SOURCE: Goulet, Andrea. “‘Tomber dans le phénomène’: Balzac's Optics of Narration.” French Forum 26, no. 3 (fall 2001): 43-70.

[In the following essay, Goulet explores the dual narrative modes of vision and sight, or mystical revelation and scientific observation, in La Comédie humaine, showing how images of the eye and seeing, as well as ideas about spiritual seeking and inner vision, permeate Balzac's novels.]

Traditional distinctions between romantic and realist fiction in nineteenth-century France invoke a direct relation between narrative form and authorial vision: the poetic thrust of the romantic novel implies a visionary eye, attuned to the realm of mystical revelation, while the descriptive logic of the realist novel implies a scientific eye, trained for the positivist observation of details in the world. One need only read the titles of two well-known critical works on Hugo and Zola to recognize the competing poles of visuality at stake: Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel and The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times.¹ Victor Brombert's study of Hugo emphasizes a transcendent and transgressive visuality, one that exceeds mere ocular perception. Themes of temporal boundlessness, spiritual turbulence, and hallucinatory revelation invest Hugo's narrative “eye” with a visionary consciousness. By contrast, the eye in Zola's novels belongs to a precisely located materiality. As William Berg demonstrates, contemporary scientific theories of optical perception shape Zola's avowed authorial goal of “direct observation.”

Encompassing both poles of Hugo's mysticism and Zola's scientism, Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine can be said to register a continual dialogue between the competing modes of vision and sight, of revelation and observation. Certainly, the long-standing “querelle Balzac réaliste—Balzac visionnaire” has cast the author's narrative range in visual terms, assigning the fantastic and philosophical elements of his writing to the logic of voyance and its historico-sociological themes to the classificatory eye of the observateur.² Whether they have emphasized one side or another, most critics have temperately acknowledged that “Balzac was both an observer who looked at the world with the exact eye of a scientist and a seer who gazed with inspired clarity into the depths of the human spirit and beyond.”³ By associating one kind of vision with science and another with mysticism, however, this seemingly indisputable formulation promotes a distinction that was not observed in discourse of Balzac's time, nor in his Avant-propos de la comédie humaine.⁴ Moreover, it fails to take into account the particular, ambivalent status of vision within nineteenth-century scientific discourse. For Balzac is writing at a moment when a tension between empiricism and idealism pulls the scientist's eye simultaneously in two directions: toward the details of the visible world as well as toward the eternal truths that subtend them.⁵ Even more pertinent to a study of visuality in Balzac than the methodological double thrust of the sciences in general is the ambivalence that inhabited the field of optics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the philosophers of vision Locke, Diderot, and Condillac to the authors of optical treatises Monge, Hassenfrantz, and l'Abbé Nollet, the thinkers who influenced Balzac's visual theories were poised between an idealist concept of vision as the innate apperception of abstract laws and an empiricist definition of sight as subjective and physiological experience.⁶

Typical of this ambivalent position is Thomas Reid, whose Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) informed Balzac's theory of second sight (Barbéris 56). Writing before classical idealism and modern empiricism had been separated into opposing strands of thought in the field, Reid combines Descartes' and Newton's emphasis on the physical laws of optics with Locke's and Addison's studies on subjective sensation. More importantly, he blurs distinctions between physical, physiological, mystical, and conceptual vision by extending the study of optics to discussions of seers and blind men, prophets and “philosophe[s] initiés[s].”⁷ In other words, Reid's summary of the state of knowledge in the field of optics embraces both revelation and observation, both categories that Balzac's readers have tended to position at separate poles of enquiry—philosophico-spiritualist and scientific. Like Reid, Balzac invokes a spectrum of visual models: inspired voyants (Louis Lambert, Victor Morillon, Séraphita/itus), initiés of art and science (Balthazar De Claës, Frenhofer), blind seers (Facino Cane), and worldly heroes whose eyes are gradually trained to perceive the workings of society (Lucien de Rubempré, Eugène de Rastignac, Raphaël de Valentin). But if one is to elucidate more precisely the contours of tension in Balzac's texts between physical sight and mystical vision, it is not enough to indicate similar tensions in the optical discourses of his time; a necessary further step involves relating specific problematics in the study of vision to the narrative choices that Balzac makes. In this way, we might re-calibrate our understanding of La Comédie humaine's visual double thrust, its ténébreuses affaires and its recherche de l'absolu.

SECOND SIGHT AND THE AUTHORIAL “CHAMBRE NOIRE”: VICTOR MORILLON, LOUIS LAMBERT

We find the earliest fictional incarnation of Balzac's theory of voyance, or second sight, in Victor Morillon, a young orphan presented as the author of Les Chouans (1828) in its Avertissement. Although Morillon has lived in poverty and isolation, the young genius is capable of describing an imaginary life of luxury in opulent sensory detail:

Il … décrivit les plaisirs d'une immense fortune avec une étonnante vivacité de couleur; … parla des ivresses ressenties au sein des bals … peignit le luxe des appartements qu'il habita, leurs ameublements, la richesse des porcelaines, la beauté des tableaux, les dessins de la soie et des tapis, entra dans le détail des voitures somptueuses, des chevaux arabes … des modes …, du choix des étoffes, des cannes et des bijoux … sans avoir rien vu de tout cela par sa prunelle extérieure et visible. [emphasis added]⁸

The sumptuous visuality of Morillon's descriptions is anchored, paradoxically, in ascetic experience. As a result, this alter-ego of the young author of La Comédie humaine represents a purified model of authorial imagination, one in which the inner eye remains unaffected by external perception.

Similarly, the title character of Louis Lambert (1832), a doomed genius of whom Mme de Staël says “[c]'est un vrai voyant,” seems to fit a model of second sight in which the perceptible world is bypassed in favor of abstract imagination. Like Victor Morillon, the young genius Lambert can imagine vivid scenes without having actually perceived them:

A l'âge de douze ans, son imagination, stimulée par le perpétuel exercice de ses facultés, s'était développée au point de lui permettre d'avoir des notions si exactes sur les choses qu'il percevait par la lecture seulement, que l'image imprimée dans son âme n'en eût pas été plus vive s'il les avait réellement vues; soit qu'il procédât par analogie, soit qu'il fût doué d'une espèce de seconde vue par laquelle il embrassait la nature.

(T. XI, 595)

Unfettered by external sensory perception, vision exists for Lambert as the privileged medium for mystical revelation.

Si les apparitions ne sont pas impossibles, disait Lambert, elles doivent avoir lieu par une faculté d'apercevoir les idées qui représentent l'homme dans son essence pure, et dont la vie … échappe à nos sens extérieurs, mais peut devenir perceptible à l'être intérieur quand il arrive à un haut degré d'extase ou à une grande perfection de vue.

(629-30)

Ideas are presented here as pure essence, free of the distracting errors of the visible world.⁹ As with Victor Morillon and his ideal vision, Lambert's second sight seems disconnected from the mechanics of perception: “La vue et l'ouïe, dit-il en riant de son expression, sont sans doute les gaines d'un outil merveilleux!” (623) The images that interest Louis Lambert are those of the mind, not those of the eye. In fact, to access his inner vision, Lambert figuratively shuts off his external senses:

—Quand je le veux, me disait-il dans son langage …, je tire un voile sur mes yeux. Soudain je rentre en moi-même, et j'y trouve une chambre noire où les accidents de la nature viennent se reproduire sous une forme plus pure que la forme sous laquelle ils sont d'abord apparus à mes sens extérieurs.

