From defective eye to the poetics of precise vision: Maylis de Kerangal

Superiority of the bad eye

Maylis de Kerangal, La lentille et le roman, Les arts de lire (Verdier, 2026). [quote as LEN]

This slim volume originates from a lecture Maylis de Kerangal delivered on August 9, 2024, at the Banquet du livre in Lagrasse, whose overarching theme was "Thinking and Looking Elsewhere." The theme of elsewhere, of gazing into the distance, of seeing in general, becomes the guiding thread of an essay that weaves together autobiographical elements, literary theory, the history of science, and the poetics of the novel within a dense space. The text is written in short verses that almost resemble a record of thought, interspersed with longer prose excerpts from Kerangal's own novels, which serve as evidence and reflections of her theses. The poetics-based lecture repeatedly interrupts its own argumentative flow with these passages from Kerangal's novels, not merely as illustrations of the theoretical theses—they are arguments in themselves, and their selection, placement, and internal logic point to the boundaries and shifts that the manifesto entails in relation to the work.

The verse text in LEN—those short, detached lines that form the actual core of the manifesto and frame the self-quotations—is an argument in its very form. In terms of content, it revolves around three movements. First, the self-diagnosis: "I am nearsighted," "I move in sfumato," "I perceive more than I see." ¹ – the defective eye as a starting point, which is not a deficit but an epistemic disposition, a particular way of being in the world. Secondly, the conceptual distinction: “voir” versus “regarder,” seeing versus observing, passive perception versus the active act of attention, “transformer ma vue en regard.” And thirdly, the concise, almost aphoristic conclusion: “I should really wear glasses. Contact lenses. Instead, I write novels. It’s the same thing.” ²

What the verse text reveals as a whole is a tension between modesty and ambition. The short lines, the fragmented sentences, the pauses seem like the antithesis of the long, breathlessly flowing sentences familiar from Kerangal's novels. In the manifesto, Kerangal speaks in a different voice than in the novel, a more deliberate, tentative, less overwhelming one. But behind this formal modesty lies a high ambition: the self-diagnosis of poor eyesight becomes a theory of writing itself, Spinoza and Galileo are invoked as forebears, the Fresnel lens as a structural model of the novel. The verse text makes this tension visible by expressing the grand in small units—each line a step, each step inconspicuous, but the direction is steep. LEN is a manifesto that subtly presents itself as a confession, a self-revelation.

Kerangal lists her visual impairments like a medical record, with clinical precision and without affectation—hyperopia, myopia, astigmatism, congenital cataracts, incipient age-related strabismus. The author acknowledges her shortcomings. The form of the verse reinforces this impression—the short, detached lines, the tentative pauses, the modesty of the small units, the fragmentary nature reminiscent of a confession, of the laborious extraction of truths long concealed. Kerangal presents herself as someone who doesn't see well, who hallucinates, who tricks ("Je triche," during the game of Panneau in the car), who is never certain of what she has seen, who is afraid to reveal the truth. This is the vocabulary of guilt and humility—the vocabulary of confession.

But behind this confession lies a manifesto, and the ingenuity lies in the fact that the confession both enables and protects the manifesto. By beginning with an admission of deficiency, Kerangal immunizes herself against the accusation of hubris: she claims numerous giants of optics and thought as ancestors—but she does so from the perspective of the cross-eyed, the nearsighted, the woman who can never be an eyewitness.

Kerangal's ambition is considerable: poor eyesight is not a deficiency, but epistemological superiority; the novel is not one art form among others, but the functional equivalent of the scientific lens that revolutionized the world order in the 17th century; writing is not expression, but an instrument of knowledge, a search for truth. These are not modest theses—but they are presented with humility, in the syntax of tentative exploration, in the gesture of admission. This is the true ingenuity of the little book: it presents itself as a confession and is a program; it presents itself as a self-examination and is a poetics; it presents itself as a personal confession and is a theory of the novel in general.

Structure and function of self-citation

The seven self-quotations in LEN follow a dramatic structure: They begin with the coastal road from Kennedy cornice, rise above Paula's burning eyes in Un monde à portée de main and Diderot's landing approach in Birth of a bridge Pierre's obsessive mirror grinding reaches its center in the Cairo display case. La valise noire, where the argument of the lens as a homemade visual instrument becomes explicit, and end with the brain scan from Repair the living and the shipwreck Day of surfKerangal consistently selects those passages that depict seeing as an active, physical, and manual act—thus omitting sections of the same texts where seeing is undermined, fails, or is exposed as an instrument of power. Opéra's binoculars, for example, do not appear; Marianne's inability to read letters is missing. The manifesto engages in a selective self-reading. This is a productive, yet also limiting, process.

What the self-quotations reveal about the book as a whole is this: LEN is not a manifesto of openness, but of consolidation. Kerangal retrospectively writes himself a poetics of the work that is coherent, more elegant, more closed, philosophically ennobled by Spinoza, Galileo, Kepler, and Fresnel. The novels are, in reality, more ambiguous, more politically dangerous, more emotionally turbulent than the manifesto admits: they depict blindness as failure, lenses as instruments of power, seeing as pain. The last self-quotation (from Day of surf) is the most honest in this respect because it most readily breaks this control—the narrator hears, imagines herself, presses her forehead to the glass, and seeing merges into something that no lens can capture. By placing precisely this quotation at the end, Kerangal, perhaps unintentionally, hints beyond her own manifesto: The novel is more than a lens; it is a sensory instrument for all, and LEN is the beautiful, clever, but ultimately still incomplete attempt to capture this in a single metaphor.

The first self-quotation describes the Corniche as a topographical object—the coastal road as a “planar escape route, without ends,” a threshold between land and sea, a magnetic borderland. This is followed by the scene of the young people who appear in June. The Corniche is organized by the gaze, by focusing and framing. In the context of the manifesto, this quotation demonstrates panoptic perception, zooming, framing as a narrative technique—the narrative voice is a camera that pans, zooms in, and takes in the overview. What Kerangal omits is interesting: she does not quote Opéra's binoculars, nor the surveillance structure of the novel. The manifesto chooses the democratic gaze—the narrative voice that sees everyone—and excludes the gaze of power. The self-quotation presents the Corniche as an optical novel, but omits the question of whose gaze this is and what power relations it embodies.

