Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction

Asymptote

FAUX TITRE 338 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Asymptote An Approach to Decadent Fiction

Robert Ziegler

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2009

Maquette couverture: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2700-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2701-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter One: Perversion

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The Pervert, the Aesthete, and the Author: J.K. Huysman’s A rebours

29

One in the Blood: Catulle Mendès’s Zo’har

47

Chapter Two: Magic

65

The Grammar and the Key: Joséphin Péladan’s Le Vice suprême

69

Our Servants’ Work: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël

89

Chapter Three: Change

107

Dogs, Parrots, Jews, and Women: Octave Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

111

Baby Doll: Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade

134

Chapter Four: Play

153

Biography as Mask: Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires

158

Imposture and Collusion: Jean Lorrain’s Histoires de masques

176

Chapter Five: Creation

193

The Poetics of Evanescence: Georges Rodenbach’s L’Art en exil

197

Out of the Great Absence: Remy de Gourmont’s Sixtine

214

Conclusion

235

References

253

Index

261

Acknowledgements I have many people to whom I am beholden for their help in the preparation of this book. To the diligent, dedicated, and dependable staff of the Montana Tech Library – especially Carolyn Kamrud and Betsy Garlish – I am thankful for locating and sending me in the wilds of Vermont all the research materials I needed for this project. To Evelyn Merkle, for her gracious and unstinting work in preparing this manuscript, like those before it, I am grateful as always. To colleagues and friends, Allan Pasco, Marc Smeets, Pierre Michel, Elizabeth Emery, and Jennifer Forrest, for their counsel and guidance, I am also thankful. Finally, to my brilliant, industrious, and patient daughter, Mary, who devoted countless hours brainstorming and editing this volume, I am extraordinarily indebted. And to my wife Louise, who helped edit the book, gave unsparingly of her love and support, I am thankful always. Portions of this work have appeared previously in other publications. For their permission to use this material in revised and expanded form, I wish to thank the editors of Romance Studies, the Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, the Cahiers Marcel Schwob, Dalhouse French Studies, and Faszination des Okkulten: Diskurse zum Übersinnlichen.

Introduction asymptote Noun a straight line that is closely approached but never met by a curve [Greek asumpttos not falling together]

Literary historians of the fin de siècle traditionally follow Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso in writing nosographies that equate criminal genius with the thematic and stylistic excesses of Decadent artists. Given the profusion of perverts, neurotics, and addicts appearing as characters in Decadent works, it is unsurprising that their authors are sometimes swept into the same taxonomic niche as the pathological specimens whose stories they tell. For critics, Decadent creation is seen as a form of teratogenesis, in which authors become monsters by producing unnatural texts. Beginning with Mario Praz’s magisterial study, The Romantic Agony (1933), Decadence is identified by the contagiousness of its rhetorical floridity. A neurasthenia of language, it affects interpretive studies of Decadence, as the sickness of source works reappears in

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their analyses. The Decadent writer, professing shocked dismay at his hero’s transgressions, comes back as the critic who deplores the aberrancy of Decadent authorship. Interpreters, writers, and characters – exhibiting the symptomatology of unhealthy language – use hyperbole, incongruous imagery, startling neologisms as Decadence is manifested as lexical incontinence and overflow. In their picturesque appraisals of Decadence, these early critics continue to confuse author and hero. Given the exhibitionistic flamboyance of some Decadent authors skilled in the art of public appearance as a theater of outrage, the line between life and writing is often easily blurred. Rachilde, with her provocatively masculine attire, Lorrain, with his sorties in panther skins and tights, Péladan, with his hirsutism and apochryphal Chaldean ancestry, authored public personas as marketing strategies, performances enflaming an audience that disapproved of the very books they devoured. It has long been the convention to adopt a critical stance that condemns the immorality of Decadent authors who depict the immorality of their characters. Praz, taxing the Decadents with algolagnia and perversion, attacks Jean Lorrain as “a fumiste of quite deplorable taste,” – as having a passion “for faisandage and all kinds of combinations of lust and death.”1 “[A]ttracted to sexual monstrosities, Villiers “moved amongst men like a somnambulist, […] and,” according to Praz, was “a kind of visionary of the pavement.”2 Péladan, “permeated by his ineffectual sexual obsession,” celebrated the fin de sexe in his “Hymn to the Androgyne.”3 All in all, Praz concludes in an elaborately Decadent flourish, the fin de siècle was “a mythical age of pornographic literature, with sexual ichthyosauri and paleosauri, caprices à la Goya and incubi à la Rops.”4 In overviews of the fin de siècle dating from the following decades, Decadent authors are still characterized as mythomaniacs whose identities are crafted as strange fictions – resembling their heroes who are often artists themselves. Thus, in A. E. Carter’s view, Paul de Fertzen, the hero of Rachilde’s Les Hors Nature, is an all too familiar monster lacking even the ability to shock, such an unoriginal 1

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Cleveland: Meridien Books, 1955), pp. 338-9. 2 Ibid., p. 315. 3 Ibid., p. 325. 4 Ibid., p. 332.

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Decadent confection that Rachilde must have composed him from “a literary cake mix.”5 Indeed, the repetitiousness of Decadence’s exceptional material is perceived as killing the dynamism of a literature moving toward suicidal self-loathing, as in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas, where the hero, Carter writes, “shows us the decadent at the point of hating his own decadence.”6 In a 1961 study, George Ross Ridge begins a differentiation of the clever inventor and his monstrous invention. On the one hand, Ridge says, there is “the superannuated aesthete, the dandy twirling his gold-headed cane as he leers over his absinthe,” on the other, the artist who “piously laments the collapse of French morality.”7 To conflate the neurasthenics and androgynes with the authors who imagined them is to assume, Ridge says, that these writers “were in fact what many of them were protesting against.”8 Yet as his analysis proceeds, Ridge perpetrates the inaccuracy he identifies, contaminating Decadent art by equating it with the people who produce it. Too often Ridge refers to the Decadents as fluid, composite entities: the cerebral deviants and fiery misogynists who infect the author and thus become him. Critical histories dating from the present day continue to dismiss Decadence as a sterile adhesion of the creator and creature. Jean Pierrot and Pierre Citti denounce Decadence for its inertia and isolationism, disparaging Decadent art as a manifestation of cultural entropy. But when Pierrot claims that the Decadent artist “se sent un isolé”, that “il […] s’enferme par dédain aristocratique des ambitions vulgaires dans son univers intérieur,”9 is he referring to an author like Huysmans or to his protagonist des Esseintes? Or when Citti remarks on the phenomenon of “l’individualité morbide,”10 is the diagnosis of morbidity one passed on Decadent authors by their contemporaries? Is it a judgment applied by Decadent authors to their misanthropic he5

A.E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), p. 100. 6 Ibid., 110. 7 George Ross Ridge, The Hero in French Decadent Literature, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961), p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Pierrot, L’Imaginaire décadent 1880-1900 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1977), p. 69. 10 Pierre Citti, Contre la décadence: Histoire de l’imagination française dans le roman 1890-1914 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987), p. 31.

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roes? Or is it a finding that Citti himself relates to Decadent authors and their protagonists? Along with proposing a radical differentiation of fin-de-siècle authors and their characters, this study argues that, for the Decadents, authorship is a transformative process. By projecting into fiction unwanted traits, destructive tendencies, the writer dissociates himself from a character who embodies an obsolete identity. Creative work does not illustrate a narcissistic entanglement of authors and characters. It does not show, as critics have long maintained, that Decadence is sterile self-reproduction. By allowing the playful fashioning of multiple identities, writing exorcised harmful features, enabled an experimentation with adaptive strategies, so that art became a dynamic act of creative regeneration. Paradoxically, Decadent writing turns into a successful quest for health. Having rejected the regressive impulses that he works through in his characters, the Decadent is able to escape the shell of stifling subjectivism. Free to move out into the world of material reality, he experiences again the inexhaustible richness of other people. In describing the interrelationship of Decadent artists and their fictions, this study uses the mathematical figure of the asymptote to show how they converge, then split apart and grow more distant. The writer’s approach to the facsimile selves, the fictional epigones he plays with and discards is the curve that never intersects with his authorial identity, the straight line traced by intelligence, discipline, and work. The immeasurable distance separating Huysmans from des Esseintes – the sedate novelist from an incarnation of fetishist aestheticism – is like the asymptotic curve that nears but never meets the line. Creating fictional projections of their most damaging traits, these authors approach their characters as their own seductive tendencies. While allowing expression of the lure of destructive impulses, authorship also requires the clear-headedness to overcome them. The point of contiguity between the Decadent writer and his hero is the site of the most narcissistic identification with his material. The curve that approaches and recedes describes the dialectic of Decadent creation, the working artist’s oscillation between experiencing the Many and the One. In the theme of masking in Jean Lorrain, in Marcel Schwob’s imaginary biographies, fiction enables the writer to proliferate as his multiple disguises. Counterfeiting others by donning the apparel of their histories, the authors succeed in es-

Introduction

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caping the trap of ipseity through the impersonation of their characters. Each fiction is a persona, a garment put on for a day. As Schwob’s heroine Monelle advises: “Ne te lègue rien à toi-même. Ne sois l’esclave d’aucun vêtement, ni d’âme, ni de corps.”11 For all the Decadents’ dedication to the practice of le culte du moi, narcissism could not compensate for their claustrophobic subjectivity. In its most debilitating form, Gourmont’s philosophy of Idéalisme afflicted the gifted intellectual with the misfortune of aloneness, irremediably cutting him off from those he disdained and desired. From the premise that artistic genius was a sign of privilege and election, Decadent hypersubjectivity degenerated into crippling solipsism. Despite the sterility of the artist’s conjugation with the products of his mind, he is led to intuit that others are similarly imprisoned in their consciousness. From there, it is just a short step toward the movement of turning outward, prompting hesitant attempts at empathy and love. The issue of the overlapping of Decadent writers and their characters depends on confusing the fictional protagonist with an authorial alter ego. The character is not the artist but a stage in his identity formation, embodying unwelcome tendencies that, in being fictionalized, are transcended. The often infantile traits externalized by Decadent writers in their characters show them situated in a primitive phase of their psychological development. This study’s opening chapter discusses the Decadent idealization of perversion as an aesthetic and metaphysical emancipation from man’s servitude to nature. Yet in Péladan’s glorification of the androgyne, in des Esseintes’s sensual self-exploration, in Mendès’s celebratory analysis of forbidden fraternal incest, they contradict Freud’s equation of heterosexual object choice with maturity. Unwilling to leave the self, they justify perversion as Luciferian defiance. In an affront to nature, they refuse to surrender to instinctual desire, rejecting their status as automatons stripped of agency and freedom. Life-affirming Eros is seen by the Decadents as abjection. As Jean Pierrot says: “S’il est impossible de refuser absolument l’univers du sexe, condamné parce qu’il se rattache à la vie naturelle, il faut du moins s’efforcer, par le developpement des perversions, de continuer à insulter la nature.”12 11 12

Marcel Schwob, Le Livre de Monelle (Paris: François Bernouard, 1928), p. 18. Pierrot, L’Imaginaire decadent, p. 169.

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In the Decadents’ treatment of perversion, the curve that never joins the asymptote is the archaic appeal of self-love which takes precedence over object choice. Epitomized in A rebours is the appearance of perversion as aestheticism. The funerary pageantry with which des Esseintes celebrates his impotence, his satisfaction with appreciating art and his inability to produce any, his self-sequestering avoidance of the outside world and other people explain his predilection for interacting solely with himself. Anal auto-eroticism, as Julia Przybos notes,13 is at the heart of des Esseintes’s globalizing aesthetic enterprise. Paving a turtle’s shell with gold, covering his library walls with leather, furnishing his mind with images of Moreau’s Salome suggest that glitter, gilt, and sparkle cover the excrement beneath – the only material the pervert is capable of making. It is the temptation of sterile beauty-worship that Huysmans entertains and overcomes, not coupling with his novel but releasing it for audience appraisal which, over the years, has often ranged from mystification to wonderment. Asymptote, which, in Greek, refers to what does not fall together, conveys the aim of Catulle Mendès’s fictional indictment of the incest he begins by glorifying. Refusal of exogamy, the choice of a partner as a genetic variant of oneself, extend the Decadent theme of narcissistic self-enclosure. In Mendès’s Zo’har, the incestuous couple – unlike the asymptote and curve – collapse together and celebrate their union in a remote Norwegian castle, reaffirming their disregard for society’s scrutinizing censorship. Like infantile perversions, incest is directed toward an origin, the dissolution of the sibling dyad restored to genetic indivisibility. Situated at the end of time – apprehensive of the Götterdämmerung – the Decadents elaborated myths of supralapsarian innocence. Denouncing nature as a shopworn trope, monotonous and trite, they repeated Rousseau’s incrimination of social institutions. Familial, religious, and educational mechanisms of repression perverted instinct and accelerated cultural decay. Awaiting the extinction of the race, the Decadents idealized a spurious purity, a racial childhood in which man was exonerated of responsibility and cynicism. Phylogenetic as-

13

Julia Przybos, “De la poétique décadente: la bibliothèque de des Esseintes,” L’Esprit Créateur 27. 1 (Spring 1988), p. 73.

Introduction

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similation of characters to animals licensed aggressive and sexual impulses which could be acted on with impunity. Like Huysmans, Mendès disavows his theme through authoring the novel, which stands as a product of the Decadent culture the incestuous couple has repudiated. At first disdainful of society’s judgments, Mendès identifies with his characters, who are presented as impervious to condemnation, unintimidated, and free. Ultimately, however, the taboo is dramatically revalidated when the lovers – as asymptote and curve – fall together in their criminal passion, whose fruit is the punishment exacted on their deformed, unborn baby. At the end, it is the text of Zo’har that is identified as the monster, the grotesque specimen born from the coupling of blasphemous material and moral outrage. The book stands as the hideous remains of its cautionary message, stamping the law of the Father on the child of disobedience. As perversion strands the deviant in an early phase of sexual development, magic defines a belief system proper to a primitive stage of man’s intelligence. The Decadents’ diffusion of a singular identity into multiple personas that live and die as works of art is evident in the figure of the Magus, who usurps the powers of the gods and unites them in himself. To be sure, the craze for occultism that pervaded the fin de siècle came from a reaction against science and its impoverishment of experience. Also, the self-styled Magus was a variant on the stereotype of the Decadent artist/genius who was regal, cold, and solitary. The attraction of esotericism to fin-de-siècle intellectuals came from “a desire to be the depositaries of a true knowledge unknown to others.” Hence, the obsession seen in writers like Hello, Bloy, and Péladan “with secret messages, with apocalyptic predictions, with allegorical commentaries on holy writing.”14 Interest in learning the hidden truths possessed by forbidden sects and closed societies explains the appeal of the Vintrasian cult and its announcement of the impending reign of the Paraclete. Huymans’s curiosity about the alluring horrors of 19th-century Satanism, motivated by the biographical study of Gilles de Rais, conveys the same libido sciendi that Griffiths detects in other writers. The chiliasm complementing 14

Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870/1914 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), p. 124.

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their world’s-end scenarios filled the Decadents’ imagination with expectations of cosmic turmoil. Here the asymptote describes the lure of exclusivity and elitism, association with the anointed few granted superhuman power. Magic thinking, which Freud associates with fantasies of omnipotence, begins in Péladan and Villiers as a wish for spiritual elevation yet also haloes the thaumaturge with an air of intellectual hauteur. Yet having magnified the Magus in whom the power of the gods is concentrated, these novels end by stressing his commitment to serve his fellow man. Despite their syncretistic fusion of Rosicrucianism and Catholicism, Villiers and Péladan assign priority to church doctrine over the heresy of magic. Central to this study of Decadent fiction is art’s transformative power. By externalizing and liberating writers from their paralyzing narcissism – by ridding them of the prejudice and hatred that stunt their growth – art revitalizes practitioners by reattaching them to the community. Violent, bigoted characters, as archaic features of the writer’s self, are projected into fiction and, through negative identifycation, are eliminated. Despite the Decadents’ disposition toward eschatological paranoia, despite their reputation for indulging in aesthetic introversion, the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair witnessed a reigniting of political passion – from the anti-democratic arguments made by Catholic reactionaries to Remy de Gourmont’s excoriation of hyper-patriotism and xenophobia. The conventional view of the fin de siècle was one of ideological disengagement, Olympian detachment from the sordidness of quotidian affairs. This is the image readers take away from the ascensional orientation of Là-bas, where Huysmans’s characters discuss astrology, deplore the vulgarity of their era, and eagerly anticipate the reign of the Holy Spirit. Yet, as Guy Ducrey says, the fin de siècle was also riven by political discord: anarchist bombings, the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, the violent polarizing of political sentiment following the sentencing of Dreyfus. “Si Dreyfus est condamné en 1894, l’Affaire ne bat pas son plein que deux ou trois ans plus tard, mais provoque une profonde fracture dans le pays entier.

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Le discours sur la décadence et celui de l’antisémitisme se recontreront alors, et iront souvent jusqu’à se confondre.”15 Dubbed “l’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle” by biographers Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, Octave Mirbeau authored novels whose sexual violence was egregious yet which also allegorized the corruption of social institutions. Satirizing on the one hand the ethereality of the Pre-Raphaelites, Mirbeau also rooted his vituperative fiction in the blood and manure of social strife. Like his journalistic fulminations, Mirbeau’s incendiary novels traced the author’s evolution from anti-Jewish nationalism to an embrace of Jean Grave and his anarchist idealism. Mirbeau’s fiction strikes a provocative tone in its attempt to shock and scandalize, issuing passionate arraignments of colonial exploitation, denouncing religion and its campaigns of instinctual repression, condemning the casual disregard of indigents and vagrants, even deploring cruelty toward animals shown to be more human than their abusers. Mirbeau’s fiery social criticism, his fictional and dramatic writings present a compelling demonstration of the Decadents’ political engagement. Yet while his novels clamor for justice and advocate for social change, the work of authorship also effected a transformation of the author. Spanning continents, Mirbeau’s panoramic tableaux of torture and malfeasance combine with disturbing representations of anti-Semitism and misogyny, suggesting the urgency of the author’s need to wrestle with prejudice in himself. Thus, in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s denunciation of intolerance effects the gradual evacuation of residual hatred from the writer. By projecting brutality and racism onto the character of Joseph, the repulsive yet charismatic gardener of whom the heroine is enamored, Mirbeau uses writing to rid himself of his own unhealthy attitudes. Mirbeau’s heroine, the disabused chambermaid, Célestine, becomes the vehicle through which he discharges residual anti-feminism. Catalyzing change in the psychology of the author, creative work entails the therapeutic eradication of his bigotry. For Rachilde, the early experience of professional discrimination – humiliations suffered by the fledgling female novelist – are documented in the introductions to Monsieur de la Nouveauté and A 15

Guy Ducrey, Préface, Romans fin-de-siècle, ed. Guy Ducrey (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), p. xviii.

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mort. Rachilde’s most well-known novels detail the vengeful hunger of her heroines, who begin by reasoning that, in order to vanquish their tormentors, they must adopt similar practices intended to castrate and belittle. In Monsieur Vénus, in order to beat the man, the heroine must be the man. Ultimately, these fantasies of retribution prove unsatisfying, as the character confronts her aggressor, takes up his panoply of weapons, yet can do no more than inflict the same indignities and injuries. In Rachilde, the combination of masochism and fury locks victim and attacker in repetitious conflicts, ritual battles that do not elevate or empower the female warrior. Novels like Madame Adonis and La Marquise de Sade, “[qui] alléchai[ent …], en jouant sur les titres, les lecteurs émoustillés par Monsieur Vénus”16 invert roles yet do not alter the relationship of power. Thus, at the conclusion of La Marquise de Sade, the heroine is pictured empty-handed. With her nemeses already disarmed, mortified, or dead, the heroine and novelist have no more challenges to meet. Yet despite the apparent stalemate in the sex wars waged in Rachilde’s novels, she still indicates a possible way out of the impasse. For the Decadents who believed themselves confined to their individual perceptions, narcissism is as much a curse as a psychological predisposition. If only the self is knowable, the art work is a mirror in which the writer contemplates an image that is infinitely variable. If, for Rachilde and Mirbeau, creation is a vehicle of adaptation, freeing them of the resentments and prejudices disabling them, for other authors, writing becomes a form of play which, as with children, allows them to overcome perceived inadequacies through fantasy. Each fictional work produced as a disposable identity affords the creator a brief experience of power and excitement while inevitably returning him to the jail of his own consciousness. But before they undergo a disheartening repatriation in their minds, the Decadents experience “une aliénation grâce à laquelle l’esprit se récupère sous la forme des autres.”17 What Schwob sees as a salutary capacity for pity enables the writer to escape himself through compassionate identification with another. 16 Claude Dauphiné, Rachilde: Femme de lettres 1900 (Périgueux, Pierre Fanlac, 1985), p. 36. 17 George Trembley, Marcel Schwob: Faussaire de la nature (Geneva: Droz, 1969), p. 28.