(593, emphasis added)

This formulation of second sight as a purer, non-corporeal type of vision employs a charged metaphor to identify the locus of inner vision: the “chambre noire,” or camera obscura.

The camera obscura is an optical device that allows rays of light into a dark space, projecting images onto an enclosed screen. After Kepler's discovery of the retinal image in 1604, the camera obscura dominated philosophical discussions of sight for two centuries as the most suggestive analogy for how the human eye sees, with the retina understood as analogous to the camera obscura's screen. As Jonathan Crary argues in Techniques of the Observer, the camera obscura model of vision was not a neutral one; in fact, it promoted a primarily Cartesian conception of vision as reasoned abstraction rather than as physiological phenomenon.¹⁰ The “chambre obscure” isolates the observer from the external world and presents vision not as temporal, bodily sensation but as ideal, purified illumination.

The Cartesian subtext of the camera obscura model does seem, initially, to accord with Louis Lambert's retreat from the phenomenal world into a purified space of interiority. As with Victor Morillon, this gifted seer taps into images of a “forme plus pure” than those available to the eye—so that abstraction underlies Balzac's ideal of artistic inspiration.

But as Crary reminds us, the implications of the camera obscura model were in flux by the early to mid-1800's, when Balzac was beginning to write the novels of La Comédie humaine. Although traditionally associated with a non-corporeal purity of vision, the camera obscura image would eventually be recuperated into empiricist notions of visual perception that take into account temporality and bodily experience.¹¹ And in fact, if we look again at the Louis Lambert passage, we see that his “chambre noire” begins already to deviate from the Cartesian ideal—as well as from the visionary ideal represented by Victor Morillon. While Morillon was able to access his inner vision directly, Louis Lambert sees with his mind only after seeing with his eyes. His mental images, says Lambert, have a purer form than “la forme sous laquelle ils sont d'abord apparus à mes sens extérieurs.” In other words, this visionary does not completely bypass the physical world of phenomenal experience. His “second sight” is modeled on a “first” sight, that of the bodily eye.

As the second event in a sequence, Lambert's inner vision partakes of an empiricist temporality that blurs the purely Cartesian implications of the camera obscura.¹² If we take the historical spectrum of theories of visual perception as moving from a seventeenth-century Cartesian idealism (mind over eye) to a nineteenth-century empiricism (eye over mind), Balzac's Victor Morillon represents the former while Louis Lambert begins to incorporate elements of the latter. As I have begun to suggest, Lambert's description of his own second sight allows elements of temporality, materiality, and experience to seep into the idealized model of mystical vision figured by the “chambre noire.”

And in fact, throughout Louis Lambert, the representation of “second sight” remains connected to a physiological, phenomenal visuality. The schoolboy Lambert's keen eyesight, for example, is instrumental to his astounding capacity for learning; “L'absorption des idées par la lecture était devenue chez lui un phénomène curieux; son oeil embrassait sept à huit lignes d'un coup, et son esprit en appréciait le sens avec une vélocité pareille à celle de son regard” (ll [Louis Lambert], 16-17). Eye and mind work in conjunction here; physical perception is not skipped over in Balzac's conception of genius. Lambert's eyesight is emphasized as its own faculty, much as in the description of Etienne, the visionary title character of Balzac's story “L'Enfant Maudit”:

Comme tous les hommes de qui l'âme domine le corps, il avait une vue perçante, et pouvait saisir à des distances énormes, avec une admirable facilité, sans fatigue, les nuances les plus fugitives de la lumière, les tremblements les plus éphémères de l'eau.

(em [“L'Enfant Maudit”], 391)

Such emphases on the physical properties of eyesight—its relation to distance and to light—may seem out of place in the description of men whose souls “dominate” their bodies. But it underlines the fact that Balzac's understanding of vision is not fully decorporealized. The eye may act as privileged intermediary between body and mind, but it does not do so as a transparent window to the other world; rather, it retains its physiological characteristics.¹³

Of course, Louis Lambert is a rather unsystematic text, influenced by Swedenborgian and Mesmerist mumbo-jumbo and by the temporal distance separating the author's memory from Lambert's theoretical proclamations. It would, therefore, be a mistake to try to extract a coherent doctrine out of Louis Lambert's often contradictory musings on the relation between mind and matter, voyance and physical sensation. But that incoherence itself argues against a purified, sublimated mysticism that bypasses physicality altogether. Balzac himself presents the gift of second sight in Louis Lambert as an unexplained phenomenon whose make-up defies rigorous distinctions between matter and spirit. At the end of his narrative about Louis Lambert's short, doomed life, the narrator proposes a systematized distillation of Lambert's revelations, which includes this definition of second sight, or “Specialité:” “La Spécialité consiste à voir les choses du monde matériel aussi bien que celles du monde spirituel dans leurs ramifications originelles et conséquentielles” (688).

Two aspects of this definition go beyond the explicitly mystical, purely transcendent character of the faculty of second sight. First, the seer is understood to have access not only to a transcendental, spiritual realm, but to the hidden meanings of the material world as well. The revelation of occult, or hidden, causes in the daily, physical world undermines any theoretical separations between “Balzac-réaliste” and “Balzac-visionnaire.” Second, the vision is not an atemporal revelation, but an understanding of origins and consequences—that is, of past and future; the role of the seer is not incompatible with the human experience of time. In this way, vue (sight, with all of its physiological implications) imprints itself continuously onto vision (revelatory vision).

In Louis Lambert, Louis is presented as “soul-dominant” like the enfant maudit and Séraphita, beings whose angelic nature dooms them to eventual exclusion from the base, physical world. The narrator—Balzac as a child—represents the materialist counterpart to Lambert's spiritualism: “Il était spiritualiste; mais j'osais le contredire en m'armant de ses observations mêmes pour considérer l'intelligence comme un produit tout physique” (615). The extremes of this argument (mind as pure spirit, mind as pure matter) are explicitly denounced, consistent with Balzac's general defense of the imbrication of spirit and matter: “Nous avions raison tous deux.” What to make, then, of the fact that the materialist narrator survives, while the spiritualist seer goes mad and dies? Certainly, the text presents itself as a nostalgic elegy for the pure spirit that cannot make it in this world; like Séraphita's ascension, Lambert's tragic death reflects an incompatibility between Ideal and Real. But Balzac's text also puts into question the utility of a pure model of voyance, of vision unmarred by the material world. Lambert's obsessive worldly passion with Pauline (initiated, significantly, through the eyes) is presented as the beginning of a downfall into madness and death.

If the fictional Victor Morillon represents an ideal horizon of pure, non-corporeal vision, Louis Lambert tells of how the gift of second sight plays out in the world. Victor as author can be seen as a preempiricist ideal, a fantasy creator, given that Balzac's own writing was in fact supported by actual experience and observation. Once translated into a real life, that of Louis Lambert's, the concept of second sight gets thickened by the material world. With his paean to Lambert's voyance, Balzac strains toward a visionary ideal; but the sheer materiality of his realist oeuvre taps into an alternative mode of visuality, one that engages the bodily eye, not just the mental one.

