ABSTRACT
Peter Brooks is not concerned with the procedures of conventional psychological criticism, namely the psychoanalytic interpretation of authors, readers, or fictional characters. The nineteenth-century novel is seen by Brooks as making 'ambition the vehicle and emblem of Eros, that which totalizes the world as possession and progress'. Brooks takes as his final starting-point the observation that both Freud and the nineteenth-century novels that taught him so much use the motor or engine as the model for the dynamics of the narrative text. It is to La Peau de chagrin that Brooks turns for a detailed exploration of his theme, in an attempt to engage with desire 'not only as the motor force of plot but as the very motive of narrative', an exploration of the 'narrative of desire and the desire of narrative'. La Peau de chagrin is thus seen as an 'allegory not only of life but of the telling of the life story'.
