• 1 Franz Boll’s 1876 discovery of ‘retinal violet’ brought new physiological evidence to the hypothesi (...)

1Late nineteenth-century scientific studies of photochemical effects in the eye inspired a set of curious fictions: stories in which an optogram, or retinal photograph, reveals the last thing seen by a newly-dead person.1 In Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s fantastic philosophical tale Claire Lenoir (written in 1867 and revised in 1887), the eccentric narrator Tribulat Bonhomet uses an ophthalmoscope to observe a horrifying retinal image in the titular heroine’s eye: the figure of a vampiric savage wielding in triumph the bloody head of his victim, identifiable as Claire’s lover. The optogram appears again in a little-known detective story written in 1897 by Jules Claretie, entitled L’Accusateur. The ‘accuser’ of the title turns out to be the eye of a murdered diplomat, for when the police photograph the cadaver’s dissected retina, they find in it a blurred image of the face on which the victim had turned his gaze upon dying. The forensic function of the optogram is put to similar use by Jules Verne in his science-fiction adventure Les Frères Kip (1902), in which a sea captain is stabbed to death on a remote island in the tropical South Pacific and the identity of his assassins is revealed by the enlarged photograph of his corpse’s eye.

• 2 Villiers de L’isle-Adam, Claire Lenoir et autres contes insolites (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1984) (...)
• 3 Jules Claretie, L’Accusateur (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1897) 21.
• 4 Jules Verne, Les Frères Kip (Paris: Hachette, 1972) 70.

2Beyond the central motif of the optogram, however, these three texts—Villiers’s Claire Lenoir, Claretie’s L’Accusateur, and Verne’s Les Frères Kip—have in common the theme of a domestic space violently troubled by the invasion of exotic, foreign elements. This thematic convergence first came to my notice through the recurring motif of a South Seas knife or Malaysian Kriss. In Claire Lenoir, Claire’s European husband wreaks revenge on his sea-going rival by atavistically inhabiting the form of an ‘Ottysor,’ an exotic combination of primitive beast and Polynesian pirate. As Claire’s lover approaches the South Sea island, the Ottysor awaits his prey with knife in hand: ‘Il aiguisait furtivement, derrière lui, un grossier coutelas de pierre.’2 In Claretie’s L’Accusateur, the assassin hails from Buenos Aires, but has come to Paris to track down his victim, a former French ambassador. When the story’s detective Bernardet enters the antechamber of the murdered man’s salon to investigate the crime, he notes the diplomat’s collection of exotica, including ‘quelques armes précieuses en panoplies, sabre japonais ou kriss de Malaisie.’3 Finally, in Les Frères Kip, the murder weapon itself is a Malaysian kriss and though the crime takes place on a tropical island near New Caledonia, populated by suspect primitives, the knife shows up in a gap between the wooden planks of a sailing ship’s cabin: ‘C’était un poignard de fabrication malaise, un de ces kriss à dents de scie, qui s’était glissé dans l’interstice des deux planches disjointes.’4

• 5 Pierre-Georges Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: José Corti, 19 (...)
• 6 Gwenhaël Ponnau, La Folie dans la Littérature Fantastique (Paris: Presses du C.N.R.S., 1987) 10.
• 7 Jacques Noiray, ‘Introduction,’ Claire Lenoir et autres contes insolites (Paris: Garnier Flammarion (...)

