ISBN 0-8093-1753-2
L. Ross Chambers (book jacket)
"I have read Renée Kingcaid's Neurosis and Narrative with great interest and real admiration. Decadence in French literature is a topic that is still largely treated in broadly interpretative terms, and a book that reads certain of its texts with the close attention and critical acumen Kingcaid displays here is already a valuable addition to that field. . . . [T]his is also the first specific account known to me of a relation between neurosis and the rhetorical and narrative structures of a specific corpus of writing--one that is in fact contemporaneous with the period of the invention of psychoanalysis. . . . Consequently, there are matters of interest here for literary historians, narrative theorists, critics interested in literature and psychoanalysis, and feminists interested in the concepts of neurosis and hysteria."
Roland Champagne, Studies in Short Fiction
"The simultaneity of French Decadence and Freud's psychoanalysis is a well-chosen topic to explore the question under what conditions can troping be neurosis. Kingcaid is not concerned with the influences between Freud and Decadence but with the ways in which psychoanalysis can assist in reading the short fiction of Marcel Proust, Jean Lorrain, and Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette). She is well-informed about the scholarship in psychoanalysis, Decadence, and literary semiotics and applies these well as she gives close readings of the metonymic powers of these narratives. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is especially beneficial in revealing the predisposition of psychoanalysis to consider hysteria as a female malady. Kingcaid's choices of Decadent authors of short fiction also help to dispel this myth. Kingcaid's study shows that neurosis is not a gender-specific condition but a human form of creativity in which French Decadence excelled."
Kathryn E. Wildgen, Rocky Mountain Review
"As Renée A. Kingcaid explains in the last chapter of Neurosis and Narrative, she was 'tempted. . . by the temporal coincidence of two discourses--Freud's and the Decadents'--that share a common interest in neurosis and that express this interest in narrative, whether or not they set out explicitly to do so' (146). Her excellent study greatly enhances the comprehension and the aesthetic reaction of the reader of thoses texts she analyzes. Her constant concern is to enlighten, not dazzle or confound her reader with obfuscating jargon, at least not any more than is necessary in a text in which Lacan's name is mentioned. Kingcaid's professed goal is to offer 'something new to our understanding of neurosis and Decadence: that is, that narrative technique, and not just Decadent language or its themes, substantiates the claims of this literature to plunge its roots deeply into neurosis' (150). and this she does succinctly and convincingly."
Will L. McLendon, Romance Quarterly
"Primary among the numerous virtues of these essays is that of considering in its own right a minor work by a 'major' author (Proust) while promoting to critical prominence the short fiction of his two 'minor' contemporaries. . . Using Freud's Dora case (Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ) and Lacanian theory as a base, Kingcaid carefully defines her terms and goals, compes to grips straightway with the question: what is the Décadence decadent from? What 'falls away' in this literature, along with 'the conventions of everyday language that keep the signifier safely apart from the troubled pools of the childhood unconscious,' are 'the veils from the eyes of the mind' (8). Language 'in its high neurotic mode' is the meat of these studies of Proust, Lorrain, and Rachilde through their short stories in collection, 'a bastard form of fiction' whose very brevity would seem to give them certain advantages over the decadent novel."
Robin Mackenzie, Modern Language Review
"Renée Kingcaid's book Neurosis and Narrative is an imaginative attempt to plot the relations between, on the one hand, the concepts of psychoanalysis (fetish, trauma, displacement, the return of the repressed) and on the other, narrative devices and thematic structures in the short fiction of Proust, Jean Lorrain, and Rachilde. . . . The chapter on Les Plaisirs et les jours is, to my mind, the least successful of the three: there is an over-reliance on biographical data (Proust's relation to his father in particular), and the fetish seems at times too blunt an instrument to allow Kingcaid to distinguish between the most disparate textual levels and phenomena. However, the analysis of the narrative shifts and strategies at work in the stories themselves is often strikingly subtle and convincing.
Kingcaid is in fact a very perceptive 'close reader,' as the subsequent chapters on Lorrain and Rachilde confirm: the former in particular seems to me very convincing in its charting of the various textual manifestations of the return of the repressed in Masques et fantômes. . . The chapter on Rachilde is similarly enlightening in its treatment of patterns of displacement which structure her fictional world. . . In general. . .Kingcaid's presentation of the theories she uses is lucid and to the point, and her choice of approach is entirely vindicated (if vindication were needed) by the interest and subtlety of the reading it generates."
Maryline Lukacher, Nineteenth-Century French Studies
"Neurosis and Narrative raises numerous issues that call for a revision of psychoanalytic language, particularly in its confrontation with neurotic, decadent literature. One of Kingcaid's achievements is to have unburied these fin de siècle stories. Her book makes a strong case for their inclusion in the canon."
Denis Pernot, Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France
"Renée Kingcaid présente ici les résultats d'une recherche originale qui complète utilement notre compréhension de la décadence. Constatant que les premiers travaux de Freud sont contemporains du développement du discours décadent, l'auteur lit différentes nouvelles de Proust, de Lorraine et de Rachilde de façon à mettre en évidence le fonctionnement d'une rhétorique de la névrose. Ce faisant, ses lectures s'intéressent autant à l'interprétation psychanalytique dees constantes thématiques qu'elles repèrent qu'à la mise en fiction et à la narrativisation de la névrose. . . . Lisant de manière convaincante la névrose de l'écrivain décadent aux formes et structures qui lui sont données dans des nouvelles représentatives de l'esthétique du tournant du siècle, le livre de Renée Kingcaid ouvrira certainement des perspectives méthodologiques et interprétatives nouvelles à ceux que les écritures de la décadence intéressent."
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