Hallucinations and pathological visual perceptions in Maupassant's fantastical short stories--a neurological approach

Maupassant excelled as a realist writer of the nineteenth century, with fantastical short stories being an outstanding example of his literary genius. We have analysed four of his fantastical stories from a neurological point of view. In "Le Horla," his masterpiece, we have found nightmares, sleep paralysis, a hemianopic pattern of loss and recovery of vision, and palinopsia. In "Qui sait" and in "La main" there is also an illusory movement of the objects in the visual field, although in a dreamlike complex pattern. In "Lui," autoscopy and hypnagogic hallucinations emerge as fantastical key elements. The writer suffered from severe migraine and neurosyphilis involving the optic nerve, which led to his death by general paralysis of the insane (GPI). Visual loss and visual hallucinations affected the author in his last years, before a delirant state confined him to a nursing home. Our original hypothesis, which stated that he could have translated his sensorial experiences coming from this source to his works, had to be revised by analyzing some of his earliest works, notably "Le Docteur Héraclius Gloss" and "La main d'écorché" (1875). We found hallucinatory symptoms, adopting the form of autoscopy and other elaborated visual misperceptions, in stories written at age 25, when Maupassant was allegedly healthy. Therefore, we hypothesize that they may be related to his hypersensitive disposition, assuming that no pathology is necessary to experience such vivid experiences. In addition, Maupassant's abuse of drugs, as illustrated in "Rêves," could have provided an additional element to outline his painstaking visual depictions. All these factors, in addition to his up-to-date neurological knowledge and attendance at Charcot's lectures at "La Salpêtrière," armed the author for repetitive and enriched hallucinatory experiences, which were transferred relentlessly into his works from the beginning of his career.     

The story of a Chinese map

Sommaire

De même que le nom de “CASSINI” est intimement lié à l'établissement et à la publication, entre 1750 et 1815 de la “Carte géométrique de la France au 1/86 400”, un autre patronyme, moins connu peut‐être, celui de “NAUDIN”, brille d'un éclat particulier pour tout ce qui touche à la cartographie française de 1688 à 1746.

Le but de cet article est précisément de faire connaître à ceux qui s'intéressent à la cartographie ancienne, ce que fut, en la situant dans son cadre historique, l'oeuvre de cette remarquable famille de géographes: “les NAUDINS”.     

Beyond the One-World Frame of Fiction: The Breakdown of Reality in Hushang Golshiri's Stories

The debate over political commitment in Iran was never limited to adjudicating content: it was frequently a debate over form as well. In the realm of fiction, this debate fixated on realism, the nature of mimesis, and the autonomy of art and the literary text. Within a few short years after forming the iconoclastic journal Jong-e Esfahan in 1965 with a group of likeminded colleagues, the writer Hushang Golshiri had become the preeminent modernist fiction writer in Iran. His critical essays represented a passionate defense of aesthetic autonomy at a time when realism and, particularly, socialist and “engaged” literature were powerful shibboleths in the Tehran literary scene. This paper begins with a look at Golshiri's critical interventions in this debate and then moves on to show how the short stories he produced in the Jong era were an even more integral part of his response to the mimesis question. By reading his stories with a methodology drawn from “possible worlds” theories of narratology, Todorov's fantastic, and Golshiri's own theories, we see how these works break down the “one-world” frame of reality that realism takes for granted, and require the reader to grapple with multiple, often contradictory, possible realities in its stead.     

Les fondements d’une phénoménologie de la littérature selon Jan Patočka

Le phénoménologue tchèque Jan Pato?ka, auteur d’une phénoménologie asubjective défendant la thèse d’un procès asubjectif de l’apparaître (d’une autonomie du phénomène par rapport à l’ego), a accordé au problème des relations nécessaires et difficiles que la philosophie entretient en son sein même avec la littérature une attention particulière qui l’a conduit à poser les fondements d’une phénoménologie de la littérature centrée autour de l’idée d’un asubjectivisme de l’écrivain. Nous suivrons ici deux axes de réflexion connexes: premièrement, nous montrerons pourquoi et comment Pato?ka restaure le vocabulaire et la vision de l’homme propres au mythe et reprend ce qu’il aperçoit comme le fondement de la tragédie pour élaborer une nouvelle compréhension du phénomène de l’existence comme mouvement. Deuxièmement, nous décrirons le rôle que joue l’écrivain moderne à une époque marquée par la fragmentation de la vie. Car l’écrivain qui édifie une “littérature métaphysique” a le privilège, selon Pato?ka, d’être “l’administrateur propre et originel de l’intégralité de la vie et de la totalité universelle”, il est ainsi une sorte de “quasi-phénoménologue” dont la philosophie ne peut se passer si elle veut saisir ces phénomènes qui, sans être purement et simplement subjectifs, ne peuvent néanmoins être réduits à l’objectivité du concept.     

