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  • Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet
  • Zvezdana Ostojic (bio)
Andrea Goulet. Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 304 pages.

In her 2016 book Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France, Andrea Goulet explores shifting extradiegetic scientific and philosophical paradigms through an extensive corpus of French crime literature ranging from mid-nineteenth century romans-feuilletons to late twentieth-century postmodern fiction. Throughout the pages of this profoundly erudite scholarly work, Goulet demonstrates the ways in which the vast body of literature she analyzes conditions the tension between the rational, deductive processes of the crime novel detective and the ultimately ambiguous nature of the violent crime. She weaves an intricate, deeply researched web of connections that spans over 150 years of modern French crime fiction and pinpoints the inaugural text of this genre's primary tropes in Edgar Alan Poe's short crime story The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). However, what is innovative in Goulet's usage of Poe's story as foundational is her refusal to situate it as a normative text. She considers it rather as one that is "as non-normative—that is, as counter-rational, gruesome and conflicted—as any of the sensational murder narratives that were excised from the most purified accounts of the roman policier" (7). According to Goulet, French crime fiction inherited from Poe's story "two irresolvable tensions: between abstract intellection and bodily violence, and between (inter-) national politics and domestic privacy" (11). And indeed, as Goulet successfully illustrates, these tensions will continue to haunt French detective novels up through the most modern text she incorporates in her study—Dantec's cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies (1999). As she walks her reader across centuries and territories, Goulet extends her network of connections in two directions. On a "vertical" axis, she takes her reader deep below street-level Paris in an exploration of subterranean crime novels. On a "horizontal" axis Goulet emerges from the depths of Parisian catacombs to portray the cartographic dimensions of crime fiction, underlining the topographical aspect of detective investigation.

Goulet's book is divided into three sections: "Archaeologies," "Intersections" and "Cartographies." In "Archaeologies" Goulet delves below ground level and explores catacomb crime gangs who subvert the apparent political [End Page 841] structure existing in the above-ground city. She argues that Cuvier's geological discoveries caused a shift in the comprehension and representations of time and space in nineteenth-century crime fiction. With close readings of Berthet's Paris avant l'histoire (1876) and Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), Labourieu's Les Carrières d'Amérique (1868), Guéroult and Couder's Les Étrangleurs de Paris (1859), Zaccone's Les Drames des catacombes (1861) and Lermina's Les Loups de Paris (1876) she succeeds in pointing out the ways in which these underground crime stories are deeply marked by Cuvierian catastrophism and prehistorical violence that challenge and subvert the above-ground horizontality and linearity of the Second Empire's Hausmannian Paris. These stories demonstrate how temporal linearity as well is subverted and superseded by a va-et-vient in which the prehistoric violent past continuously haunts the nineteenth-century spaces of modernity. Moving then to the Belle Époque's crime novels such as Leroux's La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (1904) and Souvestre and Allain's Fantômas: le bouquet tragique (1912), Goulet uncovers the underground world of larvae and ghosts who come to replace catacomb gangs.

As Goulet approaches the first decades of the twentieth century she shifts her focus to "the intersections between national historiography and paleontological discourse" that she finds particularly noticeable in Gaston Leroux's Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1908) and Maurice Leblanc's "La Comtesse de Cagliostro" (1924), works that were directly influenced by advances in the domain of paleontology (80). What Goulet finds particularly noteworthy about these novels is that they share an omnipresence of oceanic space, and more importantly of coastal caves. This shared thematic results in their distancing from the urban metropolis and in an exploration of the "proto...

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