Stella

Abstract

Camille Flammarion: Introduction de Danielle Chaperon. (Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, 69). Paris, Champion, 2003. 288 pp. Hb €40.00. Best known as the founder of the Société Astronomique de France, Camille Flammarion also belonged to a generation of writers who, assisted by powerful editors, aimed to popularize science through mass-marketed volumes. While Louis Figuier wrote of the marvels of technology and Jules Verne produced a history of the great navigators, Flammarion authored the massively successful Astronomie populaire (1879) which, coincidentally, helped to establish his brother Ernest's still famous publishing house. But if Verne was primarily an author of fiction who also produced manuals, Camille Flammarion was the opposite. His two most successful novels, Uranie (1889) and Stella (1897), are uncertain forays into fiction, though they remain historically important for a number of reasons — not least because they tell us something about the appetite for scientific romance in an era dominated by the Jules Ferry reforms. In her introduction to Stella, Danielle Chaperon asks whether this popularizing novel can truly be considered ‘literary’, and she focuses her attention on a marginal discussion about the scientific novelist within the text itself. Curiously, her argument assumes that literature and science are still considered to belong in opposing camps in the late nineteenth century. Yet, as Chaperon rightly suggests, this is less a novel of initiation into the wonders of physics and astronomy — though it is that too — than an account of sexual and emotional liberation. Its real interest is in the depiction of a heroine who seeks both intellectual and sensual communion with her lover, and who is prepared to flout convention and social expectation in order to pursue her goal. The confrontation of science and faith is, as might be expected of a novel published in 1897, central to that drama, and the debate about positivism, God and the Catholic Church occupies such a significant space that it ought, one feels, to have been tackled more fully in the introduction. The position that the novel promotes is revealing. Rejecting Catholicism as well as positivism, Stella and her lover Dargilan espouse a form of cosmic mysticism and claim that it is because they have turned away from conventional religion that they are able to believe more fully in a divine presence. The novel refers frequently to Pascal, yet finds a uniformly positive message in the contemplation of those ‘espaces infinis’. More might well have been said about Flammarion's very fin-de-siècle view of such matters. Although the footnotes that the editor provides throughout the text offer some insights into the historical context of his writing, they sometimes appear arbitrary and impressionistic. A problem of a different order is the unusually high incidence of careless typographical errors in this volume. But it ends with a useful chronology and bibliography, the latter offering a comprehensive list of Flammarion's own publications as well as a selection of recent writings about him.