Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction Dorothy Kelly Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction. Andrea Goulet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 272. $49.95 (cloth). The image of a murderer imprinted on a dead woman's retina, the delayed visual experience of an afterimage—these and other examples of nineteenth-century optics ground Andrea Goulet's investigation of the science of the eye and modern French fiction. Her method brings to mind Foucault's genealogy of the gaze in her investigation of changes in the nineteenth-century understanding of vision in science, philosophy, and literature. She first identifies crucial opposing terms that structure the century's philosophic and scientific debates on perception. She then locates these oppositions at the heart of the modern French novel, whose form is tied to visual perspective and whose narrative subject is defined according to visual paradigms. Her premise is that an understanding of nineteenth-century optical science and philosophy can help us to understand the visual logic of narrative and the way the nineteenth-century "envisions" the acquisition of knowledge through sight. Her clever title, Optiques, aptly embodies the two major oppositions in the debate. The French word on the one hand refers to the "objective" science of the eye and of vision. On the other hand, the word optique can mean a "subjective" point of view or a perspective in both the literal and figural senses. The word's dual meaning thus expresses the opposing conceptions of vision that vie for primacy in philosophy/science and in narrative. Is vision a purely mechanical and physical reception of light from without? Or does sight exist in the mind, in subjective perception? The exact nature of the opposition varies from text to text: inductive or deductive logic, objective or subjective perspective, idealist or empiricist philosophy. A great strength of her readings is that she does not distort the texts to fit one single, over-arching dichotomy but rather reveals the problematic specific to each text from the particular optical topics found there. Her mapping of the vagaries of these dichotomies is important and interesting because it reveals the changes (again one thinks of Foucault) in the understanding of vision that lead to such schools of thought as phenomenology in the twentieth century. [End Page 834] Her introduction provides a coherent and useful background to the scientific and philosophical issues that she examines in detail in the literary texts. Then each of the book's three parts centers on the way in which the literary texts negotiate contradictory understandings of perception. In order to situate the science firmly in the texts, she has chosen narratives that use specific optical topics such as optograms in their narratives. Her claim is that the appearance of these topics in the literary texts is not gratuitous but rather central to nineteenth-century narrative concerns and practices, and to these texts specifically. The first section on Balzac exposes the conflict between the ideality of visionary insight and the empiricism of realist vision. Séraphîta and Victor Morillon, whose immediate and intuitive "second sight" does not need the empirical world, contrast with Henri de Marsay and his immersion in the temporality of interpreting what his eye perceives. For de Marsay, understanding results from taking a second look, a different kind of "second sight." Centering her analyses on the specific optical topics of the camera obscura and afterimages, Goulet shows how Balzac's texts engage in a kind of struggle between the two positions, between Romantic elements of the fantastic in the visionary experience of seers and nascent realism in empirically minded protagonists. In the second section on the early French detective novel, a genre which evolves in part from Balzac's narratives, Goulet reads against the typical view of detective fiction as a manifestation of pure Cartesian rationality exemplified by Sherlock Holmes. Using the science and philosophy of Cuvier and Helmholtz, she identifies both deductive and empirical tendencies of criminal investigations in texts by Poe, Doyle, Gaboriau, and Leroux. The optical topics of interest in these chapters include "floaters" and blind spots...