Contamination: 41st Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium Image: Louis Pasteur, by M. Renourad (L’Illustration, 1884) Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University 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 NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 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 NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 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