Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 295.

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLegacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 295.Pim HigginsonPim HigginsonUniversity of New Mexico, Albuquerque Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAndrea Goulet’s ambitious and wide-ranging Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France is a fascinating and timely new approach to French crime fiction that researchers in the field will appreciate. Legacies covers works from the early sensationalist romans feuilletons of the Second Empire, culminating in Eugène Sue’s famous Mystères de Paris (1842–43), and moves diachronically to conclude with late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century noir texts by authors such as Fred Vargas, Maurice Dantec, and Vladan Radoman. Recent research on the crime fiction generally focuses on sociological concerns and the polar’s challenge to preconceptions about genre and popular culture. Also, current scholarship has tended to privilege noir or hard-boiled narratives over the ostensibly more traditional novel of ratiocination. Goulet’s first important move is therefore to lead us back to the origins of the detective genre, Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) mentioned in her title, and the “intellectual” approach famously inaugurated by the novel’s protagonist, Auguste Dupin. Indeed, this was the critical slant adopted in Régis Messac’s early Le “detective novel” et l’influence de la pensée scientifique (1929). Nevertheless, if science, and/or “rationality” play a pivotal role, Goulet’s frequent invocations of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault (among others) suggest the deconstructive impulse at the heart of this project. In sum, this study is also or first about the narrow limits of rationality that the French crime genre exposes.As is particularly evident in the opening chapters, the idea of spatial and temporal forms of mapping and the tension between these two axes of analysis guides her reading. These axes are embodied metonymically for Goulet in historical nineteenth-century figures: Georges Cuvier and Napoleon. On one hand, Cuvier represents an evolutionary, paleontological, and archeological methodology broadly informing the crime genre. He helps explain how early French detective fiction sees the criminal foundation of modernity as the resurgence of atavistic forces. On the other hand, Napoleon represents a spatial axis as the figure whose expansive national project began France’s broad colonial march outward and precipitated the subsequent return of a spatially defined alterity to the French same. These names, Cuvier and Napoleon, thereby become the two axes that vector time and space in a manner akin to what Mikael Bakhtin defined as the chronotopic features of the modern Western novel. They also broadly define Legacies of the Rue Morgue by dividing Goulet’s text into two mutually constitutive parts. All the while, these two guiding modalities of inquiry are themselves critically examined for their epistemological investments in “objective” forms of theoretical situatedness.Stated differently, Goulet’s greatest achievement here is simultaneously to locate metaphors and tropes of hypermodernity, deep historical and prehistorical, or geological time, and spatial metaphors and tropes of local, peripheral, and/or international settings (and the kinetic and static relations between these various places) in the texts she analyzes. This manner of proceeding allows the author to underscore, through the seemingly objective discourses of natural and social sciences (history and geography, for example), the particular—and sometimes peculiar—parameters of France’s sense of its own rapidly evolving identity. What Legacies vividly describes is a France that perceives itself as national space millennially rooted, but that is increasingly driven to contend with the centrifugal forces of global expansion as these are exponentially accelerated by the technological and political revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That is, as Goulet shows, French crime novels simultaneously critically assess the forces of modernity and postmodernity and are symptoms of them as well. In this sense, Goulet provides an elaborate and entirely convincing explanation for the paradoxical simultaneity of reaction and revolution several critics have noted as a defining feature of the crime genre in general and the French polar in particular. The texts simultaneously bemoan the effects of modernity and represent some of the most compelling symptoms of its unstoppable momentum.To summarize, this is a brilliant new approach to the genre that is impeccably documented, elegantly written, and creatively assembled. Indeed, it is important to underscore that this is not an assemblage of disparate articles but is a sustained critical analysis that moves through often overlooked materials (this is particularly true of the earlier chapters), using a highly original and tremendously productive approach. As any such enterprise, it necessarily makes choices about which texts to include, and in some cases one may question what is excluded. Perhaps the most noteworthy absence is Jean-Patrick Manchette, who is generally recognized as the originator of neo-noir in a French context and for whom preoccupations with space and time were essential. Manchette’s early politicization of the genre and his evident preoccupation with France’s colonial enterprise would have been welcome. Others might mention Boilleau-Narcejac (only mentioned for their critical writings) as a possible oversight, given their uniquely Gallic take on the genre and their transnational influence. Nevertheless, despite these very minor concerns, this is a book to which any serious critic of the French crime genre will be referring in the future and that represents, more broadly, a key contribution to the study of the modern French novel as well. With Legacies of the Rue Morgue, Andrea Goulet has made an incontournable contribution to the field. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 3February 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694796HistoryPublished online September 28, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.