The second self-quote (from Un monde à portée de mainThe text describes Paula's eyes, which burn, are open eighteen hours a day, and tilt to the side in the evening – “son œil gauche cloche, il verse sur le côté.” And then the crucial formulation: seeing under the glass-roofed workshop no longer simply means keeping one's eyes open to the world, but “c'est engager une pure action, créer une image sur une feuille de papier, une image semblable à celle que le regard a construite dans le cerveau.” Kerangal chooses this quote as evidence for the thesis that seeing is an action, that “regarder” engages the body. The passage is fitting for the manifesto because it makes the physical dimension of looking explicit and simultaneously articulates the connection between seeing and image production – between lens and novel. The character's squint (“son œil gauche cloche”) is Kerangal's own squint, transplanted into the character of Paula. The self-quotation functions here as an autobiographical reflection: Kerangal quotes herself in order to recognize herself in her character – and invites the reader to walk the same path. But the quotation contains more than the manifesto states: it also describes the pain, the exhaustion, the price of seeing – “les muscles douloureux et le front brûlant” – which the manifesto, in its theoretical elegance, neglects.

The third self-quote (from Birth of a bridgeThe image in question is Diderot's landing approach, the chromatic scanning motion from twelve thousand to one thousand feet. It is the most visually dense quotation in the manifesto and functions as the ultimate demonstration: here we see how a novelist's optician works. Kerangal places this quotation after the Spinoza passage as proof that her writing is an "investigation of truth." Diderot looks like Spinoza, polished: systematically, patiently, focused on the object, on recognizing the task at hand. What the quotation achieves in the manifesto is this: it ennobles the engineer's craftsmanship through its analogy to philosophy—and simultaneously ennobles writing through its analogy to engineering. This is a threefold ennoblement: craftsmanship, philosophy, literature are the same practice of precise seeing. But here, too, the selection is revealing: the quotation shows Diderot alone, in the airplane, contemplating. It does not show Diderot on the construction site, in conflict with the workers, struggling with the river—the novel in its social and political dimension. The manifesto thus chooses visual meditation and leaves out the novel as a social analysis.

The fourth self-quotation (from the “Parabole du miroir”) does not come from a novel, but from the collection Le Ciel vu de la Terre It's a text about a boy named Pierre who builds his own telescope and spends weeks grinding the mirror glass. The crucial sentence: "To polish the surface of the mirror, it's essential to find the right movement, the right 'grind,' and then repeat it, repeat it, tirelessly repeat it." ³ Kerangal cites this as a model for the writing process: the novel emerges through repetition, through modulated trajectories, through patient refinement. Following the quotation, the manifesto arrives at a lyrical condensation: “Finding the right movement, the right ‘process’ and repeating it […]. Gradually moving away. Moving, displacing oneself. Immersing oneself in another world. In another place. In aliore loco. Elsewhere.” ⁴ Self-quotation here serves as a springboard into the abstract – Kerangal detaches herself from the quoted text and develops her theory of elsewhere, of the “ailleurs,” from it. The self-quotation is transcended; the novel becomes theory.

The fifth self-quotation (from La valise noireThe narrator is shown in the Cairo Museum, she and Sélim "like cats," stalking through the halls, finally standing before the display case with the figurines, the "powers of life." It is the quotation that leads directly into the Autochrome theory: the image by Auguste Léon that Kerangal cannot see because it is trapped in a foreign imaginary, and for which she has to build her own lens. The Autochrome photograph of Léon from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, 1914—a display case with figurines, without caption, without explanation. She says she cannot see this image because it is "taken into the realm of an imaginary elsewhere—the Orient, pantheism"—that is, enclosed in an imaginary that is not hers, in a cultural and historical framework that blocks her access. The image is there, it is physically visible, but it remains opaque because the lens through which it was captured—the lens of the early 20th century, of Orientalism, of the colonial gaze of Albert Kahn's archival project—is not her lens. She cannot simply look at the image and understand it because seeing is always already mediated by an imaginary realm that one either shares or does not. Therefore, she must construct her own lens—and this happens through storytelling: by embedding the image in her own story, with her Montreal night, with her friend's suitcase, with the Saint Laurent. Writing is the act that replaces the foreign imaginary with one's own, thereby making the image truly visible—not objectively, but personally, situated, particular. This is the crux of the matter. This quote is the only one in the manifesto that explicitly talks about the necessity of writing as an act of seeing: "Comme je veux voir this image, je dois me fabriquer une lentille. Comme je veux regarder cet ailleurs, je dois en faire le récit." The self-quote La valise noire It is therefore not an illustration, but a derivation—it is proof that the novel does what the manifesto describes. The self-referentiality is interesting: Kerangal quotes a text in which she explains how another text came about. The manifesto becomes a commentary on the novel, the novel the foundation of the manifesto. This interweaving shows how closely writing and reflection on writing are linked in Kerangal's work—but it also reveals a danger of self-interpretation: the author explains her own work, and this explanation threatens to close it off, to domesticate it, to protect it against other readings.

The sixth self-quotation (from Repair the livingRévol describes the reading of the brain scan: the tomographic sections, the halos, the black marks, the decoding of codes – and the final finding: “Le cerveau de Simon Limbres est en voie de destruction, il se noie dans le sang.” Kerangal uses this quote as evidence for the concept of CUTTING —of the cut as an operation of cognition. The novel works with cuts like a microscope, like a scanner: it penetrates matter, it opens the interior, it makes the invisible visible. What the manifesto doesn't say: this quote also reveals the emotional coldness that medical vision requires—Révol "ne cille pas," he doesn't flinch. The manifesto praises the clear vision, but the novel shows what it costs. The self-quotation is detached from its affective context: in the novel, we know what the diagnosis means for Marianne, for Juliette, for the entire family. In the manifesto, the scan is an epistemic figure. This is a significant shift: the manifesto intellectualizes what the novel keeps emotionally.

