ABSTRACT
Narratives of the nineteenth-century French fantastique, from Théophile Gauthier’s Avatar (1856) to Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla (1887), can be understood in terms of a double characteristic. First, they attempt to renegotiate or, better, overcome the mind-body dualism in favor of a holistic view of the self. Second, they offer avant la lettre literary explorations of the unconscious. Namely, concerning the latter, narratives involving automata, mesmerism, ghost apparitions, possessions, and variations of madness can be considered as attempts to circumscribe and talk about a region beyond—commonly understood and scientifically investigated—consciousness. In this chapter, we focus on Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s last novel, L’Ève future (1886), in which the inventor Thomas Edison appears to attempt to cure his friend’s, Lord Ewald’s, love for the actress Alicia Clary—whose uncanny disjunction between her external appearance and her personality has haunted Ewald—by creating an android in which Alicia’s ideal external beauty would be combined with an equally ideal spirituality. In what follows we attempt to show Villiers’ critique of the metaphysics of selfhood, exploring a series of interrelated themes. First, we investigate his holistic view of the self by analyzing his critique of the Cartesian metaphysical framework, in which the mind-body dualism is grounded. Second, we show the way in which this critique of a metaphysics of consciousness is expanded into a critique of the metaphysics of the unconscious. Namely, we show how Villiers can be understood to pre-empt and be critical of a metaphysical, that is, ahistorical and hypostatized, conception of the unconscious. Third, in this context, we show in which way this critique of metaphysics and the resultant holistic view of selfhood entail the Nietzschean ethical stance of creating oneself as a work of art.