4But not only do tropes of irruption and invasion inhabit the historical discourse surrounding these texts; they also serve as metaphors for the mode that I will call the ‘optogram fantastic.’ Although Villiers’s, Claretie’s, and Verne’s stories belong to different generic categories—fantastic tale, roman policier, and science-adventure fiction—in this fin-de-siècle moment of contaminated membranes we might do well to ignore such boundaries and suggest that if Claire Lenoir, L’Accusateur, and Les Frères Kip share the theme of violent encroachment on private space, they share as well a particular textual quality that has traditionally marked the category of the fantastic as ‘irruptive’ in its very form. From Pierre-Georges Castex’s classical definition of the fantastic genre as ‘intrusion brutale du mystère dans le cadre de la vie réelle’5 to Gwenhaël Ponnau’s statement that ‘[l]e fantastique se caractérise [. . .] par l’irruption de l’inadmissible au sein de l’inaltérable légalité quotidienne,’6 the genre’s inherent ambiguities are figured as a piercing confrontation between two disjunctive spheres or planes. The imaginary and the real, the irrational and the rational, the queer and the quotidian—these are not two balanced, parallel realms mediated by a static barrier, but clashing forces whose interpenetration results in the uncanny of the fantastic form. Writing about Claire Lenoir, Jacques Noiray proposes that ‘[l]’ophtalmoscope [. . .] permet de mesurer scientifiquement l’irruption d’une réalité visionnaire dans l’univers de la réalité objective.’7 Indeed, in all three of the optogram fictions discussed here, optical technology scrambles boundaries between two distinct realms (life and death, inside and outside) to reveal the uncanny gap created by their clash.

• 8 Verne 7.
• 9 Based on a reading of Les 100 millions de la Bégum, Bruno Latour identifies Jules Verne as a ‘pre-P (...)

6Verne sets his tale in 1885, identifying the date as 46 years after Great Britain’s occupation of New South Wales and 32 years after the colonization of New Zealand, a place, he writes, devoured by gold-fever and dangerously affected by the promiscuity of nations8. As Australians and Chinese, Americans, and Europeans descend like birds of prey on the rich territories, criminals driven by cross-boundary gold-lust take advantage of an unpoliced space opened up by colonial expansion: the seas and the islands. Throughout the novel, in fact, oceanic territories, unmoored by single and stable national affiliation, are presented as a dangerous place of mixing, of unchecked circulation (open, like a post-Pasteurian body, to infection and contamination by blood-thirsty—or gold-hungry—visitors).9

• 10 Rudyard Kipling, ‘At the End of the Passage’ 154.

7It is noteworthy that colonial expansion, with its attendant clashes, provides a setting not only for the French optogram fictions I am primarily discussing, but also for Rudyard Kipling’s 1891 short story, ‘At the End of the Passage,’ in which a group of civil servants face death in a lonely Indian outpost of the British Empire. This story, too, features an optogram: the photograph of a dead man’s retina that may or may not reveal the terrifying circumstances of his death. But what is striking is the conjunction of colonial threat with optical boundaries, as one character (Mottram of the Indian Survey) complains that in this ‘tawny’ land, he must continually ‘wash [. . .] my eyes to avoid ophthalmia, which I shall certainly get’ and another civil servant (the engineer Hummil) suffers nightmarish visions that dissolve into ‘swimming specks within the eyeball’ before literally inscribing themselves as death into his terrified eyes.10

• 12 Claretie 104.

9But well before Kipling, Verne, and Claretie, Villiers had already combined the motif of the retinal afterimage with the theme of dangerous travel, in the particularly brutal murder of Sir Henry Clifton, naval officer and lover of Claire Lenoir. This ill-fated marine lieutenant is an aventurier, in both French senses, exploring the seas and engaging in adultery, itself a form of intrusion by a foreign body into a domestic sphere. Clifton is killed by the Ottysor-pirate-cum-avenging-husband in the island dunes of ‘l’extrême Océanie,’ at the latitude and longitude of the Marquesas, ‘en avant du groupe sinistre des Pomotou.’12 Given the violent outcomes of marine exploration for characters in Verne, Villiers, and Claretie, it becomes evident that the sea itself is coded as a site of confusion—not only perceptual, but also moral and territorial.

• 13 Verne 64.

