Contamination - 41st Annual Nineteenth

Transcription

Contamination:
41st Annual Nineteenth-Century
French Studies Colloquium
Princeton University
November 5-7, 2015
NCFS 2015: Contamination
November 5-7, 2015
Thursday 5 November
Session 1 – 12:00 pm - 1:45 pm
Panel 1.A: Impurities of the Novel
Chair: Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania
“Space and Narration in Les Misérables”
David F. Bell, Duke University
The narrative logic of realist novels is causal, one event in a novel leads logically to
another, and the deus ex machina is banished in favor of a logic of encounter and coincidence,
organized around the structure of the biographies of individual novelistic characters evolving in a
sort of “naturalized” space. Hugo’s Les Misérables is not always, perhaps not even principally,
structured by this realist logic. It has been estimated, for example, that about twenty-five percent
of the pages of the novel take the form of digressions, tied to narrative events in only loosely
thematic ways, where Hugo discusses ideas and issues at a leisurely, didactic pace while the
story in the narrative grinds to a screeching halt. It is almost as if the novel’s organization were a
reactivation and exploitation of the classic rhetorical notion of the topos. As Frances Yates
argued in The Art of Memory, the notion of topos, analyzed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, came out of a
tradition of architectural mnemonics, and this paper explores the role this architectural
mnemonics plays in structuring Hugo’s novel.
“Une forme d’hybridation romanesque chez Balzac : organique/inorganique”
Francesco Spandri, University of Rome III
Le problème des relations entre l’organique et l’inorganique se présente dans La Comédie
humaine sous de multiples formes, et notamment à travers l’insertion dans le récit des
interactions mutuelles entre le Minéral et le Vivant. Tout au long du grand cycle narratif, la
matière minérale ne semble exister que pour modifier l’élément vital et en subir à son tour
l’influence. Dans La fille aux yeux d’or la coappartenance tragique de l’immatériel (vue, pensée)
et de la matérialité (métal, monnaie) se manifeste dès le titre du roman. L’exemple du père
Grandet incite plutôt à voir dans cette coappartenance du « regard » et du « métal jaune » la
preuve de l’existence d’un « langage secret » qu’il incombe à l’écrivain de décoder. Le nœud
organique/inorganique marque également la condition “mythologique” d’un Gobseck, créature
moitié homme moitié bronze, à la fois être ordinaire et symbole de richesse. On retrouve encore
ce type de rapport croisé dans le thème ferroviaire, si visible chez Balzac : c’est l’image de la
société lancée dans sa « voie métallique » (Le Cousin Pons) qui se charge alors d’exprimer
l’interconnexion étroite entre le monde minéral et le règne du vivant.
Nous nous proposons donc d’étudier les différents modes d’action réciproque entre le
Minéral et le Vivant en les inscrivant dans la perspective d’une conception large de la fiction
permettant d’articuler lecture immanente et signification historique du texte.
“La plume noire: Gaston Leroux's Impure (R)evolutions of the Underground”
Andrea Goulet, University of Pennsylvania
When the titular character of Gaston Leroux's 1903 serial novel La Double vie de
Théophraste Longuet begins exhibiting traits of the 18th-century brigand Cartouche in his speech
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and behavior, his friend turns to Darwinian pangenesis for explanation: just as a pigeon can
display the generation-skipping tare of a black feather on its plumage, the mild-mannered
Longuet might have inherited a tell-tale variation of the human species in the form of
Cartouche's disruptive violence. But the atavistic irruption of a low-life murderer into the body
of a Third Republic bureaucrat is not the only example of taint or contamination in this quirky,
parodic novel. In this paper, I will explore multiple forms of contamination at work in Leroux's
first roman-feuilleton:
Contamination of genre. Through humorous citationality and formal experimentation,
Leroux plays in this text with familiar tropes of the popular novel, from the mysteries and
pursuits of the roman policier to the inexplicable phenomena of the fantastic and the rationalist
discourse of proto-science fiction, with a provocative sprinkling of the criminal canard's
sensationalistic melodrama.
Contamination of medium. Like so many of his contemporaries, Leroux was a journalist
(chroniqueur judiciaire for Le Matin as of 1894) and a prolific writer of serial fictions published
in the same newspapers as his reportage features. In Théophraste Longuet, he dismantles
boundaries between fact and fiction by transplanting whole phrases from a press release on an
1897 underground concert into the text of his novel.
Contamination of language. Longuet's possession by Cartouche makes itself known
through linguistic disruptions (rendered typographically through italics), as archaic phrases and
bawdy tavern-songs puncture his speech and a graphological brutality sullies his writing. And of
course the monstrous Talpa, these snout-nosed and sex-crazed subterranean holdovers from the
fourteenth century, link retrogressive archaism to evolutionary biology by speaking the medieval
langue d'oïl under the modern streets of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Contamination of space. I read Leroux's novel in the lineage of underground narratives
like Berthet's Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), in which criminals hide in abandoned quarries
alongside counterfeiters, Revolutionary pamphleteers, and Templar knights invested in a pure
monarchic line of succession. In the end, I will argue, Leroux's 1903 novel, for all of its parodic
extravagance, constitutes an incisive comment on the ideologies of progress and purity in
France's national history.
Panel 1.B: Political Ecologies of City and Country
Chair: Sylvie Goutas, Wheaton College
“Paris is a Disease: Pathologies of Provincial Corruption in the Comédie humaine”
Charles Rice-Davis, Augustana College
This paper explores the peculiar and surprising intersection of two of Balzac's most
expansive themes: human pathology and the corrupting influence of urban (particularly Parisian)
manners on provincial ways of life. While a good deal of commentary has been devoted to each,
three novels (Les Chouans, Le Médecin de campagne and Pierrette) point to a more complex,
interrelated model of Parisian corruption as a pathological category, to be catalogued, diagnosed
and (hopefully) cured.
Pierrette provides a particularly useful lens for examining this confluence. The novel's
heroine is diagnosed with the then-deadly disease of nostalgia, specifically with what the narrator
calls "la nostalgie bretonne, maladie morale si connue que les colonels y ont égard pour les
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Bretons qui se trouvent dans leurs régiments." This fatal form of homesickness had indeed been
associated in the medical world with displaced provincials (especially with Bretons), and had
posed major difficulties for military medicine during the Napoleonic wars. Likewise, the details
of Pierrette's case of nostalgia demonstrate Balzac's intimate familiarity with the scientific
literature on the disease. Pierrette's ultimately fatal case of nostalgia is, however, never separate
from the incursion of Paris, which "finit par égratigner la surface" of the world around her.
With this diagnostic framework, I propose a reconsideration of critical moments in Les
Chouans and Le Médecin de campagne in medical terms. In both novels, a character laments an
earlier experience of corruption in the capitol: Marie de Verneuil (“mon séjour à Paris a dû me
gâter l’âme”) in the former and the doctor Benassis (“je devenais Parisien”) in the latter. What
can be gained by reframing these moments as not only dramatic confessions, but also as
testimonies of diagnosis and survival?
“Terreur & Terroir: Wilderness and Resistance from Nineteenth-Century France to
Québec”
Brian Martin, Williams College
In the introduction to Les Chouans (1829), the opening novel of the Comédie humaine,
Balzac dramatizes the country landscape of Brittany as a wilderness worthy of French America:
“La place que la Bretagne occupe au centre de l’Europe la rend beaucoup plus curieuse à
observer que ne l’est le Canada.” Long after Voltaire’s dismissal of New France—in Candide
(1759)—as worth little more than “quelques arpents de neige,” Balzac’s comparison of Brittany
and Québec inaugurated a new century of literary texts on French America in nineteenth-century
France, from Jules Verne’s account of the 1837-38 Patriots Rebellion in Famille-sans-nom
(1888), to Louis Hémon’s celebrated novel on the lives of Québécois loggers and homesteaders
in Maria Chapdelaine (1913). While Balzac, Verne, and Hémon sparked the French imagination
and its fascination with the wilderness, culture, and people of French America, Québécois writers
documented their own struggles against frontier adversity, colonial oppression, and cultural
assimilation in nineteenth-century Québec. Inspired by folk tales and legends, Québécois texts
celebrate the forest labor and rural courage of trappeurs, bûcherons, défricheurs, and patriotes,
from Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846), Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard le
défricheur (1862), and Joseph-Charles Taché’s Forestiers et voyageurs (1863), to Louis-Honoré
Fréchette’s Contes de Jos Violon (1899) and Honoré de Beaugrand’s Chasse-galerie (1900).
Like Balzac’s Scènes de la vie de campagne, Québécois romans du terroir stood in contrast to
the overpopulation, pollution, and exploitation of nineteenth-century industrialization and
urbanization, from Paris to Montréal. During this conference on “Contamination,” these texts
invite us to compare urban and industrial forms of terreur to idealized notions of rural terroir: to
consider the role of forest folktales and country novels as literary antidotes to urban
contaminants and industrial dangers in nineteenth-century France and French America.
“Entropie urbaine et utopie pastorale chez Zola”
Maxime Goergen, University of Sheffield
Le développement accéléré de l'espace urbain est représenté chez Zola, comme chez
Balzac avant lui, comme un acte de violence: violence physique à la ville ancienne qu'on éventre,
à la campagne qu'on détruit, violence sociale à ses habitants. A mesure que la ville s'agrandit et
que les rapports sociaux s'y complexifient, la nature, les frondaisons de la ville, deviennent
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mobilisables par la littérature comme l'espace expérimental d'une sociabilité apaisée perdue ou
en train de se perdre. Mais, contrairement à Balzac chez qui l'utopie pastorale est pleinement
fonctionnelle dans La Comédie humaine comme alternative à la vie parisienne, chez Zola
l'autonomie relative et la complémentarité entre un espace urbain conflictuel et un espace naturel
heureux est sans cesse menacée. L'agitation urbaine envahit l'espace naturel: c'est ainsi dans les
frondaisons du péri-urbain, dans les bois et les parcs, que commencent les transactions louches
qu'on mènera à bien une fois de retour en ville. Mais chez Zola c'est surtout la nature qui envahit
la ville. Mais cette nature n'est plus la nature: transformée par la ville, elle est devenue maladive,
artificielle ou perverse: la serre de La Curée, et son atmosphère méphitique, l'avalanche de linge
blanc imitant la pureté des Alpes dans Au Bonheur des dames. Le rapport ville-nature se présente
donc chez Zola sous le profil de la contamination et de l'entropie: le naturel y devient une valeur
culturelle, reproductible, marchande, et s'inscrit dans le circuit des désir sexuels ou financiers de
la ville.
Cette communication placera d'abord cette contamination entropique entre la ville et la
campagne au cœur des tiraillements idéologiques des Rougon-Macquart, entre amour du progrès
et nostalgie d'un ordre ancien; elle présentera ensuite, en particulier dans les deux romans cités
ci-dessus, les mécanismes de cette contamination. Dans une deuxième partie, enfin, elle
s'intéressera au roman Paris et à sa tentative de dépassement paradoxal de cette entropie, dans ce
que nous définirons, à la suite de Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson, comme une tentative ultime de
construction d'une utopie pastorale… au cœur même de la ville.
“On the ‘champs renouvelés par l’industrie’: The Sung Ecology of Pierre Dupont”
Xavier Fontaine, Princeton University
Anthem of the Revolution of 1848, the “Champ des ouvriers,” dubbed “Marseillaise du
travail” by Baudelaire, irrevocably elevated its author, Pierre Dupont, to the rank of icon among
political songwriters. Does not Walter Benjamin make him the champion of the proletarian
revolution in his Arcades Project? The solidarity of workers across borders, the defense of social
progress, the exaltation of the forces mobilized by industrial work...: so many themes do indeed
appear to foreshadow the lyrics of “L’Internationale.”
Yet, this view needs to be expanded against the backdrop of Dupont’s vast corpus.
Eschewing class struggle, the four volumes of the Chants et chansons—whose release spread
over the years 1851-1859 saw the Second Empire succeed the Second Republic—attest, on the
contrary, to a relentless desire to penetrate all layers of the social fabric. Blithely mixing erudite
references, local realities, patriotic and political allusions, broaching alternatively the city or
countryside, and disseminated by “colportage” to the most remote regions, Dupont’s
compositions transcend all social (bourgeoisie vs. working class and peasants) and geographic
divisions (urban vs. rural areas).
At the core of this deliberately federative will lies a particular conception of the song’s
essence. For Dupont, it is nothing but a rendering of a primordial melody: the sounds of nature.
Across the diversity of themes surpassing the simply bucolic, nature acts as the creative principle
at the root of the entire “Dupontian” repertoire as well as its continually regenerated product. The
“grande voix de la nature”—in the words of Ernest Reyer—guarantees the “purity” of the songs
all the while creating a dynamic in which any other mentioned reality is perceived as necessarily
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contaminating and inflecting nature, becoming its legitimate extension. In the preface to his last
volume, Dupont does not even hesitate to talk about “champs renouvelés par l’industrie.”
This unifying perspective departs from an approach that reduces Dupont to a mere
songwriter related to the 1848 events and will allow an outline of the political implications of
what proves to be an authentic “ecological system,” notably by confronting Dupont’s rhetoric
with other thinkers such as Leroux and Proudhon. How are the social body and the nation, not to
mention the democratic ideal, articulated by the “voice of nature”?
Panel 1.C: Mapping Colonial Contaminations: Displacement and Difference in
Theater, Fashion, and the Press
Chair: Mary Harper, Princeton University
“Des Arabes à l’Opéra! Rifa’a al-Tahtawi et Mohamed as-Saffar au spectacle à Paris”
Lise Schreier, Fordham University
Le 3 octobre 2014 s’installe au premier rang de la salle de l’Opéra Bastille un couple de
visiteurs du Golfe persique. Venus assister à une représentation de La Traviata de Verdi, ils
deviennent l’attraction de la soirée. Motif: la femme a le visage voilé. “Tous les spectateurs ont
pu la voir, elle était en gros plan sur tous les écrans,” note l’administration de l’Opéra pour
justifier le fait qu’on ait demandé à ces deux personnes de quitter les lieux en pleine
représentation. Si cet incident est représentatif des complexités de la France contemporaine, il
rappelle aussi d’autres épisodes datant du dix-neuvième siècle durant lesquels des Arabes, venus
assister à un spectacle parisien, ont involontairement éclipsé les artistes pour devenir le clou
d’une soirée. Ce déplacement de l’intérêt du public de la scène à la salle, présenté par les
journalistes et les caricaturistes de l’époque comme une forme de contamination, forme l’objet
de cette communication. Les dichotomies familières aux dix-neuvièmistes seront soulignées (ces
Arabes, affublés d’éventails et de cachemires, affolent les dames). Mais elles seront également
discutées de concert avec les récits de certains de ces visiteurs qui ont consigné leurs impressions
de ces mêmes événements dans leurs journaux de voyage. Les témoignages de Rifa’a al-Tahtawi
et Mohamed as-Saffar sur leur expérience des lieux de spectacle parisiens entre 1826 et 1846
pourront nous aider à formuler une généalogie de la difficulté à accepter une présence autre dans
des espaces de sociabilité français tenus pour essentiels.
“Defending the homme de couleur in Paris”
Pratima Prasad, University of Massachusetts, Boston
In 1836, the Parisian Revue des Colonies espoused the cause of a young mixed-race man
from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion (île Bourbon) who had been incarcerated and put on
trial on the island for what were, by all accounts, trumped up charges of planning an insurrection.
The young man was Louis-Timagène Houat, a self-identified mulâtre who would go on to be the
Reunion’s first novelist. Pratima Prasad’s paper takes as its starting point a letter written by
Houat in defense of himself and published in the Revue des Colonies. She reads Houat’s letter
alongside other early nineteenth-century writings in the French press by hommes de couleur (free
men of color) from Martinique and Saint-Domingue who were similarly accused, slandered, or
whose reputations were sullied, in large part because they were perceived as a threat to the ruling
whites in the colonies.
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In the colony, the identity of the homme de couleur is tethered to very specific types of
communal attachments that he maintains with various ethno-classes: privileged whites, slaves,
free persons of color, etc. But in order to fashion himself as worthy of defense and protection
from the liberal intelligentsia in France, he strips himself of these attachments “back home,”
pledging instead his belonging to a purer and more benevolent French state, la Mère-patrie. In
his telling, the metropole is a beacon of justice and liberty, whereas French ideals are corrupted
and contaminated in the colonies.
“Alger, cette antichambre de l’Afrique’: Fashioning Exoticism in Bel-Ami”
Heidi Brevik-Zender, University of California, Riverside
This paper examines late-nineteenth-century connections between the Parisian metropole
and the colonial Maghreb to which France was ever more aggressively laying claim in this
period. The approach centers on intersections of sartorial objects and the metaphor of the
antechamber in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. In particular the paper analyzes the ways in which
garments reveal the author’s critique of France’s expansionist politics by highlighting what
Maupassant depicts as the harmful "contaminating" effects of colonization in France itself (as
opposed to abroad). This reading of the novel implies that the impetus for Maupassant’s sharp
criticism of colonization is not what it did to the colonies, but rather what it threatened do to
French society more generally as brutal practices, personified by the novel’s anti-hero Georges
Duroy, were domesticated, normalized and eventually imitated. The analysis focuses on
examining the appropriation of exoticism in Bel-Ami, an endemic phenomenon of early-ThirdRepublic urban modernity, one that Susan Hiner, working through the lens of fashion, has called
“the domestication of the exotic.”
“Le mal de la Kasbah: Pierre Loti in Algeria”
Sage Goellner, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Pierre Loti (1850-1923) is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel, Aziyadé
(1879). This communication treats one of Loti’s lesser-known works, Les Trois dames de la
Kasbah (1882), in part inspired by his visit to Algeria in 1868. In this deceptively simple tale, a
group of French sailors arrive in Algiers and in a drunken haze they enter the Kasbah by
accident. Three of the sailors stay the night with Algerian prostitutes. It is later revealed that they
are infected with syphilis, which will eventually kill one of the sailors and infect the offspring of
the others. In Les Trois dames de la Kasbah, the disease expresses a vicious cycle of crosscontamination between metropolis and colony that symbolizes colonialism’s deleterious effects.
However, the surrounding architecture of the collection in which the short story first appeared,
Fleurs d’ennui (1882), is largely ignored in the scholarship on the Les Trois dames de la Kasbah.
As its preface states, Fleurs d’ennui is “un livre double” recounted by two narrators, Loti and
Plumkett. I argue that the frame story to Les Trois dames de la Kasbah foreshadows the
moribund anti-colonial morality tale it introduces. Just before Les Trois dames de la Kasbah, the
dialogue between the two narrators in this refractive text begins to paint negative images of
sickness and decay, presaging Les Trois dames de la Kasbah’s biting criticism of the
sociocultural disorder wrought by the French in Algiers.
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Panel 1.D: Baudelaire, Gautier et le venin du réalisme
Chairs: Karen F. Quandt, University of Delaware; Nicolas Valazza, Indiana University,
Bloomington
“« Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens »: Baudelaire, Gautier, and Landscape Painting”
Cassandra Hamrick, Saint Louis University
« On fit de [Courbet] l’apôtre du Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens, comme bien des
grands mots », writes Gautier in his review of the Salon of 1868. Confusion concerning the
meaning of the term is also noted by Baudelaire: « ... réalisme, – injure dégoûtante jetée à la face
de tous les analystes, mot vague et élastique », he writes in his 1857 essay on Madame Bovary.
Later, he appears to question whether Realism has a sense at all (« Puisque Réalisme il y a »).
At issue for Baudelaire, as would also be the case for Gautier, is what constitutes the « real ».
Ultimately, for the poet of Correspondances, the question remains intimately linked with Poetry
itself : « La Poésie est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, c’est ce qui n’est complètement vrai que dans un
autre monde » (ibid.). Nature is but a dictionary of signs reflective of a reality beyond the
material surface of « ce monde-ci ».
Similarily, Gautier speaks of the harmonious monde or microcosm that resonates in the
individual artist’s work. In the drive to renew art, Realism, on the other hand, has fallen off
course, stripping landscape painting of the principles of unity and cohesiveness that underlie
what might be called a kind of pre-ecological vision of nature. Rather than a rejuvenating
influence on art, Courbet’s Realism appears to have had a contaminating effect on artistic
expression in the eyes of Baudelaire and Gautier.
In this paper, we examine how the repercussions of this paradox are played out in the
representation of nature in landscape painting, particularly as seen by Théophile Gautier.
“La poétique de l’aquarelle: Gautier décontaminé par Baudelaire”
Karen F. Quandt, University of Delaware
Dans son premier essai sur Théophile Gautier (1859), l’exhumation menée par Baudelaire
des poèmes oubliés de son prédécesseur romantique révèle son désir de préserver le poète
adamantin des années 1830, purifié des banalités des entreprises journalistiques, des éloges creux
du progrès répandus au cours du Second Empire, et d’une esthétique de ‘l’art pour l’art’ hyperstylisée. Gautier applaudit au blanchiment intensif des façades de Paris exécuté en vue de
l’Exposition universelle de 1855 (“Le Nouveau Paris”, Paris et les Parisiens au XIXe siècle) avec
la même vigueur qu’il sacrifie l’aquarelle, dont les couleurs brûlées au four créent un émail
inflexiblement dur (“L’Art”; Emaux et camées, 1852). Cependant, Baudelaire déjoue habilement
la menace de cette “lourde nuée” de systèmes hygiéniques oppressifs, soulignant plutôt le flot
“élastique”, voire naturel du lyrisme primitif de Gautier, ainsi que son éclat coloré qui éclipse
même la clarté reflétée par le marbre ou le cristal.
Baudelaire célèbre dans cet essai les “fraîcheurs enchanteresses” et les “profondeurs
fuyantes” suggérées par la technique de l’aquarelle, ce qui nous invite à lire son exhumation d’un
Gautier romantique comme procédant à un “aquarellement” de son propre lyrisme. Les poèmes
urbains de Gautier enfouis dans le recueil Albertus (1832) me permettront, comme point de
départ, d’établir comment leur teinte générale d’une atmosphère éthérée et suggestive d’une
harmonie sourde inspirent la mise en scène établie par Baudelaire dans les “Tableaux parisiens”
(Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). Même si Baudelaire insiste plus vigoureusement que Gautier sur les
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laideurs produites par les pollutions et les chocs de la ville, mon propos sera de montrer
comment son appropriation des nuances de l’aquarelle sauvegarde son lyrisme d’une entreprise
nettement réaliste en même temps qu’elle détermine la forme ondulante de ses poèmes. Si
l’atmosphère de Paris prenait une couleur décidément noire lorsque sa population et son zèle
industriel s’épanouissaient avec abandon, le lessivage du paysage urbain mis en œuvre par
Baudelaire laisse filtrer, malgré tout, des couleurs et des harmonies vives et rêveuses parmi la
fange et la discorde.
“L’Œuvre empoisonnée : Baudelaire, Clésinger et la chair de la Présidente”
Nicolas Valazza, Indiana University, Bloomington
Apollonie Sabatier, surnommée « la Présidente », a servi de modèle, entre autres, à la
statue de la Femme piquée par un serpent de Clésinger, et inspiré le poème À celle qui est trop
gaie de Baudelaire, deux œuvres jugées scandaleuses lors de leur exposition et publication. La
statue de Clésinger a ainsi donné lieu à un âpre débat dans la presse en 1847, alors que le poème
de Baudelaire a été censuré suite au procès de 1857. Or, les scandales suscités par ces deux
œuvres présentent des analogies frappantes : le sculpteur et le poète sont accusés d’avoir
contaminé leurs œuvres avec la chair de leur modèle. D’une part, Gustave Planche soutient que
la statue de Clésinger n’a pas été modelée, mais bien moulée sur le corps de la femme, de sorte
que le procédé de l’artiste serait « à la sculpture ce que la photographie est à la peinture ».
D’autre part, les vers de Baudelaire sont accusés de « tout dire, tout peindre, tout mettre à nu »,
et condamnés par le tribunal pour « réalisme grossier ». Mon propos est d’examiner, à la lumière
du débat critique et des actes du procès, comment ces deux œuvres, qui ont préfiguré – bien
malgré elles – la querelle du réalisme, thématisent cette contamination de l’art par la chair, tout
en la dissimulant. En affirmant, dans À celle qui est trop gaie, vouloir « infuser [s]on venin »
dans le corps de la femme (ce que fait effectivement le « serpent » dans la statue de Clésinger), le
poète menace de rompre l’étanchéité entre l’œuvre et la chair ; une menace que les juges, avec
leur « interprétation syphilitique » du poème, ont bien perçue.
“Baudelaire, pour rire ou pour de vrai”
Paolo Tortonese, Université de Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
On rencontre dans le Spleen de Paris des rapprochements soudains entre des thèmes
traditionnellement incompatibles, comme par exemple l’amour et la nourriture, des chutes
brusques vers des thématiques basses, des plongées finales dans l’infect, qui laissent parfois le
lecteur dans l’hésitation : il se sent suspendu entre le rire et l’angoisse, entre la lecture comique
et la lecture sérieuse, ou tragique. La stratégie de Baudelaire, dans ces cas, semble répondre à
une nécessité d’entraîner le lecteur du haut vers le bas, en dévoilant par surprise la réalité banale
ou abjecte qui se cache derrière une apparence rare ou exquise. Cela ressemble d’une part à la
stratégie comique, d’autre part à la stratégie réaliste. Comme les comiques, Baudelaire juxtapose
la bassesse à la noblesse ; comme les réalistes, il dévoile le mal derrière le bien. L’équilibre
instable entre ces interprétations possibles, ainsi que l’incertitude générique du Spleen, donnent à
ses poèmes en prose un caractère unique d’ambiguïté.
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Panel 1.E: Public Hygiene and the Ecology of Waste
Chair: Effie Rentzou, Princeton University
“Rehabilitating Matter: Recycling Waste in Sand, Flaubert, Zola”
Manon Mathias, University of Aberdeen
This paper will examine the production and recycling of human waste in narratives by
Sand, Flaubert and Zola in the context of Pierre Leroux’s theory of the ‘circulus’. Drawing on
the insights of thinkers such as Alain Corbin and Dominique Laporte, the paper will explore the
new ways of conceptualizing relations between the body and the earth which emerged as a result
of scientific reflection on the place of humankind within nature. The discovery of deep time and
the theory of ‘transformisme’ challenged the assumption of man’s pre-eminence and inscribed
humans within a vast animal, mineral and vegetal network. Leroux used this sense of
interconnectedness to develop his ‘circulus’ theory in which human manure would be reused as
fertilizer, solving food shortages and fostering a collaborative relationship between humans and
the environment. Such rehabilitation of matter not only had a practical purpose but also carried
moral and ideological implications, as it disrupted the hierarchy between pure and impure, spirit
and matter. The regenerative power of matter takes on a political dimension in Sand’s work, as
she uses the criculus principles of collaboration and solidarity to challenge individualism within
human society. Although Zola foregrounds the breakdown of circulatory networks, his work also
revalorizes matter and foregrounds symbiotic relations between man and his environment.
Flaubert appears to mock the Leroussian ‘circulus’ theory, particularly in Bouvard et Pécuchet.
But the centrality of matter, and particularly our inability to manage its fluctuations, is
everywhere apparent in his œuvre. The nineteenth-century focus on waste and its reuse
prefigures today’s concerns with ecology, sustainability and recycling, but it also reveals a
particular fascination with the boundary between the human and the non-human.
“Thérèse Raquin and Second Empire Waste Management”
Andrea Thomas, Loyola University Maryland
In his 1868 preface to Thèrèse Raquin, Émile Zola defended himself against critics’
charges of “ordures et puanteurs,” “flaque de boue et de sang, d’égout, d’immondice,” and
“littérature putride” by claiming that he was simply writing the truth which would, in turn, purify
all. Here, in what is often considered a kind of manifesto for naturalism, and throughout the
novel, Zola saturates his prose with waste, water, and fire. Preferring the title of “chirugien” to
“égoutier littéraire,” Zola nevertheless provides some of his earliest commentaries on Second
Empire sanitation and society.
As a “chirugien” in Thérèse Raquin, Zola first experiments with Hippocratic
temperaments—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—for his characters, all of
whom lack free will and a soul. For example, when the novel’s protagonists, Laurent, of
sanguine temperament, and Thérèse, of melancholic temperament, commit murder, their remorse
manifests itself in a purely physical way. Yet, even as Zola’s characters adopt humors, parts of
Paris also take on a symbolic function in the context of these temperaments. As a dumping
ground for dead bodies and refuse, for instance, the Seine plays a crucial role in Thérèse Raquin.
The phlegmatic temperament of Camille, who drowns in the Seine, is symbolically linked to
water; both the river and the character continue to haunt the protagonists. Likewise, the morgue
serves as a “spectacle” at the center of Paris and takes on a perversely erotic character. In this
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presentation, I will show how Zola uses these temperaments symbolically in his urban imagery
in order to criticize contamination and waste in Haussmann-era Paris.
“Antidote Water: Public Baths and Swimming Pools in the Paris of 1830-1848”
Jennifer Terni, University of Connecticut
Between 1800 and 1850 the population of Paris had doubled, passing the million- person
mark in 1846. The city’s concentration of population, which reached its apogee in 1851 at 99 000
inhabitants per square mile, was the real source of urban misery. The choking density of traffic,
the perennial mud of Parisian streets, and the devastation of the cholera epidemic in 1832 were
so many symptoms of urban overcrowding.
Parisians responded in a variety of ways. On a public level, hygiene and beautification
became urgent priorities in this first era of modern urban planning. It was during this period that
the city was conceptualized in terms of systems and networks, and that its first public utilities—
gaslight, public transit, and railways—were established.1 This was the context in which new
suburbs were required to plant trees and flowers, to lay sidewalks and install gaslight, reflecting
new standards of urban development. The development of water infrastructure, however, lagged
far behind. While London installed indoor plumbing, the Paris prefecture added only 1800 public
water sources during this period. Paris’ most important source of private water remained its
22,000 water carriers until Haussmannization.2 The problems of hygiene, beautification, and
water found a private outlet in the growing popularity of the city’s public baths and swimming
pools. My paper will explore how people used these venues to suggest that the enjoyment of
Parisian water venues helped draw increased attention to the pollution of the city’s water
sources. I argue, that the importance of clean resources for recreation in this highly urban setting
foreshadowed an important strand in the logic of conservation.
Panel 1.F: Sound and Color Pollution
Chair: Seth Whidden, Villanova University
“Reading Noise”
Misha Avrekh, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Digital and Print Media department
If in the French urban novels of the late 1830s / early 1840s (Balzac, Sue) noise comes to
be depicted as a ubiquitous nuisance and a pollutant to be avoided and regulated, it is relatively
scarce in the regional novels from this period. In a way, this absence itself becomes a marker of
provinciality: silence dominates the countryside just as noise supposedly prevails in the city. In
my presentation, I will look at “noise”/bruit -- and, more generally, at notable auditory outbursts
-- in Prosper Mérimée’s Colomba (1840) and Balzac’s Les Paysans (1844) as sensory tools that
help make the countryside readable. In both novels, noise figures as an anomaly, a sign of
confrontation, calamity, or simply of forthcoming novelty, of arrival or encounter. The
geographic differences between the regions under study in these two novels -- an unassimilated
1
This is the argument of both Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004) and David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 8, 16-18, 3334.
2
Douglas Klahr, “Le développement des rues Parisiennes pendant la Monarchie de Juillet” in La Modernité avant
Haussmann (Paris: Editions Recherche, 2000) 222-227.
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borderland in Colomba, an uncontested interior in Les Paysans -- set up some of the distinctions
between the representations of noise that will be discussed in my paper. The metaphorical
meaning of bruit as a symptom of notoriety is also relevant both as a sign of readability and as a
way of interpretively connecting “provincial” noise (or lack thereof) and noise as an urban
nuisance. More generally, recent literary studies have argued for the pre-eminence of visuality in
the literary discourse of the eighteenth century (Wall, Levitt). My presentation will attempt to
position the auditory as a competitor, if not a successor, to the visual as the dominant mode of
depicting the world.
“Lyrical Contamination in Madame Bovary”
Renée Altergott, Princeton University
Throughout the period of genesis of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s
Correspondance reveals his aesthetic agenda to both elevate and purify the literary genre of
prose through its prosody and content.
First, in order to create a prose that would be “aussi rythmée, aussi sonore”3 as poetry
without being metered or rhymed, he shouted and reworked phrases in his gueuloir until the
contaminating poetic agents of assonance and word repetition had finally been neutralized.
Second, he had to actively suppress his own authorly tendency to write in Romantic figures of
style. In a letter to Louise Colet, he equates this with being riddled with lice: “Je suis gêné par le
sens métaphorique qui décidément me domine trop. Je suis dévoré de comparaisons, comme on
l’est de poux, et je ne passe mon temps qu’à les écraser” (27 décembre 1852).
Restricting his figurative language to a few mediocre tropes that pollute the thoughts and
dialogues of Charles and Emma, Flaubert turns to sound description as a new locus of
metaphorical signification. While the repetitive leitmotivs of Hippolyte, Binet, and the blind
beggar could pass for mere background noise, close analysis suggests that their repetition
produces subtle meaning for both the characters and the reader. Moreover, comparison of
successive drafts of these passages shows that Flaubert was able to use these descriptions to
absorb the explicit similes and metaphors he had otherwise erased from his text.
In this paper, I will examine the role of the textual leitmotiv in the realization of
Flaubert’s project for prose. Sound descriptions seem to offer an efficient alternative to the
metaphor, by conveying hidden meaning via realistic detail. However, Flaubert’s paratextual
recourse to musical metaphors such as the “symphony”4 to describe his text seem to betray the
ever-present influence of romantic tropes on his own conception of the act of writing. Should we
therefore regard the sound description as a catalyst of “new prose,” or rather as evidence of the
persisting interpenetration of Romanticism in prose?
3
Lettre à Louise Colet, Croisset, 22 juillet 1852
“Si jamais les effets d’une symphonie ont été reportés dans un livre, ce sera là. Il faut que ça hurle par
l’ensemble…” (Lettre à Louise Colet, Croisset, 12 octobre 1853; with regards to the Comices scene).
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“The Contagion of Poetry: Baudelaire’s Verse Contaminated by Strange Sounds”
Helen Abbott, University of Sheffield
In the wake of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal trial, Le Présent published a poem by Émile
Deschamps entitled ‘Sur Les Fleurs du Mal. À quelques censeurs’.5 Two lines of Deschamps’
poem stand out, and merit further interrogation:
Et la contagion, en vers, n’es pas possible,
À moins qu’on ne les chante, – et ce n’es point le cas –
Deschamps’ claim that verse in and of itself cannot contaminate is tempered by the suggestion
that singing those same verse lines could, in fact, spread contagion. The subsequent claim that
Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal are not to be sung (and therefore not capable of contaminating) is
intriguing, even wrong-footed, given that we know that a number of Baudelaire’s poems have
been set to music as song. This paper sets out to critique and examine this perspective on the
musical contamination Baudelaire’s poetry, with a particular focus on poems which highlight the
supposed depravity of Baudelaire’s poetic outlook, notably ‘Les Litanies de Satan’.6 It argues
that contagion comes into verse through cross-contamination with other art forms such as music.
However, it will also argue that cross-contamination does not have a negative, damaging effect
on Baudelaire’s verse, but is an important means of expanding the poetic sound palette.
Reviewing the critical scholarship which has largely ignored ‘Les Litanies de Satan’ and its
musical settings – notably the unusual context of 1960s-1980s American electronica settings of
‘Les Litanies de Satan’ by Ruth White and Diamanda Galás – this paper concludes that musical
contamination of poetry helps us to understand that we should expect Baudelaire’s poetry to turn
up in very unusual places.
Break 1:45 pm - 2:15 pm
5
The poem is dated 13 August 1857, just one week before the judgement was passed on Baudelaire (20 August
1857), but did not appear in print until 1 September 1857.
6
Elsewhere Deschamps had praised Baudelaire for poems such as ‘Don Juan aux Enfers’, les ‘Spleen’, ‘Les
Femmes damnées’, ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’, ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, ‘Le Vin de l’assassin’, ‘Confession’,
highlighting the power of their originality, daring to broach topics untouched elsewhere. See Émile Deschamps letter
to Baudelaire, 14 July 1857.
November 5-7, 2015
Thursday 5 November
Session 2 – 2:15 pm - 4:00 pm
Panel 2.A: Pourriture de Flaubert. (Dislocation de l’insignifiance)
Chair: Anthony Zielonka, Assumption College
“L’écrivain vaurien. (Flaubert ou la tentation de l’insignifiance)”
André Benhaïm, Princeton University
Le bourreau des Bovary est-il vraiment si méchant ? La méchanceté est affaire de chute
perpétuelle. Et chez Flaubert, tout semble toujours finir par s’écrouler, comme si casser la gueule
— culbuter, injurier, gueuler à tue-tête — était sa raison de vivre. On trébuche, on tombe, on se
ridiculise, on meurt bien sûr et, en général, très mal. Le pire, c’est que l’auteur semble se moquer
de tout cela, de toute la misère et surtout de toute la bêtise qu’il voit comme le fléau de
l’humanité, sa lèpre, et contre laquelle il n’a d’autre antidote à proposer que l’insulte. L’insulte,
c’est-à-dire, qui passe par l’écriture. Et s’il n’y a pas de gros mots chez Flaubert, quelque chose
cloche dans cette prose qui prolifère. Chez l’auteur qui met tout le monde en boîte l’écriture
refuse d’être achevée, préférant boiter que se coucher. Une écriture qui s’inspire de ce qu’elle
aspire peut-être donc moins à détruire qu’à sublimer. C’est du rien, du banal, de l’insignifiant
que Flaubert tire la force de son verbe. L’extrait, oui, d’un mouvement ascendant,
symétriquement opposé (inverse donc équivalent) à celui qu’il met en scène. Le rêve du « livre
sur rien » est celui d’un vaurien qui au monde immonde cherche noise.
“Morbleu ! De la couleur qui jure”
Aymeric Glacet, Sewanee, the University of the South
Morbleu ! Corbleu ! Parbleu ! Sacrebleu ! Tout est bleu chez Flaubert, même les insultes.
Même et surtout les insultes. Qu’on les entende dans le gueuloir ou qu’on les lise dans sa
correspondance, elles sont passées au bleu. Mais si l’insulte est bleue, si l’injure est bleue, c’est
aussi parce que toute l’œuvre tire au bleu. Les mots, comme les couleurs, sont plus ou moins
couvrants. Là où d’autres voient rouge, là où d’autres broient du noir, là où ils en voient de
toutes les couleurs, Flaubert voit bleu, n’imagine qu’en bleu, ne rêve que de bleu. Mais ce ciel
sans nuage n’est-il pas un mauvais présage ? Et ne faut-il pas s’inquiéter de ce que cache
réellement cette couleur, de ce qu’elle recouvre, et s’il n’a pas quelques bleus à l’âme, ou de quel
blues l’écrivain serait victime tant cette couleur semble avoir un impact funeste sur ses
personnages, tant elle semble avoir contaminé tout son art, tant elle semble également peser sur
sa vie. Chaque couleur a son propre langage. Et c’est l’histoire de cette couleur que nous
aimerions évoquer, parce que c’est la couleur du bovarysme, mais aussi parce que c’est une
couleur qui lui colle étrangement à la peau.
“Poison d'envie, poison d'Emma”
Gilles Glacet, Soka University
Emma est envieuse. Flaubert sait qu'un envieux, peut-être parce qu'il en est un lui-même,
ça se fabrique. Il la fabrique donc à petits coups, lentement, patiemment, à coup de frustrations.
Alors oui, Emma est envieuse. De qui? De quoi? Peu importe sans doute, parce qu'envier nous
dit Sartre, Gustave ne cesse de le répéter, c'est jouer perdant. Ainsi, Emma, par nature d'abord,
mais elle s'en convainc régulièrement, joue perdant. Et puis l'envieux, explique encore Sartre en
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parlant de Flaubert, n'a jamais le sentiment de posséder. C'est de ce sentiment, et de ces
possessions, de ces jouissances frustrées que nous aimerions parler en particulier. Parce qu'en fin
de compte, il y a ceux qui, comme Rodolphe ou le pharmacien Homais, se nourrissent en
prédateur du monde ; il y a ceux qui, comme Charles, nourrissent le monde, et il y a ceux que le
monde n'assimile pas et qui n'assimile pas le monde. Ceux-là, comme Emma, empoisonnent
et/ou sont empoisonnés par le monde.
“Face au dégoût : Flaubert et l’art de la (dé)composition”
Florence Vatan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
L’oeuvre de Flaubert témoigne d’une attention marquée pour la matière décomposée: des
fœtus pourrissant dans les bocaux du pharmacien Homais dans Madame Bovary au perroquet
rongé par les vers de Félicité dans Un coeur simple en passant par les cadavres pestilentiels de
Salammbô et par la “charogne boursouflée” de l’ennui existentiel, la décomposition et la
pourriture forment un leitmotiv des romans et de la correspondance. Selon leur habitude,
Bouvard et Pécuchet se plongent dans cet univers avec un zèle exemplaire, notamment lors d’une
rencontre impromptue avec la charogne d’un chien et via la création d’une fosse aux composts.
À la lumière des analyses phénoménologiques d’Aurel Kolnai sur le dégoût, j’examinerai
comment et à quelles fins Flaubert mobilise cette émotion fondée sur une phobie du contact et
sur une crainte ambivalente de la contamination. Il s’agira également d’explorer dans quelle
mesure Flaubert contourne et transfigure le dégoût par le biais du grotesque et de la “chimie du
style”. Sur ce point, la référence récurrente au fumier mérite attention. Si Baudelaire se propose
de transformer la boue en or, Flaubert assigne au fumier un pouvoir fécondant inspiré en grande
part de la théorie de la génération spontanée. C’est ainsi qu’il esquisse l’idéal esthétique d’un
écrivain capable de faire naître la beauté à partir de l’immonde, et de tirer des “décompositions
fécondantes” et des “putréfactions” de l’humanité de nouveaux joyaux esthétiques.
Panel 2.B: Contamination Across Fields: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Fin de
Siècle
Chair: Rachel Mesch, Yeshiva University
“The Marquis de Morès: A French Cowboy in the American West during the Fin de
Siècle”
Venita Datta, Wellesley College
During the fin de siècle, William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, became
synonymous with the figure of the cowboy in France. Playing to sell-out audiences during the
1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show introduced many in the
French public to the myth of the American West. But in the years preceding Buffalo Bill’s
arrival in France, other figures, among them, Edmond de Mandat-Grancey, through his novels
and articles in the press, along with other such French travelers to the United States as Paul
Bourget, contributed to French knowledge of the West, which had been shaped in the earlier part
of the century by the novels of American James Fenimore Cooper and of Frenchman Gustave
Aimard.
In the 1880s, three French men of note made their way out west: Edmond de MandatGrancey himself, Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de
November 5-7, 2015
Morès; and Raymond Auzias-Turenne. The first two were aristocrats, the third a bourgeois with
pretensions to aristocracy. All were monarchists and former military men. In this paper, I will
examine the reasons for their departure from France and attempt to determine what they sought
in the United States, as well as the ways in which their views of the American West were colored
by their disdain of the Third Republic. For all three, the American West, which represented new
opportunities akin to those found in the colonies, allowed them to give free rein to what they
believed were the masculine, heroic and chevalresque ideals of the aristocracy.
My paper, part of a larger book project on French-American cultural and political
relations during the fin de siècle, is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. I will be examining
articles from the contemporary press, archival sources, notably, the papers of the Marquis de
Morès at the North Dakota Historical Society, as well as novels and autobiographies written by
the three would-be cowboys. As an historian who teaches in a French department, I frequently
incorporate literary texts in my historical analyses because I believe that the cultural and political
are inextricably linked and, moreover, that the literature of an age can often tell us a great deal
about the historical perceptions and myths of the time.
“‘Salon of the Street’: Democratization of Art or Contamination of Public Space?”
Ruth E. Iskin, Ben Gurion University
The birth of modern advertising in the form of large color posters spread across the Paris
streets during the last decades of the nineteenth century gave rise to early debates about high
culture vs. mass media. My paper analyzes this debate by examining the contradictory responses
to the color poster by critics, artists and architects. Enthusiastically welcoming responses were
based on the belief that posters on the streets represented a democratization of culture – bringing
art to people without the high-culture constraints of gold frames and galleries. Another favorable
position approved of the posters on aesthetic grounds, viewing them as a welcome colorful
decoration of the monochromatic modern urban space. One critic even argued that some posters
manifested a great deal more talent than most of the paintings displayed in the official Salon,
urging the audiences of art exhibitions to “cleanse their eyes” by looking at Jules Chéret’s
posters on the street. At the other end of the spectrum, some observers – predominantly
architects – objected to posters on the grounds that they corrupted taste, offended the eye by
assaulting artistic standards of beauty, invaded the personal and psychic space of passersby,
contaminated the views of architecture, spoiled city vistas and turned civic space into a
commodified space. Embedded in this discourse were different political leanings as well as the
professional identities of the commentators, pitting those who regarded bringing art to the streets
as an important value against those who were invested in maintaining not only the integrity of
architecture but more broadly the status of high art. The paper will analyze this debate by
examining texts as well as a wide-range of contemporaneous visual materials, including blackand-white photographs, color lithographs, illustrations, and caricatures representing posters in
the city.
“Conjugal Fictions: Fin-de-Siècle Marriage Plots and the New Biography”
Rachel Mesch, Yeshiva University
By the end of the nineteenth century, marriage—long considered the defining institution
of French society—was widely perceived as under attack. Leftist Republicans fought against
Catholics to loosen the constraining policies of the Napoleonic Code, and the 1884 legalization
November 5-7, 2015
of divorce inflamed passions in a nation already troubled by a declining birth rate and
preoccupied by fears of psychosocial degeneration. Unlike previous scholarship devoted to the
vulnerability of the institution, however, this paper argues that some of the most surprising,
fascinating and creative responses to the fin-de-siècle marriage crisis took place not outside of
but rather within traditional conjugal structures. Following Jo Burr Margadant’s description of
the “new biography” as one which recognizes that “identities are mobile, contested, multiple
constructions of the self and others that depend as much on context as any defining traits of
character,” I will present two (mini) “conjugal biographies,” of famous writing couples: Jane and
Marcel Dieulafoy and Rachilde and Alfred Vallette.7 By examining each couple’s life together as
well as their extensive writings on marriage (fictional and autobiographical), I hope to offer a
snapshot of a transitional moment in the history of French marriage, when the institution was
being refashioned—in myriad surprising ways—from within. In the process, I plan to highlight
how cultural historical perspectives on Third Republic values can enhance the interpretive
possibilities for reading fin-de-siècle literary texts, making legible certain interpretive elements
otherwise hidden.
“Multidisciplinarity Run Riot? Editing the Cahiers (1898-1901) of Henri Vever”
Willa Silverman, The Pennsylvania State University
My remarks will focus on the challenges involved in editing a series of four unpublished
diaries written between 1898 and 1901 by the Art Nouveau jeweler and prominent Parisian art
collector, Henri Vever (1854-1942). While life writing is frequently approached from the
perspectives of literary studies and textual analysis, Vever’s private writings, complemented by
the critical apparatus (in the form of notes and a substantial introduction) that I am preparing to
accompany them, invite approaches and methodologies drawn from numerous disciplines and
interdisciplinary fields. These include, but are not limited to, history (including social history, the
history of private and daily life, and the history of technology), art history, urban studies, and
material culture studies. Becoming sufficiently conversant with these disciplines in order to
frame cogent analyses of topics as disparate as the competitive world of Parisian luxury
commerce in the late-nineteenth century; attitudes towards the newly-invented bicycle and the
transformed sense of time and space that resulted from its increased use; and relationships
between bourgeois fathers and daughters, is an evident challenge in editing this account of such a
vibrant life. However, maintaining an interdisciplinary frame of analysis for the diaries also
enables insights into, for example, the connections among Vever’s book and art collecting
practices, his social status, and his esthetic tastes. This paper, then, will address a range of
theoretical and methodological challenges – and some tentative solutions to them – encountered
in preparing the print edition of Vever’s diaries, and in thinking about a possible digital edition
of them as well.
7
Jo Burr Margadant, ed. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France.
(Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) 25.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 2.C: Métissages
Chair: Maureen DeNino, Princeton University
“‘Ange de la victoire et de la liberté’: Adrienne Leading the People in Lamartine’s
Toussaint Louverture”
Molly Krueger Enz, South Dakota State University
Alphonse de Lamartine’s “dramatic poem” Toussaint Louverture (1850) is set in the final
days of 1802 when Toussaint Louverture was the undisputed leader of Saint- Domingue, fighting
against the French for the liberty of his country and people. In the work’s preface, Lamartine
declares that he intended to write a political work, “or rather, it was a cry for humanity in five
acts and in verse.” As a member of France’s Provisional Republican government that abolished
slavery in 1848, Lamartine was dedicated to the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies.
Despite the title of the play, the eponymous hero does not act alone and is not the only leader
who rallies for his country’s independence. He could not have fought as effectively or achieved
his goals without the unwavering support, loyalty, and aid of his niece Adrienne who symbolizes
the political power struggle between her island homeland and the French métropole. As the
central mixed-race figure born after her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, she represents
France’s colonization of Saint-Domingue and the violent exploitation of its land and people. In
this presentation, I argue that Adrienne actually surpasses her uncle in her steadfast dedication to
her country and to the revolutionary cause that led to its independence from France in 1804. Just
as her uncle Toussaint is called the “Black Napoleon,” Adrienne can be compared with the
central figure in Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting “Liberty Leading the People” as Liberty’s
mixed-race reincarnation who leads her Haitian compatriots to battle for their freedom.
