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<i>Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction</i> (review)

2008; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frf.0.0018

1534-1836

Eduardo A. Febles,

French Literature and Criticism

Reviewed by: Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction Eduardo A. Febles Andrea Goulet . Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. viii + 272 pp. Andrea Goulet's Optiques opens up our eyes to a whole new way of seeing the history of nineteenth-century French literature. Her central thesis revolves around an epistemic shift registered in the science of optics from an idealized model based on deductive a priori rules as theorized by Kepler, Descartes, and Newton to an empirical inductive method espoused by Berkeley, Locke, and Condillac, among others. According to Goulet, this shift was inscribed in the very fabric of various narrative practices of the nineteenth-century as evinced in Balzac's ambiguously realist novels, in the emerging detective genre, and in a set of fin-de-siècle fantastic and science fiction works. In the first part of her study, Goulet uses this optique to revisit Balzac's status in the romantic/realist debate through an analysis of selected works from La Comédie humaine—Les Chouans, Louis Lambert, La Maison Nucingen, Le Bal de Sceaux, Séraphîta, La Recherche de l'absolu, La Peau de chagrin and La Fille aux yeux d'or. Goulet provides the scientific context to Balzac's metaphors of vision through the lens of either visionary or realist modes of looking that refract the subjective/objective question of optics. In the narrative of La Fille aux yeux d'or, for instance, Henri de Marsay's vision hinges on temporality for cognition as opposed to the visionary second sight of characters such as Victor Morillon and Louis Lambert: "De Marsay's gift of second sight depends on a temporal delay. Only after going back over, mentally, the previous evening's experience can he understand, partially, his own lack of control" (80). Ironically, then, the fall from visionary romanticism to realist observation entails the recognition of realism's inherent short-sightedness: ". . . the Paris that opens La Fille aux yeux d'or belies . . . a static conception of description. Hinting at what is to come, it already represents a fragmented space, in which attempts at unity are fated to fail" (65). When dealing with such a monumental corpus as that of Balzac's La Comédie humaine, it becomes difficult to trace thoroughly the epistemic shift that, according to Goulet, underlies Balzac's oeuvre. At times, the minute analysis of few details in such works as Les Chouans is used to draw conclusions which could have been more systematically pursued. [End Page 269] In the second part of her study, Goulet uses as case studies Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1869) and Gaston Leroux's Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907)—with several incursions into Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe (genre oblige)—to show that the detective novel rehearses many of the issues that plagued the science of optics during the nineteenth century. Whereas the detective genre has come to be defined as mostly deductive in nature—a private investigator uses his intellectual acumen to solve a mystery without the need to dirty his hands—Goulet successfully exposes the narrative strategies mobilized to hide the empiricist bent of these novels: "the roman policier can function only by alternately highlighting and obscuring the logical processes of induction and deduction" (109). Furthermore, she classifies Gaboriau's novel as a "visual bildungsroman" that recreates the logic of vision as an acquired skill rather than as a given birthright. Finally, drawing an analogy between the sealed yellow room of Leroux's work and the "yellow spot" or fovea centralis of the eye, Goulet traces the ways in which empirical methods are degraded and repressed in Le Mystère de la chambre jaune only to return and violate the sanctity of pure reason. The last section of the book brings together various works under the rubric of optogram fictions: Jules Verne's Les Frères Kip, Jules Claretie's L'Accusateur and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Claire Lenoir and L'Eve future. The phenomena described in this section transports us to the fantastic realm of images...