FROM CAMERA OBSCURA TO AFTERIMAGES: LA MAISON NUCINGEN AND LE BAL DE SCEAUX

Il nous arrive souvent de regarder une robe, une tenture, un papier blanc avec assez de distraction pour n'y pas apercevoir sur-le-champ une tache ou quelque point brillant qui plus tard frappent tout à coup notre œil comme s'ils y survenaient à l'instant seulement où nous les voyons …

Le Bal de Sceaux

Many of us, as Balzac suggests, have experienced the phenomenon described in this passage: having turned our attention away from a particular object, we encounter the delayed visual impression of a blurred shape or a spot of bright light. The effect is even more dramatic when one has purposely focused on an especially contrasting and luminous image, such as the pattern of dark window frames against a light window. The resulting effect (with the light/dark pattern reversed) is called a “retinal afterimage,” an optical phenomenon with a telling history.

Before the eighteenth century, the “afterimage effect” had been dismissed as illusory and therefore inconsequential for serious studies of vision, concerned as those were with the objective nature of the physical world. After Peiresc's 1634 description of window afterimages, the phenomenon had become a sort of parlor trick.¹⁴ And although the “illusion” attracted the scientific attention of thinkers like Mariotte, Newton, and De la Hire, it was not until the eighteenth-century that the retinal afterimage became an object of study as one of several subjective phenomena of vision. No longer was the study of optics concerned only with the physics of objective reality and the rational laws governing a normative concept of vision; Locke's empiricism had turned attention to the subjective experience of seeing. Illusory appearances like blur circles (the “haloes” formed around distant lights), floaters (“mouches volantes”), and retinal afterimages became part of a larger inquiry into the ways in which our bodily eyes affect how we see the world. In 1743, Buffon (the naturalist whose work interested a young Balzac) published his “Dissertation sur les couleurs accidentelles,” a term he coined to describe the afterimages of colors as distinguished from the objective colors that we first perceive. “Les couleurs accidentelles” depend on our organ of sight rather than on the properties of light; they are verified through the observation of subjective experience. Buffon's observation of retinal afterimages paved the way for a growing interest among nineteenth-century scholars, such as Goethe, whose definition of the phenomenon locates it in the observer's body: “Let the observer look steadfastly on a small coloured object and let it be taken away after a time while his eyes remain unmoved; the spectrum of another colour will then be visible on the white plane … it arises from an image which now belongs to the eye” (Crary 69). And it was, indeed, to the physiology of the eye itself that scientists like Purkinje, Aubert, and Helmholtz turned for explanations, performing numerous experiments designed to test the neurological effects of retinal stimulation by light and electrical sparks (Helmholtz V.II, 23. Variations of Sensitivity, 228-264). Despite the many advances in the field, even as late as 1867 Helmholtz decried the incompleteness and inexactitude of scientific knowledge on afterimages. The problem, explains Helmholtz, lay in the limitations of the observer's body:

The difficulty about it is that at first every observer has to gain a certain practice in apprehending and judging accurately the phenomena encountered here; and in doing this generally these experiments soon prove to be so trying to the eyes that severe and dangerous ocular and nervous trouble may ensue if they are pursued too long.

(II, 23, 229)

Thus the very thing that made afterimages a new object of study—their corporeality—also limited the means of acquiring knowledge about them. As scientific inquiry about vision moved in emphasis from the rational abstraction of Descartes to an experience-based empiricism, the subjective body became not only the object of study but also the tool for that study. Cartesian models had swept away anomalies, pulses, and bodily eccentricities in order to create an abstract, idealized model of vision. But empiricist theories of vision brought them back, attempting to explain the eye's functions through observation of how and what a living subject's eye actually sees under changing conditions. In this way, a certain position of mastery over an abstract realm of knowledge gave way to a more phenomenological science of vision, one that studied the body from within the body.

And in fact, it was the groundedness—in the body, in time—of afterimages that made them such a suggestive phenomenon for empiricist theorists of vision. For, as Crary points out in Techniques of the Observer, afterimages carried important theoretical implications for the study of perception and cognition:

First, … the privileging of the afterimage allowed one to conceive of sensory perception as cut from any necessary link with an external referent. The afterimage—the presence of sensation in the absence of a stimulus—… posed a theoretical and empirical demonstration of autonomous vision, of an optical experience that was produced by and within the subject. Second, and equally important, is the introduction of temporality as an inescapable component of observation.

(Crary 98)

As phenomena produced through an interaction of light and the bodily eye, afterimages are subjective; as delayed responses to an initial luminous impression, afterimages exist within a sequential temporality. Both characteristics imply a new way of understanding how we see—and know—the world: through experience, through time. Thus the study of afterimages signals an important epistemological shift away from objectivity and atemporality, away from the kind of abstract purity of the camera obscura model that Balzac invoked to depict Louis Lambert's visionary gift.

So what does it mean when Balzac calls our attention to the experience of afterimages? Surely, when he mentions afterimages in the passage I cited above, Balzac is not entering into a scientific debate about methodology in the field of optics. He neither identifies the phenomenon as an “afterimage” nor invests his mention with any explicit epistemological weight. But it is worth noting the moments at which Balzac draws on the realm of optical experience for his metaphorical imagery. In fact, I would suggest that attention to the context of these optical images can tell us something not only about Balzac's conception of vision and its relation to knowledge, but also about what visual epistemology has to do with the narrative project itself. The conjunction of visual figure and narrative form begins to emerge, for example, in another text featuring a passage in which a retinal afterimage appears: La Maison Nucingen (1838).

La Maison Nucingen is the rather convoluted story of Eugène de Rastignac's rise to fortune through the financial dealings of his lover's husband, the Baron de Nucingen. It is narrated as an overheard tale told by a dinner reveler, Bixiou, to his Parisian chums in a restaurant. Bixiou and his friend Blondet have promised to lay their friends' curiosity to rest with a detailed narration of the banking deals that propelled Rastignac upwards through the layers of French society—and so they relate a tale full of secondary characters and seemingly unrelated events.

One episode concerns a ball at which a mediocre young Parisian named Godefroid de Beaudenord becomes enamored of a lovely—and unmarried—young lady. Godefroid, a superficial fop who ends up being the dupe of Rastignac's financial machinations, is convinced by a friend that he should ask for the lady's hand in marriage. As Bixiou tells it, the lovestruck Godefroid can still think only of the object of his affections, Isaure, even a few days after the ball:

Pendant trois jours dans la chambre obscure de son cerveau, Godefroid vit son Isaure et les camélias blancs, et les airs de tête, comme lorsqu'après avoir contemplé longtemps un objet fortement éclairé, nous le retrouvons les yeux fermés sous une forme moindre, radieux et coloré, qui pétille au centre des ténèbres.

(mn [La Maison Nucingen], 353, emphasis added)

You will recognize the two optical phenomena in this comparison: the camera obscura (here, as with Louis Lambert, compared to the dark enclosure of one's mind) and the retinal afterimage (a bright object reappears as a persistent, blurred image once the eyes have been closed). Their coexistence reminds us that Balzac is writing during a period of flux in theories of vision, a moment when the implied mastery and objectivity of a Cartesian perspectivalism overlaps with the subjective corporeality of empiricist theories of vision. And yet the coexistence is fraught with an underlying tension, for the study of subjective, corporeal phenomena like retinal afterimages marks a departure from the classical conception of vision, away from the a priori purity of the camera obscura model.¹⁵

So when the passage in La Maison Nucingen moves from the “chambre obscure” to the effects of afterimages, it re-inserts the temporal, bodily, phenomenal world into an abstracted, Cartesian model of vision. This point is made clearer when we compare the passage directly to the one from Louis Lambert that we looked at earlier:

Soudain je rentre en moi-même, et j'y trouve une chambre noire où les accidents de la nature viennent se reproduire sous une forme plus pure que la forme sous laquelle ils sont d'abord apparus à mes sens extérieurs.