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Schwob’s heroine, Monelle, advises disciples to forsake the poverty of reality in favor of the enriching manufacture of illusion. Truth is ineluctable. Truth is what afflicts us. Lies are what challenge us to use art as liberation: “pour imaginer un nouvel art, il faut briser l’art ancien. Et ainsi l’art nouveau semble une iconoclastie.”18 Steeped in medievalism, an accomplished philologist and translator, Schwob suffered from the Decadents’ overdeveloped sense of history. Unlike children, who know nothing and play in the realm of possibility, Schwob was an inventor hobbled by an awareness of past events. As knowledge of how things were precludes imagining how they might be, Monelle teaches her followers the virtue of obliviousness: “Ne fais pas durer ton bonheur du souvenir jusqu’à l’avenir. Ne te souviens pas et ne prévois pas. […] Ne te connais pas toi-même.”19 For Schwob’s readers, his books are like the refuge Monelle offers waifs and runaways: “une maison où on joue,”20 an asylum from work and truth, a place where one finds respite from the monotony of identity. The asymptotic curve described by Schwob’s biographies shows the temptation that he felt to discontinue writing and instead begin living the lives of those that he imagined. Yet Schwob was able to overcome this impulse by analyzing and transposing it in his resurrective histories of buccaneers and demigods. Schwob’s work is to explain the urge to stop working and start playing, the wish to go into the book and join Monelle’s band of nomads, to become another visionary like those who populate his stories, adult children indisposed to exchange irresponsibility for artistic discipline. But by remaining on the outside of the lives of pyromaniacs and prophets – by narrating, not becoming a child-outlaw or a self-styled god – Schwob moves from art-as-play to analysis of the game. Having walked among the dead whom he resuscitates from history, Schwob returns, enriched, to the home of his identity as their chronicler. Target of public obloquy, fomenter of scandal and hilarity, Jean Lorrain fulfilled in life the fantasy that Schwob lived out in fiction. A self-multiplying mystifier diffused into pseudonyms and disguises, Lorrain was a showman who eclipsed himself as an impresario and 18

Schwob, Le Livre de Monelle, pp. 13-14. Ibid., p. 20. 20 Ibid., p. 23. 19

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craftsman. Flaunting his homosexual bravura, Lorrain wore masks not to hide behind but to engage the speculative creativity of the spectators deciphering them. Lorrain’s fiction often communicates the ontological anxiety of discovering that beneath the mask, there is no face but only emptiness. In Lorrain, the ludic pleasure of impersonation becomes a mania, hyperkinetically producing and destroying false faces and cardboard grimaces. In Lorrain, the asymptote nears, then moves off from the line, approaching the delirium of universality, giving a foretaste of the pleasure of protean anonymity. Just as perpetrating art-as-fraud is an exhilarating exercise, vacating an old identity – like demolishing a crumbling edifice – prepares for the architectural challenge of building new façades. The place concealed by Lorrain’s mask is also a house in which one plays, but it is a self-dismantling structure from which creativity has flown. Ruins of emotions that are fluid, moving, transient, they are abandoned sites, masks that are worn, then removed and thrown away. On the one hand, Lorrain’s goal is to avoid becoming trapped in one identity that asphyxiates and immobilizes. On the other hand, he stages the spectacle of frantic self-invention, constantly engaging readers’ interpretive responses. The conclusion of each story shows that Lorrain no longer lives there. Each title is an alias identifying the writer as someone else. Lorrain distinguishes between a mask that the subject picks himself and the faulty image a hostile audience imposes from outside. Lorrain’s mythomania frees him from his reputation before it stabilizes, invalidating the opinions of critics and detractors, propelling him into the creative work of inventing himself anew. Acerbic journalist, prolific novelist, fan of longshoremen and sailors, object of public levity with his mustachio and make-up, Lorrain is a master of the techniques of playful self-fictionalization. Rather than following a chronology marked by dates of publication, this study traces a thematic path from perversion to creation, from sexual self-definition as maladaptive and pathological to artistic liberation through identification with another. The historic and cultural determinants of Decadent discouragement showed that the therapeutic benefit of writing was as a deterrent to self-destructiveness. In Huysmans, the work of authorship prevents regression and creative failure, blocking a movement away from artistic and sexual maturity toward

Introduction

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unproductive experiments in self-stimulating aestheticism. In Mendès, the novel reaffirms exogamy and community, cutting off a retreat to the private realm of incest and transgression. As art’s purpose is to privilege collectivity over self, the Decadent novel that begins by lauding the prestige of the Magus ends by renouncing secret teachings in favor of orthodox Catholic dogma. In Mirbeau and Rachilde, the inveteracy of an old prejudice is mitigated as it is processed into fiction. Projected onto Célestine, Mirbeau’s vestigial anti-Semitism dissipates when its irrationality and gratuitousness are exposed. Through writing, Rachilde ventilates her resentment of phallocracy so that, rather than emulating her oppressors, she can set her rage aside. However, apart from stressing art’s value in separating asymptote and curve, Decadent literature also engaged in self-critical analysis. Unsurprisingly, in an era noted for its stifling aesthetic narcissism, works of fiction equated glory with their impossible accomplishment. The more brilliant a novel’s insights, the more crushing its message of futility. In L’Art en exil, Rodenbach’s diagnosis of sterility plays out against a backdrop of an uncapturable reality. As is his famous novel, Bruges-la-Morte, Rodenbach’s subject is atmospheric: the dynamics of forgetting, blurring, muting, disappearing. Words strain to make permanent sounds and images that fade. The ephemerality of everything, the universality of loss seem an adumbration of the fate of a novel virtually no one reads today. This is the paradox inherent in the project of Decadent creation: commemorating oblivion, preserving evanescence, materializing as text what is receding into absence. The irony of Rodenbach’s novel is the insistence by the hero on surviving the disintegrative forces of indifference, decay, and time – winning undeserved glory for the poetry he never writes. His ambition to counterbalance the nonexistence of the art work, the impermanence of its material with the immortality of the creator, provides a meditation on vanity in both senses of the word. Rodenbach’s unusual contribution to Decadent aesthetics is the precision of his analysis of the processes of decay: the phenomena of pulverization, evaporation, liquefaction; the operation of the death drive; the effacement of a loved one’s face, the transience of mourning; the extinction of memory and affect in the heart of one who grieves.

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This study ends with an examination of Remy de Gourmont’s Sixtine, a long-neglected Symbolist work famed for its lexical vexatiousness. With its multifaceted genre complexity, its hero’s selfabsorption, the literariness of a worldview that separates him from other people, it exemplifies the Decadent story of misanthropic selfisolation. Often compared to A rebours, it lacks the ironic nihilism of Huysmans’s project, its failure to purify the experience of crassness through the alchemy of style. The virtue of Gourmont’s novel is as an absolutist project that alienates the hero from life which art transforms into itself. Gourmont’s protagonist is adamant in evacuating spontaneity from experience. The revitalizing promise of contingency and surprise is neutralized by his impassive contemplation of eventualities, by the rigorous analysis of his possible reactions so that when an event arrives, it is already old and classified. When Gourmont’s hero falls in love, he models his relationship on literature, then experiences the inevitable disappointment of discovering the triteness of real life. One’s mistress is not as inspirationally savory as Dante’s Beatrice. No matter that, in authoring his imitative daydreams, he is empty of the passion that animates the characters he would emulate. In a way, the trajectory of Gourmont’s novel is a negative complement of A rebours. Whereas des Esseintes finds satisfaction in his sexual inertia, preferring to recall romantic humiliations rather than possibly enduring new ones, Gourmont’s hero is barricaded behind his aesthetic superciliousness. He awakens to love and danger when he chances on a woman who tears him away from scripts by Villiers and Flaubert, who drives him from the mausoleum whose pediment bears the word Literature in gold letters. When his character turns from passion and embraces literature as suicide, Gourmont’s novel seems to illustrate the collapsing of the asymptote, as the curve of the story’s romantic intrigue meets the line of aesthetic fatalism. But as this study argues, it is by completing the Decadent descent toward stagnation that the processes of death are completed and overcome. The anteriority of art, the preexistence of literary models make life an ersatz copy of something already beautified and stylized. It is too late when Gourmont’s hero learns of intersubjectivity. While he is limited to his perspective, his is no more valuable than another’s. He is the object of his loved one’s views, a potential hero in her romance, susceptible to transfiguration by the

Introduction

23

poetry of her feelings. It is through interaction with others that life is elevated into art, which as Gourmont’s novel indicates, is a cooperative creation. At the end, Gourmont’s hero acknowledges he has been rejected for another. Rededicating himself to art as mortification and asceticism, he imagines living in a cave strewn with the skeletons of hyenas. Like des Esseintes, he has no belief in God as consolation, only a sterile cult of beauty as his privilege and punishment. Gourmont’s novel marks the pinnacle of Decadent aestheticism’s deathly grandeur, its elimination of friendship, love, and comfort from the world. With the vulgarity of existence sublimated into literature, with people seen as epigones of famous characters from masterpieces, the Decadent artist can operate only as a disappointed critic, contemptuously judging reality as no more than pastiche. As this study claims, in the Decadent’s insistence on hypersubjectivity, he emphasizes the triangular relation of author, text, and character. It is by objectifying himself through the process of creation that he can see himself as others do and can intuit an audience’s perceptions. While he starts by identifying with his character, it is through the therapeutic work of authorship that he banishes unhealthy feelings, discharges destructive impulses. Through dissociative selfdefinition, he is changed, reborn, and cured. As long as it functions as a chrysalis in which the transformation happens, the text is an enclosed space of suffocating selfcommunion. The Decadent’s initial discovery of the other is the encounter with an archaic self from which creation has estranged him. The parthenogenetic transformation of an author delivered of his character leaves behind the text as a stillborn monster engendered by the intercourse of same with same – resembling in this way the incestchild as the figural embodiment of Mendès’s Zo’har. While he is locked in the magnificent tower of his lofty point of view, the Decadent artist, through writing, effects his self-creation. Subject to the metempsychosis that brings rebirth in every work, he is never prisoner of a self that is constantly mutating. The production of his art is a liberating act, a molting of the text as skin that houses him no longer. Every fiction is an imaginary life that dies upon completion, investing value in art’s splendor as a mortuary science. How gorgeous are the fin-de-siècle scenes of deliverance from the flesh, Axël and Sarah’s expiration amidst a cascade of gold and

24

Asymptote

emeralds. “Comme ils sont décadents […] dans ces romans-là,” Ducrey exclaims. “Comme ils savent mourir! Peut-être ne savent-ils que cela: mourir encore, mourir toujours. Mourir en beauté.”21 It is this necrophilic union of author and himself as dying character that offers an illusion of the convergence of asymptote and curve. But as the lovers’ corpses in Axël drop elegantly to the floor, outside, as Villiers writes, one hears the sounds of life resume. Decadence may be seen as an approach and a recession from the line, from death as textual completion with its ordering formality. The pervert, the thaumaturge, the anti-Semite, the man-hater – in being fictionalized – are unfamiliar selves of authors undressed of their masks. Marcel Schwob, no longer trapped inside his invalidism and erudition, grows distant from the line of research, self-consistency, and imitation. Always moving toward the intersection of the creator and his products, Decadence is transcended as it passes its finality and continues into the unmapped realm of expressive possibility.

21

Ducrey, “Préface,” p. iii.

Chapter One Perversion In characterizing perversion, Freud defines deviations from the “normal sexual aim” as acceptably commonplace, undeserving of reproach, only on the condition that they appear “alongside” conventional sexual behavior and do not “take their place in all circumstances.”1 When perversion acts as a supplement or extension of copulative union, there is no substitute or displacement of the normal sexual goal. While retaining its singular purpose, it is complicated or enriched by what Freud calls “some addition” to normal coital activity. While accentuating his conviction that conventional sexual behavior is unchanging, Freud is amenable to the supersession of uniformity by diversity. In sexual activity, while there is one aim assigned priority, there are many ways to achieve it. It is when perversion does not enhance but replaces the original goal that it is indicative of degeneracy – when it is chosen instead of and not practiced in addition to – that Freud considers it blameworthy. Only when “a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation” is one justified, Freud says, “in regarding it as a pathological symptom.”2 For the Decadents wishing to experiment with provisional identities, perversion allowed freedom from a limiting, prescriptive norm. While there was only one way to be healthy, there were countless avenues into deviance. Opposing the unoriginal monotony of heterosexual genitality, perversion afforded chances for spontaneity and innovation. 1

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 253. 2 Ibid.

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Asymptote

In reacting against Zola and the medical paradigm of naturalism, the Decadents often associated individualism and aberrancy. Draconian programs aimed at enforcing servility and sameness met with resistance by those invoking the prerogative to be sick. In conformity with Freud’s conception of perversions as accompaniments to health, Decadent authors valued deviance for permitting expressive possibilities. The asymptotic course of forays into sexual pathology allowed the artist to approach perversion without merging fantasy with actual behavior. By presenting des Esseintes’s aestheticism as a life-threatening compulsion, J.-K. Huysmans successfully rids himself of the temptation he projectively experiences. Using naturalism as the diagnostic tool, he relies on Decadent fiction for the cure. The novel’s dual purpose explains its development on parallel registers since, as Charles Bernheimer writes, Huysmans’s writing constructs “a counterdiscourse to naturalism, giving stamps of approval to literary and artistic works that exemplify a decadent sensibility.”3 A rebours moves from a quadrant of masochistic auto-eroticism before resuming its run alongside the axis of adaptation to sexual norms. Huysmans’s signal literary contribution was to depict the artistic temperament as pathology while displaying his own creative work as its therapeutic remedy. The reclusive aesthete fêtes his impotence with black wines and chocolate crème: – “las de ce luxe similaire, de ces caresses identiques,”4 he forsakes actresses and chanteuses in order to explore a wealth of unconventional sensations. Expanding the erotogenic landscape, he explores the labial, lingual, and rectal zones, stimulating his nasal cavities with myrrh and frangipani, imagining auditory exaltation by reading libretti from Wagner’s operas, enjoying ocular irritation by covering his living room in orange. Lacking Baudelaire’s “courage de se plonger dans ce bain de multitude,”5 he renounces hearing Berlioz in favor of consuming him as sheet music. Too debilitated for sexual congress, he interacts with women just as memories, structuring relationships with his mistresses in order

3

Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture in the Fin de Siècle in Europe, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2002, p. 72. 4 J.-K. Huysmans, A rebours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), p. 84. 5 Ibid., p. 327.

Chapter One: Perversion

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to play the role of weakling. A limited capacity to invent factitious selves correlates with des Esseintes’s professed intolerance for others. In following its hero’s trip into the impasse of degeneracy, Huysmans’s novel ends by apologizing for normality and health. Having imagined the appeal of regression to aestheticism, Huysmans pathologizes the subject of his fiction. A selfish cult of beauty, a solitary regimen of self-stimulation are forbidden by the doctor summoned to examine des Esseintes. Commanded to leave his Thebaid and resume normal social functions in the capital, des Esseintes departs a novel vacated of its material. Identified with the physician, the consummately naturalist authority, Huysmans administers his writing as a prophylactic defense against Decadence as disease. In place of the polymorphous perverse disposition of the infantinvalid, Huysmans proposes the culturally advanced appeal of disciplined monotheism. Left infirm by the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, des Esseintes longs for religious faith and submission to a stern divinity. Having chased the illusion of anarchic freedom through immersion in the multifariousness of art, A rebours ends by invoking the law of doctor, God, and author. On the other end of the perversion spectrum, incest aims at restoring the unity of pre-oedipal narcissism, with the subject choosing as his partner an extension of himself. Instead of a dissolution in the mother, joining with an opposite-gender sibling intends returning to the balance preexisting the division of self and other. Catulle Mendès’s novel Zo’har explores the complexity of incest, first describing the Decadent attraction of transgressing the taboo, asymptotically moving toward the axis of unrestraint and pleasure, approaching yet never entering the realm of lawlessness and inexpression. The Decadent dimension of Mendès’s novel shows the specious reasons for the taboo, exposing as arbitrary the religious and societal injunctions against incest. The central characters are lovers – a halfbrother and half-sister – who share a passion which, by seeming natural, cannot be forbidden or illicit. In the novel, divine interdiction of incest is pictured as theatrical superstition-mongering. Since the threatened genetic punishment for producing mutant progeny is dismissed as unreliable, the renegade lovers are initially crowned with glory. But at the end, as in A rebours, rules are upheld and religion vindicated.

28

Asymptote

Cultural inculcation of a horror of incestuous love is so pervasive that abstention is seen as natural, not as the result of centuries of conditioning. Yet Zo’har stresses that the Decadent art work is able to survive only by upholding the conservative institutions that Decadence subverts. Without the social and linguistic framework that legislates, names, and separates – without taxonomies that specify what is authorized and disallowed – there are only pleasurable acts and not the literature that sanctions them. Incorporating the function of crime and punishment, Zo’har excuses the sin of incest as justifying intervention by a novel that labels it taboo. In both Mendès and Huysmans’s novels, the recourse to perversion is a detour into the unstructured inexpressibility of prehistory. A timeless realm where others are experiential modalities of the self, it is a hothouse paradise of spontaneity and satisfaction. At first, the riotous luxuriance of Decadent flower beds is untended by a gardener who censors unspeakable impulses and imposes artistic order. But then, perverse desires indulged freely when one is alone are recuperated by the fiction expressing the collective interests of society. From singularity to multiplicity, from perversion’s body to art’s i ntelligence, these works describe a curving line coming from an unrepresentable distance, a line that moves impossibly near yet never merges with the subject.

Chapter One: Perversion

29

The Pervert, the Aesthete, and the Author: J.-K. Huysmans’s A rebours Despite the celebrity that J.-K. Huysmans earned for authoring A rebours, a novel heralded by Arthur Symons as “the breviary of the Decadence,” Huysmans’s origins were in naturalism with its emphasis on productivity. While Huysmans’s hero in A rebours proclaims the superiority of artifice – assigning precedence to Decadent style over the crassness of naturalist substance – the book issues an indictment of the otiosity of aestheticism, distinguishing a character who makes nothing but memories and neuroses from an author who succeeds in completing the novel diagnosing him. A rebours is perhaps the most famous case of critics conflating Decadent writers and their characters, disciplined creators from the riotous creatures who proliferate in their fictions. In attempting to identify the model for Huysmans’s character, biographer Robert Baldick cites the eccentric poet Robert Montesquiou, the young dandy Charles Baudelaire, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Huysmans’s character Jean Folantin in A Vau-l’eau. However, Baldick goes on to associate the writer and his protagonist, asserting that “des Esseintes became the repository of Huysmans’ secret tastes and untold dreams.” Such were the temperamental affinities between the two that “in their sickly sensibility, their yearning for solitude, their abhorrence of human mediocrity, and their thirst for new and complex sensations, author and character were one.”6 However, readers of Huysmans recognize that A rebours marked a passing moment, a stage in the author’s evolution toward the Spiritual Naturalism of his later works. In their movement toward convergence, the asymptote and curve describe Huysmans’s fleeting coincidence with an embodiment of his Decadent sensibilities. But ultimately his work on A rebours showed Huysmans the sterility of the cult of beauty. By writing his novel, he identified the etiology of unproductive aestheticism, which he was able to overcome through the successful authorship of his text. 6

Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 80-1.

30

Asymptote

Aestheticism as Perversion In A rebours, Huysmans provides a foundational study of Decadent art while discrediting Decadent aesthetics as a manifestation of perversion. In a psychoanalytic investigation well-suited to illumine Huysmans’s novel, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel explains the link between creativity and deviance. In her delineation of the origins of perversion, Chasseguet-Smirgel says that, at the moment when the Oedipus conflict arises, the normal subject takes his father as his ego ideal, realizing that in competing for his mother’s love, he must achieve genital maturity. It is only by resembling the father that the boy can hope to displace him later. Recognition of the need for development and growth situates the subject in the present time of his smallness and inadequacy, yet also orients him toward a future filled with the promise of sexual competence. The double difference that Chasseguet-Smirgel sees at the root of the Oedipal drama involves acknowledgement of the genital complementarity of the sexes and acceptance of the generational gap that defines the child as an inferior epigone of his father. However, the pervert harbors illusions of his present sufficiency, being convinced that “pregenital sexuality is equal, if not superior to, genitality.”7 Instead of emulating the father in the hope of one day enjoying his prerogatives, the pervert idealizes his ego and the products of his body. The fecal stick replaces the paternal phallus, and so eliminates the double difference, since excrement is “a product common to adult and child, woman and man.”8 One can easily differentiate the self-satisfied Decadent pervert from an author respectful of a father who is powerful and productive. While Huysmans is the working writer who submits to the rigors of creative labor, the Decadent character rejects the need to abandon pleasure for reality, denies or pretends to ignore the paternal values of reason and discipline. Disguised as the knickknacks with which he furnishes his retreat, he lives an atemporal existence in which there is no gap between desire and fulfillment. The impulse toward aestheticism becomes all the more urgent because of the actual worthlessness of the objects that the Decadent idealizes. Hence his transmutation of 7

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 91 8 Ibid.