Economic despondency and social division: A political review of the year, 1996

Verschave, F. X., La Françafrique. Le plus long scandale de la république (Stock 1998). 379 pp. 130F ISBN 2 234 04948 2

Gourévitch, J.‐P., L'Afrique, le fric la France. L'aide, la dette, l'immigration, l'avenir: vérités et mensonges (Le pré aux Clercs, 1997) 372 pp., 110F. ISBN 2 84228 022 9     

Le châtiment de Babel

Umberto Eco, La recherche de la langue parfaite dans la culture européenne, Paris, Le Seuil, collection “Faire l'Europe”, 1994, 436 p. (traduction de La ricerca della lingue perfetta nella cultura europa, Roma‐Bari, Laterza) ; ouvrage paru simultanément en italien, français, anglais (Basil Blackwell, Oxford), allemand (C.H. Beck, München) et espagnol (Critica, Barcelona).

Maurice Olender, Les langues du Paradis. Aryens et Sémites : un couple providentiel, Paris, Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1989 ; rééd. Paris, Le Seuil, Points‐Essais, 1994.     

MACHINE-PLOTTING OF PHYTOGEOGRAPHICAL DATA

Cette communication constitue un rapport progressif sur une étude concernant l'utilisation des machines modernes et électroniques pour la classification des données sur la distribution des plantes indigènes de la province d'Ontario, Canada. De 1949 jusqu'à 1963, les données ont été classifiées manuellement dans un catalogue et plus de deux cents cartes de distribution, préparées aussi à la main, ont été publiées de temps à autre. Commençant en 1963, les données nouvelles furent produites sur une “Friden Flexowriter” qui est une machine àécrire électrique commandée par un ruban de papier perforé. Le premier résultat de cette opération est un document transcrit pour le catalogue; le second un ruban de papier perforé au moyen duquel on peut obtenir des copies additionelles du document; le troisième une fiche perforée de quatre-vingt colonnes. Ces fiches forment les bases pour la cartographie automatique. Des exemples illustreront différentes cartes préparées par trois machines diverses. La machine “I.B.M. 407A” emploie les fiches perforées et produit une carte avec les signes imprimés régulièrement d'après les positions sur le gril. La machine “Hewlett Packard” emploie le ruban de papier perforé et produit une carte avec les signes imprimés dans toutes les positions désirées. La machine “Calcomp plotter” emploie le ruban magnétique et trace les contours, les symboles et le titre. On conduit maintenant des expériences pour tracer tout à la fois une carte aux échelles diverses employant les données mises en depôt dans la “mémoire” d'un cerveau électronique. Ces recherches permettent plusieurs applications possibles pour l'avenir, par exemple, i) la préparation des étiquettes pour les récoltes, ii) l'inventaire rapide des spécimens dans l'herbier, in) l'échange des données entre les herbiers et les musées, iv) la collaboration sur des proiets floristiques, v) les banques de données (“Data banks”), et vi) un service d'identification par machine.     

Miyazaki Hayao and the Aesthetics of Imagination: Nostalgia and Memory in Spirited Away

Miyazaki Hayao has achieved international renown for a succession of feature-long animations that have been noted for their visual flair and highly imaginative world-constructs. Many of the narratives in these films have been situated in fantasy worlds with often only a tenuous representation of the world as experienced in some conventional contemporary (or historical) sense. Yet beyond the surface of these figures and fantastical plot devices there is a clearly discernible stream of engagement with the past. Focusing primarily on Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) of 2001, this paper critically engages with the leading commentaries on nostalgia and memory in Miyazaki’s work, contrasting the “culturalist” approach of Susan Napier with the “machinic” approach of Thomas Lamarre. In turn, the aesthetic theory of R.G. Collingwood, in particular his concept of “magic”, is employed to demonstrate how certain aesthetic devices within the film facilitate an imaginative engagement with the past, one that is subtle but nonetheless highly evocative of distinctive nostalgic emotions.     