The last and longest self-quote (from Day of surf) describes the scene on the train where the narrator Le Monde—Reads the report about the shipwreck in the Manche, the radio communication between the stricken boat and the coast guard, the passing of responsibility between French and British authorities, the missing eighteen-year-old boy. It is the most political quote in the manifesto and functions as the conclusion of the argument: The novel is the instrument that makes the signals of the distress flares audible, keeps the capsizing visible, that does not avert one's gaze. “Le roman me ramène à ce naufrage tragique. Il est ce qui me met les yeux en face des trous.” Kerangal ends the manifesto with this quote because it fulfills the ethical dimension of the lens metaphor: The lens is not only epistemic, it is political. Seeing the novel is seeing responsibility. But the quote also shows—and the manifesto does not address this—how much Day of surf It goes beyond the purely visual: The narrator hears the radio voices of the drowning woman, she presses her forehead against the train window, she imagines. Seeing merges into hearing and imagining. The final self-quotation thus unintentionally refutes the manifesto's limitation to the optical metaphor: The novel is not a lens—it is a comprehensive sensory instrument that sees, hears, touches, and imagines, and that is more than LEN admits to herself.

Seeing and looking. The defective eye as a poetics starting point.

The text itself begins with a clinical self-assessment, which is simultaneously a literary positioning. Kerangal presents herself as bigleuse Before, as someone with strabismus, with a whole catalog of ophthalmological findings: hyperopia in the left eye, myopia in the right, mild convergent strabismus, congenital cataract, incipient presbyopia. This inventory of visual defects is by no means self-pity. It is a precise diagnosis of one's own perceptual conditions and thus one's own writing conditions.

Her left eye sees well into the distance, her right eye well up close—neither sees both. The author staggers, is clumsy, bumps into things, mistakes faces, moves with a sfumato. But from this deficiency arises a compensation: she recognizes people not by their faces, but by their gait, pace, silhouette, the perceived mass of their bodies. She perceives more than she sees. And she invents, even hallucinates—she shouts "vu!" in a car game before she has actually seen a sign, because she is betting on its presence. This epistemic uncertainty, the fear of error, of false testimony, shapes her entire relationship to truth. She will never be able to be an eyewitness—she calls it an oxymoron, "témoin oculaire." The eye as proof, as fact, as camera-verité: that is not her eye.

From this weakness of mere seeing, Kerangal develops a philosophically charged distinction between "voir" (to see) and "regarder" (to look at). Seeing happens, looking is an act: one directs one's gaze at something, isolates it, tears it from the sphere of generalities, devotes attention to it. "Regarder, c'est faire attention." The body engages. Looking is an ethical gesture—not the morality of abstract seeing in general, but the loyalty that binds one to the object to which one has turned.

This distinction unfolds in the first of the inserted novel excerpts, from Un monde à portée de main (2018). The character Paula, an aspiring trompe-l'œil painter, learns to see in a physical sense: her eyes burn, are open for eighteen hours a day, and her left eye tilts to the side in the evening. Seeing here is no longer passive reception, but a "pure action": creating an image on paper that matches the image constructed by the gaze in the brain. Seeing and representing, perceiving and inventing are inextricably intertwined.

The lens as a prosthesis – and the novel as its replacement

The key figure in the essay is Baruch Spinoza. In Amsterdam in 1656, after being excommunicated from the Portuguese Jewish community, he became a lens grinder—a respected trade, not merely a means of earning a living. Kerangal interprets this dual existence as a statement about the unity of material and intellectual activity: Spinoza doesn't simply change rooms when he moves from the workbench to ethics. Thinking in a sequence of technical, concrete gestures—that is what makes him a philosopher. Grinding lenses and thinking are perhaps the same thing, because in both cases it is about seeing: removing irregularities, dust, and impurities from the glass surface in order to achieve a form of transparency.

Kerangal reflects this metaphor back onto her own writing practice. Her work connects optics and literature, or more precisely: writing is optics. The 17th century, the century of light—refraction, mirrors, camera obscura—is also the century in which the lens transforms from an instrument of error to an instrument of truth. Galileo points his telescope at Jupiter and discovers four moons; the world is reconfigured. The revolution is optical. Kepler, himself nearsighted and plagued by diplopia, establishes the fundamental principles of optics. The defective eye does not hinder perception—it merely requires different instruments.

In the excerpt from Birth of a bridge (2010) In the film, the figure of Georges Diderot, on final approach, performs an analogous movement: He scans the landscape from a height of twelve thousand feet, differentiates chromatic zones, follows the course of the river that structures the space, until at one thousand feet he closes his eyes and asks the question: What is the task? To relate two landscapes. That is the story, the work, what awaits him. Seeing here is understanding the task at hand.

Kerangal describes her relationship with glasses: refused as a child, given up as a teenager, and now worn only reluctantly (the progressive lenses make her dizzy). Actually, according to ophthalmologists, she should be wearing contact lenses—soft, comfortable lenses, placed on her cornea every morning with her index finger. Instead, she writes novels. "C'est pareil." This is the book's central sentence, succinctly stated, yet programmatic: a novel and a contact lens are functionally equivalent. Both rest on the eye, correct vision, and sharpen what remains blurry.

In the excerpt from the “Parabole du miroir” (in Le Ciel vu de la TerreIn 2011, the young Pierre builds his own telescope, grinding the mirror glass for weeks, searching for the right gesture, the right movement, repeating it tirelessly – an image for writing itself: finding the right move, repeating it, subtly modulating the trajectory. In the end, one tips into another world. “In aliore loco. Ailleurs.”

Elsewhere – the Elsewhere as a poetic problem

The conference theme, "Thinking and Looking Elsewhere," is problematized by Kerangal with philosophical precision. Looking is an act of particularization: one directs one's gaze toward an object, making it special, sharp, distinct. "Elsewhere," however—the elsewhere—is not a special object. It is boundless, centerless, vague, unlocatable, definable only in relation to a "here." Kerangal's search for synonyms in a crossword puzzle dictionary yields a whole panorama: pas ici, jamais là, dans les nuages, distrait, pensif, émigré. The elsewhere is not a place, but a state—absence, distraction, being lost in dreams.