10In the case of Jules Verne, it is perhaps his external perspective on British imperial rule that allows him free play with the colonial tropes of this moral and territorial confusion. One of Les Frères Kip’s two central villains is the Irishman Flig Balt, a dishonorable wanderer of suspect national allegiance. Seafaring in this novel is not a condemnable activity in and of itself—after all, the heroes (Gibson, Hawkins, and the Kips) represent upright participants in the international exchange of merchandise; but an unmoored wanderlust never fails to signal rogue intentions. While tavern-hopping criminals, for example, look forward to cutting ties with their originary states, the ‘good guys’ never forget their homeland. The heroic Pieter and Karl Kip, though brave and dedicated temporary citizens of the English sailing vessel, announce to their captain: ‘En quelque endroit que nous débarquions, [. . .] nous trouverons les moyens de nous faire rapatrier . . .’13 In this novel, then, boundaries matter. And British imperial expansion disrespects traditional boundaries, geographical and political. The pro-Fenian excursus at the end of Les Frères Kip, invoked to distinguish honorable Irish rebels from the unsavory population of a Tasmanian prison, gives voice to Verne’s support of self-rule, that is, of a nationalist resistance to cross-boundary incursions. It is as though each nation, for Verne, were a seed-pod that, when opened (by a puncturing intruder-state), would disperse its bad seeds—or germs—into the world to wreak havoc against vulnerable organisms.

• 14 Verne 8.
• 15 Villiers de L’isle-Adam 48–49.

11Moreover, geographical displacement in Les Frères Kip is marked by linguistic intermixing, as when Verne provides both European and native names for the tropical islands of the Pacific: ‘Dunedin est située sur la côte sud-est de cette île du Sud que le détroit de Cook sépare de l’île du Nord,—en langue indigène Tawai-Pounamou et Ika-na-Maoui, dont se compose la Nouvelle-Zélande.’14 One might compare these linguistic borrowings, which mobilize an exoticizing anthropological discourse, with the stupefying babble of Claire Lenoir’s narrator Tribulat Bonhomet, as he chats up the Lenoirs before dinner: ‘Je parlai [. . .] des sectes de sorciers qui dansent en Afrique avec des bâtons de soufre enflammé sous les aisselles,—du passeport tatoué sur mon dos que m’avait donné, en signe d’affection Zoué-zoué-Anandésoué Rakartapakoué - Boué - Anazenopati-Abdoulrakam-Penanntogômo V, roi des îles Honolulu et Moo-Loo-Loo.’15 Though mere afflatus, Bonhomet’s invocation of savage sorcery and tongue-twisting foreignness in the calm of Claire Lenoir’s staid salon presages the much more violent and intimate irruption that will end the tale. The comical disjunction between ‘Moo-Loo-Loo’ and Hegelian philosophy in this tale points to a way in which Villiers’s fictional universe differs from Verne’s, for in Claire Lenoir, intercultural exchange is neither rational nor economic; it brings together completely separate spheres without the mediating space of the seas, without the space-time logic of human travel. Still, Bonhomet’s tattooed passport introduces, in a symbolic register, the themes of circulation and foreign imprint that will motivate Verne’s—as well as Kipling’s and Claretie’s—optogram fiction.

• 16 Verne 22.
• 17 Verne 45.
• 18 Verne 137.

12In Verne’s text, the language of anthropological science is harnessed by the Europeans to describe Maori natives as physiological types; ‘ce type d’indigènes de taille moyenne, au teint de mulâtre, robustes, musculeux et souples, aux cheveux crépus, dont se compose généralement la classe du peuple chez les Maoris.’16 The ethnographic tone of cultural objectivity, however, can only serve as ineffectual prophylactic, like the ‘anneau de corail’ that protects the islands ‘comme une muraille défend une ville forte.’17 Things—arrows, bullets, knives, foreignness—breach the bounded spaces of civilized life. As do people. The criminals Flig Balt and Vin Mod, who first ‘invaded’ the ship under cover of falsified documentation, constantly penetrate the Kip Brothers’ chambers, both on and off the ship. But what allows them to do so with such ease is the pre-existing porosity of these spaces; when Vin Mod comes to the Kips’ hotel room to plant the incriminating kriss, he is aided by a window-opening and his previous visual ‘invasions’: ‘ . . . [il] pénétrait dans le logement des deux frères, sans avoir eu à briser un carreau de la fenêtre, restée entrouverte. Cette chambre, il en connaissait bien la disposition pour y avoir maintes fois plongé ses regards, [. . .] il y glissa les papiers, les piastres, le poignard, et la referma.’18 As with the ‘deux planches’ in our earlier citation, a gap has already been opened in Les Frères Kip—opened by colonialism, by the promiscuity of nations and races, by xenophobic fears and linguistic incomprehension. Within this space, no chamber’s membrane (including that of the optical chamber) remains impervious to invasion by external forces.