(ll, 593, emphasis added)

Both Louis Lambert and Godefroid perceive mental images in the figural camera obscura of their minds. The image of a darkened chamber signals a distance from the external, physical world. For Louis Lambert, the distance is caused by an ascetic retreat from the physical world and for Godefroid, it has to do with the physical absence of the woman he admires. But while Lambert's “chambre noire” allows a purified image of the world to develop, Godefroid's “chambre obscure” is modified, as though by the subjective phenomenon of afterimages: compare the “forme plus pure” of Lambert's mental image to Godefroid's “objet … sous une forme moindre, radieux et coloré, qui pétille au centre des ténèbres.” The latter description recalls the language used to describe retinal afterimages, in which the bright blots of color appear shaky and hazy because of the eye's twitches and the semi-obscurity of the closed eyelid. This represents a deviation from the conventional way in which the camera obscura is used to figure vision. In its Keplerian and Cartesian use, the “chambre obscure” had been compared to an open eye that allows a ray of light to project an accurate image to the retina; it acted as a model of pure vision, shutting out any disruptive, extraneous phenomena. In the passage from La Maison Nucingen, however, the “chambre obscure” of the mind is compared to a closed eye, one whose nerves and pulses blur the shrunken, shimmering image. From pure blackness (Louis Lambert's “chambre noire”) to shadowy obscurity (Godefroid's “chambre obscure” and “ténèbres”), the two passages echo a subtle ambivalence in optical discourse between the clear-cut purity of abstracted vision and the bodily disturbances of experiential sight.

It is only fitting, of course, that the spiritual visionary Lambert be associated with an atemporal model of revelation while the lovestruck Godefroid is associated with a corporeal and subjective perception. After all, Lambert is gifted with the inner vision of “second sight,” while Godefroid—propelled by his libidinal stirrings and blind to the ways in which he is being manipulated—has a real lack of vision; the two characters lie on either side, as it were, of normal visual perception. What I find interesting is that this difference manifests itself even in the casual and seemingly similar use of an optical phenomenon, the camera obscura, to refer to their mental processes. While Lambert “sees” the abstract truths of a burgeoning philosophy in his purified mind, Godefroid sees Isaure, the conventionally pretty and conveniently rich young lady he wants to marry. Bixiou calls Godefroid's attraction to Isaure “l'idéal ascétique”—a possible indication of a link to Lambert's visionary mode—but the phrase can only be taken as irony, since Godefroid's rather bumbling courtship shows no signs of pure artistic, ascetic, or amorous genius. Even if Godefroid's cerveau is initially pure, it is soon affected by the afterimages of time and the body in the form of libidinal interest and manipulations of financial timing.

La Maison Nucingen is, after all, a story about cynical intrigue and manipulative venality. Through a series of complex investments, divestments, false rumors, and delays, the Baron de Nucingen assures his own and Eugène de Rastignac's rise to fortune. Speculation here takes on a joint financial and visual meaning, with the chance effects of the market combining with conscious distractions of Godefroid's focus of attention in order to blind, “aveugler,” the victims of the capitalist ruses. The move in visuality from absolute essence to phenomenal appearances corresponds, in a sense, to the move in early nineteenth-century finances from a confidence in stable values to a more fluid conception of the relation between monetary units and their changing appearances (in the stock market, for example). With their “fausse faillite” scheme, Rastignac and de Nucingen are able to manipulate those appearances because they have abandoned an absolutist belief in transcendental value.¹⁶ Similarly, the scientists of empiricist vision turn their attention away from abstract models of vision and towards the shifting, pulsing phenomena of visual experience. Rather than pin down a transcendental physics of vision, they allow temporality to affect its study. The interest in retinal afterimages, or “les couleurs accidentelles,” rests on the fact that they function according to temporal delays and to an element of chance—much as Rastignac's confusing manipulation of Godefroid's (and other victims') investment relies on chance and temporal delay for its success.

This may seem like a negative shift—from idealized, pure image to “une forme moindre” of a previous ideal; but I think there is more at stake here than just a nostalgic glance at purer forms of ascetic vision and value. We should remember that La Maison Nucingen is a tale within a tale: the framing scenes take place at a restaurant, where an unidentified narrator has overheard a story told by the young man-about-Paris Bixiou. The narrator then recounts the story, with a full staging of its narration, complete with details about Bixiou's voice, his gestures, the interruptions from his listeners. In a way, then, “La Maison Nucingen” is a story about story-telling. As the main internal author-figure, Bixiou is materially incorporated into the very production of the tale—unlike Victor Morillon, who is given a fictional role external to the story of Les Chouans.

Bixiou's listeners continuously attack his story-telling technique as “marivaudage.” For example, when he begins to enumerate the camelias worn by Isaure at a ball, Bixiou is interrupted by his companion Blondet: “Allons, voilà les trois cents chèvres de Sancho!” (351), an allusion to Don Quixote's exhortation to Sancho Panza to get to the point. Bixiou defends the value of pleasure over brevity in literature and Blondet apologizes for the interruption. Bixiou is interrupted again, however, right after he compares Godefroid's mental image of Isaure to the effects of after-images:

[BIXIOU:]
… Godefroid vit son Isaure et les camélias blancs, et les airs de tête, comme lorsqu'après avoir contemplé longtemps un objet fortement éclairé, nous le retrouvons les yeux fermés sous une forme moindre, radieux et coloré, qui pétille au centre des ténèbres.
“Bixiou,” dit Couture, “tu tombes dans le phénomène, masse-nous des tableaux?”

(353)

“Tu tombes dans le phénomène”—Well, precisely! At the very moment that he invokes the subjective phenomenon of vision we call an afterimage, Bixiou is accused of paying attention to the world of appearances, to inessential phenomena, to details that do not matter. Or to return to the terms used by Thomas Reid, he is accused of pausing at the level of “apparences visibles” before getting on to what they signify. The centuries-long philosophical debate between unifying essence and diversity of forms gets applied here to the realm of narrative—through a visual figure. Bixiou has gone beyond a conventional description of imagined love by appealing to our own visual experience, to the way in which an idealized image—rather than remain stable in the abstract vacuum of a pure camera obscura—is distorted, blurred, changed by the mechanisms of our bodily eye. Couture's impatient reaction to this appeal signals a desire to pull Bixiou back to his narrative point. In other words, Couture wants Bixiou to eliminate distracting details drawn from the material (sensory, phenomenal) world and to pass directly to the story's essence—just as a Cartesian theory of vision tries to eliminate the phenomenal distractions of sensory perception from an idealized, essentialized notion of vision.

But Bixiou, the storyteller, defends his narration. The material world cannot be skipped over, for it comprises the tale itself. In the realist mode of storytelling, the details do count, the phenomena of the visible world do “matter.” The material particulars—like the number of Isaure's camelias or the way in which Godefroid's imaging of her recalls our own visual experience—cannot be skipped over in the service of brevity any more than the visible world can be skipped over in the service of a theoretical purity of vision.