From this follows the apparent paradox: “Regarder ailleurs” is an oxymoron. In order to be able to look at the elsewhere, one must transform it into a specific object, encircle it, bring it into sharp focus. “La précision de ma lentille est ma coquetterie dans l'œil.” My ethics, says Kerangal, are corneal. ⁵ The cornea is the outermost transparent layer of the eye, which first refracts and focuses light before it reaches the lens. It is the first optical element of the visual system, directly exposed to the world, without protection, without an intermediary. To be "corneal" means, first and foremost, to be directly confronted with the world, without distance, without buffer: the eye that is directly touched, that physically feels the outside world, that cannot duck away.

In the context of the manifesto, Kerangal means that her ethics of writing is not abstract, not general, not top-down—but rather an ethics of direct touch, of the surface, of contact. The cornea is the organ that does not view the object from afar, but is brushed by it—the light literally strikes it. Kerangal's ethics are corneal in the sense that they demand loyalty to the concrete object, the particular, the detail: not the moral abstraction that practices "voir en général," but the attention that exposes itself to the individual and allows itself to be touched by it. The cornea can also be injured—keratitis, scratches, infection—and this is part of the metaphor: an ethics of the cornea is one that takes the risk of contact, that does not look protected, but exposes.

This process of locating the elsewhere is demonstrated in the excerpt from La valise noire (Sun/sun, 2024). Kerangal describes an Autochrome photograph by Auguste Léon from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, January 1914—a display case with statuettes, unlabeled. The image lies within the web of an alien imaginary: the Orient, pantheism. She cannot see it. To see it, she must construct her own lens. The Autochrome photograph itself is already such a lens: a trichrome filter made of potato starch, millions of tiny grains, colored orange, blue, and green, overlaid with a photosensitive black-and-white layer. A makeshift lens. And the novel she writes about it is, too. The image triggers a chain reaction of imagination: Montreal, the Nile, the DNA double helix, her friend's grave, his travel bag as a small sarcophagus. Imagination is river, convoy, transfer. Through her lens, the elsewhere becomes a special here and now. “Écrire, c’est être situé.”

The novel as an optical discipline

Kerangal reads her own novels as "romans optiques" – as books whose narration is an optics. Kennedy cornice (2008) zooms, pans, changes camera angle, becomes the surface itself. Repair the living (2014) unfolds the phrase at the level of gestures, scratches at the edge of reality, omitting nothing. Description here is the making possible of the unspeakable in a single sentence. Un monde à portée de main This poses the question: What does "seeing" mean? Day of surf (2024) returns to a destroyed city, rendered unrecognizable by war: How does one recognize what has become unrecognizable?

The inserted excerpt from Repair the living The film shows the doctor Révol reading a brain scan: he looks at layers ("coupes"), rotates the image, zooms in, measures distances, deciphers codes. Simon Limbre's brain is drowning in blood. Seeing here means inescapable knowledge. The section, the histological sample under the microscope, the detail in economic terms—becomes the central category. The novel is "en détail," not "en gros." It cuts into matter, opens access points, makes the inner workings of things visible. The detail is the point of contact between knowledge and imagination, the graininess under the tongue, the asymmetrical, the accidental—the antithesis to the standardization of language, to the mass production of imaginings.

Optical metaphors and semantic fields in the work of Maylis de Kerangal

The window and the pane

Windows and panes of glass are present in almost all texts and function as threshold objects: they enable seeing, but at the same time mediate it, distort, reflect, and fog up. In Tangente vers l'est For Aliocha, the Trans-Siberian train compartment window is his only opening to the world – but in the tunnel it becomes a mirror, reflecting his own face back instead of showing the landscape. His outward gaze tips into an inward gaze. Day of surf The narrator presses her forehead against the train window and sees her own face superimposed on the pane, overlaid with the passing night – the self and the outside are inseparable. In Kennedy cornice Residents pull the curtains apart to watch the teenagers, remaining hypnotized and glued to the screen – the window as a cinema, the viewer himself framed and visible. Canoes Olive Formose presses his forehead against the glass and follows the helicopters over the Périphérique with his eyes, talking to himself – the glass is the boundary to what is lost, to a catastrophe that cannot be repeated. The semantic field of the window always carries a dual movement: it opens and closes simultaneously, it reveals and protects, it connects and separates. This is the structure of the lens itself – transparency is never complete, every lens has a refraction.

The binoculars and the telescope

Optical instruments of extension – binoculars, telescopes, lorgnettes – appear in the work as instruments of power that do not democratize seeing, but rather hierarchize it. Opéra's Zeiss binoculars in Kennedy cornice This is the clearest example: It gives him an overview, but not an understanding; it isolates the young people like insects under a magnifying glass. kirun Lars, the LKAB representative, gazes from the terrace of the new glass building at the frozen lake – a view that signals possession. In LEN, Kerangal explicitly works against this power-oriented perspective when she describes Galileo's telescope as a revolutionary instrument that doesn't rule, but discovers. The contrast in the work is thus: the binoculars as a surveillance tool versus the telescope as an instrument of knowledge. This tension is never resolved – Kerangal shows that the same lens can be both, depending on the viewer's perspective.

The scan, the tomography, the X-ray image

In Repair the living Vision is medicalized: The brain scan is a layered optical system (“cuts of a millimeter thickness”), an internal view that the eye alone could never produce. The X-ray image makes the invisible visible—but at a price: It shows the body as a map, as topography, and thus deprives it of its vitality. Révol reads the scans “like geographical maps”—the metaphor of cartographic vision lends beauty to the medical gaze, but also distance. Seeing through technical lenses produces knowledge that guides action (Simon is brain dead), but at the same time reduces the human element. The semantic field of medical vision—halos, aureoles, shadows, taches—belongs to a vocabulary that oscillates between pathology and painting: The lesions in the brain are also aesthetic objects, and this makes the interpretation of these images morally fraught.

