The Triangle of Representation

Reviewed by: The Triangle of Representation Lawrence R. Schehr Prendergast, Christopher. The Triangle of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. 123. The phenomenon of French theory began as a heady import to the English-speaking world in the late sixties. Produced originally at a moment at which the political stakes were very high—the war in Vietnam, mai 68, the free speech movement, various movements of liberation and decolonization—theory, with a capital "T," was seen by many as an powerful antidote to a perceived complacency in the ivory [End Page 153] tower, many of whose denizens were almost smug in their belief in canonicity, deep meaning, genius, and the like. The refreshing heterodoxy and iconoclasm of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida was perceived by many as a breath of fresh air. Theory, of course, came in with its own auto-critique: the volume, The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey (1970), based on an epoch-making conference at Johns Hopkins, contained both Lévi-Strauss and a critique of Lévi-Strauss in Jacques Derrida's famous article, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The political context of that initial percée was often forgotten, and as we moved into a post-Vietnam era, as the political seemed endlessly translated in a consumerist West into the economic, as the age of transnational capitalism reached new heights, we found ourselves living in what Jean-François Lyotard called "the postmodern condition." No master narratives, just deconstructive discourses (13); no tropes save irony. It is in this context that Christopher Prendergast has produced an excellent set of studies collected in the work at hand. His goal is to unpack some of the discourses of modernism and postmodernism as he looks at the knot of representation as it has been tied and untied over the past quarter century or so. He starts bravely as he insists that many people simply have it wrong, when, in the garb of the postmodern that has replaced that of canonicity, they say that many things are unrepresentable: "Everything is representable," he writes (1). The representation may be inadequate to the represented, but this does not mean that representation itself is impossible; the ideology inherent in certain forms or praxes of representation may be deconstructed, but this is not the same as saying that the object, concept, event, or thing cannot be represented. There are a number of strong chapters in this book. The first, on the triangle of representation, sets the tone for the volume. It is lucidly argued and offers a debunking, to borrow Paul de Man's term, of some of the more extravagant claims made by some postmodernists. It is a useful critique, not without its relations to the critique of postmodernism offered famously by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Prendergast's excellent chapter on the foundational work of Raymond Williams brings an important historical perspective to the work of that cultural critic, whose investment in modernism is again, through the forces of cultural development, unfortunately too often overlooked by contemporary critics. Readings of the work of Stephen Greenblatt and more generally [End Page 154] New Historicism and its perceived foibles, as well as studies of Edward Said and Walter Benjamin, for example, are even-handed assessments of what Prendergast perceives as the strengths and weaknesses of various critical approaches. And there are fine pages on the work of Erich Auerbach combined with a reading of Balzac's novella, "The Unknown Masterpiece." The volume is heterogeneous in its subject matter, containing a mix of studies, and this heterogeneity leads me to my first hesitation about the text. The last three chapters, the first of which is on history painting, the second of which is on Matisse and Proust, and the last of which is on the translations of Proust into English, do not seem to have the strength of the chapters already mentioned. Surely the subjects are worthy ones, but there is great scholarship on history painting that cannot be addressed in a few pages. The chapter on Matisse and Proust is, I think, far too speculative: "My suggestion that

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