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

  • Optical Allusions:Seeing Clearly in Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
  • John Greene (bio)

In 1776, Jean-Jacques Rousseau began a series of essays, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, the tenth and last of which would remain unfinished on his death in 1778. Since its publication in 1782, the text has been read as a continuation of Rousseau’s autobiographical explorations that manifest most clearly in Les Confessions (begun in 1766) and Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques (1772). As one of Rousseau’s modern biographers puts it, “Rousseau is the prophet of introspective analysis.”1 So commonplace are readings of the Rêveries that link Rousseau’s use of lexicons of light and darkness, sight and recollection to his ongoing introspection that we rarely pause to consider whether Rousseau’s images might not have a literal referent in addition to their metaphoric one. In this article, I argue that central to the appreciation of Rousseau’s use of images of light and darkness in the Rêveries is an understanding of the range of optical devices used in entertainments at the time. After providing a context for public and private optical devices known to the philosophes and referred to by or in connection with them, I will focus on Rousseau’s use of sight and memory in the Rêveries as indicative of someone familiar with the technology of the optique, known in English as the peepshow box. Such a new reading of Rousseau’s work is, of course, not exclusory of a range of psychoanalytic interpretations of his imagery and obsessions in his most introspective passages. Rather, my [End Page 197] analysis invites consideration of the Rêveries as demonstrating more than its author’s introspection; specifically, it demonstrates Rousseau’s active engagement with and enjoyment of the latest optical devices.

Speculation regarding Rousseau’s mental state seems de rigueur for modern writers on the Rêveries. Damrosch suggests that the final essay, which Rousseau would not live to complete, is haunted by selective memories of an idealized youth and that “in reverie he could regain the security of a beloved child.”2 Yet even as Damrosch succumbs to the temptation to psychoanalyze Rousseau, he is aware of the pitfalls of attempting to do so:

Since Rousseau left such a rich account of his psychic experience, every school of interpretation has had grist for its mill…In the twentieth century psychoanalysis took over, producing myriad attempts to identify causes for masochism, exhibitionism, and paranoia. Most interpreters agree that Rousseau became paranoid, but that is all they can agree on. How unbalanced he actually was, and how much of the time, and for what reasons, and with what consequences, are questions that each analyst answers in terms of a preferred theory. In every instance the evidence exists only because Rousseau himself considered it important and tried to explain it.3

Because Rousseau documents his changing mental states with unflinching honesty and makes it clear that an exploration of mind and self is one of his primary goals, he has encouraged readings of his work that focus on the symbolic and spectral rather than the literal and concrete. Caught between the two, his demonstrable interest in optical devices that engage the viewer with varying degrees of fidelity and clarity has been largely overlooked. Yet Rousseau (as a skilled amateur botanist) prized the luminous brilliance of the optique for the representation of botanical specimens it made possible, and he borrows descriptions of the workings of the optique and the lighting effects and fades it allowed for passages of the Rêveries reflecting on the preservation of dreamlike illusion. To understand his interest in this device is to find the Rêveries full of engagement with the world, even as Rousseau claims to be in retreat from it.

In discussing a range of optical devices popular in the eighteenth century, different terminologies naturally imply different technologies in operation behind the scenes, and it will be helpful at the outset to identify what is and is not included in any claim for Rousseau’s special interest in this area. To begin with, a lantern may just be a lantern (a candle...

pdf

Share