Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge by Larry Duffy (review)

Larry Duffy’s work is a wide-ranging, impressively researched, and wonderfully erudite study of how and why Flaubert and Zola include scientific material of all kinds in their novels. Although it has its roots in ‘genetic studies’ (p. 1), the work is much more than either an enumeration or examination of the sources used by Naturalist writers, or a work of literary criticism. Instead it is a broader investigation of the authors’ concern with the processes and procedures of incorporation in its widest sense. Duffy draws on an impressive number of medical and scientific documents and treatises — some of which were consulted by Flaubert or Zola, but most of which were not — in order not only to examine what the content of these sources tells us about nineteenth-century discourses and disciplines, but also, and perhaps more valuably, to look at the means by which such extra-literary materials were included in literary works and what this tells us about the writers’ own methods of incorporation. As such Duffy’s study is an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century French medical and scientific discourses and their relationship with cultural and literary production. Central to Duffy’s notion of incorporation is, of course, the body. He cleverly combines analysis of the authors’ representations of literal incorporation — the ingestion of medicines and poisons — with their incorporation of knowledge from a wide range of disciplines including pharmacology, toxicology, taxidermy, and psychology. Following Susan Harrow (Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)), he goes beyond the simplistic connections suggested by the double meaning of ‘corps’ to remind us not only that the human body is the privileged site of the deployment of Naturalist knowledge, but also that the nineteenth century saw scientific and medical professions becoming incorporated as recognized groups. Thus, Part 1 discusses, through detailed reference to articles in scientific journals, and with special attention paid to the role of Mathieu Orfila, how pharmacy — ‘the key incorporative profession’ (p. 18) — became a clearly delineated body and how these disciplinary changes are manifested in Madame Bovary. Part 2 continues the focus on Madame Bovary by investigating the various attempts made (by both critics and characters) to interpret, explain, and eliminate the novel’s two privileged examples of bodily deformity — the blind beggar and Hippolyte’s club foot — and what they reveal about nineteenth-century shifts in attitudes to monstrosity and abnormality. Part 3 moves from Flaubert to Zola and discusses how La Bête humaine and Le Docteur Pascal incorporate a range of scientific discourses, from theories of thermodynamics, perpetual motion, and the psychology of monomania to the use of hypodermic injections in therapeutic medicine. The final chapter, on Le Docteur Pascal, is a particularly convincing discussion of the ability of the body to store information both in its memory and in its genes. In all, this is an important and timely book that will be of particular interest to medical and scientific historians and those working in the medical humanities.