Dazzling, vertigo, blindness

Being blinded is a recurring semantic field that marks seeing not as insight, but as being overwhelmed. Paula enters into Un monde à portée de main Leaving the painting studio, one is confronted by the September sunshine and is blinded – the sudden light disorients, after painting has calibrated the eye to the inner world of the studio. Kennedy cornice “éblouit” the sun terrace of the LKAB building Opéra on the Just Do It. In Sous la cendre Théodora Finbarr deliberately shines a flashlight into her eyes – blinding as a gesture of dominance. The vertigo ("vertige") is the physical consequence of this extreme vision: Suzanne on the diving board, Diderot on final approach, the narrator in Day of surf Upon first entering Le Havre, the semantic field of glare and vertigo always signals a transition: the old vision is no longer sufficient, the new one is not yet calibrated. It is the equivalent of Kerangal's defective eyes in The lens – the strabismus, the sfumato, the “J'avance en sfumato” is not pathology, but epistemic disposition.

The mirror and the reflection

Mirrors do not appear in the work as places of self-knowledge, but as places of alienation. Marianne in Repair the living She looks in the bathroom mirror and "saisie de ne pas se reconnaître" – the shock of the news has changed her; the reflection shows a woman she doesn't yet know. Paula in Un monde à portée de main She checks her squint in the mirror before going out. Aliocha in Tangente vers l'est He sees himself in the train window, which becomes a mirror, and recognizes his own strength – that is the moment he decides to escape. The new LKAB building in kirun The city is reflected in its glass facade – the mine shows the world its own image back, as a gesture of modernity. For Kerangal, the semantic field of the mirror is always linked to transformation: one sees oneself in the mirror not as one was, but as one is becoming. The mirror is a lens through time.

Color and chromaticity as a tool for knowledge acquisition

Kerangal's chromatic vocabulary is exceptionally precise and scientific: In Birth of a bridge During the landing approach, distinctions are made between "rouge brique argileux", "foncé brun puis violacé", and "ombres turquoise" – the recognition of the landscape occurs as a chromatic differentiation. In Un monde à portée de main The painter's color vocabulary – “blanc de zinc, noir de vigne, orange de chrome, bleu de cobalt, alizarine cramoisie, vert de vessie” – is a language of precise seeing, a taxonomy of the visual world. Dans rapides Listening to Blondie changes the colors of the city: “le béton tourne mauve, une gamme chromatique absolument neuve.” For Kerangal, color is never decorative, but epistemic: it signals the degree of the viewer's attention. Those who name colors precisely are truly seeing. The semantic field of chromatics connects with that of painting, weather, geology, and medicine (the bruises on Théodora's skin after the dive, the violet halos in the brain scan) – color is the common language of all these ways of seeing.

Sfumato, the veil, the blur

Kerangal develops in The lens The “J’avance en sfumato” serves as a programmatic self-description – and sfumato as an aesthetic principle is present throughout the entire work. kirun The city initially dissolves into darkness: “espace autour du car fondu au noir”, no contours, no scale. In Kennedy cornice Faces and silhouettes become blurred beyond a certain distance – Opéra needs binoculars because the eye isn't sufficient. Tangente vers l'est The Siberian taiga is a semantic field of ambiguity: the trees, endlessly repeating themselves and obliterating any sense of orientation. Sfumato is not a flaw, but a condition: only the blurriness makes the moment of sharpening meaningful. The semantic field of ambiguity—"flou," "brume," "voile," "trouble," "opaque"—is the precondition for seeing in Kerangal's work, not its failure. It is the initial state from which looking, "regarder," the isolating of the particular, extracts what is to become visible.

Light and darkness: the fundamental tension

The most fundamental semantic field is that of the light-dark opposition – but Kerangal consistently avoids classical symbolism (light = knowledge, dark = ignorance). In kirun It is the polar eclipse that structures the space through light sources – streetlights, window courtyards, mine lamps; vision here depends on artificial light, not natural light. Repair the living Révol loves hospital nights because of their "lumière de clair-obscur – appareils qui clignotent dans la pénombre" – the semi-darkness is his true element, not the bright daylight of normal medicine. In Sous la cendre Moonlight is the medium of perception: Théodora's face, illuminated by the moon, is seen by Finbarr as something never before seen. Canoes The single lightbulb on the dentist's ceiling bathes the plaster models in an almost sacred light—the light transforms the forensic object into something aesthetic. The semantic field of light and darkness in Kerangal's work is thus a field of calibration: it's not about having a lot of light, but the right light—the light that reveals the object as it is, in its particularity, its texture, its history. This is the lens as an ethical instrument, polishing as a moral practice—and in this, Kerangal's novels and her manifesto are in complete agreement.

Elsewhere as a political now: Day of surf and the English Channel

The book culminates in a politically charged ending. The word "Channel"—the English name for the English Channel and the fictional name of a cinema in [location omitted]—is used in the story. Day of surf – becomes “mot-lentille”, a word that focuses like a lens: The eye is opened with a flash. In the long excerpt from Day of surf The narrator reads aloud on the train back from London. Le Monde-Dossier on the boat disaster of November 24, 2021, in the Manche, in which twenty-seven people drowned. The radio transcripts between the stricken vessel and the coast guard—the maneuvering, the passing of responsibility between French and British authorities at a fictitious maritime border that is valued more highly than life itself—are so precise that they make the soundtrack of the drama audible. The tunnel under the Channel, thirty-six minutes at a depth of forty meters, the blacked-out window panes like extinguished screens: The narrator presses her forehead against the glass and imagines that the missing eighteen-year-old boy has washed ashore on a pebbly beach.

The novel, Kerangal concludes, leads back to this shipwreck. It is that which prevents us from looking away. Through the optical effects of its instruments, it directs us to the here and now, which it takes as its own special object, one it is called to observe. The word "détresse" (distress, despair) derives from the Latin "distringere"—to separate and to constrict simultaneously. The strait ("détroit") separates and connects. Distress at sea is a constriction: of the throat, the heart, the lungs. It is mental, related to breathing, pneumatic. The distress flares—brief, intense, fleeting, visible by night and day for twenty nautical miles, for forty seconds—speak of making visible, of attention, of literature.

