SAVAGE REPRISALS
Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks.
By Peter Gay.
192 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Peter Gay, the prominent cultural historian, here does a skillful turn as a literary critic. Highlighting three landmark novels of the 1850-1910 period -- ''Bleak House,'' ''Madame Bovary'' and ''Buddenbrooks'' -- Gay explores fiction as ''a mirror held up to its world,'' albeit a mirror that throws ''imperfect reflections.'' This broad premise gives him plenty of room to ruminate about literature in relation to history and biography. Reading ''Savage Reprisals,'' one of the Norton Lecture Series books, is like sitting in a college lecture hall and listening to a seasoned professor perform scintillating riffs on masterworks and their contexts.
The book's title refers to the vindictiveness that drives these novels. Some of Gay's most provocative insights relate to the revenge motif. He points out that Charles Dickens, infuriated by a botched lawsuit that wasted his time in 1844, gets ''reprisal for injuries suffered -- and injuries imagined'' in ''Bleak House'' (1853), where he satirizes the British court system as vicious and stupid. Gay shows that Dickens's flawless heroines, like Esther Summerson in ''Bleak House'' or Agnes Wickfield in ''David Copperfield,'' are not to be dismissed as cloying paragons. Instead, they can be viewed as the imaginative creations of an author who had ''problematic relationships with women, starting with his mother.'' Dickens was scarred in childhood when his mother refused to allow him to quit a warehouse job and resume his education, a refusal, he later said, ''I never can forget.'' Devastated also by the death of his beloved sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, Dickens assuaged his grief by fashioning idealized mother figures in his fiction.
Gustave Flaubert, too, used the novel to exorcise social and personal demons. The self-appointed scourge of middle-class mediocrity, he lamented to a friend, ''I feel against the stupidity of my epoch waves of hatred that choke me.'' His most memorable attack on bourgeois culture came in ''Madame Bovary'' (1857), his classic portrait of a bored housewife whose failure to find happiness in two adulterous affairs leads to her suicide. Here Gay navigates adroitly between history, biography and close reading. He notes that since divorce was banned in France during the period ''Madame Bovary'' was written, adultery was a ''perhaps necessary recourse for a restless husband or a neglected wife.'' He analyzes Emma Bovary with admirable subtlety. On the one hand, she embodies the provincial culture Flaubert detested. She is, in Gay's words, ''an instructive instance of the general inauthenticity, a small replica of her society at large.'' Still, as Gay shows, Flaubert deeply sympathized with her. Fleshing out the novelist's famous statement ''Madame Bovary, c'est moi,'' Gay informs us that Flaubert felt so close to his tortured heroine that he wept when writing and that he suffered two attacks of indigestion as he composed the scene in which she poisons herself.
Also hostile to bourgeois society, according to Gay, was Thomas Mann. Describing ''Buddenbrooks'' (1901), his novel about a family's decline over four generations, Mann spoke of ''the artist's sublime revenge on his experience.'' Gay demonstrates that in the novel Mann wreaks revenge on his well-heeled father, a senator and grain merchant, by excoriating capitalism. On a deeper level, Gay suggests, Mann in his fiction sought reprisal against repressive sexual conventions. Although married and the father of six, Mann wrestled with homosexual yearnings that surfaced most notably in ''Death in Venice,'' in which he portrays an aging man taken with a beautiful Polish boy. ''Buddenbrooks,'' Gay points out, is short on heterosexual love scenes and rife with homoerotic suggestions. For instance, the piano playing of the 8-year-old Hanno Buddenbrook is an orgy of sensual sound. Mann seems captivated not only by the music, which Gay calls the novel's ''harbinger and . . . agent of Eros,'' but also by the young musician, swept to orgasmic heights by his own playing.
Gay frames his readings with provocative theorizing about literature in its relation to human life and society. Well armed with solid biographical and historical facts, he is in a strong position to challenge the recently fashionable critical approach known as deconstruction or postmodernism. Assaulting the postmodern notion that ''there is no such thing as truth to begin with,'' that ''everything, a work of history as much as a novel, is only a text with its subtexts,'' he insists that novels reflect reality, though sometimes obliquely, and history represents a collective search for truth on the part of scholars who, despite disagreements, hope to establish ''a thoroughly well-informed accord on the past'': ''To put it bluntly, there may be history in fiction, but there should be no fiction in history.''
This argument is sound, though one has to consider the entire range of Gay's other books -- not just this slim one -- to find full support for it. In particular, his work on the Enlightenment and his multivolume study of the bourgeois experience stand as monuments of scrupulous scholarship. They lend credence to the notion that history, far from being merely a text or a subjective fabrication, is, at its best, a credible record of past people and events.
Because ''Savage Reprisals'' is literary criticism rather than history, it treads on more ambiguous territory than does Gay's previous work. Although Gay convincingly argues that his three authors ''have much to say to historians'' since they anchor their fiction in actual people and events, he also acknowledges that that they distort facts according to their passions and beliefs. His past books have revealed that bourgeois society was in many ways cultured and progressive. He balks, therefore, at his novelists' savage portraits of the bourgeois experience. For instance, he says ''Madame Bovary'' does ''a considerable injustice'' by caricaturing the French middle class as stupidly philistine; the novel is ''not a disinterested presentation of the evidence,'' and so its ''uses to the historian as historian are severely limited.'' Simultaneously fascinated and repelled by his authors' efforts as social commentators, he coins notably ambivalent epithets for them -- Dickens is an ''Angry Anarchist,'' Flaubert a ''Phobic Anatomist'' and Mann a ''Mutinous Patrician.''
A tapestry of contrasting shades, ''Savage Reprisals'' shares the complexity of its subjects. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in real time, often about real events. To some, this may seem obvious. To those appalled by trendy dismissals of historical scholarship, it is a bracing return to common sense.cts. It reminds us that novels are written by real people with real feelings in r