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Introduction The Epistelllology of Optics: Seeing Subjects, Modern Minds In Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881), Gustave Flaubert pokes fun at the fads and follies of his age by allowing his characters to cycle through a series of dilettantish obsessions. Among the many scientific, pseudoscientific, and philosophical discourses debunked through the heroes' ineptitude, we find a discussion of the nature of light. Bouvard and Pecuchet, who have been roaming about in a hazily metaphysical mood, turn their attention to a candle's flame: "As they watched the candle burn, they speculated as to whether light is found in the object or in our eye. Since stars may already have died out by the time their light reaches us, we may be admiring nonexistent things."! This philosophical reverie has two parts. The first asks about light's objective nature: does candlelight find its source in the external world or in the eyes of its perceivers? Such a question raises a centuries-old inquiry into visual perception and its role in the apprehension of reality. In ancient Greece, the question was understood literally: thinkers debated whether the substance of light is emitted by external objects or by the eye itself. Ancient theories of emission were abandoned, for the most part, as knowledge ofoptical anatomy increased. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, however, the question of light's objective nature was rekindled and reformulated by Newtonian physics, which analyzed light as a measurable substance, and by Lockean empiricism, which emphasized the viewer's perception of luminous phenomena. In scientific discussions contemporary with Flaubert, the tension between the objective nature of light and the subjective phenomena of vision frequently resolved itself around the conceit of a candle's flame. For example, Robert-Houdin, in the Comptes rendus de l'Academie des sciences of 1869, describes the apparent objectivity of rays emanating from a candle's flame-"these rays ... appear ... to be emitted so concretely that one nearly tries to pick them up with one's fingers"-but concludes nonetheless that "this radiant image is purely subjective."2 The notion of a purely subjective image had gained increasing validity within the field of nineteenth-century physiological optics as experimental scientists turned attention to entoptic phenomena-that is, phenomena 2 Introduction occurring within the eye, such as floaters, blur circles, sunspots, and afterimages . But as Bouvard and Pecuchet's confusion suggests, the question of objective versus subjective origin for such images had not been definitively resolved by the scientific community in one direction or the other, even at this late date in the century. In fact, ifwe look at the second part of Flaubert's passage cited above, we find that the indeterminacy of a luminous image's epistemological status leads to an even more radical ontological crisis: does what we seea star, for example-even exist? This step in Bouvard and Pecuchet's reasoning is informed by contemporary advances in optics on the physical properties of light. In 1849 and 1869, respectively, the French scientists Fizeau and Foucault had published well-circulated research on measuring the speed of light. Their discoveries act as a topical premise for Bouvard and Pecuchet's doubt and lead to the broader question: given that the distance of astronomical bodies surpasses the speed oflight so as to allow us to see stars that no longer exist, how can we be sure that anything we perceive is real? The slippage, so typical of Flaubert's text, from scientific progress to systematic doubt may seem merely comic or cliched in the context of Bouvard et Pecuchet's deflationary irony.3 But the very triteness of Flaubert's idees re~ues affords modern scholars important insights into the vocabularies and premises of scientific discourses circulating in the Europe of his time. Bouvard and Pecuchet's reflection on light crystallizes the substantive epistemological question that gripped contemporary thinkers from Descartes, Condillac, Malebranche, and Buffon to Helmholtz and Giraud-Teulon: how can subjective perception guarantee knowledge of external reality? Or, what is the relation between what the eye sees and what the mind knows? This book argues that these questions ofvisual epistemology, while scientific and philosophical in nature, fundamentally structure the semantic and symbolic logic of the modern French novel-not only through the satirical invocations of a Bouvard et Pecuchet, but more directly through the shifting elaborations of the narrative subject as defined according to visual paradiglns. From Hugo's scenes of hallucinatory blindness, Balzac 's elaborations of visionary science, and Villiers' obsessive interest in visual...

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