The Fresnel lens as the final image

The book ends with a powerful image: the Fresnel lens, developed in 1823 by Augustin Fresnel for the Cordouan lighthouse. It is not composed of a single smooth surface, but of many small lenses, arranged concentrically in rings—a collective of tiny lenses, uneven, discontinuous, multiple. Its light carries far across the sea. Kerangal needs the novel, like this lens, to see the elsewhere in its particularity. The novel as the optics of the singular. “My lens, the novel.”

Boundaries and in-depth study

Interpretation of the title

In Kerangal's texts, seeing is not a mental act, but a physical one. Eyes burn (Un monde à portée de main), pupils dilate (in Repair the living, before Simon's scan), foreheads are pressed against the glass (Tangente vers l'est, Day of surfSight coexists with physical pain, exhaustion, and desire. It is never purely receptive; it is always engaged. This confirms the thesis of The lens, but radicalizes it: When Kerangal says, “le corps se met en jeu”, the work shows that this is literally true in literature – characters physically suffer the consequences of their looking.

In several texts, seeing takes over the function of speaking: Aliocha and Hélène in Tangente vers l'est They communicate through glances and gestures; Eddy and Suzanne in Kennedy cornice through gazing together at the sea; Finbarr and Théodora through the flashlight. Seeing here is a language prior to language, a language without words. In The lens Kerangal doesn't explicitly address this dimension – she emphasizes the linguistic aspect of the novel as a lens. But the work shows that the lens can also "show" without saying anything.

Opera in Kennedy cornice Despite using Zeiss binoculars, she fails to understand the teenagers. Marianne in Repair the living can't read the letters on the sign. The narrator in Day of surf He cannot identify the body. Sight can fail, and it characteristically fails at moments of highest emotional intensity—precisely where sight is most required, it breaks down. This is a correction to the harmonious lens metaphor of The lensThe lens does not solve the problems of vision, it shifts them.

Kerangal develops a historical perspective in her texts: the perception of pastoral life through Greuze's paintings in À ce stade de la nuit, the vision of the explorers and colonizers and their naming of the "discovered" Earth. The vision of the colonizers is a vision that does not perceive what is found, but rather overwrites it—it is the opposite of Kerangal's ethic of cornée, the opposite of loyally looking at the object as it is. It is a vision that obliterates the particular and replaces it with its own universality. Consider also the Neolithic bone in Canoes, to the photograph from 1914 in The lens Even this – all of this shows that seeing is always historically situated, always refracted through a temporal lens. In The lens The Autochrome photograph serves as a model for this: the color granules made from potato starch are the historical material that carries the image. There is no timeless vision.

In the great novels (Birth of a bridge, Repair the living, Un monde à portée de main, Kennedy corniceNo single view is sufficient for the whole picture. Perspectives multiply, complement each other, and contradict each other. This is the Fresnel lens as a narrative architecture: many small lenses with the same radius of curvature that together produce a far-reaching beam of light. Kerangal describes this in The lens as a principle, but the work demonstrates it – the analysis shows that this structure is already in Kennedy cornice (2008) exists, i.e., before the theoretical formulation.

LEN is a poetics in verse – not in a playful, essayistic sense, but in the most literal: The book explains how novels see. The thesis is concise: Because Kerangal has poor eyesight, because her vision is blurry, approximate, and squinty, she needs an instrument. This instrument is the novel. It sharpens what remains blurry, it concretizes and makes particular what is vague, it makes visible what would otherwise remain in darkness – the shipwreck in the English Channel, the destruction of cities, the death of a friend, a display case of Egyptian statuettes.

The title can be read on at least three levels. First, literally: the contact lens that Kerangal doesn't wear, and the novel she writes instead. Then metonymically: the lens as a scientific and artisanal instrument—Spinoza's grinding wheel, Galileo's telescope, Fresnel's lighthouse beam, the Autochrome photograph made from potato starch—and the novel as its literary counterpart, performing the same service to perception. And finally, poetologically: the lens as an ethical figure representing the precise, loyal, attentive gaze upon a particular object, and the novel as the form that institutionalizes, reiterates, and sharpens this gaze—like the grinding of the lens through the same gesture, the ever-modulated path.

There is a structural analogy between the Fresnel lens and the novel: both are not smooth and homogeneous, but discontinuous, composed of many surfaces, uneven – and precisely for this reason, their light travels far. The novel, Kerangal concludes, is not a transparent mediation of reality, but a curved, refracting, multi-layered glass that shines all the farther the more it relinquishes the illusion of immediate vision. This is a poetics of the admitted: I see poorly, therefore I write. And because I write, I see.

The lens is not neutral

LEN is a clear, beautiful manifesto—and a partial self-interpretation. Its strengths are obvious: The autobiographical grounding of the poetics in the biology of seeing is original and honest. The Spinoza analogy resonates because it takes the craft of writing seriously. The Fresnel lens as the concluding image is structurally convincing.

But the manifesto has blind spots – which is perhaps unavoidable in a poetics of poor vision.

Firstly, overrated The lens The innocence of the lens. The analysis of the texts shows that lenses—binoculars, telescopes, scans—can be instruments of power that do not enlighten but control. Opéra's Zeiss lenses are the antithesis of Spinoza's patient work: they dissect the object instead of understanding it. The lens is not neutral.

Secondly, it is underestimated The lens The failure of sight as narrative potential. The most beautiful moments in Kerangal's work are not those of clear seeing, but those of the failure of seeing: Marianne, who cannot decipher the letters; Finbarr, who sees the corpse by moonlight, not by daylight. The novel's lens is not always sharp.

Thirdly, the auditory dimension is underdeveloped in the manifesto. The analysis shows that in À ce stade de la nuit, Dans rapides and Canoes Hearing has the same function as seeing in the other texts: it isolates, it concretizes, it "looks." The lens is not only optical, it is also acoustic—a lens for hearing, a lens for voice. In The lens The answer to the question "Comment regarder ailleurs?" is: through the novel. But the novel can also hear, not just see.

