Naissance du fantastique clinique: la crise de l’analyse dans la littérature fin-de-siècle by Bertrand Marquer (review)

As Jean-Louis Cabanès has stated, nineteenth-century French literature, ‘à partir de Balzac, […] exprime souvent sa vision du monde par le biais de métaphores médicales’ (Le Corps et la maladie dans les récits réalistes (1856–1893) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), p. 94). Whereas much critical attention has been devoted to realist writers and their tendency to focus on what a clinical diagnosis reveals about the lisibilité of a patient’s body, Bertrand Marquer’s fascinating and meticulously researched monograph makes a compelling case for probing the complex relationship between pathology and the anti-realist poetics of ‘le fantastique’. Stemming from the premise that ‘le fantastique fin-de-siècle se définit en effet comme une enquête sur le réel ou plus exactement sur ses détails’ (p. 10), Marquer argues that the aesthetic and fantastical richness of fin-de-siècle fiction subjects the morbid body to a distinctive and revealing ‘méthode expérimentale’ (p. 79). This places particular emphasis on the fantastical as an optical affair, whereby bodies are viewed through a lens that blurs clinical knowledge and the role of the imagination. As a result, the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ are problematized, and attention is diverted onto the effects an apparently deviant, corrupt, or monstrous body has on the individual. The conceptual framework offered by the idea of a ‘fantastique clinique’ contextualizes readings across three chapters dealing with a range of concerns, including fear, hallucination, primitivism, atavistic behaviour, innate tendencies to crime, irrationality, introspection, and pain. The study’s corpus is made up of a comprehensive and quite diverse collection of texts by writers such as Claretie, Gautier, Lorrain, Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Zola, and even Poe, although it includes no works by women writers (and does not address their absence). To various degrees, Marquer’s readings dramatize Durkheim’s notion of the homo duplex and focus on the interior dramas of the split subject — the unstable ‘Je’ — whose ultimate fear is of himself. The study is detailed, combining literary, theoretical, and scientific sources, and has been carefully planned; 253 footnotes are accumulated in one chapter alone, and while some ideas in the main argument could have been developed, this is a coherent and insightful account that will prove a stimulating source of information for anyone interested in the ways in which Foucault’s definition of ‘the clinic’ may be applied, somewhat unconventionally, to a non-realist aesthetic. What is revealed ultimately by Marquer’s analysis is that, while the ‘fantastique clinique’ in fin-de-siècle French literature moves on from nineteenth-century fiction’s previous inclination to incorporate scientific reason and analysis into plot structure, it does not reject it entirely. Instead, a focus on ‘le fantastique’ reorients clinical vision from the quest to find medical ‘meaning’ and directs it to perform an ‘anatomie de l’âme’ (p. 134). In its exploration of sensation and the aesthetic qualities of the fantastical body, Marquer’s study rightly asserts that the ‘fantastique clinique’ in fin-de-siècle French literature plays its part in fiction’s revitalization at a time when its preoccupation with rationality was the object of cynicism and even despair.