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31

feces into gold, pebbles into diamonds, and anality into spiritualism. The gilded, jewel-encrusted surfaces which the Decadent values are shells that hide the excremental material beneath. In A rebours, the parable of the tortoise whose carapace des Esseintes inlays with gold conveys a lesson about the sterile morbidity of aestheticism, as the shell represents the gorgeous prison in which the occupant grows sick. A rebours is rife with allusions to symbolic and symptomatic expressions of perversion, behaviors that fail to bring the hero confidence or pleasure. Having provided an inventory of Huysmans’s characters’ deviant practices, Per Buvik concludes: “Il y a peu de jubilatoire dans les descriptions des perversions huysmansiennes.”9 Des Esseintes’s recourse to the peptone enema expresses a wish for oral and anal self-sufficiency, yet it is a fantasy that ultimately proves unsustainable. His genital dysfunction becomes the occasion for a mock funeral celebrating the pervert’s loss of virility. And des Esseintes’s denigration of nature, his overvaluation of shiny simulacra cause a self-immurement manifesting what Leonard Shengold calls “sphincter defensiveness,”10 making des Esseintes close his door and body to outside influences and other people. In the development of perversion, as Chasseguet-Smirgel says, the subject is often abetted by a mother who deprecates her conjugal partner and who, “by her seductive attitude toward [her son …], fosters in him the illusion that he has neither to grow up nor to reach maturity.”11 In the case of Huysmans’s hero, however, it is not the mother’s complicity, but the general defaulting on her responsibilities to her child that motivates des Esseintes’s behavior, which he camouflages as a cult of the beautiful and as an elitist appreciation of art. Des Esseintes also suffers from the absence of a father whom he might emulate and idealize. Suspension of the super-ego functions that come from introjecting the father leaves des Esseintes with nothing to help regulate his tendencies toward self-indulgence, perversion, and narcissism. In the novel’s opening description, the missing father is represented as the empty spot in des Esseintes’s portrait gallery, as the 9

Per Buvik, “Les Perversions de Huysmans,” Bérénice 10.25 (Dec.-March 1985), p. 334. 10 Leonard Shengold, Halo in the Sky: Observations on Anality and Defense (New York: The Guilford Press, 1988), p. 31. 11 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p. 2.

32

Asymptote

transition from the genital norm to pregenital perversion is imaged in the gap between the pictures hanging on des Esseintes’s wall. Portraits of stout, barrel-chested paragons of forbidding masculinity succeed one another until there is a space followed by a caricatural likeness of a foppish deviant with rouged cheeks and pomaded hair crowned with a strand of pearls. Little detail is provided about des Esseintes’s shadowy and unhappy childhood. But in the subsequent development of des Esseintes’s misanthropy and isolationism, the magnification of his own person, the crystallization of his identity as a sensualist and an aesthete – especially in his alternatingly proud affirmation of his sexual impotence and his insistance on dominating and abusing the women he knows he is unable to satisfy – des Esseintes’s retreat from adult heterosexuality can be traced back to the dereliction of his parents. The hyperaesthetic des Esseintes, simultaneously pained by and drawn to novel effects of lighting, lurid colors, corrosively acrid shades of orange, the bejewelled breastplate worn by Salome in the painting by Gustave Moreau, is described as having passed “[s]on enfance […] funèbre”12 in a hushed atmosphere of darkness and invalidism. Thus, the adult des Esseintes’s love of gaudy excess compensates for the “entrevues décolorées” with a bed-ridden, emotionally withdrawn woman lying motionless “dans une chambre obscure du château de Lourps.”13 If, as Joseph Smith says,14 image production as artistic expression derives from the infant’s original hallucination of the absent mother, des Esseintes’s restoration of an unresponsive caregiver recreates her as brilliance and sparkle correcting for the impression of her as cold, colorless, and still. Des Esseintes’s father had also abdicated on his parental duties. Residing most of the year in Paris, des Esseintes’s father had made perfunctory inquiries about his son’s health and academic progress 12

Huysmans, A rebours, p. 93. Ibid., p. 3. 14 As Smith maintains: “a work of art would not enter the cultural order if it did not recapitulate the loss and recreation sequences beyond infancy that are universal in human development [… N]o matter the other levels of meaning, the work of art […] ultimately recapitulates original loss and celebrates the original imagistic recreation of the mother” (“Mourning, Art, and Human Historicity,” Telling Facts: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph Smith [Baltimore,The Johns Hopkins UP, 1991], p. 138) 13

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before boarding a train again and returning to the capital. In his place, the paternal figures that des Esseintes adopted were the Jesuit fathers to whom his education was entrusted. At once coddled and ignored, des Esseintes had been encouraged in his undisciplined behavior, urged to pursue his study of whatever interested him, entertained by discussions “sur toutes les doctrines théologiques qui le sollicitaient par leur subtilités et leurs arguties.”15 It was the Jesuits who determined des Esseintes’s penchant for intellectual dilettantism, his longing for metaphysical certainty, his wish to go beyond the inconsequentiality of aestheticism-as-play and rediscover the authority of a father whose rules were dogma and whose opinions were truth. Prematurely weaned of parental love, des Esseintes had reacted to his abandonment by defensively idealizing his own aloneness. What Shengold characterizes as an anal-narcissistic defense – control of the sphincter as shutting the door to the self – extends to des Esseintes’s design of his Fontenay retreat. Des Esseintes’s fantasy of selfmothering also entails elimination of the need for others, as he hopes to derive sustenance from the act of elimination, using the peptone enema as a substitute for the breast. Denying interconnectedness and dependency, des Esseintes constructs a barricaded, autonomous self, idealizing the material he produces and consumes, recapitulating the quest for anal satisfaction on the part of the child who takes pride in making something himself. Thus, des Esseintes prefers his interpretations of art to art works themselves, shuns experience in favor of recollection, and appreciates artificial images more than objective reality. Chasseguet-Smirgel’s picture of the deluded pervert, encouraged by his mother in cultivating a sense of his sufficiency, is different from Huysmans’s representation of a maladapted des Esseintes, who directs his anger at the mother and her surrogates and who sees his health imperilled by avoidance of the world. The aestheticism that disguises the excremental nature of the pervert’s objects fails as a strategy to deny his hunger for substance and meaning. Unlike nature qui a fait son temps, as des Esseintes observes, his decorated interior, with its moldings enameled in indigo, its parquet floor strewn with fox pelts, its walls bound in leather, topologizes a beautiful self as the artistically rehabilitated place that 15

Huysmans, A rebours, p. 6.

34

Asymptote

houses it. As Chasseguet-Smirgel says: “The beauty of the setting thus projects itself upon the Ego, captures and magnifies it. The perfection of art palliates the defects of nature.”16 Yet at the end, des Esseintes’s gorgeous sanctuary is a prison in which he languishes. Mistresses as Memories In des Esseintes’s interaction with women, the emotionless, unloving mother is brought back as avatars he is able to control. Instead of risking the unpredictability of potential new liaisons, he contents himself with remembering and dreaming of former mistresses. Metonymized as the absent breast, the bad mother is recovered when he takes a praline bonbon, puts it in his mouth, and sucks. However, in the account of des Esseintes’s memories of earlier relationships, the emphasis is on the failure of aestheticism, the futility of replacing the mother with a series of paid impersonators, and the dissatisfaction des Esseintes feels with substituting style for substance. The primacy that des Esseintes assigns to oral needs is evident in his enjoyment of art as pleasures of the mouth, in his mnemonic Siraudin candies, in the musical compositions he plays through the use of his orgue à bouche. In swallowing the Curaçao of clarinets, the brandy of tubas, the gin of trombones, the anisette of flutes, des Esseintes further internalizes the thébaide, making the locus of satisfaction into labia, tongue and palate, allowing art to replace a mother who is reintroduced as liquid. However, as endogamy had enfeebled des Esseintes’s ancestral line, “usant [un] reste de vigueur dans les unions consanguines,”17 abstention from consuming the real and consorting with other people had left the Duke etiolated and unable to survive. Des Esseintes’s attempt to mitigate the frightening alterity of women involves replacing them with performers whom he hires to play a role. The worrisome adventitiousness of unmediated life is eased by its assimilation to theater, with its familiar scripts and trained actresses. Conjured up by the sarcanthus flavored pastille melting in his mouth, Miss Urania, the American circus acrobat, is the first of the mistresses whom des Esseintes remembers. Whereas his mother was 16 17

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion, p. 96. Huysmans, A rebours, p. 2.

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always listless and dying, Miss Urania is hale and sturdy, a creature “au corps bien découplé, aux jambes nerveuses, aux muscles d’acier, aux bras de fonte.”18 Yet in des Esseintes’s allusions to Miss Urania, he repeatedly refers to the difference between her professional persona and the feminine conventionality of her actual identity. An American, she is associated with vulgarity and materialism, qualities antithetical to des Esseintes’s professed aesthetic values. Miss Urania had agreed to play the part of mother/Hercules because she knew “par les ouïdire, que des Esseintes était riche.”19 The resentment des Esseintes had felt for a cold, unfeeling mother is redirected at the actress who performs her part unconvincingly, and at himself, since he also proves to be an unskilled illusionist, unable to complement his mistress by being “un cocasse et maigre clown.”20 In Huysmans’s account of his hero’s relationship with a ventriloquist, the mother as absent food, as unspoken words of love, is exchanged for predictable responses that a customer dictates and pays for. Recalling an unhappy childhood scene that des Esseintes changes and embellishes, he remembers his first glimpse of the performer who had animated cardboard children with her voice. Allowing an evasion from the trap of his soliloquizing consciousness, he had witnessed a simulated dialogue between the dummy with whom he identified and a mother who had addressed him and permitted him to respond. In repressing awareness of the double difference between the sexes and generations, the pervert seeks enjoyment of immediate incestuous satisfaction. Not wishing to grow up and achieve sexual maturity, he lives in an atemporal realm of pleasure unpostponed, as his existence describes the meeting of the asymptote and curve. The pervert’s occupation of an eternal present of instantaneous gratification explains the lack of plot development in A rebours, since, like his hero, Huysmans’s novel does not move toward maturity and meaning but unfolds as an unstructured series of experiments in autostimulation. Des Esseintes’s perversion also involves hiring women as maternal surrogates. In doing so, des Esseintes substitutes money for the phallus, a symbolic instrument enabling him to satisfy mistresses he controls. But money is ultimately a discredited and inauthentic 18

Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 158. 20 Ibid., p. 159. 19

36

Asymptote

object, the glittering surface overlaying the fecal substance underneath. Des Esseintes’s efforts to recover the mother by staging these scenarios are thwarted by his knowledge of their theatricality and falseness. Huysmans’s dissociation from his unproductive and developmentally stunted character is evidenced by his frustration of des Esseintes’s attempts at self-deception. Wishing for the experience of blissful fusion with the mother, the pervert moves from the use of language that distances to more intimate forms of communication like taste and smell. Professionally identified as the mouth that lies, the ventriloquist had initially been associated with another more truthful orifice, read as natural messages emanating from other body cavities: “Cette brunette suintait des parfums préparés, […] elle brûlait comme un cratère.”21 It is typical of Huysmans’s pervert that the frauds he perpetrates are self-debunking. Arranging for a performance of Flaubert’s dialogue between the Chimera and Sphinx, des Esseintes constructs a scene of unspeaking closeness with the mother: “Doucement, il étreignait la femme silencieuse, à ses côtés, se réfugiant, ainsi qu’un enfant inconsolé, près d’elle.”22 Positioning the unfathomable riddlewoman at one end of the room and the child as illusion-consumer facing her at the other end, des Esseintes ventriloquizes the ventriloquist, putting his own ideas into Flaubert’s words and then projecting them through these figures. Etymologically strangling speech with her silence, understanding with her mystery, the Sphinx closes the sphincter that isolates the Chimera, preventing communication and intercourse with the woman. Instead of entering the censer/crater and incorporating the mother as fragrance, des Esseintes expresses his wish in words, and in so doing, makes this wish unrealizable. The magic phrase from Flaubert’s text – “Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des plaisirs inéprouvés”23 – brings a response that denies and returns des Esseintes to the familiar terrain of the monologue: “c’était à lui-même que cette voix aussi mystérieuse qu’une incantation, parlait; c’était à lui qu’elle racontait sa fièvre d’inconnu, son idéal inassouvi [….] Toute la misère de ses propres efforts lui refoula le coeur.”24 21

Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 163. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 22

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What the Chimera asks for, in the regressive formulation that moves from pleasure to flower to perfume, is what des Esseintes seeks in his importation of rare horticultural specimens from the greenhouses on the avenue de Châtillon, in his ruminations on the grammar of fragrance, and in his recollection of the artificial spring produced by the factories of Pantin. Unable to supply the illusory phallus permitting the pervert’s pregenital coupling with the mother, des Esseintes fantasizes about incorporating her through audition, ingurgitation, olfaction. The failed strategy of substituting a dummy for the self, reversing roles like genders, and projecting his own voice through the ventriloquist prevents des Esseintes from replacing an immature body with a cardboard facsimile, filling the mother’s silence with words expressing the child’s need. Increasingly, for des Esseintes, fetishes substitute for the woman whose defectiveness and incompletion are seen as existing on the level of language, unspoken words filled in by beautiful sounds, polished verses, sumptuous scents, exquisite tastes. In des Esseintes’s dreamy recollections, the image of an actual woman often dissipates like a mirage, becoming memory fragments by which she is reassembled in stylized form. It is only by discovering the inoperability of the fantasy of union that des Esseintes turns to memories and art works allowing the mother to be retrieved as discrete sensory residue. The perversion engendered by desires to possess an unresponsive mother involves elaboration of an aesthetic of absence: referents idealized by the ethereal insubstantiality of words, bodies evaporated into rarefied manifestations, elliptical metaphors, exotic fragrances. Yet what des Esseintes desires is the vulgarity of nature, the body of the mother, not the prettiness of artifice.

38

Asymptote

The Failure of Artifice Des Esseintes’s experience of things involves him in a dialectical interplay of beauty and squalor, ambrosial nourishment and coprophily, flowers and gangrene, crass materialism and symbolic purity. The mother’s unavailability inspires des Esseintes’s minimalist aesthetic, his associating the most profound ideas with the fewest possible words, richness of content with spareness of expression. A pathogenetic aesthetic, des Esseintes’s re-creation of the sick mother involves recourse to images of sickness. His fondness for Echinopsis blossoms, reminiscent of amputations, and Cypripedium, suggestive of diseases of the throat, extends to a love of flowers whose petals evoke symptoms of histolysis – burns, cauterizations, images of syphilis repressing fantasies of incest. To the pervert, A rebours administers a course of aversion therapy, arousing a desire for taboo things and punishing attempts to satisfy it. The cream cheese and scallion-covered bread that des Esseintes sees two children fighting over begins by making his mouth water and then induces crippling nausea. The dreams of exoticism inspired by the spectacle of rare flowers deteriorates into a nightmare of the Flower Horsewoman who threatens des Esseintes with castration. Occasionally, Oedipal interdictions obstruct des Esseintes’s desires, as when an angry father introjected as a brutal dentist punishes the move from pregenital sucking to the aggressiveness of biting by extracting des Esseintes’s carious tooth and handing him the bloody chicot wrapped in newspaper. However, for des Esseintes, the substance hungered for is often poisoned at its core. In des Esseintes’s aesthetic, a mother described as white and silent is vivified and euphemized, condensed into Mallarmeen images alluding to the inexpressibility of perfection. Love as sustaining milk is imbibed as the complexity of liqueur symphonies; medicinal smells, overpowering the original odor di femina, are masked by perfumes evoking nature, pleasure, health, and light. Cured of consumption, Madame des Esseintes is diffused as ambient sweetness, “un fleur naturel de rires en sueur, des joies qui se démènent en plein soleil.”25 While in matters of literature and art, des Esseintes is no more than a dilettante, as a designer and consumer of fragrances, he is an 25

Ibid., p. 178.

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accomplished virtuoso, a composer of the orchestral music of musk and patchouli, an historian of smells. Des Esseintes’s attraction to actresses can in part be explained by the fact that the fetishist is the most skilled of illusionists, a prestidigitator adept at manipulating objects, colorful, aromatic, shiny things that hide the truth of an underlying absence. Like a magician, the fetishist creates a perception that where there was nothing, there is something. More than permitting a disavowal of the mother’s castration, the fetish, for des Esseintes, conceals the fact that the mother is absent altogether. By privileging his transient sensory reactions over objects themselves, by disembodying women as the smell of flowers, converting poetry into the diffuse reverie that poetry induces, des Esseintes conjugates presence and absence. Mother may be gone, but she was here just a moment ago. Her scent still lingers. The taste of her remains in my mouth. Whereas the Romantics recovered the lost beloved as idealized landscapes, des Esseintes experiences women as a topology of the artificial. Soon after dispelling the scent of female laughter and sweat, he re-evokes them as the technical apparatus that calls them to mind: “Les femmes s’étaient peu à peu évanouies; la campagne était devenue déserte; alors, sur l’horizon, des usines se dressèrent.”26 Home to the Pinaud and Saint-James perfumeries, Pantin – with its homonymic suggestion of puppetry – is another locus of simulated life, illusory freshness, vernal inauthenticity. As the ventriloquist projected her voice into cardboard children on the stage, Pantin, through the heat and sweetness generated by its industry, creates the impression of an environmental mother. A tropical homeland or counterfeit Antibes, it welcomes the dissolute consumptive, forgiving vice, curing the ravages of debauchery, joining the tubercular mother to her debilitated offspring – uniting them in an embrace of chemical fragrance and synthetic sunshine. But restoration of the mother as warmth and vigor is a fraud that cannot deceive des Esseintes for long. So the place promising comfort and shelter, the woman offering “[une] quasi-protection achetée”27 are disappointing fakes provoking hostility and rage, prompting impulses to sully and desecrate.

26 27

Ibid., pp. 178-9. Ibid., p. 158.

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Asymptote

Images of mud and feces, pestilence and miasma accompany des Esseintes’s memories of maternal surrogates and places. Succeeding the discovery of Miss Urania’s venality is “l’exorbitant attrait de la boue,”28 the urge to cover her in excrement. More than a country of eternal springtime, Pantin is a place of manure piles and mud puddles, a sanitarium for the sick roué, its “émanations féminines”29 evoking the memory of prostitutes, bad habits which the convalescing patient is helpless to relinquish. As critics of Huysmans often remark, his hero’s quest for authenticity often assumes a primary oral urgency, a craving for food that sustains, nourishment that satisfies. From Folantin’s life of desolate gastronomic vagrancy (A Vau-l’Eau 1882) to Saint Lydwine’s rejection of counterfeit sacramental wafers (Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam 1901), Huysmans’s characters look for a reality that fortifies, yet they end up in restaurants serving poisonous refection. The hypostatized Christ, who is subject to corruption, is another spoiled aliment that leaves the hungry child frustrated. “La comestibilté du Christ, […] loin d’être une invitation à l’Eucharistie, rend au fond ce Christ tabou, immangeable.” For Huysmans, as Jean Borie remarks, “[l]’obligation de vivre (l’alimentation) est liée comme dans un cauchemar à l’obligation de pourrir.”30 Thus, des Esseintes’s ruminations on Pantin conclude with a rejection of the artificial, whose superiority over nature he had maintained all along – “Puisque, par le temps qui court, il n’existe plus de substance saine, puisque le vin qu’on boit et que la liberté qu’on proclame, sont frelatés et dérisoires.”31 The pervert’s failure to create a convincing simulacrum, to pose as a partner capable of satisfying the mother, leads des Esseintes, not to fantasize about Oedipal murder, but to anticipate the extinction of humanity altogether. No one gets the food he needs, so, rather than leave the weak to starve, why not administer a euthanasic abbreviation of their suffering? Momentarily leaving the uterine enclosure of Fontenay, des Esseintes ventures out one day into the garden where he beholds a 28

Ibid. Ibid., p. 185. 30 Jean Borie, Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1991), p. 153. 31 Huysmans, A rebours, p. 185. 29

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band of urchins fighting over an “immonde tartine.”32 These children are like God’s creatures left unprovided for by their Maker, communicants denied Christ materialized in the species of the Host, and who, instead of receiving blood and body as good wheat and pure wine, are fed potato starch and chemicals that dash their spirits and ruin their stomachs. Here, as elsewhere, des Esseintes’s diffuse religious yearnings reintroduce the Oedipal father as an absence, a delinquent figure who permitted the development of his son’s perversion. Lacking an ego ideal, des Esseintes longs for law and meaning, a sense of the transcendental that would take him out of himself. Desirous of a powerful male figure encouraging emulation, des Esseintes flavors his aestheticism with mock ascetic practices, giving his bedroom the false austerity of a monk’s cell, entertaining masochistic fantasies of martyrdom and self-denial. There is no incentive for des Esseintes to model himself on the father or his surrogates, the Jesuits who, when he arrived at school, “se mirent à choyer l’enfant.”33 Pampering, indulgent beings, these cassocked teachers were just more women who, instead of promoting discipline, were permissive and indifferent. The corollary of the pervert’s illusion of sufficiency and entitlement is his exile to a world of indolence and pleasure, being deprived of goals that give his life its temporal dynamism, orienting him toward a future of striving and achievement. The mother who imbues her son with feelings of false mastery promotes a sense of omnipotence that can easily give way to helplessness and despair. Des Esseintes’s identification with the scruffy, fighting street children ends with a reflection on the wisdom of contraception, sterilization, and infanticide expressive of his own death wish. Instructing that the immonde tartine be thrown away like an unwanted fetus, he considers life as so much superfluous organic matter. Perversion and Faith Why would des Esseintes want to grow up and resemble the father? There is no such person, only a criminal delinquent who abuses and abandons his creatures. Fond of citing Schopenhauer’s 32 33

Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 4.

