The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman of the Seine Across the Tides of Modernity

Description

The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine" (the Unknown Woman of the Seine), and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also called "The Mona Lisa of Suicide," has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is simlarly "a ghost story for grown-ups," narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It also investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Iconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue," casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age. Cover The Drowned Muse Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures Note about Translations Introduction The Discontinuous Chronology of a Social, Literary, and Artistic Phenomenon Charting a Constellation: Drawing Maps and Lines Structuring a Corpus: The Collection I. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN 1. Thinking an Image in Theory and History Exploring an Untimely History: Survivals, Dialectical Images, and Anachronisms Approaching a Paradoxical Vestige The Inconnue in the History of Casts and Death Masks: Benkard’s Collection 2. ‘The Most Poetic Topic in the World’ Bringing out the Dead: Le Gallienne’s Eroticism as Horror ‘And From Being Statues They Turn into Phantoms’ 3. ‘White Ophelia Floats Like a Great Lily’ ‘Noyer le poisson’: Magritte’s Drowned Women and Painted Masks A New Undine Nabokov’s ‘Inconnue’ Marius Grout’s Poèmes à l’Inconnue: The Dead Woman between Muse and Christian Liminal Figure Drowned Women and the Watery Corpses of German Expressionism II. THE DEAD WOMAN AND THE PALIMPSEST OF THE CITY 4. The Dead Woman and the Modern City Legibility of an Image, Legibility of the City ‘The Death-fraught Idyll of the City’ The Discourse of Estrangement and Its Literary Treatments ‘Fugitive Beauty’ The Commodity ‘A Mythology Takes Shape and Comes Undone’ 5. ‘The City as a Magnified Ghost’: A Cartography of Survivals The Morgue The Seine: ‘Vieux cimetière fluvial’ (‘The Old Fluvial Cemetery’) Julien Green’s Paris Louis Aragon’s Aurélien Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) Patrick Modiano’s Des Inconnues (Unknown Women) III. TRACES OF A METAMORPHOSIS: POPULAR IMAGERY, PHOTOGRAPHY, CINEMA, AND THEORY 6. The Inconnue as Popular Icon A Metamorphic Image A Figure of Community and a Political Allegory: From Print to Cinema An Allegory of Modern Allegory Old Ghost, New Haunts 7. Man Ray and Aurélien: When Text Meets Image Aurélien and the Project of the Œuvres Romanesques Croisées: The Tradition of the Illustrated Book Revisited Illustration as an Empreinte and a Process of Collage: Displacing Representation 8. ‘Jellyfish at the Cinema …’ ‘All that a Heart Desires Can be Reduced to a Watery Figure’: Vigo’s L’Atalante ‘An Uncanny Halo’: Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage ‘The Imprint of a Duration’: Truffaut’s Romantic Cinema ‘The Lament of the Seine’ 9. ‘Emanating as if from the Depths of a Tomb’: The Inconnue’s Philosophical Lives Blanchot’s Inconnue: Literature, Haunting Images, and Fascination Thinking the Image and Thinking Images As She Lies Dying: The Maiden and the Passion of the Image Conclusion Appendix 1. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’ 2. Marius Grout, Poèmes à l’Inconnue 3. Maurice Magre, ‘Complainte de la Seine’ Bibliography Index