SubStance

The 2003 release in France of Bruno Podalydès's film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room [Le Mystère de la chambre jaune] (1907) brings renewed attention to this classic detective story and to its visual potentiality.¹ Podalydès plays up its scenes of surveillance, blindness, and insight by overlaying tropes of photography with the visual universe of Tintin comic books; in his film, the book's narrator Sainclair becomes a bespectacled photographer whose optical prosthetics identify him as "he who sees" (Podalydès, 352). But while the story's cinematic rebirth may tempt us to read its "optics" in a vague post-Lacanian sense (metaphors of mastery, sins of the filmic gaze), such a reading would elide a scientism specific to Leroux's age.

As with so many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century detective novels, Mystery of the Yellow Room embeds its criminal investigation plot in the broader semantic universe of scientific investigation: the initial crime, a nocturnal attack on Mademoiselle Stangerson, occurs in a chamber (the Yellow Room) abutting a scientific laboratory where she and her father have spent years engaged in physics research — the pre-radiographic study of the "dissociation of matter." The international renown of the Stangersons, described as precursors to Monsieur and Madame Curie, is said to be such that the threatened interruption of their research constitutes an "incalculable loss to science."² But in Podalydès's film version, laboratory vials give way to quack machinery, as Stangerson is recast as a kooky inventor of solar cars and trick gadgets.

In his decision to evacuate the serious scientific content of Leroux's 1907 novel, Podalydès resembles modern critics of the detective fiction genre. For in the wake of forceful psychoanalytic and post-structuralist readings of the 1970s and '80s, critics have generally been loathe to invoke the scientific context of detective fiction, perhaps for fear of falling into the simplistic influence model exemplified by one of the genre's earliest [End Page 27] studies, Régis Messac's Le "Detective Novel" et l'Influence de la Pensée Scientifique of 1929.³ But by foregrounding the tensions inherent to linguistic systems and libidinal romance, we risk forgetting that complex streams of ambivalence coursed through the scientific epistemology of detective fiction at its very genesis. This essay aims to revive the connection between literary detection and scientific deduction, between investigative mode and empirical method in the context of fin-de-siècle positivist thought.

Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room, an acknowledged keystone in the detective genre's emergence, connects explicit musings on physics to a constellation of less obvious allusions to optics — that is, to the science of vision, in the literal, physiological, anatomical sense. This 1907 novel thus emerges as a key to understanding the early detective as private "eye."⁴ Indeed, through attention to the optical semantics of the novel's pivotal yellow room (chambre jaune/ optical chambre) and its elaboration of criminal inquiry, this essay will reveal the visuality of the detective genre itself to be crucially structured by an unresolved epistemological struggle between empirical method and abstract deduction.

I. The Yellow Room/The Blind Spot

When writing his novels, the erstwhile journalist Gaston Leroux used to enforce a peculiar home ritual. He shut himself up in a small study for the duration of the writing period while his family waited in silence; after days and weeks, he exited the room, announced the completion of his novel with a pistol shot, and was greeted by the jubilant racket of his relieved relatives (Hoveyda). This anecdote may provide some psycho-biographical illumination of themes in Le Mystère de la chambre jaune, a novel woven around pistol shots, enclosed rooms, and a woman silenced by her (former) husband. But more specifically, it...