magiadoreal

When she is explaining to Rodolphe and Clémence why she can never marry Prince Henri, Fleur-de-Marie concludes her pathetic confession: "I love Prince Henri too much, I respect him too much, ever to give him a hand that has been touched by the bandits of the Cité" (...). The formula recapitulates the antithesis that governs her existence, and suggests the uncrossable bar separating the terms of the antithesis. Calling upon Freud's concepts of the "displacement upwards" that can occur in the symptoms of the hysteric neurotics, we can say that "hand" here is a metonymy, a euphemism that displaces the place of uncleanness, of soillure . Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , p. 149

Thomas Hardy who finally unveils the body in the English novel, most particularly in Tess of the d'Urbervilles , facing at last, in relative nakedness, the presence and power of Eros, and making the next step - to D.H.Lawrence - merely inevitable. In France not only is the weight of self-censorship so much lighter (...), there is also the unavowed but nonetheless living inheritance from the eighteenth century novel, especially its masterpiece, Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses , which has never been surpassed as an account of the political erotic body and its place in the network of writing and reading. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , p. 144.

Balzac apparently believed (it was one of his father's articles of faith) that man is endowed with a limited quantity of vital energy, in essence sexual potency, which he could either prudently conserve or else exorbitantly expend. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , pp. 43-44.

Walter Benjamin has made this point in the simplest and most extreme way, in claiming that what we seek in narrative fictions is that knowledge of death which is denied to us in our own lives (...). Benjamin thus advances the ultimate argument for the necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , pp. 22.

Our lives are ceaselessly interwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, antecipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , p. 3