| This dissertation investigates the representation of the labyrinth in nineteenth-century French novels from a period when, according to Daniel Oster and Jean Goulemot, a new notion starts to develop, that of "ecrire Paris".1 Written at a time of radical mutations imposed on Paris by the government of the Second Empire and Baron Haussmann, these novels about the city put the labyrinth at the heart of the narration. I examine the meanings these literary texts give to the labyrinth as they appropriate and transform a figure found not only in myth but in archeology, history, numismatics, architecture, plastic arts, and pleasure gardens.;My first chapter regards models of the labyrinth in ancient sources, such as the Iliad by Homer (xviii. 590-593), The Histories by Herodotus (Book II: Euterpe), Euthydemus by Plato, and Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder (Book 36: Stone), and analyses the labyrinth theme through the Santarcangeli conception. The first half of chapter two focuses on writings by Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Retif de la Bretonne and on some early-nineteenth-century monumental novels of Balzac.2 It demonstrates how these authors transform and modernize the labyrinth model, using its narrative, poetic, and heuristic potential to explore a hidden network of historical and social causality. I also show how they try to define, with this method, a new territory for literature and a new way to consider the city as a capital. The second part of the chapter deals with specific texts by novelists such as Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Eugene Sue, which both deal with the city of Paris and fit into the eighteenth-century tradition established by Mercier, de la Bretonne, and Balzac.;My final two chapters examine how, by using semantic, semiotic and hermeneutic strategies, nineteenth-century French authors invent a notion that is even more complex: the city as a body at once structural, architectural, political, social, and even biological. Their literary innovations will open the way to a new literary praxis of destructuration and lead to new forms of "city writings" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of which the "roman noir" constitutes one of the most striking examples.;1 Daniel Oster & Jean Goulemot, La vie parisienne. Anthologie des moeurs du XIXe siecle (Paris: Sand/Conti, 1989) Preface: "Ecrire Paris" 5. 2 I use the term "monumental novels" in reference to works whose excessive length became the predominant form of writing in the 19th century. Indeed, this was the century of Chateaubriand's Les Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, Michelet's Histoire de France, Balzac's Comedie Humaine, the century that witnessed the invention of the feuilleton (example: Eugene Sue's Mysteres de Paris), and generally of massive works which claimed to capture the history of the nineteenth century and to portray the entire society of their time. |