“Oxiane ou les clés de la révolution de Saint-Domingue”
Sarah Mécheneau, Michigan State University
Publiée en 1826, l’œuvre anonyme Oxiane ou la Révolution de Saint-Domingue s’inscrit
dans la tendance de la littérature de la Restauration, époque durant laquelle les notions d’égalité,
de liberté et de fraternité faussement acquises après la Révolution française sont au centre du
débat littéraire. De nombreuses œuvres, souvent écrites par des femmes, traiteront du destin
tragique du personnage du mulâtre. Cet engouement s’explique par le caractère foncièrement
romantique de ce personnage, tourmenté entre la souffrance de ses frères opprimés et imprégné
de la culture de ses maîtres oppresseurs mais surtout protagoniste du grand traumatisme de la
France du XIXe siècle, les insurrections de Saint-Domingue.
Cette étude mettra en lumière la grande complexité d’Oxiane ou la Révolution de SaintDomingue. Le titre de ce livre témoigne de sa double interprétation et du génie de son auteur qui
manie avec brillance le genre sentimental afin de transmettre de véritables revendications
sociales tentant de définir la société post-révolutionnaire mais inscrivant néanmoins son œuvre
au cœur de la contemporanéité de son époque.
Nous nous intéresserons aux nombreuses pistes présentées dans ce roman à clé qui, bien
que peu remarqué par le lectorat de son époque, se distingue à présent par la richesse de sa
narration. Il s’agit tout autant d’une nouvelle sentimentale qu’une chronique journalistique
relatant la révolte des esclaves de 1791 à Saint-Domingue mais encore un manifeste pour
l’égalité des races.
November 5-7, 2015
“Hugo, Dumas, Gobineau et Firmin: la bête noire ou l'Autre”
Daniel Desormeaux, University of Chicago
Qui n’a pris pour cible sa bête noire? Traquée partout dans les vieilles histoires comme
dans les mœurs, dans les contes comme dans les proverbes; source de mythes, de peurs, de
superstitions, de fantasmes érotiques, de grossesses méfiantes, de polémiques littéraires, de
joutes électorales, elle devient même un beau sujet de roman exotique chez Dumas et Hugo.
Eux-mêmes, Hugo et Dumas, furent des bêtes noires, mais pour des raisons distinctes. Dumas, à
vrai dire, l'a peut-être été doublement, triplement même. Toujours est-il que la bête noire déborde
les frontières littéraires pour s'engouffrer sur le terrain de la science, plus précisément
l'anthropologie raciale, au milieu du XIXe siècle. La bête noire est pourtant sans forme et sans
essence. Que vient faire alors cette figure quasi mythique dans l'anthropologie naissante? C'est à
Arthur Gobineau qu'il faut commencer par poser une telle question. Et chez Anténor Firmin d'y
trouver un premier élément de réponse. Car, pour une curieuse raison, à partir du début du XIXe
siècle, au tournant de la vogue romantique, la bête noire apparaissait déjà comme moins
dangereuse qu'une Autre? C’est cette Autre qui nous intéresse dans cette communication. Car la
belle, au-delà des savoirs ou des croyances, n'en sera pas moins blanche, et la bête moins noire.
Dumas et Hugo ont ainsi vaguement évoqué ses contours avant la psychanalyse de Fanon. Que
dire en définitive de cette peur sournoise de mélanger, voire discuter des goûts et des couleurs?
Panel 2.D: Les plafonds enrichis: Mallarmé Defiled and Undefiled
Chair: Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University
“(Im)Pure Reading: Blanchot on Mallarmé”
Claire Chi-ah Lyu, University of Virginia
In L’Espace littéraire, where Mallarmé figures prominently, Blanchot writes that reading,
if it is to be authentic, must keep the void (or what he also calls the distance) of a literary work
pure. My paper explores Blanchot’s intriguing, and hard to grasp, proposition that reading has to
do with the purity of the void, and how this plays out in his treatment of Mallarmé’s work. I
begin with a close examination of Blanchot's theory of reading; I then contrast it with
Mallarmé’s poetics where purity and void also play a key role but in relation to writing (rather
than reading); finally I reflect upon how these considerations might modify our concept of
reading and open alternate possibilities for our critical practice.
According to Blanchot, we read inauthentically most of the time, because our inherent
“horreur du vide” makes us incapable of safeguarding the void as it is: we fill it up immediately.
A prime example of inauthentic reading, which concerns us directly, is critical reading. This
happens, for Blanchot, when a reader, as specialist, fills the void of the work with content. Once
filled with and solidified into content, the work becomes seizable through understanding, which,
in turn, paves the way for evaluative judgment of all sorts. Blanchot sees this as impure reading.
But how can we not take content into account when we read? What would a pure,
authentic reading look like? Is it even possible? Mallarmé’s “pure” writing, which strives to
evacuate content (as exemplified in Un coup de dés where the void of le blanc displaces content
in an unprecedented manner), might help us to approach the enigma and risk of “pure” reading
that Blanchot proposes.
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“Pores of Nothingness: Caloric Theory, the Hegel Question, and the Poetic Sublime”
Grant Wiedenfeld, Yale University
During his 1860s crisis, Mallarmé writes a letter famous for its mysterious and baroque
metaphor: “Ma pensée a été jusqu’à se penser elle-même et n’a plus la force d’évoquer en un
Néant unique le vide disséminé en sa porosité.” Here previous critics (especially Derrida) have
seen evidence of his proto-existentialism—a crisis of faith that many have attributed to his
reading Hegel or about Hegel. However, other critics have challenged the German influence
(characterized as a contamination by Gaulists) and left open the “Hegel question.”
I claim that Mallarmé takes the image of porosity directly from Hegel’s Science of Logic
(1817, trans. 1859). The German philosopher borrows the idea of porosity from caloric theory, a
theory of heat rendered obsolete in the late nineteenth century by modern thermodynamics.
Caloric was the concept of a weightless fluid that transferred heat from warm to cool bodies.
Hegel envisioned thought as an invisible flow through an object’s pores. The dialectician posits
an emptiness at the center of every being, suspended between substance and its antithesis.
Mallarmé takes the caloric analogy one step further and applies it to the sublime, creating a
haunting picture of self-consciousness.
Discovering this reference has implications beyond the Hegel question. Through Derrida
and his interpretation of dissemination, Mallarmé has been read as an icon for the transgressive
power of poetry to annihilate Platonic concepts. Yet caloric porosity and other ideas current in
Mallarmé’s time give a different inflection, recovering his Idealist humanism. We are left to
ponder the strange unity that the poet experienced in nothingness.
“Krysinska’s Palimpsests: Composing Theory before Mallarmé’s ‘Critical Poetry’”
Darci Gardner, Appalachian State University
In his youthful essay “Hérésies artistiques: l’art pour tous,” published in L’Artiste in
1862, Mallarmé makes bold assertions about poetry before having produced much of it himself.
Such license was never afforded to his contemporary, Marie Krysinska, a pioneer of free verse
who was ostracized from critical discussions of the form. Krysinska became the only woman to
perform original chansons at Le Chat noir cabaret, and yet, as difficult as it was for her to secure
an audience for her creative work, the greater challenge was to find an outlet for her critical
insights. She wished to advocate a new kind of poetry, and while she could express her views in
a feminist newspaper or through the mouths of male characters in her fiction, she was
discouraged from encroaching on the masculine domain of academic prose.
Bereft of opportunities to publish the type of writing that might define a movement or
inspire followers, Krysinska resorted to theorizing her art directly in her poetry. In texts that
make prominent use of palimpsest and mise en abyme (“Chanson d’automne,” “Berceuse
macabre,” “Roman dans la lune”), she carefully establishes her conception of how poetic
language operates and how readers process it. This paper first identifies the poetics of free verse
that these texts enact and then illustrates how it informs the critical poems that Mallarmé
published in Krysinska’s wake.
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“Baroque et belle: Mallarmé’s Prose Smut and Other Open Secrets”
Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University
In response to one reader’s request for help in understanding a poem, Mallarmé is once
said to have said: “Cherchez, et à la fin vous trouverez une pornographie. Ce sera votre
récompense.” Mallarmé would never have allowed himself such unguarded expression in print,
and he may never have said this in the first place, but regardless of whether such apocryphal
anecdotes are true, any reader of Mallarmé will sooner or later find themselves confronted with
the question of what is sometimes referred to as his “discreet eroticism.” In this short paper, I
would like to re-examine the role of the erotic in two of Mallarmé’s prose poems, both from the
1880s, one more comic and less discreet than the other. In “L’Ecclésiastique,” the speaker of the
poem comes across a cleric in the act of “polluting” (in the medieval and theological sense) a
(not so) secluded spot of the bois de Boulogne. In “Le Nénuphar blanc,” the speaker rows
upstream to visit an unknown female neighbor, but withdraws from the bushes without
delivering his intended greeting. Although offering distinct perspectives on desire, morality,
society, religion, and literature, each prose poem reminds us of the underlying structural
importance of the body to Mallarmé’s poetic project, not only as that which is obscurely and
provocatively represented, but as the thinking and feeling body that reads and finds pleasure in
momentary and partial understanding. How should this poetics of the body be reconciled with
Mallarmé’s ideal literature or “Idée”? Does the erotic interfere with and sidetrack, or facilitate
and feed, Mallarmé’s lifelong pursuit of Beauty through literature? In short, what are we to make
of these concessions to human appetite in the context of a literature that at various prominent
moments asserts its ideality and incorporeality?
Panel 2.E: Iconic Female Figures
Chair: Alice Price, Temple University
“Manet’s Street Singer and the Poets in 1862”
Thérèse Dolan, Temple University
Édouard Manet’s painting of the Street Singer depicts an incident that occurred in 1862
when the painter and his studio mate Antonin Proust strolled near the demolition sites around
Boulevard Malsherbes that resulted from Baron Haussmann’s plans for the renovation of Paris.
The picturesque features of street singers had also fascinated writers throughout the ages, and
several of Manet literary acquaintances depicted aspects of their lives and characterized their
songs. A pertinent literary parallel that has never been discussed in the context of Manet’s
painting can be found in Baudelaire’s “À une mendiante rousse,” his poem on a female street
singer. The young waif who inspired Baudelaire also had found herself limned in a poem by
Théodore de Banville, celebrated in a song by Pierre Dupont, and painted in oil by Émile Deroy
in the 1840s at a time when these four men were in close contact with another in the heady days
of their bohemian youth at the cusp of their creative careers. Memories of these times before the
February Revolution of 1848 and the works of these men had to have flooded Baudelaire’s
thoughts as they wove themselves back into his life through his writing at the very time Manet
was at work on his image of a street singer. The interplay of essays and poems by these men,
along with a relay of images and discussions of popular songs, emerged in Parisian culture at the
very time when Manet broached his subject of an entertainer sauntering out of the same type of
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café where these men who depicted the street singer in the mid-1840s forged their aesthetic
ideas, created their early works, and experienced their first flush of critical acclaim.
“La petite danseuse de quatorze ans d’Edgar Degas, figure hors norme”
Liliane Ehrhart, Princeton University
Edgar Degas n’expose qu’une sculpture de son vivant, la Petite danseuse de 14 ans, qui
fait scandale à l’Exposition des Indépendants en 1881. Huysmans, qui suit le travail de l’artiste
d’exposition en exposition, loue Degas pour son apprentissage autodidacte de nouvelles
techniques picturales et ses représentations originales de sujets de son époque : des criminels, des
prostituées, des danseuses en coulisses. Qualifiant Degas de « peintre de la vie moderne », il
reconnaît cependant que la petite danseuse ne peut pas plaire. De fait, le petit rat de l’opéra est vu
comme une curiosité : devant cette gamine en cire, le public « très ahuri et comme gêné, se
sauve » et les critiques la caractérisent de troublante, animale, laide et monstrueuse. En offrant à
voir une enfant à la peau déjà trop usée par l’exercice, Degas souhaite représenter
anthropologiquement une réalité sociale de son temps, écartée par l’histoire de l’art et qui
contraste avec l’image sociale et picturale plus éthérée des gens de la haute société. Mais sa
figure de cire ne produit qu’une agression esthétique.
La cire, matériau non noble, utilisée par de nombreux artistes pour des esquisses, se voit
déplacée de l’atelier à la salle d’exposition à l’ahurissement du public et de la critique. Seul
Huysmans écrit que la cire pourrait bien, aux côtés du bois, être la matière à redécouvrir au
XIXème siècle, et ce, bien que la société ne jure encore que par des matières nobles comme le
marbre et le bronze. Il s’agit dans cette présentation d’interroger aussi bien la portée symbolique
de la chair en cire peinte, agrémentée de poils de pinceaux et autres matériaux issus de l’atelier
que d’observer quels systèmes de représentations et de valeurs la Petite danseuse, figure de
l’abject et sculpture anticonformiste de son temps, perturbe et corrompt.
“Purifying the Female Body in the Drawings and Paintings of Suzanne Valadon”
Richard Gray, Ashland University
This paper explores how Suzanne Valadon’s drawings and paintings featuring the nude
female body produced in Montmartre during the latter half of the Belle Époque disrupt the
traditional notion of the male gaze (Mulvey 19) and also reposition both the woman as “viewing
subject” and as a “subject to be viewed.” Suzanne Valadon rubbed elbows with Impressionists in
the cabarets of Montmartre of late-19th century Paris, and from 1880 to 1893 she served as a
model for artists including Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas. Valadon’s own art earned the
backing of Degas, with whom she shared a close relationship. In her œuvres that depict the nude
female body, Valadon paints a canvas of purity, innocence, and saintliness that operates in
striking opposition to the crime, drunkenness, and debauchery of the Bohemian Montmartre with
which she was closely familiar.
Although Valadon produced her artworks in a Montmartre that Nicole Myers calls “a
place for escape, pleasure, entertainment, and sexual freedom,” I wish to propose here that due to
her intimate observation of the female body resulting from her experience as a model, a vibrant
feeling originates from Valadon’s nude drawings and paintings that seeks to purify the female
body and juxtaposes it against the district’s backdrop of sin and sacrilege. Arguably transgressive
in her position as a woman painting the nude female body, through modeling Valadon had thus
entered the male public domain of art and in due course transformed this domain as an artist.
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Consequently, through her use of purified, self-possessed bodies that are not explicitly
sexualized, Suzanne Valadon’s drawings and paintings presenting the naked female body resist
traditional depictions of women through their class and supposed (hyper-)sexuality.
Panel 2.F: Romantic Contaminations
Chair: Mary Jane Cowles, Kenyon College
“Mme de Staël, Literature and Other Contaminating Discourses”
Patrick M. Bray, The Ohio State University
In her De la littérature, Staël proposes for the first time, according to Jacques Rancière, a
historically determined conception of the art of writing. She stands at the crossroads between the
18th and 19th centuries, containing two systems of thought in germ – while she uses the term
“literature” in its former, broader meaning of elevated writing, what we might call the
“humanities” today, she also moves, almost imperceptibly to the modern sense over the course of
De la littérature. Literature holds revolutionary potential, but only on condition that it privilege
its status as the art of writing over the representation of other discourses, such as politics or
history. Literature, specifically the novel, must not be contaminated by and must in turn not
contaminate other forms of writing.
This tension, between what she calls “les écrits philosophiques” and “les ouvrages
d’imagination,” is developed and transformed in her two subsequent novels. Delphine, published
soon after De la littérature, shies away from any detailed description of the turbulent historical
events that pass during the narrative; the radical politics of the novel must be inferred from the
narrative and the characters’ own assessment of concrete situations in their letters. By contrast,
Corinne is a hybrid novel, introducing the French reading public to the many faces of Italy even
as it makes claims about politics and literature, mediated by the tragic love of Corinne and
Oswald. Fictional narrative, instead of representing politics as allegory, thus becomes a means of
mediating the complex emotions and conflicts that arise in post-Revolutionary politics.
I would like to argue that while Staël establishes the parameters of theory, politics, and
aesthetics in the modern novel with De la littérature, her writing practice shows literature’s
potential to exceed categories, contaminating other discourses, and pointing the way to an
emancipatory politics.
“La contamination romantique”
François Vanoosthuyse, Université Paris III
Le terme un peu bâtard de « préromantisme » a traditionnellement servi à désigner, dans
les histoires littéraires, les productions françaises identifiables au romantisme mais antérieures à
la Restauration (voire à 1830). Cette approximation ne permet de comprendre ni l’importance
quantitative et qualitative du phénomène, ni la vigueur et la nature du débat que suscitèrent des
œuvres pour nous aussi inoffensives, et patrimoniales, qu’Atala de Chateaubriand ou Le Cid
d’Andalousie de Lebrun (1825). Le fameux discours, prononcé en 1823 à l’Académie Française
par le « classique » Auger contre la contamination de la littérature française par la barbarie
teutonne et anglaise, est l’un des innombrables documents qui pourraient être utilisés pour rendre
compte de la crispation nationale occasionnée par la pénétration progressive de Shakespeare, de
Schiller, des romantiques allemands et anglais en France depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle.
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Cependant, le fait est que les pièces de Lebrun ou de Soumet, que les romans de Mme Cottin et
de Mme de Duras – exemples qu’on pourrait compléter par de très nombreux autres – ont peu de
choses à voir, structurellement et linguistiquement, avec les productions théâtrales, poétiques et
romanesques d’Hugo, Dumas, Nerval et consorts, autrement dit de ceux que l’histoire littéraire a
appelés traditionnellement « la génération romantique ».
Il y aurait donc eu d’abord un romantisme par contamination, affectant des genres
traditionnels en France (comédie, tragédie, roman psychologique, élégie), un romantisme peu
étudié et mal connu, bien que fondamental et abondant, et c’est cette littérature, et les problèmes
« généalogiques » qu’elle pose, qu’on prendra pour objet.
“The Romantic ‘Contamination’ of French Literary Language by the Vernacular: Claude
Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne and Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un
condamné”
Alex Raiffe, Princeton University
The Greek language is often thought of in relation to French literature and culture as an
elitist and erudite source of inspiration, allegory, and etymology for poets and prose authors.
This presentation, however, seeks to tell the lesser-known tale of how common Demotic Greek
was the first vernacular to enter modern European literature with Claude Fauriel’s 1824
publication of Les Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne, a philhellenist collection of Greek
popular ballads translated into French prose. Riding on a wave of mass support for the Greek
War of Independence, Claude Fauriel presented Demotic Greek, often disparaged by Classicists
as a degenerate version of Ancient Greek, as bearing traces of the genius of the Ancients and as a
potential source of inspiration for French poets and of enrichment of French literature itself.
I argue that Fauriel’s pioneering of the literary value of the Modern Greek vernacular
paved the way for the appropriation of the French vernacular into Romance literature in the
1830s. Following the revolutionary upheavals of that year, the inclusion of French popular
speech in works of literature became an integral part of the Romantic aesthetic of the grotesque
and the idiom, as formulated by Victor Hugo in the Preface to Cromwell. I more specifically
focus on the foldout facsimile of a handwritten chanson en argot in the first edition of Victor
Hugo’s 1832 Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, which I argue is an important moment for the
emergence of the French vernacular in literature. Perverting the paradigm in which Ancient
Greek served as a model for the perfection of modern French, Fauriel perhaps unwittingly
launched a new, Romantic paradigm, articulated by Victor Hugo, in which Demotic Greek
became the model for how vernaculars could enhance (or contaminate) their national literary
traditions.
“‘La Poétique du Poitrinaire’: The French Stage Consumptive as Romantic Vector, 18281834”
Roberta Barker, Dalhousie University
Though consumptive heroines such as Dumas fils’ Marguerite Gautier are among the
icons of the nineteenth-century French theatre, there was a time when the very notion of placing
a poitrinaire onstage appeared an abomination against the canon of bon goût. When the actress
Mme. Albert dared to play a dying consumptive heroine in the vaudeville Valentine, ou la Chute
des Feuilles in 1828, Le Figaro’s critic remarked that many would tremble to see “le dramatique
des scènes d’hôpitaux transporté sur le théâtre.” Yet Albert’s performance was a great success.
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A few years later, the well-loved figure of Henri Muller in Dumas Père’s Angèle (1833) would
definitively establish the poitrinaire as a popular theatrical archetype.
In 1880, a doctor writing in the medical journal L’Union médicale recalled that Muller’s
role provided “un tableau assez complet de ce qu’était la poétique du poitrinaire en l’an de
grâce romantique 1834.” In this paper, I show how this theatrical poétique du poitrinaire served
as a powerful vector, popularizing Romantic notions of subjectivity and theatrical aesthetics.
German characters both, Valentine and Henri embodied the influence of German Romanticism
upon French literature, their fragile bodies emblematizing the French Romantics’ rejection of the
neo-classical tradition. They were quintessential Romantic subjects whose depth of feeling
rendered them both exemplars for and sufferers in the modern world. The daring physical
language of the symptom by which performers externalized the physical and emotional agonies
of these characters helped to shape new acting techniques that would culminate in the rise of
naturalism. Viewed as a hideous contamination of the theatre by some and a noble purification of
it by others, the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire created an intensely affective performative
language that would spread across transnational stages and that remains influential to our own
day.
Break 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Thursday 5 November
Session 3 – 4:30 pm - 6:15 pm
Panel 3.A: The Insalubrious Geography of Paris
Chair: Marie Sanquer, Princeton University
“Contaminating Spaces: La Cousine Bette and the Doyenné Neighborhood”
Dorothy Kelly, Boston University
The metaphor of contamination in La Cousine Bette functions in two different symbolic
spaces. The first is Bette’s interior, psychological space, where her repressed resentment for her
subaltern treatment, like a dormant plague germ, lies waiting to be set loose by the Hulot family
betrayal: “l’envie resta caché dans le fond du coeur, comme un germe de peste qui peut éclore et
ravager une ville, si l’on ouvre le fatal ballot de laine où il est comprimé” (82). After her family’s
betrayal, Bette becomes a ‘puissance occulte’ as she moves among various households in the
text, spreading her poison, similar to Valérie’s Brazilian lover, who brings a real toxin “plague”
to Paris.
The second symbolic space of contamination is the physical Doyenné neighborhood, a
space of living death, whose inhabitants are “probablement des fantômes” and who inhabit “des
tombeaux vivants.” This city space threatens to spread death to those who enter its “coupegorge.” Like the wool that wraps Bette’s plague, the Doyenné at first harbors and adequately
contains three outcast characters: Bette, the poor cousin; Valérie, the illegitimate, disinherited
child; and Steinbock, the Polish immigrant. However this containment ends with Hortense’s odd
incursion with her father into the Doyenné space. Their infiltration sets in motion the exodus of
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Bette, Valérie, and Steinbock out of the Doyenné, prompting the downfall of the Hulot family. I
shall show first how the Doyenné symbolizes Balzac’s recurring representation of the fearful
marginalized poor, who threaten to contaminate the rest of the city. However its ghostly
dilapidation also figures Hulot himself and the plague of the leftover elements of Napoleonic
heroism, who are dangerously set adrift in the changed capitalist Paris, as Hulot’s heroic
administration during the Napoleonic wars evolves in the new era into financially devastating
commerce in women and criminal commerce in Algeria.
“Place Maubert and the Romance of Abjection”
Aimée Kilbane, University of Colorado, Boulder
In references from the mid-1800s to the turn of the century, Place Maubert has been
immortalized as both a site of romantic nostalgia for “vieux Paris” and its disappearing local
color, and the residence of the city’s most hopelessly abject population. Though considered by
some, like Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, to be one of the areas most in need of rehabilitation, it
was not touched by urban renewal until 1889. Contemporary narratives present it simultaneously
as a kind of civic treasure and a scourge of society that must be modernized and sanitized:
Aristide Bruant, in his chanson “A La Place Maubert” (1889), questioned the benefits of any
improvements to the quarter if it would cease to exist as a result; in Paris inconnu (1861) Privat
draws attention to the plight of the poor in the place Maubert, insisting that crime is caused by
insalubrious conditions, not by the character of the residents; for Alfred Delvau, in Les Dessous
de Paris (1860), place Maubert offers both an exotic encounter with “les Peaux-Rouges de Paris”
and a means of time travel back to the Middle Ages.
This paper will investigate such varying accounts and the ambivalences they betray as a
form of domestic exoticism that turned the poor into a spectacle (and often a tourist attraction) as
a means of neutralizing any perceived threat that they may have posed. At the same time, the
authors’ expressions of empathy and identification with the marginalized indicate a desire to
mediate the distance between such spatially sequestered populations and the bourgeois public
consuming their products of popular culture.
“Decontaminating the Dead in Post-Revolutionary Paris”
Erin-Marie Legacey, Texas Tech University
The “Revolution” of the dead at the end of the eighteenth century in Paris is a familiar
narrative: In 1780, after decades of complaints from civilians and Enlightenment Reformers,
Paris’ long-standing churchyard cemeteries were condemned for reasons of public hygiene.
Louis-Sebastien Mercier described the “air” in Paris’ oldest and largest cemetery as “the most
insalubrious in all of Paris.” Over the next half century a new culture of the dead emerged in
Paris, characterized by visually stunning burial spaces on the city’s peripheries, most notably the
Paris Catacombs and Père Lachaise cemetery. This process of relocating the dead irrevocably
changed the landscape of Paris, but it also helped to redefine the role of the dead in the city, as a
constructive, rather than a destabilizing force. Within the span of a generation, Parisians stopped
talking about the dead as harbingers of doom and began turning to them as potent arbiters of the
social and political discord that otherwise characterized the early nineteenth century in France.
This paper examines the crucial role that the French Revolution played in this process of
transformation. Specifically, it demonstrates how the eighteenth-century understanding of “the
dead” changed as a result of the Revolution. By the end of the Terror in 1794, individuals and
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communities began to reject the dead in their city as more than a miasmic danger; they had also
become disquieting reminders of urban political violence, instability, and discord. The new
culture of the dead that took shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century responded to these
concerns. Both Père Lachaise (opened in 1804) and the Paris Catacombs (opened in 1809) were
almost immediately interpreted as rational, apolitical, and cohesive social spaces.
Panel 3.B: Polluted Styles: Language as Poison and Remedy
Chair: Mandy Mazur, Princeton University
“‘Dois-je en tout parler comme Rousseau?’: Reconsidering ‘Stendhal, lecteur de
Rousseau’ as a Fear of Narcissistic Contamination”
Hadley Suter, University of California, Los Angeles
The question of “Stendhal, lecteur de Rousseau” has been interpreted as the classic story
of paternal rejection: in general, it is understood as Beyle’s repudiation of Rousseau’s style, his
skepticism about the possibility of self-knowledge, and his more agnostic approach to the
“virtue” of originality. While the question of style most explicitly lends itself to the metaphor of
contamination—we all know Stendhal’s diurnal “antidote” of reading a few pages of the Code
Civil to purge any penchant for flourishing his prose—the phenomenon of contamination may
also be used to understand what I argue to be the key difference between Rousseau and Stendhal.
This is their conception of that entity which impedes le naturel. For Rousseau, it is le regard
d’autrui; as such, the natural self must retreat from society in order to stop feeling the inhibition
of this gaze. For Stendhal, eminently more social than his predecessor, this entity is rather le
regard sur soi, or what I call the “self-spectator,” whose gaze the natural self must learn to
circumvent rather than escape.
This figure of the self-spectator, though finalized and animated onto the page by
Stendhal, can in fact be traced in its “fetal” incarnation to the “Devin du village” episode of Les
Confessions. The difference, however, between this proto-self-spectator and the one at work in
Stendhal’s œuvre demonstrates that Beyle’s real fear of Rousseau’s contamination was not, in
fact, a question of style, but one of narcissism. This narcissism is defined by Stendhal in terms of
how the “authentic” artist must relate to—and present—both his ambition and manifestations of
his creative impulse. Rousseau finds pleasure in viewing not only his creative act enacted, in Le
Devin, but also in the spectacle of the spectators viewing it alongside him; Stendhal, contrarily,
often writes of his inability to “speak” of his past creative endeavors, or of his creative ambition
at all. Situating Stendhal’s commentary on the subject, as it appears throughout his
autobiographies and private journals, and calling on his famous fear of pronouncing “cette
effroyable quantité de Je et de Moi,” I will demonstrate how through the figure of the selfspectator, an alternative route to relating to the self’s ambition is plotted out. This method is a
means of self-protection from the “contamination” of Rousseauian “narcissism,” and adopts
instead what I call the “myth of the métier” and the ideal of “circular contact with the real.”
“Deux duchesses et leurs maux d’esprit; de Balzac à Tremblay”
France Lemoine, Scripps College
Dans cet essai, j’analyserai La duchesse de Langeais d’Honoré de Balzac et la
« duchesse » de la « Main » du roman québécois Des Nouvelles d’Édouard de Michel Tremblay
November 5-7, 2015
au travers du prisme du langage. Le charme des mots de l’héroïne balzacienne Antoinette de
Langeais, créée en 1834, enflamme non seulement la passion du général Montriveau mais aussi
celle du travesti Édouard, personnage créé en 1984, à plus de cent cinquante ans d’écart, et sur
un autre continent. Ces textes sont intimement liés puisqu’Edouard prendra comme nom de scène
« la duchesse » (de Langeais), cimentant ainsi l’idéal social qu’elle incarne pour lui et les deux
faces de son identité franco-québécoise.
Je considérerai ici la notion du langage comme poison, toxicité et décadence puisqu’on
peut considérer ces deux récits comme recouvrant une étude du pouvoir du langage dans la
conscience individuelle comme dans ses interactions avec autrui. Cet essai explorera comment
ces romans expriment une angoisse profonde du mot qui se révèle, tour à tour, mensonge,
trahison, sadisme, souillure, obscénité et/ou corruption.
La thèse de cet essai est que, malgré les profondes et multiples dissemblances internes et
contextuelles de ces textes fictionnels, l’enjeu central est identique : la maîtrise du verbe. Selon
nous, la faillite amoureuse et sociale de chacune des deux duchesses est due à son envoûtement
avec le langage de Paris et son incapacité à se détacher de son milieu et dès lors d’exprimer sa
véritable identité par la parole. En sus, l’amour inexprimé de la duchesse de Langeais pour
Montriveau et celui inexprimable de « la duchesse » Édouard pour Paris sont assimilables à des
maladies incurables qui tueront la première et marqueront à jamais la seconde. Le dialecte du
faubourg Saint-Germain tout comme le joual des « provinciaux » d’Amérique du Nord se
révéleront contaminés, corrosifs et intraitables, menant également à la dégénération, l’aliénation
et l’abjection.
“Empire Wastes: Puns and the Poetics of Contamination in La Curée”
Sara Phenix, Brigham Young University
The poetics of La Curée is thoroughly a poetics of contamination. With its transposition
of the story of Phaedra to Second Empire France, La Curée is contaminated in the strict sense
that it intercalates myth into the chronicle of real estate speculation under Louis-Napoléon.
While the concept of contamination is suggestive in obvious ways in the novel’s portrayal of
political and moral corruption, I claim that Zola also theorizes contamination on the semantic
level of the text. Whereas studies of other rhetorical figures have shed much light on the novel’s
meaning, I argue that the pun more accurately typifies the sociostylistics of the novel. As the
juncture of multiple meanings, the pun is the linguistic incarnation of contamination par
excellence: one meaning cannot be understood without others simultaneously resonating. This
kind of paronomastic play in La Curée is the rhetorical figuration of the novel’s depiction of
instances of corrupt convergence: regulators with speculators in backroom deals; the beau monde
with the demi-monde in seedy theaters and cafés; and, more dramatically, stepmother with
stepson in an incestuous affair. In order to underscore themes of duplicity and corruption, Zola
positions key puns in La Curée at spatial and temporal corollaries, or, in other words, at
moments and in spaces that also join disparate entities: at sunsets, at doorsteps, and at thresholds.
Renée’s discovery of her husband and her stepson’s complicity coincides with her inability to
distinguish silk from self in the famous mirror scene: by indulging in all of her sexual and
sartorial fantasies, Renée realizes that she has privileged, to devastating effect, l’amour de soie
over l’amour de soi. While critics characterize Renée’s failure to see her husband’s manipulation
as a symbolic extension of her myopia, it is also Renée’s inability to perceive the polysemic
resonance of certain words that leads to her destruction and eventual death.
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Panel 3.C: Phantasms of National Identity
Chair: Maurice Samuels, Yale University
“Penser la hiérarchie des races pour arrêter la vague démocratique : le dialogue
contradictoire entre Gobineau et Tocqueville”
Brigitte Krulic, Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre La Défense
La peur de l’indifférenciation qui brouille repères et hiérarchies traverse les débats,
menés tout au long du XIXe siècle, sur les effets pervers d’une modernité démocratique
individualiste accusée de se répandre comme une vague incontrôlable qui « contamine » le tissu
social et l’ordre politique : destruction des barrières que la société inégalitaire préserve et
renforce ; désintégration du lien social ; nivellement moral, culturel et politique. Il s’agit ici
d’examiner comment le dialogue contradictoire entre Gobineau et Tocqueville, dont les relations
personnelles et la correspondance sont connues, participe de ce débat.
Dans la théorisation tocquevillienne, le principe d’identification à son semblable et son
égal est aux fondements de l’égalité des conditions, fait générateur de la démocratie, à rebours de
la société inégalitaire « hiérarchique » inscrite dans la dichotomie pur/impur irriguée par le sacré
(hieros) qui assigne à chacun, individu, groupe social ou ethnique, un rang défini dans une
échelle de gradations et de barrières censée préserver des souillures de la proximité.
Gobineau met les notions d’ « égalité/inégalité » et de « mélange » au service d’une
construction idéologique visant à fonder « scientifiquement » le combat contre la démocratie,
dans ses dimensions politique, sociologique et anthropologique. L’inégalité sociologique des
sociétés hiérarchiques est transposée en inégalité entre races. On comprend que Tocqueville ait
vu dans l’Essai sur l’inégalité des races de Gobineau un « système de maquignon », selon son
expression, plus adapté aux « haras » qu’à l’humanité ; le fatalisme déterministe de Gobineau
qu’il juge faux et nuisible s’oppose à sa conviction que la démocratie est irrésistible car ancrée
dans la nature et que ce n’est pas le « sang qui fait la destinée des hommes ». Son engagement
contre l’esclavage et la ségrégation raciale, tiré de son expérience américaine, en est une
illustration.
“How a fait divers Becomes National Epic: Literature and Citizenship during the FrancoPrussian War”
Colin Foss, Yale University
During the Third Republic, literature became a means to educate citizens, to erase
regional difference, and to promote a certain conception of what it meant to be French. For
Weber, this national literature was transmitted through regional education programs, while others
such as Antoine Compagnon locate literary nationalization in Parisian university circles. These
perspectives invariably situate the literary aspect of state building in the 1880s, 90s and beyond.
However, in this paper as in my larger project, I argue that it was in the early days of the
Republic, during the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870-1871, that literary institutions began
organically producing Republican literature.
Moving from particularly viral faits divers in Parisian newspapers during the Siege, to
their eventual representation in literature, I show how a series of rumors circulating within
Parisian culture came to be canonized as national epics. Some, such as stories about Napoléon
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III’s capture at Sedan, eventually ended up in Zola’s novel La Débâcle. Others, like the myth of
the “cuirassiers de Reichshoffen,” became not only a patriotic anthem to rival the Marseillaise,
but also the inspiration for a popular adaptation of Corneille’s Horace. These instances
demonstrate that diverse literary industries collaborated to transform dubious rumors into a
corpus of literature that taught its readers how to conceive of a nation. Finally, I will examine
how a generation of writers – including Daudet and Maupassant – ridiculed the elevation of these
faits divers in their satirical short stories in the decades after the War.
In conclusion, examining the institutional means by which national literature was first
conceived, and the authorial reactions to this process, invites us to rethink the originality of
governmental, top-down initiatives in the later years of the Third Republic.
“Le zonier et sa roulotte, ou la contagion aux portes de Paris”
Derek Schilling, Johns Hopkins University
Alors que les fortifications entourant Paris sont obsolètes dès 1870, les « fortifs’ » et sa
zone militaire non aedificandi structureront jusqu’à la veille de la Grande Guerre la géographie
parisienne, canalisant le mouvement des personnes et des biens, et imprimant aux citadins une
« image de la ville » (Kevin Lynch) organisée par cercles concentriques. Sous l’égide de l’octroi,
l’enceinte de Thiers composera pour l’économie parisienne sous la Troisième République un
enjeu majeur. Mais dans les lettres, le douanier dans sa guérite fait piètre figure à côte de son
voisin plus colorié, le « zonier ».
Etranger à la ville comme à la banlieue limitrophe, le zonier ou la zonière paraît un corps
inassimilable par excellence : voué à la précarité et manquant de soins, il incarne la double
menace de la criminalité et de la contagion. Ainsi, dans des pamphlets, rapports officiels et
compilations littéraires de « choses vues » des années 1890 et 1900, sur des tons diversement
misérabilistes et alarmistes les observateurs opposent cette figure au citadin, bourgeois de
préférence ; à la roulotte branlante du « romanichel », s’oppose la demeure parisienne en pierre
de taille. Or le zonier sera sommé de porter un stigmate frappant toute population supposée
nomade, donc dangereuse : il est ce par quoi voyage et se propage la maladie.
S’appuyant sur des textes d’époque ou contemporains (Madeleine Fernandez, Jean-Louis
Cohen et André Lortie), cette communication cernera la dynamique par laquelle la stigmatisation
du zonier permet d’entretenir la croyance post-haussmannienne dans un Paris intra-muros
assaini. Derrière les arguments d’utilité publique sur l’expropriation de la zone, se profile une
pensée moins hygiéniste qu’eugéniste, selon laquelle la protection sanitaire de la ville ne peut se
faire sans le rejet (et la réduction) d’un corps contaminé et abject menaçant de faire irruption
chez soi.
“The ‘pure’ artist: artistic and national identities in Camille Mauclair’s La Ville lumière”
Katherine Shingler, University of Nottingham
This paper considers Camille Mauclair’s all-but-forgotten 1904 art novel La Ville
lumière, aiming to show how it maps notions of artistic identity onto national identity. As such,
the novel may be seen as quietly heralding the reactionary xenophobia for which Mauclair would
later become known.
La Ville lumière initially appears to follow the model of the Bildungsroman, tracking the
progress of the young Julien Rochès as he arrives in Paris from the South and seeks to establish
himself as a painter. And yet the narrative is not really concerned with what Rochès learns, as
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Mauclair makes it clear that he is already an accomplished, albeit ‘instinctive’ artist when he
comes to Paris. What is at stake, rather, is his ability to resist the ‘faussetés corrosives’ that
inhabit the city and threaten to contaminate the pure artist. The myth of the artist that emerges
from Mauclair’s text – and indeed is common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art
writing more generally – is one of the artist as a special kind of personality: ascetic, pure, saintly,
and able to run the gauntlet of Parisian temptations. For Mauclair, moreover, this myth is
politically inflected as the influences from which the artist must be protected are, implicitly,
foreign: foreign not just to art, but to French art. To remain a pure artist, Rochès must ultimately
retreat from cosmopolitan Paris into a culturally stable France profonde. Examining the novel in
relation to Mauclair’s shifting aesthetic and political allegiances, I hope to show that in its
simmering fears about Paris as a confusing and disorientating melting-poet of aesthetic ideas and
identities, La Ville lumière foreshadows Mauclair’s later critical attacks on avant-garde art,
which he characterized as barbaric and alien to French tradition.
Panel 3.D: Heads and Hands
Chair: Allison Deutsch, University College London
“Magical Hats and Disembodied Heads”
Susan Hiner, Vassar College
This paper contextualizes the lady’s hat in nineteenth-century French fashion culture and
looks at the practical and symbolic value of the tools of its production. Hyper-feminine, as a
social symbol, the chapeau de femme offered a miniature, yet exaggerated, version of a
dress. Removed as it was from its use value, this luxury commodity, concealing its seams, pins,
glue, and thread, was also severed from its conditions of production—the very illustration of a
commodity fetish. This process of erasure is strikingly obvious in the many advertisements for
and illustrations of fashion hats over the course of the century, where the object is portrayed in
all its magical glory, separated from the elements and processes of its creation, free-floating and
often independent even from the heads of the women who purchased it. The consumer herself
becomes secondary under the spell cast by the hat, and the women who produced it vanish
altogether.
Along with the hat, the head form, referred to as a tête à poupée, or marotte, filled
multiple, and symbolic, functions. The marotte’s use value is obvious enough—it is a stand-in
for the head of the female consumer on which the modiste could work and embellish the hat. But
these têtes, descendants of the poupées de la mode of the eighteenth century and ancestors of
twentieth-century mannequins, in their eerie verisimilitude and their status as objects to emulate,
also serve as uncanny reminders of the power of commodification to shape the feminine and deanimate real women. The marottes are idealizing mirrors, inanimate doubles, often resembling
the modiste herself. My paper will analyze these hats and heads and explore how their powers of
animation and verisimilitude contributed to fashion’s cultural production of femininity.
November 5-7, 2015
“Expert Hands, Infectious Touch: Painting, Pregnancy and Mourning in Berthe Morisot’s
The Mother and Sister of the Artist (1869-1870)”
Mary Hunter, McGill University
When Berthe Morisot asked Edouard Manet to have a look at her recently completed
portrait of her mourning mother and pregnant sister in the days before the 1870 Salon, she did
not expect him to completely repaint the depiction of her mother. “[I]t isn’t possible to stop
him,” she wrote in distress to her sister. “He moves from the petticoat to the bodice, from the
bodice to the head, from the head to the background.” While Morisot sought out Manet’s
expertise, she feared that the painting’s public display would ruin her reputation as an
independent artist as his heavy hand left too obvious a mark on her canvas.
This paper will explore the gender politics of occupational expertise – artistic and
medical – through an analysis of Morisot’s The Mother and Sister of the Artist. Firstly, it will
consider the significance of hands and touch in Manet’s and Morisot’s work. Secondly, it will
examine how the hands of male experts ‘infected’ female spaces, such as paintings and pregnant
bodies.
“Facing Camille in Claude Monet’s On the Beach at Trouville”
Marni Reva Kessler, University of Kansas
In On the Beach at Trouville of 1870, Claude Monet represents two women who shade
themselves from the sun and wind with hats and parasols. The figure on the left is quite likely
Monet’s wife, Camille, and the woman on the right, probably the spouse of painter Eugène
Boudin. The latter is clearly not Monet’s focus, though her almost caricatured facial features and
barely described black mourning attire direct us to the bright star of the image, Camille, in her
white, lace-trimmed dress, ornately flowered straw hat, holding a parasol, the underside of which
is a splashy periwinkle blue. Whether Camille also wears a veil has stumped scholars and yet it
seems clear to me, in part because the terrain of Camille’s face is so unclear, that a veil falls
across the upper part of her visage. But, this veil reads as being at once a material presence and a
shadow, a physical object that declines into its own immaterial trace.
Using Freud’s discussion of contranyms, words that can have opposite meanings, I want
to parse Camille’s veil as a contradictory object, one that, in formal and material terms,
controverts itself. For Monet’s darkened film of pigment over Camille’s face stands for two
disparate things: one tangible and the other not. Indeed, this makes sense, for a veil is also quite
literally a screen, itself a contranym, since to screen can mean both to show and to conceal. This
painted veil also stands for the thing that would have screened the wind and sand—problematic
presences on the day Monet worked on the painting, for countless grains of sand dust the surface
of the image— from Camille’s eyes and nose. With a sleight of hand, Monet blurred this veil of
paint over Camille’s face into a richly layered and nuanced investigation of the contranymic
status of the very object he represents.
“Le Chef”
Michael Garval, North Carolina State University
November 5-7, 2015
The term chef derives from the Old French word for head, and of course the chef de
cuisine is also the “head” of the kitchen staff. The chef’s hat or tocque, in use since the early
1800s, points to both meanings of chef, marking at once the physical head it crowns, and the
executive status it symbolizes. Across the long nineteenth century moreover, chefs from
Antonin Carême through Auguste Escoffier acquired new-found prestige and authority, as they
emulated the intellectual aura of the writer – posing as hommes de lettres, rather than cooks. For
despite increasing professionalization in the culinary realm, and top practicioners’ growing
celebrity, chefs remained associated with a long history of domesticity. In this sense, as a public
figure, the nineteenth-century chef was caught between the luster of intellectual endeavor and the
stigma of manual labor; or, more simply, between the head and the hands. This paper thus
focuses on chefs’ heads and hands depicted in the period’s popular visual culture – including
caricatures, illustrated menus, and postcards – as part of a broader reflection on the rise of the
celebrity chef.
Panel 3.E: Chambres Doubles: Reading Chambers, Reading Baudelaire
Chair: Scott Carpenter, Carleton College
Discussant: Ross Chambers, University of Michigan, emeritus
“The Infinite Readability of Poetry: Ross Chambers on Baudelaire”
Claire Chi-ah Lyu, University of Virginia
I would like to present what I find most inspiring in the new book by Ross Chambers An
Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise and, in doing so, to share what I
have learned from reading his works over the years. I wish to express my deep gratitude toward
the generosity Chambers offers both in work and in person.
In An Atmospherics of the City Chambers demonstrates how Baudelaire's poetry awakens
to noise and traces its shift from "noise-adverse" to "noise-friendly" to "entropy-incarnate" and
finally to the new genre of "urban diary." He shows that "urban diary," in its "formal
manifestation of formlessness," takes literature beyond the limits of communicable message and
opens it to "infinite readability." In this regard Chambers proposes Baudelaire to be an "initiator
of discursivity" along with Marx and Freud whom Foucault had singled out in his well-known
essay "What is an author?" To place a lyric poet amidst the two exemplary theorists and to show
with rigor and inventiveness that poetic language is as foundational and consequential as other
modes of "stronger" discourses -- I find this breathtaking.
I propose to discuss the notion of "infinite readability" together with the idea of
"meaningfulness" Chambers develops in Meaning and Meaningfulness. This will allow us to
reflect upon the "dignity" of poetry with which An Atmospherics of the City closes. To the three
characteristics of poetry Chambers identifies -- "infinite readability," "meaningfulness," and
"dignity" -- I wish to add a fourth: generosity. In awakening to noise, poetry opens to what is
most inimical to the poetic universe traditionally conceived as a closed system of harmony and
November 5-7, 2015
order. Similarly, Chambers' works open for us the possibility of conceiving reading and criticism
in terms of a capacity to open to the other: as a form of generosity.
“Tattered Allegory in ‘Le Vieux saltimbanque’”
Ellen Burt, University of California, Irvine
This paper will celebrate and argue with Ross Chambers’s long-awaited book. The
narrative of Baudelaire’s literary evolution (from fetishized aesthetics to allegory to irony)
sketched out in the first part of his Atmospherics of the City will be set aside, in favor of
Chambers’s later characterization of the work as an urban journal where allegory and irony are
proximate, alternating modes. The point will be argued by investigating Chambers’s definition
of allegory as a reflection on ruins that installs a narrative and implies a transcendent perspective.
Through a reading of “Le Vieux saltimbanque,” where an old clown provides an allegorical
figure for the allegorizing artist, identified by V. Swain with Rousseau, I will contend that
Baudelaire’s allegories are in critical ways different from those of Rousseau and the Romantics,
where they are indeed extended, conversionary, and propped on the supernatural.
To tatter the rich folds of allegory the better to respond to his needs as modern poet, Baudelaire
transfers to it characteristics of irony—its disruptiveness, its explosive punctuality, its reliance on
forces rather immanent than transcendent. Thus, Baudelaire disdains the conversionary scheme
of Rousseau’s Confessions and its reliance on an eternal being and divine justice. His effects of
supernaturalism are just effects, tricks of staging that require no belief in a providential order but
only a superior calculation that can be related, as Benjamin does, to the market. No difference is
to be found between prose and verse collections here. (In “Le Joueur généreux,” the devil
implies that his practice thrives on disbelief. Remorse in ‘Au lecteur’ is not owed to God’s grace
but to a pleasure economy operating in moral choice; sin is a better bet than virtue since through
“adorable remorse’ the same act can be enjoyed twice—in the doing and in complacent
recollection.) In The Arcades Project, Benjamin underscores the evanescent nature of
Baudelaire’s allegories and the poor returns he gets on them: unlike the surefooted, extended
allegory of London in Peter Bell, showing Shelley’s firm grip, the Baudelaire’s poet is a
stumbler whose uncertain grasp lets allegories slip away. As for the old clown, it is revelatory
less as figure standing for old things affected by time than on account of the clown’s potent
allegorizing look that brings prematurely to dust what it touches. Allegory interrupts a narrative
violently to cause the present to reveal itself as past; it brings out obsolescence in the
contemporaneous. Because allegory allows Baudelaire’s relation to history to come into view,
Chambers rightly wanted to preserve it by means of his evolutionary scheme. But unless one
attends to the transformations Baudelaire has made in allegory itself, one misses its historical
dimension at its sharpest, not as a reflection on events that have occurred, but where it makes the
event appear as such in the falling away of the trappings of life. It is less Baudelaire’s literary
evolution following 1848 than his economizing and ironizing tattering of allegory itself—
available throughout his works—that is most revelatory of this historical dimension. Chambers’s
conception of the work as metropolitan diary is the better way to gain access to these
transformations that Baudelaire effects in the figure of allegory.
“Allegory in Tatters: ‘Les Sept Vieillards’”
Kevin Newmark, Boston College
November 5-7, 2015
It is not at all uncommon to greet the publication of an important new book by declaring
it an event in its own right. And the publication of Ross Chambers’s book on Baudelaire, An
Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise, is no exception to the rule. This
book is an event, and a most welcome one, too—given the paucity of serious attention the
reading of 19th-century French poetry seems able to generate in the wider field of literary and
cultural studies today.
But just what do we mean when we call a book an event? Especially when the book we
are talking about is a book of poetry or a book about poetry? What is the relation between what
happens (poetically) inside a book and what happens (historically) outside a book? If An
Atmospherics of the City constitutes an event in its own right, it is due precisely to the way it
responds to questions of this nature with unmatched intelligence, finesse, and resourcefulness.