42

Asymptote

comments on life’s bleakness, Huysmans agrees that if God created man, he would not wish to be that God, for “la misère du monde me déchirerait le coeur.”34 The divinity, as des Esseintes conceives of him, is another absentee parent who visits the curse of life on children he deserts before he gets back on the train. The ambiguously gendered figures who blighted des Esseintes’s childhood had been characterized both as mothers – withheld food or unblessed Eucharist – and as fathers – associated with broken promises, absent guidance, and unjust law. Like des Esseintes, Huysmans had wanted to eat, had craved love and knowledge, acceptance and an experience of the sublime. Ultimately, A rebours issues an indictment of the unsatisfactoriness of selfindulgence and the bankruptcy of perversion, as des Esseintes discovers that narcissism starves and the self is not enough. The more the parents are experienced as unresponsive, cold, and distant, the more the God replacing them must offer consolation, light, and order. Des Esseintes may wish to usurp the generative power of the divinity as Logos, but all he can do is pay a ventriloquist to project his speech into a dummy. As Huysmans shows in A rebours, linguistic perfection is ineffability, food-words, textual elixirs transmuting an original silent void into an eschatologically expressive plenitude. However, because the mother is weak and sick, her hardy epigones are reviled and smeared with excrement. Because the father is aloof and disconnected, his rules seem dubious and unclear. Biologically, God’s handiwork is ragged urchins and the parents who beat them, the triteness of a world that repeats ad nauseam the tired spectacle of mountains, lakes, and forests. The natural child is nature itself, and so the pervert who dreams of replacing the father is artifice that contrasts with simplicity, glittering falseness replacing the vulgarity of things that exist. God’s gift to man is the biological teleology of a life that aims at extinction, a developmental fatality that does not destine the child to acquire mastery like his progenitor, but that condemns him to become old and infirm, weak and impotent as he was in his infancy. Des Esseintes’s wish is to forearm himself against the trauma of abandonment, to defend against desertion by parents who default on their responsibility to feed and teach. Yet what he experiences is the 34

Ibid., p. 127.

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failed promise of the nourishing peptone enema. There is no triumph of oral and anal narcissism, no autarchic enclosure of a being who produces what he needs to consume. The lesson that des Esseintes learns is not just that self-isolation brings debility and woe, but that the legacy of his parents was a lack that nothing in this world could fill. The child calls for a mother who remains hidden in whiteness. Terrified, the adult summons the doctor who he is convinced will come too late. And the unbeliever appeals in vain to God to help him sustain the illusion of faith. Characterized by an attraction to the richness of its iconographic pageantry, des Esseintes’s interest in religion is itself a form of fetishism. “Ce cléricalisme spécial, ce mysticisme dépravé et artistement pervers vers lequel il s’acheminait”35 is a shiny covering meant to hide the truth of the misery of life in the body. Adoption of Catholic practices would involve the most superficial of changes, allowing des Esseintes de faire peau neuve, to gild his damaged carapace with gorgeous beliefs: “il eût voulu se forcer à posséder la foi, à se l’incruster dès qu’il la tiendrait.”36 But neither mother, physician, nor savior is mindful of des Esseintes’s appeal. The more urgent the need, “plus la visitation du Christ tardait a venir.”37 Trying to overcome the threat of castration, des Esseintes constructs a kitchen resembling a womb. This massive attempt at internalization not only blocks the memory of the mother’s unresponsiveness but also represses the trauma of birth altogether. Sailing on an amniotic sea, des Esseintes is a boat drifting in a watery maternal universe. The first of des Esseintes’s motionless journeys, the voyage to meals involves no displacement or discomfort but instead immobilizes the infant sailor in space and time, returning him to an environment that nourishes and protects. Subsequently, too, des Esseintes’s life is a succession of sea trips that are never taken, armchair voyages with Baudelaire, whose destination is Anywhere Out of the World. Why endure the inconvenience of actual experience? Why substitute the arduousness of excursions to real countries for “les dociles fantasmagories de [s]a

35

Ibid., p. 329. Ibid., p. 330. 37 Ibid. 36

44

Asymptote

cervelle?”38 For the pervert, the mature genitality of adulthood is another remote place that he is disinclined to visit, a less appealing locale than an elegantly appointed present. Through the porthole of his dining room with its view of ersatz oceans and clockwork fish, des Esseintes can set off en route to nowhere with Arthur Gordon Pym, or visit Dickens’s London by eating haddock and rhubarb pie. At the end, the dream of being an unborn child circumnavigating the uterus of Fontenay is dashed by a realization that the voyage is perilous, fraught with storms, menaced by hidden shoals. Life may be a frightening trip, but it is one that must be made: “Ainsi, sa béatitude était finie! Ce havre qui l’abritait, il fallait l’abandonner.”39 In A rebours, the stationary journey to the here and now begins with an experience of the lovelessness of the parents, as an absence of ideals causes an idealization of absence. Unmotivated to want to grow up to take the father’s place, des Esseintes has no wish to mature, no need to learn modesty and patience. Experiencing the mother as cold and ungiving, he does not even learn to want to eat. Unable to produce, he appropriates others’ objects, then values his aesthetic sensibility more than the materials inspiring it. For des Esseintes, God’s face is hidden, his word inaudible. Unprompted by Oedipal rivalry to kill the creator and take his place, des Esseintes replaces divine authority, meaning, and law with art works, esteeming decoration more than substance, and containers more than contents. Conclusion Decadent aestheticism is grounded in an original experience of loss, so that, when the needed thing is missing, a simulacrum is designed to replace it, when the mother is unavailable, a hallucinated likeness of her is summoned. But each time, the beautiful image proves to be a flimsy construct, a gossamer thing dissolving before the subject can embrace it. The untenability of des Esseintes’s illusion of self-sufficiency, the repeated discovery that aestheticism leads only to sickness, fuels the rage that des Esseintes directs at the mother and her

38 39

Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 325.

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surrogates, inciting the writer to overcome loss through the production of his novel. Marking the end of des Esseintes’s imaginary voyage through color, music, perfume, literature, memory, nightmare, and boredom is the shipwreck of the entire aesthetic enterprise, the inundation of the character’s identity, and his submersion beneath a tidal wave of human mediocrity. Aestheticism as a manifestation of perversion had been meant to confer on des Esseintes the prestige of the father, yet Huysmans’s hero had been a fraudulent creator incapable of producing anything. Thus, his appreciation of art had evinced a wish to share in the glory of the masters. A bibliomaniac, he had cherished the elegance of a text “endowed with the magic of an ego quality,” one “which builds his self-esteem and reduces anxiety by allowing [him] to feel that he participate[s] in the power, intelligence, or historical significance of the author.”40 An environmental disguise, des Esseintes’s Fontenay fortress is a decorated surface, walls bound like books, air suffused with fragrance, paintings applied like cosmetics to adorn the skin of a sanctuary. But even body boundaries inscribed with poetry, arrayed with canvases, and anointed with perfume cannot conceal the smell of corruption, nor cover the hollowness at the heart of its occupant. In an adumbration of Huysmans’s post-conversion novels, A rebours contrasts the hero’s infantile helplessness with the fruitfulness and responsible maturity of his creator. “Compensating for the character’s impotence is the productivity of an author whose work stands as evidence that […] loss has been overcome.”41 In later works, Huysmans’s narrators are less perverse and narcissistic, and instead evolve an aesthetic whose dynamism arises from a genuine wish to emulate the father. In Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), he describes art – like life – as being an award made by God, one that the writer may use for sacred or profane purposes, but which nonetheless retains “le caractère divin d’un don.”42 Conjugating with nature, the artist uses his talent, not to sully the mother, nor to replace 40 Norman Weiner, “On Bibliomania,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly (April 1966), pp. 220-1. 41 Robert Ziegler, Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p. 37. 42 J.-K. Huysmans, Les Foules de Lourdes. Oeuvres complètes 18 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1972), p. 109.

46

Asymptote

the father as would an unworthy pretender, but to magnify God’s work and thereby better resemble him. Only if his art, in its doxological function, is a perfect reflection of the divinity can a man aspire to be like his father, “car le Beau infini, inaccessible à l’être déchu, est identique à Dieu même.”43 A rebours marks the moment in Huysmans’s development as an artist when the temptation was the strongest to identify with a spurious fictional avatar. Ultimately, in the aftermath of Huysmans’s dissociation from des Esseintes, the curve begins to move away from the asymptote once more. What is remarkable in the writings charting Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism is the homology of art and life, biography and fiction, the inseparability of the religious experience of his protagonist, Durtal, and the record of Huysmans’s own ongoing spiritual evolution. In A rebours, Huysmans exorcises the false god of aestheticism, confessing that art is not enough to satisfy his hunger for an absolute. For Huysmans, des Esseintes is an epitome of the fallen being: weak, lost, disconnected from the generative source of things, groping for a transcendent ideal on which to model himself. The pervert’s project to inlay his shell with gold and wreath his head with pearls – inhaling and swallowing art, incorporating the beauty he expels and consumes as aestheticism – cannot satisfy his need for a higher reality. Des Esseintes’s penchant for quoting Schopenhauer reveals the futility of the pervert’s strategy of cultivating the illusion that all is well. Only if he recognizes that his works are as much God’s children as his own can Huysmans escape the prison of aestheticism. Only then is he able de faire peau neuve and emerge from the shell of corruption. The lesson that Huysmans learns from his character in A rebours is that by exalting the father, the novelist can raise himself up – by idealizing the Creator, he can partake in creation.

43

Ibid.

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One in the Blood: Catulle Mendès’s Zo’har In A rebours, the issue of Decadent perversion affected an author who inured himself to the temptation of aestheticism. Yet in a fin de siècle blighted by fantasies of apocalypticism, the question of aberrant conduct assumed a deeper social meaning. While the individual who deviated from established sexual norms could be exalted for courageous claims of behavioral individualism, his defiance also underscored the ineffectiveness of cultural institutions, suggested the fragility of society, and made the approaching world’s end seem imminent. It was against this backdrop that fin-de-siècle beliefs in inevitable racial extinction, feelings of eschatological despair were paralleled by the popularity of origin stories that promoted a sense of innocence and possibility. Pervasive fears that the world was approaching its final days fueled nostalgia that shaped alternative genesis narratives, images of oases standing outside of time, refuges in an idealized country of fantasy and art. Doomsday predictions like Péladan’s announcement of the looming Finis Latinorum (Le Vice suprême), Marcel Schwob’s “La Terreur future” with its fanatical death-mechanics, Huysmans’s image of a society so rotten with materialism that Jesus could not find sanctuary in communion wafers made of potato starch (A rebours) – all oriented the Decadents toward a mythical anteriority, a paradise preexisting a culture and literature of guilt. In an era characterized by a romanticized view of history and an image of cultural deterioration, Catulle Mendès often achieved a rare aesthetic synthesis. Perhaps for this reason, Mendès has been considered a paradoxical figure, a writer “[dont] l’oeuvre et la carrière journalistique […] coincident avec l’essor de deux courants que l’histoire littéraire tend à dissocier.”44 Associated with the Parnassians, Mendès was also deeply involved in the debate over naturalism and contributed as well to defining a Decadent aesthetic. Sharing the Parnassians predilection for Hellenism, their evocation of exotic 44

Dominique Laporte. “‘Mais le père est là-bas, dans l’île’ (T. de Banville): L’Enjeu de la ‘paternité’ hugolienne chez Catulle Mendès,” Dalhousie French Studies 69 (2004), p. 15.

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Asymptote

places, their interest in India and Hinduism, Mendès was unconstrained by a Judeo-Christian worldview characterized by alienation from an unforgiving god. In his roman contemporain Zo’har (1886), Mendès evokes behaviors that in bygone eras were accepted and seen as honorable, practiced by divinities and nobles, yet which in modern times were looked upon and deviant and monstrous. Unrepression which, in the ancient world, afforded access to eternity gave way to injunctions that replaced freedom with masochism and denial. Separated from censorious gods, reproachful ancestors and fathers, Oedipal trespassers were exiled from equilibrium and stasis and relegated to a diaspora characterized by itineracy and loss. Associatively idealized by remembrances of satisfaction, the past became a garden from which self-awareness drove man out, stranding him in a time measured by depletion and exhaustion. In his novel, Mendès opposes a modern life of suffering and regret to yearnings for a mythical age of ignorance and indivisibility. Unity evoked by the figure of the hermaphrodite was also represented by the androgyne, which as Pierre Jourde says, “incarne le désir autarcique, le refus narcissique du monde.45 This state in Mendès’s novel is rediscovered in the coupling of incestuous siblings. Experienced as incompletion, the sense of difference afflicting the Decadents is succeeded by the subject’s repatriation in a mirrorland of recognition and self-duplication: women lovers in Mephistophéla, “the brother-sister tandem [which in Zo’har] obeys the principle of ‘like attracting like’; love that craves ‘the same’, that seeks the cure for its burning desires by quenching the thirst with what ‘poisoned’ its pulse.46 The dualist aesthetic that Mendès ostensibly espouses contrasts the Parnassian ideal of immutability and perfection with the naturalist principle of generational mobility. While incestuous passion is lived in a realm of atemporality and innocence, it is also set against a contemporary backdrop of collective disapproval. Initially euphemized as the discovery of one’s complementary half, the male’s recognition of 45

Pierre Jourde, “Le monstre,” Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), p. 254. 46 Eva Loewe, “’Elemental Images of Impossible Love’: The Brother-Sister Conjunctio as Reflected in Art,” On the Sublime in Psychoanalysis, Archetypal Psychology and Psychotherapy, ed. Petruska Clarkson (London: Whurr Publisher, 1997), p. 250.

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“the soror mystica, the pure […] virgin-sister-self,”47 the attraction of incest ends in procreative dissolution, as unity disintegrates into a nightmare swarm of malformed offspring. Materializing the taboo by incarnating its cultural expression, the child of incest marks the rebirth of a time of degeneration and mortality. Fulfillment of a promised punishment, the child is a malediction from the future, killing the story of love which survives as its cautionary moral. Mendès’s novel therefore operates on a conflicting dual register: extolling incest as an emancipation from arbitrary law while upholding the taboo as essential to a culture that enables and promotes literary works like Mendès’s own. In glorifying the incestuous lovers, Mendès’s novel describes the curve that nears the asymptote. In detailing in graphic terms the freakish horror of their punishment, it reestablishes a judgmental distance from the theme it at first had celebrated. In the beginning, Zo’har draws on prevailing fin-de-siècle archetypes, as the couple dismisses the risk of genetically malformed children, denounces Biblical injunctions that ratify patriarchal power, and questions unexamined prejudices and proscriptions against endogamy. On the level of transgressive fantasy, incest initially is romanticized and glorified. Representatives of French Catholic culture – Mother Superiors, doughty friends embodying hyper-masculinity – are confounded by the sin they are powerless to eradicate. Mendès shows these characters as ineffectual or self-interested, suggesting that the only pure, spontaneous impulse untainted by neurosis-breeding guilt is the love that joins the couple, making them whole and unafraid. However, on the parallel level of naturalist ideology, Mendès later reintroduces the theme of collective sanction, of society performing its regulatory function by punishing infractions. Mendès follows Zola in dismissing the superfluity of religion. There is no need for a frightening god spewing angry execrations, no need to invoke superstition to deter immoral action. Consistent with the medical model adopted in Le Roman expérimental, it is biology that makes the law and that punishes violations. As can be seen, the asymptotic path described by Mendès’s novel first approaches incest as a mythical ideal, then checks that 47

Ibid., p. 259.

50

Asymptote

movement by defining it as culturally taboo. Contemporary institutions of family, class, and church, entrusted with modeling behavior, are shown to be hypocritical and impotent. Visceral revulsion for “unnatural” relations is shown to be the product of cultural conditioning. Yet it is the prohibitions against incest that form the substance of Mendès’s novel, taboos that lay the foundation of culture and justify the value of discipline and self-denial. More than the monster, incest’s child is the silence of fulfillment, whereas literature is culture’s medium for issuing the injunction. Zo’ har arraigns those who surrender to the attraction of same to same, who prefer pleasure to effort, and choose ignorance over knowledge. As the book embodies guilt as its creative inspiration, culture arises in response to an original experience of banishment or separation. Incest as Mythical Idea In Eden, the forbidden intercourse that brought together God’s two children was the reason for their exile. So, as Harold Feldman writes, when Adam “ate of the apple and became knowing, he reproached himself with incest and he was condemned to work and she was condemned to pain in childbirth.”48 Creative labor is one of the consequences of this primary transgression, as incestuous desire incorporates a wish to silence the authority who reproves it. Opposing peace and muteness, the novel speaks culture’s proclamation of the taboo, arguing, as Feldman adds, “Freedom from work is freedom for incest.”49 In its naturalist depiction of the star-crossed sibling lovers, Zo’har pictures the couple as offspring of a caricatural Oedipal father. A blustering, violent satyr, a military officer who sacks cities and despoils wenches, he is a figure from Freud’s Totem and Taboo, leader of the horde who, through insatiability and intimidation, drives out competing males and claims all sexual vessels for himself. Having sired two bastard offspring: Stéphana, child of a scheming adventuress, and Léopold, son of an Austrian colonel’s doe-eyed daughter, General de la Roquebrussane is thwarted in his sexual

48

Harold Feldman, “The Illusions of Work,” The Psychoanalytic Review 42 (1955), p. 264. 49 Ibid., p. 268.

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predations when, one night, in a dangerous neighborhood, he is knifed in the stomach by an interloper. Unknown mothers, a murdered father create a gap in the family history, facilitating idealization of the opposite-sex sibling. This, as Otto Rank says, is the basis of the incestuous attraction. Purer, younger, more accessible surrogates for the father or the mother, “siblings, through their similarity in age, thought, and emotion, stand much closer to one another than to adults.”50 Disqualified by his absence, by his reputation for sexual rapaciousness, General de la Roquebrussane fails to discharge his authority as a father. With his bile-yellowed eyes, his amorous bellicosity, he is a comical Yahweh whose only victim is himself. Without the structuring influence of a family history, Léopold and Stéphana substitute their own narratives of power and rivalry, defiance and submission. As a roman contemporain, Zo’har, in its settings, its constellation of characters, and self-impeaching didacticcism, makes familiar social, theological, and biological arguments against incest, showing their untenability in a modern setting, yet suggesting that they still must be respected. With its intrigue set against the backdrop of fin-de-siècle Paris, with its gambling dens and suspect boudoirs, Zo’har also unfolds in a time of myth. Topological symbolism assumes a central place in Mendès’s novel – since in response to the universal censure emanating from society – the couple goes into exile, fleeing eyes that monitor and mouths that blame. Moving to distant, inhospitable lands mirroring their sub- or superhuman status, they depart from the fleshpots of the capital for the desolation of the Norwegian fjords. Whereas Stéphana is raised under the tutelage of nuns, Léopold and a childhood friend test their mettle by exploring Africa. Antipodally structured by the jungle and cloister – the id-dominated anarchy of the savage place, a prison life structured by the inflexibility of devotional offices and liturgical calendars – the novel opposes instinct and repression, lawlessness and self-discipline. Yet whereas Léopold, whose travels map the unconsciousness as continent, is hobbled by religious scruples, Stéphana is shown as being masculinized by pride. 50

Otto Rank, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend: Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation, trans. Peter Rudnytsky (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), p. 364.

