In her latest literary study, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-century France, Hannah Thompson explores the relationship between the body and the limits of representation in canonical French texts spanning the July Monarchy to the end of the nineteenth century. Reading the works of Sand, Hugo, Maupassant, Zola, Barbey d’Aureyvilly, and Mirbeau, Thompson explores at turns the sexualized, ill, effeminate, emasculated, wounded, monstrous, disabled, and traumatized body, as much for how they are represented as for what (else) they might represent; for what each author discloses about them as what we readers are left to imagine. These many bodies are considered through the lens of the taboo, a notion that Thompson astutely defines as shaping a fundamental triad between reader, writer, and text. Citing classic Bataille, Thompson describes the mechanism that binds this triad as the repeated assertion of the forbidden and its subsequent transgression. The site of tensions between ‘the sayable’ and ‘the unsayable,’ taboos contribute to the ever-emerging legibility of the body, fueling the desire that spurs us readers on. The study is neatly balanced across two main sections, The Body and The Reader, each bearing three chapters. Among many innovations, perhaps the most generative is the deceptively simple notion that the reader also has a body, a matter Thompson takes up in the second half of the book.
Chapter One undertakes a study of two women authors, Georges Sand and Rachilde, to explore the complexities of describing female desire and pleasure. Readings of Sand’s Indiana (1832) and Léila (1833, 1839) as well as Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884), The Marquise de Sade (1887), and The Juggler (La Jongleuse, 1900) reaffirm that female desire is always illicit in the nineteenth-century novel. Both writers deflect and defer meaning to compensate for an inability to convey female pleasure via patriarchal language. As Thompson reminds us, invalidism is frequently a metaphor for the impossibility of representation earlier in the century; by its end, Rachilde thematizes this inexpressibility by delighting in voluptuousness for the reader, while her protagonists must engage in a stark reversal of both classic gender binaries and sensation to achieve any pleasure at all.
Chapter Two examines the sick and suffering bodies in Emile Zola’s novel Lourdes (1894) and the relationship between faith and science at the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the textual devices deployed by Sand and Rachilde, Zola, a writer inspired by the theories of famed French doctor Claude Bernard, coheres closely to clinical discourse in his unrelenting descriptions of the physical symptoms of tuberculosis, resisting a typical temptation to resort to metaphor. This technical precision stands in stark contrast to descriptions of Nana, whose face ravaged by syphilis is a reification of her infected genitals.
Chapter Three offers a reading of Zola’s The Debacle (1892) based on the Franco-Prussian war but written two decades after the defeat of the French army at Sedan and the fall of France’s Second Empire. Thompson’s reading focuses at once on the cleaving of sex from gender and the ensuing reconsideration of masculinity, wherein the wounded and debilitated body of the soldier is a synecdoche for the fragility of France herself.
Chapter Four opens the second section of the book and offers the most startlingly innovative interpretations of the triad at the heart of the matter. Reading Mirbeau’s Torture Garden (Le Jardin des supplices, 1899), Barbey D’Aurevilly’s L’Ensorcelée (1854), and Les Diaboliques (1874), Thompson explores the unsayability of excruciating pain inflicted on another while demonstrating the reader’s unwitting complicity as (at turns) witness, masochist, and sadist in unremitting textual violence.
Chapter Five engages foundational theory in disability studies to explore monstrosity in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and The Laughing Man (L’Homme qui rit, 1869). Pointing out that Hugo’s formulation of the grotesque allows for a positive recuperation of the monstrous, Thompson argues compellingly that ‘the monster’s insertion into language erodes the distinction between the permissible which gives distinction to the taboo’ (11). On the other hand, readings of Gwyneplaine and his blind companion, Déa, point to a complementarity that is characteristic of Hugo, but, to my mind, bear further examination and nuance.
Chapter Six studies Zola’s novel The Truth (La Vérité, 1903) by means of trauma theory to cast the novel as an example of what Suzette Hanke has called ‘scriptotherapy’ (127). For Thompson, the novel constitutes a double narrative, layering deeply personal, childhood sexual trauma and murder, and the Dreyfus Affair, an epic national trauma that gave rise to virulent anti-Semitism and polarized the French for more than a decade. While I am somewhat skeptical of the evidence Thompson offers for the childhood trauma she posits and the interpretation of its novelistic detail, it is an intriguing reading within the study’s overall trajectory, an example of Zola’s profound self-censorship that seems incongruous with his theoretical commitments to truth in representation – and politics.
This examination of some of the best-known prose in nineteenth-century French literature is especially masterful for the thoughtful – sometimes stunning – deployment of the readings and the overall structure of the study. For example, the brilliant implications of the first chapter, which pairs the thematization of taboo desires with Barthes’ notion of the pleasure of the text whilst citing Rachilde’s textual sadism, are not completely clear until Chapter Four, wherein the reader is complicit in the same, and the so-called ‘pleasure of the text’ becomes the pain of narrative withheld. In its sweeping consideration of the body in disarray, Thompson’s study places itself squarely within studies of the body while also relying upon the tenets of newer arenas of inquiry such as disability studies. At times I found myself wishing for more attention to the impact that disability studies might have on these readings. Likewise, chapters might be strengthened to foreground historical and theoretical connections between them. Then again, the interpretive turns of this study are also, certainly, its grace.
University of Minnesota-Morris, MN, USA
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© 2016 Tammy Berberi
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1141570