It comes as no great surprise that Chambers will identify the philosophical category of the
aesthetic as the mediating principle that serves to link the events of empirical history to the
poetic or literary experiences of reading and writing. “That Baudelaire was a prime mover in
insisting on the indispensable role of the category of the aesthetic in the modern age is not a
matter of dispute,” Chambers writes at the beginning of his book (3). And if we take
Baudelaire’s allegiance to the category of the aesthetic as indisputable, then the thesis Chambers
will draw from this allegiance would itself become nearly indisputable. “Art, as a practice of
atmospherics,” Chambers goes on to say, “was to enact something like the etymological sense of
the word aesthetics; poetry as [Baudelaire] practiced it was to function as an aesthesis capable of
making sensible the dimension of strangeness inherent, most notably in the ‘moving chaos’ of
the familiar urban street.”
The singular strength of Chambers’s book resides in his own recognition that this general
thesis about aesthetics as a bridge between historical and literary experience can be confirmed
only by coming to terms with, in other words, reading, the allegorical and ironic operations that
are actually performed in Baudelaire’s writing. But what is the relation between allegory and
irony on the one hand and the category of the aesthetic on the other? What if there is something
inherent to allegory and irony that contaminates, disrupts, or even “dispenses” with, the
“indispensable role” played by the aesthetic in mediating between historical and literary
experience? What then of Chambers’s powerful suggestion that Baudelaire’s “antiaesthetics”
might offer at the very least a way of “awakening the poetic readers to the unconscious state of
alienation in which they lived”?
This paper will propose some preliminary responses to these questions by reading
Chambers reading “Les Sept Vieillards.”
Panel 3.F: Littérature et crime : un cercle vicieux ?
Chair: Andrea Goulet, University of Pennsylvania
“Le chef d’œuvre du crime : fonctions du meurtre dans la fiction courte de la fin de siècle”
Jean-François Fournier, Appalachian State University
Loin d’offrir aux lecteurs des modèles de vertu ou d’héroïsme, les contes fin-de-siècle
sont peuplés de personnages déréglés dont le vice confine à la folie voire aux pulsions
meurtrières. Le portrait des noirceurs de l’âme humaine procède d’une part chez les auteurs
d’une volonté de choquer le bourgeois. Il répond aussi à une surenchère dans la course acharnée
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aux lecteurs qui anime la presse de l’époque. Octave Mirbeau perçoit dans l’engouement
omniprésent pour l’assassinat, cette grande préoccupation humaine, un des traits marquants de la
société bourgeoise du progrès.
Fruit d’une décomposition annoncée des mœurs, le désir criminel devient avec la folie un
thème de prédilection des œuvres de fiction courte, dont la brièveté stimule le choc du lecteur en
l’absence d’édification morale. À travers la lecture de contes et histoires courtes de Maupassant,
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mirbeau, Mendès et Richepin, il sera question de montrer la prégnance
d’un sentiment de propagation du meurtre des centres urbains vers des campagnes jugées saines
jusque-là. La contamination perçue de la société bourgeoise donne lieu à une angoisse que la
tonalité d’humour noir renforce plus qu’elle ne la cache.
Dans ces œuvres, il ne s’agit pas seulement de proposer un miroir à une société
désemparée par une perte des valeurs et un matérialisme croissant. Il existe par ailleurs une
exigence de meurtre symbolique des règles usées du conte romantique ou classique. C’est bien à
une rénovation esthétique, au moyen d’une exécution violente de formes datées, que ces auteurs
nous convient. Nous exposerons les caractéristiques poétiques et philosophiques impliquées par
un traitement humoristique du meurtre dans un format de fiction courte, où la contamination du
tissu social aboutit à une renaissance littéraire.
“L’affaire Morrisset, un Lacenaire en 1880 ?”
Judith Lyon-Caen, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales
La « suggestion littéraire du crime » apparaît comme un motif récurrent dans la littérature
criminologique et psychologique fin de siècle (Tarde, Proal et Scipio Sighele) mais aussi dans
certains travaux d’histoire littéraire de l’époque (Louis Maigron). Repris par la presse, ce thème
– dont on ne sait s’il relève de la vulgarisation de thèses scientifiques, ou au contraire d’une
élaboration savante à partir du sens commun – apparaît comme l’un des leitmotive des discours
fin-de-siècle étudiés par Marc Angenot. Ce panel propose d’en explorer la généalogie, les
déclinaisons et les usages.
Les travaux psycho- et crimino-logiques se nourrissent de « causes célèbres », anciennes
ou récentes, qui apparaissent comme autant de preuves ou d’illustrations de la « contamination
littéraire » ; ils recyclent toute une série d’écrits sur la « mauvaise influence de la littérature »,
produits au long du XIXe siècle dans des contextes multiples : mises en cause politiques de
l’influence délétère du roman et du théâtre sur le peuple (autour de 1830 et de 1848),
proscription des « mauvais romans » dans les milieux catholiques, dénonciation de
l’industrialisation de la littérature au nom de la valeur littéraire elle-même. Comment
comprendre l’articulation des « causes célèbres » et l’argumentation sur le caractère criminogène
dans la littérature ? Par quelles opérations d’écriture cette articulation passe-t-elle ? Le recyclage
du vieux discours de la mauvaise influence de la littérature sur les mœurs doit-il s’analyser
comme une dépolitisation du regard sur la littérature ? Relève-t-il d’une forme de conquête de la
criminologie sur l’ensemble des questions politiques et sociales ? Comment le discours de la
suggestion littéraire s’articule-t-il avec les autres pensées de la contamination, de la contagion à
l’œuvre dans les sciences de l’homme fin de siècle ? Quelle histoire de la littérature, et en
particulier du moment romantique (Maigron), contribue-t-il à écrire ?
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A côté des réflexions générales, on voudrait privilégier des études de cas, autour des
affaires qui deviennent des « cas » criminologiques – et qui, de ce fait, sont parvenues jusqu’à
nous. Je pense notamment à l’affaire Chambige (J. Finkelberg), ou, dans mon cas, à l’affaire
Morisset (1881), du nom d’un jeune employé de la ville de Tours qui, à défaut de devenir poète,
pensait devenir célèbre en devenant assassin, sur le modèle de Lacenaire.
L’étude de ces affaires (mais aussi d’affaires plus anciennes, comme l’affaire Lafarge
étudiée par Jann Matlock, l’affaire Ferrand et l’affaire Bancal dans les années 1840) montre que
la question de l’influence de la littérature y est centrale, non seulement comme motif dans le
temps de l’instruction et du procès, mais aussi comme moteur même de l’écriture des « causes
célèbres ». L’influence néfaste de la littérature fait alors l’objet d’appréciations paradoxales :
dans le cours de certains procès (Chambige, Morisset), l’action de la littérature est davantage
revendiquée par les accusés que par l’accusation, qui ne veut pas diluer la responsabilité des
criminels. Dans d’autres procès (Bancal, Ferrand, Lafarge), c’est au contraire un argument
central de l’accusation, qui cherche à montrer la faiblesse des accusés. Comment comprendre ce
paradoxe ? Comment passe-t-il dans l’argumentation des criminologues ? Comment atteindre le
sens donné par les accusés à leurs usages de la littérature ? Dans le procès de Morisset,
l’accusation refuse de prendre au sérieux l’identification de l’accusé à Lacenaire ; dans l’affaire
Chambige, la défense du jeune homme insiste sur la dimension littéraire de la vie de Chambige,
et l’affaire devient, dans la presse, le procès de la littérature décadente, du rapport brouillé de
l’art et de la vie. Chambige, fort de ses relais dans les milieux littéraires parisiens, réussit à faire
entendre sa voix, là où Morisset échoue : la question de la suggestion littéraire du crime est aussi
une question sociale.
“The Chambige Affair: A Study of the Relationship Between Crime, Literature, and
Science in France at the End of the Nineteenth Century”
John Finkelberg, University of Michigan
On January 25, 1888 in a villa on the outskirts of Constantine, Algeria 22 year-old law
student Henri Chambige was found wounded next to the half-naked corpse of Magdeleine Grille,
a 30 year-old married mother of two. The case was brought to trail before the Cour d’assises de
Constantine from the 8th to the 11th of November 1888; two opposing explanations were
presented before the courtroom. Henri Chambige claimed it was an attempt at a double suicide;
the lovers planned to consummate their love for one another and then commit suicide to avoid
public disgrace. The prosecution accused him of drugging, hypnotizing, and murdering Mme
Grille, and assessed that ambition and literary interests corrupted him. The scandal garnered
public attention both in Algeria and the French metropolis. From the beginning, language of
literary “contamination” and “suggestion” characterized the arguments made in the courtroom, as
well as the debates in the French press, about Chambige’s psyche at the time of the crime. The
press played a major role in shedding light on the question of literary suggestion and crime,
which caught the attention of psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists. Intellectuals in
France including Louis Proal, Gabriel Tarde, and Scipio Sighele understood there to be a critical
link between Chambige’s psyche and the contemporary novel. In their rereading of the scandal,
these men developed theories on crime, suicide, and the powers of literature to influence the
human psyche. The following work argues that the Chambige Affair reveals an intimate
relationship between psychological sciences, criminology, and literature in France at the end of
the Nineteenth Century.
November 5-7, 2015
Reception – MacLean House, 6:45 pm - 8:00 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Friday 6 November
Session 4 – 8:30 am - 10:00 am
Panel 4.A: Outbreak/Breaking Out: Theater and War
Chair: Florent Masse, Princeton University
“Aesthetic Quarantine: Theatrical Modernism in Lenormand’s Le Lâche”
Susan McCready, University of South Alabama
Set during the First World War, H-R Lenormand’s 1926 play Le Lâche is the story of an
artist who attempts to avoid war service by feigning illness and retreating to a Swiss sanitarium.
Tableaux devoted to meditations about art, identity, and suffering in war alternate with those that
advance a plot of espionage and betrayal. Lenormand’s overt theatricality forces a reflection on
the ambiguous and shifting ground of identity in wartime, and of aesthetics in the postwar
theater.
“The Sullied Stage: Ideological Impurities in Great War Theater”
Leon Sachs, University of Kentucky
Students of the First World War are familiar with the term “union sacrée” referring to
the wartime truce in France between opposing political and ideological camps, one rooted in the
traditions of the Church and the Ancien Régime and the other in secular humanism inherited
from the Enlightenment and the Revolution. But how did this “union” manifest itself in artistic
form? This paper considers three different plays appearing in the aftermath of war — Paul
Raynal’s Le Tombeau sous l'Arc de Triomphe (1924), François de Curel’s Viveuse et le
moribond (1926) and Maurice Rostand’s L’Archange (1925) — in order to reveal the kinds of
theatrical inventions required to produce the new ideological admixture.
“Theater, Theatricality and the Crimean War”
Sima Godfrey, University of British Columbia
Whereas the Crimean war does not figure prominently in the canonical literature of 19thcentury France, it was amply represented in large scale paintings, popular novels, and theater of
the second half of the 19th century. With reference to the theatricality of the Crimean War, this
paper looks at representations of the conflict as depicted in some of those popular plays.
Panel 4.B: Exorcizing the Church
Chair: Stamos Metzidakis, Washington University in Saint Louis
“Priests and Nuns: The Fashion Cure”
Margaret Waller, Pomona College
There are many kinds of contamination. But they seldom require exorcism—and a
secular one at that. So, too, it is the rare exorcism that is followed by a fashion cure. This paper
explores one such case.
In the views of many revolutionaries in the early 1790s, the only way to make France the
republic on which they could stand was to rid it of the “devil,” which is to say the Catholic
Church. For them, it was a matter of exorcising the worst kind of contamination—the kind from
November 5-7, 2015
without (the Vatican) that was also deep within. The story of the revolutionaries’ deChristianization of France is well known. But what about the fashion connection?
Until 1789, the fashion magazine had been studiously, we might almost say religiously,
secular and avoided references to the Church. But from 1790-1793 in Lebrun-Tossa’s fervently
republican version, Journal de la Mode et du Goût, condemnations of the Church as a source of
perversion cropped up almost from the beginning and in almost every issue.
As an antidote to the contaminating presence of men and women of the Church, LebrunTossa did not preach confinement or continued celibacy but instead social reintegration through
heterosexuality. Putting them into properly gendered dress—Army uniforms for the priests and
fashionable dresses for the nuns—would turn them into “real” men and women, attractive to
each other and capable of reproducing the newly secular state in and as the patriarchal family.
But by the last several issues, a lascivious condemnation of sexual shenanigans in convents and
monasteries in verse form became the periodical’s new religion, squeezing out practically
everything else, including fashion, in the 8-page journal de la mode. Meanwhile, the editor
invented a female proxy: a former nun, writing in the first-person, who notes her new-found
pleasure in coquetry and proposes herself as the perfect candidate for fashion journalist (or
flaming queen?).
In this paper I explore how fashion and politics, proposed as de-contaminating antidotes
to religion, are revealed as mutually contaminating practices.
“Censorship and Scandal: How George Sand Picked a Fight With the Catholic Church”
Kate Bonin, Arcadia University
In October 1862, when George Sand proposed the manuscript of her new novel,
Mademoiselle La Quintinie, to her editor François Buloz, she warned him that its contents were
potentially dangerous: “Avec un gouvernement de bon plaisir et de caprice imprévu, vous
risquerez un avertissement […]. [N]ous serions tancés, honnis, maudits, attendez-vous à cela. Si
vous publiez ce livre, vous ne serez jamais canonisé et peut-être jamais pardonné.” Sand was
right to anticipate institutional censure of what was arguably the most scandalous novel she ever
wrote; the following year, the Vatican placed Sand’s entire œuvre on its Index Librorum
Prohibitum. With Mademoiselle La Quintinie, Sand attempted to offer her readers what she
termed “la solution du problème religieux;” that is, the novel seeks to counter what Sand
perceived as the undue, anti-modern, even unhealthy influence of the ultramontane French
Church and its supporters (the parti clérical) in Second Empire politics and social life.
Quintinie’s attack on the parti clérical articulates Sand’s positions on issues ranging from
Church doctrine and policy, the Italian Risorgimento and the contested legacy of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. These were controversial subjects, but Sand had already written other polemical, even
censured works of fiction: what then sets Mademoiselle La Quintinie apart?
In answer to this question, this paper analyzes the ways in which Sand employed canny
tactics of citation, provocation and even downright trolling, both within the novel and in
complementary texts written before, during and after Quintinie’s publication. Appropriating and
subverting the Church’s own rhetoric of purity and corruption, sin and redemption, Sand cleverly
orchestrated the voices in conflict with her own. Quite clearly, Sand conceived of scandal and
censorship as weapons that she could use to shape public opinion and bring about real social
change.
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“Contamination et religion dans Madame Gervaisais des Frères Goncourt, L’Evangéliste de
Daudet et Lourdes de Zola”
Anne-Simone Dufief, Université d’Angers
Il s’agit d’étudier le regard porté sur la religion et les phénomènes de conversion qui se
multiplie dans la seconde moitié du XIX) siècle, dans trois romans qui se font écho et dont les
auteurs sont athées ou agnostiques. Le phénomène religieux y est moins envisagé dans sa
dimension individuelle et spirituelle que dans une relation à l’institution et à la collectivité. Ces
œuvres se penchent sur les phénomènes d’influence et de contamination à une époque où va
bientôt se développer la psychologie des foules. Fautes morales et pathologies sont constamment
mises en relation tant sur le plan thématique que métaphorique. Il faudra resituer dans le contexte
de l’histoire de la psychologie ce phénomène de constant va-et-vient entre une nosographie
souvent répugnante et la souillure morale qui toutes deux appellent la purification.
Panel 4.C: Containing Crime in the Prison and Penal Colony
Chair: June K. Laval, Kennesaw State University
“La contagion du mal au bagne guyanais : symptômes et remèdes dans deux romans de
Louis Boussenard”
Cyrielle Faivre, Providence College
La peur de la contagion est dans une certaine mesure à l’origine de la fermeture des
bagnes métropolitains en France : on commence, à partir des années 1820, à s’inquiéter de la
présence des forçats, ces êtres « incurables » qui menacent d’« infecter8 » la population locale.
Pour remplacer ce que Ginouvier qualifiait d’« écoles normales de la dépravation publique », on
a recours à la colonisation pénale qui est supposée éloigner ces agents infectieux d’une
métropole encore traumatisée par la sanglante insurrection de juin 1848.
Dans Les Robinsons de la Guyane (1882) et Les Chasseurs de caoutchouc (1886), Louis
Boussenard reprend la métaphore du corps malade pour dénoncer le bagne colonial qui répand,
selon lui, les germes de la criminalité en Guyane. Fervent défenseur de l’idéologie colonialiste,
l’écrivain cherche en effet à « réhabiliter » la Guyane que les Français se représentent à l’époque
comme « le réceptacle de toutes les maladies ».
Ainsi Boussenard utilise-t-il l’argument invoqué par Napoléon III – la propagation de la
maladie criminelle en métropole – pour dénoncer le Second Empire qui a inoculé le virus dans
l’eldorado guyanais par le biais des transportés (les criminels de droit commun). Ces derniers
affichent des symptômes inquiétants, de la laideur à la variole en passant par le cannibalisme, et
menacent de contaminer les autres habitants. Au contraire, le déporté Robin, qui incarne les
valeurs de la Troisième République, est dépeint comme « une tache de propreté » capable de
guérir le corps insulaire guyanais.
8
Je reprends ici les termes utilisés par Hubert Lauvergne, médecin en chef du bagne de Toulon, dans son ouvrage
Les Forçats, considérés sous le rapport physiologique, moral et intellectuel (1841).
November 5-7, 2015
“De la contamination au laboratoire hygiéniste : imaginaires des prisons en France au
XIXe siècle”
Marion Croisy, Université Paris III, & Thomas Le Roux, CNRS
Dans un siècle hanté par l’hygiénisme, la prison, lieu clos dans lequel l’observation
sociale peut aisément s’effectuer, devient l’un des symboles de la contamination : investie par le
regard des médecins autant que par celui des homme de lettres, la prison perçue comme espace
de contamination est un lieu commun des discours « sérieux » et littéraires qui la représentent.
Ces textes témoignent alors des différents aspects que revêt la contamination car avant la théorie
pasteurienne, les voies de la contamination sont perçues comme multiples : tant par la
dégradation sociale que par la malpropreté qui y règnent, les prisons sont l’archétype de la
souillure et de sa diffusion.
Cette communication a pour ambition d’étudier la circulation des savoirs et des images
au sein d’un corpus d’hygiénistes et d’un corpus littéraire, croisant ainsi l’approche littéraire et
l’approche historique. Il s’agira de montrer comment ces textes participent de la construction de
l’imaginaire de la prison pénale, cette prison qui, au XIXe siècle, est aussi pensée comme une
voie de guérison. Ainsi l’exclusion et l’isolement du détenu apparaissent-ils comme les
meilleures façons de prévenir la contagion du vice.
“‘Les galères font le galérien’: The Bagne of Toulon As a Site of Revolt, Abjection and
Transmutation In the Nineteenth-Century Imagination”
Amelia Fedo, New York University
Crime has long been seen as contamination, uncleanness, or impurity. According to
Foucault, the medicalization of crime led to prisons and hospitals being used to contain
contagious sufferers and prevent them from propagating their disease in society. Crime was no
longer simply a social ill: it was a personal pathology as well. To this end, criminals were
typically only exhibited to the public in one spectacular moment of violence, part sacrifice and
part lesson; otherwise, they were either hidden behind the walls of a prison or transported. This is
the logic of the universe of François Villon and Jean Genet; but what of Vidocq, Vautrin and
Valjean? They belong to the universe of the highly atypical, paradoxical, and at times even
carnivalesque bagne métropolitain, an institution which originated in the mid-eighteenth century
but which did not exert a powerful hold on the French imagination until the Romantic era.
In the bagne, those sentenced to travaux forcés were neither executed nor hidden, but on
permanent view in the space of everyday life: working in proximity to civilians, convicts were a
curiosity for visitors but a commonplace for inhabitants of the town. Halfway between the
Foucauldian categories of supplice and punition, the bagne was incompletely medicalized:
despite phrenology's identification of various "types," convicts were indiscriminately mixed
together—where, to the dismay of reformers, they could "corrupt" each other socially,
linguistically and sexually.
This porosity and liminality made the bagne an object of particular fascination and horror
for nineteenth-century writers, journalists, moralists and reformers. Romantics in particular were
intrigued by the fate of the forçat, a marked man who had to either take society as his enemy or
struggle to redeem himself, while reactionaries found such attitudes dangerous: for to rethink the
abjection of the bagne was to destabilize all of society.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 4.D: Becoming Animal
Chair: André Benhaïm, Princeton University
“Infectious Affections and the War on Pity”
Kari Weil, Wesleyan University
“War is waged over the matter of pity” Derrida writes in The Animal that therefore I Am,
adding that it is a war that has been waged for some two hundred years. This paper will explore
possible origins of that war within the contested “emotive regimes” of post-revolutionary France
and their relevance for the representation of human-animal relations during the 19th century.
While one may expect that pity played a role in the establishment of the Society for the
Protection of Animals and anti-cruelty laws of the 19th century, I want to argue through a range
of texts from Eugene Sue’s Godolphin Arabian to Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie du dressage”
(which I read as companion to his crowd theory), that pity “mattered” in contradictory ways.
Formerly considered to have relevance for politics and the public sphere, pity, and especially pity
for animals would come to be “othered” as a lesser, animal instinct (not unlike some theories of
empathy today) better suited to Arabs, the English or peasants. Advocated by the likes of
Michelet or Hugo, the political or ethical force of pity or empathy for animals was regarded by
others with suspicion or mockery. Concerns for its contagious (or magnetic) quality, moreover,
and for its cultivation through unconscious (and suspect) practices like animal magnetism, or the
unruly energy of crowds, led to the importance of having an unaffected, if not ironic master to
control is public manifestations.
“‘J’aurai grand soin que vous ne vous trouviez plus en société’: Infantile Feral Behaviors
and the Fear of Contamination in 19th-century Children’s Books”
Pauline de Tholozany, Clemson University
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, several cases of feral children marked the minds
of the European elite. Peter of Hanover, the wild girl of Champagne, and Victor of Aveyron were
some of the most famous cases. When they were found, these children intermittently walked on
all fours and were unable to speak. Reports also describe an animal-like relation to food,
depicting them in the act of dismembering animals, devouring raw meat, or eating grass.
Drawing examples from 19th-century children’s book and education treatises, this paper
will analyze the ways in which the misbehaving children in these texts share traits with their feral
counterparts. In these stories, the naughty child embodies a state of nature that dangerously
triggers animalistic behaviors. These texts systematically involve a physical isolation of the
problematic child from the rest of society: the naughty child’s body contains traces of a past state
that cannot be eliminated, but that can be contained through physical ostracism.
Paradoxically, this fear of contamination was absent from the attitudes towards real cases
of feral children: on the contrary, much effort was done to socialize them and include them into
neighboring communities. A comparison between reports on those children and their later
fictionalized incarnations shows two conflicting perspectives on un-socialized children: between
humanistic ideals and ontological fears, the question of whether or not the animalized child risks
contaminating others is one that preoccupied pedagogues and educators throughout the century.
November 5-7, 2015
“Devenir-animal et poétique de la trace dans La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier de
Flaubert”
Julien Weber, Middlebury College
Dans le premier volume de La Bête et le souverain, Jacques Derrida a attiré notre
attention sur l’étrange ressemblance qui affecte en occident les figures du souverain, du criminel
et de la bête en vertu de leur commun “être-hors-la-loi”. Or, La Légende de Saint Julien
l’Hospitalier dramatise singulièrement cette contamination mutuelle. Comme plusieurs critiques
l’ont déjà remarqué (Elisabeth de Fontenay, Anne Simon) l’identité humaine du personnage s’y
trouve affectée par l’animalité dès les premières scènes de chasse. Mais il faudrait ajouter à ce
constat que l’animalité dont il s’agit est particulièrement complexe, puisqu’elle se présente sous
la forme d’un pouvoir souverain qui s’exerce sur la vie de tous les animaux, un pouvoir étranger
à toute règle ou toute forme de ritualisation de la mise à mort de l’autre.
Dans cette communication, je voudrais discuter les rapports de miroir qui s’esquissent au
cours du conte entre cette pratique excessive de la chasse et un certain idéal eshétique que
Flaubert qualifie d’esthétique du “stylet” dans sa Correspondance (“un style qui vous rentrerait
dans l’idée comme un coup de stylet”). Alors que la pratique silencieuse du meurtre en série de
Julien a souvent été opposée à celle de l’écrivain, je voudrais suggérer qu’il existe une complicité
entre le “tuer pour le plaisir de tuer” du personnage et la pratique nominative quasi-cratylienne
qui caractérise en particulier la première partie de La Légende. Loin de s’en tenir toutefois à cette
esthétique, le conte dramatise au contraire son interruption ainsi que l’émergence d’une poétique
de la trace, dont le dernier alinéa – si souvent commenté – n’est que la manifestation la plus
évidente. Quel est le rôle des animaux dans l’émergence de cette poétique de la trace? Et qu’estce que le conte nous dit finalement sur les rapports de contamination entre chasse, souveraineté
et écriture?
Panel 4.E: The Politics and Poetics of Cholera
Chair: Melissa Verhey, Princeton University
“La flânerie aux temps du choléra dans l’Horace de George Sand”
Morgane Cadieu, Yale University
Dans Surveiller et punir, Foucault analyse la gestion de l’accumulation des malades en
France en contrastant la distribution spatiale de la lèpre au Moyen Âge et celle de la peste au
XVIIe siècle. La lèpre supposait une exclusion des contaminés hors des murs de la cité, tandis
que la peste était traitée sur le mode du quadrillage : la ville était découpée pour permettre le
contrôle des pestiférés qui étaient combinés, intra muros, avec des personne saines. Cette étude
de Foucault ouvre le chapitre sur le panoptisme, montrant ainsi que la gestion d’une maladie est
conjointement topographique et optique : sa répartition dans l’espace détermine son mode de
visibilité et renseigne sur la spécificité du processus de contamination.
Foucault explique que le XIXe siècle voit ces systèmes de « partage » et de
« découpage » fusionner dans des lieux clos tels que l’hôpital ou l’asile. Les épidémies de
choléra de la première moitié du XIXe corroborent-elles cette thèse, ou l’exemplarité de cette
maladie a-t-elle nécessité l’élaboration d’un autre modèle de répartition spatiale ? Je me
focaliserai sur les liens entre l’urbanisme et l’hygiénisme, et notamment sur la cartographie des
égouts de Paris par Bruneseau en 1806, et leur étanchéisation et recouvrement suite à la
November 5-7, 2015
deuxième pandémie de choléra en 1832. Neutraliser la contagion a eu pour conséquence de
soustraire au regard le système de traitement des déchets.
Je prendrai pour exemple paradigmatique l’Horace de George Sand : le choléra a-t-il
conditionné les déambulations des personnages et la description de l’espace parisien ? A-t-il
déterminé la mise en scène du regard des flâneurs et flâneuses ? Et dans une perspective
autobiographique relevant de l’éco-féminisme et de la biopolitique du genre, les modes de
visibilité du choléra ont-ils contaminé la visibilité même du genre de Sand, c’est-à-dire son
travestissement ?
“« Un fléau sans imagination » ? Représentations du choléra de 1832”
Anne-Sophie Morel, Université de Savoie
Notre contribution souhaite s’interroger sur les représentations que les écrivains ont pu
donner de l’épidémie de choléra de 1832. Il s’agira à la fois de mesurer les implications
esthétiques et morales de cette contamination et de montrer en quoi elle participe d’une
(ré)invention d’une poétique moderne de la mort. Nous nous appuierons notamment sur
les Mémoires d’outre-tombe de Chateaubriand et l’« Histoire du choléra » de Jules Janin, publiée
dans les Contes nouveaux.
Chez Chateaubriand, l’évocation du choléra qui frappe Paris en 1832 est mise en
perspective : s’inscrivant à la suite des récits de peste de la littérature antique et des grandes
épidémies de l’histoire européenne, elle montre l’affrontement de deux esthétiques contraires,
construisant un diptyque entre grandeur et décadence. Aux prestiges de la représentation du
choléra médiéval, inspirée de l’Histoire épique, succèdent les spectacles grotesques de la
modernité. « Fléau sans imagination », réduit à un accident sanitaire quantifié, inspecté,
administrativement traité, le choléra témoigne de la dépoétisation du monde contemporain. Il
signale aussi la maladie qui affecte plus profondément le corps social, gangrené par l’argent-roi
et coupé de toute inspiration religieuse. La représentation de l’épidémie emprunte à des
intertextes et des topoï hérités du passé. Elle s’accorde avec l’imaginaire macabre des
romantiques et l’esthétique fantastique qui leur est chère. Le choléra esquisse ainsi au gré des
textes une danse macabre, teintée parfois d’une noire ironie.
“Re-imagining Contagion: Stendhal-Balzac-Michelet-Baudelaire”
Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
Given the cholera epidemics in Paris, Marseilles and elsewhere in France both in the
1830s and again in 1854, it is unsurprising that the phenomenon of contagion was a recurring
preoccupation in the country for much of the nineteenth century, especially since the medical
profession was undecided as to whether cholera was contagious or not. But if literary
representations of contagion were initially situated within the depiction of plagues, for example
in the fictional Dernières lettres de deux amans de Barcelone (1822), by H. de Latouche and
L’Héritier de l’Ain, which took as its setting the recent outbreak of yellow fever in the Catalan
city, they were still more evident outside the context of epidemiology. This paper will be
specifically concerned with examples of the figurative representation of contagion in a selection
of literary authors writing during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. It will begin by
establishing as its reference point the allusions by Baudelaire, in two of his prose poems, to
‘extase contagieuse’ and ‘[l]a contagion de la folie’ and to which I shall return by way of
conclusion. The intervening discussion will explore the literary hinterland to Baudelaire’s
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evocations of these phenomena, focusing on love, as well as ecstasy and madness, and making
reference to representative medical and religious discourses of the period. With reference to
earlier, above all Neoplatonic, notions of love, the analysis will highlight the originality of
Stendhal’s evocation in Lucien Leuwen of ‘le plat et vulgaire moyen de la contagion de l’amour’.
Balzac will be considered both with regard to his extension of the range of positive phenomena
and conditions with the potential for contagion and for his specific concern in this context with
ecstasy and madness. La Sorcière will be examined in the light of Muriel Louâpre’s discussion
of the way Michelet uses the image of contagion to re-think the concept of transmission; and in
relation to the little-known work by his fellow historian Napoléon Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs
du désert (1842). Finally, the paper will return to the prose poems with which it began. In the
light of the preceding investigation of the wider context, it will view Baudelaire’s evocations of
contagion as examples of the poet’s frequent re-working of contemporary commonplaces, before
outlining a possible reading of Le Spleen de Paris in terms of the poet-persona’s relationship
with his fellow denizens of the city viewed in terms of a form of contagion.
Panel 4.F: Sex, Slang, and Squalor: Modes of Contamination in Hugo’s Novels,
Plays and Adaptations
Chair: Kathryn Grossman, The Pennsylvania State University
“The Άνάγκη of Άναγνεία: Claude Frollo’s Inevitable Impurity”
Briana Lewis, Catherine LeBlanc, and Leah Thirkill; Allegheny College
On the wall of the cathedral in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, beneath the famous
word “ΆΝΆΓΚΗ” or “fatalité,” Jehan Frollo glibly notices that his brother has also carved the
word “Άναγνεία” or “impureté.”1 And yet, whereas ἀνάγκη is foregrounded as a unifying theme
in the novel, the text makes clear that ἀναγνεία was inscribed there first; that is, in the implied
narrative of Claude Frollo’s descent into the madness of his deadly obsession with Esmeralda,
his preoccupation with impurity predates his focus on their seemingly inevitable shared fate. At
the root of his impurity is an irresistible urge to look where he shouldn’t — Claude Frollo
himself identifies the moment he first sees Esmeralda as the beginning of a kind of invasion of
his mind and body: “à dater de ce jour, il y eut en moi un homme que je ne connaissais pas”
(274). For him, even watching the beautiful girl perform in front of the cathedral is an illicit act,
an act of voyeurism, which becomes a kind of contamination, psychic “matter out of place,”
making him unfit for both his ecclesiastical work and his occult practices.
In this presentation, we will explore the multiple connections between ἀνάγκη and
ἀναγνεία as they pertain to the character of Claude Frollo — the inevitability of this voyeurism
and the sense of impurity it creates in Claude as voyeur. In the end, his perceived unavoidable
contamination sets in motion the inexorable fate, the ἀνάγκη, that befalls both him and
Esmeralda.
“Linguistic Contamination in Hugo’s Hernani and Les Misérables”
Laurence M. Porter, Oberlin College
1
Hugo, Victor. Notre-Dame de Paris. Collection Folio Classiques. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. p. 400.
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Critics fulminated at the irreverent treatment of nobles and of the king in Hugo’s
Hernani, as well as the explicit mentions of the bandits led by the title character. John J. Janc’s
revised critical edition of the play (2014) allows one to attempt to assess Hugo’s intentions. Was
he advancing any sort of egalitarian agenda? On the linguistic level, the presence of familiar
expressions seems an irreverent intrusion into the exalted domain of high tragedy, and a smug
endorsement of the democratizing tendencies that led to a quasi-constitutional monarchy in 1830.
When Les Misérables appeared from the depths of Hugo’s exile in 1862, he raises the
ante by devoting entire scenes of the action and complete chapters of authorial digression to
depicting and analyzing unsavory milieux: and aggravated recidivism after Notre-Dame de Paris.
The author’s detailed, loving exploration of varieties of thieves’ cant descends the social ladder
by several notches. Its very presence struck some as scandalous, especially as it was
accompanied by an appeal to treat vagabond children and even hardened criminals humanely, out
of enlightened self-interest. In a word, an entire legislative program has now become attached to
depictions of undesirables, and the target of this contestatory use of sermo humilis is no longer
the language of seventeenth-century Classical Tragedy, but of social inequities in the hic et nunc
of French society. Hugo mischievously juxtaposes to these thrusts a depiction of the private
language of bells in the convent, also used in part to circumvent the regulations of the modern
state. As an outcast from the French state between 1851 and 1870, he was particularly well
situated to sympathize with others who remained beyond the pale.
“Wretchedness on Air: Orson Welles Adapts Les Misérables”
Bradley Stephens, University of Bristol
Orson Welles’s 1937 radio dramatization of Les Misérables has to date received no
critical attention. Anyone with an interest in how and why this pioneer of twentieth-century
American culture adapted one of the previous century’s most globally recognized novels has had
to make do with passing discussions by Welles’s various biographers. Such a critical blindspot
both in the history of Welles’ storied career and in the international reception of Hugo’s epic
itself demands to be investigated.
The theme of contamination indicates a telling lens through which to achieve this
objective. Notwithstanding the narrative instances of dirt and abjection which Welles adapts,
including Fantine’s squalor and Jean Valjean’s flight through the Parisian sewers, more
figurative understandings of the term bring into focus the appeal of Les Misérables for him. In
the socio-economic sense of degradation, and in the moral sense of corruption, Hugo’s novel
offered Welles the opportunity to engage the American public with the despair of the 1930s.
Each of the seven episodes in his radio serialization – produced by the Mercury Theater
repertory company he had co-founded – opens by paraphrasing Hugo’s own preface that “So
long as these problems are not solved, so long as ignorance and poverty remain on earth, these
words cannot be useless.”
Welles insisted that the appeal of canonical writers such as Shakespeare should be
harnessed to attract a popular rather than elitist audience in order to maximize the moral impact
of such works. Not only did his appropriation of Jean Valjean’s plight reiterate the scope of
Hugo’s novel to stimulate public debate around the issues of economic misery and social
depression, but it also exemplified what Neil Verma has elsewhere theorized as radio’s ‘theater
of the mind’, itself an often ignored media form in adaptation studies.
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Break 10:00 am - 10:30 am
November 5-7, 2015
Friday 6 November
Session 5 10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Panel 5.A: Contaminated Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and (Poetic) Spaces
Chair: Adrianna Paliyenko (Colby College)
“Un milieu immonde: Pedophilia, Homosexuality and Sodomy in Tardieu’s étude médicolégale de la Pédérastie”
Sharon Johnson, Virginia Tech
In the medical world of nineteenth-century France, fear of contamination became a
leitmotiv in works on homosexuality, pedophilia, and sodomy as suggested by the corpus
produced by E. Salle (1835) Ambroise Tardieu (1859), Louis Pénard (1860), and François
Antoine Hippolite Fabre (n.d.). It was a crime “contre nature” (Tardieu, De la pédérastie, 123 ;
Salle, “Défloration et viol,” 225), “repoussant” (Tardieu 119), “un vice honteux” (Tardieu 119,
123 ; Fabre 346) involving a “une funeste passion” (Pénard 100). Practitioners of “ces
abominables turpitudes” (Pénard 99) had “des goûts dépravés” (Tardieu 123), and “une
imagination déréglée et de la plus scandaleuse débauche” (Fabre 346). Yet, Dr. Tardieu’s reasons
for writing the most complete study at that time were admirable: he observed a daily increase in
instances of blackmail related to male prostitution and pedophilia in the cases he was asked to
evaluate for the courts, stating that the July 1845 crime, “Affaire de la rue du Rempart,” created
the need for a new category of classification in forensic science. In this paper, I will provide an
overview of Tardieu’s pioneering study, De la pédérastie, which documented cases of “violences
pédérastes” and the signs of homosexual activity while underscoring the images of
contamination and impurity that replicate this rhetoric of “immondices” and “fange” in the
nineteenth century.
“Trains, Bodies, Desires in Verhaeren and Noailles”
Aimée Boutin, Florida State University
The image of the railway’s contamination of the landscape is a recurrent topos in the 19thcentury imaginary. NCFS scholars will no doubt be familiar with Emile Zola’s use of the
metaphors of disembowelment and rape (éventrer) to connote the train's penetration into virgin
territory—body and land—in La Bête humaine. The novel further develops implicit connections
between insanity (a neurasthenic illness known as “railway spine”) and the fury of the railway.
As opposed to the novel, poetic discourse explores different figurations of this motif, ranging
from violent intrusion to welcome interruption. The poetry of Emile Verhaeren and Anna de
Noailles illustrates the diversity of approaches to the railway’s overall productive rather than
destructive contamination of body and landscape. Verhaeren’s “L’En-avant” (Les Forces
tumultueuses, 1902) famously communicates the engine’s drive as it channels through the
speaker’s “muscles bandés,” whereas “Les Conquêtes” (La Multiple Splendeur, 1906) conveys
the entanglement of the railroad with other cultural flows. Less well known than Verhaeren’s
poetry of the railway, Noailles’s Les Éblouissements (1907) explores the train’s association with
desire, escape, and sexuality. In poems such as “Embrasement,” “Tumulte de l’aurore,” and
“Trains en été,” the sensuality of the railway “contaminates” mind and body by blurring inside
and outside.
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“La « femme romanesque », une contamination pour rire ?”
Damien Zanone, Université Catholique de Louvain
Albert Camus a rappelé dans L’Homme révolté (1951) l’usage qui voulait, au XIXe siècle,
que « les jeunes filles fussent “romanesques”. On entendait par là que ces créatures idéales ne
tenaient pas compte des réalités de l’existence ». Ce fut en effet l’affaire de toute une littérature
que de rappeler aux jeunes filles et aux femmes qu’elles avaient là, dans l’inaptitude au réel, un
rôle à tenir : posé comme diagnostic, le mot de romanesque semblait considéré comme suffisant
pour dire un mal moral et aussi son remède (écarter les romans). Ce discours traditionnel de la
critique contre les romans devient, dans les cent années qui précèdent l’intervention décisive de
Flaubert dans ce débat avec Madame Bovary, un thème de convention susceptible de
représentations ironiques ou pathétiques. L’adjectif « romanesque » est alors l’attribut nécessaire
de sujets féminins : « elle paraît romanesque » (Balzac, Ursule Mirouët, 1841), « cette petite fille
est sans doute romanesque » (Musset, Fantasio, 1833), « les femmes sont si romanesques »
(Sand, Le Secrétaire intime, 1834), une « femme singulière et romanesque s’il en fût » (Stendhal,
Mina de Vanghel, 1832), etc. L’emploi du mot dans un titre suffit pour annoncer tout un
programme (La Femme romanesque, pièce d’Alexandre-Joseph Le Roy de Bacre, 1801 ; Une
femme romanesque, roman de Claude Vignon, 1881).
À partir de ces deux derniers ouvrages, la communication interrogera le discours qui
prospère sur l’idée qu’une contamination s’opère, comme en un milieu homogène, entre romans
et femmes et entre femmes et romans. Le traitement comique de la figure de la « femme
romanesque », sorte de reformulation propre au XIXe siècle de la « précieuse ridicule »
moliéresque, nous retiendra particulièrement.
Panel 5.B: Stealth Contamination: The Commune at the Fin-de-Siècle
Chair: Peter Brooks, Princeton University
“Vallotton, Fénéon, and the Legacy of the Commune in La Revue blanche”
Bridget Alsdorf, Princeton University
In 1897 the anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon published a series of responses to a survey he
conducted on the political and cultural legacy of the Paris Commune. Fénéon’s “Enquête sur la
Commune” appeared in La Revue blanche, a leading journal of avant-garde arts and letters,
accompanied by fifteen prints by the the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. An artist closely
associated withLa Revue blanche, Vallotton was similarly fascinated by the Commune’s
continuing influence on Parisian culture. His portraits of political and cultural leaders illustrate
the text, providing another form of reflection on the Commune and its ideological afterlife in finde-siecle France.
This paper will consider Fénéon’s survey alongside Vallotton’s illustrations as well as
several related prints that the artist published in the 1890s. By addressing the enduring memory
of the Commune — both its revolutionary crowds and their suppression — in late nineteenthcentury Paris, Vallotton’s work conveys a profound ambivalence about the relationship between
the Parisian people and forces of social order. Vallotton’s ambivalence registers a central fact
about the changing dynamic between artists and their audiences in this moment, a turning point
in the emergence of mass media and social psychology.
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“Explosive Contaminations: Mallarmé and Anarchist ‘propagande par le fait’”
Cory Browning, University of Oregon
When questioned about the anarchist bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893,
Mallarmé riposted, “je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre.” This comment and several others
have fueled speculation about purported anarchist leanings and raised questions about how to
read his explosive poetry. This presentation begins with the premise that such speculation misses
the broader context and, consequently, fails to fully understand how Mallarmé’s poetry and
anarcho-terrorism interact to inform larger questions of aesthetics and politics.
It proposes that we situate Mallarmé’s poetry alongside the anarchist development of a
new strategy for revolutionary action, “propagande par le fait”(propaganda of the deed).
Upholding Marx’s observation that we make our own history but under conditions handed down
from the past, I argue that Mallarmé’s poetry and its relation to anarcho-terrorism are best read
as a reworking of the conditions for revolutionary action handed down directly from the
Commune and indirectly from the Jacobin Terror.
I trace the development of propaganda of the deed to the Marx/Bakunin debate,
identifying as the fulcrum the contested influence of the Terror on the Commune. Bakunin, I
demonstrate, recognized the Jacobin legacy as not merely ideological but, more important
because more insidious, affective and aesthetic. Propagande par le fait, I suggest, thus
developed as a form of revolutionary action that sought to alter the affective aesthetic conditions
of the present. Within this broader context, I then turn to a close reading of Mallarmé’s
“Accusation” to more fully explicate the explosive contaminations of aesthetics and politics.
“1886, Year of the Commune: Symbolism, Artistic Sociability, and the Persistence of
Revolution”
Effie Rentzou, Princeton University
1886 was a key moment for symbolism: it marked the introduction of the “vers libre” and
the “monologue intérieur,” formal innovations that would revolutionize poetry and prose to
come. These formal breakthroughs were largely elaborated collectively through magazines that
proliferated during this period, a plethora of symbolist publications that is a symptom of an
intense group activity. A new artistic sociability arose within the symbolist circles, accompanied
by a flourishing of ephemeral publications, but also a parallel elaboration of forms and theory in
these publications. But why do these phenomena appear with such intensity specifically in the
1880s? This paper will argue that the transmutation of literary activity in the 1880s is a cultural
response to the political (but also cultural and ethical, in the sense of the reorganization of the
everyday) radicalization brought by the experience of the Commune. The Commune offered a
model of both social organization but, chiefly, of the symbolic value and function of artistic
creation that would be reproduced in the symbolist circles and later on in the avant-garde:
importance of the group and communal creation, proliferation of small press/journals, written
declarations, manifestoes, petitions, and mainly the reconceptualization of literature as not just a
metaphor but as an integral part of a society in flux. The paper will discuss the reemergence of
the blueprint that the Commune created and its cultural recuperation by the symbolists, as a
moment of deferred action, of “afterwardness,” in the psychoanalytical sense. It is to be noted
that the structures that the symbolists created - group activity, magazines, theory and practice,
polemic statements (manifestos) and formal innovation - are all elements that will reappear thirty
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years later as constitutive parts of the historical avant-garde. The paper will link thus these three
historical moments, 1871, 1886, the 1910s, and trace the survival of the Commune as a
constantly reactivated experience within culture.
Panel 5.C: Hugo-Maupassant: corps perméables
Chair: Stéphanie Boulard, Georgia Tech
“Devenir pieuvre”
Stéphanie Boulard, Georgia Tech
La pieuvre est l’animal central du roman de Victor Hugo Les Travailleurs de la mer. Le
récit s’étoile de corps qui viennent se prendre dans la trame mortelle de ce monstre-araignée ou
hippogriffe. La pieuvre qui est le monstre par excellence, le seul monstre véritablement animal
de l’œuvre hugolienne, et dès lors constitutif des mythes hugoliens.
Or, ce monstre qui est tour à tour « prodige » ou « chef-d’œuvre », est, nous dit Victor
Hugo, « gangrène » ou encore « scorbut », une sorte de maladie sur pattes, flottante, qui s’infiltre
de pages en pages, qui contamine chaque personnages (Gilliatt, Clubin, Déruchette) pour tresser
une « toile-palais » qui est le livre lui-même. Et ce, jusqu’à Hugo lui-même écrivant sans
ambages dans sa lettre du 19 décembre 1866 à Paul Meurice qu’il essaye d’attirer sur son île à
Guernesey, « car moi aussi je suis une pieuvre, et rien n’est tenace comme une vieille amitié ».
Je veux étudier alors ce que j’appellerai le devenir-pieuvre. C’est-à-dire l’enchainement,
la transmission, voire la traduction de l’acte du face à face qui vrille sur lui-même, s’éprend de
son adversaire, concilie l’inconciliable, et par là s’illimite dans le corps de l’autre. Le concept de
devenir que fabrique Deleuze recouvre l’opposition identité / devenir au sens où le devenir
repose sur le principe de variation de l’identité. Ce que je veux appeler le devenir pieuvre, c’est
cette infiltration qui produit une identité hybride, le devenir étant phénomène de « double
capture, d’évolution non parallèle, de noces entre deux règnes ». Je veux montrer en quoi
l’ombre portée du monstre impose sa variation à tous les personnages de l’œuvre, mais aussi en
quoi il étant ses ramifications tentaculaires au-delà du livre lui-même.
“Les Misérables: Proximités et contaminations”
Philippe Moisan, Grinnell College
Les personnages hugoliens, en particulier ceux des Misérables, existent en grande partie
dans une insularité. Chacun d'entre eux représente une identité aux contours bien définie, une
ligne de force qui génère le texte autour des thèmes principaux du roman: à Valjean l'espace de
la rédemption, à Thénardier celui du crime, à Javert le système de surveillance et de répression,
et ainsi de suite.
Il existe cependant, à côté de ces identités verticales et visibles, un autre réseau
d'identités, horizontal, souterrain, qui fonctionne non plus sur le mode de la pureté, mais celui de
la contamination. Dans cet autre ensemble, les différents personnages n'apparaissent plus dans
une fixité, mais dans une incessante redistribution des rôles, au hasard des rencontres et des
proximités. Si l'on prend le triptyque Valjean/Javert/Thénardier, que tout semble opposé, il existe
plusieurs moments dans le texte où le contact entre les trois personnages occasionne une
contamination des identités.
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Par exemple, lors de l'épisode du guet-apens de la masure Gorbeau, au cours duquel
Valjean, au contact de Thénardier, se transfigure brutalement en bagnard qu'il était autrefois,
Thénardier passe du statut de prédateur de monsieur Leblanc à celui de proie de Javert, et Javert
de laisser transparaître un mot d'admiration pour le criminel qui s'est enfui, "ce devait être le
meilleur." Et dans le reste du roman, Valjean, Javert et Thénardier, par le jeu de leurs identités
multiples, ne cessent finalement d'être des mutants qui changent en permanence de territoire, de
statut social ou littéraire. Au delà, Les Misérables sont peut-être aussi un texte qui n'est pas
uniquement organisé comme un protocole de guérison sociale, c'est aussi le roman qui révèle une
contamination du corps social.
“Spreading Sensations in Maupassant”
Michal P. Ginsburg, Northwestern University
Most studies of smell in nineteenth-century French literature link the intensification of
collective sensitivity to odors of all kinds to the growing importance of privacy and the
individual and to “the bourgeois aim of both keeping away from and protecting himself against
the masses” (Corbin, 162). This new sensitivity to smells is most obvious in discussions of
hygiene and public health in the first half of the century, before the Haussmannization of Paris
and the Pasteurian revolution changed both material conditions and the understanding of the
causes of disease. This raises the question of how to interpret the representation of smell in the
latter part of the century, in authors such as Zola and Maupassant. In this paper I argue that
though Maupassant’s preoccupation with smell has an undisputable link to issues of class and to
the fear of “social contagion,” the specificity of his treatment of smell lies in seeing its
“spreading” or “invading” capacity as leading to the abolition of the separation between subject
and object in the experience of both art and madness.