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Already subjected to an exchange of gender by their temperament and upbringing, they are onomastically inverted, as Stéphana observes: “Je pense à une chose quelquefois: dans notre hymen, l’épouse, c’est toi, l’époux, c’est moi; de ton nom d’homme, on peut faire, facilement, un nom de femme, – ah! tiens, je ris, de demoiselle; – change une lettre de mon nom de femme: il sonne comme un fier nom d’adolescent.”51 Change a syllable like a chromosome, and the two lovers collapse together; with opposites interpenetrating and yielding the singularity of the androgyne. In their pre-incestuous lives, the characters describe experiences of rootlessness or confinement, interment or dereliction corresponding to the exploration of their psyche. Stéphana, at first unable to explain her malaise or its possible alleviation, complains of a sense of suffocation, of energies bottled up and ready to explode taboos. The convent becomes a microcosm of the broader social nursery in which growth is inhibited and life is stunted, turning jungle flora into hothouse orchids. An etiolated plant struggling to survive in the vitiated atmosphere of prayerful automatism, Stéphana splashes the vividness of life over the anemia of renunciation: “violente créature, comme l’éclosion parmi des plantes d’herboristerie d’une grande fleur sauvage.”52 The adolescent male, desiring to travel Anywhere Out of the World, is driven by a centrifugal impulse toward overflow and selfdilation, movement toward the future and uncertainty underlying an orientation inward, toward personal history and the past. Léopold listens to Justin Cardenac’s account of his exploratory mission to Niger, a project to find a river’s source “dans le mont Okéri, sur le territoire des Bassas.”53 With defamiliarizing names evoking the uncharted terrain of the mind, the journey to the source suggests a search for ancestors and origins. As Léopold’s education is tempered by voyages into atavism, Stéphana’s confinement in the cloister triggers outbursts of raw instinct. Even as Mendès’s novel incriminates the legitimacy of the taboo, showing the prohibition of the sibling bond as arbitrary and superstitious, it endorses the cultural mechanisms that normalize

51

Catulle Mendès, Zo’har (Paris: Charpentier, 1886), pp. 252-3. Ibid., p. 27. 53 Ibid., p. 58. 52

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behavior, foundational institutions of a social order that permit the publication of Mendès’s book. Indeed, it is by preventing incest that civilization comes into being, as God punishes sinners by promoting the value of work and childbearing – situating exiles in the time of loss recovered by the process of narrating it. Working with fabric, creating patterns, producing textile as text, women spin time, reworking it into illusions and stories. As Feldman says: “Even our word History, which should be truth itself, comes from a Greek word for adorning […] something, and both derive from ‘histos,’ a web, warp, or loom.”54 Thus, in Zo’har, the romanticization of incest is a story told by Stéphana, the wife and the sister. Mendès’s novel anchors its intrigue in the issue of incest as desire and consequence, a wish for forbidden freedom which would entail an end of work. Mendès’s characters express this wish by implicating themselves in heroic narratives of emancipation, escape into an extra-textual utopia where everything is permitted and nothing is expressed. Infantilizing projects, trips into a past ungoverned by rules intend relocation to a place preexisting civilization, sustaining discovery narratives whose goal is to leave their premise undetermined. Before meeting his half-sister, Léopold embarks on a nostalgic journey to a counterfeit past inhabited by an inauthentic family. Just as the thunderbolt-wielding punisher/god was only a lecherous sexagenarian knifed by a ruffian, Léopold’s surrogate family is a fantasy born of absence. Better a society governed by capricious rules than the anarchy of Africa. Better the threat of castration by a wrathful father than the freedom to do anything. Replacing General de la Roquebrussane and his disreputable consorts are Madame Cardenac and her son in their pastoral home. Rather than intimidating Catholic dogma threatening ostracism and damnation, there is the country faith of childhood, a sunny, whitewashed church, the simple iconography of “[une] religion [qui] se puérilise.”55 Woven of denial, Léopold’s story of the past joins with his fantasy of the future, in which the keeper of the hearth is identified as his life’s partner who, in the evening, sorts the laundry, abolishing 54 55

Feldman, “The Illusions of Work,” p. 262. Mendes, Zo’har, p.130.

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time that kills innocence and brings exclusion and guilt. Every day there dawns in eternity. The mother of his children is still pure, and there is only an impossible repetition of an amnesiac temporality, “le retour de chaque soir dans le lit sacré où l’épouse entra vierge.”56 In Mendès’s account of the foredoomed liaison, he stresses passion as predestination. Temperamental complements, Léopold is the neurosis-riddled Catholic paralyzed by horror of incest as a Biblical abomination while, convent-educated, Stéphana is a prototype of the instinct-driven maenad. Oblivious to taboos ratified by history, she feels no remorse, offers no excuses, experiences no anticipation of punishment, displays no fear of hell. Unlike her, Léopold plunges into casuistic reasoning in an effort to justify incestuous love, or succumbs to visceral revulsion that escapes understanding and analysis. He realizes that the cultural insistence on exogamy is not timeless or universal – that in order to ensure the integrity of the royal bloodline, ancient Egyptians had authorized marriages that were forbidden in later cultures. He remarks that throughout history, incest “sat on thrones and slept in royal beds.” “Abel fut le mari de sa soeur; Cléopâtre fut la femme de son frère; nul ne s’épouvante, nul ne s’étonne. Ce qu’avaient osé des élus de Dieu, des maîtres de nations, Léopold n’aurait-il pas pu l’oser, lui?”57 Contrasting with the unjust, arbitrary, but necessary codification of laws and sanctions, Mendès introduces the unstructured world of Decadent self-indulgence: dissoluteness and self-abasement so pervasive they elicit neither disgust nor reproof. Loulou Antoine, Léopold’s Amazon mistress, La Marchisio, the conniving procuressfriend of Léopold’s dead mother, and her wastrel son, Paul, live with their entourage in a twilight moral world of parasitism and fraud. Resilient and shameless, they scheme, gamble, swindle, and copulate, and in their cheerful immorality, they infirm all social and religious programs of behavioral regulation. Because brother-sister love is genuine, it is reconsecrated as natural. Because moral outrage is inoperative, the need for social correctives becomes more urgent. While the tone of Mendès’s narrative is one of dismayed irony, the novel rehabilitates the authority that sinners and sophisticates disregard. Offering a countervailing view of the time of sin and 56 57

Ibid., p.132. Ibid., p. 200.

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chastisement, Mendès situates order at the origin and the infraction as its sequel. The novel illustrates the effects of quotidian depravities, suggesting how contemporary literature was nurtured in a climate of moral anarchy. Turn-of-the-century Paris and its hothouses of iniquity risk begetting a literature as lax and meretricious as its subject, ephemeral works as forgettable as the casual peccadilloes of their characters. Fully articulated, the Biblical system of law and enforcement functions in a time of before and after, in which sequence is equated with causation. First there is God’s commandment, then the trespass by his creatures, and finally the expression of anger as consequence and finality. The correlation of punishment and sin constructs a teleological arc making time an instrument and manifestation of divine justice. However, for Loulou Antoine and La Marchisio, there is the jumbled temporality of accident and superstition. In their world, things happen without reason, so that an attempt to establish order where there is only contingency and nonsense demonstrates an irrationality that is the proper response to their acceptance of reality. Whereas the reward for prayerful submission is metaphysical security, the appropriate reaction to chance and disorder is risk-taking and gambling. Thus, La Marchisio books passage on a casino ship sailing between Biarritz and Saint-Sebastien, consults with mediums using Ouija boards to obtain betting tips from the dead. While she loses on every wager, she is no different from Léopold and Stéphana, who are unlucky in the game of passion and predestination. Once the lovers’ charade of pretense, denial, and dissimulation is over – after the refutation of a report that Stéphana was the progeny of an itinerant Italian dancer – after the dissolution of a marriage authorized by wish fulfillment and self-delusion – the two confront a deed whose innocence is stripped away by knowledge. As he undergoes again the expulsion from the garden, Léopold’s reaction is to leave his partner and set out on an endless journey of shame and expiation. Léopold’s experience of guilt as temporal expatriation contrasts with Stéphana’s claimed entitlement to pleasure in eternity. For Stéphana, the experience of love precludes the existence of a god: “J’ai fait descendre le ciel sur la terre,” she tells Léopold, “et je l’ai mis dans mon lit, entre nous deux.”58 She rejects the dichotomy of 58

Ibid., p. 291.

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place and time, an earthly hell and celestial afterlife. Time born of frustration, homelessness arising from alienation from the body ends when obedience to pleasure relocates paradise in the bed of the lovers. Whereas parent-child incest is complicated by differences in maturity, sibling incest resulting from a displacement of the Oedipal relationship is facilitated, as Rank affirms, by similarities in temperament, age, and emotion. Equally possible is the couple’s desire to correct the original Oedipal model, as Léopold embellishes his mother’s image as impetuous and wanton by projecting her as a half-sister seen as spiritual and undefiled. Stéphana creates a euphemistic version of her lecherous and violent father, adjusting it so that it becomes a partner valued for his circumspection and fidelity. Yet whatever the psychological underpinnings of the taboo on sibling incest, whatever idealization of the opposite-sex parents makes them younger and more beautiful, there is the mythic lure of love as commingling, fusion, and reunification, dissolution in the mother’s womb, dark memories of what Stéphana calls “une seule vie dans les veines paternelles.”59 As linguistic interdiction, the incest taboo is both an injunction and its effect, transgression enforcing the silence that results from substituting the forbidden word for the forbidden act. Stéphana longs to connect sibling incest to the unity of two beings before birth. Incipience and finality, beginning and end restore a oneness transcending time. “Pourquoi l’unité d’origine, la proximité des naissances s’opposeraient-elles à l’hymen dont elles furent comme le commencement, et le conseil? Non, c’est bien plutôt une prédestination au lit conjugal que la parenté des berceaux.”60 Despite professing to renounce salvation in favor of happiness, exchanging a present filled with satisfaction for an endless life in heaven – despite claiming “an unrepressed life,” which as Norman O. Brown says, “would be timeless or in eternity”61 – Stéphana cannot stop drawing on a lexicon of religious terms, referring to love as predestination, describing curses and benedictions, characterizing herself and Léopold as saints and angels, pariahs and demons. Once language acknowledges forbidden passion, it can speak only of 59

Ibid., p. 290. Ibid. 61 Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1959), p. 93. 60

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commandments that are broken, guilt and remorse, a knowledge of the laws that destroys innocence. Surely the mythic and cultural value, the moral complexity of Mendès’s novel is most evident in the associative richness of the evocative title Zo’har. In an epigraph from Leviticus, Mendès notes the injunction against discovering the sister’s nakedness. And in another citation from the Géographie de l’enfer terrestre, Mendès recalls the extermination of the five cursed cities, Lot’s travels through Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboim, Adama, and – in Genesis 19:30 – his sojourn in the hill country above Zoar. In the novel, what had been the sacred authority of Scripture is replaced by the inconsequentiality of theatrical mystification. After learning of an arrangement to have Stéphana wed an acquaintance – after staging an imagined affront and provoking a duel with his rival – Léopold, out of shame and in search of distraction, attends a Biblical dramatization titled Zo’har, “tragédie-ballet que représentait depuis un mois une compagnie d’acteurs et de danseurs italiens.”62 Featuring a prodigious cast, bizarre costumes, elaborate sets, and overwrought dialogue, the play relies on stagecraft, technical sophistication, and unintelligibility in order to impress an audience disoriented by “l’inconnu mi-obscur d’un langage étranger.”63 Like primitive peoples dazzled by the machinery of miracles, theater-goers are enthralled by the virtuosity of a stage director whose ponderous script induces uncomprehending amazement. In substituting a contemporary play for a Biblical text, Mendès trivializes his book and its message, equating divine law with dramaturgy and the clever novel that contains it, suggesting that the validity of the taboo depends on expedient cultural argument. One respects the taboo, not as the word of God, but as a passage from a script. Obedience to the law does not order the world but produces culture and the art works expressing it. In Genesis, after fire rains down on Sodom, after Lot’s wife ignores the commandment against retrospection and is changed into a pillar of salt, the father and his daughters take up residence in a cave outside of Zoar. In the Bible, rather than sibling incest, the forbidden act is initiated by the children who, instead of being driven by lust, sin 62 63

Mendès, Zo’har, p. 106. Ibid.

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order to perpetuate the family line. Drunk with wine, his inhibitions lowered, Lot is an irresponsible father, a delinquent god tricked and manipulated by his creatures. Submission to Oedipal authority does not depend on obeying laws whose legitimacy is inherent. Lot’s daughters, in rejecting death, choose to ignore the taboo. Like incestuous siblings, they covet, not protection, but immortality. Resembling a divinity whose gift to his children is suffering and mortality, Lot is deceived by his daughters, who feel cheated of their portion of happiness in eternity. As Lot’s elder daughter tells her sister: “let us make him drink wine tonight […] and you go and lie with him, that we may maintain life through our father.”64 God’s intercourse with Creation is itself a form of incest, an unbalanced power relationship spawning endless generations of monstrous victims. In the desacralized ballet-tragedy through which contemporary unbelievers are evangelized, Mendès identifies one city as the point of incubation for each perversion: one for bestiality, one for sodomy, one for necrophilia, one for incest. In the play, instead of the alcohol-addled patriarch, there are the androgynously gorgeous siblings. Mendès takes the spareness of Biblical narrative and enriches it with florid dialogue and spectacular sets, problematizing the incest taboo which the drama depicts as both horrible and glorious. Evoking pagan iconography, the play shows the inhabitants of Zoar worshiping the statue of a hermaphroditic goat-god: “hideuse idole d’or, mâle et femelle, humaine et bestiale, barbue, mamelue, homme-chèvre, femme-bouc, s’unifiant, bisexuelle et biforme, en un seul monstre qui se riait à lui-même.”65 Despite the annihilating detergency of celestial fire, the incestuous couple is unrepentant. Burning hail may shower the city and an earthquake shatter the idol, but the brother and sister continue their epithamial duet. Thus, Naim et Jescha, siblings from the accursed city of Zoar, remonstrate with God and mock the futile expression of his impotent anger: “L’orgueil que ton Dieu lui-même ne peut ravir au crime, c’est d’avoir précédé le châtiment.”66 Before the division of agent and conscience, brother and sister were one in the blood of the father. Today’s sin, tomorrow’s damnation cannot undo what Naim

64

Genesis 19.34, The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. Mendès, Zo’har, p. 110. 66 Ibid., p. 119. 65

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calls “notre enlacement d’hier.”67 Punishment’s didactic message, its dissuasive address to future criminals is useless since God’s wrath destroys yet is powerless to instruct. The priority of the sin, the belatedness of the sanction show the lovers as victors whose innocence contrasts with the cruelty of Yahweh. Incest as Cultural Taboo Christianity’s contribution to morality is to suggest the generational guilt of the unborn. Consumed by flame and sulfur, defiant parents die unedified, transferring the expiatory burden to their children. The genetic legacy of incest follows the descending trajectory of Decadence, as the naturalistic text of degenerative heredity directs the fin-de-siècle movement toward a disappearance of the race. Not just the devil Zo’har named after the city where he is worshiped, but also the rightful God and the child’s parents see a future inscribed on the body, approving “les difformités, les rampements, la ressemblance à des bêtes.” All incite “les monstres à des accouplements d’où naîtront des monstres pires.”68 A blighted lineage confirms the Decadent sense of a virulent temporality. “La durée, rien qu’en durant, se fabrique à elle-même un passé de plus en plus étouffant, la futurition élimine et dépose après soi le passé, – c’est-à-dire: fait du passé avec le futur.”69 Whereas the lovers, oblivious to the taboo, emerge triumphant and indemnified, the teratologic specimen left behind is guilty for having come too late. In Zo’har, the famous volume of the Kabbalah that is recalled by Mendès’s title, the issue of agency, responsibility, and justice is addressed. Most victimized among God’s creatures, as the authors of Zo’har comment, are those who are oppressed “on account of their inheritance”70 and whose transgression precedes their birth. Among these is “the child conceived in incest” who, “upon issuing forth in the world […] is cut off from the community of the holy people.” And so it is that “the unhappy bastard weeps tears and wails before the Holy 67

Ibid. Ibid., p. 112. 69 Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” Dieu, la chair et les livres, ed. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), p. 53. 70 Zo’har: The Book of Splendor, ed. Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), p. 94. 68

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One,”71 The twisted, the malformed, the monsters, the pariahs, through their petitions and lamentations, obtain redress from the Almighty, so that, in time, “a place is prepared for them, such a one as cannot be attained to or occupied even by the most righteous.”72 The God of Zo’har does not endorse the principle of original sin nor work through an implacable biology that visits the father’s sins on his offspring. No soteriological renewal redeems the child born of incest, and the abnormalities and diseases in which the parents’ love is manifested are the material expression of a temporality of death. The hopeless quest of Mendès’s heroes is to expunge their memories and history, to flee the community of the law-abiding and thereby escape their judgment. Stéphana rightly accuses Léopold of self-deception and bad faith, as he professes to believe his beloved wife is not actually his sister. She notes that, in his life of vagrancy, he flees from Justin Cardenac, whose name suggests good-heartedness, loyalty, and fairness. The language of the tragedy Zo’har may be alien and obscure, but the sentence of religion and the institutions that enforce it publish the condemnation of the lovers and is everywhere writ large. The objective of Lot’s daughters, to ensure the survival of the family, is also the malediction accompanying the fulfillment of their wish. Blessed in its timelessness, mythical incest is death as rapture, a fusion so complete that there is no possibility of an aftermath. After being disabused by Paul Marchisio about the truth of Stéphana’s birth, Léopold succumbs to an attack of memory loss that repeats his denial and repression. And when he finally awakens in the conjugal bed, it is as if “après un immémorial séjour dans la tombe.”73 The dormant adjacency of the couple lying parallel as in a coffin anticipates the final scene which mocks and hallows the indestructibility of their love. In Zo’har, the text of guilt is readable only on the body and in the conscience, as crime’s inescapable consequence is published by Stéphana’s ventre gros. First Léopold tries to pursue a life of fugitive unawareness, removing himself from the past, settling in a house on the Spanish coast. Later the couple embarks together on a trip into forgetfulness, acquiring a remote Norwegian palace beneath the abyssal torrent of 71

Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 96. 73 Mendès, Zo’har, p. 281. 72

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the Skegeldafoss, “quadruple niagara d’incendie et de sang”74 (303) whose opalescent mist recalls the storm of fire that destroyed Zoar. When Léopold learns of his sister’s pregnancy, memories of the tragedy are reactivated, making his life the performance of a morality play whose message is addressed to him. Manifested as the swollen belly, Stéphana’s fecundity is a deformity proleptically written out as a nightmare swarm of freakish children. Mendès’s view of incest as instituting a temporality of death is illustrated in two parallel episodes in the novel. First, when Léopold had grasped the horrible truth of his forbidden passion, he had fled the Cardenacs’ household, setting off on a run across the countryside, feeling himself pursued by a band of personified regrets. Unseen behind him he had heard “une rumeur grossissante comme si ses piétés d’enfant, ses gaïtés d’écolier, tout son pur autrefois, l’avait poursuivi.”75 Later, when Léopold realizes the consequence of his criminal love, he reenacts this scene in his race across the Norwegian nightscape – beneath a black sky constellated with red stars that stream like bleeding wounds. This time it is not his past joys but a hideous genetic legacy that follows him, what Jankélévitch sees as a future that the past consumes and turns into itself. Whereas incest aims at resolving dualism, ending gender opposition, reuniting two beings who were one in the blood of the father, their monster offspring effect disintegration and divorce, a multiplication of the self as its defective parts. As Pierre Jourde writes: “le monstre représente certes une singularité et une exception, mais cette exception tient à l’impossibilité de réaliser l’Un.”76 The human form dissolves into disparate, unmatched limbs, phylogenetically regressing to half-animal creatures; toad-babies, spider-babies, wolves made from vipers’ tangles. Unity collapses into proliferating fragments, and from Stéphana’s womb and from Léopold’s conscience comes un accouchement, un pullulement of unspeakable, teeming things. Not pursued by nostalgia for childhood whose promises miscarry, Léopold is hunted by the future, as the Furies wait up ahead. It is significant that publication of God’s inexorable punishment is not expressed as the indisputability of a Biblical text but as 74

Ibid., p. 303. Ibid., p. 153. 76 Jourde, “Le monstre,” p. 243. 75

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involuntary memories of a theatrical melodrama. Mendès’s novel does not anchor its defense of the incest taboo in cultural anthropology, religion, or myth, but in a contemporary work of popular art. Zo’har, the cursed city, with its hermaphroditic idol is destroyed and then reassembled as a turn-of-the-century novel. Mendès’s irreverent picture of nineteenth-century Catholicism – convent dormitories poisoned by the breath of sleeping postulants, “l’imbécillité presque générale des hommes et des femmes qui peuplent les cloîtres d’à present”77 – is offset by his sense of the instructive value of his art. Mendès’s novel is preaching and prurient, appalled by the sin it evokes in titillating detail. Incest, for the reader, is a solitary fantasy staged in the theater of the mind. The taboo as injunction becomes operative only when the constituent rule against speaking is violated. It is by publishing the law, addressing an audience in a theater hall, apostrophizing readers from the bookstore shelf where Zo’har is displayed that the taboo implicates the community and loses its private quality as a fantasm. On its lowest level, Zo’har is complacently salacious, giving voyeuristic glimpses of Stéphana standing undressed at the window, lingering over the casual smuttiness of Paul and Louolu’s lovemaking. When it admonishes a collective audience, Zo’har inspires disgust for the sin it sanctions, and shows that condemning incest is necessary for the survival of a culture that nurtures literature. Conclusion In J.-K. Huysmans’s Là-bas, the writer and literary theorist Durtal boasts of discovering a new sin that had never before been classified. Pygmalionism, as Durtal describes it, connects an artist to his work, the object to which he gives birth and calls “the daughter of his soul.” Pygmalionism is more transgressive, in the opinion of Huysmans’s character, since it does not issue from the intercourse or two independent beings. It is as this secret coupling of an author and his text that incest can be euphemized as mystical and sacred, celebrated as the nuptials of two predestined beings. Withdrawing from the world of moralists and judges, Mendès’s lovers take up residence in their lonely marble fortress, preserving there an illusion 77

Mendès, Zo’har, p. 32.