In short, Balzac's own realist narrative project is at stake in Bixiou's defense of “phenomenal” narration. Bixiou embodies the author-function not as isolated voyant but as effective guide to the labyrinthine realities of society. He is no fictional Victor Morillon, pure spirit and ideal horizon of artistic production as imagined in a Preface draft. Bixiou belongs to the real cast of characters populating Balzac's La Comédie humaine. And his narrative project has less to do with providing a distillation of a sweeping historical event (as Les Chouans was meant to do) than with providing the reader with the sense of a particular atmosphere at a particular moment; as readers we are given enough details to identify with the narrator, sated by an elegant Parisian restaurant meal, listening from behind a curtain to intrigue-heavy gossip.

As his themes and methods move away from idealized overviews and toward daily dealings and contemporary experience, Balzac closes a gap that had been established in the Preface to Les Chouans between visionary author and worldly reader. In that Preface, Balzac described Victor Morillon as a publicity-shy seer, reluctant to tarnish the purity of his vision by allowing mercenary publishers to share his stories with the world:

Les images qui ne devaient pas sortir de son âme, les tableaux au trait, aussitôt effacés que dessinés, qui passaient rapidement dans sa pensée secrète empreints de la grâce des aurores, il les a décrits, en les exposant aux regards de tous, il leur verra perdre leur fleur virginale.

(414)

This early, melodramatic description of the images wrought by gifted inspiration emphasizes their purity, their protection from the eyes of the public, their isolation in a sort of “chambre noire” of the soul—so much so that contact with the world necessarily defiles them. With Bixiou, on the other hand, there is no such imaginative purity: his tale of Rastignac's rise to fortune is based on what he has directly observed, heard, witnessed. The scene of narration itself is given over to be visualized, so that the reader may phenomenologically enter into the experience not only in the tale, but of the tale. Where Les Chouans's unidentified narrator had lamented the impossibility for a reader to see the story's introductory landscape, La Maison Nucingen presents the reader with sensory connections to every element of the story. Bixiou's narration functions according to the empirical logic of observation and experience; unlike the abrupt revelation of images in Victor's mental sanctuary (his “fleur virginale”), Bixiou's story comes to the reader slowly, with interruptions and delays, temporal mediation and sensory screens. If Victor represents the visionary purity of second sight, La Maison Nucingen casts aside that purity in favor of a temporal logic of narration, a series of afterimages rather than one pure “second sight.”

What are the implications of this textually encoded move from one mode of seeing to another in Balzac? Can we read La Maison Nucingen as an exploration of the “modern observer”—that is, of the seeing subject as bodily, temporally grounded and implicated in a nexus of political and economic forces that strip the subject of perspectival mastery? I think so, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the multiple narration (by the frame-narrator, Bixiou, Blondet, Finot, and Couture) implies the abdication of a unique, all-knowing perspective. As with changing theories of optics, an objective, mastering gaze is decentered, and Reason replaced with the experience of individuals. This narrative “democracy” is in keeping with Bixiou's defense of the story's flow as against the voiced by his listeners for a narrative purity, one that follows only the “essence” of the tale. Further, the move away from pure, essential value is echoed in the financial themes of the tale, where relativism and speculation determine the rise and fall of fortunes. And finally, the narrative and financial flux are linked to new modes of government. After having heard the ins and outs of the financial rigamarole that allowed Nucingen and Rastignac to make fortunes, Blondet proclaims that the only way to eliminate financial corruption is to go back to absolute government: “Au gouvernement absolu, le seul où les entreprises de l'Esprit contre la Loi puissent être réprimées!” (392) He adds that all healthy societies go back to a monarchy in one form or another. With Blondet's outburst, La Maison Nucingen ends on a note of nostalgia for the stable purity of a political Absolutism. But its narrative form belies that nostalgia, proposing instead a forward flow whose implications include the following substitutions: a) history for transcendence; b) empirical methodology for a priori deduction; c) speculation for absolute monetary value; d) gradual sight for visionary illumination; e) multiple narration for unifying perspective; f) bodily flux for abstract purity; and g) (semi-) democratic regimes for absolute monarchy.

This may seem a lot to hang on a short story like La Maison Nucingen, but I am trying with this list to show how thoroughly a visual tension—between transcendent “second sight” and physiology-based optics—inflects the broader historical, philosophical, and narrative ambivalences that course through La Comédie humaine. There is no doubt that Balzac, writing at a time of post-Revolutionary flux, was both looking back and looking forward. And while texts like Les Chouans, Louis Lambert, and Séraphita exist under the sign of a dominant nostalgia, other texts exhibit a forward propulsion. Among these I would count Le Bal de Sceaux, to which I now want to turn, as I think its analysis will clarify my point.

Le Bal de Sceaux was written in 1829, soon after Les Chouans. But while Les Chouans is set in 1800, at the end of an era (note the original title, “Le Dernier Chouan”), Le Bal de Sceaux takes place in 1815, at the beginning of the Restoration reign of Louis XVIII—a time of transition, of change, and of a sense of inevitable progress.

It is the story of Emilie de Fontaine, the elegant and beautiful youngest daughter of a royalist count, Monsieur de Fontaine. A Bourbon loyalist, Fontaine had lost a fortune fighting for the king during Napoleon's first rise to power. Such selflessness had won him the consideration of the other courtiers as “le plus pur des vendéens”—but that consideration included as well a bit of sneering at such absolute purity. Slowly, the count begins to realize that those who had joined the king in exile had received far more recompense than those who had bravely fought at home. As a result, Fontaine decides to emigrate with the court during the second royal exile (1814-1815); in other words, he learns from experience. He learns so well, in fact, that he returns to France with the court, after Napoleon's defeat, as one of Louis XVIII's closest counselors. Despite having once balked at any hint of dilution of monarchical power, he eventually accepts representative rule: “Ce prince philosophe [Louis XVIII] avait pris plaisir à convertir le vendéen [Fontaine] aux idées qu'exigeaient la marche du dix-neuvième siècle et la rénovation de la monarchie.” (117) Fontaine has observed his surroundings and allowed experience to modify an originally pure political model.

Fontaine's daughter, Emilie, is another story. Among the favors that Louis XVIII has granted to Fontaine is the marriage of his children to wealthy bourgeois mates. But as Le Bal de Sceaux begins, we learn that his youngest child, Emilie, refuses all proposed matches because she considers them beneath her station. The count's move to a progressive political stance had included the acceptance of a new definition of nobility, one that recognizes class based not only on aristocratic birth but on merit and even on wealth. Emilie, on the other hand, clings to the most traditional, essentialist definition of nobility taught to her by her aristocratic mother: to be a nobleman, one must be born a nobleman. Emilie has in mind an image (we could say a “pre-image”) of her ideal mate: he must be rich, elegant, handsome, svelte, and a Peer of France—that is, of the highest nobility.

Notably, Emilie wants her ideal suitor's nobility to be visually apparent. She seems especially interested in the arms emblazoned on her future spouse's carriage as visible sign of his standing: “Il me serait insupportable,” announces Emilie, “de ne pas voir mes armes peintes sur les panneaux de ma voiture au milieu des plis flottants d'un manteau d'azur.” The lucky position of judgment from which this young lady rejects all suitors is set up by Balzac in visual terms: “[l]e jeune homme qui, au premier coup d'oeil, ne remplissait pas les conditions voulues, n'obtenait même pas un second regard.”