Provocation Versus Performativity: Launching la littérature coloniale française in 1909

In 1909, the colonial newspaper La Dépêche coloniale launched an enquiry entitled La Littérature coloniale de la France comparée à celle d'Angleterre. It was through this initiative that the idea of a ‘French colonial literature’ first caught wider public attention and generated polemics in literary circles and beyond. The aim of this article is to study the aesthetic and ideological agendas driving the enquiry and the polarised reactions it produced, from a sociological perspective inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's work. The author argues that La Dépêche coloniale's questionnaire encoded a set of assumptions designed to guide the answers and impose a vision of colonial literature, rather than elicit debate. One of the respondents, Pierre Mille (1864–1941), preferred provocation: in a piece published in a high-circulation daily Le Temps ahead of the results of La Dépêche coloniale's enquiry, he proclaimed Rudyard Kipling to be the model colonial author, only to conclude that French colonial literature was inexistent. The ensuing debate marked a watershed in the conceptualisation and the institutionalisation of French colonial literature, by setting in motion a process that would be brought to completion in the interwar period.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

Did Herbert Spencer Have Reading Epilepsy?

Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century philosopher, has frequently been dismissed as a “fantastical hypochondriac” (as his most recent biographer, Mark Francis, terms him). Yet he left a record in his Autobiography of symptoms that suggest a very different diagnosis. Abruptly at age 35, he found that the activity of reading, previously indulged in without difficulty, triggered paroxysmal episodes of disturbing “head-sensations” including “giddiness” (so Spencer described them); these severely curtailed his ability to carry out his philosophical studies. Of all possible explanations for such episodes, none seems as likely as reading epilepsy. Enduring preconceptions about Spencer's presumed neurosesmay have kept modern historians from appreciating that Spencer suffered from a legitimate, if esoteric, neurological malady.     

A History of Chinese Immigration in the United States and Canada

The 2005 Québec novel by Nicolas Dickner (English publication, 2008) presents intertextual effects that become a reflection on writing. The novel is a voyage of self-discovery while offering connections to Melville, Joseph Conrad, the German “bildungsroman,” nineteenth century classic novels, twentieth century French existentialist essays, Anglo-Saxon seafaring sagas, Central and South American imaginative tales, “cric-crac” stories of Québécois “raconteurs,” subversive Canadian novels, adventure stories, detective narratives, comic books and computer-generated discourse. This complex mise en abyme of writing through interlacing genres stands as a metaphor for diversity and rootlessness in North American society.     

Paul Valéry on Photography: A Poetic Writing of Light and Time

This article studies Paul Valéry's personal reflection on photography, as it appears in his essay “Le Discours du Centenaire de la Photographie,” based on a speech given at the Sorbonne in 1939 to members of the French Academy. It stresses the relationship between this essay and the French poet's writings on painting and aesthetics, in particular his work on Corot. Moreover, it analyzes the synthetic character of Valéry's critical approach, which attempts to bring together the language of poetry, philosophy and science when dealing with this utterly modern visual language. Photography is celebrated here as a unique art form that can at the same time imitate and reproduce nature perfectly, while allowing mankind to create a cosmological vision of life and the universe. In other words, the poet underlines in this text the utmost modernity of photography, at a time when many in France were still reluctant to acknowledge its artistic identity.     

About Medicine and the Arts Charcot and French Literature at the fin-de-siècle

The relationship between medicine and the arts, literature in particular, has many aspects. One of the most obvious relations is the use of literature as a source for historical studies. Jean-Martin Charcot and his school often appear in French literature at the end of the 19th century. Several aspects will be highlighted in this study, including (1) the ideas about degenerative diseases in the work of Emile Zola, the main author of the naturalistic movement; (2) decadence and spiritism in two transitional novels by Joris Karl Huysmans, who, once supporter of the naturalistic movement, changed his ideas following observations of disease and cure that could not be explained in a scientific way. Charcots work on hysteria and hypnosis, as well as Brown-Séquards rejuvenation experiments with testicular extracts played an important role with this respect; (3) Charcots relationship with the Daudets, in particular his treatment of Alphonses tabes dorsalis and the ambivalent attitude of his son Léon Daudet towards Charcot; (4) the influence of the lectures at the Salptrire on the work of Guy de Maupassant, who attended the lessons in the mid-1880s. The reading of novels and biographies of these authors provides a part of the social context and the cultural atmosphere in Paris at the “fin-de-siècle” when Charcot and his school played an important role in medicine. Moreover, it shows the influence of medicine and science on society as recorded by writers.     