• 19 See Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Universi (...)
• 20 Claretie 104, 109. See Christian Phéline’s ‘L’Image accusatrice’, Les Cahiers de la Photographie 17 (...)
• 21 Claretie 260.

13The fin-de-siècle was the age of Cesare Lombroso, the criminal anthropologist whose methods contributed to ‘la police scientifique,’ known for its Bertillonage or anthropometric identification of criminal traits.19 It may come as no surprise that Claretie’s L’Accusateur is dedicated to Lombroso—and in fact throughout L’Accusateur, physiognomy and racial characteristics are often invoked to describe suspects and criminals. Indeed, the ‘service d’anthropométrie’ is called upon in this novel not only to photograph the victim’s eye but also to track the identifying features of its foreign suspect.20 Claretie fuses anthropometric photography with optogram biology in order to urge the application of new technologies to the field of criminal justice. At one point, he even gives his readers a glamorous glimpse into the bureaucracies of contemporary crime-fighting by typographically miming the official form of signalement as found at the actual service anthropométrique; without identifying details, the list of categories21 is reproduced vertically in the novel’s text:

• 22 Claretie 214.
• 23 Claretie 221.
• 24 In optics, there is similar anxiety about foreign bodies entering the eye, troubling its transparen (...)
• 25 Claretie 222.
• 26 Claretie 244.
• 27 Claretie 206.
• 28 Claretie 301–02.

14The physiological categorization of criminals by ethnic type was a primary mode of policing, of controlling circulation within the city limits of Paris at the time of L’Accusateur and though Claretie’s novel is set in Paris rather than the high seas and Pacific islands, it has in common with Les Frères Kip the representation of xenophobic profiling and anxieties about the undetected circulation of invading bodies. In this case, the threat is to the civil order of an urban space, whose boundaries have been pierced in two directions: by the eventual victim, whose diplomatic duties have taken him to the Southern hemisphere; and by the assassin, brought back, like a delayed virus, to the European continent. It is the killer’s foreignness—though displaced from visage to accessory—that identifies him from the start, when a cooperative witness describes the stranger’s only evident distinguishing trait: a sombrero. The detective Bernardet hypothesizes from this fact that the man is a stranger: ‘Coiffé à l’espagnole, il n’avait pas eu le temps d’abandonner la mode des pays d’où il venait, cherchant aventure.’22 ‘Cherchant aventure’—the man must be an adventurer, a wanderer (Bernardet later adds the epithet ‘errant’ to his description23), unmoored and unfixed to his place of origin, like the criminals in Les Frères Kip. This makes him a threat within the very logic of the story’s underlying motivation, the optogram technology that hopes to pin down, to fix once and for all, a fleeting image in the eye.24 When Bernardet finally sees the stranger, he is struck immediately by the tell-tale hat, but also by an optical fixity that signals, paradoxically, the wandering impulse that makes him a dangerous suspect: ‘L’œil était fixe comme celui des chercheurs d’inconnu qui interrogent l’horizon, regardent l’eau courir, contemplent la mer, demandent une sorte de bonne aventure à l’infini.’25 This suspicious wanderer, named Pradès, claims to have recently arrived from Australia, but lets drop a reference to Buenos Ayres, the city where the murder victim, Rovère, had filled a diplomatic post; as in Les Frères Kip, the Southern hemisphere’s new contacts with Europe touch off anxieties about circulation and exchange. Moreover, L’Accusateur shares with Verne’s novel the displacement and condensation of criminal threat onto objects marked as foreign: objects of penetration, like the Malaysian kriss or the ‘couteau espagnol, à lame courte’ that Pradès carries in his pocket;26 objects of signalement for the surveilling eye, like the Spanish-style hat worn by Pradès; and objects that call attention to liminality, like a missing frame that ends up playing a central role in the story’s plot. This frame, ‘orné de pierres mexicaines, espèces de cabochons, qu’il [Rovère] avait autrefois rapportées d’Amérique’27 embodies an irruption of the foreign into a domestic space, one that reverberates with meaning for Pradès as he, an intruder in Rovère’s home, plunges his knife into the victim’s body. As the murderer explains to Bernardet, he had become distracted by his victim’s intense stare at a painted portrait on the wall, ‘un portrait entouré d’une sorte de cadre historié où Pradès crut apercevoir des pierres précieuses, des perles enchâssées dans les rinceaux (il sut depuis que c’étaient simplement des minéraux intéressants, un cadre sculpté et orné par quelque orfèvre de la République Argentine et rapporté de Buenos-Ayres) . . .’28 Motivated by both avarice and uneasy guilt (he senses the painted friend as witness of his misdeed), Pradès rips the portrait from his victim’s hands, steals the frame and sells the painting; this is what allows the painted ‘témoin’ to become a living red herring—the frame (a sort of fetish parergon), whose imported and inlaid stones mark exoticism, wealth, travel, all that made Rovère vulnerable to attack. Again, boundaries are at issue, as is the power of the eye to crystallize troubling connections across those boundaries.

