of the fountain is an interpretive narrative that affords a reading of proxemic events in the narrative and that views these events, as White would have it, as a “chaotic and senseless … stream of life” (135). At the end of this chapter White discloses that all narrative emplotments must be understood as having a single intention: “the meaning of which is nothing but the process of linguistic figuration itself” (144).

It should be stressed that limitation of narrative meaning to the play of four classical tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) amounts not only to a method of productive reading but also to a restriction of reading: even as it clarifies the tropological basis of narrative emplotment, it closes off the reading of narrative as primarily referential or manifestly historical. It is important to consider further just what, in the practice of figural reading, has been excluded from discussion—just what sorts of “meaning” are left out: in essence, all readings that would discover order or purpose, rather than devastation and confusion, in ordinary existence. In an piquant coda to his reading of the fountain passage, White notes Proust's recognition (in his insertion of the figure of Hubert Robert, the painter and architect whose fascination with ruins occasioned the nickname “Robert des ruines”) of the inherent condition of “ruin” of experiential reality—“its impression of solidity and beauty and its real nature as a chaos as senseless as” the fountain itself (146). This reading of the fountain passage seems a remote and melancholy characterization, but one that is mirrored in the essays in White's new book.