Kate Rees

‘Nous avons une reconstitution à reconstituer’: Re-enacting the Mystery of the Yellow Room

This article considers the most recent film adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Le mystère de la chambre jaune, the 2003 version directed by Bruno Podalydès, as a production which ‘palimpsestuously’ brings out the self-reflexive qualities of the original text. Leroux’s detective novel can be seen, intertextually, as a series of embedded narratives, symbolized by the enclosed walls of the locked Yellow Room itself. Focus falls in particular on the representation of newspapers in the novel, an echo of practices at work in Poe’s early detective stories, which cut and paste newspaper reports as fictionalized source texts. As in Poe’s tales, such texts are challenged and pastiched by the broader narrative of the novel. Podalydès’ film incorporates its own embedded narratives via the inclusion of newspapers, photography and theatre, and accentuates the ludic quality of Leroux’s text through the frequent images of toys and gadgets which give visual significance to cogs and levers, making manifest the workings of the contraptions as Leroux exposes the workings of narrative in his mystery novel. This article will examine Podalydès’ embracing of the self-awareness of its source text and the way it playfully points to multiple points of origin.

The Cassandra Journalists (1848–1940)

ABSTRACT This article examines the strategies available to women journalists in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on the voice of Cassandra adopted by Marie d’Agoult at the time of the 1848 revolution. D’Agoult created a new journalistic model which included three specific features: the assumption of a poetic, prophetic, and apocalyptic voice in order to announce disaster; the explicit invocation of the figure of Cassandra; and a dramatic practice of ‘coming out’ which meant dropping the disguise of masculinity. For those rare women who, in the wake of d’Agoult, managed to write about politics in newspapers and periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century, the reference to Cassandra was almost inevitable, as illustrated by the careers of Juliette Adam, Claude Vignon and Séverine. This practice of women’s journalism endures into the twentieth century, taken up in particular by Louise Weiss and Geneviève Tabouis when fascism was on the rise.

Sensory Reportage and the ‘Steeplechase’ Between Novels and Newspapers in Verne’s Michel Strogoff

ABSTRACT This article considers the emphasis on acute sensory perception associated with the rise of the ‘grand reporter’ in the late nineteenth century, and the representation of such perception in the novels of Jules Verne in particular. Focusing in particular on Verne’s novel Michel Strogoff (1876), I discuss the comic exaggeration of the visual and aural capacities of the reporters depicted in this text, arguing that the subversion of sensory experience acts as a riposte to practices of information-gathering associated with the new media, such as the eyewitness report, and also as a reflection on techniques of realist literature. The article draws on discussion of the senses and the critique of ocularcentrism in particular in anthropological studies, suggesting that Verne’s Michel Strogoff offers a satire of reifying practices of viewing the world, and instead implies the need for a multi-sensorial approach to representing the real.

Scenes of Debris in Charles Fenestrier’s La vie des frelons: The Conflict and Convergence of the Newspaper and the Novel at the fin de siècle

Abstract This article focuses on the conflicting images of the press in the fin de siècle years by way of the frequently employed metaphors of order and chaos, and dirt and cleanliness. It offers close analysis of a 1908 novel by the journalist Charles Fenestrier, La vie des frelons, which gives a detailed and satirical insight into the life of reporters in the offices of a large daily newspaper at the turn of the century. The newspaper is initially viewed as an impressive, streamlined vehicle with the capacity to organize and unify; but, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the new characteristics of a journalism increasingly linked to practices of reportage are in fact much more murky. At the same time, the boundaries between newspaper and novel become blurred. The more the novel rejects the new journalism, the more it is seen to borrow from its practices, both structurally and stylistically. In this text, patterns of order and debris give voice to a tense relationship between journalism and the novel, asking questions about the generic boundaries of each, as fiction and reportage conflict and coalesce.