• 30 Christian Phéline, ‘L’Image accusatrice’ 55.
• 31 Latour 17. See also Pierre Darmon, L’Homme et les microbes, on the pre-history and history of micro (...)
• 32 Claretie 70.

16Although her book focuses on the Anglo-German context, Otis’s characterization of a British ‘imperial immune system’ can be productively applied to France. Christian Phéline tells us that in French thought of the 1880’s, the racial classification systems of Bertillon and Tarde, with their attempts to visualize criminal threat through racial features, were understood as analogous to Pasteur’s work; the containment of criminal ‘contagion’ became a sort of ‘macro-biologie sociale.’30 In the decades of Villiers’s, Claretie’s, and Verne’s optogram fiction, France was, as it were, ‘Pasteurized.’ The ‘irruption of the microbe’ created a sense of external threat and infection to the no-longer-integral body, but already hygienist concerns had localized life and death anxieties on the corporeal boundaries between outside and inside.31 The confluence of themes with those I have been discussing in optogram fiction should be, by now, obvious; but Claretie adds another implicit connection in an analogy used to describe Bernardet’s avid study of Vernois’s optogram research: the detective pores over the archival documents with ‘l’acharnement d’un paléographe déchiffrant un palimpseste ou d’un pastorien courbé sur ses bouillons de culture’.32 Here, the scientific desire to conquer new territory is combined not only with the theme of microbial irruption, but also—through the figure of paleographic palimpsest—with the theme of temporal irruption, a topos that haunts the ‘optogram fantastic.’

• 34 Verne 40.
• 35 Claretie 310.

17At the risk of robbing Serres’s statement of its evocative grace, let me point out its characterization of fin-de-siècle France as a place of modernity inhabited by ancient impulses. The paradigm holds sway not only in the realm of Pasteur and microbiology, but in various forms of visual science as well. When a character in Les Frères Kip proclaims that ‘nous sommes tous les deux possédés du démon de la photographie,’ he is lightheartedly mocking his own modern technophilia while invoking the archaic trope of possession, of the loss of control associated with an invaded body.34 And it is, paradoxically, the very modernity of the fin-de-siècle moment that seems to awaken atavistic impulses, as Dr Erwin of L’Accusateur implies in his description of the new century’s threshold: ‘C’est l’heure des miracles. Mais pour qu’ils s’accomplissent, il faut, comme à ceux de la foi primitive, y croire . . .’.35 Primitive faith, primitive rituals—and primitive savagery—crop up in the literary, scientific, and theoretical works of the late nineteenth century with notable frequency; from Zola’s La Bête humaine to Morel’s and Tarde’s degeneration theories, the French stage is set for Freud’s later work on the ‘phylogenetic fantasy’ and primitivist irruptions in Totem and Taboo.

• 36 Phéline, ‘L’Image accusatrice’ 45.
• 37 Claretie 85.

