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Chapter 3 Alternative Optics: Seraphita, La Recherche de l'absolu, and La Peau de chagrin When Balzac was taken to task in Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1963 Pour un nouveau roman, it was not only because the nineteenth-century author's realist notions of form, character, and plot exemplified a genre ripe for renewal, but also because the mimetic project itself had come to imply a particular ideology of vision, one that privileged understanding over perception. Observation of the physical world may have played a key role in La Comedie humaine, but Balzac's descriptions of that world seemed always to lead necessarily to a metaphysical beyond, an au-deLd that the Ecole de Minuit hoped to purge from its own antirepresentational fiction . In his 1964 Essais critiques, Roland Barthes joined Robbe-Grillet in calling for a textual mode that would replace the visionary symbolics of Balzacian realism with a registration of perception unencumbered by the myths ofunderlying essence, of metaphorical symbolism, and ofanthropomorphic projection: "la description optique."l And though both Barthes and Robbe-Grillet would later disavow the simplistic neutrality of "optical description," their initial characterization of realist visuality led to a generation of scholarly projects emphasizing a "readable" [Lisible] Balzac, one whose novelistic descriptions follow the revelatory logic of La physioLog;ie. The fact that visible signs in La Comedie humaine-the gloves on a parvenu, the color of a villain's eyes, the cut of a dandy's coat-seem to lead invariably to knowledge of the invisible hierarchies ofsocial life allowed latter-day critics to represent nineteenthcentury realism, with Balzac as its figurehead and whipping boy, as a mode that used vision in the service of metaphysical knowledge, a genre in which the act ofseeing (whether social, scientific, or visionary) slipped automatically into the epistemological register. Even Lucien Dallenbach, who swung the pendulum away from the structuralist, lisible Balzac toward a poststructuralist, less totalizing one, takes La Comedie humaine's link between seeing and knowing as emblematic of the Balzacian project.2 Citing Balzac's statement, "Seeing has been my sole ambition. For isn't seeing the same as knowing" [Voir n'est-ce pas savoir?], Dallenbach likens Balzac's visual epistemology to that of the Alternative Optics 49 nouveau romancierClaude Simon. Like Balzac's, "Simon's optique . .. consists above all in a will to see [un vouloir voir] that spies and scrutinizes passionately . . . and that ceaselessly seeks to extend the domain of the visible-better yet, to see past sight itself."3 Though working from opposite ends of the mimetic spectrum, the two authors seem to share across a century the very visuality that Robbe-Grillet denounced as realism's foible: Gaining access to the hidden heart of things, breaking through appearances, sounding the depths concealed behind or underneath an observable surface, exploring behind the scenes, rending all kinds of veils and curtains, glorifying screens the better to pass through them, . . . : all these are manifestations of a never-satisfied desire to go deeper, to penetrate, that relates the act of seeing in Simon's writings more closely to Balzac than to Robbe-Grillet. (48) Thus, for Dallenbach, Balzac's literary project lies essentially in the potential thrust of vision beyond sight, of meaning beyond perception.4 But while it is certainly true that Balzac sets up his fiction's visual stakes in epistemological terms-''Voir n'est-ce pas savoir?"-we should not forget this famous formulation's interrogative form, for it appears significantly in a text that very much calls into question the seeing/knowing nexus: La Peau de chagrin.5 The question (''Voir n'est-ce pas savoir?") is posed by the antique shop dealer in the novel's key set-up scene, as the antiquaire explains to Raphael de Valentin why he himself has never entered into Peau de chagrin 's diabolical bargain of fulfilled desires in exchange for shortened life. The old man has tried at all costs, he says, to avoid the (literally) exhausting excesses of vouloirand pouvoir, preferring the perpetual calm of savoir, which he describes as a purified life of the mind, an "intellectual pleasure" whose enjoyment stems neither from the "heart, which can be broken" nor in the "senses, which can be dulled," but in the "mind, which never wears out and outlasts all else" (40). In this contrast of the mind against both passions and senses, even travel and exotic adventuresmountain climbing in Asia, haggling in China, sleeping in an American wigwam-become decorporealized pleasures...

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