Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Blind in France by William R. Paulson (review)

Book Reviews William R. Paulson. E n l ig h t e n m e n t , R o m a n t ic is m , a n d t h e B l in d in F r a n c e . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987. Pp. 259. William Paulson has written a fascinating and persuasive study of the discourses on blindness in Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century France. In a series of analyses of philosophical, pedagogical and literary texts, Paulson uncovers three intersecting repre­ sentations of blindness: the philosophic, the sentimental, and the visionary. His book is a wide-ranging history of the desacralization and resacralization of blindness, impressively erudite and filled with dazzling textual readings. The representations of blindness Paulson studies originate in the Molyneux problem debated by eighteenth-century philosophers. The first chapter of Enlightenment, Roman­ ticism, and the Blind demonstrates that philosophers such as Locke, La Mettrie, and Con­ dillac were interested less in blindness than in the first moment of sight, and whether that moment would confirm their own theoretical formulations about the relation between per­ ception and understanding. In the second chapter, perhaps the best in the book, Paulson analyzes the text that undercuts the very possibility of the Molyneux experiment, Diderot’s Lettre sur ¡es aveugles. His brilliant discussion accounts both for the often puzzling details of the Lettre, and for its even more puzzling overall structure. Cataract operations, and the philosophical discussions they spawned, led to a profusion of literary works, particularly popular farces and vaudevilles, centered on cures of blind­ ness. Chapter Three analyzes the “ sentimental mythmaking” in several of these littleknown poems, novels and plays, and concludes with a marvelous reading of Cerfvol’s L ’Aveugle qui refuse de voir. The period’s increased interest in the blind also led to the establishment of institutions for their education. In the fourth chapter Paulson discusses the history of such institutions and examines the “ quasi-disciplinary” discourse surround­ ing them (Haiiy, Dufau, etc.). In Chapter Five brief discussions of Chateaubriand and Ballanche reveal that for the romantics, “ [t]he blind poet is a figure not of literature’s direct link to the sacred but of its impossible look back to a putative lost origin.” Paulson then turns to a subtle and insight­ ful analysis of the uneasy relation between “ the blind figurations of the unconscious” and “ communicable narration” in Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Chapter Six surveys Hugo’s references to blindness before proceeding to a discussion of L ’H om m e qui rit. Paulson’s masterly psychoanalytic readings “ explore the symbolic implications of sight and its absence in the context of the origins of sexuality and the strife between fathers and sons” ; this chapter, one of the book’s best, is sure and exciting. The Epilogue draws together the book’s different strands, and uses brief discussions of works by Nodier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert to show how representations of blindness undergo a clear change following the romantics. Although the Epilogue reminds us that the boundaries of this study mark off a period whose preoccupation with blindness and shared representations of it provide a certain coherence, the texts Paulson discusses “ cannot be reduced to a single discursive form ation,” and the book lacks a unifying thesis. Readers will, however, find this lack compensated by Paulson’s wide-ranging knowledge and by his illuminating readings of texts both familiar and neglected. E l iz a b e t h J . M acA r t h u r Tulane University 120 W in t e r 1988 ...