18The idea of a primitive savage impulse as threat to the modern civilized order rests upon the trope of xenophobia and criminality discussed in the previous section. Lombroso, for example, incorporated atavistic theories into his 1880’s studies on violence, defining the criminal as ‘un être atavistique qui reproduit dans sa personne les féroces instincts de l’humanité primitive et des animaux inférieurs.’ According to his recapitulation thesis, both crime and insanity constitute brutal regressions to a primitive, simian state; moreover, this state of regression characterizes entire ‘savage’ races understood as blocked in an anterior phase of biological progress.36 In our optogram fictions, savage—and foreign—irruptions of violence into the spaces of civility and civilization carry with them the threat of contagion, that is, the capacity to render modern European subjects brutal and bestial. When L’Accusateur’s ‘crime du boulevard’ is discovered and announced in the Parisian press, crowds follow its details with avidity: ‘[t]out ce qu’il y a de curiosités vulgaires dans l’homme se réveille, comme des bestialités ataviques à l’odeur du sang.’37 The whiff of foreign-primitive contagion permeates L’Accusateur’s descriptions of its South American assassin, identified by the cut of his hat:

• 39 Guy de Maupassant, Le Horlà (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
• 40 Claretie 300.

19The exotic hat transforms the suspect into something rather eerie, as the physical description fades into the language of a vague uncanny: ‘un retour de quelque chose de loin.’ One hears echoes here of another fin-de-siècle text, Maupassant’s Le Horlà, where that which possesses the narrator—ghost? demon? disease?—seems to have arrived by boat from South America, part of an ‘épidémie de folie venante de Rio.’ As the narrator explains, ‘Le ça vient toujours d’un ailleurs. Mais maintenant, il est en moi.’39 What Claretie’s text suggests is that the ‘ailleurs’ that haunts late nineteenth-century Europe is both spatial and temporal, for the ‘retour de loin’ responsible for the diplomat Rovère’s brutal murder in a Parisian parlor refers both to a geographical displacement (South America to France) and an atavistic irruption of primitive savagery into modern civilization. Even the central murder itself, like the killings in La Bête humaine, is ascribed to base animal instinct rather than reasoned revenge: ‘Pradès maintenant, venu pour supplier ou menacer, n’avait plus qu’une pensée, hideuse et féroce: tuer. Il ne raisonnait pas. Il n’était plus qu’un instinct déchaîné.’40 This instinct is not only primitive, but foreign, honed in a geographical ‘ailleurs,’ the ‘là-bas’ of South America: when the killer slashes his victim’s throat with a knife, he does it, writes Claretie, like the gauchos of Argentina as they slaughter their beef.

• 41 Villiers de L’isle-Adam 95.
• 42 Villiers de L’isle-Adam 114 (my underline).
• 43 Villiers de L’isle-Adam 116.

20The savage Other returns in Claire Lenoir even more dramatically, as the text is strewn with literal and metaphorical possessions by beasts and demons, vampires and cannibals. Claire’s husband, Césaire Lenoir, argues that civilized humans ‘sont engagés encore dans les liens inférieurs de l’Instinct, sont des bêtes invisibles’—and well before he inhabits the form of the savage Ottysor, he casts the ‘bête humaine’ thesis within the multiple displacements of geography, time, and culture: ‘Et moi, et moi-même, [. . .]. Je sens en moi des instincts dévorateurs! J’éprouve des accès de ténèbres, de passions furieuses! [. . .] des haines de Sauvage, de farouches soifs de sang inassouvies, comme si j’étais hanté par un cannibale!’41 After Lenoir’s death and reincarnation in the South Seas, it is Claire who is haunted, atavistically possessed by the very image of her savage husband; ‘Oh!,’ she cries, as she recounts the vision that torments her, ‘par quelle suite de pensées, , pouvais-je en être venue à me le figurer . . .’42 And in a final destabilization of intersubjective barriers, the troping of Claire’s vision as bodily possession (‘Ah! vampire! démon! [. . .] Laisse mes pauvres yeux!’) gets transferred onto Bonhomet, who tells us: ‘Un Démon me saisit donc le bras, courba ma vieille tête, appuya sur mon œil, et presque de force, la loupe puissante, et, m’indiquant, dans l’âme, les yeux de la morte, me vociféra dans l’oreille en assourdissant mon angoisse:—Regarde.’43 Thus the story’s astounding conclusion is explained not in terms of optical science but as the work of a demonic invader.