Time Warp: Imaginary Media to See the Past in the French Merveilleux-scientifique Genre

A little-known french genre called the merveilleux-scientifique took great interest at the turn of the century in seeing the invisible. Microbes, auras, thoughts, aliens, waves embodied this scopic urge for the invisible. One recurrent theme is being able to see the past, thanks to an imaginative apparatus (a mirror covered with dust, fog, a wall, glass, light itself, rocks). This paper wants to investigate the trope of using an imaginary media to see history in a few forgotten stories (L’Historioscope by Mouton, Poussière by Mille, Sur le mur by Roland, Le Maître de la lumière by Renard, Les Trois yeux by Leblanc). We will be showing the impact contemporary (pseudo) sciences (slow light by Camille Flammarion, eye movements by George Buswell, afterimages and persistence of vision by Joseph Plateau) had on this reenactment of the magic mirror and how it is closely entangled with detective stories. Machine do watch us die and these devices enable the character to solve mysteries by rewinding time. Visual Studies and Media Archeology will come in hand to help us study, precisely, what can not be stopped, but only replayed.

Keywords : Literature

Updated on 11/05/2018