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of incest as a romanticized ideal. Unavailable for public scrutiny, incest is an art work exclusively engendered and consumed by its practitioners. Yet Léopold, incriminated by the biological evidence of his sin, commits suicide after Stéphana reveals the fact that she is pregnant. Upon recovering her husband’s disarticulated corpse, Stéphana follows the symbolic life-itinerary described by the arrangement of buildings on their estate – from the body/house of lovemaking, past the chapel of penitence refused, and finally to the mausoleum where the lovers lie forever side by side. Posted on the crypt door, Stéphana’s message to posterity is a proclamation of defiant love also serving as an epitaph: Ci gisent/ Léopold et Stéphana/ Le frère et le soeur/ Qui s’aimèrent.78 Like the Biblical god who metes out punishment too late, Justin Cardenac arrives after the drama’s final act is finished. When he reads the sacrilegious statement, he beats the door down with a hatchet, seizes the lovers’ entwined bodies, and hurls them from a promontory into the sea. Once published, the taboo act of incest becomes the expression that forbids it. Since the moral infirmity of Decadence is exacerbated by being documented, Mendès’s novel ends by problematizing the community’s recovery of peace of mind. After his exposure to the truth of the violated prohibition, Justin Cardenac again sets sail on the sloop carrying him through the North Pole’s frozen wastes, completing the voyage of Mendès’s narrative into pathological geography. Would the vessel ever regain the temperate zones of normality and health? “La Thule reviendrait-elle jamais […] à l’écume toute lumineuse de soleil, vers les belles Méditerranées sereines, voisines des patries?”79 Zo’har’s value is to circumnavigate countries proscribing exploration. Indulging a transgressive dream of incest as aristocratic privilege, it situates its subject on the level of secrecy and silence. But as literature produced by a culture whose institutions enforce repression, the novel voices community censure of inexpressibly private pleasure. Having approached the taboo as asymptote, the novel then expresses cultural disapproval and, denouncing what it had celebrated, 78 79

Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., p. 320.

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the curve then moves away again. With its pandering moral condemnation of a sin evoked in titillating detail, the novel professes revulsion for incest out of cynical expediency. Degraded to the level of theatricality and artifice, the solemnity of Biblical law is ironically upheld when executed through the machinery of popular fiction. After the outlaw couple of glorious renegades eludes the jurisdiction of society, there is the material expression of sin surviving as biology and book. Nestling in the dead mother’s pelvis is something resembling a small bird’s skeleton, what Mendès likens to the nothingness of what had never been there to start with.80 Following the unhealthy intercourse between an author and his fantasy, there comes the exogamous coupling of the novel and its audience, whose fruit is the ambivalence that Zo’har induces and communicates. A hybrid being, Mendès’s readers’ response mirrors the story’s taxonomic slipperiness. A toad-baby, a spider-baby, a case of fictive teratology, it is part naturalistic fable, part cultural anatomy, part pornography, part morality play that slithers, creeps, and swarms. Modeling an appreciation of incest as literary inspiration, Zo’har elicits disgusted wonderment for a subject whose complexity it captures. Marvel at the criminals’ recklessness, Mendès’s narrative seems to say. Despise their sin. Obey the law. Admire the novel. Love the monster.

80

Ibid., p. 319.

Chapter Two Magic Chastened by military defeat, unreconciled to the decline of the aristocracy, disheartened by the spread of Republicanism, the Decadents rejected Positivism with its claims of enlightenment through science. Medical pathologists like Nordau and Lombroso championed programs of social health whose effect, the Decadents believed, was to democratize mediocrity. Regarding artists as invalids taking pride in their degeneracy, they equated “le génie et la maladie mentale.”1 Whereas naturalism advocated progress through technology, the Decadents promulgated an ideology based on irrationality and regression. They were convinced that western culture had reached the final stage of its development, one dominated by scientific reason and analytical lucidity. Strangers in what Freud would see as civilization’s mature phase, they refused to bow to the uncompromising exigencies of reality. Bridling at the obligation to “acknowledge their smallness,” as Freud says, they refused to submit “resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature.”2 Proclaiming the inevitability of la décadence latine, fin-desiècle writers assumed beliefs more characteristic of earlier eras, among them an investment in magic as a tool for obtaining specialized knowledge. Rejecting the aridity of science in favor of the pageantry of religion, they spurned the despairing fact of man’s mortality and impotence, preferring the beautiful untruths of wish fulfillment to the unglamorous incontrovertibility of reality. Foremost among the defining features of animistic cultures is a belief in what Freud calls the omnipotence of thought. The Decadent Magus, like those encountered in Péladan and Villiers, boasts of an imperviousness to temptations that originate outside him. Not invested 1 2

Pierrot, L’Imaginaire décadent, p. 77. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Vintage, 1960), p. 88.

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in an external reality he dismissed as cheapened and profane, he attached love to his own person, proclaiming his superhuman abilities and demonstrating “a process of thinking” which, in Freud’s words, was “still to a great extent sexualized.”3 Unwilling to adjust to a monotheistic belief system, he professed no obedience to a punishing God whose power he arrogated to himself. Rejecting egalitarianism, the Decadents also sought to reestablish a hierarchical ordering of society according to degrees of intelligence. For this reason, the figure of the occultist as he appeared in Decadent fiction substituted an aristocracy of genius for privilege by birthright. In Péladan, philosophers and poets were acclaimed as warrior/prophets who foresaw a new era, a meritocratic age of intellectuals and visionaries. For Péladan, elevated literature containing rarefied ideas was a catalyst for disseminating hermetic knowledge among his readers. As a result, his writing is marked by tension between two competing goals: on the one hand, educating the public and on the other, preserving the exclusive status of the adept. In the realm of sexuality, the asymptotic line in Decadent literature had moved from perversion to normality. Similarly, in the Decadent belief system, there is a return from the austere isolation of the mystic to a loving interdependence within the community of the faithful. To be sure, there are atmospheric differences in the works of Péladan and Villiers, dissimilar settings, styles, representations of magic as doctrine and ritual. With its aura of Romantic medievalism, Villiers’s Axël unfolds in a labyrinthine castle at the heart of a trackless forest, a stronghold as impenetrable as its occupant’s brooding thoughts. In Péladan, the author’s Manichean cosmology pits an aristocracy of evil against an army of intiates engaged in apocalyptic warfare, taking place in the princely mansions, gambling dens, theaters, and courtesans’ boudoirs of contemporary Paris. Unlike Villiers’s proud and scornful hero – hunter, swordsman, mystic, liege – Péladan’s thaumaturge enjoys only the solitude of his mind. Consorting with cynics who cultivate the hyper-refinement of their vices, he stands apart and judges them, cold, impassive, and aloof. Unlike Péladan, for whom magic could not defeat the evils of the world, Villiers saw esotericism as freeing man from the bonds of corporeity. Yet, for both authors, the Magus stands as a solitary figure, 3

Ibid., p. 89.

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leading them to resist the lure of secret knowledge, occult powers, in favor of collective efforts to effect humanity’s salvation. However, since initially both were alienated from what Freud regarded as a scientifically enlightened worldview, the characters in Péladan and Villiers regressed to the magic thinking of pre-rational cultures. Endowed with logomantic eloquence, steeped in the secret wisdom discovered in ancient grimoires, they shared their authors’ view of literature as a weapon that combated ignorance and promoted virtue. Yet because the occult material they contained was shrouded in an abstruse idiom, the knowledge these works imparted was obtainable only with difficulty. Impregnable structures, they had doors that opened solely to the chosen. As examples of a literature that edified and purified, both novels entertained a twofold aim, guarding their secrets from the curious, acting as a spiritual detergent for those whose intellects they trained. Furthermore, Axël and Le Vice suprême also share a crucial thematic bond – in illustrating the conflict between mystical passion and Christian love. Where superhuman insights and inexpressible beatitudes raise the hero above the plane of human suffering and strife, the novel risks leaving the world which is the true domain of literature, forfeiting its ability to advocate for the sacralization of future art. In Péladan, the Magus must reject the quest for incommunicable power, and in Villiers, the lovers must renounce their passion as suicidal fusion. Only then can fiction ensure the welfare of a community of kindred readers, not celebrate a superior man alone in his selfish death or ecstasy. Again, in Péladan and Villiers, the asymptote departs from the One to approach the Many. Narcissism, which Freud associates with animistic thinking and which, in common parlance, is a feature of the megalomanic Decadent thaumaturge, gives way to self-sacrifice and devotion to one’s brother. Péladan and Villiers reject what Denis de Rougemont describes as Eros, “a desire that never relapses, that nothing can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation to obtain its fulfillment in the world.”4 Instead, they turn toward Agape, the gentleness of solicitude for one’s fellow man.

4

Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), p. 62.

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In magic, the adept divorces himself from life in order to rise above the ignorant. But in writing, these authors relinquish death’s ineffable perfection. If magic, as Péladan claimed, is superseded by the Scriptures, the artist’s task is not to unlock a secret but to spread the gospel among his peers. The Decadents, no longer climbing to the summit of their egotism, descend to the mortal plane where they agree to work in concert with God’s creatures. At the end, both Villiers and Péladan reject Axël’s nihilistic thinking. Learning that magic can be used in causes that are higher than themselves, they act in imitation of their Master, as servants who do the work of life.

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The Grammar and the Key: Joséphin Péladan’s Le Vice suprême In his biography of Joséphin Péladan, Christophe Beaufils describes the chaotic scene at the opening of the Salon de la RoseCroix in 1891. The turbulent crowds, the circus atmosphere, the exotic pageantry of the proceedings contributed to the air of festive artificiality that accompanied the Sâr in all his public appearances. Enshrining the religious art Péladan claimed to promote, the Salon began with a daybreak Mass at the Chapel of the Virgin at NotreDame. Afterward, despite exorbitant entry fees charged to the curious, the throngs of artists, gawkers, and sophisticates “espérant voir le fameux Sâr dont la presse avait tant parlé”5 lined up at the gallery door. So numerous were the onlookers, so choking the congestion that omnibus traffic between the Opéra and Montmartre had to be suspended temporarily. By the following day, over 22,000 visitor’s cards had been left at the gallery reception. Celebrity artists at the Salon included such noteworthy figures as Verlaine, Willy, Zola, and Puvis de Chavannes. And while bemused incredulity often greeted the exhibition of the Salon’s mystically erotic canvases – while the Parisian press treated the event with its customary condescension – the response to Péladan’s Salon was generally serious and admiring. Today, the reaction to Péladan’s work is one of ignorance, contempt, or apathy. With his flowing togas, chamois books, and prodigious beard oiled and perfumed, as Beaufils says, in harmony with the revolution of the planets, Péladan’s identity as a public oddity has largely eclipsed his reputation as an author, occultist, and art connoisseur. To be sure, Péladan’s stridently reactionary politics, his virulent anti-feminism, his bombast, and neologistic turgidity have detracted from what can justifiably be regarded as his historically revelatory ideas. On the one hand, Péladan’s grandiosity and unbounded self-regard, his advocacy of “divine prostitution” (the recommendation that women be exploited as sexual vessels for male 5

Christophe Beaufils, Le Sâr Péladan 1858-1918: Biographie critique (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1986), p. 90.

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geniuses), his monograph on spermatorrhea, have earned the ridicule with which posterity has treated him. On the other, Péladan’s role in the debate about religion, magic, and literature – his exploration of occultism from the perspective of esthetics and epistemology – have established him as an important innovator in turn-of-the-century France. As with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Péladan’s gravitation toward Rosicrucianism was motivated by an interest in using fiction to communicate metaphysical insights. For all his reliance on stagecraft and self-dramatization, Péladan sought to reconcile magic and literature in the hope of adding a supernatural dimension to art so that it became a potent spiritual force. Illustrating the figure of the asymptote, Péladan recreates himself in the the Magus, then separates from a character whose wisdom is superseded by Catholic doctrine. The asymptotic path described by Péladan’s career shows him initially drawn to esotericism with its exalted exclusivity, then moving on to an embrace of Catholicism requiring self-effacement and solidarity. Magic, whose adepts displayed intellectual pride and a predilection for solitude, was abandoned in favor of religious service characterized by cooperation and community. Both Péladan’s fiction and the magical arts it depicts are shown to be defensive weapons used against transgression and evil. Like the thaumaturge who combats vice by learning to withstand its seductions, the author evokes the world of decadent depravity the better to impugn its dangerous glamour. Péladan’s image of himself as a Magus, as a champion of spiritually avant-garde art, cast him as an enemy of popular taste, conventional thinking, and democratic ideals. Only when Péladan neared completion of his fictional Ethopée, did he relinquish this view of himself as a superior man whose genius counteracted vulgarity. No longer posing as a visionary – a fighter against iniquity and ignorance – Péladan accepted a more modest role in the collectivity of Catholic apologists working together in the defense of their faith. In Péladan’s first and best-known novel, he elaborates on the appeal and utility of magic, suggesting how the acquisition of hidden knowledge satisfies the seeker’s curiosity while elevating him above the riffraff whom he openly despised. Arguably, interest in Péladan’s fiction is aroused for similar reasons, as readers motivated by a wish to learn the secrets the author imparts hope to enjoy access to the circle of initiates of which the Sâr was a privileged member.

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Yet even in Le Vice suprême, Péladan alludes to magic’s disappointing inadequacies: its failure to act as a positive force, its limited value in punishing evildoers, its inability to safeguard the innocent and to stave off the end of the world. Even uncertain access to an exclusive coterie of initiates and adepts cannot rescue the Magus from a lonely existence bereft of worldly comforts – denied the blessings of love, lacking the consolation of friendship. In a pivotal scene in Le Vice suprême, where the thaumaturge and priest forge an alliance, Péladan offers an adumbration of his later subordination of magic to Catholic doctrine. No longer isolated in his intellectual aerie, above the world of struggle and passion, the Magus joins with other artists in creating inspirational masterpieces, reigniting the faith of the wayward believer, disseminating the word of the Gospels. The Seduction of Magic In his early fiction, Péladan’s emphasis is on the appeal of magic as a specialized discipline, one immersing the practitioner in the world of vice he is bent on reforming, giving him the enviable cachet of possessing rare wisdom and inexplicable powers. Certainly, it is Péladan’s familiarity with the accoutrements of magic that accounts for the appeal of his work, as readers are seldom left unaffected by Péladan’s acquaintance with the occult sciences. Indeed, Péladan’s immersion in astrology, magnetism, alchemy, and astral travel, can be traced back to his father, Louis-Adrien Péladan, who was himself a student of magic, believing in the predictive reliability of the writings of Nostradamus. From his father, Péladan also inherited an authoritarian ideology that reinforced his commitment to the ultramontanist cause. Péladan endorsed the views of Eliphas Lévi, popularizer of hermeticism whose teachings informed his work, believing that “[t]out ce qui s’accomplit hors de l’autorité s’accomplit hors de la nature, qui est la loi positive de l’autorité éternelle.”6 Like Lévi, Péladan confronted a troublesome issue that he wrestled with throughout his career, namely the church’s longstanding condemnation of necromancy as heretical and idolatrous. Apologists 6

Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Paris: Edition Niclaus N. Buissière, 1972), p. 31.

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like Barbey, who generally defended Péladan’s ideas and lauded his work, took issue with his glorification of the thaumaturge in both his fiction and his life, complaining that esotericism was incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy. Like Péladan, Lévi notes that the Magi were present at the birth of the Savior – that the church’s “mystérieux fondateur a été salué dans son berceau par les trois mages,”7 and that magic therefore predated the religion that transcended it. For Lévi, the Magus incurs condemnation for choosing to discover secret knowledge rather than accepting revealed truths. Lévi believed that disseminating occult teachings dispelled superstition, whence his mission to explain the principles and rituals of magic, to publish “ce que les les anciens sages appelaient la clavicule” and to disclose “ce que les gens de la campagne appellent encore le grimoire.”8 For Péladan, the unreconstructed elitist, magic’s attraction was as a rarefied discipline, and its value, as shown in his early novels, was to protect adepts from spiritual evil. However, over the course of his multi-volume Ethopée, the dialectical interplay of necromancy, art, and faith began with the initiate’s fantasy of limitless power and ended with his celebration of beauty as a manifestation of the divine. First describing the curve as it moves toward the asymptote, Péladan identifies with the initiate yet gradually dissociates himself from the character whom he formerly had idealized, finally acknowledging that literature’s value lay in its service to the church. Mérodack, the central character in Le Vice suprême, is the heroic Magus as spiritual combatant, a man living in the midst of the corruption and vice he alleges he wants to eradicate. For Péladan, the decline of Occidental culture – finis Latinorum – is evidenced by the spread of democracy and sexlessness, the prevalence of undifferentiation and homogeneity. Lawlessness, solipsism, androgyny cheapen a society unstructured by hierarchy. Once directed at other people or external objects, illicit desires are internalized. One fantasizes of adultery yet refrains from its commission. One dreams of sacrilege or sexual violence, but in the absence of the act, there are only transgressions of the mind. When evil is intellectualized, no person is hurt or violated. But, for Péladan, morbid delectation, imaginary 7 8

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 53.

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misdeeds, are a refinement of taboo behavior and represent the most pernicious crime: “Il y a de l’aveuglement dans la satisfaction de l’instinct, et de la démence dans la perpétration du méfait, mais concevoir et théoriser exigent une opération calme de l’esprit, qui est le Vice suprême.”9 Multiplied as the agent, locus, and inspiration of the sin, Péladan’s decadent malefactor is harmful only to himself. Artistes sans faire, godless metaphysicians, anachronistic aristocrats, Péladan’s villains are purveyors of blasphemous witticisms. Living in the midst of intellectual cynics, censoring their excesses, condemning their pride, Mérodack uses magic to prove his superiority over those who believe themselves an elite. The true decadents whom Péladan repudiates are mediocre, passive, and indolent like the audience of sophisticates that Péladan’s priestly hero, Father Alta, excoriates in a sermon. Too cynical and lazy to achieve true Luciferianism, they display a moral otiosity undeserving of damnation: “petits vos vices, idiote votre vie; nulle votre pensée, et l’enfer vous dédaignera pour votre inanité même dans le mal.”10 It is magic that allows Mérodack to distinguish himself from these aristocrats of vice. Whereas they are plunged in “le nirvana du passivisme,”11 he attempts to use his secret knowledge as a moral corrective. In a society in which ideas are decoupled from their implementation, thoughts assume a magically operational power. Overseen by a coterie of Kabbalists and visionary priests, the world that Péladan evokes is governed by a supra-rational causality, one articulated by an elaborate system of secret rituals and arcane ceremonies. Adopting the lexical distinction made by Eliphas Lévi, the Magus Mérodack privileges rules over principles, grimoire over clavicle. Péladan’s novel is filled with allusions to necromantic practices. Adept at chiromancy, conversant with astrology, Mérodack registers disturbances on the astral plane, employs somnambulists to see into the past, parries sword thrusts by using magnetism to induce temporary paralysis in his adversaries, practices insufflation to erase traumatic memories in innocent victims. Péladan’s allusions to the techniques of magic may be part mystery and part mystification, leaving readers to wonder

9

Joséphin Péladan, Le Vice suprême (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), p. 210. Ibid., p. 292. 11 Ibid., p. 76. 10

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whether his treatment of thaumaturgy deserves dismissal or serious appraisal. However, Péladan engages readers not just by promising to impart the secrets of esotericism. It was also Péladan’s evocation of the hothouse world of Parisian aesthetes and intellectuals that drew readers to his book. As Beaufils remarks: “la description d’un milieu de pervers mondains sur un canevas délicieusement romanesque” was a failsafe strategy for ensuring for his novel “un succès immédiat.”12 A titillating overview of the lushly sacrilegious indecencies of urban artists and aristocrats, Le Vice suprême counterbalances its prurient exposé of decadent mores with a serious defense of magic, offering a glimpse into a world of upper-class evil, while encouraging readers to reject it as Mérodack does. The narrative encourages reader identification with Péladan’s hero, satisfying their curiosity while simultaneously affording them a position of moral superiority. Opposing the vain conceits of science, which replaces mystery with determinism, Péladan uses Mérodack to show the appeal of hermeticism with its inaccessibility and grandeur. Repelled by materialism and money, Mérodack sees bodies purified by abstraction, sublimated into luminous sidereal auras, a world where the crassness of the deed gives way to the immaculacy of its inspiration. Itself a paean to obliterative idealism, Péladan’s text is “about Thought, not activity.”13 Characterized by his mystic superciliousness, Péladan’s hero flees from Schopenhauer’s entangling webs of illusion and desire, and situates himself instead in a place accessible only to an aristocracy of creativity and genius. Péladan’s characters eschew contamination by human interaction, preferring to perform as stars in moral or metaphysical dramas. Ordinarily accessible to everyone, objects in Péladan are distilled into mystic symbols. Private spaces are deserted in favor of the temple or the theater. Prophylactic in its application, yet destructive in its effects, magic in Péladan is deterrent or retributive, discouraging malicious acts or punishing sins already committed. Immersed in an atmosphere of corrosive intellectual cynicism, Péladan’s Magus is no hermit fastidiously cloistered in solitary 12

