Jenson on Xu (2023)

Long before Althusser proposed the concept of symptomatic reading, nineteenth-century critics were heavily engaged in a different kind of diagnostic interpretation. Take this passage from Charles Morice’s La Literature de tout à l’heure (1889) regarding characters in nineteenth-century French novels:

leurs mobiles d’action sont dans leur bile ou dans leur nerfs […] Nous les suivons du regard, figures pales, figures colorées, agitées de maladies, névrose ou chloroses, pousées par la faim, par l’ivresse, par la sensualité…toutes des figures sur qui pèse la Fatalité d’un vice physique ou d’une héréditée de folie (157, cited in Xu). 

Here, the concept of neurosis (la névrose)—central to early research in psychology, physiology, and medicine—breaks out of the examining room, surging over scientific barriers and into the pages of nineteenth-century French letters. Ye Xu’s L’archéologie de la névrose dans les lettres françaises, 1870–1900, gives a bibliographically rich account of this conceptual contagion, presenting a detailed and compelling history of how the fin-de-siècle became so neurotic about neurosis.

Across five chapters, Xu traces neurosis through medical science and its publics, literary production, literary criticism, and the cultures and aesthetics of decadence, culminating in a reading of what she terms “l’exégèse névrotique de l’oeuvre verlanienne” (23). In doing so, Xu weaves a detailed history of neurosis into a thesis about neurotic style, carving out important space for literary accounts of neurosis beyond psychoanalysis. While the Freudian paradigm is not exactly ascendant, Xu is right to differentiate the nineteenth-century conception of neurosis as “fondamentalement ancré dans une structure de savoirs encore vierge des acquis de la pensée freudienne” (5). Indeed, by locating neurosis more solidly in the context of its emergence, Xu’s study facilitates productive links between nineteenth-century French literature, neurology, psychology, physiology, evolutionary biology, and sociological materialism. 

Chapter one introduces readers to early medical conceptions of neurosis in terms of “névrose,” “nervosisme,” “neurasthénie,” and “hysterie.” Tracing these definitions from medical dictionaries to “actualités médicales,” Xu makes the case that the medical roots of neurosis would remain detectable in uses, interpretations, and representations of neurosis beyond the medical purview. Opening onto this broader scene, chapter two takes on the “symphonie” of neurosis in the public sphere. “Parfois euphonique parfois cacophonique,” Xu defines this symphony as “composée des savoirs médicaux, la théorie de la dégénérescence, la mise en scene de la névrose et d’abondants écrits à propos de la névrose issus du monde des lettres” (63). From this cauldron of influence, Xu successfully synthesizes a broader “literary and intellectual” conception of neurosis founded on irrationality, hypersensibility, pessimism, and debauchery. Throughout chapter two, these foci are borne out in extensive readings of literary works from 1870–1900. Pivoting from mimetic representations of neurosis, chapter three reveals how criticism at the fin-de-siècle advanced an exegetical approach centered on the idea of literary neurosis. If nineteenth-century novelists “played doctor” by diagnosing their characters with various nervous ailments, nineteenth-century critics were just as quick to develop a literary symptomology of neurotic writing, diagnosing works, authors, and even movements with the maladie du jour. Accordingly, in chapter four, neurosis intersects with decadence. Working with literary and critical histories from chapters two and three, Xu explores neurosis as a complicating factor in narratives of social and aesthetic decadence rooted purely in fantasy or hedonism. Pressing on notions of instinctivity and excess, Xu lends decadence an important conceptual specificity, refiguring neurosis as one of its most fundamental “avatars” (199). Finally, chapter five takes on the life and works of Paul-Marie Verlaine, a poet who we might even say, according to Xu, “est mort de la névrose” (273). This is where Xu’s argument becomes most decisive. 

Chapter five brings to the fore what is most theoretically innovative about Xu’s approach to neurosis in French letters. In her reading of Verlaine, the medical and material foundations of neurosis—painstakingly established in the proceeding chapters—emerge in the form of an environmentally and corporeally attuned poetics. Here, nervous hypersensibility materializes as a medium of contact between self and environment. Contrary to a romantic poetics of ecological interiority, Xu argues that Verlaine’s neurotic environmentalism registers a more fundamental staging of the connection between nervous and environmental materiality. If, according to Xu, romantic poetics emphasizes a philosophy of duality between the objectified world and the reflective subject, Verlaine’s poetry “laisse fusionner le monde et le soi et laisse connecté la physique et le psychisme” (334). In other words, for Xu, Verlaine’s neurotic dysfunction opens onto a poetics of material and affective influence, where the failure to reflectively grasp the world is precisely what allows the world to body forth. Situating Verlaine within the larger intellectual history of neurosis, Xu’s theoretical claims seem to ripple across the surface of the nineteenth-century “world of letters” as a whole. Still, if Xu’s reading of Verlaine’s pathological environmentalism pushes her argument to new heights, it also exposes its own neuroses. 

Especially in discussions of environment and materiality, Xu’s account of French letters is surprisingly metropolitan. Despite the enormous body of scientific, environmental, and moral literature generating from France’s global peripheries, Xu’s focus remains trained on a world of French letters synonymous with its continental interior. Even in discussions of biological degeneration, a crucial tributary to nineteenth-century theories of neurosis, the conceptual substrate of race is hardly mentioned at all. Xu’s project, in other words, manifests a particular sensitivity to the “outside,” something that chapter one tells us is affiliated with “nervosisme.” Xu’s intellectual history is simultaneously meticulous and incomplete, exhibiting a specificity bordering on myopia. Nevertheless, Xu’s singular focus and archival precision give L'archéologie de la névrose significant historical traction, making it an important contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century French letters. So, if L'archéologie de la névrose, exhibits signs of nervosisme, it is worth remarking that for many nineteenth-century thinkers, neurosis could easily shade into genius.