Panel 5.D: Dirty Business: The Muddled Reception of Artistic, Intellectual,
Commercial, and Manual Labor in Fin-de-siècle France
Chair: Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University
“‘L’Affaire Tcheng-Ki-Tong’: A Chinese Diplomat amid Celebrity and Scandal in the
Third Republic”
Ke Ren, Bates College
The Chinese diplomat-writer Chen Jitong (1852-1907) was one of the most colorful
transcultural figures in fin-de-siècle Paris. A secretary at the Qing legation, he reinvented
himself as a widely read author of seven French-language books, such as Les Chinois peints par
eux-mêmes (1884), a skillful speaker at learned societies and international congresses, and a
charismatic public personality. “Le Général Tcheng Ki-Tong” also owed his celebrity to two
public controversies around 1889-91. The first was a dispute over the authorship of his first two
books, which were claimed by one Adalbert-Henri Foucault de Mondion, a former tutor at the
Chinese embassy who was also a spy for Georges Boulanger. The second scandal resulted from
a series of aborted government and personal loans Chen attempted to negotiate with French
banks. Both incidents were played out in the French mass press, with many journalists and
commentators either coming to Chen's defense as an honorable cultural mediator or producing
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embellished accounts of Chen's flamboyant lifestyle in France. The much publicized nature of
these scandals may be seen in Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895), in which the social critic
included, among list of items he found to be wrong with decadent Paris, the story of the
deceptive “fin-de-siècle diplomatist” from China.
Situating these events in the historical context of French imperialism in Asia, the
Boulanger Affair, and late Qing China’s self-strengthening movement, this paper traces the
various public images of Chen Jitong in the Parisian press in the late 1880s and early 1890s. I
argue that these portrayals and satires of Chen actually reveal conflicting self-images on the part
of the French public. The proliferating discourse surrounding Chen were as much about
fascination with the Chinese diplomat as about contemporaneous celebrations of
cosmopolitanism in the Third Republic or anxieties over the decadence of the fin-de-siècle.
“Gustave Caillebotte's Portraits and Self-Portraits of Men at Work”
Ting Chang, University of Nottingham
This paper examines Gustave Caillebotte's representation of men at work in a group of
paintings dated from 1875 to 1885. Manual labour is evidently the subject of Les Raboteurs of
1875. Intellectual work is embodied in his portrait of Henri Cordier in 1883, and two years later,
in Portrait d'homme écrivant dans son bureau, whose sitter is believed to be Emile Fontaine, a
member of the yachting club to which Caillebotte belonged. Midway in this period Caillebotte
depicted himself at work in Autoportrait au chevalet, in 1879-80, using the long-standing
vocabulary of the painter in front of an easel with palette and brush in hand. Drawing on new
archival findings and recent scholarship, my paper will explore the relationship between these
four paintings of seemingly unrelated intellectual, manual, and artistic labours. I suggest that
Caillebotte was investigating parallels between his work as a painter, Henri Cordier's work as a
Sinologist, and the effort of the floor-scrapers (Les Raboteurs). These canvases, in other words,
offered homologies that have thus far been overlooked.
“Fedor Hoffbauer and the Work of the Historical Imagination”
Catherine E. Clark, MIT
This paper will analyze the historically reconstructed scenes of Paris produced by
architect and artist Fedor Hoffbauer and their reception between 1867 and 1906. His scenes were
published in the two-volume, critically acclaimed, Paris à travers les âges in 1875 and exhibited
at his Diorama de Paris à travers les âges, which ran for two years at the Théâtre Marigny on
the Champs-Elysées starting in 1885. Hoffbauer got his start as a reconstructionist of Parisian
history in 1867, when the city commissioned him to produce a series of watercolors showing its
streets and neighborhoods before the transformations of Haussmannization. These would become
the basis for the color lithographs of Paris à travers les âges, whose research and execution took
Hoffbauer five years of full-time labor in dozens of archives and collections. And yet the artist,
once a darling of the Parisian historical world, would become something of an intellectual pariah
by the early 1900s. In 1906, a Musée Carnavalet employee dubbed the paintings from his
diorama of “no utility” for the history of Paris and proposed putting them out with the trash to
free up storage space.9
9
Charles Sellier, “Note à Monsieur Brown, Inspecteur en Chef des Beaux Arts,” January 10, 1906, VR 234,
Archives de Paris.
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This paper argues that Hoffbauer fell from favor because his work was tainted by the fact
that it dared to visually depict elements of imagined history, the product of the “historical
imagination,” or the mental images of the past formed by all students of history. It explores the
distinction, which emerged at the turn of the century, between depicting the reconstructed past in
images and in words. It explains how Hoffbauer’s work was rejected because the resulting
products of his meticulous archival research were pictures rather than texts, and in doing so
questions emerging hierarchies of intellectual labor and history in images that persist today.
Panel 5.E: Politics in the Paris Sewers: Progress, Decadence, and Utopia
Chair: Andrea Thomas, Loyola University Maryland
“Contaminating Discourses: Progress, Aesthetics, and the Sewers of Paris”
Dean de la Motte, Salve Regina University
In his Grand Dictionnaire universel du dix-neuvième siècle (1866-79), Pierre Larousse
describes le Progrès as the religion of nineteenth-century France. He is not, of course, alone in
his enthusiasm, which is shared by such literary luminaries as Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. At
the same time, a powerful—and ultimately triumphant—counter-discourse centered on
modernity and decadence takes shape in the work of Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and
Huysmans, to name only the most notable. In abandoning the utopian political impulse
underlying the ideology of progress, these authors nevertheless consistently seek to create their
own version of utopia, a self-enclosed aesthetic realm that would lie safely beyond the “filth” of
contemporary society.
It is not surprising, then, that this influential strain of French literature—at once
politically reactionary and artistically innovative—reinforces through its narratives and its
imagery a consistent association between what it believes to be a sham discourse of progress and
dirt, filth, and, especially, excrement. The great irony, of course, is that the very society these
writers so revile in their work was engaged, at the same historical moment, in a comprehensive
program to sanitize Paris, most obviously in Eugène Belgrand’s massive sewer project.
This talk will examine the many paradoxes that arise from a close examination of the
discourses concerning “filth” and “sewage” as they emerged from what, at first, appear to be
diametrically opposed camps: the forces of le Progrès and those who—despite their
commitment to artistic innovation—shared Huysmans’s character’s belief in Là-bas (1891) that
“il n’a pas inventé grand’chose, ce miserable siècle!” Drawing on well-known literary texts, but
also correspondence, newspapers, government publications and historical and theoretical
literature on the Paris sewer project itself, I will suggest that neither of these camps could fully
escape being contaminated by the other.
“La contamination ou le contrôle : obsession de la maîtrise et séduction des souterrains
dans le Paris du XIXe siècle”
Marta Caraion, Université de Lausanne
Dans cette communication, je me propose d’étudier, dans le discours sur Paris de la
seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, l’expression d’une dialectique paradoxale entre la peur de la
contamination (un frisson qui n’est pas sans attraits) et le fantasme du contrôle (caractéristique
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du Second Empire), en examinant deux ouvrages monumentaux qui fonctionnent comme des
baromètres socio-culturels d’une époque :
-Paris-guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, 2 vol., 1867 ; ouvrage
collectif préfacé par Hugo, comportant une centaine d’articles signés des plumes les plus
diverses (Georges Sand, Michelet, Edouard Fournier, Champfleury, Gautier, Du
Camp…), publié à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle de 1867 ;
-Maxime Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du
XIXe siècle, 4 vol., Hachette, 1867-1873.
Je me pencherai, dans ces ouvrages, sur le traitement du Paris souterrain et du Paris des
égouts (chapitre XXX chez Du Camp, partie «Paris souterrain» dans le Paris-guide, comportant
entre autres un texte de Nadar intitulé «Le Dessus et le dessous de Paris»), et sur leurs rapports
aux autres discours sociaux de cette période : littéraires (les égouts dans Les Misérables de Hugo,
1862), traités de politique urbaine (projet d’urbanisation de Haussmann sur les égouts, repris
vingt ans plus tard dans ses Mémoires, 1890-1893), discours de soi (Nadar, «Paris souterrain, aux
catacombes et égouts» dans Quand j’étais photographe, 1900)…
Il s’agira de comprendre comment le souterrain, l’égout constituent à la fois le noyau
d’un imaginaire dysphorique de la contamination et la possibilité euphorique d’une métaphore du
réseau en tant que processus idéal de communication et de maîtrise.
“Sewer Trains: Contamination, Technology and the Underground in 19th-century Paris”
Caroline Grubbs, University of Pennsylvania
During the last three decades of the 19th century, Paris was inundated with speculative
designs and ambitious projects for a chemin de fer métropolitain. The idea of a Métro souterrain,
however, incited virulent reactions in fin-de-siècle urban culture. The situation of a public
transportation network below ground would require a symbolic reordering of urban space as the
underground, traditionally the province of organic refuse, criminals and social outcasts, would
become accessible to the average citizen. To what kinds of pathogens – both moral and
biological – would bourgeois Parisians be exposed by routinely venturing underground?
In this paper, I argue that projects for a Métro souterrain unearthed subterranean
anxieties from the first half of the century that had been buried in the wake of Second Empire
renovations to the city’s infrastructure. These anxieties were articulated through images of
contamination. In 1878, for example, architect Louis Heuzé warned of the dangers involved in
excavating this “fetid heritage of past generations” otherwise known as the Parisian subsoil.
“What mephitic exhalations may be released from this earth,” he asked. “Shouldn’t we worry
that epidemics might break out in Paris following so much exposure of putrid ground?” Heuzé’s
characterization of the underground as a receptacle of disease harkens back to early 19th-century
depictions of the sewers, in particular to Pierre Bruneseau’s official reports on the Parisian
sewers from 1805-1812 (which inspired Hugo’s treatment of the underground in Les
Misérables). Latent in critiques of subterranean railways is, moreover, the persistent association
of the topographical underground with moral decay. Through comparisons with literary and
scientific explorations of the sewers from the first half of the 19th century, this paper shows that
underneath concerns for hygiene and contamination surrounding fin-de-siècle plans for an
underground Métro lay enduring cultural anxieties about the underground as a site of social
pathology.
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Panel 5.F: The Transition to Prose
Chair: Colette Windish, Spring Hill College
“Psychic Contagion and Bertrand's Scarbo: Infected by Form in ‘La Chambre gothique’”
Ryan James Swankie, University of Texas, Austin
In a letter from 1837, Louis “Aloysius” Bertrand describes his book Gaspard de la Nuit
as an attempt to create a new genre of prose. Ironically, his new literary form--the bambochade-initiated a new genre of poetics: the prose poem. My paper proposes the idea that his desire to
influence a change in genre is an attempt to alleviate the psychic contagion of traditional poetic
form. I argue that the medieval ballad, with which Bertrand was enamored, is represented in
Gaspard de la Nuit as a bogeyman figure who dominates the poet's reverie and infects the text
with nightmarish hallucinations. Bertrand's aestheticizing of form into content, or ballad into
bogeyman, heralds avant-garde poetics.
Who is this bogeyman in the bedroom? He is the amorphous character Scarbo: a sadistic,
frenetic dwarf-insect. This supernatural figure appears in the prose poem “La Chambre
Gothique” to interrupt the vision of reverie that is a voyage into the medieval past. During the
subsequent prose-poetic suite, Scarbo tortures the poet physically and psychologically. His
haunting presence and sadistic actions are a staging of the violence inherent in the conflict
between the infinite vision of reverie and the constraint of fixed, poetic form. Scarbo inflicts an
angoisse felt by the poet, who seeks form to capture the harmonious vision, but only finds the
decayed corpse of the medieval ballad upon which is the dung beetle (escarbot) bogeyman who
infects the poet's mind and the textual body. I conclude that Bertrand's re-imagining of traditional
form--the ballad as a reinvigorated prose-poetic text--serves as a modernist figure of a remedy,
or potentially even a "cure," for the terminal contagion of diseased and decaying modes of
expression. Indeed, Gaspard de la Nuit's own intertextual contagion can be seen not only in
modernist form, but perhaps even more significantly, in the echoing images of "the poet in his
bedroom" fighting the bogeyman of formal infection from Baudelaire's "La Chambre double" to
Mallarme's "Frisson d'hiver" and beyond.
“Reforming Art and Society in Hugo's ‘Claude Gueux’”
Allan Pasco, University of Kansas
Victor Hugo’s desire to reform both society and art marks all of his work, as one would
expect of the leader of the Romantics. Determined to create a militant, utilitarian, literary work
that was also aesthetic, he reformulated the fable in his attempt to reform society. His ‘Claude
Gueux’ tells a pathetic tale that reveals the penal system’s profound injustice. Much as he
explicitly liberated the drame of certain strictures, including verse, with a ‘shadow’ tragedy, so
he implicitly freed the fable genre of verse, replacing the traditionally short generic form with a
fabular short story.
“Baudelaire and Benjamin in the Streets of Paris”
Beryl Schlossman, University of California, Irvine
Literary criticism is on sure ground when referring to Walter Benjamin’s exploration of
verse, but Benjamin says little about Baudelaire’s prose poetry. On the one hand, he underlines
the impact of Baudelaire’s verse, and maintains throughout his writings that Baudelaire’s most
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powerful insights appear in his verse rather than in his essays and theoretical writings. On the
other, Benjamin often refers to Baudelaire’s verse and prose poems without emphasizing the
formal distinction between the two. The result of this ambiguity is a generalized uncertainty
about Benjamin’s position in relation to Paris Spleen.
The role of Paris Spleen in Benjamin’s work has received little critical attention, even
though Benjamin explores the topics and themes that run throughout the work. But comments on
‘Loss of a Halo’ and other works give evidence of Benjamin’s interpretive approach to Paris
Spleen as poetry. In several essays on Baudelaire, Benjamin’s commentary places the work in the
lineage of The Flowers of Evil and draws a clear trajectory from the verse to Paris Spleen.
Lunch 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Friday 6 November
Session 6 – 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Panel 6.A: Popular Media and the Arts of Vulgarization
“Art de la contamination et effets de contagion: la vulgarisatrice et le microbe”
Bénédicte Monicat, The Pennsylvania State University
L’histoire des sciences au XIXe siècle est intimement liée à des pratiques de vulgarisation
scientifique dont Daniel Raichvarg et Jean Jacques présentent l’éventail dans Savants et
ignorants (1991) et que Bruno Latour inclut à l’analyse développée dans Pasteur : guerre et paix
des microbes (2001), pour ne citer que ces deux ouvrages parmi bien d’autres. Mon intervention
se situe à l’intersection et dans le prolongement de leurs lectures respectives : elle examine de
manière plus ciblée la contribution des femmes à la transmission des savoirs scientifiques et elle
envisage cet engagement dans le contexte du « déplacement général des pouvoirs » (196) que le
mouvement pastorien exemplifie selon Latour. Que peut donc nous dire de cette histoire
l’ouvrage qui fera l’objet plus précis de la présente analyse, Ferments et fermentations,
travailleurs et malfaiteurs microscopiques, publié par Isaure Rey en 1884 chez Hetzel dans la
Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation puis réédité dans la Bibliothèque des professions
industrielles, commerciales et agricoles ? De quelles façons la vulgarisatrice investit-elle l’objet
scientifique ? Dans quel projet social s’inscrit-elle, et comment ? L’art et les effets d’une
écriture définie et justifiée par ses qualités de contamination et ses capacités de contagion sont-ils
porteurs des germes (…) d’une autre histoire ? C’est peut-être une fable que nous donne à
méditer l’histoire de la vulgarisatrice et du microbe, une fable qui a plus d’une morale à nous
livrer.
“Une épidémie dionysiaque: Guignol, marionnette lyonnaise”
Roxane Petit-Rasselle, Westchester University
Fort prisées sous l'Ancien Régime, les marionnettes connaissent leur apogée au XVIIIe
siècle, notamment avec Polichinelle et les spectacles d'ombres chinoises. Le besoin
d'appartenance culturelle succédant à la Révolution entraîne l'éclosion de marionnettes
régionales: Guignol à Lyon, Lafleur en Picardie, Barbizier à Besançon, Jacques à Lille et les
Cabotan à Amiens. A la différence des autres pupazzi, les spectacles de Guignol se propagent
comme une épidémie, d'abord en milieu urbain et régional, puis dans le reste de la France,
provoquant l'inquiétude des autorités et avec elle, une censure implacable. Cette communication
se focalise sur la construction lyonnaise de Guignol en tant que phénomène social: pourquoi ce
personnage devient-il un mythe populaire?
A partir du répertoire classique de Guignol, notre étude démontrera d'abord la filiation
directe de la marionnette à Dionysos. Réceptacle des traits subversifs et idéologiques de la
divinité, Guignol incarne la transgression, l'homme du peuple face à l'élite, la solidarité, le
partage, l'éloquence et l'esprit d'indépendance. En s'appuyant sur des rapports de police, des
arrêtés préfectoraux et des lettres de cafetiers, nous verrons comment --malgré la censure-- les
stratégies du texte, alliées à celles du spectacle, coïncident avec la disposition mentale et
idéologique du contexte d'accueil, posant à la fois une menace grandissante pour l'ordre en place
et les jalons d'une nouvelle "identité" lyonnaise dans la France post-révolutionnaire.
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“‘À tacher ce beau et grand génie’: David d’Angers’ Reproducible Portrait Medallions and
the Market for Celebrity”
Sean DeLouche, Baylor University
During his forty-year career, the French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers (17881856) produced over 500 bronze portrait medallions of the most famous living celebrities of the
period, including artists, actresses, writers, soldiers, politicians, and revolutionaries. These
bronze medallions are nearly uniform in size and shape: circular and averaging sixteen
centimeters in diameter, or about the size of one’s open hand. On the obverse, the artist sculpted
the famed contemporary in antique profile, sometimes with a facsimile autograph and a list of his
or her famous accomplishments. The artist conceived of these medallions as perpetuating a long
and distinguished tradition of artistic commemorations of grands hommes in France. The massproduced portraits were sold on the open market in order, David d’Angers hoped, to edify and
uplift the people. Despite the loftiness of this project, David d’Angers expressed great “distaste”
for the medallions. Scholars have traditionally understood the sculptor’s disparaging and often
contradictory remarks about the bronze portrait medallions as an aversion to their reproducibility
and more broadly to their potential commercialization and commodification. This paper
suggests that what David d’Angers feared more specifically was the contaminating associations
of the burgeoning market for celebrity culture, which was coming into being in France during the
second quarter of the nineteenth century. Reexamining the writings by the sculptor and his
celebrated sitters and the portrait medallions themselves within the contemporary discourses of
la gloire and la célébrité, this paper demonstrates that they dreaded depiction in this massproduced pantheon would “dirty” their image with a less respectable form of fame. The artist
feared his portraits would be seen not as virtuous, disinterested art but as the bric-à-brac of
celebrity culture, and the famous sitter feared being transformed from a worthy grand homme
into a mere célébrité. This paper also makes use of some of the three dozen medallions of
celebrities by David d’Angers in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.
Panel 6.B: Rires, Satires, Révoltes - Rimbaud and the Poetry of Corruption
Chair: Winter Borg, University of California, Davis
“Rimbaud, poète-pitre”
Alain Vaillant, Université Paris Ouest
La communication partira d’une analyse du célèbre poème de Rimbaud « le Cœur du
pitre », dont les allusions à peine voilées à la sodomie ont dès l’origine intrigué les
commentateurs et suscité toutes sortes d’hypothèses fantaisistes à caractère biographique. Nous
nous proposons de montrer que toute le texte repose sur une réécriture parodique des prières
rituelles à l’adresse du Sacré Cœur : au-delà de ce texte particulier, cette interprétation conduit à
réévaluer la signification religieuse de la poésie rimbaldienne, mais aussi à s’interroger sur la
vraie portée de son rire satirique et parodique.
“Clara and the Ulcer: The Photographic Contagion of Rimbaud's ‘Vénus anadyomène’”
Bridget Behrmann, Princeton University
Among the perenially most shocking texts of Rimbaud’s perenially shocking œuvre,
“Vénus Anadyomène” offers a remarkable vision of beauty corrupted. The goddess, as Rimbaud
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describes her, incarnates an aging prostitute’s unsightly and decaying flesh, replete with an anal
ulcer and a tattoo (“Clara Vénus”). Seth Whidden has called the poem’s Venus “allegorical of
Rimbaud’s new aesthetic and his poetic project with relation to the Parnassian poetic approach.”
Yet in satirizing a classical ideal of aesthetic closely associated with a certain strain of
Parnassianism, Rimbaud also engages with a broader cultural dispute that set pure art against
vulgar science.
This paper analyzes “Vénus Anadyomène” within the mid-nineteenth century context of
this dispute, focusing on the mediating role played by photography. Since the artistic value of
photography had beeen hotly contested for decades prior to the composition of “Vénus
Anadyomène,” Rimbaud’s appropriation of photographic techniques in the poem is a crucial
element of its provocation. Drawing on contemporary photographic practices, from images of the
planets to images of statuary, I argue that the Venus of the text is itself photographic. The
poem’s radical poetic experiment—a revolting satire and a satirical revolt—is animated by a
deliberate cross-contamination of art and science.
“Revolting Bodies –The Poetry of the People in Rimbaud’s Forgeron”
Robert St. Clair, Dartmouth College
In “Le Forgeron” – a long poem written in the Fall of 1870 – we find Rimbaud borrowing
from a widely disseminated corpus of representations of popular revolt in the 19th century, if not
of the peuple as a figure of social excess, dérèglement or abjection (cf., Frégier’s classes
dangereuses, Hugo’s ochlocratie or Flaubert’s “peuple qui pue” in 1848, etc.). Simply put, we
seem to see the peuple appear as a challenge to coherent political discourse. The crowd figures a
potential site of danger – of unthinking upheaval rather than rational movement (“C’est la
crapule / Sire. Ça bave aux murs, ça monte, ça pullule”) – and the eponymous Forgeron, read as
a metonym for le peuple, seems to incarnate a process of misery and degradation so thorough
and intolerable as to announce a kind of total destitution of humanity, a radical impoverishment
reducing “le peuple” to its rudimentary bio-power of reproduction.
Noting a shift in denomination, from the “C’est la crapule” to “Nous sommes ouvriers,”
this paper argues that Rimbaud’s discursive citations are in fact détournements, the aim of which
is to transform poetic space itself into a noisy, mouthy fabrique (etym., faber) for the articulation
of a radical denunciation of the disorder of the “given,” and for the production of a revolutionary
desire for a rupture with the actual. Situating the present of 1870 on a revolutionary continuum
with a past of world-historical events (whence the paratextual date given at the outset of the
poem: vers le 10 août ‘92), “Le Forgeron” stages an antagonistic, epic prise de parole which
uses the prosodic corporeality of the text itself to reject at the level of metrical order, and as a
kind of fabrication of politics, a political logic or partage du sensible relegating those who
belong to the race de fer to a position of naturalized inferiority, of mind-numbing toil and mute
suffering.
In its dramatic staging of two antinomic political logics – the monology of monarchy and
the master signifier of the King’s Body vs. the polyphony and dissemination of democracy –, and
in its inauguration of a body-politic without a permanent or definitive subject (i.e., the body of
the king vs. the void or the multitude into which the eponymous “Forgeron” recedes), Rimbaud’s
epic of the people in revolt is not just a key text participating in a cultural archive, or corpus, of
Communard politics which flourished in the late Second Empire (cf., Kristin Ross, John
Merriman); in confronting the reader with the imperatives and aporias (in 1870 perhaps as today)
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of what might be called the “constitution of a people” (Laclau, Casarino, Rancière), and in its
gesture of revolutionary anamnesis reminding readers of the possibility of the “impossible” (i.e.,
changing history itself), “Le Forgeron” is also emblematic of what we might call Rimbaud’s
poetic politics, the lyrical materialism linking his poetic texts to their historical contexts and
literary intertexts.
Panel 6.C: Discipline and Commodify: Women’s Bodies on Stage and in Print
Chair: Karen Humphreys, Trinity College
“A Cruel Pleasure: Les Piqueurs of 1819 and the Art of Sexual Harassment on the Streets
of Paris”
Heather Belnap Jensen, Brigham Young University
In the fall of 1819, it was reported in the press that a number of young bourgeois women
had been pricked on their buttocks by a sharp instrument while walking in the parks, streets, and
public promenades of Paris. Wielding a cane or umbrella with a long needle attached to it, this
individual (or individuals?) would surreptitiously stab unsuspecting girls and then disappear into
the crowd. While this rash of incidents elicited, in the words of one journalist, “cruel pleasure”
for the perpetrator and engendered panic in les Parisiennes, for others, it provided rich fodder for
literary and visual puns. Unsurprisingly, bawdy songs and vaudeville acts quickly emerged,
lampooning the act of these “piquers,”as well as the proposed remedy, offered by an earnest
pharmacist in the Marais, for treating these wounds.
Of particular interest are the print caricatures that were produced in response to this
season of street harassment. Images with descriptors such as Étrennes pour le jour de l’an 1820.
Préservatif certain contre la piqûre or Par brevet d’invention, cuirasses préservant des piqûres
focused on preventative measures, showing young women in shops trying on prosthetic buttocks
to hide under their skirts. Others focused on the act itself, with the indignant reactions of the
young girls being enjoyed by the perpetrator and his audience. Yet another, titled Le résultat
d’une Piqûre, features a fashionable young woman now heavily pregnant. The dozen or so prints
associated with this little-known event share a common thread: the diminution of the violence of
these acts. In this paper, I seek to not only identify the iconography of street harassment in early
nineteenth-century French print media, but also to consider how such caricatures functioned to
(re)produce a culture that sanctioned sexual violence against women.
“Art for Art’s Sake at the Opéra: The Moral of Gautier’s Ballet”
Rachel Corkle, BMCC CUNY
This paper reads Romantic ballet, and specifically the ballet blanc, as a site of struggle
between purity and contamination. I read Gautier’s libretto for Giselle in the context of his
preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin and its famous call for art for art’s sake. Giselle is an
emblematic Romantic ballet, divided into two acts: the first expresses a complicated plot with the
help of props and pantomime, the second is a ballet blanc and stages women in white in wellordered geometrical forms. The transition between the two acts is stark. The drab autumnal
browns of a Rhineland village make way for the emblematic “whiteness” of the ballet blanc.
This second act is purified in color and contrast and furthermore purified of props, pantomime
and plot.
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Romantic ballet’s interest in form and technique has been criticized as neglecting
expression, yet lauded for embodying art for art’s sake—uncontaminated by moral utility. I
argue that ballet blanc’s prioritizing form and technique plays an integral role in the expression
of a specifically nineteenth-century preoccupation with and moral discourse on emotion.
The technical virtuosity of the Romantic ballet goes hand in hand with a new attention to
both disciplined bodies and the discipline of the interiors—physical and emotional—that govern
these bodies. The plots of Gautier’s libretti in which our heroes and heroines suffer for letting
their bodies act out of passion, could not be translated into a more fitting form than virtuosic
ballet.
Giselle’s ballet blanc is at first glance an embodiment of art for art’s sake, but has it truly
been purified of utilitarian drives? When read in the context of post-Revolutionary corporeal and
affective discipline, it is perhaps as morally “useful” as it is “beautiful.”
“Classified Contamination: Prostitution, Abortion, and Abortifacients for Sale in the Belle
Époque Mass Press”
Hannah Frydman, Rutgers University
In fin-de-siècle France, a reader who turned to the back pages of many Parisian
newspapers could find, in the guise of miracle drugs, articles for intimate protection, and
massages, thinly veiled advertisements for abortifacients, contraceptives, and prostitutes. This
commodification of women’s sexual but non-procreative bodies circulated quickly and
noiselessly, tucked between the folds of the journals. Alongside the news—central to Republican
ideals—once-virtuous readers’ minds came into frequent communication with dangerous
contaminants; a seemingly inoffensive ad for “English lessons” pushed imaginations into the
gutter with images of flagellation, the “English vice.” These unobtrusive ads became targets for
vice crusaders who pushed for the application of obscenity laws to prosecute these “affronts to
public morality.”
Much has been written about the prosecution of obscene artistic representations of
women’s bodies, but work on censorship has said little about advertising and even less about the
way obscenity laws targeted flesh and blood women. I explore classified advertisers,
advertisements, and campaigns for anti-vice legal reform in the last years of the long nineteenth
century in order to argue that illicit commerce in women’s sexuality, coupled with women’s
attempts to gain sexual and economic freedom, created a conundrum for Republican
policymakers: their interests in promoting economic liberalism and freedom of the press were at
odds with their desire to control women’s use of the classifieds. This led to policymakers moving
away from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with contamination, with the attendant need to
protect innocent minds from obscenity, to the explicit targeting of women’s (sexual) freedom,
culminating in the anti-contraceptive law of 1920. By analyzing these often overlooked back
pages, I show the ways in which women’s unorthodox businesses both exploited the gaps
between law and morality and played a role in the history of women’s rights (and of their
revocation).
Panel 6.D: Recycling the Nineteenth Century
Chair: Stéphane Pillet, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayaguëz
November 5-7, 2015
“Mallarmé and the Caribbean Mosaic”
Neal Allar, Cornell University
The beauty of Caribbean poetry, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, is its imperfection, its
inability to reassemble the fragments of a broken history and recuperate its African, Asiatic and
European origins. Caribbean poetics, especially as conceived by Walcott and his Martinican
counterpart Édouard Glissant, thus embraces cross-cultural contamination as a founding
principle – a principle based upon chance encounters between disparate cultural signifiers. It is
no coincidence, then, that Stéphane Mallarmé has served as a key inspiration for contemporary
Caribbean poetics, for Mallarmé’s sinuous syntax requires a haphazard reassembly of language:
the eye jumps up and down the page as it reads, seeking antecedents for pronouns, subjects for
verbs, nouns for modifiers. The opacity of Mallarmé’s poetry is due, in large part, to the
necessary impurity of this repiecing, much as Caribbean poetry, often equally opaque, resists
reduction to a single, unproblematic meaning. To read this poetry is to participate in its poetics,
to take part in its meaning-making, with the knowledge that this creation remains incomplete. In
this paper, I focus particularly on the relationship between Mallarmé and Glissant: not only how
Glissant drew on Mallarmé in his own poetic practice and social criticism but also how
Glissant’s notions of Relation and opacité – poetic categories conceived in opposition to
rationalist, colonial epistemologies – can help us hear Mallarmé with a Caribbean ear.
Mallarmé’s engagement with the notions of hasard and nonsense in “Igitur” and “Un coup de
dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” often associated with a plunge into the darkness of the néant,
takes on an affirmative, liberating potential in the Caribbean context. Mallarmé, who finally
“cède l’initiative aux mots,” releasing his words into the realm of chance, lays the groundwork
for a postcolonial poetics that invites the reader to participate, with each reading, in the
construction of a new mosaic.
“21st-Century Symbolism?”
Nikolaj Lübecker, University of Oxford
One of the major concerns in 20th century philosophy was to interrogate the limits of the
human subject. Inspired by thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Saussure, critics argued that the
human subject was caught up in various social, psychological and linguistic structures that
restricted its autonomy. An important tendency in 21st century theory has been to radicalise this
decentering of human subjectivity. Writers associated with affect theory, new materialism,
speculative realism and ecocriticism (among others) now contend that the push towards
economics, the unconscious and language was insufficient, because it largely remained stuck in
an anthropocentric perspective that recent scientific discoveries (in the biological and cognitive
sciences, for instance) and contemporary socio-political developments (such as the climate crisis)
force us to challenge in a much more radical way.
For many, very good reasons, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé appealed
to the readers of Marx, Freud and Saussure. But it is becoming increasingly clear that French
symbolist poetry also offers a lot to those 21st century readers who are keen to radicalise the
critique of anthropocentrism. This paper will focus on Baudelaire’s prose poetry in order to
reflect on the potential – and the limitations – of these largely ‘non-anthropocentric’
interpretations. It will focus on three big questions: What does ‘spleen’ mean when associated
with a city and not a human subject? What does ‘soul’ mean when the lyric subject is entirely
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caught up in logics of contamination and ‘transversality’ (Guattari)? What role should ‘beauty’
play in a 21st century interpretation of French symbolism?
“Degradation of a Profession: the Choice of Images for a guide-conférencier Protest”
Sara Pappas, University of Richmond
In January 2015, a protest was staged in Paris outside the Palais Royal-Musée du Louvre
metro stop and across from the Louvre itself. The demonstrators were mobilized against a new
law that would disassociate the "carte professionnelle du guide-conférencier" from formal study
and a degree program and replace the carte professionnelle with a registry based on a voluntary
declaration by the registrant. The protestors handed out flyers that decried the unraveling of their
profession, the possible elimination of jobs, and even "[la] dévalorisation de l'image de la France
et de son patrimoine."
My paper will focus on the choice of images for this protest. In addition to banners and
signs with declarative statements, the demonstrators held up large images of specific works of
art, most of them paintings. As far as I could see, there were two representative images for the
nineteenth century; the first was appropriately emblematic of revolution and protest: Delacroix's
La Liberté guidant le peuple. The second painting was not a large nineteenth-century history
painting, nor was it a Courbet or Manet that so scandalized the Salon. It wasn't even a familiar
and recognizable Impressionist image. The second painting representing the nineteenth century
at the protest was Gustave Caillebotte's Les raboteurs du parquet. Why the Caillebotte? Is it a
straightforward reference to gentrification and neo-liberalism? Or is the choice of Caillebotte
more nuanced? I will consider the Delacroix and the Caillebotte in the context of the protest and
their relationship to the demonstrators and to the other images chosen for the demonstration.
Panel 6.E: “What’s your poison?” Distillations of French Alcohol Culture
Chair: E. Nicole Meyer, Georgia Regents University
“Viral Marketing: Le Vin Mariani and the Export of French Culture”
Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University
Le Vin Mariani, a tonic of Bordeaux wine and cocaine concocted by chemist Angelo
Mariani in 1863 Paris, had, by the 1890s, become the ultimate international energy drink,
extolled in the pages of Life magazine (1894) by world-renowned Naturalist novelist Emile Zola
as “the Elixir of Life, giv[ing] vigor, health, and energy.” Mariani’s wine has become an
obligatory reference in the history of cocaine addiction, yet much less attention has been devoted
to exploring the commercial mechanisms behind its tremendous international success. Drawing
on Doug Rushkoff’s writings about viral marketing, this liberally illustrated presentation will
examine the highly effective (and often unscrupulous) techniques used by Mariani to make his
product a household name, in France and in the United States.
Within this examination of marketing techniques the paper will concentrate on Mariani
advertisements targeted to American women, major consumers of this “health tonic.”
Capitalizing on received ideas about the “healthiness” of Bordeaux wine and the cultural
sophistication of the French nation, the marketing campaign featured notable women writers and
performers (among them Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Rachilde, Louise Michel, and Polaire) who
November 5-7, 2015
provided enthusiastic autographed testimonials. Mariani’s techniques—including free samples,
word of mouth promotions, special packaging, celebrity endorsements, and collectibles—made
the addictive product an irresistible part of early American soda fountain culture, itself targeted
to female consumers. The wine may have been delicious, but its remarkable global expansion
can be credited to Mariani’s early “viral marketing”—his clever exploitation of social networks
to promote French culture abroad.
“The Fairy and the Aphid”
Gretchen Schultz, Brown University
I propose to look at the culture of drinking in the late 19th-century, specifically with
regard to two elements associated with infestation and contagion. The vine-eating phylloxera
aphid, accidentally imported from the US, laid waste to French vineyards in a slow, but steady
march across the country, beginning around 1865 through the turn of the century. In so doing,
this small bug devastated and forever altered an industry that was both a source of national pride
and essential to the health of the French economy. The resulting wine shortage, among other
factors, contributed to the rise in consumption of absinthe, la fée verte. Once considered a
fashionable apéritif at the mid-century, absinthe came to be considered a national peril and was a
central focus of the temperance movement. Hygienists and physicians detailed and denounced
the scourge of absinthism, which was thought to lead to criminality, epilepsy, and degeneration,
among other ills. At the same time, French wine (and in particular the reds of Bordeaux and
Burgundy) was touted as a healthful dietary staple. The absinthe prohibition campaign succeeded
with its interdiction in 1915. This paper will explore these two threads with particular emphasis
on their relation to French nationalism.
“‘A l'heure des mains vides’: The Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour”
Melanie Hawthorne, Texas A&M
Renée Vivien entitled one of her poetry anthologies "A l'heure des mains jointes" (1906),
evoking either--as the English translation has it--"the sweet hour of hand in hand" (Naiad, 1979)
when women hold each other's hands, or—as the cover of the first French edition would seem to
suggest—the moment when one puts one's hands together in prayer. This (illustrated)
presentation takes as its starting point a different moment of the day, when one's hands are
empty.
Since poetry is often considered "difficult," what better way to approach it than with a
drink to fill the empty hand? And since Vivien herself was so fond of cocktails, why not a
cocktail invented specifically for her?
I will share the recipe for the "sunset goddess" cocktail (perfect for when the sun goes
down), and use the setting of the cocktail hour as the occasion to re-read Vivien's poem "The
Sunset Goddess." In addition to reviewing the question of who served as the inspiration for this
poem (Eva Palmer? Natalie Barney? Hélène de Zuylen?), I will explore the poem's tribute to
Charles Baudelaire and its later influence on the work of Guillaume Apollinaire.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 6.F: Contaminating the Social and Cultural Orders: Class, Gender, and the
Politics of le partage du sensible
Chair: Armine Mortimer, University of Illinois
“Social Transgressions: Rancière's Reading of Le Rouge et le noir”
Marina Van Zuylen, Bard College
The danger of passing from one class to another, the ability to dream or write oneself out
of an assigned milieu, is at the center of Jacques Rancière's work on the nineteenth-century
novel. This paper will address what I will call "contamination control" in his reading of Le
Rouge et le noir. Rancière is known to focus on moments of epiphany, moments when real or
fictional characters break out of their allotted roles and reclaim agency. These out-of-body
experiences, as utopian and short-lived as they might be, coincide with a radical divorce from
place and time. They reside outside the logic of calculation, connecting the subject back to his or
her senses. Out of the porous underground man of Parisian life, Julien is reborn, perfectly
immune to the scorn or praise that sculpted his previous identities. Just before his mise à mort,
he sheds his esprit de ressentiment and develops a Bartleby-like indifference to advancement or
social failure. Casting aside his master plans, he experiences a sustained reverie, a blissful torpor
that inoculates him against the vicissitudes of ambition. Rancière explains how Julien's
becoming immune to the gaze of the outside world coincides with a new form of receptivity, a
redemptive "partage du sensible." Paradoxically, it is when Julien is able to take in the microelements of life rather than its great philosophical abstractions that he ceases to be contaminated
by class envy. By changing the vocabulary with which class is described (no longer using
words like parvenu, arriviste, or nouveau riche), Rancière examines how the novel's final twist
allows Stendhal's vocabulary of contamination to morph into a vocabulary of flight and
autonomy.
“Urban Locomotion and Social Contagion in 19th-Century Paris”
Masha Belenky, George Washington University
“Le voyage en omnibus unit toutes les classes sociales sans distinction ni division. De
tous les milieux parisiens où l’on se puisse rencontrer, la voiture d’omnibus est évidemment celle
qui offre la plus parfaite image de démocratie et de fraternité courtoise.” Writing at the turn of
the century, Octave Uzanne offers this romantic and nostalgic vision of the Parisian omnibus, the
first vehicle of urban mass transit. Yet this vision of social class cohesion stands in stark contrast
with numerous nineteenth-century visual and textual representations of the omnibus interior,
which portray it instead as a site of deep class tensions and “social contagion.”
When the omnibus service was first launched in 1828, the most striking feature of the
new vehicle was that it was by law open to everyone regardless of class, wealth, or social status.
Yet by all historical accounts, in reality the omnibus fell short of this universal inclusiveness.
The wealthy and status-conscious travellers eschewed it in favor of private carriages or carriages
for hire, while the poor and the working class could not afford even the low fare of the new
service. The placement of initial omnibus lines clearly privileged the neighborhoods where
wealth and commerce were concentrated. As a result, the majority of real-life omnibus
passengers in the early years were most likely commercial and other petit bourgeois, and thus the
November 5-7, 2015
class composition of the vehicle’s interior was a far cry from the universal inclusiveness that the
vehicle purportedly boasted.
And yet, despite this reality, it was the potential inclusiveness that inexorably captured
the imagination of contemporaries. The omnibus literature from across nineteenth century
capitalized on the idea embodied in the vehicle’s name – “for all” – to express a panoply of
anxieties associated with the (theoretically) democratic nature of the vehicle, and more broadly,
with rapidly shifting social relations which characterized nineteenth-century France more
generally.
Focusing on a number of popular lithographs and works of urban observation from the
1830s and 1840s, this paper shows how different forms of nineteenth-century popular culture
used the figure of the omnibus to construct class tensions within the discursive space of the page.
Rather than reflect the “reality” of class mixing on the omnibus (a reality that is questionable at
best), the omnibus literature articulated bourgeois preoccupations with the perceived potential for
“class contagion” within the newly created urban spaces, and shaped the way class tensions were
perceived by the public.
“‘Cette lèpre sentimentale’: Sandisme, Female Contagion, and the Politics of
Representation”
Alexandra Wettlaufer, University of Texas, Austin
As Jacques Rancière explains in his “Dix thèses sur la politique,” the essence of politics
is “a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular
form of reason…that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet
politique]”10 and manifests a “specific rupture in the logic of the arche” or the principles of
knowledge (Thesis 3). Challenging the distribution of power and subjectivity, politics, within
this framework, proposes new configurations of what is “thinkable” or “imaginable” and new
ways of seeing the world. For Rancière, politics “is the manifestation of dissensus, as the
presence of two worlds in one” (Thesis 8), thus exposing the exclusionary nature of structures of
power and rendering visible “new” subjects that had always been present but previously not
perceptible, thus voiceless, silenced. This “constitution of a specific subject” takes place, for
Rancière, not as much in the subject’s utterances as in the recognition of those utterances (or
actions, consciousness) in political terms by those already endowed with political subjectivity,
for “if there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not
seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding that it is an utterance coming
out of the their mouths” (Thesis 8).
In this paper I will examine the double effect of George Sand, both in her novels and in
her public persona, in altering the partage du sensible to give voice and visibility to previously
silenced subjects: women, peasants, and the urban proletariat. In reading resistance to Sand,
through mainstream (male) literary critics, authors, and caricaturists I will consider the various
strategies of anxious containment that sought to empty the figure of the female author—that is,
both Sand and her followers—of political subjectivity by turning their “utterances” into empty
echoes, devoid of meaning, and returned to the realm of the unimaginable. Yet, in the
proliferating representations of the female author by her critics and the repeated use of the tropes
of disease and contagion, emblematized by Balzac’s characterization of “le sandisme” as “cette
10
Jacques Rancière, Thesis 1 in “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5.3 (2001).
November 5-7, 2015
lèpre sentimentale,” we paradoxically find an affirmation of precisely that which these critics are
trying to deny: radical change in the body politic and the constitution of new aesthesis.
Panel 6.G: The Syphilis Plague: Prostitution and Hygiene in Fin-de-Siècle France
Chair: Candace Skorupa, Yale University
“Textual Contagion: Syphilis and the putain naturaliste”
Steven Wilson, Queen’s University Belfast
The embodiment of a potent threat to the social, cultural and biological ideals of purity
and hygiene, the nineteenth-century prostitute left her mark not only on the mind, but also on the
body, of a generation of French writers, many of whom were personally affected by the
contagious disease with which she was inextricably associated: syphilis. A prime source of
contamination, the syphilitic prostitute’s abject body is often depicted in the literature of the time
as putrid matter – oozing fluids, decomposing and rotting. Heavily infected by the discourses of
medicine, science and public hygiene, the representation of the ‘putain naturaliste’ – ‘par nature
corrompue, puteo’, as Patrick Wald Lasowski puts it – enjoys a privileged position in the broad
literary-cultural imagination of nineteenth-century France. This paper considers the discursive
and ideological construction of two of naturalism’s lesser-known syphilitic prostitutes, the
sexually-contagious figures of Lucie Thirache in Paul Adam’s Chair molle (1885) and
Alphonsine in Adolphe Tabarant’s Virus d’amour (1886), and reads them within an intertextual
framework that includes Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s treatise on prostitution, Alfred
Fournier’s neo-regulationist rhetoric, and Edmond Fournier’s theory of hérédosyphilis, all of
which testify to a nineteenth-century obsession with transmission, contagion and the challenge of
the porous body. In this way, our examination of the prostitute who is, at the same time, victim
and source of contamination, serves as a departure point for a consideration of syphilis as a
textual as well as a sexual epidemic, circulating across discursive boundaries, corrupting not only
the physiological body, but bodies of knowledge. The paper will thus conclude by suggesting
that the metaphor of the text as body (corps, corpus), subject to rhetorical, intertextual and
discursive contamination, provides an interpretative framework that allows us to appreciate more
fully the sense of hantise that characterises syphilis in nineteenth-century France.
“Sexual Contamination and the Threat of Transmission: Syphilis in 19th-Century
Regulations, Representations, and Testimonials”
Sayeeda Mamoon, Edgewood College
In her compelling essay “From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal
Disease, 1730-1802,” Kathryn Norberg argues that in the years immediately following the
French Revolution, streetwalkers became “increasingly identified with syphilis” while the
affliction suggested “hidden moral corruption.”11 The conflation of syphilis and prostitution at
the dawn of the 19th-Century made venal sex an issue of public policy where the ownership of
the whore’s body shifted to the domain of medical science.12 Archival records from the period
indicate that as early as 1800, two doctors were appointed by the Parisian police to inspect
11
See Kathryn Norberg; “From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal Disease, 1730-1802” in
Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 8, No. 4 (April 1998) 42
12
Norberg, 44.
November 5-7, 2015
female sex workers and officially document their names.13 By 1812, all prostitutes had to
comply with mandatory registration and pelvic examinations while brothels and solicitation were
limited to designated red-light areas. 14 Despite measures to contain the disease and the
continued scapegoating of streetwalkers as the agents of contamination, syphilis reached its peak
between 1879 and 1880, with as many as 5000 new cases of annual outbreak.15 According to
some reports, between thirteen to fifteen percent of the male population carried the disease, and
the number of contagious syphilitics in French society rose to the staggering figure of one
million by the turn of the last century.16
In this paper, I investigate how cultural productions, namely literature and the visual arts
between the 1870s and the 1890s address and depict the syphilis epidemic. My reading focuses
on “La vengeance d’une femme” by Barbey d’Aurevilly (1874), Zola’s Naturalist novel Nana
(1880), Maupassant’s patriotic short story “Le Lit 29” (1884), and the dream sequence in
Huysmans’s decadent novel A rebours (1884). I also look at Toulouse Lautrec’s 1894 Rue des
Moulins tableaux along with Félicien Rops’s Mors Siphilitica etchings from the same year. In
addition, my study is informed by testimonials from Maupassant and Daudet, as well as
anecdotal reports from their cohorts.
In my research, I am interested in learning to what extent the works perused resist,
reproduce, regulate or sublimate the venereal disease. My examination lends particular attention
to the following questions: How do gender and class play into the iconography of syphilis? Who
are the perceived victims and perpetrators? How are the transmitters of the infection
pathologized? What are the artistic devices and narrative strategies used to allude to the illness
without naming or figuring it? Can the disease be contained and destroyed through its
representation or is the ailment allegorized? And finally, whether attitudes, perceptions and
preventions related to syphilis change and evolve over the course of the 19th century and the
ways in which these developments are acknowledged in the written and visual representations of
the Fin de Siècle.
“Les bas-fonds et la tératologie syphilitique chez Maupassant”
Céline Brossillon, Ursinus College
Alors que la sexualité des couples bourgeois est propre et tournée vers la procréation, la
sexualité célibataire est perçue comme sale, n’ayant d’autre but que le plaisir. Le célibataire
devient ainsi l’emblème d’une société décadente où le plaisir est roi et la prostituée reine, ces
deux êtres complices dans la prolifération d’un cancer social. La maison close, sorte d’initiation
à la virilité, est le lieu où l’adolescent se fait homme, et où les célibataires reviendront
régulièrement. Toutefois, l’amour vénal inspire à la fois désirs et dégoût : les filles sont
généralement décrites dans l’outrance, leur hygiène est médiocre, et leur chambre pue la misère
humaine. Par ailleurs, Maupassant fait référence aux « taches suspectes » sur leurs draps,
évoquant ainsi le mal vénérien rampant chez les filles de rue. Les bas-fonds de la société cachent
sous des parfums leur odeur d’égout, et le célibataire vit dans l’angoisse de la contagion, parfois
paralysé par la syphilophobie. La fréquentation des prostituées constitue ainsi une contamination
13
Ibid.
Norberg 45
15
See Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in 19th Century France, Duke UP
(1997), 234.
16
Bernheimer, 312.
14
November 5-7, 2015
morale doublée d’une potentielle contamination biologique. La sexualité du célibataire qui a
recours aux prostituées porte le sceau de l’infamie, de la maladie et de la mort. En effet, le
célibataire, qui incarne une forme de dégénérescence de par son rejet des valeurs bourgeoises et
sa quête des plaisirs en dehors du mariage, ne peut avoir qu’une sexualité déviante, et cette
perversion se paie par la maladie dont la prostituée se fait le véhicule. La syphilis est ainsi perçue
comme le châtiment imposé à la débauche célibataire.