Beaufils, Le Sâr Péladan, p. 31. Ingeborg M. Kohn, “The Mystic Impresario: Joséphin Péladan, Founder of Le Salon de la Rose+Croix. Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies, eds. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon (New York: AMS Press, 1995), p. 24. 13

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contemplation. Consorting with perverted painters whose minds are haunted by androgyny, innovators in crime and cynicism, merchants of aphrodisiacs, Mérodack joins in Prince de Courtenay’s circle of dominicaux, intellectuals who convene “au sabbat du Verbe […] pour profaner et souiller l’Idée.”14 The hyperacuity of their sacrilegious ingenuity raises them above the plane of commonplace evil. Cleansed of its interpersonal application, consigned to the realm of playful conversation, supreme vice appears innocuous in its practical inconsequentiality. Disconnecting sinful acts from transgressive conceptualization, Prince de Courtenay’s associates are sober in their celebration of theoretical fornication and regicide. Without the detergent property of sacred art, their words are diabolical invocations, “leur pensée étant une page écrite par l’enfer, pour l’enfer”15 (210). Accompanying the character, readers take their own voyeuristically detached tour of Péladan’s cool world of evil imagined but unpracticed, experiencing what Jean Lorrain calls “hypothétiques luxures” (Monsieur de Bougrelon). “[S]ort[ant] leurs idées comme des lames du fourreau,”16 the Prince’s friends practice outrage as escrime. Consummated in the privacy of their brains, confined to the elegant precincts of aristocratic drawing rooms, l’esthétique du mal achieves a specialized refinement, affecting no one but the connoisseur pleased with his scandalous virtuosity. Consuming Péladan’s fiction is analogous to ingesting poison, as evil absorbed in doses of entertaining social realism is neutralized by the administration of supernatural obscurantism. Cultivating sinful impulses without ever really indulging them, Mérodack braves temptation by watching the beautiful Léonora d’Este undress, steeling himself against instinctuality and lust, risking the pollution of his astral light, and then proclaiming: “Je suis Mithridate.”17 In Péladan, the initiate strives to annihilate corruption through the application of his will. In a society devolving into moral chaos, Mérodack introduces magic as a principle that classifies and stratifies. The dynamism animating Péladan’s novel comes from the use of magic that transmutes and ennobles, alchemy that purifies base matter, astrology 14

Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 210. Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 213. 17 Ibid., p. 258. 15

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that maps. Unlike the horizontality of evil that moves from brutishness to demonism, magic appeals to Péladan with its hierarchical ordering, ranking its practitioners by gradients of knowledge, power, and virtue. Vice takes an individual as a unique utterance by God and makes him indistinguishable from all those who are obedient to instinct. Syntactically arranging human elements in the divine text, magic suggests the etymological link between the occult sciences and language, with grimoire as grammar acting as ordering symbols that supply meaning. Fleeing the snare of desire and lust, Mérodack uses magic in his practice of detachment and chastity. Indeed, in Péladan, occult skills work in the opposite sense of sexual desire, which results in degradation, reflexivity, and a relinquishment of self-mastery. Codified in the formulas of ancient ceremonies, the logomantic power of spells and incantations derives from the male prerogative of naming as knowing – recalling that among all the creatures in the Garden, Adam alone possessed the nominative authority to classify and differentiate. Rescued from their gratuitous materiality, objects are revalorized as symbols written as lines of a grimoire. Through magic, what appear to be ephemeral events are acts inscribed on the invisible page of the astral plane, becoming a text of consequence that permanently implicates its author. In Péladan, the world of the Magus is one of inflated semiosis. Evolving into an elaborate system of ritual defenses, magic in Péladan protects against a surrender to riot and spontaneity. Repressing the promiscuous confusion of democracy, fleeing the realm of pleasure and compulsivity, the Magus ascends to the plane of order and authority, where satisfaction comes from self-denial. Evil is overcome when it is analyzed and resisted, when objects are made less terrifying by being understood and not desired, when one realizes the “la femme n’est elle-même que l’allégorie pratique du Désir.”18 In charting Mérodack’s development as a Magus, Péladan characterizes him as a man intent on steeling himself against taboo behaviors by the practice of exposure and inoculation. Mérodack rises above the excremental plane of appetite and instinct: “Embourbé un moment dans la fange passionnelle, il s’en dégagea avec […] fureur.”19 Detached from woman depersonalized as allegory, he gravi18 19

Ibid., p. 229. Ibid., p. 158.

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tates toward magic with its majesty and mystery. Subject to apotelesmatic explanation, his life is laid out on a grid of ominous zodiacal signs. Representing the sun’s twelve houses, the book of Mérodack’s destiny announces the triumph of passion over intellect, predicting that, at the end, he will become an “assassin par amour”20 In his account of Mérodack’s initiation into the arcane arts, Péladan’s narrative remains as opaque as its material. Recalling the divinatory methods of the gematria, Mérodack had practiced numerology, “demanda[nt] leurs lois aux nombres, aux lettres leur ésotérisme.”21 Shunning life, he experiences it only through a disintegrative analysis of its building blocks. Magic with its emphasis on secret names, unalterable rituals, fights against the deterioration of things into muddle and confusion. But entanglement in the infinitesimally small, an obsession with the ceremonial minutiae of necromantic teachings, risks leaving the seeker lost in a maze of unreadable signs and portents. Yet despite Mérodack’s cultivation of psychic quietism, he is afforded no isolation or withdrawal, but is instead required to expose himself to desire in order to overcome it. To resist the sin of pride, he goads a weak man into slapping him, encourages the insults of an adversary who taxes Mérodack with cowardice. Assigning vengeance to the Lord, he endures the discipline of humility, and then paradoxically is proud when shame’s redness becomes his crown, “[le] rubis sur son front.”22 In order to combat sloth, he cultivates a life of self-indulgent indolence, then devotes eighteen-hour days to writing turgid metaphysical treatises. Lust, the sin polluting the astral light with larval shadows, is neutralized when Mérodack is left unaffected by the spectacle of undressed women. Mérodack visits brothels, pays court to society ladies, remains unmoved by female nudity, displaying “une continence monstrueuse.”23 The prophylactic discipline that Mérodack adopts differs only in its goals from morbid delectation. For the Decadents, perversion is intellectualized out of fastidious refinement. Anemic sinners, they imagine the vices they are too exhausted to engage in. Yet for Méro20

Ibid., p. 159 Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. 161. 23 Ibid., p. 163. 21

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dack, temptation is summoned and then dismissed, leaving him hard and cold and strong: “La Bête était vaincue dans tous ses protéismes.”24 Péladan’s writing may be intended as a similar exercise in temerity, evoking and mastering social evils seen as dangerous and toxic. When the curve runs parallel to the asymptote, Péladan identifies with his character. So as the Magus performs secret ceremonies, replacing disorder with lucidity, the writer observes the rites of literature in his attainment of self-mastery. As Lévi writes, “chasser les ombres de ce chaos et lui faire donner des formes parfaites à nos pensées, c’est être homme de génie, c’est créer, c’est avoir triomphé de l’enfer.”25 Inspired by Lévi, Péladan extols magic as a celebration of the transitivity of the Logos, le Verbe, which when spoken by God, is efficacious, embodied in creation. Equating expectoration and speech, food and words, associating orality and language, Péladan establishes a hierarchy of things put in the mouth and expelled from the lips. Profaning God’s sacred utterance, the man who commits sins of the mouth swallows the primordial dirt of the uncreated, desecrating art’s sacramental purpose. Mérodack excoriates the members of Prince de Courtenay’s jaded brotherhood, recoiling from the stink of goat’s kisses on their breath, the mephitic odor of le Bouc: “Vos lèvres, à vous, au lieu de l’Eucharistie, ne connaissent que l’hostie sacrilège. Coprophages! qui ne savez que la parole qui blasphème et le baiser qui pue.”26 In the novel, Péladan offers his own post-lapsarian allegory of desire – telling the story of Corysande d’Urfé, an orphaned protégée of Prince de Courtenay, an incarnation of femininity as immaculacy and innocence. Living among the dominicaux in the vitiated atmosphere of their cynicism, she remains untainted by their exchanges of blasphemous persiflage. The plot to drug and rape the virgin constitutes the novel’s only action, providing a symbolic reenactment of the banishment from Eden, nature’s corruption through its permeation by treacherous intelligence. Daughter of no one, Corysande is absolved of the guilt of family history, becoming an angel or a Muse inspiring chastely super24

Ibid. Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 95. 26 Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 235. 25

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annuated romances. Adopted by the prince, watched over by the Magus, she proleptically embodies purity as loss, representing anachronistic goodness persisting in an era of universal depravity. Péladan’s allegory of virtue’s murder is the culminating moment of the novel, signaling the irreversible movement toward the collapse of Western culture, presaging the separation of the asymptote and curve. Since magic is ineffective in preserving righteousness and innocence, Mérodack can draw from his arsenal of esoteric weapons only to sanction the evildoer. The Limitations of Magic Despite endowing the Magus with terrifying power, Péladan emphasizes the inadequacies of the necromantic arts. Mérodack is pictured as becoming increasingly isolated, and his prescience, his capacity to foresee disasters that are looming, only deepen his frustration at being unable to avert them. Ordinarily, in Péladan’s conception of the moral universe, sin incurs its own punishment. Projecting on the astral plane “ses miasmes et ses molécules invisibles,”27 evil deeds rebound onto the perpetrator and exacerbate his obsession. Thus, an immodest actress on stage becomes “un magnétiseur inconscient,”28 drawing the audience’s lecherous gaze, kindling their obscene fantasies, so that though “un effet de choc en retour,” desire is redirected toward its source. Evil’s subtle residue envelopes and saturates the malefactor, and through what Lévi variously refers to as une lumière latente or un fluide, causes guilty ideation to return and haunt the mind of the transgressor. Péladan’s definition of magic incorporates a similar economy, connecting consequence to action, locking the sinner in his private hell. Thus, the imperious femme fatale, Princess Léonora d’Este, is obsessed by the wish to seduce the morally unassailable Father Alta, yet “elle voit revenir contre elle tout le fluide nerveux qu’elle a émis.”29 Adopting Lévi’s term goetia as demonic infestation – chaos preceding the ordering of the world by the Word – Péladan shows how psychic turmoil is the consequence of sinful acts. A brain tenanted by ghosts, bedeviled by self-hatred is the stage on which addiction to 27

Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 93. Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 259. 29 Ibid., p. 320. 28

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punishment is played out. Becoming a retributive force, the desired object “reste à l’état de larve fluidique dans l’atmosphère astrale” as it infects the victim’s mind “et le pousse à récidiver.”30 Similarly, Mérodack remonstrates with de Courtenay’s colleagues about the toxicity of their iniquity, explaining how a painter obsessed with androgyny is incapable of lofty visions, how a cynic deprived of hope foregoes the possibility of temporal renewal. Only rarely can an evildoer operate with impunity, requiring the Magus to try to intervene and use his power to right the balance. But when the fateful moment comes, even though he is equipped with special skills, Mérodack is unable to prevent the misfortune that is impending. In Péladan’s loss of innocence fable, the Marquis de Donnereux is the consummate despoiler, oily, old, leering, methodical in his acquisition of rare pornography. The antipathetic enemy of everything clean and uncontaminated, he is a degenerate in whom is concentrated the principle of cultural decay. Using a chambermaid to administer a potent sleep-inducing agent, he violates Corysande in a darkly necrophilic scene – pausing before he begins his work to pollute his victim with his gaze, resembling “[l]a limace [qui] contemplait la rose avant d’y baver.”31 More sacrilegious than Léonora’s project to corrupt a priest, virtue’s murder elicits the retaliatory outrage of the Magus who, using his powers, identifies the perpetrator and then administers heaven’s vengeance. Traveling astrally, Mérodack employs a somnambulist to witness a reenactment of the crime, drawing on magic to reverse the narcotic effects of the potion, substituting sleep as lucidity for unconsciousness as helplessness. In the final chapters, Péladan shows the Magus deploying the full repertoire of his arcane skills, inducing sleep clairvoyance, practicing insufflation to soothe the anxious victim, casting a spell that visits punishment on the assailant. Using techniques that Lévi classifies as divinatory or thaumaturgic, Mérodack practices somnambulistic mediation, astral travel, breath as anesthesia, spell-casting as a means of enacting superhuman justice. Having identified Corysande’s attacker, Mérodack dispels her alarm, and by breathing on her temples, induces soothing dreams 30 31

Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 325.

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(“L’insufflation froide apaise les douleurs,” as Lévi writes).32 Using metonymy as magic, he fashions a wax doll of the marquis, affixes a head band on the effigy, and – as the somnambulist reports – implacably tightens the serre-tête, causing the rapist to thrash and scream, until Mérodack crushes the figurine and thereby executes God’s punishment. It does not matter that the Magus tries to spare the sensibilities of his protégée; Corysande worries as a consequence of the lacuna in her memory. Intuiting the truth of the attack and her ensuing pregnancy, she catches a mortal chill that kills both her and her unborn baby. In the novel, magic is shown as operating in similar fashion, causing evil to miscarry when it is already too late. Apart from the envoûtement sanctioning the violent theft of innocence, Mérodack’s supernatural abilities serve to counteract or neutralize – taking the reality of evil and undoing it with the word or breath. Assassin par amour, Mérodack is limited in his power and, because of his limitations, can only destroy what threatens love. In Le Vice suprême, a concatenation of seemingly unrelated misfortunes underlines the true powerlessness of the Magus. A hapless, well-intentioned speculator, practicing the profane alchemy of investment, wishing to restore the sovereignty of king and nobles, loses everything in a market crash – plunging Prince de Courtenay into ruin and causing him to die at his own hand. Unable to stand the stain of shame, Corysande survives only briefly, then goes to join the others guilty of the mortal sin of suicide. The Magus, adept at chiromancy, reading lines of text on hands and foreheads, does not prophesy but is instead inscribed in the book of his own destiny. Péladan’s necromancer cannot initiate change, cannot innovate or build but only minimizes the injury wrought by all-pervasive evil. Magic and Faith In the confrontation of ochlocracy and elitism, Péladan shows the necessity of prodigal children again becoming answerable to a disciplinarian whose law had gone unenforced for too long. Like other reactionary Decadents, Péladan yearned for a restoration of the established order, a reaccession of the king, a return to the veneration 32

Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 326.

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of Catholic doctrine, relief from repressed guilt born of Oedipal insubordination. Among this group, as Michèle Besnard-Coursodon asserts, “le crime qu’ils partagent, c’est le meurtre du Père. Nietzsche l’avait proclamé en 1885: Dieu est mort. Péladan ne cesse de le rappeller, et de vitupérer: une société d’où est evacué le Père – peuple sans chef, corps sans tête, est une société […] vouée à l’Apocalypse. Tel est le sens du FINIS LATINORUM qui termine Le Vice suprême.”33 In Péladan’s later novels, the metaphysically constructive role not discharged by the initiate is assumed by officers and soldiers of the church. In his generally laudatory preface, Barbey criticizes Péladan for endorsing magic, an error which Barbey says is “absolument contraire […] à l’enseignement de l’Eglise”34. By glorifying a knowledge system that exalted human pride, Péladan, according to Barbey, had resorted to sensationalism in order to generate interest in the book, making his narrative implausible by introducing “un merveilleux extra-humain.” But in the hierarchical order which Péladan supported, the Magus occupies an intermediate place between the layman and the priest. Rejecting the characterization of magic as heretical, Péladan shows Mérodack volunteering to work in the interests of the church. Characterizing the alliance forged between the hierophant and cleric, he describes Mérodack visiting Alta in the cloister of Notre-Dame. In a profession of mutual admiration, they acknowledge a common cause: “le Prodige de la Grâce et le Prodige de la Volonté, le Moine et le Mage s’embrassèrent.”35 Up until the conclusion of Péladan’s Ethopée, Mérodack and Alta strive together to recreate a world structured by discipline and virtue, subordinating selfishness to idealism, subjecting impulse to control, substituting hierarchy for randomness, placing the child beneath the father. Alta sees hereditary aristocracy as an obsolete institution, but says that the crusaders who once set out to liberate the Holy Sepulcher must now pledge to defend the sacred cause with philanthropy and art. Fulminating against the irreligion of his congregants, he summons his audience to again take up the sword: 33

Michèle Besnard-Coursodon, “Nimroud ou Orphée: Joséphin Péladan et la société décadente,” Romantisme 13. 42 (1983), p. 122. 34 Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly, Préface, Le Vice suprême (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), p. xvii. 35 Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 191.

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“prenez la plume, le compas, la parole, magnifiez le Verbe en une oeuvre, fut-elle seulement utile.”36 Originally, there is the indivisibility of the creator and his work, primordial stuff, raw material unprocessed by intelligence. Before the artist applies his hand and mind, there is the empty page, the lump of clay. Then comes the discovery of the mission, which is expressive and transformative, further clarifying the Logos by human exegesis. What is life’s purpose for the Magus, as Péladan’s narrator inquires? “il ne peut être […] que l’occasion et le moyen de faire un chefd’oeuvre de ce bloc d’âme que Dieu lui a donné à travailler.”37 For the members of the Rose-Croix who collaborate in La Vertu suprême, producing a masterpiece is the prime objective of artists, geniuses, priests. It is work combining a spiritual, ethical, and esthetic component, creation whose purity is incompatible with procreation. Inheritors of the Albigensians who reject materiality and marriage, they believe, as Péladan’s visionary says: “Ceux qui engendrent de l’esprit ne doivent pas engendrer selon le corps.”38 For Péladan, the goal of the writer, monk, and alchemist is to make matter as good as gold through ordering refinement: “Chercher l’idéal dans la perfection de son coeur, n’est-ce pas l’art suprême?”39 In Alta’s admonition to his congregants, he expresses Péladan’s conception of a sanctified esthetic, in which privilege is the equivalent of merit. Nobility does not depend on ancestry or fortune. Consecrated by their actions, there is only one higher race, les Aristes – the best – who through achievement, do God’s work on earth and postpone the extinction of the race. “Génie et vertu,” as Alta says, “voilà les aristocraties éternelles de ce monde et de l’autre.”40 Commenting on magic, Péladan insists on the historical supersession of hermeticism by the Gospels: “L’adoration des Mages signifie l’abdication des ésoterismes devant l’Incarnation de la Vérité. Ce qu’il y a de vrai, de fécond dans la magie, se trouve dans les paroles

36

Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 246. 38 Péladan, La Vertu suprême (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1900), p. 3. 39 Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 51. 40 Ibid., p. 293. 37

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que Jésus a prononcées et l’Evangile annule les clavicules et des grimoires, puisqu’il les surpasse.”41 A confederate of Father Alta, Mérodack may display a supernatural prescience that allows him to promote Catholic doctrine in a way the priest cannot: “Moine,” as he apostrophizes his ally, “les mages vinrent adorer Jésus alors que les prêtres ignoraient sa naissance.” Thus, he says, “ce sont les mages qui feront arriver le règne de Dieu.”42 Yet it is also foreknowledge that proves to be Mérodack’s greatest curse, the ability to see the future while remaining powerless to prevent it. In Péladan’s novel, the Magus’s most salient feature is this disenchanting wisdom, the ethical superiority that isolates and estranges. Living in the midst of philosophers and poets, Mérodack is condemned to remain alone, since because of his moral absolutism, he is confined to his role as admonitory judge. Like the author, Mérodack deplores the revolutionary principle of solidarity, insisting that in place of freedom, equality, and brotherhood, there are the obligations accompanying rank. Incumbent on the writer/Magus is the responsibility to help his inferiors, whence his position in a paternalistic system of generosity and debt. As Péladan writes, “le vrai nom de liberté, c’est DEVOIR; le vrai nom d’égalité, c’est HIÉRARCHIE; le vrai nom de fraternité, c’est CHARITÉ.”43 The same duties assumed by the aristes are what determine their lonely moral pedigree. As Beaufils maintains, magic for Péladan “consiste à être totalement maître de soi, de ses impulsions, à rejecter la grossiereté bourgeoise d’un pays démocratique, et surtout à cultiver […] son orgueil pour faire de soi une personnalité intraitable.”44 Péladan therefore complements his picture of esotericism – secret teachings that offset evil, punish crime, and thwart disaster – with a positive image of religious faith as a creative principle inspiring hope. The sacerdotal brotherhood of which Alta is a member is negatively imaged in Prince de Courtenay’s brotherhood of dominicaux, and mirrored in the Society of the Rose-Croix as it appears in La Vertu suprême. But because Mérodack refuses to 41

Joséphin Péladan, “L’Occultisme contemporain,” qtd. in Jean-Pierre Bonnetot, Préface, Le Vice suprême (Geneva: Slatkine, 1979), p. vi. 42 Ibid., p. 392. 43 Ibid., p. 391. 44 Beaufils, Le Sâr Péladan, p. 89.

