The power of narration in the representation of things

Literature critics engaged in a wide discussion about the best way to represent Flaubertian Bouvard and Pecuchet. The last novel by the great French writer is not only one of his best works, but it is in fact appealing to everyone concerned with “scientific production of knowledge” and methodology. Critics interpret differently the final approach of the long voyage through science made by the two modest Parisian copyists: the wish to come back to copy. Is it that they are so stupid not to appreciate the fruits of what they were supposed to learn, or is it that what was supposed to be learned was in fact sterile? Are Bouvard and Pecuchet lacking methodology or they want to show that methodology itself fails to produce an emancipate knowledge? That is to say: is the circle the best narrative image to represent Bouvard and Pecuchet? Or is it the spiral?
I don’t know whether Bouvard and Pecuchet was in the mind of curators while building the Making the modern world exhibition. Mutatis mutandis, some analogies do not seem casual.
I must say I found the exhibition one of the best examples in grand narratives on trustful relations between science and technology. From the beginning you see that the perspective is explicitly and triumphantly progressive. When entering, you see the name of the gallery on a monolith on your left, while you are able to see the very end of the gallery thanks to a neon door connecting to the Wellcome Wing. As a new Pecuchet, you can trust you are in something that makes sense, something clear and unequivocal. Progressive dates written on the floor, big technology objects in the centre and the two lateral walls showing respectively nine vitrines on thematic periods and five vitrines on “every-day technology” give you also comforting ideas of organic unity and definition. The overflowing mass of things tickles feelings of prosperity, and acceleration in time and in creativity. It is like the “How many things are here” would stand for “How many things where made since 1750 up to now”. While entering the museum from the commodity world outside, the current visitor is seduced in his own language to discover what “making this world” meant through history.
But if you follow the thematic vitrines on your left you can see that the last one, representing “Age of ambivalence” and the increasing scepticism about trustful attitudes towards science, forms a striking contrast to the triumphant grand narratives up to there. Actually, the disturbing icons of new anxieties on show here build themselves a new grand narrative, but of opposite sign. You can see some Thalidomide tablets, an Home cloning kit and in the end a CCTV directed towards you in pure Orwellian style. But what was surprising to me was the curators’ introductive choice.
Curators decided to give Enki Bilal’s strips the task to represent feelings of ambivalence. A great French cartoonist, Enki Bilal has a particular sensibility in science fiction. The futuristic scenarios of his novels are desolate and gloomy, poor in objects and commodities. People living there are drawn unsharply, appear disoriented and use tribal signs as a matter for identification. Sometimes familiarity gets into the scene as pure non-sense: in a vignette, dialling a phone number has become a complete abstract gesture. So why to keep –as Bilal does– a common and tangible telephone and a well-known finger-movement?
The power of estrangement is made stronger because it deals directly with the very beginning of the Making the modern world exhibition: as a birth-act, curators decided in fact to represent a visual mnemo-story of the Encyclopédie and its attending enthusiasm. So why not call a French novelist to re-discuss the topical French act of birth of the modern world, and the topos according to which the growth of knowledge is the key for human emancipation? Suddenly we are aware to be right at a new key-point, in the sensible place of a narrative circle, or rather of a narrative spiral. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, we are perhaps invited to reconsider the triumphal grand narratives and their linear perspectives, we are called to observe critically. Flaubert was deliberately ambiguous in saying in which way Bouvard and Pecuchet restarted copying: as in the end of the Making the modern world exhibition, the decision is ultimately up to us.