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  • La Lutte des paradigmes: la littérature entre histoire, biologie et médecine (Flaubert, Zola, Fontane)
  • Philippa Lewis
La Lutte des paradigmes: la littérature entre histoire, biologie et médecine (Flaubert, Zola, Fontane). By Niklas Bender. (Faux titre, 351). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 556 pp. Hb €110.00; $149.00.

‘Quelle est l’image de l’homme à la fin du XIXe siècle?’ (p. 525). To answer this broad question Niklas Bender considers the ways in which historical, biological, and medical models of humankind interact in the novels of three writers: Flaubert, Zola, and Fontane. The nineteenth-century novel is examined as a site of tension between opposing world views (scientific, historical, and mythic), and as a site in which ideas of positivism and social [End Page 254] progress coexist uneasily with notions of scepticism, biological determinism, and degeneration. How might a biological world view relate to an historical one? Where do these disciplines converge and where do they part company? Bender’s analysis is thorough and convincing, and his arguments are clearly signposted. Using a range of nineteenth-century historical and philosophical texts (Michelet, Burckhardt, Nietzsche), and medical and physiological sources (François Magendie, Claude Bernard), this study draws out various paradoxes in these writings, which are perhaps indicative not so much of the authors’ failings as of the myriad of contradictory theories of humankind and overlapping discourses vying for attention in an increasingly secular age. Bender challenges the traditional, simplistic interpretations that have tended to contrast Zola’s naturalism and Fontane’s realism. For Bender, each writer’s work betrays, rather, a mélange of contradictory paradigms, known or unbeknown to the writer. In Zola’s work, the scientific paradigm is dominant, yet his concern with historical specificity and social progress, as well as the undeniably mythic structures that underlie the Rougon-Macquart series, are identified by Bender as inconsistent with the biological model. Salammbô exemplifies Flaubert’s negotiation of the biological and historical, featuring characters whose physiology and pathologies are both rooted in antiquity and open to modern interpretation: for example, many of Salammbô’s crises echo nineteenth-century medical reports on hysteria. Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and Fontane’s Effi Briest and Irrungen, Wirrungen emphasize the historical paradigm. Fontane in particular positively rejects the scientific, yet Bender detects an unacknowledged reliance on essentially scientific structures and paradigms in his work, for example in the impersonal narrative technique, and the prominence of sexuality throughout his œuvre. In some respects the relationship between literature and science in the nineteenth century may seem an unoriginal topic, yet Bender does provide new insights, admittedly alongside much material that could have been condensed in favour of a more concise and gripping narrative. Too much time is spent recounting plot and character, which seems unnecessary given that the texts under consideration are so well known (although the synopses of Fontane’s work will prove useful for students of French literature unfamiliar with this author). The corpus is conventional and it would have been refreshing to see Bender expand his ‘panorama’ (p. 363) of the Rougon-Macquart series and concentrate less on Nana and Germinal, as more original work could perhaps be done here. A particularly welcome element of the study, however, is the comparative approach: the comparisons between the French and German historicist schools and realist movements are illuminating and greatly increase the depth, reach, and potential implications of Bender’s analysis.

Philippa Lewis
University of Cambridge
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