Break 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Friday 6 November
Session 7 – 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm
Panel 7.A: La littérature à l’épreuve du réel: censures, contaminations, contagions
Chair: Alain Pagès, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
“« Une charogne » : Flaubert et Baudelaire”
Jacques Neefs, Johns Hopkins University
Alors qu’il rédige dans le chapitre VIII de Bouvard et Pécuchet, le passage où les deux
bonshommes rencontrent « la charogne d’un chien », ce qui les conduira à une méditation sur la
mort et la vie, puis à la décision du suicide (auquel finalement ils renoncent par une sorte de
miracle), Flaubert note dans son manuscrit « éviter Baudelaire ». Pourtant la prose de Flaubert
est elle aussi une méditation (ironique et métaphysique) sur la portée esthétique et philosophique
d’une « charogne ». L’exposé propose d’interroger, en lisant très précisément les deux textes, le
rapport spécifique que la modernité esthétique entretient avec la « contemplation » et
l’interrogation de la limite de la vie et de la mort, de la « charognerie » dans sa substance
élémentaire, celle de la corruption et de la contamination infinies, de la violence du vivant, et
leur conversion en forme d’art.
“La contamination par le rire: la représentation du personnage du président dans deux
vaudevilles sous la Deuxième République”
Janice Best, Acadia University
Lorsqu’on rétablit la censure en France en 1850, après une courte période de liberté
d’expression, les directives données aux censeurs furent claires : il fallait éliminer des planches
« l’antagonisme entre les classes inférieures et des hautes classes […], les attaques contre les
principes d’autorité, contre la religion, contre la famille, la magistrature, l’armée, […] en un mot
contre les institutions sur lesquelles repose la société » afin de faire du théâtre « un lieu de repos
et de distraction et non pas une arène ouverte aux passions politiques » (Archives Nationales,
F/21/4635).
Les censeurs veillaient à contrôler l’image donnée des personnalités politiques, et en
particulier du chef de l’état. Comme le fait d’avoir un président était une nouveauté sous la
Deuxième République, nombreux étaient les auteurs à vouloir en parler dans leurs pièces. Dans
la plupart des cas, les censeurs prirent le parti de tout simplement supprimer ces allusions.
Comme ils l’expliquèrent dans un rapport : « En général, il peut y avoir inconvénient à appeler
ainsi en plein théâtre l’attention sur la personne ou sur les actes du chef de l’état, parce que de
mauvais esprits pourraient y trouver l’occasion d’une manifestation fâcheuse » (A.N. F/21/989).
Dans cette communication, je compte explorer la représentation du président dans deux
vaudevilles datant de 1850 et de 1851, La Maison du Carrousel ou l’Hôtel de Nantes de Henry
de Kock et Martial ou le Vol à la fleur d’orange de Bayard et Verner. Selon les censeurs, les
références au président dans ces pièces ne pouvaient être tolérées parce qu’elles donnaient lieu à
des incidents et à des détails comiques. Comme il s’agissait de comédies, cependant, les censeurs
accordaient une plus grande latitude aux auteurs dans les sujets et les situations à aborder.
Plusieurs censeurs firent référence à cette liberté comme étant le « privilège de la parodie ».
J’espère démontrer que les techniques employées par les auteurs pour créer des effets comiques
November 5-7, 2015
leur permettaient de garder certaines allusions au chef de l’état, malgré l’interdiction des
censeurs.
“Pour une littérature expérimentale : la contagion en action”
Kristen Cook-Gailloud, Johns Hopkins University
Prise dans un sens général, la contagion a ceci d’intéressant qu‘elle dérange et change.
Guerrière invisible et acharnée, elle s’insinue dans son hôte à son insu, le trouble, le saisit,
l’agresse, pour le laisser vainqueur ou vaincu. Contemporain de savants qui, par le biais de la
méthode expérimentale, ont cherché à battre en brèche la théorie arriérée des miasmes et à
s‘interroger sur les spécificités de l’action contagieuse (Filippo Pacini, Louis Pasteur et Robert
Koch parmi d‘autres), Émile Zola rédige en 1879 un article qui reproduit le même
questionnement: “Le Roman expérimental“. Visant à prescrire un paradigme de pensée mieux
adapté aux changements rapides de la nouvelle société industrielle, son texte opère toutefois
selon une logique double qui n’a pas toujours été comprise par ses lecteurs: sur un plan concret,
Zola y souligne la nécessité de savoir quitter un mode de pensée devenu désuet afin de pouvoir
entrer dans un régime de pensée nouveau; sur le plan moins manifeste de l‘expression
métaphorique, et dans l‘intention de provoquer et de véritablement remuer l’esprit de son
interlocuteur, l‘article imite le fonctionnement invisible et puissant du phénomène contagieux
situé au coeur des interrogations scientifiques de son époque. Cette présentation analysera les
deux modalités selon lesquelles le projet expérimental de Zola s’intéresse à l’action contagieuse.
En partant des modulations textuelles du projet expérimental (publié sous forme d’article en
1879, de recueil en 1880, puis de roman dans Les Trois villes, 1892-1898), je montrerai comment
Zola fait de la contagion un outil littéraire destiné à contaminer l‘analogie établie entre maladie
et péché catholique, et, de manière plus générale, à éradiquer le dangereux dogme de la
convention et de la présomption.
Panel 7.B: Between Nations: Fictions of Frenchness
Chair: Nicholas White, University of Cambridge
“Fictions of Jewish Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century France”
Maurice Samuels, Yale University
In the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, reports indicate
that increasing numbers of French Jews are immigrating to Israel, calling the future of French
Jewry into question. This reverses what many have seen as a tradition if not of indifference then
at least of ambivalence on the part of French Jews to the Zionist project. In this paper, I want to
probe the history of this ambivalence by examining how French Jewish fiction viewed the
question of Jewish nationalism in the nineteenth century. Whereas most historians have
characterized the ethos of Franco-Judaism as being opposed to Jewish nationalism, I will show
that in the period before the creation of the modern Zionist movement, French Jewish writers
imagined multiple models of Jewish collective identity. How, I want to ask, did the specific
features of Jewish emancipation in the French context allow for an idea of Jewish nationalism to
take shape alongside expressions of loyalty to France and to the ideal of French universalism?
How did literature contribute to the formation of these complex ideologies?
November 5-7, 2015
“Axes of Otherness: The Jew Between Empire and Nation in Maupassant's Bel-Ami”
Dorian Bell, University of California, Santa Cruz
The German-sounding name of Walter, the conspiratorial Jew pulling political and
economic levers in Maupassant's Bel-Ami, belies his supposed "méridional" status as a Jew from
the Midi. Southern French Jews had arrived from many places in many different ways. They
generally were not, however, Ashkenazim from Germany and Eastern Europe, as Walter's name
suggests him to be. What to make of this incongruence? The answer, I offer in this paper, has to
do with the unique capacity of Jews-or at least their nineteenth-century representation-to
translate between national and imperial scales. By giving Walter the onomastic trappings of
German identity, Maupassant inscribes him in a grand French literary tradition of GermanJewish villainy. The national "axis of otherness," to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson, here
appears firmly oriented along eastern and European lines, at least with regard to German Jews.
But as I argue, the fact of these Germanic bugbears' Jewishness also aligned them with an axis of
otherness rapidly extending in the southern, African direction followed by French imperial
expansion. This is particularly the case for Walter, whose Moroccan speculations in the novel
recall the scandal surrounding France's invasion of Tunisia in 1881, and whose southernness
therefore rejoins the creeping new threat he incarnates. The result invites us to reconsider the
displacement that occurred when, according to Jameson, nineteenth-century colonial powers
substituted European national rivalries for a more fundamentally unsettling axis of otherness
produced in the encounter by Europeans with their imperial subjects. The displacement was
never absolute, and traces of uncontained colonial otherness explain how frequently European
imperial nation-states figured differences among them by means of the Jewish national other.
Thus, I conclude, might anti-Semitic ire manifest an anxiety about the nation's increasing
inhabitation of a world system marked by impenetrable complexity and racial alterity-something
feasible because of the Jews' understood racial or conspiratorial association with colonized
subalterns-while recoding that anxiety into a more tolerable encounter playing out at a national
scale as a matter of national rivalry-something feasible, in turn, because of the same
overdetermined Jew's continued association with the German or British or any other national
enemy.
“On Political Annihilation: Targets and ‘Halos’ of Collateral Damage in Political Fiction”
Emily Apter, New York University
Grégoire Chamayou writes about drone targets as carrying force-fields of vulnerability
inclusive of and surpassing their discrete bodies. Around the epidermal envelope is an
apocalyptic halo, a "perimeter of destruction," a zone of potential harm where collateral damage
happens. Chamayou (and Eyal Weizman) consider this halo of potential annihilation as a key
component of the forensics of drone warfare. I'd like to extend the concept to social warfare, as
depicted in the nineteenth-century political novel. The drone-effect becomes perceptible when
the subject is suddenly annihilated and those under its halo collaterally destroyed as a result of
political maneuvers or targeting by a sovereign body (the state, the police, political opponents).
The comparison of the social/political field to a warzone is a well-worn trope, but I would be
giving new weight to social forensics, to the calculated ratios of return on damages that turn the
pursuit of power into a truly deadly business. The drone model of warfare might also be used to
analyze the post-revolutionary technological model of sovereignty that characterized the
Napoleonic state, its domestic policing and military campaigns abroad. It is a state that tracks the
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citizen like prey, and strategically exploits that invisible "perimeter of destruction" that makes of
each targeted citizen an unwitting accomplice to collateral damage.
“Zola's Alsace and the Franco-German ‘Translation Zone’”
Nicholas White, University of Cambridge
Notoriously, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was triggered by a willful act of
mistranslation, in Bismarck's manipulation of the Ems Dispatch. "Mistranslation in the art of
diplomacy," as Emily Apter explains, "comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between
nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral
calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the
other)." In this context, this paper aims to study the territorial, linguistic and cultural play of war,
and the interplay between the Gallic and the Germanic in what was the most famous Third
Republic novel on 1870, Zola's La Débâcle (1892). Indeed, by the 1890s, Zola was an
international celebrity, immediately translated into numerous languages, including German. I
would therefore like to consider this particular novel as a cultural object on the international
stage, instantly crossing the border that the French army had failed to cross in 1870, and inviting
responses from reviewers in Germany, as Zola was well aware. Germans also engaged in the
subsequent polemical debate on the accuracy of Zola's account. This paper will in particular
explore the fictional, and sometimes fictitious, interactions between French and German
characters (from Napoleon III and Bismarck downwards) in a novel that was criticized for
focusing on the French experience to the exclusion of the German one, whilst remaining - as the
history of defeat demanded - within the geographical limits of France. The novel begins on a
non-descript and unprepossessing spot just outside Mulhouse, and Alsace provides, I shall
suggest, a complex way for Zola to rethink the Franco-German relationship, filtered through
relationships of family, friendship and romance which cut across the cultural and military
boundaries between the Gallic and the Germanic.
Panel 7.C: Dirty Sisters: Censoring Contaminated Word and Image
Chair: Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University
“‘Contamination through the Eyes’: The Censorship of Illustrated Posters in Fin-de-siècle
Paris”
Karen L. Carter, Kendall College of Art & Design
In the early 1890s, the Parisian police, under orders from the Minister of the Interior,
seized and destroyed hundreds of examples of publicity posters while the posters’ artists and
printers were charged with outrage aux bonnes moeurs, or violation of public decency.
According to press accounts, the principal reason for this censorship was the posters’ images of
sexualized female figures and their public display. The palpable sense of sexuality in this group
of publicity posters was perceived by the Parisian authorities as not only challenging delicate
sensibilities but also as posing a real threat to public morals. Moreover, the experience of
viewing these images was expressed in the popular press as unleashing an unbridled, treacherous
sexuality in the public sphere that was threatening precisely because it could not be sequestered,
but controlled only through its removal and destruction.
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This paper will analyze the critical discourse of the 1890s that described the illustrated
publicity poster in contradictory terms: both lauding its modernity and aesthetic potential and
simultaneously condemning it as a source of suspicion and worry. In addition, my paper will
analyze, through a text-image comparison, specific examples of censored posters in relation to
the journalistic accounts that discussed them and the laws that defined their transgressive status.
Ultimately, this paper seeks to illuminate the contested terrain between press freedom and moral
censorship that was enacted in order to protect urban populations, in particular bourgeois
females, who were deemed vulnerable to visual “contamination” and corruption.
“Dodging the Censors: Daumier’s Haussmannization Prints”
Jennifer S. Pride, Florida State University
Honoré Daumier’s prints from 1852-1870 have not received adequate scholarly attention
due to long-held beliefs that strict censorship laws prevented artists from satirizing and
caricaturing political and social issues. Yet, a close examination of Daumier’s satirical
caricatures in Le Charivari reveal that the artist documents the confusion and anxiety inherent in
the ongoing erasure and remarking of the city’s physiognomy and, consequently, social and
cultural traditions. I argue that Daumier used satire and irony as strategies to dodge the censors
and provide social critique during this period of urban transformation known as
Haussmannization. Rather than producing overtly critical images, Daumier’s prints represent the
reality of Haussmannization in coded terms. In Le Charivari, caricatures combine image and
text to reveal social anxieties regarding the loss of old Paris, the irony of new problems such as,
dirt, sewage, traffic congestion, and accidents in the evolving city. Daumier also poked fun at
modern life with images of Parisians dancing on the newly paved macadam boulevards,
navigating the new phenomenon of the crowds, and self-reflecting on their roles in modern Paris.
Such satirical images are a paradox of modernity itself in that they comprise irresolvable binaries
regarding the positive/negative impact of Haussmannization. The character and conduct of
Haussmann, himself is likewise satirized and forms part of the verbal-visual web of controversy
that leads to his dismissal just before the end of Empire. Despite press censorship, these
caricatures generate a discourse on Haussmannization and, implicitly, the Second Empire, with
regard to disrupting, corrupting, and complicating life in the modern metropolis.
“Cross-Contaminated Bodies: Constructing Obscenity in the Public Imaginary”
Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University
This paper examines how textual and illustrated obscenities challenged the efficacy of the
Second Empire censorship laws, while the laws made more vivid the efficacy of the obscene. To
illustrate the dynamics of cross-contaminations between word and image and between fine art
and popular culture, I argue that Edouard Manet signified in his 1863/65 Salon paintings, Le
déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, the slippage between legal (academic) and illegal (erotic)
photography of female nudity within the context of the censorship laws formulated during the
1850s. I extend this visual dynamic to the literary by viewing Manet’s paintings and
pornographic photography with the earlier 1857 censorship trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Here I show that the prosecutorial discourse shaped the critical
reception of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia and extended the repertoire of the obscene.
While the judicial discourse on literary censorship was replete with pictorial allusions to both
illicit photography and the unidealized Realist nude, the critical discourse was replete with
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allusions to the moral contamination of both the actual models and painted figures. This
intersection of the judiciary and artistic spheres demonstrates multiple cross-contaminations
through which the legal construction of obscenity contaminated the public imaginary and then
exceeded the law’s repeal in 1870.
The display of Manet’s 1877 painting of Nana illustrates the enduring public fear of
moral contamination. Nana was rejected from the official salon because of its lewdness. This
condemnation was again compounded by Manet’s references to erotic photography and Zola’s
15-year-old prostitute Nana who had just emerged from L’Assommoir. As Huysmans recounts,
when Nana was prominently exhibited in a storefront window on a busy Parisian boulevard
crowds gather with “screams of indignation.” Yet, Huysmans’ praise for Manet’s representation
of “the quintessential fille” registers the enduring efficacy of artistic cross-contaminations to
challenge the public imaginary on the obscene.
“Le masculin entre texte et images : de la déconstruction à la féminisation”
Frédéric Canovas, Arizona State University
« Elle avait lu Paul et Virginie et elle avait rêvé la
maisonnette de bambous, le nègre Domingo, le chien
Fidèle, mais surtout l'amitié douce de quelque bon petit
frère, qui va chercher pour vous des fruits rouges dans des
grands arbres plus hauts que des clochers, ou qui court
pieds nus sur le sable, vous apportant un nid d'oiseau. »
On aura reconnu ici une des pages les plus connues du roman de Flaubert dont le
personnage éponyme nous servira de guide. En effet, il me semble possible de voir dans le
personnage d’Emma une figure de lectrice susceptible de nous donner une idée de ce que fut la
lectrice type du récit de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre sous la monarchie de juillet : une petite
bourgeoise de province éduquée au couvent, vive et intelligente, comme la décrit Flaubert dans
les premiers chapitres de son roman. Le contexte est marqué bien sûr par un vif regain de
religiosité sous la Monarchie de Juillet – livres religieux, ouvrages de piété, souvent illustrés,
belles reliures deviennent des objets recherchés. Ce sont avant tout des livres-cadeaux offerts lors
d’occasions particulières : première communion, communion solennelle, étrennes, ex-praemio,
etc. Nul ne l’a mieux compris le parti qu’il pouvait en tirer que Léon Curmer (1801-1870),
fondateur d’une « Bibliothèque religieuse », qui fait de l’ouvrage de piété illustré son fond de
commerce. Le livre illustré devient avec Curmer un produit de consommation.
La rencontre de Curmer avec le peintre Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonnier en 1835 est
décisive. L’année suivante, l’éditeur commande au peintre cent trente illustrations pour Paul et
Virginie par Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, récit « dévot », « empreint de morale chrétienne et de
religiosité naturelle » selon Els Jongeneel.17 Meissonnier réalise une multitude de petites scènes
de genre très détaillées pour illustrer le récit. L’ouvrage comporte aussi 7 portraits et 28 autres
planches hors texte. L’image joue donc un rôle de première place puisqu’elle s’impose au regard
avant même le texte, capte toute l’attention des lecteurs et des lectrices et finit par être investie
de la signification du texte tout entier. Dans cette communication je propose d’analyser le choix
de certains épisodes illustrés et la façon de les illustrer en m’attachant plus particulièrement aux
illustrations qui mettent en scène le personnage de Paul.
17
« La mise en image de La Chaumière indienne par Curmer », Image & Narrative, 2011.
November 5-7, 2015
Paul et Virginie est un roman où les personnages féminins dominent et où les
personnages masculins sont souvent associé au mal (le gouverneur La Bourdonnais incarne les
valeurs perverties de l’Europe, le maître de l’esclave marronne sauvée par Virginie est le
symbole de l’injustice et de la cruauté du système colonial). Il était normal, dans ces conditions,
que les plus beaux portraits, les plus flatteurs, soient des portraits de femmes. Virginie est
clairement au centre des illustrations et ce sont ses caractéristiques féminines qui s’imposent à
nous : ses « yeux bleus », ses « grands cheveux blonds », sa « sensibilité extrême », sa « légère
mélancolie ». Parallèlement, les descriptions de Paul comportent des caractéristiques souvent très
masculines : « teint plus rembruni », yeux noirs, « un peu de fierté », « toujours en mouvement »,
« intrépide », personnalité plutôt volontaire et parfois même agressive. Cependant, contrairement
au récit de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, le personnage de Paul est féminisé dans les illustrations de
l’édition Curmer. En effet, les caractéristiques traditionnellement liées au sexe masculin ne se
retrouvent pas dans les illustrations où Paul apparaît plutôt comme un personnage effacé, en
retrait, comme figé dans les marges des figures, et souvent abattu, affaibli. En fait, dans les
illustrations, le personnage de Paul est littéralement « absorbé » par sa relation intime avec
Virginie. Au fil des pages, le personnage de Paul en perd toute caractéristique intrinsèque pour se
résumer à une sorte d’alter ego, de double asexué de Virginie. Personnage asexué car désexué
par les illustrateurs, littéralement émasculé. Cet aspect des illustrations, dont on a peu parlé
jusqu’ici, exagère certains passages du texte de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre condamnant les
relations sexuelles, faisant l’éloge de la virginité, et prônant implicitement l’abstinence sexuelle.
La stratégie des éditions Curmer est claire : ne pas fournir à son lectorat plus féminin que
masculin des images susceptibles d’échauffer l’esprit de jeunes filles dans l’état de Virginie :
« depuis quelque temps Virginie se sentait agitée d’un mal inconnu. Ses beaux
yeux se marbraient de noir ; son teint jaunissait ; une langueur universelle abattait
son corps. La sérénité n’était plus sur son front, ni le sourire sur ses lèvres. On la
voyait tout à coup gaie sans joie, et triste sans chagrin […] Elle pense à l’amitié
de Paul, plus douce que les parfums, plus pure que l’eau des fontaines, plus forte
que les palmiers unis ; et elle soupire. Elle songe à la nuit, à la solitude, et un feu
dévorant la saisit. Aussitôt elle sort, effrayée de ces dangereux ombrages et de ces
eaux plus brûlantes que les soleils de la zone torride » (160).
On imagine aisément l’effet que pouvait avoir de telles évocations sur l’imagination d’une jeune
lectrice telle qu’Emma Bovary. Ainsi non seulement toute trace d’érotisme est-elle gommée et
effacée des illustrations mais les personnages sont-ils encore désexués et le texte évangélisé par
les illustrateurs : les personnages y sont sans cesse représentés en prière, les figures s’inspirent de
scènes religieuses archi-connues, notamment tirées des Evangiles. Travail, famille, vertu : telles
sont les valeurs mises en scène au dépens des aspects plus ambigus du récit de Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre. En cela les éditions Curmer se situent dans le droit fil de l’idéologie conservatrice
développée sous la Monarchie de Juillet et participe à son élaboration auprès d’un public plus
jeune et encore malléable.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 7.D: Crowds, Spectacles, and Contagious Affects
“Sur quelques décapitées de jadis”
Claudie Bernard, New York University
Le motif de la décapitation a contaminé la littérature postrévolutionnaire, qui, friande de
fiction historique, le projette volontiers dans le passé. On s’intéressera ici au fantasme de la
décapitation de la femme, telle qu’il se présente dans trois nouvelles situées aux XVIe et XVIIe
siècles : Hélène Gillet de Nodier (1832), Les Cenci de Stendhal (1837), et Une page d’histoire de
Barbey d’Aurevilly (1887).
On montrera comment la culpabilité féminine (infanticide d’Hélène, parricide de Béatrix,
inceste adelphique de Marguerite de Ravalet), liée à une souillure sexuelle, tient au détournement
(chez Nodier), au retournement (chez Stendhal) ou à la contagion de la faute masculine (chez
Barbey). On analysera ensuite la dissémination de la violence érotique et de la violence
meurtrière du supplice, de la condamnée (coupable ou innocente) sur ses proches (complices),
sur le bourreau (détaché et maudit), sur le peuple spectateur (mué en objet ou sujet de la mise à
mort), et sur la figure royale ou papale.
On examinera comment les narrateurs, séduits par leurs héroïnes, et impliqués en
première personne dans les horrifiques anecdotes, mettent en place, sous divers alibis, des
stratégies de séduction et de brutalisation du lecteur. Et on se demandera en quoi l’« histoire
fantastique vraie » de Nodier, la « chronique italienne » de Stendhal, la « page d’histoire » de
Barbey tout à la fois convoquent et conjurent une violence historique qui, par-delà le XVIe et le
XVIIe siècle, pointe vers le XIXe.
“« Il fallait rire » : Le rire contagieux au service de la tyrannie dans L’Homme qui rit, de
Victor Hugo”
Julie Hugonny, New York University
L’Homme qui rit, de Victor Hugo met en scène un paradoxe : son héros éponyme, dont le
visage est figé en un rire silencieux, suscite l’hilarité des foules qui payent pour le voir, mais luimême ne rit jamais. Gwynplaine, personnage « dénué d’humour » selon Joe Friedmann, est donc
le porteur contagieux, mais sain, d’un virus auquel il est lui-même immunisé.
En effet, si Gwynplaine fait rire tous les hommes, c’est par contact direct : ce rire ne se
propage pas d’homme à homme, il est un phénomène dont il faut faire l’expérience à la source.
Ce rire est donc contagieux, transmis par Gwynplaine exclusivement, et non épidémique,
propagé par l’air.
En revanche, si ce rire exige la présence de Gwynplaine, il est irrésistible et affecte tous
les hommes : du Peuple aux Lords, personne n’y échappe. Grâce à lui les uns se distraient de leur
ennui et les autres oublient leur pauvreté.
Le visage figé en rire de Gwynplaine pervertit ainsi son message personnel, un message
révolutionnaire d’égalité, qu’il délivre dans un discours vite noyé sous les rires provoqués par
son apparition. En effet, pour Marie-Hélène Huet, si l’épidémie est propice aux idées
révolutionnaires, qui sont portées par l’air du temps, la contagion, elle, correspond à un mode de
pensée conservateur : on peut la contenir, et confiner les cas dangereux afin de l’étouffer. Et c’est
bien un effet antirévolutionnaire qu’a ce rire sur le peuple : leur permettant d’oublier leur misère
le temps d’un spectacle, il retarde d’autant un vrai soulèvement populaire. C’est ainsi que le rire
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de Gwynplaine, ce rire tyrannique et contagieux, trahit son message en entérinant malgré lui le
status quo.
“The Esthetics of Contamination and the Advent of the Electric Age”
Kieran Murphy, University of Colorado, Boulder
Julien Gracq has argued in his essay on André Breton and Surrealism that the advent of
the electric age during the nineteenth century finally provided an effective model to legitimize
“volatile” cognitive phenomena that had lacked until then proper representation. The
unpredictable esthetics of contamination, shock, transmutation, and, more broadly, of the
ungraspable and the contagious that characterizes Breton’s oeuvre hinges on a fundamental
image that gives it its coherence and that Gracq identified as the principle responsible for the
onset of mass electrification, namely, electromagnetic induction. In this paper I trace the
emergence of the image informing the “volatile” esthetics of Surrealism back to Balzac’s
groundbreaking literary invocation of electromagnetic induction. Balzac was particularly
attuned with such breakthroughs in physics due to his friendship with the son of André-Marie
Ampère, the famous scientist whose work in electromagnetism greatly contributed to Michael
Faraday’s epoch-making discovery of induction in 1831.
After showing how electromagnetism began to alter Balzac’s worldview, I will turn to its
later appearance in Gustave le Bon as a new way to conceive the suggestive power of words and
images on crowds. Finally, in my theoretical conclusion, I will show how electromagnetic
induction shaped Bachelard’s influential historical epistemology, more particularly the related
concepts of “transcendental” and “psychic inductions,” which allowed the philosopher to convey
the mode of operation of elusive “intuitions” at work in scientific and literary inventions. The
closely associated but now forgotten concept of “verbal induction” also provided him with a way
to account for a channel of communication that, unlike the mere reproduction of sensory
perception found in “mimetic poetry,” could overcome linguistic mediation and transfer to the
reader the actual movement of the intuition that had inspired the author’s writing in the first
place.
“Contagion in/of French Cinema: Cinephobia, Spectators, and the Role of Emotion”
Rae Beth Gordon, University of Connecticut
The paper examines representations of contagion in early cinema in relation to the very
frequent presence of the theme of contagion in articles on the new medium. I propose that these
articles can best be understood in the context of late-19th theories of emotion, as well as in the
context of late-19th-century psycho-physiological theories of unconscious imitation, namely the
internal reproduction of what one sees18. Fears surrounding the ability of the action and
characters on screen to exert a negative influence on spectators were expressed in the 1910's in
books, film magazines, and in newspapers. The anti-cinema discourse of a number of
sociologists, criminologists and specialists in public hygiene, espoused also by a number of
psychiatrists, psychologists and the clergy, spread alarm regarding the propensity of spectators to
18
I have related the latter to the dynamics of imitation in film spectatorship in previous work, and will focus here on
the emotions. Note that the recent theory in neuroscience of "mirror neurons" is nearly identical to the
psychophysical and psychophysiological theories on the automatic internal reproduction of what one perceives
which were published in France between 1880 and 1900.
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imitate the actions seen on screen. The medical use of hypnotic suggestion in the last third of the
19th century, as well as its use by itinerant magnetizers, set the stage for the immediate
perception of the power of suggestion exercised by the cinematograph. In addition to the practice
of hypnosis in hospitals, theaters and fairgrounds, the fear of contagion through suggestion
obviously harkens back to Gustave Le Bon's 1895 Psychologie des foules.
However, I believe that its basis also lies in the far less sensationalist notions surrounding
the unconscious internal mirroring of the other's gestures, and the new theory of the emotions.
In 1884-85, William James and Carl Lange proposed the thesis that emotions are a physiological
reaction originating in the vasomotor systems; this reaction then triggers the outward corporeal
expression of anger, joy, fear, and only then do we consciously feel the emotion. (Note that the
spectator's body is affected by the emotion even if s/he does not become conscious of it.) These
psycho-physiological notions found fertile ground in the scenarios of many films from 19081913 where a character's gestures, facial expressions and emotions are transmitted to another
character. After considering several texts that proffer warnings about contagion, followed by
excerpts of films that illustrate this phenomenon, we will see how automatic motor response is
intimately interwoven with emotional response, and why the two --alongside the menace of
hypnotic suggestion-- underlie fear of the contagion propagated by film.
Panel 7.E: Poisons, vermines, contagions – vers une poétique de la contamination
chez Baudelaire
Chair: Robert St. Clair, Dartmouth College
“Contaminated Flowers: Gautier on Baudelaire and Hawthorne”
Joseph Acquisto, University of Vermont
Théophile Gautier’s four essays on Baudelaire reveal a struggle to find the right way to
introduce him to the reading public. One of Gautier’s most frequently used tools is simile; his
comparisons of Baudelaire to soda water, Epsom salts, and cats, to cite just a few, illustrate the
difficulty of naming who the poet is and what he does in his poetry. Despite Gautier’s assertion
of the harmlessness of Baudelaire’s poetry, I claim that there is an element of danger in the new
reading practices inspired by Baudelaire that Gautier does not fully acknowledge but that is
revealed, intriguingly, in a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappacini’s Daughter,” which Gautier
mentions in three of his four articles on Baudelaire and which concerns a young woman who
tends her father’s garden of poisonous plants without herself becoming contaminated. I suggest
that the processes of reading and writing as they are portrayed and performed in Hawthorne’s
story reveal important aspects of Gautier’s own approach to Baudelaire, in both the possibilities
it opens up and the limitations it suggests. Gautier’s attempts to get a handle on Baudelaire’s
newness via comparative descriptions risk cancelling the newness of the poetry by
reappropriating it within the familiar. By contrast, the specific comparison to “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” invites reflection on the full complexity of Baudelaire’s poetry, but in ways that
Gautier did not identify and which he probably did not foresee, focusing as he did on a single
aspect of the story, choosing what he wanted us to see in it and thus preserving coherence and
sanity at the price of full acknowledgement of the richness of the text of Hawthorne’s story and,
by extension, Baudelaire’s poetry as well.
November 5-7, 2015
“Vers, vermines, vermisseaux et autres bestioles contaminantes dans l'œuvre poétique de
Baudelaire”
Dominique Rincé, École Polytechnique
On connaît bien le bestiaire de Baudelaire pour ses grands oiseaux chargés de symboles
(hiboux songeurs, cygnes égarés ou albatros spleenétiques), ses « bons » chiens ou « toutous »
frétillants, et surtout ses « chats » tout empreints d'une mystérieuse et fascinante félinité. On
connaît moins en revanche la petite faune rampante qui semble avoir élu domicile, pour l'infester
et le vivifier tout à la fois, dans le poème baudelairien. Vers, vermines, vermisseaux, mais aussi
mouches, punaises, araignées, fourmis, chrysalides et autres insolites « helminthes », grouillent
et prolifèrent dans les alvéoles des « vers » homonymes puisqu'aussi bien c'est dans ceux des
Fleurs du mal, bien davantage que dans les proses du Spleen de Paris (en dépit de la reptilienne
dédicace à Arsène Houssaye!), que ce grouillement infectieux et contaminatoire paraît s'exercer.
Notre présente communication, après avoir dressé rapidement l'inventaire de ce micro
bestiaire vénéneux, s'attachera à en dégager la portée symbolique et surtout poétique si l'on veut
bien considérer que des Memento mori comme « Une Charogne » ou « Le Flacon » sont aussi
d'authentiques arts poétiques où s'opère, dans le terreau du texte, l'oxymorique travail de
décomposition / recréation porté par ces « infâmes » petites bestioles... « De la vaporisation et de
la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là », proclamera le premier fragment de Mon cœur mis à nu.
Rien de tel en effet que de « noirs bataillons de larves » pour effectuer ce paradigmatique
retournement de l'organique putréfié et pulvérisé au poétique reconfiguré et sublimé!
“Étranges contagions”
Éric Trudel, Bard College
On sait comment Baudelaire, dans ses Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, ouvrait grandes les
portes du Beau à la morbidité, en évoquant « l’Esthétique classique » sous la figure d’une
« matrone rustique, répugnante de santé et de vertu. » Personne ne doute d’ailleurs que ses
Fleurs malades, véritable « floraison de monstruosité » aient elles-mêmes été source majeure de
l’infection parmi ses lecteurs. Devant quelques images tirées du « capharnaüm diabolique […] de
Breughel le Drôle », le poète s’exclamait avec joie qu’il s’en « répand[ait] une contagion » pour
ajouter ensuite ce commentaire, comme pour en tirer une leçon pratique : « souvent nous
trouvons dans l’histoire, même dans plus d’une partie moderne de l’histoire, la preuve de
l’immense puissance des contagions ». De la même manière, dans le Salon de 1846, il invitait
son lecteur à le suivre « dans l’hôpital de la peinture » où il lui serait loisible de toucher « aux
plaies et aux maladies » et ainsi s’intéresser à « toutes les affections morbides. » Considérant
avec horreur « l’invasion » de la photographie dans l’art, Baudelaire évoquait pourtant au
contraire une « maladie » par laquelle l’industrie venait corrompre l’art. Enfin, la chose est bien
connue, il n’hésita pas à décrire l’esprit républicain de 1848, dominant, comme une « vérole dans
les os » qui n’épargnait rien ni personne : « Nous sommes, affirmait-il, Démocratisés et
Syphilisés ». C’est donc à cet imaginaire multiple et contradictoire de la contagion que cette
contribution voudrait s’intéresser, en repérant et interrogeant ses différentes valeurs, à la fois
vecteur d’un effet de trouble ou de nouveau qui « va toujours son chemin » (qu’on pense à la
contagion du mal, du rire, de l’ironie, de la poésie par la prose) ou risque hygiénique qu’il
faudrait pouvoir tenter, en vain, de contenir.
November 5-7, 2015
“Verse-nous ton poison – l’altération poétique chez Baudelaire”
Catherine Witt, Reed College
Outre sa valeur de métaphore désignant l’expression poétique – Baudelaire, dans un
projet de préface, parle « d’extraire la beauté du Mal » (OCI, 181), le poison est un motif repris
dans une dizaine de poèmes des Fleurs du Mal qui lie et organise le recueil. Dans l’édition de
1861, il figure tout aussi bien dans l’inventaire des crimes dont ne peuvent s’enorgueillir les
craintives âmes qu’interpelle « Au Lecteur » que dans la dernière strophe de l’ultime poème « Le
Voyage », où le poison devient une réconfortante liqueur pour le poète qui veut sonder le gouffre
de l’Inconnu. La présente communication s’intéressera de près au poème « Le Poison » que
Baudelaire inscrit au centre du recueil dans le cycle de compositions dédiées à Marie Daubrun.
Dans ce poème, le poison compte avec le vin et l’opium parmi les substances dont les vertus
évocatoires poétisent le monde, mais c’est aussi, comme l’indique le sous-titre des Paradis
artificiels, l’un des « moyens de multiplication de l’individualité » sur laquelle est fondée la
poétique baudelairienne. L’essai poético-pharmaceutique que sont Les Paradis artificiels (1860)
orientera notre lecture de la pénultième strophe du « Poison », où l’absorption du liquide
vénéneux qui s’écoule des yeux de la femme aimée ne fait pas que désaltérer « les songes » du
sujet poétique « en foule », mais entraîne aussi une altération radicale du langage poétique
conventionnel. Oscillant entre désaltération et altération, cette strophe ouvre un lieu abyssal
dans lequel se joue la poétique contaminatoire des Fleurs du Mal.
Panel 7.F: Epidemiology of the Feuilleton
Chair: Judith Lyon-Caen, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales
“Contamination, souillure et mutation : l’épidémie feuilletonesque”
Nicolas Gauthier, University of Waterloo
Avec le recul historique, l’émergence du roman-feuilleton sous la monarchie de Juillet
peut sembler être la marche triomphale d’une innovation que tous s’empressent d’imiter.
Cependant, plusieurs commentateurs y ont plutôt vu une implacable « maladie littéraire » (Alfred
Nettement, Études sur le feuilleton-roman, 1845) contaminant tout ce qu’elle touche. Le thème
de la contamination est crucial parce que, plus qu'un simple mode de publication, ce sont une
poétique, une esthétique et une conception du littéraire qui sont attaquées parce qu’elles
« souillent » un idéal de la Littérature, y multiplient les impuretés et en corrompent les
fondements. Notre communication se propose de lever le voile sur ce pan moins connu de
l'histoire littéraire pour mieux cerner la méfiance initiale envers ce genre, laquelle a longtemps
cadré et biaisé la critique des œuvres feuilletonesques. Nous examinerons comment le romanfeuilleton a « contaminé » le journal Le Constitutionnel, second quotidien parisien en importance
en 1836. Initialement opposé à cette innovation (ce qui explique notre choix), il a finalement
cédé et a même posé un jalon de l’histoire du roman-feuilleton en offrant à Eugène Sue la
somme colossale de 100 000 francs pour son Juif errant en 1843. Nous constaterons ainsi que,
plus encore que ceux d’une marche triomphale ou d’une invasion, le motif de la contamination
s’avère particulièrement approprié pour comprendre la façon dont le roman-feuilleton s’impose
dans les journaux lorsque se répand ce que les contemporains auraient bien pu nommer
l'épidémie feuilletonesque.
November 5-7, 2015
“‘Matière de librairie’: Defining the Literary Marketplace in the Feuilleton”
Anne O’Neil-Henry, Georgetown University
In his 1839 essay “De la littérature industrielle,” Sainte-Beuve famously railed against
what he saw as the contamination of the contemporary literary field, concluding that “deux
littératures coexistent dans une proportion bien inégale et coexisteront de plus en plus, mêlées
entre elles comme le bien et le mal en ce monde, confondues jusqu’au jour du jugement” (691).
The rise of commercially driven literature threatened the purity of artistic production for this
critic who found authors’ preoccupation with the material conditions of their works lamentable
“pour les lettres en général” (687). This paper explores these “contaminating” material
conditions in the Bibliographie de la France ou le Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la
librairie (established in 1811), a publication that both catalogued the rise of popular literature
that concerned Sainte-Beuve, and also served as a site for the making of the professional
knowledge of the modern commercial book trade. In particular, I study excerpts from a
supplement to this journal known as the Feuilleton ou Journal de la librairie (created in 1825)
that functioned as a « bulletin board for the book trade » (Haynes, 98). Throughout the July
Monarchy, the abundant legal cases pertaining to counterfeiting, property rights and printing
practices lead to the development in the Feuilleton of a regular feature (the Décisions judiciaires
en matière de librairie, as it was most frequently called) that chronicled these cases and their
outcomes and, eventually, established for its professional readers the general practices of the
nascent literary marketplace, sometimes in a question and answer format. Through my analysis
of these understudied Décisions from the 1830s and 40s, I show the professionals who wrote in
and subscribed to the Feuilleton exploring and defining the boundaries of the literary
marketplace in this early moment of mass culture.
“Marked by the Fold: Materialization of Newspapers and Formatting of Roles”
Cary Hollinshead-Strick, American University of Paris
In an article published in response to Le Play’s 1864 La Réforme Sociale en France,
Sainte-Beuve describes the ouvrier littéraire: “...on est journaliste ; on l'est, fût-on romancier, car
c'est en feuilletons que paraissent vos livres même, et l'on s'en aperçoit ; ils se ressentent des
coupures, des attentes et des suspensions d'intérêt du feuilleton ; ils en portent la marque et le
pli.”
Sainte-Beuve’s critique of serial publication refers indirectly to the enlargement of
newspapers to accommodate more advertising, and even perhaps to the participation of women
in the distribution of such newspapers. For, in the very masculine world of print-shop culture,
plieuses were mostly women, whose work folding newspapers became essential with the advent
of the large format newspapers in which serial novels were published. Stallybrass suggests that
owners’ need for pawned clothing, and the wear which left devaluing folds in its cloth, may have
shaped Marx’s ideas about use value. Although newspaper production was industrial, SainteBeuve’s insistence that the readerly experience of serial fiction defined authors who published it
as journalists suggests that a person’s social category is determined by the bound or folded status
of his prose. Material memory of having been in a newspaper keeps a novel and its author from
respectability, not quite that way that pawning his overcoat kept Marx from the library, but
nearly.
Sainte-Beuve’s sometime correspondent, Vallès, also used “la marque et le pli” to
characterize the lasting effects of seminary on a fellow revolutionary. For both writers, the
November 5-7, 2015
shaping of the social is named with terms from the packaging of newspapers, suggesting that the
newsprint Sainte-Beuve imagined as a contaminated medium in his 1839 “De la littérature
industrielle” had become formative, for better or worse, by 1864.
“Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the Journalistic Unconscious”
Edmund Birch, University of Cambridge
It has become a critical commonplace, in nineteenth-century French studies at least, to
conceive of the relationship between fiction and journalism in terms of contamination. The
newspaper is deemed to have infiltrated – or, in a more pessimistic vein, to have contaminated –
the novel, a notion which goes beyond the mere fact that many novels were first serialised in the
press. In a discussion of Marc Angenot's 1889. Un état du discours social, for example, Fredric
Jameson explores the ways in which Angenot's particular argument about fiction and social
discourse 'directs our attention toward the contamination of nineteenth-century discourse in
general by the narratives of journalism'. And these concerns equally crop up in more recent work
by Marie-Ève Thérenty, for whom the connections between fiction and the press are invariably
couched in terms of 'transferts', 'collusion' and, of course, 'contamination'. With the critical
perspectives of Angenot, Jameson and Thérenty in mind, this paper will seek to trace the sense in
which the structure of the feuilleton weaves its way into Alexandre Dumas's Le Comte de MonteCristo. First published in Le Journal des débats, this novel makes coded reference to the fact of
its own serialisation in its depiction of fragmentary text: in one memorable episode, the
whereabouts of buried treasure are only revealed when two distinct fragments of text are placed
side by side. In this way, I hope to outline the ways in which the particular forms evoked in the
novel mirror the manner of its publication, and to question whether the presence of serialisation
at various levels of the narrative points to the possibility of a journalistic unconscious.
Panel 7.G: Table ronde: Des femmes en littérature et de leur place dans le discours
critique
Organizer & Chair: Martine Reid (Université de Lille-3)
“Des raisons d'être de cette table ronde et de quelques questions toujours d'actualité”
Martine Reid, Université de Lille-3
“Sur l'intérêt théorique des traitements numériques des écrits de femmes pour
l'historiographie littéraire”
Bénédicte Monicat, The Pennsylvania State University
“Women in French : Point d'étape”
Cecilia Beach, Alfred University
“Feminist Criticism: A Cross-Atlantic Narrative”
Evelyne Ender, Johns Hopkins University
November 5-7, 2015
Plenary 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Sabine Barles, Université Paris 1
« La faim sortant du sillon et la maladie sortant du fleuve » : les excreta urbains au
XIXe siècle, entre pollution et valorisation
Reception – Chancellor Green Rotunda, 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Saturday 7 November
Session 8 – 8:30 am - 10:00 am
Panel 8.A: Contaminated by Silence
Chair: Lisa Algazi Marcus, Hood College
“La « contamination » du mutisme: stratégies narratives dans Anatole de Sophie Gay”
Ying Wang, Pace University
Anatole, publié en 1815, un « best-seller » de l’année de sa parution, est le chef-d’œuvre
de Sophie Gay, romancière et salonnière reconnue de l’époque qui nous a laissé de nombreux
ouvrages littéraires. L’histoire d’Anatole qui se développe autour de l’identité mystérieuse du
héros sourd-muet, se voit rangée par Sainte-Beuve dans l’espèce de romans anecdotes qui traitent
« une infirmité ou une bizarrerie de la nature » (XIII)19. L’instance de la surdité et du mutisme
masculins qui déstabilise le modèle des rapports amoureux entre les deux sexes, pose également
des problèmes au niveau de la narration qui demandent des efforts textuels pour répondre au
besoin de l’évocation de la sentimentalité. De fait, l’originalité du texte consiste à la «
contamination » du mutisme —une série de stratégies narratives qui privilégient le silence en
favorisant l’existence du héros sourd-muet dans la diégèse. Le roman qui a connu beaucoup de
succès en son temps est si habilement construit que la déficience physique du personnage reste
un secret jusqu’à une cinquantaine de pages avant la fin du texte. Comment ces stratégies
narratives sont-elles mises en œuvre ? De quelle manière l’infirmité du héros complique-t-elle le
processus de sentimentalisation et contribue-t-elle aux facteurs transgressifs de l’écriture
féminine ? Mon essai tend à réfléchir à ces questions.
Qui plus est, malgré l’éloge des critiques et la réaction favorable des lecteurs aux
ouvrages de Sophie Gay au XIXième siècle, les œuvres de l’écrivaine restent encore trop
« muettes » dans les études littéraires d’aujourd’hui. Ce « mutisme » m’encourage à croire
qu’une lecture serrée d’Anatole deviendra un point de départ pour continuer à rendre visibles les
ouvrages de cette femme auteur dont l’importance comme celle de nombreuses consœurs
brillantes de Staël et de Sand, mérite une attention sérieuse et continuelle.
“Contaminated with Meaning: The Rhetoric of Shadows in Hugo’s Poetry”
Tim Raser, University of Georgia
The paper will compare Hugos use of shadow-imagery from early (1839) to late (1856),
opposing “L’Ombre” to “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre,” and will trace the tendency of his
figural language to become ever more abstract: how Hugo, having named names and imposed
sentences on history’s most famous malefactors comes to posit images such as “la fleur
implacable et féroce” where it is anybody’s guess whose name corresponds to the figure. He
abandons a rigid allegorical structure in favor of one where meaning is implicit, but if that is the
case, where does the meaning come from?
19
Selon Sainte-Beuve, Ourika de Duras, Aloïs de M. de Cusine et le Mutilé de M. Saintine appartiennent aussi à
cette catégorie de romans.
November 5-7, 2015
“From Silence to Preterition: Stendhal’s and Méry’s Queer Characters
David Powell, Hofstra University
French narratives in the last two decades of the 18th century merrily included a variety of
queer characters and activities. Other than the publication of a couple of Sade’s works during the
decade following the Revolution, queers all but disappeared from French narratives, and this
despite the removal of criminal status of acts of sodomy as early as 1791.
Queers were, of course, not gone from France, but their representations in literature seem to have
gone into hiding and for almost three decades, depictions of queers remained silent. During the
Restoration and into the July Monarchy, queer characters surreptitiously reappeared; but, they
did not speak their own queer selves, they were not usually main characters, and there was never
any discussion of their sexuality, their desires, or their activities.
How can we explain the apparent disappearance followed by the timid resurfacing of
queer characters in early 19th-century French narratives. My purpose in this paper is to
demonstrate how queer characters can be pulled out of the recesses of a narrative and to describe
how the narrator surreptitiously suggests them to the reader. Through close reading in
conjunction with queer theory (J. Binnie, D. Fuss, A. Jagose, D. Hall, D.M. Halperin, C.
Nigianni, E.K. Sedgwick, N. Sullivan, M. Warner, et al.), I identify and explicate instances of
queerness and interpret the nature of these queer moments and their significance. Whether a
quasi-silent discourse or an abundant use of preterition, authors communicate, willingly or not, a
gender anxiety that relates to anxieties about republican citizenry.
In Armance (1827), Stendhal interjects numerous indications of Octave’s moods, which
his mother considers to be an illness and which, on occasion, he himself, as well as his fiancée
and later his wife, Armance, also consider to be abnormal behavior. Thirty years later, in
Monsieur Auguste (1858), Joseph Méry constructs a love triangle, much like those Eve Sedgwick
details, in which one man’s love for a woman incurs the apparent displeasure of another man,
whose friendship with the first one is peculiarly intimate.
Both authors seem to use similar narrative techniques to present their queer characters:
they wrestle with articulating their feelings and desires; they withdraw into the background
notwithstanding their prominent position in the narrative; both end the novel unhappy or
relegated to the cult of Plato. On closer reading, however, important differences emerge:
differences in social class; differences in their commitment to some purposeful goal; differences
in the nature of their devotion to another.
In my paper, I will why and how the two narratives introduce queerness and then
paradoxically dissociate the queer characters from those narratives. The repercussions of these
findings helps to explain the dissatisfaction regarding equality and universalism one finds texts
of the period, not to mention in debates raging in France today over race, religion, and sexual
orientation, including marriage, adoption, and medically-assisted procreation.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 8.B: Social Mobility
Chair: Melanie Conroy, University of Memphis
“Armance: Contamination et beylisme dans l'invention du roman stendhalien”
William Paulson, University of Michigan
Avec Armance, peut-on dire, Henri Beyle invente le discours romanesque
stendhalien. Le conflit idéologique (ou de classe) que met en scène ce discours se complique
d’une évocation récurrente de la contamination: les valeurs nobles sont entachées par l’intérêt et
la cupidité. Or cette impureté tant décriée s’avère être un ressort non seulement de l’action et de
l’analyse sociale, mais d’une réussite possible dans cette recherche raisonnée du bonheur qui a
déjà tant préoccupé l’auteur, et à laquelle la tradition critique a donné le nom de beylisme. La
contamination, ou si vous voulez l’impur, relie donc le dynamisme du conflit idéologique à la
quête d’une manière d’être et d’agir qui convienne au dix-neuvième siècle.
