Abstract
In “At the Berlin Aquarium” (1895) and “Impressionism” (1883), poet Jules Laforgue (1860–1887) reinterprets Darwinian science to affirmative of the possibility of an avant-garde revolution in perception, which is similar to the ways in which animals see. According to the poet, the physical eye of Impressionist artist can be liberated from the constraints of human thought. However, in Laforgue’s poem, this transcendent experience occurs within a city aquarium. The aquarium represents freedom for Laforgue because it is perceived as an escape from Western urban society. Nettleton thus also discusses the cultural interest in the Japanese paintings of the “Floating World” during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of aquatic literature of the period paired with contemporary zoo studies (Rothfels, Malamud), Nettleton illustrates the ways in which aquariums represented a new role for art to dive into the very origins of the human experience—within a glass enclosure.
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Notes
- 1.
Cuvier is discussed in the section Fureur geneisque de l’art in Impressionisme. Laforgue argued that a transcendent force pushed “Cuvier to reconstitute fossils,” which I will discuss later in this chapter (147). In terms of the debate between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Laforgue is obviously on the side of transformism, arguing that a Lamarckian vital force caused Cuvier’s research. Laforgue’s correspondence with Théodore Lindenlaub mentions Lohengrin, most probably referring to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s article “La première de Lohnengrin” on February 15th.
- 2.
As we will examine later in this chapter, Laforgue constructs a dichotomy between two different types of humans who are evolving in different ways, the impressionist versus the academic. In “Le Miracle des Roses,” Laforgue quotes Darwin’s study of two types of touch-me-not plants, adding, “The other sowed by sensitive ones behaved in a different manner/L’autre semis de Sensitives se comporta d’une manière un peu différente” (1986c, 586). For Laforgue, the avant-gardist is a sensitive soul that behaves and functions differently from others. The quote is found in Darwin’s lesser-known book The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). The French translation is quoted in Laforgue’s epigraph for “Le Miracle des Roses” in Molarités légendaires (published posthumously in 1920).
- 3.
“And the Obscene Mysteries of Cybele/Et les mystères Obscènes de Cybèle” (Laforgue 1986a, 606). The last line of the poem was not included in the 1903 edition of the poem.
- 4.
In the Book of Revelation, the riders of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse represent conquest, war, famine or death—the end of humanity as we know it. The term “apocalypse” in ancient Greek means “an uncovering,” typically an understanding of divine secrets that can help one comprehend earthy realities.
- 5.
One should note the lexical field of “naturally” and “naïvely” and “natural,” which can be defined as “that which has not be made, modified or altered by man.” “Qui n’a pas été fabriqué, modifié, traité par l’homme” (Le Grand Robert, 876).
- 6.
Critics of Darwin have used the topic of the eye for centuries to combat his theory of evolution. One of their arguments is that an eye of a vertebrate is too complex to have evolved from Darwinian natural selection. Creationists argue that the eye could not have appeared by slight variations and developments over the course of millions of years. Darwin himself understood the skepticism about this idea. Darwin wrote in chapter six of The Origin of Species, “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree” (337). However, Darwin did believe that the eye could have developed by numerous, slight modifications because even single-celled organisms contain parts of their cells that are sensitive to light, and these parts could have evolved into eyes (Johnson, 22).
- 7.
“Description is the work of a brain which comprehends the things it perceives in their connection and their essence; Impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the phenomenon only the sensuous elements and by a one-sided aspect of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer recognizes in a tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this concept includes. The Impressionist sees before him merely a mass of colour composed of spots of different greens, on which the sun flashes here and there points and rays of light” (Nordau 1968, 487).
- 8.
Uexküll tells a story of Helmholtz’s childhood: He and his mother passed by a church bell tower with men working on the roof. Helmholtz asked his mother if she could take the dolls down from the roof for him. Because the men on the roof were distant, the child perceived them as small people. However, he lacked the knowledge that objects appear smaller the farther away they are. “The infant’s visual space ends here with an all encompassing farthest plane. Only bit by bit do we learn to push the farthest plane even farther with the help of distance signs until the adults’ visual space ends at a distance of six to eight kilometers and the horizon begins” (Uexküll, loc 638). Distance perception is thus learned, not innate, and our experiential knowledge alters how and what we see.
- 9.
The last line in the 1895 edition of the poem, “And the obscene mysteries of Cybele” (Laforgue 1986a, 606), also suggests the return to a spiritual, pre-Christian source. Cybele was an Anatolian mother goddess described by the Greek poet Hesiod in the eighth century BC (Roller 1999, 10). Lynn Roller argues that this mother goddess was one of the earliest concepts of the divine and was a fundamental part of human development (1999, 10). The religious imagery suggests an alternative, heavenly reality that could be a refuge from modern city life. It is also yet another means of destroying previous, antiquated thought processes in order to enter into the new.
- 10.
“my faith, making an existence there again, of stumps whose antennae blink with the coral in front of it, of a thousand endless warts; a whole fetal and claustral flora, waving the eternal dream of being able to whisper one day to mutual congratulations on this state of affairs/ma foi, s’y refaisant une existence, de moignons dont les antennes clignent au corail d’en face, de mille verrues sans but; toute une flore foetale et claustrale et vibratile, agitant l’éternel rêve d’arriver à se chuchoter un jour de mutuelles félicitations sur cet état de choses” (Laforgue 1986c, 438).
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Nettleton, C. (2019). The Decadent Deep Sea: Jules Laforgue’s “At the Berlin Aquarium”. In: The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19345-4_4
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