Paysages identitaires et ruralité de proximité: regards croisés à Petit-Saguenay (Québec)

Au Québec, plusieurs groupes d'acteurs travaillent à structure? un pmjet d'avenir pour le monde rural. La question identitaire traverse leurs réflexions. Le rapport au territoire est conçu comme un trait spécifique de l'identité rurale contemporaine. Par ailleurs, le paysage offre un cadre de référence pertinent à l'analyse de cette identité façonnée par les acteurs. Cela suppose que, d'un point de vue théorique, le paysage soit envisagé selon une approche construc‐tiviste, qui va au‐delà des formes visibles pour englober aussi les références aux pratiques territori‐ales et les intentions des acteurs sociaux, de même que des dimensions immatérielles, telles les représentations et l'affectivité. En d'autres mots, le paysage est id défini comme un construit social. En confrontant ce cadre de référence à une enquête réalisée dans un village d'une région du Québec, nous avons constaté que les acteurs locaux lisent le paysage à partir de critères endogènes, c'est‐à‐dire propres à leur vécu territorial. Pour ces acteurs, le paysage agit à la fois comme agent de médiation et de communication de même qu'il participe à la construction de l'être‐ensemble. In Quebec, there are a number of groups actively engaged in structuring future plans for the rural milieu. The question of identity runs throughout their reflections, and the relationship between actors and territory is seen as a specific trait of contemporary rural identity. Furthermore, the concept of landscape provides a pertinent frame of reference for the analysis of this identity. From a theoretical point of view, this presupposes that landscape be envisaged according to a constructivist approach which would go beyond the visible forms to include territorial practices and intentions of the social actors as well as the immaterial dimensions such as the perceptions. In other words, landscape is seen as a social construction. This frame of reference was used to analyse observations gathered in a village situated in an outlying region of Quebec, and it was noticed that the local actors perceive the landscape according to endogenous criteria, i.e.: criteria specific to their real‐life territorial experience. For these actors, the landscape is both an agent of mediation and communication and a participant in the construction of a whole, a way of being or living together (“l'etre‐ensemble”).     

DAVID CARR'S THEORY OF EXPERIENCING TIMES PAST

This article is a review of David Carr's “Reflections on Temporal Perspective” in which Carr argues that present‐day historians or philosophers can experience the past, given that the past persists into the present and thus has a “presence” in contemporary life that makes it directly accessible to us. On that basis, Carr seeks to craft a phenomenological approach to history that puts experience in the place of representation and memory, rejecting thereby traditional notions of how we come to know and understand the past. Inherent in this approach is a new, and now widely shared, revision of our understanding of historical temporality, for such an experiencing of the past analytically demands a revised understanding of what “past” signifies when it is “present.” In this, Carr participates in a much broader movement in current historiography, which can be seen in the work of Frank Ankersmit, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Dominick LaCapra, Ewa Domanska, Eelco Runia, and others who focus on the persistence of the past in the present, embracing a materialist rather than linguistic or narrativist approach to historical research and writing. But if history signifies change over time, what “past” in the present do we actually experience? How is it logically possible to embrace both a commitment to the notion of historical development—as Carr does—and a notion of historical perseverance so powerful that the past as such survives and can be experienced? Carr's answer to this query is that “the present point of view is somehow permanent and yet always changing, framed at each moment by a different past and future.” What makes this possible, in his view, is the reality of superimposed temporalities, an idea he illustrates in his analysis of Braudel's La Mediterranée and other works. Hence it is precisely his “reflections on temporal perspective” that enable the experience of the past.     

Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery”

Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery” remains his longest poem and most thorough vision of an alternative history. This article argues that Muldoon's poem works to stage not only a visionary history of America but also, via the uneasy relations that develop between its two main characters (semi-fictionalised versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey), a dramatisation of the conflict that obtains between competing modes of historical understanding. Muldoon's Coleridge and Southey represent stances that may be usefully regarded as parallel to positions advanced in the famous debate regarding interpretation between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, thinkers whose names appear in the poem itself. To read the poem in light of this connection between its fantastical transatlantic history and the history of critical theory allows a reading of Muldoon's treatment of both literary and political histories as secondary to the work's playful exploration of struggles between modes of historical interpretation.