“Felicitous Contamination: Recipes for a Happy Mésalliance”
Cecilia Beach, Alfred College
Far from the 19th-century norm of homogamy, the protagonists in André Léo’s novels
often choose unconventional marriages based not on socio-economic proximity, but rather
intellectual and emotional compatibility. André Léo herself, bourgeois daughter of a provincial
notaire, married a political journalist who had first trained as a typographer and later lived with a
political activist and writer seventeen years younger than her who had peasant origins and had
been working in a factory at the time they met. André Léo deconstructs the myth of the ideal
bourgeois marriage in various ways. In both Une Vieille fille (1859) and Les Deux filles de M.
Plichon (1864), a young suitor gradually shifts his attentions from the younger, prettier sister to
her more intelligent older sister, thus challenging conventional notions of attractiveness and
marriageability. The female protagonist in Un Mariage scandaleux (1860) marries an enlightened
peasant and in Le Drame du cerveau (1992), while the vain protagonist suffers through two
unhappy marriages of ambition, an enlightened secondary character, a model of the feminine
ideal for André Léo—intelligent, generous, active, useful—marries an artisan sculptor. Similarly,
in Le Père Brafort (1872-3), André Léo juxtaposes the loveless marriage of convenience of Jean
with his brother’s happy mésalliance with a woman he loves and with whom he shares a
revolutionary bond. In La Grande Illusion des petits bourgeois (1874-5), after years of restless
ambition in his professional and private life, the protagonist abandons his grand illusions and
returns home to the working-class woman he loves. In this paper, we will explore these
relationships among others in order to understand the ingredients that lead to a happy marriage in
the works of André Léo. Through this analysis, we will show how the personal is political, how
the representation of marriage in these novels relates to André Léo’s political and feminist
theory.
“Gestural Gentry and Performing Pedigree at the Bal blanc”
Erica C. Schauer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
The French bal blanc, or “debutante ball,” originated in court society as an exclusive
practice of the aristocracy. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the ball had
evolved into an elite, exclusive ceremonial event of the leisure classes at which daughters were
showcased and officially introduced to their social peers. Finding appropriate matches for the
November 5-7, 2015
girls of marriageable age—the filles à marier of the event—was, indeed, one of its primary
goals. However, the bal blanc also provided a space for families to prove that they possessed the
requisite elegance expected of their social milieu. After years spent guaranteeing the proper
education of their daughters—both in formal classrooms and in the families’ living rooms—
parents nervously presented their daughters to society at this leisure class confirmation
ceremony. These closed rituals were traditional, prescriptive, and highly detailed. They marked
the young hostesses, and, in turn, their families, as certified members of the French elite or,
alternatively, unmasked them as frauds who did not possess the innate qualities of the upper
classes. Widespread fears of class-contamination produced barriers through which aspiring
leisure-class families needed to pass, including the acquisition of wealth, a respectable
reputation, a sense of appropriate fashion, and—perhaps the most important and most difficult
trait to acquire—gestural grace. Social belonging in the Belle Epoque was not simply sartorial—
it was somatic. It was not a mask, but rather a personification, an embodiment, and a state of
physicality that reached much further into the corporal awareness of the self and of the situation
at hand. In this paper, I ask how bona fide members of the leisure class sought out impostors in
their ranks at the bal blanc, paying close attention to the physical gestures that unmasked
newcomers as poseurs and arrivistes.
Panel 8.C: Corrupt Cities / Tainted Texts
Chair: Masha Belenky, George Washington University
“The Father, Son, and Unholy Ghost: Tainted Trinities in Le Père Goriot”
Paul Young, Georgetown University
In Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, the Pension Vauquer seems a hotbed of contagion; its façade
bears a syphilitic cupid, and its rooms are infested by its lodgers’ “catarrhal exhalations.” Even
the furnishings seem ill, perhaps because of their close contact with the pensioners, who display
a gamut of maladies. Mlle. Michonneau’s skeletal appearance suggests a libertine past, while
Poiret’s jaundice has a more ambiguous source. Mlle. Taillefer is the victim of a “blancheur
maladive,” and the novel’s title character, Goriot, has a perpetually runny eye. Sylvie, Mme.
Vauquer’s cook, must scrub the pension’s courtyard to prevent against “pestilence,” a task as
necessary as it is futile. It is hardly surprising that Rastignac dreams of leaving this fetid milieu
to enter the elegant drawing rooms of Mme. de Restaud, Mme. de Nucingen and Mme. de
Beauséant.
However, Rastignac’s social ascension is also fraught with filth; his Paris is a “bourbier,”
in which he cannot advance (literally or figuratively) without becoming tainted. Indeed,
contamination permeates Le Père Goriot. In the present paper, I would argue that in this novel,
Balzac, through a vocabulary of contamination and contagion, expresses a nostalgia for a largely
fictive ancien régime, and his fantasy of a French monarchy not encumbered by the bourgeois
stain of “La Charte.” This world, which exemplifies the kind of “noblesse immaculée” that his
narrator mentions, stands in contrast with the “gangrened” and “degenerate” society that
Balzac’s narrator evokes during Vautrin’s arrest.
Through a close reading of Le Père Goriot, and relying on psychoanalytic theory, as well
as the work of social historians, I would like to examine Balzac’s use of images of contagion and
contamination to discuss the role of history, the past, and Balzac’s depiction of changing social
November 5-7, 2015
norms and roles in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although Le Père Goriot takes
place in 1819, I would argue that here, Balzac suggests that the events following the revolution
of 1830 have created a social order in which contamination is the inevitable norm. Looking at
Balzac’s depiction of the reader who holds this book “d’une main blanche,” I will also examine
Balzac’s notion that literature might serve as a panacea or a poison, a contaminant or a cure, for
his period.
“Alphonse Daudet : un poète de la fange”
Pierre-Jean Dufief, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre
Naturaliste en mode mineur, Alphonse Daudet veut découvrir la beauté dans la laideur et
esthétiser la saleté omniprésente dans son œuvre. L’écrivain se fait subtil alchimiste de la boue
urbaine qui s’enkyste au coeur de la ville ou dans ses marges ; chez Daudet tout est boue, glisse à
la boue, redevient boue. Le romancier apparaît hanté par le retour à l’informe, dans une
liquéfaction infâme. Il s’intéresse à la physiologie, aux sécrétions, aux excrétions, à la
scatologie, aux glaires, aux vomissements.
La saleté devient volontiers synonyme d’une souillure essentiellement liée à la sexualité
car le désir est toujours vécu chez lui comme dégradant.
La saleté et la pollution sont politisées et mises au service d’une pensée conservatrice.
Daudet dénonce les excès de l’urbanisation, les révolutions et les mouvements populaires tout
comme il s’en prendra dans Soutien de Famille aux corruptions et aux miasmes délétères du
parlementarisme.
“Branding Naturalism: The Ecology of Vice in Zola”
Jessica Tanner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In Le Mal propre (2008), Michel Serres reorients Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as
“matter out of place” by suggesting that dirt serves to make place, to appropriate territory: “la
pollution signe la volonté de puissance, le désir de l’expansion spatiale. […] Ceux qui laissent là
traces et marques, horrifiantes, s’approprient les lieux, non en les hantant, mais en excluant toute
autre personne de là.” With the publication of Thérèse Raquin in 1867, a novel famously
“trait[é] de flaque de bout et de sang, d’égout, d’immondice” by critics, Émile Zola marked out
his place on France’s literary landscape by contaminating the realist novel. The vice-laden
atmospheres and characters that both sullied and made the author’s name in the press likewise
engendered fears about contagion beyond the bounds of the book, as the consumption of Zola’s
“putrid” fictions threatened material transmission of their constitutive vice to the reader – a
contamination we might understand, following Serres, as a form of branding.
In this paper, I theorize Zola’s brand of vice as a self-corroding site of mimetic
inscription, one that engages the reader “dans le vice” (a favored Zolian expression) of naturalist
literature. In Zola, “vice” denotes several related concepts: notably, hereditary corruption or lack
(e.g., Tante Dide’s originary fêlure) and the adopted behaviors (e.g., drinking, prostitution) that
stem from it and aim to restore homeostasis between subject and environment. Both reductive
and additive, mimetic and aesthetic, vice disorients perception, becoming a privileged site of
expression for the oft-cited “saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation exacte” that
constitutes Zola’s mature aesthetics. Through an analysis of Thérèse Raquin and La Terre
(1887), I argue that Zola cultivates what we might read as a naturalist terroir of vice, crafting a
space for literature on the degraded grounds of his textual landscapes.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 8.D: Nature et santé au futur : hantises de la contamination
Chair: Kathryn Miner (Emory University)
“Prévoir/prévenir la contamination : récit d'anticipation et hygiénisme”
Valérie Stiénon, Université Paris XIII
Au croisement de la médecine, de l’urbanisme et du réformisme social, les théories
hygiénistes influencent profondément les conceptions du vivre-ensemble au XIXe siècle en
France. Au même moment, les romans d’anticipation développent des préoccupations similaires
à travers leurs visions de la communauté : conditions fragiles de la santé publique, mesures
prophylactiques contre l’épidémie, mises à l’épreuve du corps social et des infrastructures
urbaines. Émile Souvestre envisage l’allaitement des enfants à la vapeur (Le Monde tel qu’il
sera, 1846), Jules Verne conçoit France-Ville comme la « cité du bien-être » centrée sur la
propreté (Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum, 1879), Léon Daudet satirise une autocratie
médicale devenue meurtrière par l’application outrancière des lois d’hygiène (Les Morticoles,
1894) et Paul Adam présente l’organisation des villes selon les cycles de la reproduction,
favorisant la femme enceinte mais rendant stérile le soldat (Les Lettres de Malaisie, 1898).
Les convergences entre les théories hygiénistes et les récits d’anticipation reposent non
seulement sur un discours social et idéologique privilégiant certaines topiques comme la
contamination, mais aussi sur des formes d’expression spécifiques, l’hygiénisme ayant généré
nombre d’écrits – du traité à l’essai – caractérisés par leur propre poétique. Poser des principes,
édicter des lois, recenser les composantes du corps social, réformer les mœurs, cartographier la
ville et catégoriser ses habitants : ces démarches cognitives et les rhétoriques qui leur sont
associées transitent aussi par la fiction romanesque, qui les fait siennes. On propose d’examiner
ce double aspect : entre théorie et application, entre discours social et roman, comment la fiction
d’anticipation s’approprie-t-elle l’hygiénisme pour en confirmer les principes, les critiquer ou les
réinventer ? Quelles sont les modalités de ce dialogue à la fois prédictif et prescriptif
(intégration, citation, transposition) ? Enfin, une évolution est-elle perceptible au long de la
seconde moitié du siècle ?
“Nature, souillure : topologie de la contamination dans les romans de Jules Verne”
Laurent Bazin, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Née d’un souci de transmission morale et religieuse au tournant du Moyen-Age et de la
Renaissance, puis confortée dans sa finalité éducative par les pédagogues des Lumières, la
littérature de jeunesse du XIXe siècle prolonge l’effort de transmission lui conférant sa légitimité
en multipliant les intrigues porteuses de valeurs politiques et philosophiques en phase avec la
vision positiviste du monde qui organise à la même époque le progrès de la civilisation. La
fiction se met au service de l’instruction voire de l’édification, objectifs avoués d’une production
chargée de garantir dans l’espace diégétique un ordre social érigé en idéal d’harmonie ; il en
résulte un recours fréquent aux formes génériques de l’utopie ou du roman de formation, censées
garantir mieux que d’autres la mise en évidence des idéaux désignés en modèles auprès des
jeunes lecteurs. C’est le cas par exemple dans Le Robinson suisse (Wyss, Der Schweizerische
Robinson, 1812) ou L’Ile de corail (Ballantyne, The Coral Island, 1858), où l’insularité utopique
garantit une homothétie entre la pureté de l’environnement et la bonté postulée de la nature
humaine, de même que dans Les Aventures de Huckleberry Finn (Twain, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, 1884) ou Heidi (Spyri, Heidis Lehr-und Wanderjahre, 1880) où le
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cheminement de l’apprentissage se fait dans le sens d’une réconciliation entre vie naturelle et vie
sociale.
Aussi est-il intéressant de constater qu’une œuvre aussi ostensiblement pédagogique que
celle de Jules Verne puisse, à la même époque, s’inscrire dans une configuration similaire tout en
déployant des univers plus équivoques qu’on aurait pu l’attendre d’une littérature aussi
résolument inféodée à la fonction éducative. Implicitement présente dès la mise en place de
l’intrigue (les romans ne sont pas pour rien publiés dans la Librairie d’éducation et de
récréation), la dimension propédeutique s’aventure sur des chemins imprévus qui contaminent
les présupposés initiaux ; du moins est-ce ce que semblent mettre en œuvre ces avatars de
l’utopie que sont, par cristallisation, la robinsonnade (L’Ile mystérieuse, 1875, L’Ecole des
robinsons, 1882, Deux ans de vacances, 1888…), par translation, le récit de pérégrination (Vingt
mille lieues sous les mers, 1869, La Maison à vapeur, 1880, La Jangada, 1881…) et, par
inversion, la dystopie (Le Chancellor, 1874, Les Cinq cent millions de la Begum, 1879, L’Ile à
hélice, 1895…). Dans tous ces textes en effet, l’environnement extérieur exerce une influence
pernicieuse sur le comportement des héros dont il mine subrepticement le système de valeurs à
force de maladies, intoxications et autres empoisonnements. L’objet de cette présentation sera
ainsi d’étudier la façon dont de tels récits subvertissent la fonction didactique qu’ils étaient
censés assumer en adjoignant aux schèmes organisateurs de la protection insulaire et de l’errance
initiatique une dimension ambiguë qui pervertit la foi dans le bien naturel (qu’il s’agisse
d’écosystème ou de comportement humain).
“Un monde sans humains : l’altérité vectrice d’une contagion ontologique chez J.-H. Rosny
aîné”
Simon Bréan, Université Paris-Sorbonne
L’une des manifestations les plus effrayantes de l’invasion martienne imaginée par H. G.
Wells dans La Guerre des mondes (paru en France en 1900) est l’invasion d’une étrange
végétation remplaçant les plantes terrestres par un biotope approprié aux envahisseurs. Même
s’ils s’inspirent de Wells pour développer un paradigme d’altérité conflictuelle, les anticipateurs
français du premier XXe siècle ne reprennent guère cette modalité, qui s’accorde mal avec un
autre principe de leur écriture, la poétique de l’anomalie : en règle générale, les créatures ne
doivent laisser aucune trace de leur passage à la fin du récit. De ce fait, la thématique de la
rencontre avec des êtres nouveaux se manifeste dans d’autres textes que celle, au demeurant
assez peu représentée, de la contamination bactériologique, guerrière ou accidentelle.
Une exception notable, et d’interprétation complexe, est la série formée par trois récits de
Rosny, dont le premier, « Les Xipéhuz », est antérieur à la parution de La Guerre des mondes
(signé J.-H. Rosny, 1888), et s’inscrit dans la veine préhistorique de l’auteur, malgré le caractère
singulier des créatures imaginées dans un lointain passé : les Xipéhuz appartiennent à une
mystérieuse espèce minérale se développant en concurrence directe avec l’humanité, sans qu’il
soit possible d’envisager une coexistence pacifique. Dans deux romans bien ultérieurs, La Mort
de la Terre et Les Navigateurs de l’infini (signés du seul J.-H. Rosny aîné, 1910 et 1925), Rosny
lie plus nettement encore ce schéma d’opposition à une forme d’incompatibilité biologique. Dans
le lointain avenir de La Mort de la Terre, les ferromagnétaux, créatures nées des déchets
métalliques, altèrent leur environnement par rayonnement magnétique, provoquant une anémie
fatale chez les êtres organiques, dont les humains. Ils propagent par leur seule présence une sorte
de contagion ontologique, qui adapte la Terre à leurs besoins. Un schéma similaire se retrouve
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sur Mars, lorsque les Navigateurs sont confrontés à des êtres qu’ils dénomment des zoomorphes,
dont la présence provoque chez eux de dangereux malaises : plus qu’une simple espèce invasive,
les zoomorphes forment un écosystème total, transformant de manière durable le sol, la
végétation et l’atmosphère au fur et à mesure que s’étend leur nouveau règne.
Il s’agira ici d’étudier comment Rosny, dans un dialogue implicite avec les théories de
Darwin, investit la thématique de l’altérité conflictuelle pour fonder une réflexion sur l’évolution
des espèces, en détaillant selon quelles conditions de possibilité pourrait naître une forme de vie
radicalement autre, à partir d’un processus de contamination progressive de l’environnement,
susceptible de faire de l’être humain une anomalie ayant fait son temps.
Panel 8.E: Moral and Literary Contaminations
Chair: Clive Thomson, University of Guelph
“Novels of Love and Tuberculosis: Marcelle Tinayre’s L’Ombre de l’amour (1910) and
Louis de Robert’s Le Roman du malade (1911)”
Margot Irvine, University of Guelph
Although her biographer rejects the idea that the affair between Marcelle Tinayre and
Louis de Robert originated with the writing of their novels, L’Ombre de l’amour (1910) and Le
Roman du malade (1911), he recognizes that Tinayre’s family held that the relationship began
with these works (Quella-Villéger, 314). It is not hard to see why: the resemblance between the
two novels is striking; each describes the last love of a tubercular patient with a young woman
who is his nurse. The novels are telling for the consistent portrait they paint of the consumptive
patient. They differ, however, in the representation of his nurse. While Javotte in Le Roman du
malade was described as « faible et facile » in a letter from Tinayre to de Robert, her own Denise
Cayrol is a model of Belle-Époque literary feminism (see Mesch 2013): she is active, thoughtful,
and provides valuable semi-professional assistance to her father, a doctor.
De Robert’s novel was the literary sensation of 1911 and won the prix Vie heureuse
(former prix Femina) that year, with the backing of his friends Pierre Loti and Marcel Proust, but
surely also with the support of Tinayre, an influential member of prix Vie heureuse jury. This
paper compares the portraits of the tubercular patient and his nurse that seem to have spread like
the “bacille de Koch” from one novel to the other. It also re-examines their composition and
reception. If Michel Forrier can write in 2011 that de Robert’s novel is “un livre à découvrir”
(Revue française d’histoire du livre, 432), Tinayre’s answer to it, with its remarkable female
protagonist, also deserves to be better known.
“From the Smutty to the Naughty: Marc de Montifaud, Jeanne Thilda, and Shades of
Literary Dirt”
Cheryl Morgan, Hamilton College
In the years immediately following 1880, which Jules Clarétie dubbed « l’année
pornographique, » a host of critics noted a newly visible erotic print and visual culture. Albert
Wolff implored the government to clean up the Paris streets, polluted by a proliferation of
pornographic images and texts. Jules Latour claimed that pornography had become the sole
preoccupation of Republican readers and fingered Marc de Montifaud (Marie-Amélie de
Chartroule 1845-1912) as a trailblazer for the popular slim volumes of illustrated racy tales
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shamelessly displayed for public viewing. Whether the series of stories Montifaud wrote
between 1880 and 1884 were “pornographic” or not mattered little given her previous
condemnations for other works that outraged public decency.
During the years when Montifaud published her bawdy tales, the daily newspaper Gil
Blas and a flurry of “Parisian” stories and novels promoted an “art polisson” that sought to
titillate without crossing the (censors’) line. Authors such as Armand Silvestre, Catulle Mendès,
and René Maizeroy were notable agents in the vogue for what Michèle Dottin-Orsini and Daniel
Grojnowski have called a “galanterie déculpabilisée,” a “monde libertin de la noce plus amusant
et jovial que vénal .” So, too, was Jeanne Thilda (Mathilde Stevens, née Kindt 1833-1886),
whose chroniques and stories in Gil Blas made her the paper’s darling. She possessed the “grand
art d’effleurer des sujets brûlants sans se laisser tomber dans le grivois” (Le Livre, 1883) and was
praised for her elegant yet spicy style. Her first collection of stories Pour se damner, illustrated
by Henriot (who illustrated a number of Montifaud’s story volumes), appeared as the 12th and
final volume of Rouveyre and Blond’s series, “Contes gaillards et nouvelles parisiennes” series
(1883). She soon followed with another collection, Péchés capiteux, in 1884.
While Rachilde stands out in 1884 for the scandal of her Monsieur Vénus , this paper
explores other shades in the spectrum of women’s literary dirt in the early Third Republic to
measure anew the distance from Montifaud’s “smutty” tales to Jeanne Thilda’s “naughty” but
nice stories and to elucidate how and why the politics and poetics of their respective tales
delighted or outraged.
“Hygiene and Morality: The Proust Family Practice”
Michael Finn, Ryerson University
In what way or ways do the moral rules and values of a family translate into the literature
of one of its members? What is the portion of acceptance, opposition or outright rebellion that
might characterize an offspring’s literature as she or he imagines and structures a fictional
world? With such questions in mind this paper will interrogate the parallels and collisions of
points of view between the home values of the family of Dr. Adrien Proust and the rather
complex moral system that Marcel Proust develops in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu.
Proust family biographers have begun to shine a light on the infidelities of Dr Proust,
whose position as official doctor assigned to the Opéra-Comique allowed him to develop
intimate friendships with female performers. Marcel’s brother Robert maintained a mistress after
his marriage and Marcel sometimes acted as a courier between the two. The sex-related activities
of these three men remained closeted, if not always from the others, at least from Madame
Proust. Marcel is reported to have said about his father’s lovers, “Maman n’a jamais rien su.”
The paper will examine some of Dr Proust’s moral and educational principles as laid out in
works such as his Traité d’hygiène and L’Hygiène du neurasthénique.
Is the duplicity necessary for the smooth functioning of the Proust family somehow
present in the structures of La Recherche? Certainly, as critics such as Levinas have pointed
out, there is a dynamic of “duplicity”, of hiddenness and revelation at work in the novel. But this
paper will conclude on a different note. It will explore how rule-making and rule-breaking are
treated in the novel. Frequently, what the reader discovers is that a violation of moral taboos –
such as, for example, the “sadism” that is part of the lesbian episode at Montjouvain – may
contain a compensation that reads as a moral redemption.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 8.F: Jeunes filles et parfums, parfums de jeunes filles : usages, savoirs,
prescriptions
Chairs: Andrea Oberhuber, Université de Montréal & Érika Wicky, Université de Haute
Bretagne - Rennes 2
“La véritable « Reine des Roses » : Césarine Birotteau et la transmission des valeurs
bourgeoises”
Jean-Alexandre Perras, University of Oxford
C’est en 1837, quelques années après l’épidémie de choléra qui a frappé la France et
suscité la croissance de l’industrie de la parfumerie, que Balzac publie son roman Grandeur et
décadence de César Birotteau, marchand parfumeur adjoint au maire du deuxième
arrondissement de Paris, chevalier de la légion d’honneur, etc. Il est significatif que ce parangon
de la vertu bourgeoise commerçante exerce le métier de parfumeur et soit par là associé à des
pratiques hygiéniques désormais synonymes de propreté, voire de probité et de décence. En
articulant l’honnêteté du commerce et le commerce de la propreté, Balzac met en évidence non
seulement l’avènement de la bourgeoisie, mais aussi ses aspirations de pureté sanitaire et de
distinction sociale.
Or, cet idéal de pureté et d’élégance est particulièrement incarné, à la même époque, par
la figure de la jeune fille, quintessence de l’idylle familiale rêvée par la bourgeoisie montante. Il
est donc également significatif que le seul enfant du couple de parfumeurs soit une jeune fille et
que le récit se déroule au moment précis où celle-ci est en âge de se marier. La présence de
Césarine apporte au foyer des Birotteau un subtil parfum de délicatesse et de bon goût, dont il
s’agit d’étudier la composition. Celle-ci répète au piano des sonates de Steinbelt et chante des
romances, elle écrit correctement la langue française, lit Racine père et fils et sait en expliquer
les beautés, elle dessine des paysages, peint des sépias ; voilà une fleur nouvelle qui n’a pas
encore quitté la tige maternelle, un ange aux grâces naissantes, une fille unique adorée, incapable
de mépriser son père ou de se moquer de son défaut d’éducation, tant elle est « vraiment jeune
fille. » C’est dans ces termes qu’est décrite la fille unique du probe parfumeur, dont elle porte le
nom ; surnommée la « Reine des Roses » comme l’enseigne du parfumeur, Césarine est la figure
métonymique des vertus attribuées à ce commerce. En-deçà de son vernis d’agréments, le
véritable savoir de la jeune fille est essentiellement commercial et matrimonial et concourt à la
reproduction des vertus sociales qu’elle incarne.
Dans le cadre de cette communication, il s’agira d’une part, de prendre la mesure de ce
savoir spécifique de la jeune fille et d’autre part de déterminer ce que les valeurs véhiculées par
le commerce de la parfumerie au cours de la première moitié du XIXe siècle peuvent nous
apprendre sur la construction de cette figure sociale.
“Du mauvais usage des parfums : Chérie contaminée par le musc et l’héliotrope”
Andrea Oberhuber, Université de Montréal & Érika Wicky, Université de Haute Bretagne
- Rennes 2
Si, dans la préface à son dernier roman, Chérie (1884), conçu comme « testament
littéraire », Édmond de Goncourt prend soin de préciser qu’il s’agit d’une « monographie de
jeune fille, observée dans le milieu des élégances de la Richesse, du Pouvoir, de la suprême
bonne compagnie », d’un « livre d’histoire » sur « l’intime féminilité », il omet le détail du savoir
que possède (et à la fois ignore) la jeune protagoniste en matière de langage des fleurs et
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d’olfaction. Avant chaque visite du secrétaire de son grand-père, Chérie parfume en effet sa
main, grâce au savon au benjoin de la bonne, afin de rendre agréable le bref instant du baisemain quotidien ; et elle voue une passion particulière aux parfums du musc et de l’héliotrope
dont les effets lui seront néfastes. La jeune fille semble pourtant avoir lu tous les manuels de
savoir-vivre et essais pédagogiques destinés au sexe féminin car elle s’applique en tout à
« plaire » et à « savoir se faire aimer » dans le but de trouver mari et d’être (enfin) heureuse
(Louise d’Alq, Essais pour l’éducation du sens moral). Elle a aussi pu lire les conseils dispensés
aux jeunes filles dont on rencontrera une synthèse, quelques années plus tard, dans Le bagage
scientifique de la jeune fille de Clarisse Juranville et Pauline Berger, qui consacre un chapitre
aux parfums (l’iris, le musc, le benjoin, la myrrhe et le patchouli, entre autres).
Se transformant de jeune fille modèle en vieille fille au fil du récit, la protagoniste
devient la démonstration de ce que l’auteur énonce comme idée au milieu du roman, à savoir que
les parfums offrent aux jeunes filles un succédané mortifère des plaisirs charnels. Nous testerions
l’hypothèse selon laquelle Édmond de Goncourt aurait lu à peu près tous les textes de son temps
sur le parfum, en particulier les traités médicaux qui mettent en garde contre les parfums produits
par l’industrie chimique (dont une des plus récentes réussites, au moment de la rédaction de
Chérie, était la synthèse de l’héliotrope) ou encore les ouvrages d’histoire qui attribuent en partie
aux parfums musqués la décadence de la société de Louis XV. Le parfum nous permettra ainsi
d’observer l’articulation, voire la contamination, non seulement entre le roman et les ouvrages
distillant des savoirs sur le parfums (traités médicaux, guides de convenances, presse féminine,
etc.), mais aussi entre le savoir livresque de la jeune fille et ses expériences physiques du parfum.
“Parfums de Décadence : Effluves Miasmatiques dans Le Journal d’une Femme de
Chambre et Le Calvaire d’Octave Mirbeau”
Johann Le Guelte, The Pennsylvania State University
“Ce n’est pas de ma faute si les âmes,
dont on arrache les voiles et qu’on montre à nu,
exhalent une si forte odeur de pourriture.”
Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (1900)
Espace grouillant de contaminations (qu’elles soient morales, sociales, politiques, ou
corporelles) auquel on oppose souvent la campagne, naturelle et purificatrice, le Paris du dixneuvième siècle fascine et repousse l’imaginaire. La saleté et la crasse qui lui sont associées
firent d’ailleurs l’objet d’un véritable rejet à travers l’établissement de discours hygiénistes dont
le but annoncé était la purification urbaine. Cependant, si beaucoup de chercheurs ont abordé ces
discours et leur influence sur la création littéraire20, peu s’en sont approchés à travers l’étude des
odeurs, la vision ayant constamment primauté d’analyse. À l’intersection de l’histoire des
mentalités, de l’histoire sociale et de l’histoire des sensibilités, mon analyse s’attachera à
dessiner l’évolution complexe de ces discours et à les mettre en relation avec les écrits d’Octave
Mirbeau. Sous l’influence d’Alain Corbin21, mon point d’ancrage sera donc olfactif. Les odeurs
suaves et putrides, le parfum et la puanteur, se rencontrent chez Mirbeau et répondent à l’essor
d’une volonté de purification qu’il m’importera de mettre au jour. Pour cela, les espaces urbains
20
Voir, par exemple: Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century
France (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989).
21
Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la Jonquille: l'Odorat et l’Imaginaire Social: XVIIIe-XIXe Siècles (Paris:
Flammarion, 1986). NCFS 2015: Contamination
November 5-7, 2015
et provinciaux, les corps bourgeois et populaires, lieux d’émanations bien distinctes, seront
centraux à mon approche et informeront mon exploration de l’imaginaire des senteurs à la Belle
Époque.
C’est donc à travers une analyse des sensibilités olfactives au sein de deux romans de
Mirbeau que cette étude s’attachera à déceler en quoi celles-ci s’ancrent (ou non) au sein d’un
discours global de l’odeur à la Belle Époque. Ainsi, romans, critiques littéraires, traités
d’hygiène, correspondances, seront mis en dialogue afin de déterminer en quoi Octave Mirbeau
respecte ou s’éloigne du discours entourant la nécessaire « désodorisation des corps et de
l’espace » (Corbin, 123) et l’évolution du seuil de tolérance olfactif à la Belle Époque.
Break 10:00 am - 10:30 am
November 5-7, 2015
Saturday 7 November
Session 9 – 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
Panel 9.A: Contaminations génériques : le roman d’anticipation scientifique
Chair: Bridget Behrmann, Princeton University
“« Une simple expérience de laboratoire » ? Fiction hybride et mélange des genres dans le
roman d’anticipation scientifique Les Secrets de monsieur Synthèse par Louis Boussenard
(1888-1889)”
Stéphanie Dord-Crouslé, CNRS
Si le dessein explicite du savant Synthèse est de reproduire en laboratoire et en accéléré
les différentes étapes ayant conduit à l'apparition de l'homme sur la terre, le lecteur se rend
rapidement compte que le projet n'est pas aussi intégralement scientifique que le riche vieillard
suédois, qui ressemble tant à Darwin, l’a d’abord prétendu. Rejouer le processus évolutif en
partant d’un terrain vierge (un îlot madréporique perdu au milieu de la mer de Corail) et de
microorganismes récupérés au fond de l’océan doit aussi lui permettre d’obtenir un homme
parfait, pur de tout vice moral ou physique, seul époux envisageable pour sa petite-fille Anna. La
contamination de l’expérience scientifique par le projet personnel et les affects de
l’expérimentateur est l’un des éléments qui expliquent l’échec de monsieur Synthèse, bien que le
roman se termine avec l’apparition soudaine et inattendue d’un enfant noir à qui la fiction
n’alloue pas d’origine bien définie…
Cette contamination intrafictionnelle est portée et complexifiée par le mélange des genres
à l’œuvre dans un roman d’anticipation ambigu censé se dérouler quelques années avant sa
parution : le roman scientifique s’y pare de merveilleux (Synthèse fait une utilisation extensive
de la suggestion et de l’auto-hypnotisme ; son ami le pundit Krishna se déplace à volonté d’un
lieu dans un autre), tandis que les dimensions très présentes propres au roman policier, au roman
d’aventures voire au drame, s’ingénient à défaire ce merveilleux et à tirer l’intrigue du côté de la
simple machination. On essayera de montrer comment ces différentes modalités de la
contamination s’articulent tant dans la fiction qu’entre les genres dans lesquels celle-ci s’inscrit.
“La contamination du fantastique et du scientifique. Le magnétisme dans les romans finde-siècle”
Emilie Pezard, ENS Lyon
La diffusion des théories du magnétisme animal, lancée par les travaux de Mesmer à la
fin du xviiie siècle, connaît un nouvel essor à la fin du siècle suivant, avec les recherches de
Charcot sur l’hypnose. « Un homme, un être a le pouvoir, effrayant et incompréhensible,
d’endormir, par la force de sa volonté, un autre être, et, pendant qu’il dort, de lui voler sa pensée
comme on volerait une bourse » (Maupassant) : ce phénomène qu’on dit avéré et qu’on cherche à
expliquer fascine le public comme les écrivains. Cette contagion de la pensée d’un homme à un
autre forme la matière principale de nombreux récits dans les années 1880 et 1890 : en 1891, le
sous-titre de La Prise du regard d’André Valdès, « roman d’hypnotisme », confirme l’existence
d’une vogue littéraire, et pourrait de fait s’appliquer aussi bien à Jean Mornas de Jules Claretie
(1885) ou Alphonsine d’Adolphe Belot (1887).
La contamination de la pensée à l’œuvre dans le phénomène hypnotique conduit à une
autre contamination, sur le plan esthétique. Extraordinaire et effrayant à la fois, le magnétisme
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est souvent comparé aux phénomènes surnaturels qui forment la matière de la littérature
fantastique ; cependant, il s’agit d’un objet de recherche scientifique, qui appelle une approche
rationnelle. Le magnétisme suscite ainsi la contamination de deux domaines a priori distincts,
voire incompatibles, le fantastique surnaturel et la rationalité scientifique. Cette ambivalence
scientifique et idéologique fait du magnétisme un cas exemplaire pour l’étude de deux
problématiques : il permet d’interroger les critères de la scientificité en vigueur à la fin du
siècle ; il offre l’opportunité d’étudier les interprétations diverses qu’on donne alors de l’inconnu
– extension de la réalité rationnelle ou écart vers le surnaturel – et les valeurs esthétiques que
celui-ci revêt.
“Merveilleux scientifique, communication sérielle et contamination des imaginaires”
Matthieu Letourneux, Université Paris Ouest
La fin du XIXe siècle voit la sérialisation des imaginaires s’organiser autour de genres
populaires de plus en plus clairement identifiés. Ce processus est lié aux transformations
culturelles et médiatiques que subit l’époque. La presse, les livraisons, les livres pour la jeunesse
diffusent ainsi ces imaginaires fictionnels selon des logiques qui ne peuvent être envisagées dans
la clôture de la fiction, mais à travers les usages des supports et dans la mixité de leurs discours
(texte et image, textes fictifs et documentaires, etc.). Les genres populaires ne peuvent être
compris indépendamment de cette contamination constante des discours. Pour le montrer, nous
voudrions prendre l’exemple du genre du merveilleux scientifique (chez Jules Verne, Paul
d’Ivoi, Léo Dex, Louis Forest et quelques autres). En effet, à travers sa façon de mettre en scène
régulièrement des dynamiques de contamination de l’espace social (peurs et violences
collectives, guerres futures, emballements médiatiques, invasions) celui-ci révèle en filigrane
l’importance de la circulation médiatique propre à la littérature sérielle de la fin du XIXe siècle
dans la constitution d’un discours social. Ces mouvements de foule fantasmatiques qu’imaginent
les récits nous renseignent autant sur la constitution des imaginaires que sur leur façon de mettre
en discours le monde moderne.
“Le prix « Jules Verne » : circulation des thèmes, dissémination des influences,
contamination des stéréotypes”
Claire Barel-Moisan, CNRS
La revue destinée à la jeunesse Lectures pour tous décerna de 1927 à 1933 un prix annuel
destiné à promouvoir, dans la lignée des Voyages extraordinaires de Jules Verne, « le roman
scientifique où l’imagination dépasse les connaissances humaines de l’heure présente, mais où
l’inspiration est guidée par une documentation sûre et un esprit averti, sinon des certitudes, du
moins des possibilités de l’invention. » De façon tout à fait explicite, les éditeurs de la revue
marquaient ainsi la dissémination de l’influence du projet vernien dans le champ de la littérature
de jeunesse du début du XXe siècle, avec des romans s’appropriant non seulement les thèmes,
mais aussi les procédés d’écriture et parfois jusqu’aux personnages de l’auteur de Vingt-mille
lieues sous les mers, comme dans le cas du prix décerné à Octave Béliard pour La Petite-fille de
Michel Strogoff (1927).
Le projet de cette communication est d’étudier la manière dont l’imaginaire vernien
typique de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle se diffuse dans l’ensemble de la société du tournant
du siècle, jusqu’aux années 1930. L’influence vernienne s’exerce ainsi à travers un modèle de
rapport au savoir, d’intégration des discours sociaux, de circulation d’objets et de machines, ainsi
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que par la contamination de stéréotypes qui s’imposent progressivement dans le champ du
« roman d’aventures scientifiques ».
Panel 9.B: Zola's Cities: Contamination and Cure
Chair: Nicholas White, University of Cambridge
“Burning Babylon: Urban Achronies in the Paris of Emile Zola and Charles Marville”
Alexandra Tranca, Trinity College Cambridge
This paper discusses spatial and temporal contamination in representations of urban ruins
in Zola's La Curée (1871) and Charles Marville's photography album Percement de l'avenue de
l'Opéra (1862). In textual and visual discourses responding to the Second Empire's urban
projects, images of half-demolished buildings and unfinished structures blur the line between
construction and destruction, muddling linear temporality. Written after the cycle of demolitions
and constructions cycle has transformed Paris into the 'Capital of the world', Zola's urban scenes
and panoramas no longer pertain to an ongoing transformation: soon-to-be eviscerated districts
or demolition sites are long gone. Saccard anticipates evisceration retrospectively, instilling a
sense of circularity and fatality in the refashioning of Paris. The fragmentary and mutating
landscape becomes fixated, first in an overarching Haussmannian/Imperial plan, and second, as
rubble from streets or buildings is reused on different working sites. Zola's retrospective
manipulation of the urban transformations' time-frame (1853-62) produces a synthesis: ruins
acquire the unity imposed in the novel through a symbolic structure bringing them together
across time. In Marville, however, the overarching project coexists with the uncertain
topography: captions point towards the constructive goal implicit in this dismembering, while the
album form holds together fragments that have lost the identity bestowed by space and time.
Construction and demolition become contaminated as fragmentary and ruinous edifices produce
temporal and spatial distortions; the whole and the ruinous appear interchangeable, with new
avenues and neighbourhoods erected on and with the rubble of demolition. Temporal and spatial
disruptions in La Curée verge on achronie, imposing a continuous, closed narrative onto a
ruinous landscape, whereas Marville rejects atemporal unity: the shattered topography privileges
discontinuity, in disjunction with the proleptic captions. Paris shelled and burning in 1870-1
would further complicate the ideas of progress and urbanization already problematized by these
discourses.
“Zola’s Wild Child: Recuperation or Contamination?”
Jennifer Yee, University of Oxford
By the last third of the nineteenth century the threat posed by the 'classes dangereuses' is
increasingly evoked in terms borrowed from the new field of physical anthropology, that is,
through the discourse of racial difference. These classes are also displaced geographically:
whereas Balzac shows us the danger lurking in the seedy Paris of the quartier du Doyenné, right
at the royal heart of the city, in Zola's L'Argent the threat surfaces in the diseased slums to the
North of Paris. This menace to the order of bourgeois life is embodied by Zola in the figure of
Saccard's illegitimate son Victor, in a neglected sub-plot of L'Argent. The child/youth Victor
represents an un-controlled threat, contributing a particularly significant element to the novel's
refusal of closure. He is described in animalistic or primitivistic terms; and yet Zola shows us a
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contamination that cannot be neatly categorized as a one-way process moving from the slum to
the centre, or from the sub-proletariat to the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, this is a tale of
degeneration moving the other way - from the bourgeoisie to the slums - and then returning to
haunt its procreator. Zola also draws on an older, more Gothic inspiration, and in particular on
Edgar Allan Poe and the beginnings of the detective tradition. Despite this clash of genres, the
Victor sub-plot does fit within the questions raised by the novel as a whole, in particular the
possible role of amoral financial speculation in driving positive social change. In fact it revisits
an old debate concerning the benefits of education and the possibility of social recuperation:
'Victor' is the urban equivalent of 'Victor de l'Aveyron', the wild boy found in 1797 whose
education was used as an experimental test of the capacity of civilisation to recuperate and
improve the 'sauvage'.
“Zola’s Lourdes, or ‘la contagion du miracle’”
Claire White, University of Cambridge
As an instance of pure illogicality, or impossibility, the miracle can be understood as the
anti-naturalist phenomenon par excellence. Zola's staging in Lourdes (1894) of the conditions in
which the miraculous emerges seeks, in one respect, to re-establish the connection between cause
and effect that such divine intervention appears to break. Indeed, Zola's pathologisation of belief
is doubly rooted in discourses of contamination: contemporaneous theories of crowd psychology
and Charcot's account of contagious suggestion. The promiscuous foule, subject to a miasmic
'contagion de folie', is figured as a breeding ground - literalised in the image of the communal
baths: the excretions of the ailing body make of these a cesspool of abjection - the real miracle,
the narrator wryly remarks, being that any patient should make it out alive... Alongside these
psychological and hygienic discourses of infection, this paper explores the iconography of the
miracle in Lourdes as another mode of contamination, tracking the cult of the image that
underpins a communal religious vision. The circulation of the icon is brought full term, I argue,
in those extended passages devoted to the exponential proliferation, or 'débordement', of
souvenir shop merchandise: from 'les milles clichés de l'imagerie dévote' to bargain-bin napkin
rings, pipes and egg-cups, emblazoned with the beaming apparition of Notre-Dame de Lourdes.
In the endlessly-reproduced kitsch object - the gaudy foil to the sacred relic -, Zola brings his
insistence on the inauthenticity of the miraculous to its parodic extreme. But in this economy of
the infinite copy, there is, Zola notes, one image missing: that of Bernadette herself. Part of the
'oubli systématique' enforced by both city and Church, how does the iconographic absence of
their founding individual frame a wider investigation into the relationship between original and
fake? And what might Zola's fascination with the bondieuserie tell us about the operations of the
miracle in the age of mass reproduction?
“‘Lourdes’ Liquifying Bodies’ (or ‘Zola Contamined by Baudelaire’)”
Susanna Lee, Georgetown University
In Zola’s 1894 novel Lourdes, biology trumps miracle. Whether as medical restorative
(cures that pass as incredible are explained as natural phenomena) or as narrative mover (organic
inevitabilities determine medical successes and failures), biological forces overshadow the power
of faith. Indeed, the narrator implies there is as much to treat in religion – “la contagion du
mystère” (144), “la contagion de folie” (290), “une contagion gagna la foule” (210) – as in
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disease - “Les vieilles plaies qu' on y trempe… n' offrent aucun risque de contagion. Je vous
assure que sur ce point, la Sainte Vierge n' a pas même besoin d' intervenir” (259).
And yet alongside this epistemological tension, this novel sets up another more subtle
dichotomy, this time between the explanatory power of medical logic and an aesthetics of the
grotesque and incurable. Much as the strengthening of antibiotics has in recent decades made
bacterial more wily and resistant, so too in Lourdes has the growing capacity of biomedical
explanations and interventions gone together with – and perhaps produced – a quasiBaudelairean poetics of the shapeless. The provocatively named Mme Dieulafay, for instance,
dissolves before one’s eyes: “Diminuée, comme fondue, elle était devenue une loque humaine,
une chose fluide et sans nom qu'on ne pouvait mettre debout, qu' on transportait avec mille soins,
de crainte de la voir fuir entre les doigts” (80). Upon her departure from Lourdes, we see her
“face morte et imbécile de momie, qui se liquéfiait” (688).
In this paper, I read these liquescent forms as soft-tissue counterparts to the bony horrors
that Baudelaire described in “Le squelette laboureur” and “Danse macabre.” I read them also as
counterpoints to the novel’s own medical framework. Zola’s suppurating and dissolving malades
bring the pliability of the body to bear on the novel’s infrastructure and encourage the
Baudelairean grotesque to rupture the clean lines of naturalism.
Panel 9.C: French Infections
Chair: Ed Kaplan, Brandeis University
“L’irrésistible attrait du virus George Sand aux États-Unis au XIXe siècle”
Catherine Masson, Wellesley College
Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Matilda Kirkland, et Sara Clarke
Lippincott, membres féminins du groupe new-yorkais Botta qui se réunissaient dans le salon
d’Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta, écrivirent toutes sur George Sand. Bien que « Lydia Maria Child
appelât George Sand sa sœur jumelle à cause de la similarité de leurs idées22 », elle écrivit aussi
que Sand avait eu « le malheur d’être éduquée en France et qu’elle décrivait cette chose malade,
la société française23 ».
Julia Ward Howe dans son livre consacré à Paris, Is Polite Society Polite ?(1885), montre
aussi son ambiguïté vis-à-vis de Sand : « Nous entendions avec horreur le nom de George Sand,
la femme diabolique […], et nous imaginions le plaisir pervers de lire ses livres24 ». En
novembre 1861, dans un article consacré à Histoire de ma Vie dans l’Atlantlic Monthly, elle
évoque ce que Sand avait représenté pour les femmes de sa génération : « N’était-elle pas pour
nous toutes, dans nos jeunes années, un nom douteux et enchanteur ? »
Je propose donc de revenir d’abord sur l’ambiguïté américaine vis-à-vis de « cette chose
malade, la société française » et ensuite sur le risque de contagion que représentait l’œuvre
sandienne pour les jeunes Américaines du XIXe siècle. Contagion suffisamment redoutée par les
22
Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy. The Transatlantic Sources of NineteenthCentury Feminism, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 79-81.
23
Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1817-1880, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press,
1982, p. 481.
24
Julia Ward Howe, Is Polite Society Polite?, Boston, Lamson, 1985, pp. 39-40.
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parents de Julia Ward Howe, puisqu’ils ne voulaient pas qu’elle lise l’œuvre de Sand ; et que,
elle aussi, plus tard, allait d’ailleurs l’interdire à ses enfants, quitte à les priver de « la noble
langue française25 ».
“La « contagion » et la « contamination » du naturalisme : un discours transatlantique”
Geneviève De Viveiros, University of Western Ontario
Après le grand succès de L’Assommoir en 1877, Émile Zola devient une véritable vedette
littéraire. La réputation d’auteur « pornographique » attribuée au nom de Zola et la valeur
littéraire contestée du naturalisme, jugé en France, comme étant de la littérature « putride »
feront du romancier une figure controversée de la scène littéraire. De fait, l’originalité de son
style descriptif et les thèmes souvent jugés tabous explorés dans ses romans, seront constamment
à l’origine d’innombrables publications critiques dans la presse de grande diffusion comme dans
les organes spécialisés dans la littérature et ce, en France, comme à l’échelle internationale. Ce
sera le cas notamment de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, au Canada, où l’œuvre de Zola est alors
bien connue des lecteurs de la presse canadienne tant francophone qu’anglophone comme en
témoignent la panoplie d’articles publiés alors sur le romancier et son esthétique littéraire dans
The Illustrated Canadian News, Le Réveil, La Revue canadienne ou L’Album des familles. Zola
et ses théories esthétiques seront alors à la source de nombreuses polémiques sur des questions
comme la famille, l’éducation et la religion. Perçues comme de la littérature dangereuse, les
œuvres de Zola seront victimes de sévères critiques et seront à l’origine d’une campagne de
censure qui cherchera à empêcher la dissémination de ce qui est alors considéré comme de la
littérature immorale. De nombreux articles publiés dans la presse mettront en garde les lecteurs
canadiens contre la contagion du naturalisme. À une époque où les publications périodiques sont
sous l’influence du clergé, l’œuvre de Zola apparaîtra comme une oeuvre subversive remettant
en cause les valeurs associées à l’identité canadienne.
En analysant les articles parus sur Zola dans la presse canadienne de la fin du XIXe
siècle, notre communication cherchera à mettre en lumière le discours entourant la diffusion du
naturalisme en Amérique du Nord, vue comme une véritable contamination de « mauvaise »
littérature.
“Contamination or Complementarity? Mallarmé and the Aesthetics of the East”
Pamela Genova, University of Oklahoma
The presence of East-Asian cultural motifs, aesthetic styles, and philosophical concerns
represents a compelling leitmotif in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed, often his work
shows the impact of artistic elements from the East, such as the preference for mobility over
stasis, the tension between the notions of crisis and resolution, an iconographical representation
of nature, and the economy of discursive suggestion. Certainly, critics have noted an Eastern
influence in Mallarmé’s poetry, as well, as with the synthesis of poetic genres, the compositional
principles of calligraphy, and the syntactical possibilities and philosophical echoes of haiku.
In Mallarmé’s essays addressing dramatic art, specifically the 1887 Crayonné au théâtre,
we also uncover the infiltration of Japanese aesthetics, from the dramatic forms of Nō and
Kabuki, to the thought systems of Zen and Buddhism, as Mallarmé interprets the stage as a
mystical locus for the ritualized expression of the human soul, a space in which music, dance,
visual images, and language create a multidimensional artistic event reminiscent of Wagner’s
25
Howe dans l’Atlantic Monthly, novembre 1861, p. 513.
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“total artwork”. Mallarmé’s writings on theatre ground his assertions in a theoretical stance in
many ways colored by Eastern aesthetics, yet at the same time he foreshadows some of the most
influential Western theatrical theory to come. Does this turn towards the East represent then a
form of corruption or contamination in the work of one of the most eminent poets of French
literary history, an ideological a move to be understood as a rejection of Western aesthetics?
