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Chapter 10 Tropical Piercings: Nationalism, AtavisIll, and the Eye of the Corpse a group ofPolynesian pirates, the Ottysors, on the lookout for shipwrecks, hide there. . . awaiting their prey. . . . Behind him, hefurtively sharpened a crude stone cutlass. -Claire Lenoir (104, 114) On the wall were paintings, china, and full sets ofprecious weapons, Japanese sabers or Malaysian kris. Bernardet gave them a quick glance as he passed by. -L'Accusateur (21) It was then that, under the lower bunk in this cabin, inside a drawer, [Vin Mod] found an object that Karl and Pieter Kip had overlooked. It was a Malaysian dagger, a saw-toothed kris, that had fallen into a gap between two disjointed planks. -Les Freres Kip (70) The Kris and the Optogram Fantastic Beyond their central optogram motif, these three texts-Villiers's Claire Lenoir, Claretie's L'Accusateur, and Verne's LesFreres Kip--have something else striking in common: the theme ofdomestic space violently troubled by the invasion of foreign, exotic elements. In LesFreres Kip, the murder weapon that comes between English father and son is a Malaysian kris, and the scene of the crime is a tropical island near New Caledonia populated by suspicious primitives. The killer in Claretie's novel, identified by the foreign cut of his hat, hails from Buenos Aires, but has come to Paris to track down his victim, a former French ambassador; in the antechamber of the murdered man's salon, the detective Bernardet notes a Malaysian kris among a collection of exotica. And in the most troubling displacement of all, Claire Lenoir's European husband wreaks revenge on her seagoing lover by atavistically inhabiting the form of an "Ottysor," described as an exotic combination of primitive beast and Polynesian 194 Chapter 10 pirate. In short, all three of these novels figure the invasion by the Other of a known body through geographical dislocation-of weapons, hats, savages, and diplomats from across the South Seas. This thematic convergence is made evident in the epigraphs above, in which a primitive Polynesian cutlass and the surprising intertextual detail of two Malaysian kris knives remind us that these are tales not only of metaphysical inquiry, judicial mystery, and scientific plot, but also of colonial crossings and bloody murder. Why a knife? I have discussed ways in which the retinal optogram blurs and crosses boundaries, creating an unstable relation between exterior and interior, world and self; let me further propose that the South Seas knives-instruments made for piercing , puncturing membranes, violating the contours of a bounded bodybring out the latent violence of a particular colonial moment, which is itself linked to a whole cluster of anxieties plaguing late nineteenthcentury France.l One way to define this cluster is as what Fran{:oise Gaillard has called the late nineteenth century's "hantise de l'autre en moi" [obsession with the other inside the self], its haunting fear of a foreign element's irruption into one's own (bodily, psychic, or even national) space. This is, after all, the moment in France when Louis Pasteur's microbiological studies and Alphonse Bertillon's criminal anthropometry have turned attention to the idea of containment, of the protection of a corporeal or domestic sphere from the external threat ofinvasion.2 Irruption and invasion also served as metaphors for psychic and supernatural hauntings: pre-Freudian atavistic theories portrayed uncontrollable violent impulses as a threat to modern order, while Mesmerist dabblings in the occult posited the existence of otherworldly forces at work in the here and now. But not only do tropes of irruption and invasion inhabit the historical discourse surrounding these texts; they also serve as metaphors for the literary mode that I will call the "optogram fantastic." Although Villiers's, Claretie's, and Verne's stories belong to different generic categoriesfantastic tale, roman policier, and science-adventure fiction-in this fin-desiecle moment of contaminated membranes we might do well to ignore such boundaries and suggest that if Claire Lenoir, L'Accusateur, and Les Freres Kip share the theme ofviolent encroachment on private space, they share as well a particular textual quality that has traditionally marked the category of the fantastic as "irruptive" in its very form. From PierreGeorges Castex's classical definition of the fantastic genre as "abrupt intrusion of mystery into the context of real life," to Roger Caillois's statement that "The fantastic is characterized ... by the irruption of the unthinkable within everyday, unvarying lawfulness," the genre's inherent ambiguities are figured as a piercing confrontation between...

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