Emilie herself, like so many of Balzac's characters, displays the visible traits of her personality. Haughtiness and disdain, for example, manifest themselves in her height, her piercing eyes (“ses yeux perçants”), and even a rather long neck (“Son col un peu long”), which allows her to survey the world (and her suitors) from above. From her position of superiority, Emilie masters the social spectacle of her time, where seeing and being seen determine every intrigue, amorous or political. Her father, though, worries that the world might tire of “une personne qui restait si longtemps en scène sans donner un dénouement à la comédie qu'elle y jouait,” for if Emilie's power lies in her visibility, it also relies on a certain blindness in her audience: “le comte sentit que plus tard les prétentions de sa fille, dont le ridicule allait être visible pour certaines femmes aussi clairvoyantes que peu charitables, deviendraient un fatal sujet de raillerie.” Emilie has turned the serious business of marriage into a game, one whose investment in the visual realm is threatened by the emptiness of optical illusion. Her father still hopes that the suitors he presents to his daughter will have a chance, “que son assemblée de prétendus ne serait pas, cette fois, une fantasmagorie pour sa fille.” A fantasmagoria—that is, a purely superficial distraction for the eyes, to be dismissed as amusing illusion.¹⁷

The visual mastery that Emilie exerts over her private domain, however, is doomed to be toppled—at the ball of the story's title. As Anne-Marie Meininger proposes in her introduction to Le Bal de Sceaux, the choice of this particular ball reveals Balzac's interest in social and political questions that surpass the private romance of a young lady:

le bal de Sceaux n'est pas seulement l'endroit où Emilie de Fontaine aperçoit Longueville pour la première fois, c'est surtout un lieu de rencontre symbolique entre le passé et l'avenir, c'est ‘l'intéressante mêlée’ de l'aristocratie et du peuple, de ceux qui regardent et de ceux qui bougent, de ceux qui viennent des manoirs où l'on conserve et de ceux qui viennent des champs et des bureaux ou des boutiques où l'on acquiert, de la classe finissante et de la classe ascendante.

(98)

But if the ball marks a link between past and future, manorial aristocracy and commercial class—as indeed the outcome of the story confirms—Emilie arrives at Sceaux blind to its potential blurring of the boundaries she holds so dear. In fact she has decided to attend this provincial country dance for the simple amusement of displaying her radiant beauty. Emilie is certain that the townsfolk will be devoid of interest for her, other than as objects of ridicule: “Mlle de Fontaine se plaisait à se figurer toutes ces tournures citadines, elle se voyait laissant dans plus d'un coeur bourgeois le souvenir d'un regard et d'un sourire enchanteurs, riait déjà des danseuses à prétentions” (133). “Elle se voyait”: as both subject and object of her imagined visuality, Emilie puts herself in the Cartesian position of visual control through abstraction of the self.¹⁸ The perspective external to her own body allows Emilie to imagine the effect that her own charming glances will have on the bourgeois population. They, she is sure, will be “magnetized,” subjugated by her visible radiance and rendered incapable of turning away their own eyes. Emilie's haughty eye will, in short, direct a play of gazes. At least, that is what the young coquette expects from her country outing.

But something unexpected happens to Emilie as she makes her rounds at the modest ball—something that is presented initially as an optical phenomenon familiar to the reader:

Il nous arrive souvent de regarder une robe, une tenture, un papier blanc avec assez de distraction pour n'y pas apercevoir sur-le-champ une tache ou quelque point brillant qui plus tard frappent tout à coup notre œil comme s'ils y survenaient à l'instant seulement où nous les voyons; par une espèce de phénomène moral assez semblable à celuilà, Mlle de Fontaine reconnut dans un jeune homme le type des perfections extérieures qu'elle rêvait depuis si longtemps.

(I, 134)

This, the key passage I cited as epigraph to this section, returns us to retinal afterimages. As with the comparison in La Maison Nucingen between Godefroid's mental image and the common optical phenomenon of afterimages, the description of Emilie's perception of a young man appeals to the readers' common visual experience. The “tache[s]” and “point[s] brillant[s]” in Balzac's analogy recall the physiological effects of retinal stimulation described by scientists of vision like Buffon and Helmholtz. Remember that Cartesian optics dismissed such phenomena as largely irrelevant to the study of vision; for empiricist theories of vision, on the other hand, these seemingly unimportant specks on the eye are essential indicators of optical physiology. Balzac's use here of afterimages in his comparison emphasizes this relevance: Emilie's expectations that nothing in the “blankness” of the ball will attract her attention is belied by the eventual importance of the young man who appears to her as though he were an afterimage. We are being told, in effect, to pay attention to the details, to the phenomena of the visible world because they are what motivate Balzac's story and the society it describes.

Let me add a further nuance to my reading of this passage. Balzac's announced parallel of optical phenomena (the spots and lights that “frappent tout à coup notre oeil”) and moral phenomena (“une espèce de phénomène moral assez semblable à celui-là”) does not actually hold up as a rigorous comparison. One would expect the second term of the comparison to refer to Emilie's eventual recognition that a handsome man had crossed into her field of vision without her having initially noticed him. Instead, Balzac tells us that Emilie came across a man who fit the imagined ideal that she had mentally formed in advance. One might paraphrase Balzac's sentence thus: “just as something we hadn't consciously perceived (although it had crossed our field of vision) appears retrospectively to the eye, Emilie perceived a visual image whose existence she had earlier only imagined.” If a déjà-vu, a “have-seen,” exists for Emilie, it is only because of the force of her imagination—not because of any real similarity of structure between the optical experience of afterimages and her described visual interaction with the “jeune homme.” The result is a catachresis in which the physiological term (a young man passes through Emilie's scopic field) is left out entirely. The “monstrosity” of the figure as well as the hesitancy of Balzac's “assez semblable” point to a conceptual tension—one I would characterize as that between two models of vision. For in fact, the two sides of Balzac's equation are anything but “semblable,” in that they invoke two different types of seeing: the “pre-image” of a Cartesian a priority, in which visual truths are deduced from pre-existing abstract models; and the after-image of empiricist induction, in which optical phenomena are studied for what they can tell us about visual functioning. Emilie's absolute adherence to a pre-existing image of her ideal suitor belongs to a Cartesian logic of abstraction. Balzac's rhetorical appeal to the reader in this passage, on the other hand, privileges the empiricist model as useful for his telling of the story—a story that ends up undermining Emilie's absolutist visuality.

How is Emilie toppled from her high perch of visual mastery? It begins with the passage above, which alerts the reader to the importance of Emilie's first visual contact with the “jeune homme” at the bal. Then, as though the textual structure itself were recreating the double temporality of an afterimage, we get a longer, second version of that moment, one that stretches it out over the time of a more detailed description. First, Emilie is seated in a position of visual mastery over the scene:

[E]lle s'était placée à l'extrémité du groupe formé par sa famille afin de pouvoir se lever ou s'avancer suivant ses fantaisies, en se comportant avec les vivants tableaux et les groupes offerts par cette salle comme à l'exposition du Musée; elle braquait impertinemment son lorgnon sur une personne qui se trouvait à deux pas d'elle, et faisait ses réflexions comme si elle eût critiqué ou loué une tête d'étude, une scène de genre.