Clearly, through an exploration of the metaphysical and the physical grids of the dramatic stage,
his work incorporates (or is overtaken by?) an Eastern conception of theatre as a locus for
highly-stylized gesture, as Mallarmé envisions a purified dramatic space where he hoped one day
to realize the beguiling dream of his impossibly intangible Livre.
“‘Un véritable choléra de l’âme’: the reception of Buddhism in late nineteenth-century
France”
Sam Bootle, Durham University
This paper will explore late nineteenth-century French literature’s encounter with
Buddhist thought: in particular, it will analyse how contemporary discourses pathologised
Buddhism as a disease-like force, and how French writers were fascinated by Buddhist ideas
despite - or, perhaps, because of - this vision of spiritual contamination.
Buddhist studies in Europe were pioneered by philologist Eugène Burnouf, who
translated Buddhist texts and published seminal reference works on Buddhism in the 1830s and
1840s. His interpretations were hugely influential on the reception of Buddhism by French
thinkers like Victor Cousin, although their subtleties were not always heeded. In particular, his
nuanced view of the crucial Buddhist term ‘nirvana’ was ignored, and it came to be seen as
equivalent to ‘nothingness’; Buddhism, by consequence, was seen as a nihilistic religion. This
led to polemical attacks on Buddhism, with several commentators describing it as a corrupting,
miasmatic influence on French minds or even as a kind of ‘choléra de l’âme’ (cholera, like
Buddhism, having originated in India).
However, for many writers - such as Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, Louis
Ménard, Henri Cazalis, Jules Laforgue and Henri-Frédéric Amiel - this ‘culte du néant’ (RogerPol Droit) was a source of fascination. In the post-Romantic age, its quietistic vision of
withdrawal from active engagement in the world offered a welcome challenge to the secular cult
of progress. Moreover, for some the ‘néant’ seemed to offer creative potential, superseding the
‘idéal’ of the Romantics. But for others there remained a profound concern about the threat that
Buddhist doctrine apparently posed to individual identity, and hence to the very act of writing
itself.
Panel 9.D: The Optical Contamination of Literature
Chair: Helen Abbott, University of Sheffield
“Generic Contamination: Photography and the Travel Narrative in 1839”
Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Within the two months following the demonstration of the daguerreotype in Paris on
August 19th, 1839, the Swiss seigneur Gustave Joly de Lotbinière and the French painter
Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet independently learned the process, equipped themselves with
daguerreotype apparatuses and set off separately for Greece, Egypt, and the Near East. Theirs
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were the first daguerreotypes made of these regions and nearly every history of photography
commences with a mention of them. Virtually no attention has been paid, however, to the fact
that both men composed texts to accompany the publication of some of their daguerreotypes as
engravings in what was arguably the first photographic travel album, Noel Paymal Lerebours’
Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe of 1840-1844.
A consideration of these texts and images together is revealing of the effects of generic
“contamination,” the ways in which the one nuances, and even debunks, the standard attributes
of the other. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which text and image interacted to expose
and overturn the conventions of the travel album — the romantic exaggeration and fabulation of
the writing, the endlessly repeated views of sites in the images — which make each alone an
unreliable guide to the experience it purports to present. I will also consider how, once the old
conventions were laid bare, text and image were free to do other things: through the same kind of
generic contamination and interaction, they opened up travel writing and travel imagery to a new
kind of freedom, plunging the armchair traveller into the unknown and unexpected experience of
the journey itself.
“Baudelaire’s Artificial Hell: ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’s’ Photographic Poetics”
Elissa Marder, Emory University
Although Charles Baudelaire is well known for his influential diatribe against
photography in the brief section of “Le Salon de 1859” titled “Le public moderne et la
photographie,” his relationship to photography is arguably more complex than has hitherto been
recognized. In that text, Baudelaire casts himself in the role of a doctor whose mission is to
diagnose how painting has become sick because painters have become contaminated by a
photographic way of looking at the world. Photography only becomes a problem for painting
because painting has already become too photographic: photography merely executes, confirms,
and countersigns painting’s alienation from itself and its own specific art of seeing. If, therefore,
as Baudelaire famously puts it in this essay, a vengeful god gives photography to the multitude
so that it can bask in its own trivial reflection engraved upon a metal plate, the god’s poison gift
is designed as a counter-measure, a retribution, for a sin that has already been committed. It is
precisely because the multitude has already forfeited its capacity to see and has, in a sense,
already adopted a photographic relation to the world, that it deserves to receive photography as
its appropriate punishment. By giving the multitude the sensational images it thinks it wants,
photography is like a particularly potent bad drug that destroys the very desire that it appears to
satisfy.
Significantly however, on one—and only one—occasion in his entire poetic corpus,
Baudelaire actually uses the word “photographiques” in one of his prose poems. This unique
instance of an explicit reference to photography appears in “Mademoiselle Bistouri.” This
strange, enigmatic and very violent prose poem is devoted to a marginal feminine figure (often
described as a crazy prostitute) who is fixated on doctors and collects images—including
photographic images—of them. But photography is anything but a merely contingent textual
detail in this text. Instead, it is both the very name for the illness that afflicts the main character
and the allegory for the contaminating and contaminated poetic form in which the text is written.
In this paper, by reading Baudelaire’s writings about photography together with the
explicit inscription of photography in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” I shall argue that if, for him,
photography poses a threat to art, it is not, as he perhaps wishfully argues in the final paragraph
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of the Salon article, due to the fact that it is too far removed from art, but rather that it comes too
dangerously close to something fundamental about his own relation to poetic images.
“Champfleury and New Optical Contamination”
Brett Brehm, Northwestern University
In Jules Champfleury's short story "La Légende du daguerréotype" (1863), the narrator
poses this question: "N'était-il pas dangereux d'être exposé en face d'une machine mystérieuse
qui froidement, de son grand oeil sombre, regardait l'homme assis?" Indeed the man sitting for
his portrait, the ill-fated M. Balandard, finds himself the victim of the comically inept
daguerreotypist Carcassonne, whose use of violent chemicals, in repeated failed attempts to
produce an image, ends up obliterating M. Balandard's body. As critics have noted, this story
illustrates a period anxiety, one shared by the likes of Balzac among others, that daguerreotypy
interacted with the human as a kind of contamination, that this new process of representation
could strip away layers of the human body or soul. While engaging with this interpretation, I
propose an alternate reading of the story. Often cited in the early history of relations between
literature and photography, the story, as I argue, can also be read in the context of the prehistory
of phonography. Champfleury's story ends with a ghost who haunts with his voice alone, a
singularly acoustic specter. Hence I situate the story in the context of ideas such as French
inventor Édouard-Léon Scott's "spectre sonore"(1857) and Félix Nadar's "daguerréotype
acoustique"(1856 and 1864), which both entertain the question of what mechanical sound
recording might be like in the future. Ultimately, as I contend, the chemicals that contaminate
and render M. Balandard's body invisible by the story's end at the same time render his voice
forever audible. The story thus can be read as a tale of both contamination or destruction of the
visible and a mechanical preservation of the human voice.
“Une image « parasite » de la Décadence: Les Diaboliques (1874) illustrées par Félicien
Rops”
Loïc Lerme, Indiana University, Bloomington
Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé... Voici quelques noms illustres du paysage littéraire
français du XIXe siècle dont les œuvres furent associées au travail du peintre, graveur et
illustrateur belge Félicien Rops. Si celui qui fut surnommé le « peintre-littérateur26 » se nourrit
effectivement de la matière littéraire dans l’élaboration de ses modes d’expression, il n’en
subvertit pas moins le ut pictura poesis d’Horace qui sacralisait la primauté de la lettre sur
l’image. S’érigeant paradoxalement contre la contamination de son iconographie par la
littérature, Rops rejeta foncièrement l’illustration comme terminus ad quem dans la tension qui
anime la coprésence du texte et de l’image. Cette rébellion au profit du génie artistique ouvre la
voie à une psychologisation de ce qui est seulement suggéré dans le support écrit originel.
À travers une grille de lecture psychanalytique, nous étudierons la manière par laquelle
Félicien Rops acquiert une indépendance esthétique vis-à-vis du recueil les Diaboliques (1874)
de Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly via sa représentation du corps féminin. Le vice luxurieux du « beau
sexe » apparaît comme une véritable allégorie de la mort syphilitique dans l’art de Rops. Dans ce
contexte, nous verrons comment l’exploration d’une psyché humaine déliquescente rime avec
26
Vittorio Pica, « Félicien Rops à l’étranger. Italie », La Plume 172 (1896) : 463.
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adaptation, absorption et mutabilité – à l’image d’une maladie vénérienne – face à la substance
littéraire avec laquelle l’artiste se doit de composer. Fustigé par Barbey pour avoir créé une
œuvre iconographique affranchie du texte, Rops rompt non seulement le pacte illustratif
traditionnel mais, par la conception de gravures « lisibles », infecte également selon nous l’acte
de lecture lui-même.
Panel 9.E: Fantastic Diagnoses
Chair: Stéphane Pillet, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayaguëz
“Réintroduction à la littérature fantastique: Théophile Gautier, Immanuel Kant, and
Object Oriented Ontology”
Corry Cropper, Brigham Young University
Studies of the fantastic and attempts to define the fantastic as a genre have always
presupposed a human-centered ontology. But the anthropocentric hierarchies of Enlightenment
thought, embodied by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, are precisely what the fantastic seeks to
undermine. The fantastic posits a flat ontology where humans and objects stand on equal ground,
where objects act, and where human subjects are objectified. After showing connections from
Kant to Théophile Gautier through E. T. A. Hoffmann, I argue that Gautier's fantastic
undermines a human-centered worldview while theorizing the hidden life of things. This reading
leads us to tentatively redefine the fantastic as a form “speculative realism,” as a genre that takes
the presence and perspective of objects seriously, and that embeds this object-oriented ontology
into fantastic texts in ways that trouble the reader’s subject-centered consciousness.
“The Parasite Within: Erckmann-Chatrian and Cultural Hybridity”
Warren Johnson, Arkansas State University
A recurrent topos of fantastic narrative situates the intrusion of an alien, parasitic agent,
such as a ghost or vampire, as the source of evil. Erckmann-Chatrian’s fantastic tales tend to
reinscribe the parasitic agency within the host victim, such as the moribund count Nideck in
“Hughes-le-Loup,” who is condemned to a compulsive re-enactment of the murder committed by
his ancestor. This internalization of the contaminating parasitic outside forms the underlying
structural principle of much of the writers’ non-fantastic regionalist texts as well. While
apparent binary oppositions abound in Erckmann-Chatrian—Prussian vs. French, Republican
values vs. authoritarianism, the orderly and rhythmical vs. the disruptive—the setting of their
novels and tales in the liminal space of Alsace-Lorraine resists the stability of a pure ethnic
identity. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the region has been not only subject to shifting
political boundaries, it is a cultural hybrid that, by its very immixture, can serve as a model for
the French Republic as a whole. Like the fantastic parasitic element, Germanic cultural
influences inhabit the people of the region, an internalization that problematizes, as Michel
Serres describes, the boundaries between parasite and host. At the same time as the region
struggles against Prussian control, it cannot, Erckmann-Chatrian make clear in “Daniel Roch”
and elsewhere, succumb to the allure of a hypothesized national identity based on nostalgic
attachment to traditional forms that inevitably reflect its own cultural hybridity, since the
inexorable movement of change relies on circulation and exchange, processes that always
necessitate an Other that is both external and inherent. The optimal balance for Erckmann-
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Chatrian is a tension between resistance to the invasive while allowing for an evolution that
strives toward social justice, demonstrating the necessity as well as the destructiveness of
parasitic contamination.
“Seeing Double in Jean Lorrain’s ‘La Lanterne Magique’”
Sherri Rose, Hillsdale College
Like an epidemic detailed in a fait divers or in one of Charcot’s medical case studies,
tales of sexual deviance and criminal pathology run rampant across Jean Lorrain’s short stories
of the 1890s. Lorrain’s neurotic narratives exposed the complexities of the individual’s relation
to modern life, a relation both of attraction and of repulsion towards its seediness. Writing
during what Jean-Pierre Aubrit has termed “l’âge d’or du récit bref,” Lorrain shrewdly turned to
this ‘lower’ genre as a means of leveling scathing social critiques while evading censure. The
concise structure of his narratives served to mirror the fleeting encounters that characterized
more and more the individual’s experience of an often sordid urban life.
In this paper, I show how Jean Lorrain’s short story “La Lanterne Magique” dramatizes
the unsettling effects of the cross-contamination between realist and fantastic discourses in finde-siècle scientific and artistic communities. During an intermission at the Opera house, a
physicist and the unnamed narrator quarrel over the presence of the fantastic in the modern
world. Lamenting the death of the imagination at the calculating hands of science, the narrator
bemoans: “La science moderne a tué le Fantastique […]: la dernière Fée est bel et bien enterrée
et séchée, comme un brin d’herbe rare, entre deux feuillets de M. de Balzac.” Yet, is it perhaps
the dead fairy rotting within the Balzac novel who poses the greater threat of contamination?
The physicist, himself playing the role of the magic lantern, projects images for the jaded
narrator of the ghoulish double identities of the respectable opera-goers. As the curtain rises and
cuts short the debate, the residue of those phantasmagoria, I argue, calls into question positivist
contributions to society in order to illustrate the ability of the fantastic to disrupt and destabilize
the individual’s perception of the real.
“Contamination through Containment in Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla”
Irina Markina, Princeton University
Louis Pasteur’s research demonstrated the ability of science to transform inexplicable
illnesses into curable microbes enclosed within glass flasks. In his 1874 short story Le Horla,
Guy de Maupassant explores this containment of the unknown, threatening illness within the
bounds of modern science and human reason. This paper argues that the protagonist’s attempt to
logically comprehend the Horla, an illness-causing agent, within the binding of his journal leads
only to further contamination by madness. In other words, the more he tries to hermetically seal
the unknown within a logically examinable framework, the more “hermetic” it becomes. The
protagonist seeks to explain the uncanny using the scientific method, designing experiments and
describing his observations. However, this constrictive effort to understand through writing and
naming is precisely what leads the protagonist to madness. The name itself mirrors the
protagonist’s failure to define the being, who is hors human understanding, but nevertheless
present, là. The protagonist’s trip to Mont Saint-Michel illustrates the hors/la problematic, which
is responsible for driving him to madness. The extensive description of the setting presents a
clearly delineated, compact silhouette of the mount contrasted against the limitless sky, set atop a
boundless bay and assaulted by the invisible wind. All the elements are present (là) but they are
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outside (hors) the mount and cannot be totally comprehended by the senses. The delimited and
delimitating human is thus surrounded with a boundless yet perceptible world. Any attempt to
contain this exterior within the borders of human reason is destined to produce even more
ambiguity, as did the protagonist’s effort to destroy the Horla in his hermetic bedroom. The
episode of Mont Saint-Michel is a symbolic diagram of the human relation to the uncertain and
the diary in which it is contained, although unable to scientifically classify the Horla, itself
becomes a boundless, ambiguous tale.
Panel 9.F: Somatic Thresholds: Some Ways of Looking at the Body
Chair: Constance Sherak (Yale University)
Anne-Marie Baron (Société des Amis d’Honoré de Balzac et de la Maison de Balzac), “La
pensée qui tue. Balzac précurseur du psychosomatique.”
Pour le matérialiste qu’est Balzac, la mort est inscrite en l’homme dès la formation de son
caractère et de ses passions et la pensée est le moyen le plus sûr de l’atteindre. Elle est plus un
mal qu’un bien.
La pensée est plus puissante que ne l'est le corps, elle le mange, l'absorbe et le
détruit ; la pensée est le plus violent de tous les agents de destruction, elle est le
véritable ange exterminateur de l'humanité qu'elle tue et vivifie, car elle vivifie et
tue.
Balzac devait intituler Ecce homo un roman, « terrible contrepartie de Louis Lambert »
(Lettres à Mme Hanska, t. I, p. 296). Au martyr de la pensée qu’est Louis, il aurait opposé un
crétin centenaire. C’est aussi le thème de la pensée tueuse qui était au centre d’un texte, publié le
9 juin 1836 dans La Chronique de Paris, qui relatait sous ce même titre une conversation de
l’auteur avec un vieux médecin tourangeau ami de son père. Il est réutilisé dans Les Martyrs
ignorés, ébauche dialoguée qui reprend les exemples et les théories du médecin sur la nature et
les effets de la pensée
La longévité surnaturelle est donc soit un mythe comme pour le Comte de Saint-Germain,
soit une hypothèse de travail, mais rarement une réalité. Le père de Balzac, obsédé par l’objectif
de devenir centenaire, en est la preuve. Et l’ami de son père à qui il rend visite, ce médecin
« nonagénaire décrépit, desséché », en est la triste démonstration. Il ne sait plus que converser
avec les morts, car il a compris « la nature vénéneuse de la pensée ».
Walid Romani (Université du Québec à Montréal), “Stéréotypies subversives du corps chez
Maupassant”
Le Code Napoléon a sans conteste renforcé le pouvoir de la médecine et de l’État sur
l’individu en s’emparant de son corps, dès sa naissance, par le biais de son nom et de son identité
sexuelle. Le nom propre intervient pour brandir la force de la Loi, tout d’abord celle du père puis
celle de l’État. C’est à ce niveau que le langage agit pour configurer l’individu, comme le
soulignent Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) et Michel Foucault (Histoire de la sexualité,
1976). Dans La Volonté de savoir, ce dernier montre comment la bourgeoisie du dix-neuvième
siècle considère que la sexualité doit être recensée jusque dans ses moindres détails pour être
contrôlée. Dans ce contexte, le féminin est dépeint par la médecine comme une pâle copie du
masculin, laquelle doit être corrigée (Patrick Wald Lasowski, Syphilis, 1982). Ainsi, la
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psychiatrisation des rapports pervers et l’hystérisation du corps de la femme s’affirment comme
des moyens de contrôle. Cependant, les rapports de pouvoir n’existent que s’ils offrent des points
de résistance, des lieux de rencontre, des saillies pour une prise, des possibilités de renversement,
car, pour se maintenir, le pouvoir doit accorder une certaine liberté au corps.
Cette subversion se manifeste dans l’écriture de plusieurs auteurs du dix-neuvième siècle dont
Baudelaire qui, dans sa critique de Madame Bovary, écrit:
L'hystérie! pourquoi ce mystère physiologique ne ferait-il pas le fond et le tuf
d'une œuvre littéraire, ce mystère que l'Académie de médecine n'a pas encore
résolu, et qui, s'exprimant dans les femmes par la sensation d'une boule
ascendante et asphyxiante [--…] se traduit chez les hommes nerveux par toutes les
impuissances et aussi par l'aptitude à tous les excès27.
L’homme «nerveux» se confond avec la femme «hystérique», un portrait du masculin
qu’on trouve de façon récurrente chez Musset, Rachilde, Colette, Proust, etc. Le «genre» n’étant
qu’une «répétition stylisée» (Butler, 1990), les auteurs réalistes confortent le lecteur dans ses
automatismes par l’intermédiaire de stéréotypes et d’enthymèmes et lui procurent un assemblage
narratif dont la cohérence n’est jamais vraiment mise en doute. Cette représentation littéraire du
jeune homme au dix-neuvième siècle fait écho à une conception de l’identité qui insiste sur le
caractère ambigu de celle-ci. Chez Balzac et Maupassant, par exemple, les pronoms et les
substantifs employés dans Sarrasine (1830) et dans Rose (1875) ne renvoient à aucun «genre»,
mais simplement à un nom propre programmatique dont l’assonance trouble l’identité sexuelle
du personnage principal. Cet ensemble produit un effet de brouillage par lequel l’écriture sépare
le langage du corps, laissant un vide, un espace de liberté qui montre, comme le souligne
Barthes, que «toute subversion […] commence par le Nom propre» (S/Z, 1970). C’est à partir de
cette conception que la présente communication se propose d’étudier l’ambiguïté dans la
représentation du jeune homme dans À la feuille de rose, maison turque (1875), Rose (1884), et
Bel-Ami (1885).
Ana Oancea (Ohio Wesleyan University), “Experimentum in corpore vili: Literature and
Human Experimentation”
The expression long used in French medicine to refer to human experimentation or
dissection, “experimentum in corpore vili,” carries an explicit value judgement on the subjects:
they possess vile bodies. In practice, they are found to be of little importance due to their origin,
being marginal figures such as criminals, prostitutes and the indigent. In 19th century French
literature, the same characters populate naturalist fiction. In Zola’s formulation, moreover, these
texts rely on medicine for their analytical perspective. Notably, this is stressed in Le Roman
Experimental (1880), where Zola also models the author on Claude Bernard, while in the preface
to Thérèse Raquin (1868) he portrays writing as equivalent to “le travail analytique que font les
chirurgiens sur les cadavres.”
This paper places Zola’s novel in the context of 19th century reflection on the purpose and
ethics of human experimentation. The naturalist’s allusion to medicine is meant positively and is
limited in scope to writerly practice, but it implies a certain contamination of life by death.
Inspection of the vile later proves fundamental to the novel’s analysis of temperament as a
medical experiment. J.P. Bongrand’s De l’experimentation sur l’homme, sa valeur scientifique et
27
Baudelaire, Charles (1968 [1858]),« Madame Bovary, la tentation de saint Antoine», Baudelaire: Oeuvres
complétes, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, p. 452.
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sa legitimité (1905), acknowledged as the first text to propose norms for human experimentation,
reflects on the same issues. Read with Thérèse Raquin, Bongrand’s exploration of the perceived
and demonstrated scientific value of human experiments, their legality, and morality offers a
productive opportunity to study the intersections of medicine and literature in the 19th century. In
both domains, the construction of the experimental subject attests to an unresolved tension
between its vile nature and its being uniquely suited to provide insight into the human condition.
Lunch 12:15 pm - 1:45 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Saturday 7 November
Session 10 – 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
Panel 10.A: ‘Contagion intellectuelle’: Criminality, the Press and the Invasion of
Littérature industrielle
Chair & Respondent: Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Columbia University
“The querelle de la langue criminelle: Argot and the Polemics of the Serial Novel”
Eliza Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara
The popularity of the roman-feuilleton in France starting in the late 1830s not only
supported growing newspaper subscriptions but also inspired controversy surrounding both the
format and content of these novels. Compared to authors of the eighteenth century and earlier,
post-Revolution novelists were more likely to profit from literary topics deemed "seedy". They
inserted characters from criminal backgrounds (which were often conflated with the working
classes) and, in order to make their novels seem more realistic and to maintain readers' curiosity,
authors such as Eugène Sue and Honoré de Balzac attempted to imitate the criminal argot used
by real-life deviants. In the 1840s the unsavory subject matter coupled with the linguistic
portrayal of criminal types launched a public debate amongst literary critics and politicians alike,
such as Alfred Nettement, baron Chapuys-Montlaville and Louis Desnoyers. The arguments for
and against the use of argot in serial novels introduced issues dealing with personal and national
morality. How could the translation of an oral language into a written one render argot
synonymous with a certain class of people and thus, reflect a certain level of moral integrity? In
what ways did the mass production of literature catalyze the circulation of bourgeois fears and
reinforce stereotypes regarding argot and the argot speaker? Focusing on the arguments that
surfaced in the public domain, I argue that writers and critics alike made argot indexical of the
criminal classes and of a dying morality that threatened the strength and power of France.
“Viralités: Le feuilleton-roman ou la dissémination des bas-fonds”
Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dès la fin des années 1830, l’industrialisation, la démocratisation et la médiatisation de la
littérature ont suscité de vifs débats entre les tenants d’une littérature réservée aux élites lettrées
et celle qui, publiée dans le bas de page des quotidiens, se diffuse non plus par le livre (onéreux
et accessible aux seules classes privilégiées) et la librairie, mais par le biais du roman-feuilleton
et des journaux. Dans les années 1840, la publication des Mystères de Paris d’Eugène Sue, dans
le respectable rez-de-chaussée du conservateur Journal des Débats, provoque un “scandale
esthétique et moral,” selon la juste formulation de Judith Lyon-Caen. La diffusion et la réception
massive du best-seller entraînent alors des réactions critiques passionnées sur la désacralisation,
voire la dégradation, de la littérature et la démoralisation des masses. L’affirmation de SainteBeuve fera ainsi mouche et sera reprise par d’autres critiques d’horizons politiques divers : “De
nos jours le bas fond remonte sans cesse, et devient vite le niveau commun, le reste s’écroulant
ou s’abaissant” (Sainte-Beuve). Les critiques et les défenses du roman-feuilleton mettent en
place les lignes de force d’un débat annonçant celui de nos sociétés hypermédiatisées où les
barrières entre privé et public sont de plus en plus étanches et les normes morales traditionnelles
sont en perpétuelle recomposition. Cette communication portera ainsi sur l’imaginaire de la
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pollution morale qu’engendre une représentation par le bas et par les nouveaux médias, lesquels
orchestrent la « viralité » du feuilleton et la contamination fantasmée de l’espace public.
“Contagious Criminality? Reporters Without Borders and the Sensationalist Fait Divers in
the Fin-de-siècle Press”
Kathryne Adair-Corbin, Haverford College
As the private secretary of journalist and writer Jules Vallès, Séverine quickly absorbed
through first-hand experience Vallès’s innovative reportage based on the “chose vue,” and the
role of empathy, emotion, and sensualism for the journalist reporting on difficult topics. The
rapid modernization of the capital city and the daily press, and the development of a mass press
with the creation of popular dailies such as Le Petit Journal (launched in 1863) had ushered in a
more unified protocol for the reportage, which sent journalists out into the streets to gather urban
news items of interest for a growing daily news readership. In this paper Adair-Corbin examines
two criminal affairs of the 1890s in which Séverine confesses that she actively participated in the
escapes of two accused murderers. Rather than conceal her actions, the reporteresse instead
flaunted her “acte de reportage” as one of humanitarian value and social (or poetic) justice. The
Padlewski and Gouffé Affairs earned her much publicity and increased readership, but also much
criticism for having acted above the law, as she first used the accused to create a sensationalized
news story and then published what had been done, thereby endangering the accused. This mix
of the “chose vue” and the “chose dite,” when the reporter initiates the events and reports on the
results, leads to what Marc Martin calls a “confusion of roles”: “Une aventure rocambolesque
qui mène le journaliste au-delà des frontières, une grande affaire criminelle mêlée aux questions
internationales, sans omettre ce qui pose toujours question dans un reportage, car un reportage
n’est jamais qu’un témoignage: l’assaisonnement mêlé au vrai” (Martin 28). What was the
journalist’s intention in justifying these stunts as “actes de reportage”? Were these “actes,” as
she claimed, to correct social evils or purely for the sake of publicity and sensation? By her
“confusion des rôles,” Séverine herself transgressed the traditional role held by most nineteenthcentury women journalists and instead inserted herself squarely into the public eye, a move that
ultimately affected the evolution of crime reporting.
Panel 10.B: Doing Things With Vampires
Chair: Céline Brossillon, Ursinus College
“A Nineteenth-Century Plague: Vampirism”
Maxime Foerster, Southern Methodist University
In the chapter devoted to the concept of “becoming animal” in Mille Plateaux, Deleuze
and Guattari specify that while humans perpetuate their species by sexual reproduction, vampires
reproduce their own species by contamination.
French nineteenth century literature can be seen as a catalogue of such contaminations since
cases of vampirism have inspired authors such as Gautier, Dumas, Mérimée, Baudelaire,
Maupassant, and Verne.
In his Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire, who was appalled by the success of Dom
Calmet’s treatise on vampires, wrote an entry on vampires in which he can only justify the
existence of vampires as the unfortunate consequence of ignorance and superstition among the
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masses. If it is not serious to believe in vampires in the age of the enlightenment, then one may
wonder why vampires go on to contaminate the imaginations of so many writers in the next
century.
In this paper I will explore this question by interpreting vampirism from a metaphorical
point of view and by distinguishing three kinds of metaphor. In Gautier’s tale, La Morte
amoureuse, Romuald’s contamination by Clarimonde can be read as a critical update of the book
of Job; in Baudelaire’s poem, “Les Métamorphoses du vampire,” vampirism is used to describe
love as the experience of corruption; and in Maupassant’s novella Le Horla, vampirism becomes
a way of probing the dialectics between reason and madness. These three variations explain
partly why, in spite of Voltaire’s sarcasm, vampirism became a literary plague in French
nineteenth century literature.
“Contamination and Purity in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse: Tracing the Contagious
Vampire Myth to the femme fatale”
Anne Linton, San Francisco State University
Although the first nineteenth-century literary vampires were men, by the end of the
century, vampirism in France had become synonymous with the femme fatale, perhaps most
iconically associated with “Musidora” and her slinky black leotard in the early twentieth-century
serial Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade. This paper investigates the first French lady vamp,
Clarimonde, in Théophile Gautier’s 1836 masterpiece, La Morte Amoureuse. Critics have often
analyzed Clarimonde either as one of Gautier’s inaccessible women in relation to his aesthetic
beliefs, or to the tale’s influence on the increasingly popular fantastic genre, but this paper
instead argues that Gautier’s text serves a foundational role in the creation of the vampire myth
in France—one that offers insight into the theme’s enduring appeal throughout the century, long
before the fear of contagion would become inextricably bound up with vampirism. If Clarimonde
is one of the earliest female vampires, she is also a most unusual femme fatale, for in Gautier’s
tale it is the vampire’s very love that prevents the living dead from inflicting death on the living.
Neither is female sexuality cast as purely demonic, as will be the case for those fin-de-siècle
femmes fatales like Zola’s Nana. Instead, in Gautier’s early rendition, Clarimonde’s radiant love
scandalously eclipses that of Christ Himself, and Sérapion, the supposed moral compass of the
text is compared to Satan in the final scene. Clarimonde’s power spreads even after her death
both within the tale, and in literature for decades to come, allowing us to move past readings that
have tended to equate her demise with the inevitable punishment of female sexuality in
nineteenth-century France. Clarimonde invites us to rethink the figure of the femme fatale since
her love is generative in aesthetic if not religious terms whereas female sexuality will become
purely demonic in many fin-de-siècle representations.
“Of Vampires and Pale Ladies – Barbey d’Aurevilly, Une histoire sans nom ; A. Dumas,
Histoire de la dame pale ; and Gautier, La Morte amoureuse”
Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch, Angelo State University
In the mid-1960s, the physician Jean Bernard sought to entertain himself on a boring train
ride by reading Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1882 text Une histoire sans nom, a text mostly classified as
a novel, but sometimes also as a very long novella. Jean Bernard, however, read this text as a
medical case study that portrayed one of the protagonists, Lasthénie de Ferjol, afflicted by a
behavioral disorder, which Bernard later on labeled the Lasthénie de Ferjol syndrome. To this
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day, the syndrome is considered a clinical anomaly that does not fit into any nosographic
framework. The patient suffers anemia from voluntarily induced hemorrhages. It is a disease
that afflicts primarily young women close to the medical profession and/or in religious orders.
In her essay “L’Inter-diction dans Une histoire sans nom, “ Claudie Bernard has pointed to the
enigmatic nature of the title of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s text. Despite the fact that the title says Une
histoire sans nom, the story does have a name, namely Une histoire sans nom, describing
distinctly, as Bernard has underscored, the quality of both the narrative act/genre and the content
of the narration. “Histoire” in this title can refer to two things: either to the act of narrating, or to
the narrated world. That the narration does not lend itself to a clear classification, that it is not
supposed to lend itself to a clear classification, can be deduced from the epigraph “ Ni
diabolique, ni céleste ….mais sans nom.” Claudie Bernard sees this as an invitation to read
between, not only the lines, but also between what is said and what remains unsaid, the reader is
thus invited to name the unnamable, although ultimately, the reader’s labeling will remain but an
approximation.
The physician Jean Bernard names the unnamable by identifying the story as a medical
case study, and its content as the story of a traumatized female adolescent afflicted by a
psychological disorder; I would like to read this text as a vampire story written in the tradition of
earlier French nineteenth-century vampire stories, whose authors, just like Barbey d’Aurevilly,
had to come to terms with the changes brought on by the French Revolution. I will be referring
to two texts in particular: the first one is Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse,” a novella
published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836. The second story is Alexandre Dumas’s Histoire de
la dame pale, which covers the last four chapters of Les Mille et un fantômes first published in
1849.
“Contaminated Dreams: Baudelaire Vampirizes Racine”
Roderick Cooke, Florida Atlantic University
In a 1905 article, Rémy de Gourmont suggested that Baudelaire's poem 'Les
Métamorphoses du Vampire' is a rewriting of the famous 'Songe d'Athalie' from Act II, Scene V
of Racine's last tragedy. In an incisive découpage, the critic illustrated the texts’ shared tripartite
narrative structure and oneiric nature, along with the turn anchored by the character/poet's desire
to embrace the apparition. Yet Gourmont's short piece downplays the significance of this
discovery, declaring that "il suffit d'avoir conté cette anecdote littéraire. Ce n'est qu'une
curiosité."
In contrast, this paper will build on Gourmont's insight by performing a parallel reading
of Baudelaire and Racine's texts. It will emerge from this that Baudelaire profoundly modifies
the meaning of Racine's original on the axes of gender, theology, agency, and the subjectposition of the reader or spectator. The poet plays a triple game in 'Les Métamorphoses du
Vampire,' operating not only vertical references to Athalie but also horizontal ones to other
poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, together with the use of prosodic operations specific to the
poem.
I will situate the text's meaning in the synthesis of these three operations, arguing that
Baudelaire splits the gory fate met by Jezebel in the 'Songe d'Athalie' into two different (wet and
dry) forms taken by his vampire and explaining this split. A further, crucial difference lies in the
respective discourses of the two apparitions, Racine's Jezebel and Baudelaire's vampire. Where
the former stresses her kinship to Athalie and their equal powerlessness before divine wrath, the
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vampire boasts of her command over both man and the divine. By these means, Baudelaire
unravels Racine's religious didacticism, creating a depiction of transgressive, voracious evil that
connects 'Les Métamorphoses du Vampire' to the wider thematics of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Panel 10.C: Les charognes littéraires
Chair: Gisèle Séginger, Université Paris-Est
“Salammbô et la logique du vivant”
Gisèle Séginger, Université Paris-Est
Cadavres broyés par les éléphants, déchiquetés par les lions, décharnés par la faim et la
soif, décomposés par la maladie, les corps représentés dans Salammbô permettent à Flaubert de
mettre en scène ce passage de la vie à la mort, de l’organique à l’inorganique qui le fascine
depuis ses années de jeunesse, probablement parce qu’il a lu très tôt non seulement Sade mais
aussi Bichat et Lamarck, peut-être grâce à l’enseignement de Félix Pouchet (fondateur du
Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Rouen et défenseur de l’hétérogénie contre Pasteur). Flaubert a
consolidé sa culture scientifique dans les années 1850, tout en réfléchissant sur une conception
naturaliste du monde et de l’histoire à la fois et paradoxalement cyclique et transformiste. La
représentation des corps en décomposition dans Salammbô mobilise des savoirs physiologiques,
médicaux mais aussi une réflexion philosophique qui remonte parfois à l’antiquité, à Lucrèce, et
à Héraclite (cité dans le manuscrit) qui suggère une pensée générale des oppositions et du
dynamisme vie/mort.
Il s’agira dans cette communication de mettre au jour le processus de condensation et de
symbolisation interdisciplinaires et inter-épistémiques (du matérialisme antique au
transformisme moderne) qui conjoint science, philosophie et mythologie et de montrer que les
charognes de Salammbô ne sont pas de simples corps morts, mais engagent en fait par le biais
d’une représentation de la mort une pensée générale du vivant (qui a un impact sur les
représentations sociales et historiques du roman) ainsi qu’une esthétique dont la « force » (terme
flaubertien et vitaliste) est l’une des principales valeurs.
“La « contagion » par la « mouche d’or ». Les fonctions métaphoriques de la mort dans
Nana de Zola”
Thomas Klinkert, Université de Fribourg
Nana s’achève sur une célèbre scène qui met en parallèle la mort de l’héroïne et le début
de la fin du Second Empire, marquée par les cris d’une foule parisienne enragée saluant la
déclaration de guerre contre la Prusse en 1870. Cette mise en parallèle de la mort de Nana causée
par la petite vérole, maladie contagieuse, et d’un événement politique caractérisé par la
contagion d’un délire menant une collectivité vers sa destruction consentie, implique que la mort
de l’héroïne transcende le niveau purement physiologique. On cherchera à montrer que dans le
roman de Zola cette fonctionnalisation métaphorique de la mort est préparée de longue halène. Il
convient notamment de penser à un article de journal intitulé « La mouche d’or », dans lequel
l’histoire de Nana est comparée à celle d’une mouche « qui prenait la mort sur les charognes
tolérées le long des chemins, et qui, bourdonnante, dansante, jetant un éclat de pierreries,
empoisonnait les hommes rien qu’à se poser sur eux ». Cette analyse des métaphores employées
November 5-7, 2015
par Zola afin de représenter la mort tiendra compte de l’importance croissante des discours
scientifiques dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle.
“Le dessous du marbre : la chair des Parnassiens et sa dissolution de Baudelaire à
Rimbaud et Laforgue”
Henning Hufnagel, Université de Fribourg
La poésie des Parnassiens abonde en corps –beaux corps, corps de marbre ou de chair.
Toutefois marbre et chair ne sont pas des contraires. Souvent la chair parnassienne est, pour ainsi
dire, de marbre : monumentale, impérissable, éternisée par le mythe, l’art et la poésie. Mais
l’effort de pérennisation présuppose la présence d’une matière périssable. Toute la « gloire » –
proclamée par le titre Trophées – de Heredia consiste notamment dans le fait de sauver un objet
de l’oubli, de la décomposition. Souvent, les poésies parnassiennes présentent une suspension
entre le vivant et l’inerte : la chair « palpite » encore sous le marbre. C’est sur cette matière
périssable « cachée » que Baudelaire, Rimbaud et Laforgue mettent le doigt quand ils affrontent
les Parnassiens, soit sur un mode parodique, soit sur un mode tragique. Ils tirent, pour ainsi dire,
la chair de dessous le marbre pour exposer le corps maladif, en dissolution. La communication
abordera cette problématique, à partir d’une esquisse de l’esthétique du corps parnassien, dans
les poésies « La Charogne », « Vénus anadyomène » et « L’Oubli », en tenant particulièrement
compte de l’influence des discours scientifiques contemporains sur la mort.
Dans un deuxième temps, on étudiera les implications métaphoriques dans un contexte
poétologique. Si les statues se dressent contre la désintégration biologique, les Parnassiens
pensent par ailleurs les genres et formes poétiques eux-mêmes d’une façon « organique ». Ils se
rattachent à une tradition d’esthétique philosophique antérieure au XIXe siècle qui conçoit
l’œuvre d’art comme un tout organique, tradition, qui sera mise en cause au XXe siècle et avant
cela par les poètes de Baudelaire à Laforgue, grâce aux genres hybrides et des vers irréguliers. La
« charogne littéraire » est peut-être, en dernière analyse, la forme poétique même.
“Les charognes esthétiques de Lautréamont”
Frank Jäger, Université de Fribourg
Depuis que Victor Hugo a reconnu, dans la Préface de Cromwell, la valeur esthétique du
laid et du grotesque, beaucoup d’écrivains du XIXe siècle ont suivi, d'une façon ou d'une autre,
cette voie. C'est à partir de ces fondements du romantisme qu'une esthétique du morbide se
développe dans la littérature, surtout dans l'œuvre de « poètes maudits », comme Baudelaire,
Rimbaud et Verlaine. Si de telles réflexions poétologiques et artistiques constituent le premier
pilier central des « charognes littéraires », c’est l'essor des sciences du vivant qui forme le
second. La connaissance scientifique de plus en plus approfondie de l’anatomie et de la biologie
a contribué à consolider une telle esthétique et a nourri l'imagination des écrivains. L'œuvre de
Lautréamont en donne un exemple frappant. Dans Les chants de Maldoror, le protagoniste,
homme-animal hybride, plonge dans les gouffres de la vie. Il rencontre des parasites infiniment
petits, il tombe sur des charognards et réels (des vautours) et fictifs (des vampires), il fait
l'expérience de la désintégration du corps, et il décrit tout cela avec un regard médicoscientifique. Lautréamont explore un espace poétique intermédiaire entre la plénitude vitale
débordante d'un côté et, de l'autre, l'expérience d'une volonté destructrice, expérience due à la
prise de conscience de la synergie des forces vitales naturelles.
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Cette communication vise à éclairer l’esthétisation du morbide, la description d'une
nature destructrice et ses implications morales. C’est le décalage entre instinct et intellect, entre
force vitale et réflexion poétique qui se manifeste dans le texte de Lautréamont et qui nécessite
qu’on analyse l'exploitation et la transformation esthétiques des connaissances scientifiques
répandues au XIXe siècle, notamment celles qui sont liées aux sciences du vivant comme la
vivisection ou l’anatomie.
Panel 10.D: Frontiers of the Secular Republic
Chair: Philip Nord, Princeton University
“Expéditions scolaires et diplomatiques au XIXème siècle : la France comme utopie et
dystopie dans le récit francophone”
Ramla Bedoui, Yale University
Lorsqu’au XIXème siècle, les pays arabo-musulmans sont confrontés à un nouvel ordre
de domination européenne technologique, économique et militaire, ils se tournent vers Paris, la
« capitale du XIXème siècle », pour comprendre puis combler ce retard. Les politiciens, les
professeurs et les étudiants tunisiens et égyptiens les plus brillants sont choisis pour des
expéditions d’études de plusieurs années qui ont donné naissance à des œuvres telles que Le Plus
sûr moyen de connaître l’état des nations de Kheireddine Pacha et L’Or de Paris de Tahtawi.
Des écrits, parfois rédigés en français, conçus par exemple pendant la Révolution de 1830 ou
durant le Second Empire baudelairien ont largement contribué à un mouvement de réformes
appelé « Ennahdha » ou les « Lumières arabes ». Pour ce dernier, la France fait simultanément
figure d’utopie et de dystopie : un idéal politique, économique, éducatif et sanitaire, mais aussi
l’incarnation d’un pouvoir qui capitalisera sur la domination européenne. En conséquence, bien
qu’elle échoue à détourner le projet colonial, la modernisation initiée dans les pays arabomusulmans adaptera les réformes survenues en France depuis 1789 à la lutte locale contre la
corruption endémique, à la justice sociale et à l’épuration des institutions de l’emprise religieuse,
ce qui aboutit à une laïcisation partielle de l’Etat et l’éducation. Les récits des voyageurs
susmentionnés verront aussi un grand succès dans la postérité et serviront même de modèle pour
un lieu commun majeur de la littérature francophone : le séjour de jeunesse en France, un rite de
passage formateur où Paris devient autant l’instrument pour mesurer les retards du pays d’origine
que la voix de la dérive, de l’exil et du déplacement. L’auteur doit alors faire face à une utopie
dystopique qui prend la forme du double héritage intellectuel français : celui qui a aussi bien
engendré l’humanisme et les Lumières que le racisme et la colonisation.
“No Place Like Home: Military Life & Social Contamination in French Antimilitarist
Novels, 1887-1890”
Michael Clinton, Gwynedd Mercy University
This paper analyzes three novels controversial for their critical portrayal of military life
that appeared between 1887 and 1890: Le Cavalier Miserey (1887), by Abel Hermant; Les SousOffs (1889), by Lucien Descaves; and Biribi (1890), by Georges Darien. While the novels have
received some attention by scholars who see them as examples of shifting attitudes about the
relationship between the army and the Republic in the years immediately preceding the Dreyfus
Affair, few have considered in detail the stories they told and how these connected themes about
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military service, family and social life, and republican values. Delving into the novels reveals
portraits of barracks life as an artificial society where attachments are temporary and rupture in
personal relationships the norm, where soldiers lack compelling reasons for developing any
sense of duty, responsibility, or respect for the institutions and morals that a healthy republican
society demanded. Leaving their family homes behind them, conscripts entered a world of moral
contamination and social alienation, where they find themselves at the mercy of an
unsympathetic and unjust system. Reformers had argued since the 1870s that there was no place
like home to bridge the gap between military spirit and republican culture; as more of the Third
Republic’s male citizens experienced military life directly by the late 1880s, these novelists—
who themselves had completed their own military service—compelled outraged and sympathetic
readers alike to consider the barracks as no place like home.
“‘La Révolution Morale’: Dreyfus and Laïcité”
Lisa Bromberg, University of Pennsylvania
When Alfred Dreyfus accepted amnesty in 1899 without clearing his name, many
supporters were outraged. Zola summed up, “Dreyfus est libre, mais notre France reste malade.”
This illness was a moral one, and healing could only come from the enactment of truth, justice,
and, importantly, laïcisation.28 For Dreyfusards, the army, politics, and clergy were
contaminating the Republic, whose otherwise “pure” state was characterized by the absolutist
notions of equality and freedom. An innocent martyr, Dreyfus became a symbol of this new
state, and for some his death was preferable to France’s loss at the Rennes trial. For these
Dreyfusards, Dreyfus was a disposable limb of the body politic, like the medieval crusaders who
died for king and patrie.29 In this context, secularism became religiously inflected as its
advocates relied on the Christian notion of martyrdom to sustain their mission.
Indeed, many today would describe French laïcité as a “sacred” national value in which the
“Republic” simply replaces the “Church.” While France’s law separating church and state is
considered one outcome of the Dreyfus Affair, few scholars acknowledge the role that Dreyfus
played in laying the groundwork for public approval of laïcisation. Although in writing from
exile he referred repeatedly to his “martyrdom,” he did not consider death an option. Rather, I
argue that his nationalism secularized the ideas of martyrdom and the body politic to redefine
French Republicanism. His secularism supported a hybrid French-Jewish identity that was at
once political, patriotic, and religious. What was at stake was not the presence or absence of
religion in the public sphere, but the conception of the nation as a unified body of which each
citizen was both limb and head, mortal body, and immortal “Diginitas.” This reading paves the
way for a reappraisal of French nationhood in the age of laïcité.
“Contaminating Narratives: Grotesque Messianism in Marcel Schwob’s Plagues”
Gayle Zachmann, University of Florida
Describing post–Sedan (and post-Commune) France, in The Culture of Defeat, Wolfgang
Schivelbusch notes that while the fear of being overrun or destroyed can be seen in images of
desertification and ruins, in vanquished nations cultural production aspires to revanche. A term
most often associated with revenge for Alsace-Lorraine, Schivelbusch insists that post-1870s
28
Quote and explanation drawn from Joseph Reinach, Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus. Paris: Laffont, 2006, 898-89.
My theoretical lens for this paper is inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval
Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
29
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French culture invokes a more generalized national and cultural revanche: an honorable and even
messianic future, with defeat no longer narrated as a catastrophe, but as a liberation with a
missionary aspect: the responsibility to share for the good and regeneration of humanity.
Although I was at first a bit suspicious of the master narrative in The Culture of Defeat, Marcel
Schwob’s corpus seems, at the very least, to be in dialogue with the models Schivelbusch would
propose. Indeed, it would even seem to parody them. Looking back from this perspective, ruins
and freewheeling golden ages, utopias, and nightmarish dystopias distinctively mark Schwob’s
work, and I would add, so does contamination.
Figuring endemic and epidemic maladies, from leprosy and the plague, to cholera and
even mass suicide, Marcel Schwob’s narratives mobilize apocalyptic visions of disfigurement
and individual and social terror. With “Le Roi au masque d’or,” where the king’s mask conceals
the marks of his infected face, to the fetid bodies littering the streets of “La Peste,” and the
looming threat of cholera that links the real and the fantastic in “Le train 081,” corruption of
physical and social bodies menacingly taint the narratives with fin de siècle visions. And yet,
Schwob’s foul play with the literary and socially “bienséant,” does not only indicate artistic
dissidence. Indeed, post-revolutionary discourses of aesthetic and social transformation might
help us to read his tales as grotesque adventures in cultural activism that take on issues as fraught
as xenophobia, religious fanaticism, and racism.
Panel 10.E: Ecologies of Contamination : Money, Poison, and Celebrity
Chair: Jena Whitaker, Johns Hopkins University
“La Corruption comme pratique néfaste contagieuse dans la société française du XIXe
siècle, à travers La Curée d’Emile Zola”
Wabiy Salawu, University of Kent
Si le devenir d’une société dépend de l’aspiration globale du peuple et de la vision des
tenants du pouvoir, elle est également symptomatique de l’orientation que chaque individu donne
à la vie dans son environnement. Ainsi, la corruption au XIXe siècle se manifeste en France
comme un virus contagieux qui s’impose désormais comme une vision culturelle.
Dans cet article, il s’agira de montrer à travers La Curée d’Emile Zola, comment les
nouveaux tenants du pouvoir ont fait de la corruption la pratique la mieux partagée pour qu’elle
devienne le principal fondement du fonctionnement de la société française. Ce roman, peinture
qui intègre à la fois l’injustice, la duperie et la gabegie, dévoile les stratégies des milieux
financiers du Second Empire, baignant dans une corruption sans précédent, en mettant en relief
les nouveaux affairistes de cette société. Alors, cette étude critique du roman de Zola, qui se fera
à l’aide de L’Evénement Interdiscursif de Jürgen Link et Ursula Link-Heer qui privilégie le
système synchrone des symboles collectifs, permettra de dévoiler les manifestations contagieuses
de ce cancer de société qu’est la corruption. L’application du système des symboles ici ne se
limitera pas au caractère fluctuant des mots et expressions mais pourrait quelques fois s’étendre à
une partie ou à l’entièreté d’une phrase.
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Il s’agira donc d’opérer une extraction naturelle ou contre nature au sein des idées qui se
manifestent dans le texte pour y dégager, de façon claire, les contours multiformes et pernicieux
d’une vision sociale cancéreuse et contagieuse qui est celle de la corruption économique passive.