Fourth, the chronology of the work suggests an interesting correction: the optical poetics is not the result of a theoretical self-examination that was then implemented in novels. It was present from the very beginning in the writing process, in Sous la cendre (2006), in Dans rapides (2007), in Kennedy cornice (2008). LEN is therefore not an origin, but a reinterpretation. The manifesto articulates what novels have always done—which gives it the charm of all good poetics: It describes a practice that had long since outgrown description.

“Ma lentille, le roman” – this sentence at the end of The lens is precise. But the novels show that the lens doesn't simply see, but also hurts, dazzles, fails, changes, and that its effectiveness stems from its imperfection. The defective eye sees better because it knows it sees poorly. That is the real lesson the entire work imparts—one that LEN hints at but doesn't fully articulate.

Fog, darkness, blurriness, frost, moonlight, bad weather – the poor visual conditions are quantitatively dominant and qualitatively charged in the work: they are not obstacles to seeing, but its actual conditions. kirun It begins in darkness: The bus from the airport travels through a night that completely dissolves space, "espace autour du car fondu au noir," no contours, no scale; the city initially exists only as points of light and engine noise. The polar eclipse is not the absence of information, but the challenge of organizing perception at all with the available light—streetlights, mine lamps, window courtyards. Tangente vers l'est The Siberian taiga is a field of endless repetition: the same tree trunks, the same gray, a landscape that defies all orientation; the tunnel, which turns the window into a mirror, is the most radical moment of this visual disorientation. Sous la cendre The nighttime search operation for the dead of the Lusitania In the moonlight and the darkness of the Atlantic – the moonlight is not a romantic accessory, but the only available lens, and Théodora's flashlight is a foreign object in this light, blinding rather than illuminating. Dans rapides Le Havre in 1978 is a city of rain, grey concrete, and low-hanging clouds – “le béton tourne mauve” – only through listening to Blondie does the poor lighting conditions synesthetically transform into a new field of color through the music. Repair the living Révol loves the semi-darkness of the intensive care unit, the blinking machines in the penumbra, the "lumière de clair-obscur" – the poor light is his preferred environment because it sharpens attention, because one has to look more closely in the semi-darkness. Birth of a bridge The river itself is an optical challenge: the colors of the water change with depth and light, “rouge brique argileux”, “foncé brun puis violacé”, and the precise reading of these chromatic variations is Diderot's skill as an engineer. Kennedy cornice Beyond a certain distance, faces lose their contours – only binoculars restore them, but binoculars, as demonstrated, are an instrument of power, not a medium of knowledge. For Kerangal, poor visual conditions represent the semantic field of transition, of the not-yet, of waiting for calibration – structurally, they correspond to the “J’avance en sfumato” from LEN, the self-description of the nearsighted, squinting, astigmatic author who writes not despite, but through, her defective eyes: because sfumato is the condition under which the particular only becomes visible once one approaches it and extracts it from the blur.

Sfumato as a literary technique

Sfumato – a term borrowed from painting, from Leonardo's technique of soft, flowing contours without hard edges – appears in Kerangal's work not only as a self-description but as an actual writing method. The long, breathlessly flowing sentences characteristic of her style create a blurring of boundaries: between inside and outside, between past and present, between a character's consciousness and the world around them, there are no hard cuts, but rather transitions, blurs, and superimpositions. Repair the living The narrative voice of Simon's body awareness glides on the wave into the clinical description of his brain lesions without a marked boundary – this is sfumato as syntax. In Un monde à portée de main Paula blurs the line between the marble she paints and the marble that exists – the imitation is so perfect that the distinction becomes indistinct, and that is precisely the aim of trompe-l'œil art.

Kerangal's ambiguity is productive because she takes not-knowing seriously as a mode of knowledge. kirun The city only slowly organizes itself in the dark – the narrator initially doesn't know what she sees, and this lack of knowledge cannot be overcome by more light or more information, but only by recognizing a familiar object (the mine) that suddenly organizes the rest of the space. Thus, blurred vision is not blind, but rather waiting – it gathers impressions without fixing them until an anchor point clarifies the overall structure. Tangente vers l'est The Siberian taiga is a field of endless visual repetition that defies all orientation – the blurriness here is the experience of infinity, of a space that cannot be divided into details. Aliocha does not look despite the blurriness, but through it, towards the vanishing point, which is the only thing that matters.

The temporal dimension of ambiguity is perhaps its richest. In Kerangal's work, temporal planes blur – the past is not sharply separated from the present; it shines through, overlaps, returns. Day of surf Le Havre is a city that bears the ruins of the destroyed city of 1944 beneath its present surface – the narrator sees both simultaneously, and the blurring between the layers of time is not confusion, but a form of memory. À ce stade de la nuit Viscontis overlap The LeopardThe Lampedusa shipwreck and the songlines of the Australian Aborigines in the kitchen on the same night – the blurring of temporal boundaries is the condition for these connections. The manifesto describes this as a "coalescence of images," as reverie, as imagination – but the actual term would be blurring: the images merge because their boundaries are soft, because the sfumato allows them to flow into one another.

The most pointed formulation of vagueness as an aesthetic and ethical problem can be found in Day of surf, where the narrator sees "not a face, but a surface" in the police photographs of the corpse – the blurring between face and mask, between living countenance and dead surface. This boundary is never sharp in Kerangal's work: Théodora's face in the moonlight in Sous la cendre is "admirable" precisely because of its blurriness, because the moonlight doesn't cast harsh shadows. Paula's squint in Un monde à portée de main Her face becomes a place of blurriness – one eye bulges outwards, the symmetry is disrupted, and this is not ugliness, but a distinctive feature. The identity of Kerangal's characters is never sharply defined, always in transition, always between two states – and this is structurally analogous to the aesthetics of blurriness: the individual is not fixed, but in motion, and the writing captures this movement without stopping it.