(134)

In this description, Emilie's relation to the country dance is that of a spectator at a museum exhibition. The human subjects of the crowd exist only as “tableaux vivants,” as objects for her to “lorgner” impertinantly as if they belonged to the realm of visual representation. Emilie's eye is that of the art critic; it exists as origin point of a framed space, a “tableau,” whose lines of perspective exist in function of her.¹⁹

But this eye does not keep its privileged position: Ses regards, après avoir erré sur cette vaste toile animée, furent tout à coup saisis par cette figure qui semblait avoir été mise exprès dans un coin du tableau, sous le plus beau jour, comme un personnage hors de toute proportion avec le reste. L'inconnu … avait les bras croisés et se tenait penché comme s'il se fût placé là pour permettre à un peintre de faire son portrait.

(134, emphasis added)

Emilie's gaze, starting out as grammatical subject and sign of her visual mastery, loses its status quickly; it is “seized,” controlled externally, taken into a perspective other than its own. And taken by what? By something that exceeds the picturesque framing of Emilie's country scene: by an “inconnu” described as “hors de toute proportion avec le reste.” In other words, this alternate subject exists outside the rules of perspective set up by Emilie's smug art-viewer position. According to the rules of perspective for painting that were drawn up by Brunelleschi and Alberti in the Renaissance (and that dominated classical theories of art), a single element that is out of proportion in a painting destabilizes the entire work. It provokes a “désaxement,” a discrepancy vis-à-vis the origin point that is meant to organize the represented space. The “inconnu” at the Bal de Sceaux is presented as just such an element, one whose disproportion will overturn and trouble the “tableau” that is Emilie's world. Moreover, it is a disproportion only in relation to Emilie's position; in and of himself, the “inconnu” embodies the perfect ideal of esthetic form: “Sa taille svelte et dégagée rappelait les belles proportions de l'Apollon.”

Emilie is used to being the center of interest and attention. She usually wields control over her suitors by magnetizing them, by pulling their desiring gazes toward herself. But this stranger, far from succumbing to Emilie's scopic field, is gazing entrancedly at another: “Son regard fixe suivait les mouvements d'une danseuse, en trahissant quelque sentiment profond.” And Emilie's own gaze is seized and led in to his visual vector: “Mlle de Fontaine suivit alors la direction que prenaient les regards du jeune homme, et aperçut la cause de cette insouciance.” Emilie is marginalized by the young man's oblivion at the same time that she is becoming enraptured by his perfect appearance, at the moment when her haughty “survol” is troubled by desire for the first time in her life.

Obviously, Emilie will do all she can to regain her elevated position. The amusing series of her bumbling attempts have to do, once again, with visual mastery. First, our young coquette wanders at seeming random over to the area where the young man is standing. Although she feigns indifference, “par un artifice d'optique familier aux femmes, elle ne perdait pas un seul des mouvements du jeune homme.” (136) Then, when he fails to notice her, she proposes to her brother a promenade around the handsome stranger “sous prétexte d'admirer les points de vue du jardin.” (136-37) Emilie is used to surveying her sea of suitors from the “points de vue” of her whims, as though the people around her were sculptures in an art gallery. But even her attempt to recreate the control through a contrived perspectival walk fails. Through the stranger's indifference, Emilie's visual field has become uncertain, de-stabilized.

To a certain extent, Emilie's “effets d'optique” do end up capturing the young man's attention and he comes calling a few days later. The story unfolds with a series of encounters that leave Emilie more and more enamored of the young man, Maximilien, without having been able to discover his rank. Maximilien seems to fit her pre-ordained ideal to perfection: he is stunningly rich, meltingly handsome, talented at dancing, generous and good—and he loves Emilie sincerely. It is only a matter of time before the young couple falls in love. But it is a love based on a mutual blind spot: his “punctum caecum” is her snobbery, which he keeps hoping does not really exist; and hers is his non-noble rank, which she allows herself to deny. They avow their love for each other in a tender engagement scene, but the luster fades soon after when Emilie is confronted with visual proof that her fiancé is not a nobleman: she sees him selling cloth in a bourgeois boutique. Her disappointment is enormous. And despite her love for the young man, she cruelly rejects him, even after having learned that his lowly employment represents a generous sacrifice for his older brother to attain the Peerage—the title, that is, that Emilie finds so essential to her union. The tragi-comic dénouement has Emilie, age twenty-two, marrying her eighty-year-old great-uncle and—to top it off—learning too late that Maximilien has inherited the title of Pair de France from his father and older brother.

This somewhat amusing comeuppance of a snobbish young lady leaves us with an apparently clear moral: be flexible in politics and accept the march of progress. I would further suggest that Emilie's story narrativizes this political moral through the figural decentering of a visual subject. For if Le Bal de Sceaux is a political fable, it is also a fable of visibility, of the relations between seeing and knowing.²⁰ The great disappointment in Emilie's life is due to a social upheaval that changes the rules of perspective that had governed her idealized world. First, Maximilien's appearance indicates nobility to Emilie; then, when she sees him selling merchandise, she believes that her initial assessment was wrong. The gap between how he seems and what he is confounds Emilie's hopes for a happy marriage. As a result, she ends up wishing for a more direct relation between essence and appearance, one that would guarantee that a suitor's beauty and elegance are indicative of his rank. This wish takes the form of nostalgia for an era when social hierarchies were confirmed by visible signs:

Si, comme son père, elle avait quelque influence à la Chambre, disait-elle, elle provoquerait une loi pour obtenir que les commerçants … fussent marqués au front comme les moutons du Berry, jusqu'à la troisième génération. … A l'entendre, peut-être étaitce un malheur pour la monarchie qu'il n'y eût aucune différence visible entre un marchand et un pair de France.

(158)

This passage links political absolutism to stable visuality. Horrified by the social mobility of the post-Revolutionary age, Emilie wants to legislate appearances, to ensure a transparent relation between what things are and how they appear to the eye.

But the political flexibility of Louis XVIII's reign indicates a new, troubled status of the privileged seeing subject. No longer able to take in the world at a “coup d'œil” (as Emilie did when she first saw Maximilien at the ball), the modern observer must gain experience with the subtle, changing phenomena of social appearances in order to interpret them. Emilie's “coup d'œil,” based as it is on an absolute, pre-existing image of the world as it should be, recalls the Cartesian a prioristic conception of innate, idealized vision. Her father, on the other hand, has a vision of the world that incorporates learning and experience; his acceptance of historical flux recalls the empiricist concept of vision as gradual acquisition. Emilie has resisted the progress that attempts to pull her away from a static hierarchical conception of the world. But her visuality is at odds with a world coming to terms with the gaps between absolute essence and phenomenal variety. In Balzac's optical and philosophical contexts, the uniform perspective of absolute mastery is giving way to a changing conception of bodily subjects-within-the-world; theories of perception, as I have suggested, are leaning towards a subjective visuality that allows optical phenomena (shadows, sun-spots, after-images) to enter into definitions of vision. The “phénomène” of Maximilien as he first appeared to Emilie at the ball, compared as he was to the spots that appear on one's eyes, is a sign of an irruption of the body into the purified, abstracted, absolutist space of the Ideal.