“L’argent propre : imaginaire social du confinement et de la circulation”
Florence Fix, Université de Lorraine
La seconde partie du xixe siècle français découvre l’argent virtuel : les actions en bourse,
les spéculations sur données intangibles, les fortunes colossales mais invisibles installent un
nouvel imaginaire de l’argent qui se déplace tout le temps, passe d’individu en individu, tout en
restant invisible. Inauguré en 1826, le Palais Brongniart, siège de la Bourse de Paris,
emblématise ce point central de la ville moderne qui pour être spectaculaire n’en est pourtant pas
moins énigmatique. Eugène de Mirecourt, en 1858, lui consacre un essai au titre évocateur : La
Bourse, ses abus et ses mystères.
Ce nouveau rapport à l’argent installe un espace fantasmatique qui autorise, d’une part, la
circulation, tout en, d’autre part, évacuant la contamination. L’imaginaire de la spéculation en
effet s’empare volontiers du vocabulaire de la microbiologie et de l’intérêt général pour les
premiers vaccins : on parle ainsi du « virus de la Bourse » pour les agioteurs, de la « fièvre » des
affaires pour les investisseurs. Mais aucun objet matériel sale ne passe plus de mains en mains,
l’argent virtuel est fluide, propre, éthéré. La façon dont est abordé cet argent a beaucoup de
schèmes discursifs communs avec la propagation d’une maladie, mais sans la saleté : la fortune
est virale, l’affairisme financier cherche à contaminer le plus grand nombre de clients, le
déplacement de l’argent est épanchement, déplacement, propagation – tous ces schèmes se
trouvent réemployés dans un registre positif. Dans sa Physiologie du floueur, Charles Philippon
établit un portrait ironique de ce voleur moderne : la flouerie, la capacité à déplacer de l’argent
invisible voire inexistant serait « le progrès, le perfectionnement scientifique » de ce qui n’était
auparavant que vol. En « odeur de probité », le grand entrepreneur, le « tripoteur d’affaires » qui
s’est multiplié sur les travaux du Paris haussmannien et sur les scandales financiers comme
Panama, le capitaliste moderne sait manier un argent qui enfin n’a pas d’odeur et ainsi se
soustraire au rapport avec l’ouvrier manuel ou le paysan. Car l’argent propre, virtuel réalise ce
double fantasme : il circule, se répand, se multiplie (comme un virus) mais aussi confine, clôture
les classes sociales élevées qui n’ont plus besoin de frayer avec les classes populaires pour des
tractations laborieuses et tangibles.
En utilisant notamment des œuvres théâtrales (La Question d’argent de Dumas fils,
L’Epidémie et Les Affaires sont les affaires, d’Octave Mirbeau), en tant qu’articulation visible
entre les représentations scéniques de la circulation de l’argent et l’imaginaire social de l’époque,
cette contribution se propose d’étudier l’anxiété de l’épidémie telle que retravaillée de façon
positive par l’imaginaire de la finance moderne.
“Revenge Contamination: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Toxicology”
Natalie Berkman, Princeton University
In a pivotal moment of Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844), Gérard de
Villefort returns home after the most devastating trial of his career, during which the accused
turned out to be Villefort’s illegitimate son. Such a revelation comes at a particularly
inopportune moment, as Villefort has just ordered his young wife’s suicide as punishment for
poisoning his entire family. Rushing home, Villefort muses on forgiveness, but when he returns,
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it is too late. The poison was doubly effective, as Mme de Villefort has also administered the
drug on her infant child.
Poison is an apt murder weapon, chosen precisely by the titular Count of Monte Cristo.
Indeed, much earlier he had instructed Mme de Villefort precisely in such matters. In fact, poison
seems to pervade the entire novel: infected by the initial crime (the wrongful accusation of
Edmond Dantès), the perpetrators and their progeny suffer from the ramifications of their own
hubris, set in motion by the Count himself. As he mutters to himself after instructing Mme de
Villefort in the toxicology lesson that would dismantle her family, “…voilà une bonne terre, je
suis convaincu que le grain qu’on y laisse tomber n’y avorte pas.”
This paper seeks to examine poison in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, both in its literal
manifestations and as a metaphor for the book itself. The initial crime permeates the novel on a
number of levels: the motivations organically create the plan of revenge; various chemicals
demonstrate their potent capacities to heal, destroy, and obscure; and behind it all, the changing
political regimes of 19th century France and the absent figure of Napoléon reign supreme, their
ramifications serving as the fertile soil for three guilty parties to benefit from a wrongful
accusation in disguised handwriting.
Panel 10.F: Corrupting the Code: Class and Gender in Women’s Writing
Chair: Anne McCall, Binghamton University
“Robes souillées et gilets magnifiques: Sand Turns the Fictional World on its Head”
Isabelle Hoog Naginski, Tufts University
Readers of Pavel’s La Pensée du roman may remember that its epigraph is a quote by
Sand : « L’art n’est pas une étude de la réalité positive ; c’est une recherche de la vérité idéale. »
In her novels of the 1840s – the period of her « romantisme rouge » – Sand expands her search
for « ideal truth. » Among her numerous literary devices the strategy of inversion stands out,
taking the fictional world of Balzac and others and setting it on its head.
Sand takes Balzac’s deformed social pyramid, over-populated by aristocrats and high
bourgeois, and flips it, giving greater emphasis to the proletariat and the peasantry. In so doing,
she turns the pyramid back to a more “realistic” configuration, opening up a space for the voices
of workers and peasants. In Horace, she laments the lack of esprit in aristocratic circles, claiming
that there are more intellectual discussions in one day in a Paris mansarde than in one month in a
salon: « … il y a de plus grandes idées et de plus grands sentiments dans les ateliers que dans les
salons », she writes. Sand exploits the adjective “noble” to designate, not the dullards of the
nobility, but her heroes who consist of revolutionary students and grisettes: “Il y a des cœurs
purs sous des robes souillées et des cœurs corrrompus sous des gilets magnifiques. » This is a
sample of Sand’s « ideal truth. »
Sand justifies her use of ideal characters with the claim that they exist and that she herself
has met some of them. She claims:« J’ai rencontré trop de belles âmes dans la vie réelle ». In fact
such noble souls are what keeps the world from disintegrating : “Il y a encore des âmes fortes
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comme je les imagine, car s’il n’y en avait plus, le monde périrait.” Sand’s turning the literary
standards of her day on their head subverts the idées reçues of the noble gentleman and the
dangerous proletariat. Her literary strategies construct a fictional world replete with veracious
ideals.
“Undoing Beauty : the Aesthetics of Seeing in Consuelo”
Tuo Liu, Harvard University
George Sand’s Consuelo, first published in 1842-1843, occupies an intriguing position in
the Sandian corpus as one of the very few works which feature an artist as heroine. As such,
Consuelo presents an obvious parallel to George Sand herself, especially at a time when female
identity and authorship were greatly debated. Indeed, just a year later Daumier would publish his
(in)famous caricatures on the bas-bleu, where he portrayed female writers as ugly spinsters and
old hags. Such a vitriolic response betrayed the anxieties engendered by the emergence of female
creative pursuits outside of a strictly domestic sphere, and the ensuing fears of contamination.
While Consuelo needs to don male clothing during her journey to Vienna, George Sand
also engages in a form of symbolic cross-dressing as she engages with a realist mode of
representation that has traditionally been coded as “masculine”. As Christopher Prendergast has
argued, realism can be understood as “an economy of positions and drives based on the relations
of actual or imaginary looking, an economy where there is typically or stereotypically a male
looker, and one of the privileged objects of vision is the body of a woman.” Though Consuelo
has often been read in terms of voice and hearing, I propose a reading centered on a visual
paradigm of gazes and mirrors (an integral part of the 19th century metalanguage of realism). I
contend that Consuelo’s quest to find her true artistic voice is inextricably linked to her
continuous negotiation with the dynamics of seeing, both as active gazer and object of others’
gaze. Through the figure of Consuelo, Sand questions the aesthetic and ethical values of
categories such as beauty and ugliness while embracing the possibility of a non-mimetic mode of
representation. Nonetheless, if Consuelo achieves a radically different way of seeing, the writer
herself struggles to free herself of realist poetics.
“Writing under the Influence: Suzanne Voilquin’s Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple; ou la
Saint-Simonienne en Egypte”
Bettina Lerner, CUNY Graduate Center
In Les Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple, Suzanne Voilquin gives a gripping account of her
experiences as a working-class Parisian who joins the Saint-Simonians and finds her voice as a
journalist, midwife, intrepid traveler and leading feminist thinker of the 1830s and 40s. Voilquin
situates her memoir squarely in the tradition of Romantic autobiographers from Rousseau, to
Chateaubriand and George Sand. In this sense, her writing might seem to fall prey to the kind of
influence that nineteenth-century critic Cuvillier-Fleury termed a "contagion d'exemple," or what
Maurice Crubellier writing in the 1970s expressed as the contamination of popular culture by
elite interests. Instead, this paper argues that Voilquin establishes herself as a full-fledged subject
by writing her way into a series of complicit and competing discourses. Rather than simply
imitate bourgeois codes and forms, Voilquin carefully negotiates boundaries of class and gender
in France as well as in the early colonial landscape of North Africa. In so doing, she attempts to
carve out a space for self-expression for other working-class writers as well, albeit not without
troubling consequences for the colonial space in which she seeks her own freedom.
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As Claire Moses Goldberg and Leslie Rabine have shown, Voilquin's sharply politicized
portrayal of the 1820s and 30s manages to outline the principles of feminist theory out of the
radical yet essentially patriarchal practices of saint-simonianism. This paper builds on their
seminal study in order to consider how Voilquin's text elicits and reinforces what in the 1860s
was still a new reading culture created for and by working-class women, one which still today
offers up numerous paradoxes for feminist critique. I thus conclude my analysis of Voilquin's
memoir with a reconsideration of Jacques Rancière's open debate with Lydia Elhadad and
Geneviève Fraisse on Voilquin's complex position as a writer, worker and feminist.
“Plagiarism, Maupassant and Jane de la Vaudère’s Les Demi-sexes”
Sharon Larson, Christopher Newport University
In October of 1897, the literary periodical La Province nouvelle invited readers to
compare selected passages from Jane de la Vaudère’s recent novel Les Demi-sexes against
excerpts from Maupassant’s 1890 novel, Notre cœur. Though this anonymous piece did not go so
far as to outright denounce La Vaudère as a plagiarist, the unequivocal stylistic similarities
between the highlighted passages suggested that she liberally borrowed from her confrère’s
previous work. What La Province nouvelle overlooked, however, was that Notre cœur was not
the only novel by Maupassant that inspired Les Demi-sexes. Indeed, a comparative analysis
reveals that many of La Vaudère’s descriptions of her protagonist’s travels in Sicily are
undeniable reproductions of Maupassant’s legendary travel memoirs, “La Sicile” (1886) and “La
côte italienne” (1890).
Les Demi-sexes is a novel about clandestine ovariectomies in fin-de-siècle Paris. With an
ostensibly feminist preoccupation with female sexual emancipation and reproductive agency, its
final chapters nonetheless remain faithful to conventional doctrines that advocate marriage and
maternity. Given this context, Maupassant’s presence in the novel offers a new perspective on
these contradictory discourses about femininity. In fact, many of the novel’s pivotal portrayals of
female sexuality and its ensuing endorsement of procreation are actually “copied” passages from
Maupassant’s texts. La Vaudère’s alleged plagiarism, therefore, suggests a textual intrusion—
and contamination—of male-authored constructions of femininity that has implications well
beyond the ethics of textual reproduction. This paper will explore these gendered trends in
“plagiarism” (a term that also needs contextualizing) and what this apparent reliance on male
perspective reveals about discursive representations of female sexuality at the fin de siècle.
Break 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
November 5-7, 2015
Saturday 7 November
Session 11 – 4:00 pm - 5:45 pm
Panel 11.A: Mixologies: Mixings, Miasmas, Impurities
Chair: Janet Beizer, Harvard University
“Disturbing Formal Purity: Agency, Intersubjectivity, and Gender in the Sculptural
Encounter”
Nigel Harkness, Newcastle University
While sculpture in the nineteenth century is frequently associated with purity, perfection
and the ideal, recent critical work on the encounter between the viewer and the sculptural object
has highlighted the ambiguity and hybridity of that interaction. Naomi Segal, for instance, has
framed the sculptural gaze as midway between touching and seeing, and foregrounded the
sensual and sexual ambiguities of the sculptural encounter. The art critic David J Getsy’s has
posited the immobility and passivity of the statue not as a lack, but as a performed stillness and
confrontational inertness. This work provides a framework for re-reading a number of
nineteenth-century representations of the woman-statue, in works by Balzac, Sand and Gautier in
particular. Shifting the focus from the way in which this figure mixes the animate and the
inanimate, sameness and difference, I propose to explore representations of the dynamics of
the sculptural encounter, and re-examine the ethical and intersubjective issues which arise within
the unsettling space of that encounter. My paper will consider the way in which the association
of sculpture with formal purity and inertness gives way to something more troubling, less pure,
potentially contaminating, performative in its stillness, and certainly disturbing, and from there
will explore the questions of agency, intersubjectivity and gender which these representations of
the sculptural encounter highlight.
“Mixed Up: Colonial Food and Imperial Identity at the Exposition universelle of 1889”
Kylie Sago, Harvard University
A series of unsettling mixes were staged at the colonial section of the Exposition
universelle of 1889 in Paris: between France and her overseas territories, their respective cultures
and culinary traditions, and between desire and various kinds of disgust (i.e., physiological and
aesthetic) in reactions elicited by these mélanges. Consumption of colonial food products and
dishes available at markets and restaurants of the exhibition provided European visitors with a
taste of the colonies and presented a medium for cultural evaluation. Like other spectacles of the
colonial exposition at the Esplanade des Invalides, its culinary encounters prompted a flurry of
writing in contemporary publications recounting visitors’ experiences of the World’s Fair.
Expressions of disgust appear in these texts as frequently as indications of fascination with the
exoticism of colonial cuisines. These publications gesture to the delicate line separating the
experiences of disgust and desire; food at the exposition needed to be exotic enough to justify
anthropological interest, but too-exotic dishes triggered unease over contamination. For
European visitors, articulating disgust represented a discursive strategy to fortify an identity
challenged by its encounter with colonial alterity; disgust not only indicated a sense of
unsettlement, but more importantly insisted on the body’s capacity to reject whatever substances
or practices proved ultimately too strange to stomach. This paper will consider these expressions
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of disgust as indications of larger anxieties over French identity in the self-reflexively imperial
context of the Exposition universelle.
“Sillage is the New Miasma: Three Signature Scents”
Cheryl Krueger, University of Virginia
By the mid-nineteenth century, research on microorganisms and germ theory had
discredited the belief that epidemic disease was spread by contaminated air, vapors and earth.
Nonetheless, popular etiologies of miasmic contagion persisted throughout the century.
Pollution, putrefaction, effluvia and miasma had been associated with corrupted air and its
attendant smells for so long that it must have been difficult let go of the concern that odor itself
was a vehicle for contagion.
Perfume and other fragrant accessories, on the other hand, were generally seen if not as
an antidote, at least as a physical shield from the assault of mephitic air. The golden age of
osphresiolgy (as Alain Corbin dubbed it) unfolded in tandem with the birth of modern French
perfumery. Yet as the pleasures and virtues of perfume were depicted in print advertising and
product labels, the perils of perfume abuse became a topic of increasing concern in newspaper
articles, hygiene manuals and medical treatises. In works of nineteenth-century fiction as well,
evocations of fragrance suggest a perceived danger associated with the smell of something in the
air, even when that smell is perfume.
In this paper I will focus specifically on three novelistic evocations of the perfumed
letter, a well-known and ostensibly innocuous vehicle for the writer’s signature scent. In
Balzac’s Béatrix, as well as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Education sentimentale, the fragrant
letter contributes to a narrative network of physical, psychological and moral contamination. In
these works, fragrant letters function metonymically as an extension of its writer’s body and
mind, and also metaphorically, the ink and page like blood and skin, contaminated by and
contaminating with their signature scent.
“The Devil’s Stew : Exercises in Gastro-anomie”
Janet Beizer, Harvard University
Throughout the Middle Ages, the prostitute, the buffoon, the criminal, and the insane
were consigned to clothes that were striped, streaked, patchworked, gaudily hued, spotted, or
otherwise variegated to represent the idea of disorder, disruption, and impurity they were
assumed to visit upon the social order. Modern occidental culture is in fact still permeated by the
scandal of variegation, contends Michel Pastoureau, still touched by the association of the solid
with the godly, and the mottled with the diabolical. In my paper I’ll explore the phenomenon of
recomposed leftovers sold at Les Halles and other venues in the long nineteenth century, to
which the alimentary idiom l’arlequin was assigned, as an avatar of the persistent fears and
anxieties that mixing, streaking and hybridity invoke. If the alimentary arlequin was ignoble and
disgusting in its incarnation of decomposition and indistinction—an example of “gastroanomie,” in Madeleine Ferrière’s choice phrasing—it existed in a broader context of identity
loss. Reading accounts of patchworked table scraps together with descriptions of their similarly
stitched-together consumers suggests that the plate of reassembled dinner vestiges did not
directly inherit the Commedia dell’arte character’s name, but was mediated by the aspect of
indigent customers, society’s sundry castoffs as well. The garbage stew and the human stew
present parallel constructs, analogous scenes whose separate elements (patched trousers and
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asymmetrical collars, motley crowds and clashing colors, gnawed remains of multiple dinners replated together) all push mixing to the extreme of promiscuity. Following the commentary of
contemporaries (sometimes echoed today), I will explore the arlequin as devil’s food—impure,
contaminated, and contaminating by its hybridity, intermittently seductive by its socioeconomic
exoticism—in a framework grounded in anthropological, sociological, and esthetic theory.
Panel 11.B: Pureté, perversion et nostalgie : la tentation du voyage au XIXe siècle
Chair: Margot Irvine, University of Guelph
Respondent: Clive Thomson, University of Guelph
“Le voyage dénaturé ou comment pervertir son bel héritage”
Nathalie Solomon, Université de Perpignan
Si on considère que le voyage originel du siècle romantique est celui de Chateaubriand,
on constate que ses successeurs pervertissent le modèle en l’entachant d’obscénité (Flaubert), de
trivialité (Gautier, Dumas), de provocation (Custine), d’humour (Nerval) et surtout en faisant du
corps du voyageur une régie essentielle du récit, qui permet d’en refuser la nature poétique. Ces
œuvres laissent percer la nostalgie d’un voyage heureux mais désormais impossible, à la fois
géographique et temporel. Le regard sur le lieu est contaminé 1) par les autres récits, par une
pratique littéraire qu’on ne peut ignorer 2) par une réalité encombrante qui vient déranger le
fantasme et empêcher de se livrer à la rêverie sur les lieux. D’où l’importance du corps du
voyageur qui incarne la contamination du voyage idéal par une contingence un peu suspecte. On
tentera ainsi de réfléchir à la manière dont les héritiers de Chateaubriand réinventent le récit de
voyage littéraire comme un défi au voyage parfait de 1811. La faim, le froid, la chaleur, la
fatigue, la saleté, le danger, confèrent au corps du voyageur une épaisseur qui modifie la nature
du récit devenu une forme de manuel de survie exprimé en termes impeccables, qui méritent
l’admiration littéraire sans renoncer à dire le monde tel qu’il est. C’est cette mise à distance qu’il
faudra examiner, en montrant comment l’altération du modèle, et la tentation de s’y référer,
produisent un voyage inquiet et ambigu chez certains des plus grands représentants de la
génération romantique, chez lesquels on sent percer le regret d’une écriture désormais
impossible.
“La nostalgie : de la maladie «contagieuse» à l’expression esthétique”
Jelena Jovicic, University of British Columbia
Dans Le Normal et le pathologique, Georges Canguilhem note que la ligne de partage
entre ces deux états est toujours floue et, par là même, contestable : cette observation de
Canguilhem, bien qu’elle ne soit pas si récente, s’avère encore inspiratrice et offre un solide
point de départ pour l’étude des concepts appartenant à des zones turbulentes, telle la nostalgie
qui s’est vue basculer, au cours du dix-neuvième siècle, entre les deux pôles. Dans ma
communication, je me propose donc d’examiner l’évolution épistémologique et esthétique du
concept de nostalgie dans la France de la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Conçue d’abord
comme une maladie « contagieuse » et « mortelle » avec un diagnostic médical minutieusement
élaboré, la nostalgie se transformera graduellement en sentiment, sens qui nous est encore connu
aujourd’hui. Dans un premier temps, j’examinerai un ensemble représentatif de textes médicaux
sur la nostalgie (1800-1850) dont les systèmes de représentation et les schémas d’explication ont
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contribué à la construction d’une maladie originale autant qu’à sa disparition consécutive des
tableaux nosologiques. Dans un deuxième temps, j’explorerai la « migration » de la nostalgie de
la pratique exclusivement clinique vers un usage esthétique. Plus précisément, j’analyserai le rôle
qu’avait la nostalgie médicale dans la création des Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans
l’ancienne France (1820-1878), ouvrage monumental qui diffusait l’esthétique et la sensibilité
des romantiques.
“Respirer un air plus pur : les vertus curatives de l’Italie dans les Lettres à Alexandrine,
d’Émile Zola”
Sophie Guermès, Université de Brest
Les voyages d’Alexandrine Zola en Italie ont fourni l’occasion d’une riche
correspondance, qui vient d’être éditée (dir. A. Pagès et B. Émile-Zola, Gallimard, octobre
2014). Avant 1895, Alexandrine n’était jamais partie seule à l’étranger. Elle fait donc acte
d’indépendance en s’éloignant de son mari plusieurs semaines. Le prétexte est fourni par sa santé
(elle souffre de crises d’asthme) ; mais si son corps est malade, ses souffrances psychologiques
sont bien plus importantes. En effet, quatre ans auparavant, elle a appris par une lettre anonyme
que son mari avait une liaison avec Jeanne Rozerot, et que deux enfants étaient nés de cette
union. La blessure est loin d’être refermée lorsqu’elle éprouve, en 1895, la tentation d’un voyage
en Italie, et c’est une femme dévastée (on le mesure en lisant les réponses de l’écrivain à ses
plaintes) qui, après avoir suivi les traces de la jeunesse de son mari, en Provence, puis dans le
nord de l’Italie, terre des ancêtres de Zola, s’installe pour quelque temps à Rome, qu’elle avait
découverte l’année précédente avec le romancier lorsque celui-ci y avait séjourné pour préparer
le deuxième volume des Trois villes. Zola va peindre Rome comme une ville morte ;
Alexandrine, au contraire, va y renaître régulièrement, en y lavant ses plaies. Elle développe
« une affinité singulière » avec une ville qui a survécu aux invasions, portant mémoire et
témoignage de la destruction par les ruines qui subsistent en son centre comme à la périphérie.
On peut conjecturer qu’elle y a puisé une leçon de résistance et de vie, et que, revenue à Paris,
elle en a gardé la nostalgie, puisqu’elle y est retournée chaque année jusqu’en 1913, à
l’exception de 1898, année d’exil de Zola en Angleterre, et de 1902, année de la mort de
l’écrivain.
“Voyages et repérages dans l’univers naturaliste”
Alain Pagès, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
Il arrive au romancier naturaliste de voyager à l’étranger : les Goncourt se sont rendus à
Rome pour Madame Gervaisais et Zola a fait de même pour écrire son roman sur la Ville
éternelle. Mais aux longs périples initiatiques qu’affectionnent les romantiques l’écrivain
naturaliste préfère de courts déplacements qui le conduisent à des repérages de situations : Zola
se rend à Anzin pour Germinal, va dans la Beauce pour La Terre, refait le trajet suivi par l’armée
de 1870 pour composer La Débâcle, arpente Paris pour écrire L’Assommoir… Le repérage
l’emporte sur le voyage. Ce schéma étant rappelé, nous nous demanderons ce qui peut le
troubler, le déstabiliser – en pervertissant cette clôture spatiale dans laquelle s’enferme volontiers
l’enquête naturaliste. Quelle impureté, quelle nostalgie d’un ailleurs insaisissable le
voyage introduit-il ? Deux sortes de circonstances mériteront examen : le bouleversement de
l’exil, ou le drame du voyage imposé, entre aventure et retraite (Zola fuyant en Angleterre au
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moment de l’affaire Dreyfus) ; la tentation de l’exotisme, ou l’expérience du voyage colonial (de
l’utopie de Fécondité, chez Zola, aux explorations africaines et asiatiques d’un Paul Bonnetain).
Panel 11.C: Through Glass Walls, Through Fourth Walls, Through Huysmans
Chair: Willemijn Don, Bryn Mawr College
“Nature et artifice, ou de la porosité des aquariums”
Julia Przybos, Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Dans A Rebours, Des Esseintes lance un défit à la radoteuse nature, s’évertuant à prouver
l’originalité et donc la supériorité des créations de l’homme. On connaît le résultat : la tortue ne
survit pas à l’incrustation de pierres précieuses ; le Népenthès, « dont la fantaisie dépasse les
limites connues des excentriques formes », imite bel et bien le caoutchouc ; Des Esseintes doit
renoncer à une existence conçue à l’envers du rythme naturel de l’homme. Si les tentatives pour
surpasser la flore et la faune terrestres se soldent par un échec, celles pour égaler le monde
aquatique semblent couronnées de succès. Dans la salle à manger « donnant » sur un aquarium,
le personnage réussit à se procurer les sensations d’un voyage de long cours. Les objets recréant
une cabine de navire, l’eau de l’aquarium se plie aux désirs de Des Esseintes. Il lui suffit d’y
verser quelques gouttes d’essences colorées pour s’offrir les tons variables des véritables
rivières. Il y contemple « de merveilleux poissons mécaniques, montés comme des pièces
d’horlogerie » qui s’accrochent dans de fausses herbes. En 1884, Des Esseintes croit égaler,
voire surpasser le monde aquatique, en 1888, après une visite de l’aquarium de Berlin,
Huysmans rend hommage au Dieu de la Genèse qui a « réservé ses bêtes les plus extravagantes
pour les antres mystérieux des gouffres » maritimes. Grâce à la stupéfiante exubérance
aquatique, la nature trouve aux yeux de Huysmans l’estampille de génie que lui refusait Des
Esseintes.
Introduit dans les lettres par Mallarmé (Dernières modes, 1874), l’aquarium figure, après
Huysmans, chez quelques auteurs des prochaines décennies qui, eux aussi, explorent la frontière
poreuse entre nature et artifice. Je propose de montrer que, par le truchement des aquariums,
Laforgue (« Salomé »), Gide (Paludes), Breton (Poisson soluble), Soupault (Aquarium) et
Roussel (Locus Solus) s’interrogent sur les rapports fluides entre les créatures de la nature et les
créations de l’homme.
“‘L’Aquarium de Berlin’: A Majestic Oasis Within a Contaminated City”
Claire Nettleton, Scripps College
In “L’Aquarium de Berlin” (1902), J.-K. Huysmans temporarily escapes the polluted,
industrial city of Berlin and enters the public aquarium, a portal to the fantastical deep sea. The
narrator abandons the Spree River, described as a dirty gutter, to find glorious waters brimming
with multicolored coral. The noises of cars and machinery fall silent amidst the squawking of
macaws.
The urbanization and industrialization of European cities contributed to the public’s
fascination with the deep sea as an escape or refuge. With its undulating, serpentine lines and
colorful, otherworldly creatures, the ocean inspired Art Nouveau artists and Decadent writers.
They drew from observations from Charles Darwin and C. Wyville Thomson and public
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aquariums. The Berlin Aquarium, which opened in 1869 and contained tanks embedded into
rock, resembled a grotto inside the city center.
This integration of the ocean within an urban institution culminates in Jules Laforgue’s
“À l’Aquarium de Berlin” (1895). The poem idealizes and orientializes the aquarium as a haven
from the chaotic frenzy of urban life. In contrast, at the end of Huysmans’ text, the narrator gains
a new appreciation for the modern city. The imagery in these writings is emblematic of a 19thcentury European vision whose drive for industrial and scientific progress is perhaps as
obsessive as its desire to be one with the natural world.
The aquarium in Huysmans’ A Rebours, filled with dyes and mechanical fish, illustrates
the ways in which technology can replicate ecological resources. In my analysis of these works
as well as zoological treatises and sketches, I will argue that as a living painting, which is at once
organic and artificial, the public aquarium provides an idyllic sanctuary within a contaminated
metropolis.
“‘Si quelqu'un méritait le nom de réaliste, ce seraient les Hanlon Lees’: Huysmans and
Zola at the Folies-Bergère and the (Porous) Nature of the Real”
Jennifer Forrest, Texas State University
During their 1879 season in Paris, the Hanlon-Lees offered a series of dizzying
pantomimes at which Émile Zola and J.K. Huysmans were spectators. Both writers are
frequently cited in descriptions and assessments of the nature of the originality of the troupe's
performances, and yet their approaches are fundamentally different. Zola's review in the Voltaire
was of Le Voyage en Suisse at the Théâtre des Variétés, easily the most narratively constructed
of all the pantomimes in the Hanlon-Lees repertoire. Le Voyage en Suisse, written according to a
tried and true vaudeville formula by Ernest Blum and Raoul Toché, drew Zola's praises solely in
those scenes of pandemonium featuring the Hanlon-Lees. Nevertheless, he took the performance
for its mimetic qualities, alluding to but not following the acrobats into that madness that he
identified as "le néant."
Huysmans described another pantomime, Le Duel, in "Les Folies-Bergère en 1879" in his
Croquis parisiens (1880). In contrast to Le Voyage en Suisse, Le Duel possessed only the
skeleton of a narrative and a great dose of frenzied nonsense. Still associated with Naturalism,
Huysmans ostensibly begins with an appraisal of the mimetic qualities in the performance ("la
sordide chimère du théâtre n'est plus. La vie seule se dresse devant nous, pantelante et superbe"),
but his subsequent description of the fear that takes total possession of the pierrots indicates that,
unlike Zola, Huysmans willingly followed the acrobats into the "néant," into an unfiltered,
porous, and undifferentiated presentation (not re-presentation) of life marked by narrative and
generic contamination and confusion.
“‘Les fenêtres des incurables’: Glass Hospices and the Decadent Imagination”
Natasha Ryan, University of Oxford
Contemplating his opulent hothouse, des Esseintes sees the flowers arranged there ‘ainsi
que dans un hôpital, parmi les salles vitrées des serres’. Des Esseintes’ alignment of the hothouse
with a hospital is typical of late nineteenth-century Decadence, which frequently ruminated on
questions of disease, enclosure, nurture, and suffocation. The gradual displacement of miasma
theory with germ theory, and the extensive architectural vitrification throughout the century,
coincided with an aesthetic movement that encompassed both a fear of contagion and a
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fascination with artificial growth, display culture, and excess. The hothouse captured this
ambivalence: as a sealed environment, it offered a protective retreat from contamination and a
nurturing-house for exotic creativity; however, its humid, stifling atmosphere also represented a
claustrophobia that starved the artistic mind of oxygen. Similarly, its marine equivalent, the
aquarium, combines the exoticism of the decadent mind with the suffocating threat of enclosure
within glass walls. Consequently, these structures appeal to numerous poets of the period,
including Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, and Laforgue, in whose work hothouses and aquariums are
often compared to hospices and hospitals. The impermeability of glass, coupled with its
transparency and association with department-store display, mean that it at once represents an
‘art for art’s sake’ mentality, which prizes artifice over nature, and the claustrophobia of an
aesthetic that is questioning its own future, suffocated by the weight of tradition. This paper will
examine the relationship between the poetry of the late nineteenth century and the glass
structures that were increasingly a feature of the bourgeois home. As society prized ever more
vitrified architecture, poetry responded by internalising that vitrification, using the qualities of
the glass structure to interrogate its social identity, its place in the rapidly changing aesthetic
scene, and its philosophy towards content and form.
Panel 11.D: The (Im)Pure Work of Art
Chair: Ashley Byczkowski, SUNY Buffalo
“Blurring Lines Between Pure Art and Social Art: Politically Engaged Literature of the
Symbolist Movement”
Richard Shryock, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Symbolist literature of the fin de siècle is known for being detached from the world and
even being a paragon of pure art having itself as its own end. Some critics, both of the time and
currently, say that Symbolism has a socio-political dimension which comes from how the
esthetic is framed on an abstract level relative to other currents (usually anarchism) as opposed to
the referential function of the language it uses. However, a handful of Symbolist texts from the
late nineteenth century do contain depictions of social strife or attack institutions of power
consistent with what would typically be described as socially committed or political literature.
My paper explores this phenomenon using examples from a variety of works from the
1890s by Adolphe Retté, Bernard Lazare, Paul Adam, Saint-Pol-Roux and Gustave Kahn. The
majority of these works were written during or just after the era of the anarchist bombings in
Paris from 1892 to 1894. I will explore three interrelated facets of this type of Symbolist
literature relative to the time in which they were produced. 1) The tension generated by using an
esthetic typically associated with the contradictory goals of creating pure art and art that has an
explicit social function. 2) What is the message of these pieces of literature? What are the social
goals they seek to achieve? 3) Who is the addressee of these works? Is this social literature for
an élite or does it aim to reach a wider audience?
These works are key for understanding Symbolism’s overall relationship to politics and
social matters. The very nature of these works puts into question those who argue that Symbolist
literature is not at all political and those who claim that its political character derives from its
lack of open social involvement. These texts help to better define the place of ideology in
Symbolist literature as a whole.
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“The Newspaper vs. the Storyteller: Phantasms of Orality and the Quarrel of the romanfeuilleton”
Jennifer Gipson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In the 1830s and 40s, critics of the roman feuilleton faulted the newspaper and its
skyrocketing popular readership for contaminating “true” literature: speed, quantity, and market
demands trumped art and esthetics. As cheap print triumphs, the storyteller should, in Walter
Benjamin’s estimation, fall. I consider, however, how phantasms of orality come to support
notions of a “pure” literature.
For example, Schéhérazade, of Arabian Nights fame, surfaces frequently in debates about
feuilletons. Dominique Jullien has studied the resonance of Schéhérazade’s stories with political
questions or themes in feuilletons. However, by focusing on the circumstances of
Schéhérazade’s life-or-death narrative production before the sultan, I show how she also
provides a means of thinking about audience demands and the fate of art in this new market
place. On the eve of the publication of the Mystères de Paris, critic Alfred-Auguste CuvillierFleury imagines nineteenth-century readers waking up feuilletonistes at night, echoing
Schéhérazade’s sister’s request for storytelling. Originality is undesirable; stagnation ensues.
Other examples include an 1842 story by Théophile Gautier, ironically published in the periodic
press, which has a time-travelling Schéhérazade go to Paris in search of stories. Her death
dramatizes the situation of writers like Gautier who do face not murderous sultans but a tyranny
of “corrupted” public tastes.
Yet, as shown in Sainte-Beuve’s notion of littérature industrielle, writers fear
contamination not only from who is now reading but who is now writing. Schéhérazade is a
subtle reminder of the storytellers imagined as vanishing in nineteenth-century France as well,
those newly literate people who abandon their rural veillées to try their hand at writing. Thus,
critics of the feuilleton position this popular genre as a menace both to “pure” literature and to
the age-old oral traditions and poésies populaires that supposedly fall by the wayside as the
masses rush to reading and writing.
“‘La pureté de l’oeuvre’: Proust, Sand, and the Author’s Hand”
Evelyne Ender, Johns Hopkins University
When asked by a journalist what other craft or métier he might have envisaged for
himself had he not been a writer, Proust answered a “baker.” Once you unpack his answer, it
isn’t as fanciful as expected: baking is night work, so was writing for Proust. More meaningfully
-- at least for my inquiry into the underpinnings into creativity -- is the implicit symbolism.
Bread, like books, has a material appearance, but it yields spiritual nourishment, through some
form of transubstantiation. Tracing the line that divides manual from intellectual labor in the
literary field is a delicate and necessarily theoretical enterprise, as the work’s existence as a
causa mentale would seem to depend on the removal of the physical and material instruments of
creation. The book, however filled with impressions, cannot carry the impress of the maker’s
hand. Paradoxically, as each year of génétique research mines more unpublished materials of the
Proustian corpus and enriches our sense of how much manual labor went into creating l’œuvre,
what is gained is more dross, not ore.
Hence the questions I wish to addres in this paper from a comparative angle and a
phenomenological perspective. What might be the value of a materialist approach to the literary
text when it comes to making sens of the idea? What can be learned from focusing on the
November 5-7, 2015
threshold between the last brouillon written by hand and the intellectual/aesthetic product in the
form of a work or a book? The two exhibits I am using for this critical reflection are, on the one
hand, George Sand’s manuscript of La Mare au Diable and, on the other, the last set of proofs,
filled with the traces of Proust’s manual labor, of Du côté de chez Swann (at the Bodmer
Foundation).
Panel 11.E: Dirty Readings
Chair: Joshua Landy, Stanford University
“The Poet as ‘plaie sociale’ in Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux parisiens’”
Nigel Lezama, MLLC Brock University
Newly porous social frontiers and a rapidly changing economic landscape transformed
nineteenth-century Paris into an unrecognizable city for many of its denizens. This growing
alienation spurred the bourgeois order to compulsively protect the social body and instilled a fear
of corruption, which became a paradigm of thought in all discursive domains: the medical –
highlighted in the fear of disease spread through prostitution and poverty; the political –
evidenced in the numerous political speeches decrying the “déclassement” of the working
classes; and the literary – read in the predilection for figures like the escaped criminal or the
degenerate young man. These discursive irruptions betray the nineteenth century’s fixation on
self-preservation. By manipulating these ideological phobias and fixations in Les Fleurs du Mal,
Charles Baudelaire sets himself against the bourgeoisie (attested to by his 1857 trial for outrage
to public morality) and develops his own alloy of the pure and the impure.
In the poet’s “Tableaux parisiens” cycle, bourgeois anxieties about the social, political
and hygienic dangers of the urban space are transformed into poetic tropes that place the poet
above, in the midst or left in the wake of these various distressing phenomena in ways that
challenge and transform ideological figurations of perceived modern urban decay. My analysis
of this cycle of poems will engage with different representation of “contamination” in the poet’s
“Tableaux”: social, in his depiction of the urban marginalized (“Les Petites Vieilles”);
physiological, in the depiction of miasmas, stagnant waters and communicable diseases (“Les
Sept Vieillards”); and literary, in the depiction of the poet’s succumbing to the anguish of
marginalization (“Rêve parisien”). In fact, the poet’s penchant for marginalized figures,
permeable frontiers and urban filth highlights the new role occupied by the writer in the midnineteenth century: “plaie sociale.”
“Literary Intoxication and the Polemic of 1885 (Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and Paul
Bourget’s Cruelle Énigme)”
Daniel Ridge, Vanderbilt University
Literature in nineteenth-century France was often blamed for corrupting or perverting
readers, particularly young men and virtuous women, and for offending public morality (the
1857 censorship trials of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal are clear examples of this
phenomenon). From the popularized yet contested Werther effect, to the Chambige Affaire of
1889 in which literature was figuratively put on trial, literature in the nineteenth century was
often considered a moral danger by religious and judicial authorities, and in the court of public
opinion.
November 5-7, 2015
In 1885, with the simultaneous publications of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and Paul
Bourget’s Cruelle Énigme, a veritable polemic erupted in the French press that specifically
addressed the negative impact of literature and philosophy on the emerging generation. The
climate of pessimism and anxiety characteristic of the Decadent movement was thoroughly
examined by important critics of the time including Ferdinand Brunetière, Jules Lemaître, and
Francisque Sarcey. In this paper I propose to conduct an in-depth analysis of this four-month
long polemic in order to distill the crucial arguments used by an older, established generation to
explain the attitudes of the emerging one. Remarkably, the porte-parole of the emerging
generation was none other than Paul Bourget who spoke on behalf of young people, rather than
against them. Later on in his career, Bourget came to recognize that he was not an innocent
observer but had himself influenced, even “perverted,” the youth he was trying to understand
through his essays and novels. His solution, as declared in his 1889 letter À un jeune homme
published as the introduction to Le Disciple, was to write moralizing literature that condemned
Decadent themes rather than valorize them as he had done in his youth.
“Mauvais genre: Reading the Improper in Jean Santeuil”
François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The unfinished and untitled text now known as Jean Santeuil was begun by Proust in
1895 and largely abandoned by the end of 1899. Proust had misgivings about the text’s generic
status: ‘Puis-je appeler ce livre un roman ?,’ he writes in an unlabeled, incomplete manuscript
page that stops mid-sentence. Bernard de Fallois, the editor of the first published version (1952),
tidied up Proust’s disorderly manuscript into a narrative that followed the conventions of a novel
of formation. A later version edited by Pierre Clarac (1971) attempted to restitute some the
fragmentary nature of the text, but largely maintained Fallois’s reorderings. As noted by JeanYves Tadié in his update of Clarac’s version (2001), a complete critical edition of Jean Santeuil
remains to be done. Proust’s strikethroughs and revisions, most notably, are not fully transcribed
in any published version; the recent digitization of the manuscript (2014) makes them visible for
the first time.
The manuscript reveals the young Proust’s hesitations in matters of gender as well as
genre, particularly around questions of reading and desire. Love scenes are rewritten to erase
hints of gender ambiguity. Scenes of shared reading – precursors to the solitary reading scenes in
À la recherche du temps perdu – can be dated to 1895, when Proust was enamored with the
composer Reynaldo Hahn, since these sections of the manuscript are written on the same paper
used by Proust and Hahn to write letters in the fall of that year. Considering Jean Santeuil less as
a novel than as a composite text, alongside Proust and Hahn’s letters, allows for unexpected
insight into the Proustian theory of reading, through its links to Proust’s experiences and
conceptions of queerness. By undoing earlier editorial efforts toward generic purity and returning
to the manuscript, we uncover a different text, and a different way of reading Proust.
November 5-7, 2015
Panel 11.F: The Industrial City Between Utopia and Dystopia
Chair: Macs Smith, Princeton University
“‘Quelque Babylone de l’avenir’: The Future as Contaminated Version of the Past”
Chapman Wing, College of Staten Island
A recurring figure in representations of French modernity during the second half of the
nineteenth century is that of a hyper-technologized, architecturally incoherent Babylon of the
future. In his 1851 short story “Paris futur,” Théophile Gautier elaborates a vision of Paris made
of grotesque structures which combine all of the aesthetic styles of the ancient world into one
building, fused with futuristic technological devices that highlight the decadent lack of
proportions and extremes of universalism that he diagnosed in post-1848 France. From a
critique of what would come to be known as the motley style artiste, to a parody of the unlikely
synthesis of the world’s religions into one, to the evocation of future animals made of metal,
Gautier depicts modernity sarcastically as a process of improbable and unpalatable juxtapositions
between the old and the new. The Goncourt Brothers wrote of Paris in 1860 that it had become
unrecognizable, that it had become like “quelque Babylone de l’avenir”; situated in some
uncertain zone somehow belonging to both the ancient past and to the future, foreign in both its
chaos and its strange orderliness. In the 1880s, Albert Bleunard’s futuristic novel, La Babylone
électrique and Albert Robida’s novels La vie électrique and Le vingtième siècle further elaborate
the uncanniness of modernity through metaphors of a mythical ancient world contaminated by
the trappings of progress, many of which were still yet to be realized. In my paper, I examine
this tendency in futuristic literature of the nineteenth century to juxtapose the unfamiliar modern
world with the equal strangeness of the distant past, and argue that this recurring device serves as
a grandiose mythologization of the present at the same time that it purports to undercut the
present’s shameful incoherence and anticlimactic decadence.
“Industry and Class in Van Gogh’s 1887 Clichy Images”
Christa DiMarco, Temple University
To date, scholars have not addressed Van Gogh’s 1887 images of the industrial
suburb of Clichy in light of the Paris Gas Company (PGC) factory built along the Seine in the
early 1880s. PGC marketed gas-powered lighting and stoves to those living in upper-class
arrondissements in 1887, generating the largest margin of growth in sales and increasing the
demand for factory workers. Domestic-gas created a class divide between those who could afford
the resource and those who labored to provide the commodity. I intend to explore how Van
Gogh’s paintings of Clichy subversively underscore this disconnect, conveying the peripheral
community’s relationship to the day-to-day operations of modern Paris.
In Factories of Clichy (1887), Factory at Clichy (1887), and The Bridge at Asnières
(summer 1887), Van Gogh made reference to the PGC complex, which is significant because the
plant was a sign of new industrial practices. In Factories of Clichy, the couple serves as surrogate
viewers, inviting the spectator to consider the great efforts of labor occurring below the
smokestacks. In Factory at Clichy, which depicts a glass factory, and The Bridge at Asnières, the
artist made a connection between the gas factory and the glass industry, emphasizing the
increased demand of glass due to the use of gaslights. In the three images, Van Gogh preserved
artisanal methods of production, included new factory practices, and considered the nineteenthcentury laborer as a figure sequestered along the city’s outskirts. Through Van Gogh’s unique
November 5-7, 2015
visual devices, the viewer is not necessarily looking at images of work but through the lens of a
couple in the banlieue or a factory worker in his complex. The relationship between the
landscape and the factory workers shows that they exist within a cycle of supply and demand that
absorbs them into the landscape, keeping them connected to the city through the commodity their
work provides.
“Déchets et mysticisme rédempteur dans La Nouvelle Carthage de Georges Eekhoud”
Philippe Chavasse, Rochester Institute of Technology
Publié en 1888, La Nouvelle Carthage est un roman naturaliste de l’écrivain belge
Georges Eekhoud. Ce roman, qui valut à son auteur le fameux prix quinquennal de littérature
française, est le premier volet du récit des aventures de Laurent Paridael, jeune bourgeois en
rupture de ban que ses affinités pour les classes inférieures et les milieux interlopes font
graduellement descendre dans les enfers sociaux. Le cinquième chapitre, chapitre charnière du
livre, est consacré au fossé dans lequel se déversent les déchets de la fabrique de bougies qui
appartient à l’oncle de Laurent Paridael. Ce fossé nauséabond, rempli de résidus putrides, est le
ferment d’une double contamination. Il est le déclencheur d’une épidémie de choléra dans les
faubourgs avoisinant la fabrique. Sur un plan moins littéral il sert aussi de révélateur du « vice »
de Laurent Paridael, à savoir son goût exclusif pour les êtres les plus impurs, contrebandiers,
prostitués et criminels en tous genres. Le fossé devient le point d’ancrage de la rêverie de
Laurent Paridael et de son attachement à une ville, Anvers, en particulier ses quartiers
dangereux. Plusieurs images se superposent dans la description des faubourgs qui bordent le
fossé. La présence de résidus butyreux, d’acides pestilentiels renvoie aux ravages de
l’industrialisation et au traitement inique des classes laborieuses, qui sont contaminées suite à
une négligence volontaire des propriétaires de la fabrique. La revendication sociale fait ici
pendant à l’esthétique naturaliste. La vision d’un luminaire, composé de chandelles de suif
disposées au pied d’une niche à console au fond de laquelle trône une madone en bois peint,
invite à la rêverie qui transfigure le réel. L’intuition du vrai se fait jour sous les traits d’un
mysticisme populaire qui amorce un retour vers les origines. C’est ce glissement vers le
symbolisme que nous examinerons dans cette communication. Nous montrerons comment, chez
Eekhoud, la contamination est une des clés qui en ouvre la voie, la trajectoire suivie par le héros
eekhoudien étant celle d’une dissolution de l’être, d’un épanchement universel qui abolit les
frontières afin de révéler l’unité du vivant.
“‘Les Contagions de l’esprit’: Science et politique dans Les Microbes humains de Louise
Michel”
Elizabeth Tuttle, The Pennsylvania State University
Louise Michel : communarde, anarchiste, bagnarde, et… romancière ? Outre ses contes,
ses pièces de théâtre, et sa poésie, Michel publie entre 1886 et 1890 trois romans d’anticipation :
Les Microbes humains, Le Monde nouveau, et Le Claque-dents qui, jusqu’à la parution en 2013
d’une édition critique, ont souffert d’une double marginalisation : d’une part exclus de
l’historiographie littéraire et de l’autre négligés chez les études portant sur Louise Michel en tant
que militante. Dans ce travail, je propose d’analyser le premier roman de cette trilogie dans
l’objectif de découvrir comment son auteure utilise la littérature pour exprimer ses croyances
anarchistes.
November 5-7, 2015
Comme l’indique le titre, la science, en pleine évolution à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle,
occupe une place prépondérante dans Les Microbes humains. Les travaux de Pasteur ainsi que
ses applications transforment la façon dont le monde pense la maladie et par conséquent
influencent les rapports sociaux. En quoi ce nouveau rapport aux savoirs ouvre-t-il un espace à
partir duquel Michel peut développer sa pensée politique dans une œuvre littéraire? Louise
Michel subvertit des idées naissantes au sujet de la science microbienne, de la criminologie, et de
la transmission des maladies pour créer un monde qui fonctionne comme un « coup d’œil sur les
microbes humains qui fourmillent dans la pourriture de notre fin-de-siècle ». Non seulement elle
identifie ces « microbes humains », mais elle nous offre également une vision utopique d’un
monde guérit ; un monde dans lequel la science joue un rôle capitale et où les classes
prétendument « dangereuses » trouveront enfin de la justice. Ainsi, je soutiens que le roman luimême représente l’antidote contre ce que Louise Michel appelle « la maladie sociale ».
Princeton University Art Museum, Special Visit 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Current Exhibition: Cézanne and the Modern – Masterpieces of European Art from the
Pearlman Collection
Banquet 7:30 pm, Whitman College Dining Hall

Contamination - 41st Annual Nineteenth

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