Goulet - Optiques The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction

Optiques

CRITICAL AUTHORS & ISSUES

Josu Harari, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Science of the Eye and the Birth
of Modern French Fiction

ANDREA GOULET

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goulet, Andrea.

Optiques : the science of the eye and the birth of modern French fiction / Andrea Goulet.

p. cm (Critical authors & issues)

ISBN-13: 9780-81223931-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 08122-39318 (cloth : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. French fiction19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. French fiction20th centuryHistory and criticism. 3. Vision in literature. I Title. II. Series

PQ653 .G68 2006

For my parents:
Denis Andr Goulet and
AnaMaria Reynaldo Goulet

In Bouvard et Pcuchet (1881), Gustave Flaubert pokes fun at the fads and follies of his age by allowing his characters to cycle through a series of dilettantish obsessions. Among the many scientific, pseudoscientific, and philosophical discourses debunked through the heroes ineptitude, we find a discussion of the nature of light. Bouvard and Pcuchet, who have been roaming about in a hazily metaphysical mood, turn their attention to a candles flame: As they watched the candle burn, they speculated as to whether light is found in the object or in our eye. Since stars may already have died out by the time their light reaches us, we may be admiring nonexistent things.occurring within the eye, such as floaters, blur circles, sunspots, and afterimages. But as Bouvard and Pcuchets confusion suggests, the question of objective versus subjective origin for such images had not been definitively resolved by the scientific community in one direction or the other, even at this late date in the century.

In fact, if we look at the second part of Flauberts passage cited above, we find that the indeterminacy of a luminous images epistemological status leads to an even more radical ontological crisis: does what we seea star, for exampleeven exist? This step in Bouvard and Pcuchets reasoning is informed by contemporary advances in optics on the physical properties of light. In 1849 and 1869, respectively, the French scientists Fizeau and Foucault had published well-circulated research on measuring the speed of light. Their discoveries act as a topical premise for Bouvard and Pcuchets doubt and lead to the broader question: given that the distance of astronomical bodies surpasses the speed of light so as to allow us to see stars that no longer exist, how can we be sure that anything we perceive is real? The slippage, so typical of Flauberts text, from scientific progress to systematic doubt may seem merely comic or clichd in the context of Bouvard et Pcuchets deflationary irony. But the very triteness of Flauberts ides reues affords modern scholars important insights into the vocabularies and premises of scientific discourses circulating in the Europe of his time. Bouvard and Pcuchets reflection on light crystallizes the substantive epistemological question that gripped contemporary thinkers from Descartes, Condillac, Malebranche, and Buffon to Helmholtz and Giraud-Teulon: how can subjective perception guarantee knowledge of external reality? Or, what is the relation between what the eye sees and what the mind knows?

This book argues that these questions of visual epistemology, while scientific and philosophical in nature, fundamentally structure the semantic and symbolic logic of the modern French novelnot only through the satirical invocations of a Bouvard et Pcuchet, but more directly through the shifting elaborations of the narrative subject as defined according to visual paradigms. From Hugos scenes of hallucinatory blindness, Balzacs elaborations of visionary science, and Villiers obsessive interest in visual pathology through to the nouveau romans appeals to pure opticality, nineteenth- and twentieth-century French fiction has harnessed the metaphorics of sight in the service of narrative form. Consider the following topoi of literary studies: the metaphysics of the visionary novel, the omniscient eye of realist narration, the positivist gaze of scientific naturalism, the hysterical warp of decadent vision, the kaleidoscope of Proustian subjectivity, and the fragmented antiperspectivalism of postmodern fiction. Though locally contested, each of these has become a critical touchpoint in broad histories of the modern French novelindeed of modern fiction more generally. But critical and literary histories have not adequately connected the internal tensions of these topoieach implicitly associating visual perspective with narrative formto the scientific and philosophical contexts of the shifting history of vision itself. This book pays critical attention to the rich contestations and overlapping debates about the nature of vision and thoughtdebates increasingly elucidated through the field of visual studiesin order to refine and revise a history of narrative perspective.

In one of the most important interdisciplinary initiatives of recent years, scholars of art history, philosophy, and history of science have problematized a static conception of the human seeing subject by calling attention to the changing ways in which vision is imagined, defined, and articulated across various ages and cultures.and rightly so, as there is still much work to be done in what might be called the interstices of visual culture, the moments where opticality is neither dominant nor counterhegemonic, but subject to complex and fruitful internal tensions.

By recovering the scientific and philosophical debates about vision that informed nineteenth-century European thought, this book hopes to nuance and revise current critical views on the modern novel, adding historical precision to the oft-cited typing of realism as a visual mode. In contrast, for example, to the conceptual vision associated with Proustian modernism, Optiques reasserts the materialist bases of realist fiction by establishing a genealogy of popular literary genres as fundamentally opticalthat is, as articulated according to bodily notions of sight.

One of the most suggestive moments for the study of visuality is 1830, a date that not only holds literary and historical importance for France

Clearly, this history of nineteenth-century conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity is neither simple nor static. But by studying the varied intersections between visual concepts and evolving narrative techniques in nineteenth-century France, we can begin to track some of the terms of debate as they shifted from 1830 to 1910. Starting from the premise that changing notions of how the eye sees have formed and informed articulations of how the mind knowsthat optics is directly related to epistemologythis book further connects visual epistemology to the development of the modern novel in its most important transformative stage. It recovers an untold literary history by bringing to bear the scientific and philosophical context of visuality not just on the literary metaphorics of vision but on the very logic of realism and its generic offspring. More specifically, the book finds that post-Lockean debates between objective vision and subjective vision crucially structured narrative tensions: between visionary idealism and realist temporality in Balzacs