What the afterimages in La Maison Nucingen and Le Bal de Sceaux suggest is an alternative visuality to the transcendental voyance of second sight. While visionaries like Victor Morillon, Louis Lambert, and—in a more angelic mode—Séraphita represent a vertical thrust toward transcendent illumination, the physical world represented in La Comédie humaine imposes itself as necessary object of observation. Indeed, the material, visible world is not merely a transparent phenomenal indicator of what lies behind it; rather, it functions as an empirical object of observation, modifying the way in which that conceptual, underlying truth is perceived. Throughout the Balzacian text, physical vision structures the spiritual search for truth. If Balzac has given us the visionary dictum “Penser, c'est voir,” it is perhaps as a reminder that images of the mind are grounded in images of the eye, that “second sight” comes after a first.

Notes

1. Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel; and Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times.

2. On the history of this “querelle”, starting with Sainte-Beuve's and Baudelaire's interventions in 1850, see Barbéris, Balzac: une mythologie réaliste; for another now classic locus, see Béguin, “Balzac visionnaire,” in Balzac lu et relu.

3. Bays, “Balzac as Seer,” 83-92; 83.

4. With its allusive linking of mystics and sages (from Mesmer and Saint-Martin to Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire), the Avant-propos explicitly fuses science and mysticism, refusing to situate them at opposite ends of a spectrum.

5. The nineteenth-century sciences have been categorized according to discipline as either empirical and “inductive” (biology, natural history) or abstract and “deductive” (physics, mathematics). See, for example, Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences. Nonetheless, Foucault's formulation of modern (post-1800) epistemology as caught in an “empirico-transcendental doublet” better reflects the methodological and theoretical tensions between induction and deduction that pertained across scientific thought and within particular disciplines. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, 330-331. Balzac, of course, rejects categorical distinctions between scientific and mystical discourse in the Avant-Propos, where he links the scientific writings of Leibnitz and Lavater to the mystical musings of Swedenborg and Saint-Martin. But even when engaging in strictly scientific debates, the author of La Comédie humaine implicitly refuses to discount either empiricism or transcendentalism, paying tribute, for example, both to Cuvier's empiricist emphasis on the observation of natural phenomena (in La Peau de chagrin and La Recherche de l'absolu, for example) and to Saint-Hilaire's direct inquiry into what Françoise Gaillard calls “la raison invisible du visible,” the unified, hidden essence that transcends mere visible appearances (in the Avant-propos). Gaillard, “La Science: Modèle ou Vérité. Réflexions sur l'avant-propos à La Comédie humaine,” 57-83; 73. In Illusions perdues, Balzac calls Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire “deux génies égaux” (Fargeaud, Madeleine. Œuvres complètes, note p. 117).

6. The broad shift from classical (Cartesian, Newtonian) optics to a modern (empiricist, physiological) optics is chronicled in various histories of theories of visual perception, including the following: Dember, Visual Perception: the Nineteenth Century; Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing; Helmholtz, Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics; Machamer and Turnbull, Studies in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science; Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-1950; Taton, Histoire Générale des Sciences; and Wade and Swanston, Visual Perception: an Introduction.

7. Reid, “Des Erreurs des Sens,” 48.

8. Balzac, Œuvres Complètes, 417-18.

9. Certainly, as many critics have explained, this anti-materialist notion of second sight can be traced to a Swedenborgian mysticism. See, for example, Bays, “Balzac as Seer,” 83-92; and Bérard, “Une Enigme Balzacienne: la ‘Spécialité,’” 61-82. But read in the context of scientific notions of sight and second sight, Lambert's “grande perfection de vue” shares with Cartesian optics its conception of physical sensation as an obstacle to real knowledge. In Descartes, reality and truth are assured by Reason, and not by the evidence of the senses, for “c'est l'âme qui sent, et non le corps” (681-2). Descartes, “De la Dioptrique,” 651-761.

10. Crary takes the figure of the camera obscura as paradigmatic of the status of the observer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge ma: mit Press, 1990); the argument is made throughout the book, but see especially chapter 2: “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject.” Jay also refers to the “Cartesian perspectivalism” figured by the camera obscura as the “dominant scopic regime of the modern era.” Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, 69-70.

11. Helmholtz, for example, writing in the late nineteenth century in defense of the empiricist theory of vision, uses the image to explain the physiological phenomenon of the inverted retinal image: “In its optical behaviour the eye is essentially like a camera obscura” (Vol. I, 91: “Optical System of the Eye”). The comparison had been made centuries earlier by J. B. Porta (1545-1615), but Helmholtz' use shifts the figure's connotation from transparency to anatomy.

12. One might note that the Cartesian ideal of transparent vision (unimpeded by the potential errors of physical senses) appears in the term “clair-voyance,” while “seconde vue” retains an echo of “la première vue”—physical sight.

13. As Brooks writes, the Balzacian text continually slips from vue (physical sight) to vision (symbolic significance); but while the realm of meaning associated with vision remains the telos of the Balzacian text, it cannot be accessed without “the ‘pressure’ applied to the surfaces of the real, the insistence of the recording glance.” The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, 125.

14. Helmholtz, in his Treatise of Physiological Optics, tells of a seventeenth-century wager, in which Bonacursius bet a Jesuit scholar named Kircher that he could make a person see just as well in the dark as in the light; he won the bet by making Kircher look steadily at a drawing displayed in a window, then darkening the room and having him look at a blank piece of paper, on which Kircher plainly perceived the same drawing. (23. Variations of Sensitivity, 261)

15. Remember that the camera obscura model elides not only corporeality (by reducing the body to one abstract point of perspective) but also temporality (by representing the act of seeing as virtually instantaneous).

16. Their tale belongs to Balzac's attempt to represent a moment of transition—transition from one form of capitalism (still anchored in pre-capitalist value systems) to another, more modern form: “Du capitalisme larvé au capitalisme triomphant, du riche honteux au riche insolent, de l'argent maigre à l'argent gras, telle est l'évolution que, de Gobseck à La Maison Nucingen, Balzac nous fait toucher du doigt.” (Pléiade Vol. VI: Pierre Citron's Introduction, 326) Note that Citron's formulation, in addition to explaining the economic transition, also suggests an appeal to the senses in Balzac's representational mode: to the direct material witnessing of the “toucher du doigt.”

17. On the historic and literary connotations of fantasmagoria, see Milner La Fantasmagorie; and Castle “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” 26-61.

18. Lacan characterizes “seeing oneself seeing” as the quintessential delusion of Cartesian perspectival vision/thought. Lacan, “Du Regard Comme Objet petit a,” 65-84. especially 71-76.

19. On the mastering logic of the “tableau,” see Foucault. On perspectival vision, see Harries “Descartes, Perspective and the Angelic Eye,” 28-42; Bryson Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze; and Damisch, L'Origine de la perspective.

20. Goux's article “Descartes et la perspective” examines the way in which the perspectival logic of Descartes' philosophical writings is “à la fois monarchique et démocratique” in its positing of a central viewpoint from which a single subject (in the king-position, whether actually king or not) sees the world; “Voilà ce que postule la perspective, comme le cogito: la subjectivité absolue ne contredit pas mais rend possible l'objectivité parfaite.” (19) Commenting on this article, Swain writes: “The new emphasis on viewpoint both gave power and took it away—gave it, by placing the viewer at the optimum point of control, and refused it, by making this place open, democratically, to everyone.” (Swain, “Lumières et Vision: Reflections on Sight and Seeing in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France,” 7).

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