Kerangal's aesthetic of blurriness is also a political method: she rejects the overall view, the overview, the bird's-eye view that seeks to show the whole thing sharply and all at once. La lentille et le roman It says: “Le ciel ‘en général’ n'existe pas. Le regard procède par région, il cartographie. Il ne peut embrasser le ciel comme un tout.” This is the theoretical formulation of the aesthetic principle: Blur protects the particular from being absorbed by the totality. Whoever sees everything sharply sees nothing truly – because seeing the whole sharply obliterates the detail, the grain, the texture, the asymmetrical. For Kerangal, blur is the space in which the particular exists before it is extracted and made visible through writing – through the lens. Afterward, it returns to blur, like water after a wave.

Ressac as a principle at Kerangal

Kerangal describes how, when viewing Auguste Léon's painting, elements from different time periods and spaces flow back and overlap – “les ARN messagers traversent le ciel, les eaux du Saint-Laurent bouillonnent, un cathéter perfore la peau d'un poignet, une petite chouette en bois glissée dans la manche d'un pyjama,” then the Montreal cemetery, the Nile, the DNA double helix, the dead friend's suitcase. This is a classic Ressac movement: a single image sends waves rippling back into the past, and these waves return over one another, collide, and mingle. Imagination is described in LEN as a non-linear flow – “Imagination is a river, it is a process of transmission.” ⁶ – and the image of the convoy, of onward transport, implicitly contains the act of striking back: one cannot transport forward without bringing the past along.

In French, "ressac" refers to the receding of the sea after a wave breaks against rocks or a wall—that counter-movement in which the water doesn't simply flow away but surges back with its own force, mixing with the next incoming wave, creating eddies and turbulence; in short, a state of in-betweenness that is neither forward nor backward, but both simultaneously. Metaphorically, the word in French carries the meaning of a setback, of unexpected counter-pressure, of reclaiming something one thought to have left behind—it denotes the moment when the past doesn't pass away but returns and collides with the present. What's special about Kerangal's work is that "ressac" functions neither purely physically nor purely metaphorically, but inextricably links both: the real sea against which the young people in Kennedy cornice jumping and that which pulls them back after diving, the real water in which Finbarr and Théodora search for the dead of the Lusitania, the real backflow of the Manche in Day of surf – all this is simultaneously the temporal structure of remembering, the movement pattern of memory, the principle of the novel itself, which never progresses linearly but always also strikes back, overlays, and allows the past to collide with the present as if it had never been and as if it were happening right now.

The novel's title is the clearest and most programmatic occurrence of the term in the entire work. Day of surf – a day of setback, of receding – names the fundamental movement of the novel: The narrator returns to Le Havre, a city she left, a city that has changed, but which, beneath the surface of that change, has remained the same. Ressac here is initially topographical: Le Havre is a city at the mouth of a river, on the border between river and sea, between fresh and salt water, between continent and ocean – the Ressac is the physical principle of this borderland. But it is also temporal: The narrator's past crashes back into her present, like water crashing against the breakwater. The child she was and the woman she is are inseparable – the Ressac is the temporal structure of memory. And finally, it is political: The shipwreck in the Manche, the drowning victims, the overlapping of wartime destruction and present-day catastrophe – the past floods into the present without dissolving. “Comment reconnaître ce qui est devenu méconnaissable?” is the central question of the novel, and it is a Ressac question: What returns, and what has become foreign in the return?

In Repair the living The ressac is a physical reality of surfing, one that is metaphorically charged. Simon and his friends know that the ressac—the backwash of water after the breaking wave—is the most dangerous phase of surfing: you can get stuck in it, unable to free yourself, driven against the rocks. The body must overcome the ressac to reach the next wave. This is structurally the movement of the entire novel: Simon's death is a ressac, a brutal backwash that all the characters must endure—Marianne, Juliette, the doctors, the heart recipients. Everyone must pass through the ressac to reach the other side. The transplanted heart is the opposite of the ressac: it is the onward movement, the forward wave, life itself, which cannot be pushed back.

In Kennedy cornice The Ressac is literally present as the Mediterranean Sea backwashing against the rocks of the plateau. The young people jump into the water, and after diving, they have to overcome the Ressac to get back to the surface and the ladder – especially at the Face to face, the most dangerous springboard, where the Ressac is particularly strong and pulls in the wrong direction. Here, the Ressac is the physical test: those who know it, who can read it, who know how to move within it, belong. Eddy knows the Ressac, Suzanne doesn't yet—that's one of the differences between her and the group. Metaphorically, the Ressac is also the social movement of the novel: the young people come from the housing projects in the north, are thrown back by society, struggle against the border, and return. The Ressac is the structure of their lives.

In Sous la cendre The Ressac is part of the maritime rescue scene: Finbarr and Théodora row the night after the Torpillage of the Lusitania through the Ressac of the Atlantic. Here, the Ressac is the dead water between the waves, the directionless water—more dangerous than the wave itself because it has no energy to harness. The corpses float in the Ressac, rocked back and forth by it. The Ressac is the image of the liminal state, of neither alive nor dead, of neither here nor there. Théodora's dead lover is in the Ressac—he is neither found nor buried, neither present nor definitively gone.

Ressac is one of the most semantically rich words in Kerangal's work because it operates simultaneously physically, temporally, emotionally, and structurally. Physically, it is the receding of the sea—the countermovement to the wave, the water that does not move forward. Temporally, it is the structure of memory—the past striking back into the present, not as nostalgia, but as an impact. Emotionally, it is the movement of pain—not linear loss, but the return of loss, again and again, in waves. And structurally, it is the principle of the novels themselves: Kerangal's texts do not proceed linearly; they flow back, superimposing temporal planes, allowing the past to flicker within the present. The title Day of surf retrospectively names a principle that has been in effect since the first novel – and that La lentille et le roman The manifesto theoretically grasps this concept under the terms rêverie and the "coalescence of images," without actually using the word. The Ressac is the water metaphor for what the manifesto calls the lens: an instrument that does not look straight ahead, but rather makes visible what is reflected, superimposed, or rebounded.