In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 4 "Effets de lumiere," or a "Second" Second Sight: La Fille aux yeux d'or If Louis Lambert and Seraphita are the stories of Balzac's mystical seers, or voyants, La Fille aux yeux d 'or is one of the many stories about les inities, characters like Eugene de Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, and Raphael de Valentin, whose comprehension of the social landscape dawns only gradually. Lacking a masterful vision, the inities nonetheless experience moments of insight into the inner workings of the Parisian world they are trying to decipher. Typical in its visual figuration of the young ambitieux 's rise in society is Le Pere Goriot, in which the provincial Rastignac finds the doors of nobility opened to him by his relation to the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. Her noble name acts as a "touch from a magic wand" that transforms Rastignac's "mind [esprit]" and his visual relation to the urban promised land: "a flash oflight helped him see more clearly into the still-murky [tenebreuse] atmosphere of Parisian high society."! This sudden light means momentary mastery for Rastignac-over his own esprit, over the audience made captive by a name, over the tenebrous atmosphere of Parisian society. The moment recirculates an Enlightenment metaphor oflight as mental clarity, but while Rastignac will struggle throughout the novel to regain its pure and lucid power, his experiential contact with the reality of Parisian high society belies the theoretical ideal of illumination. Morally discouraged by the "elegant parricide" in which Delphine de Nucingen involves him, Eugene sees the world as an "ocean of filth" through which man must slog (276). The narrator continues : "'Only petty crimes are committed there!' he told himself. But Vautrin is bigger than that. He had witnessed [Il avait vu] society's three great expressions: Obedience, Struggle, and Revolt; the Family, the World, and Vautrin" (276). Vautrin's cynical vision is contrasted with muddy, petty mediocrity. Larger than life, Vautrin has the power to encompass all of society, to categorize and allegorize it in an overarching vision-the same overarching perspective, with its visual organization of a complex world into legible categories, that will become Rastignac's mode of triumphant access 60 Chapter 4 at the end ofthe novel. Le Pere Goriot's final scene, in which our hero looks down on the city from the heights of the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, has come to exemplify the representation of visual-epistemological mastery in the nineteenth-century French novel. With its final words, the novel presages its protagonist's social successes to come: "Over this buzzing hive, he leveled a gaze that seemed to relieve it of its honey in advance, and uttered these grandiose words: 'It belongs to both of us now!'" Paris has become a chamber whose honeyed pleasures are destined to be extracted solely by the powers of Rastignac's gaze from above. Knowledge and control are thus marked in Balzac's narrative by the panoramic overview ([survol] or "overarching gaze" [regard surplombant]) that has come to be associated with the Cartesian logic of perspectivean all-knowing gaze from above contrasted with the subject's experiential entry into a muddy and confusing world. Rastignac's survey of Paris represents the antithesis of Fabrice del Dongo's confused experience at Waterloo in Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme, in which, even after the fact, the battle's incoherence resists both visualization and conceptual perspective. Rastignac's position of visual transcendence seems predestined : like Louis Lambert, Rastignac possesses a gift ofinner vision tightly linked to his superior eyesight: "His moral sight shared the lucid scope of his lynx-like eyes. Each of his dual senses exhibited the mysterious range and flexibility so remarkable in superior beings" (114). What is this moral-rather than spiritual-second sense that shadows Rastignac 's lynx-like eyes? Throughout La Comedie humaine, the theme of second sight is assigned varying degrees of philosophical import; certainly, the idea of a "moral" second sight seems to carry less weight than that of a pure and mystic interior vision.2 Still, it signals here a certain superiority of perception that marks Rastignac as uncommon. Rather than transcend the physical world to a realm of divine essence, Rastignac's "moral sight" casts its "lucid scope" on society itself; his is the second sight of a worldly hero. Perhaps the most worldly of Balzac's society heroes is Henri de Marsay, who appears as prime minister in Beatrix, Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan , and Une...

Share