The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman of the Seine across the Tides of Modernity by Anne-Gaëlle Saliot (review)

This is a remarkable book that discusses, from a series of different perspectives, the cultural metamorphoses of the death-mask of the 'Inconnue de la Seine', an unknown girl who supposedly drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, and who, due to her great beauty, became the object of a mask whose features have captivated artists and writers from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot approaches this topic as a commodified, cultural, artistic, and essential mobile object, charting its representation in art, literature, and critical discourse, and drawing upon the writings of Walter Benjamin, in his conception of the art of collecting, and also on Aby Warburg and Jacques Rancière in their emphasis on the materiality of history. Her corpus is extensive, including Louis Aragon's Aurélien (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), Man Ray's fifteen photographic compositions based on the Inconnue, Maurice Blanchot's Une voix venue d'ailleurs (Plombières-les-Dijon: Ulysse, [1992]), Julien Green's Paris (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1984), Patrick Modiano's Des inconnues (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), Didier Blonde's L'Inconnue de la Seine (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), films by the French New Wave, and a host of other, less-known works by figures such as the poet Marius Grout and the filmmaker Frank Wisbar. Saliot's study uses the metaphors of modelling and imprinting as organizational concepts, which lends a subtle but sustained aesthetic approach to her analysis as it highlights the recurrent images of cast, imprint, palimpsest, and trace, and their relevance to modernity. The book is divided into three parts: Part One foregrounds the historical materiality of the mask; Part Two raises questions of urban modernity; while Part Three examines the Inconnue as a cultural object and leads to a discussion on the ontology and heuristic dimension of images. The book is beautifully written and illustrated, and, in its impeccable scholarship and imaginative conception of this absent but very present figure, allows not only a valuable discussion on the Inconnue to emerge, but also one that makes almost tangible the aesthetics of modernity.