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compromise on his insistence on sexual purity, he is alienated from his allies and left to set out alone. Here, Péladan’s divorce from the figure of the Magus is completed, and the distance between the curve and asymptote grows wider. While the initiate is isolated by his ideological intransigence, the priest participates collectively in advancing the institutional agenda of the church. In Le Vice suprême, it is Alta who articulates Péladan’s conception of a new confederation of artist/seers committed to sacred goals, an association that Péladan sought to found by constituting la Société de la Rose-Croix. Along with working to reintegrate the Greek Orthodox and Roman Church, Alta dreams of establishing “un tiers ordre tout intellectuel de poètes, d’artistes et de savants, une armée du Verbe; imposant par la force du chef-d’oeuvre et du document le sceau catholique à toutes les manifestations du génie humain.”45 At the conclusion of Péladan’s final volume, Alta continues to advance the same agenda, enjoining artists of virtue to sculpt the bloc d’âme they were given to shape, doing God’s work, fulfilling his word in the creation of a masterpiece. “Qui de nous,” as he asks of his Rosicrucian brothers, “serait l’ombre de lui-même, sans le livre, le monument, la statue et le tableau? Miroirs profonds, nous avons retenu le rayonnement du chef-d’oeuvre, mais de lui nous est venue la lumière; devenons lumineux: oeuvrons.”46 Conclusion Péladan’s dream of a reconciliation of art and religious faith, as outlined in La Vertu suprême, remained an unattainable ideal. Péladan quarreled with the leaders of the other Rosicrucian faction, Papus and Stainlas de Guaïta, who disavowed the Sâr’s beliefs. He witnessed the dissolution of the Société de la Rose-Croix, whose achievements were far less spectacular that their fictional counterparts’. Seeing himself as Moses condemned to die before reaching the promised land, he resolved to leave his work as a map for the seekers who would follow: “puisque notre volonté n’étreint pas l’événement,” as Alta says, “que notre esprit illumine les volontés prédestinées et prochaines.”47

45

Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 341. Péladan, La Vertu suprême, p. 391. 47 Ibid., pp. 391-2. 46

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On the one hand, Péladan envisaged a literature designed to enlighten and proselytize. As Beaufils writes, for “l’homme moderne [qui] avait perdu la foi,” the writer’s mission “serait de promouvoir la sensibilité par l’oeuvre d’art.”48 On the other hand, since, in its highest form, art remained inaccessible to the profane, Péladan’s fiction, with its florid style, its arcane references, and rare vocabulary, was intended for consumption by a restricted and elite audience. Like magic, whose secret teachings appealed to readers yet remained obscure and elusive, Péladan’s fiction may also seem to promise knowledge that it ultimately does not deliver. The remaining question concerns the value of Péladan’s work. Are his novels hollow and overblown? Is there no substance beneath the jargon and melodrama? Or is the merit of Péladan’s text dependent on the assiduousness of audience inquiry, such that the sincerity of the quest for meaning is rewarded with extraordinary disclosures? At the conclusion of Le Vice suprême, Péladan casts doubt on the value of magic. Is it an authentic discipline that rewards practitioners with specialized knowledge? Or is it imposture, an empty promise that brings only loneliness and disappointment? A sense of pessimism accompanies the image of wise men helpless to rescue humanity. In the final chapter, the historical and institutional father – the earthly spokesman for a God who had withdrawn from decadent society – is reintroduced in the character of Mérodack’s fellow Kabbalist, Rabbi Sichem. Questioning the benefits of the rare insight he possesses, Sichem paints a dispiriting picture of the decadent society he is powerless to reform – deploring the relaxation of discipline, bemoaning the diffuseness of authority, complaining that trespasses are committed without real pleasure or enthusiasm. Like Péladan, Sichem considers magic as correctional and reactive: “le mal est offensif,” he says, “et le bien seulement défensif.49 Despite the timeless teleological arc suggesting fulfillment of the messianic promise – despite the conversion of the rabbi “à qui le Kabbale avait prouvé l’Evangile50 – the efficacy of magic in hastening the return of king and Savior remained problematic for Péladan, whose readership was limited.

48

Beaufils, Le Sâr Péladan, p. 77. Péladan, Le Vice suprême, p. 388. 50 Ibid., p. 384. 49

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While offering an encomium to art that reveals a sacred truth, Péladan’s fiction descends from an exclusive literature characterized by its inaccessibility – apostolic in its goals, yet aristocratic in its expression. So while the Salon de la Rose-Croix provided the “forum for an extraordinary artistic showcase,”51 Péladan’s incongruous persona detracted too often from his message. As Kohn writes, Péladan’s “meridional expansiveness, overbearing nature, effusive mannerisms, and […] decadent prose inspired impatience, doubt, and exasperation; how could one take the Sâr seriously?”52 Unsettled, the question remains whether magic is real, its benefits tangible. Ambivalence is not a strong enough word to describe the prevalent reaction to Péladan. A showman, a visionary, an esthete, a charlatan, a buffoon: Péladan addresses present-day audiences on the same dual register as he did his contemporaries. Readers experiencing his treatment of magic as mystification and illusion risk displaying the inertia that Péladan complained of in his peers. Secret teachings are not transmitted without affecting the initiate. Magic literature is not assimilated without ennobling its reader. Péladan’s novels are intended to uplift and illuminate, serving as signposts for “les volontés prédestinées et prochaines.” Servile bourgeois art aspires only to reproduce its model, “alors qu’il devrait le transfigurer,” as Péladan recommends.53 It is by trying to grasp the principles of thaumaturgy that one unriddles its mystic formulas, by studying its precepts that one disentangles the grimoire. Péladan’s insistence on hierarchical ordering distinguishes true seekers from lazy dilettantes, elevating the genius over the imbécile, separating the virtuous from the cowardly. Judging his magic paraphernalia as futility and silliness, Péladan’s detractors dismiss his fiction with its clutter of conjurations and astral voyages. But the Fool is often seen as the most mysterious of the Arcana, the Juggler whose eyes turn heavenward and who is crowned with the symbol of infinity. To be sure, Péladan is an overwrought stylist, a self-anointed hierophant, but he calls on readers to learn his secrets and to approach his writings seriously. Clavicle and grimoire: magic as edifice and blueprint: Péladan invites his audience to look beneath his novel’s surface meretriciousness, 51

Kohn, “The Mystic Impresario,” p. 251. Ibid. 53 Joséphin Péladan, La Décadence esthétique I, L’art ochlocratique (Paris: Dalou, 1882), qtd. In Besnard-Coursodon, “Nimroud ou Orphée,” p. 133. 52

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suggesting they may see its mystic gibberish resolve itself as meaning – finding that if they learn the rules of grammar, he may deliver them the key.

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Our Servants’ Work: Villiers’s Axël Published in completed form in La Jeune France in 1885-1886, Villiers’s tempestuous romantic drama Axël was the work he wished to be the crowning achievement of his career. Set in the heart of the Black Forest, Villiers’s tale of passion and magic, faith and suicide has confounded critics at pains to explain the text’s philosophical underpinnings. Despite the exposition of Catholic doctrine by her purported spiritual mentor, the Archdeacon, Sara, Villiers’s heroine, rejects his message of Christianity. And for all the expounding of Hermeticism by the sage and seer, Maître Janus, Axël, the drama’s title character, declines the esoteric wisdom he is offered. In place of secret knowledge and spiritual comfort, the characters choose a love whose purity death alone consecrates, rejecting power, wealth, and the pleasures that come with living in the body. While Villiers’s drama seems to hallow the beauty of the lovers’ suicide, what remains is a testimonial to the value of literature, life and service. Villiers’s struggle to clarify the often contradictory message of his drama is evident in his continued reworking of the text up until the time of his death in 1889. Despite a desire to reshape his work so that it conformed to his Catholic views, Villiers resisted the impulse to amend the book for artistic and philosophical reasons, and the extant version of Axël has remained essentially unchanged. If the poignancy and lyricism of the culminating death scene are most striking, the work still ends with a celebration of a hopeful couple’s nuptials, with survivors greeting a new day, and joyfully resuming the work of life. Logomancy In analyzing the documentary foundation for Le Monde Occulte, the central scene in Villiers’ drama, Alan Raitt claims the author derived his material from Eliphas Lévi, whose Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie had first been introduced to Villiers in 1866. However, despite Villiers’s references to electuaries that inspire love, astral bodies, Increate Light, pentacles, and other mystical apotropaion, Raitt maintains that Villiers’s familiarity with occult learning was never

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more than superficial, and that “les nombreux emprunts au jargon d’Eliphas Lévi sont faits pour éblouir plutôt que pour éclairer”54 More than indicating a genuine interest in thaumaturgy, however, Villiers’s inclusion of this material may have afforded him another opportunity to reiterate the need for an emancipation from instinct, carnality, and desire, to extol the wisdom of cultivating an illusionist belief in the reality that ennobled an individual imprisoned in his own subjectivity. Additionally, one may perhaps differ with Raitt and assert that Villiers borrowed from Lévi an idea that strongly influenced him in his writing of Axël, namely the notion of the magical power of language itself. Recalling the Scriptural identification of God and Logos, Lévi elaborates a doctrine that at first seems to reconcile Villiers’s Christian and occult proclivities: the idea that the word of God and the speech of the adept enact what they say, achieving a level of transitivity that changes language from the referential to the operational. “Dans le principe était le Verbe,” Lévi quotes from the Gospel of John, explaining that “le premier principe est nécessairement le premier moteur. Le Verbe n’est pas une abstraction,” Lévi adds: “c’est le principe le plus positif qui soit au monde, puisqu’il se prouve sans cesse par des actes.”55 In Villiers’ text, le Verbe seems to create what it proclaims. Once Sara describes her rapturous vision of nuptial voyages to exotic lands, her speech, as Axël asserts, makes any journey redundant. “A quoi bon les réaliser?...” he says of her dreams, “ils sont si beaux!”56 In the notion of the Word producing what it evokes, one sees a possible resolution of the conflict on which Villiers’s drama is based. Janus, whose name “en fait un modèle de dichotomie.”57 seems assigned competing roles as both initiator and oracle, just as his speech operates on two different registers, being hortative and predictive. Despite Raitt’s thesis, the magic efficacy of le Verbe is what seems to enable these oppositions to be reconciled, since, if the speech act 54

Alan Raitt, Introduction, Axël, Oeuvres complétes II, by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 1426. 55 Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 13. 56 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, Oeuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 671. 57 Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969), p. 199.

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supersedes the act itself, it justifies suicide, and, for the lovers, makes life in the body supererogatory. Yet while it follows the lovers triumphantly from the world of disappointment and compromise, the silence following their death ensures no successful passage to the world to come. Rather than glorifying stillness and suicide, Villiers accords importance to the work that continues to speak. On the terrestrial plane, as Axël argues, the language of passion offers an avenue of escape. Gemeinsames sterben, the couple’s death should elevate them out of the existential realm of adventitiousness, compromise, and loss, and resolve the separation of self and other, bringing a unification that rises above the periodicity of desire and satisfaction. Axël’s belief is that the Liebestod accomplishes the purpose of Sara’s speech, initiating a voyage to what may be a more beautiful place, bringing about a blissful fusion of the suicidal travelers. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, death silences la parole, joins the speaker and addressee, effects a mystical dissolution of subjectivity, initiating a journey that ends with the travelers’ reintegration into a distant home country. As Ernest Jones remarks in his seminal 1906 essay “On Dying Together,” “the connection between the ideas of death and travel is primaeval” and “can signify in the unconscious to fly with the mother and thus gratify secret desires.”58 The Freudian conception of the death drive describes all life as oriented toward a mythical anteriority of inorganicism, discharged energies, and quiescence. In Villiers’s drama, the lovers’ death may not be a despairing flight from an empty future but an affirmation that, in voicing their passion, they can transcend time altogether. In place of conative language, indicative of striving and volition, there is the atemporality of le Verbe which weds expression to accomplishment. Translated into words, desires are slaves’ chains that prevent movement and thwart ascension, bonds of instinct imprisoning man in a time of dispossession, shackling him to objects that are tantalizingly elusive. Shunning Schopenhauerian Wille in favor of the liberating power of Vorstellung, the initiate stops chasing the chimera of tomorrow and extricates himself from the time of servitude: “Evade-

58

Ernest Jones, “On ‘Dying Together’ and ‘An Unusual Case of Dying Together,’” Essential Papers on Suicide, eds. John Maltsberger and Mark Goldblatt (New York: New York UP, 1996), pp. 13-14.

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toi du Devenir!” as Janus exhorts his disciple. “Ta ‘Vérité’ sera ce que tu l’auras conçue: son essence, n’est-elle pas infinie, comme toi!”59 Raitt disputes the assertion that Villiers embraces a form of solipsism, stressing instead the subject’s prerogative to fashion the world he inhabits: “Puisque seules les pensées que nous concevons sont réelles pour nous, et que nos sens nous dupent, Villiers conclut que nous sommes libres de nous créer une vérité personnelle.”60 This is the argument Axël makes to Sara in defining the operational force of speech. Expanding on Raitt’s assertion, one can say that Villiers attributes this view to Axël, who claims that, by affirming an uplifting idea in the act of verbalization, the speaker is able to bring a private reality into being. For the title character in Villiers’s drama, saying makes it so. From the standpoint of a divinity, le Verbe ratifies what always has been, signalling a confluence of the present moment of the subject’s utterance and the eternal present of the timeless truth he apprehends at the moment of speaking. The nominative authority bestowed on Adam in the Garden of Eden is the power to know again what things call themselves. Similarly, Axël’s personal truth, as Janus tells him, “aura, déjà, précédé de son être tes pensées, devant s’y appeler sous cette forme où tu l’y reconnaîtras!”61 In the character of Janus, as seer and mentor, Raitt notes a contradiction in his incompatible roles. As in the conflict between free will and predestination, Janus occupies a present moment of uncertainty and decision, while he simultaneously observes the drama’s outcome from the privileged vantage point of a god. “En tant que puissance efficiente,” Raitt writes, “maître Janus sait qu’Axël doit refuser l’initiation; en tant que mage, il tente obstinément de la lui faire accepter.”62 In answering Raitt, one can begin by observing that much of Janus’ speech is delivered in the futur antérieur, the time before le Verbe is spoken and the time established by its utterance. When the reality the subject chooses coincides with the reality of God’s design, the present instant of an action is synchronous with an unalterable 59

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 641. Alan Raitt, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste (Paris: Corti, 1965), p. 248. 61 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 641. 62 Raitt, Introduction, p. 1428. 60

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divine plan. Freedom, as Lévi says, comes when the subject concurs with the divine Logos, when in partnership with his maker, the individual affirms what cannot be otherwise: “La toute-puissance relative de la volonté, confirmée par le Verbe, rend seule les hommes vraiment libres, et c’est à la science des anciens mages qu’il faut demander les secrets de l’émancipation et des forces vives de la volonté.”63 Turgid and abstract, Janus’ language is as abstruse as Lévi’s writing, which is also replete with references to initiatic practices, oneiric symbolism, methods of divination, ritual ceremonies and talismans. Yet unlike Lévi’s book, which combines instruction on the use of objects of power, procedures for reading the stars, warding off spells, and raising the dead, Janus’s remarks seem to lack practical application. Their tenor is impersonal, and the rewards for obtaining occult wisdom remain undefined. Axël is asked to relinquish youth and happiness in exchange for uncertain knowledge, and so he initially rejects Janus’s invitation to accept Light, Hope, and Life, preferring material reality to the reality immanent in Le Verbe. Treasure Much of Axël plays out against the background of the couple’s ancestral past, the preterit ineluctability of the characters’ family history, debt incurred by relatives’ triumphs and transgressions, obligations generationally handed down and inscribed as mottos on family crests. Symbolized by a fortune in gold, the physical burden of family honor and privilege opposes the characters’ wish to affirm themselves anew. Indeed, Axël’s disagreement with Kaspar von Auersperg enacts a central conflict in the book: between ensnarement in the material world, with the lure of money, fame, and pleasure, and a deliverance from the material realm effected by the power of le Verbe. Both the Archdeacon and Maître Janus, one a tyrant who bullies and intimidates, the other a sage who guides his disciple with persuasion, try to convince their charges to free themselves of the past by renouncing inherited riches. In the first of many alchemical formulations in Villiers’s drama, the Archdeacon equates Sara’s fallen 63

Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 36.

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state with the wealth she possesses and will relinquish upon taking her vows: “ton âme impérissable, est composée, d’abord, de matière, pour pouvoir jouir ou souffrir éternellement, en restant distincte de Dieu. Materia prima, dit l’Ange de l’Ecole…”64 In Axël, treasure is always entombed underground along with the spiritually dead self of its possessor. Similarly, pivotal scenes in the text unfold in sepulchers and crypts, topologized representations of the body in which the soul is locked away. At the end, Sara – adorned in bridal raiment, sparkling with diamonds – consents to surrender her earthly being as she had refused to do in the cloister. Betrothal to Axël affirms the motto of the Auerspergs, since in shedding flesh and escaping desire, she effects her transmutation and resurrection: “Altius resurgere spero gemmatus.” Along the spatial and temporal axis of Villiers’s drama, money is always situated behind and below. Concentrated riches are kept in secret places, suggesting a connection between coffer and coffin. Dead time is consigned to ancestral burial vaults, housed in subterranean chambers of the unconscious. Repressed secrets from the past, manifested as guilt and fear, are eliminated by being acknowledged, demonstrating again the efficacy of le Verbe. The long narrative digression into the secret of the Auerspergs, the sequestering of Germany’s national fortune in an unknown cache on Axël’s land, equates wealth with an unspoken word, knowledge that only disclosure can make admissible and real. Resolved to defend family honor and deflect probes into the Auersperg mystery, Axël focuses his energies on becoming a fortress. In his reading of Axël as a text informed by a Gnostic rejection of incarnation, materialism, and sexual desire, John Anzalone suggests that Axël’s initial acceptance of life in the body corresponds to the symbolism of place which is so prominent in the drama. The impenetrability of the forest, the inviolable hiding place of the treasure, the staging of life-and-death conflicts in the in-pace of underground dungeons – all figure the body in which the priceless thing is locked away, awaiting the character’s speech to release and reveal it. Carnal pleasure, as Axël will argue, is counterfeit wealth that the lovers must renounce, since, once their

64

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 549.

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passion is expressed in dialogue, “the treasure can be possessed only symbolically, as a sign of the inner fulfillment they now enjoy.”65 In Axël, riches and family honor are the legacy of a past that works to inhibit the character’s efforts to shape a new identity. The drama begins on Christmas day, when the darkness and despair of the solstice give way to the promise of rebirth. Isolated in a convent, seemingly at the mercy of those who would deny her freedom and despoil her of her family fortune, Sara is inhumed in an obscure season and yet refuses to give up. “Ma fille,” the Abbess says to her, “vous êtes une lampe dans un tombeau.”66 Both Axël and his predestined bride are threatened with dispossession – Sara with the confiscation of the de Maupers’ riches, Axël with his land’s invasion by bands of treasure-seekers. Both react by retreating deeper into a fortress of silence and pride. Likewise, Axël and Sara have ingenuous, youthful counterparts who invite them to escape from themselves and welcome life’s joys, to accept Light, Life, and Hope. Ukko, Axël’s page, is involved in a parallel romantic narrative, and chooses connubiality and happiness over suicide and mystic union. And Sister Aloyse wishes to join with Sara in becoming Christ’s “époux ineffable,”67 turning away from the path of death, the rose-strewn “allée des sépultures,” and ascending together into the firmament as it appears on the de Maupers’ crest, rising out of the tomb of physicality into what Sister Aloyse calls “le ciel étoilé au fond de mes yeux.”68 After the lovers’ suicide, these characters carry on, acting in the service of God and doing the work of the living. At first, the prospect of rebirth for Axël only drives him into deeper isolation. Contemptuously rejecting Kaspar’s invitation to seek the hidden treasure together, Axël retreats into a description of his impregnable forest sanctuary as dense and thick as the trees themselves. The beleaguered self withdrawn behind battlements, concealed at the heart of the wilderness, safe inside walls of bravado is the thing that is precious because of its innermost location. The uninitiated person is degraded stuff, the materia prima whose potential value is a function of its internalization. For Janus, the 65

John Anzalone, “Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and the Gnostic Tradition,” The French Review 57. 1 (October 1983), p. 25. 66 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 534. 67 Ibid., p. 538. 68 Ibid.

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spurious treasure of pearls and coins corresponds to the dormant being whom his secret teachings will awaken. What is buried must be exhumed. What is repressed must be articulated, releasing the seed from the shell, giving voice to the unspoken thing, turning fear into knowledge, pitch into gold, and corruption into immortality. Gilbert Durand notes the interconnectedness of spagyrical and metallurgical processes: “La substance du précieux métal est symbolique de toutes les intimités, soit dans les contes où le trésor se trouve enfermé dans un coffre enfoui dans la chambre la plus secrète, soit dans la pensée alchimique dont la psychanalyse recoupe d’une façon triviale les secrètes intuitions.”69 In the Gnostic tradition, soul-prisons are treasure chests whose contents acquire value only if they are opened. Embodying the principle of debasement, Kaspar von Auersperg profanes language by cheapening its meaning, extolling adultery, glorifying opportunism, identifying with highwaymen who rob travelers of their purses. In Lévi’s conception of le Verbe, the Word becomes flesh, contingency becomes necessity, and the subject’s will, manifesting God’s will, realizes and reveals it. However, in the Count’s profane idiom, treachery and deceit rematerialize sublime virtues. Having emptied the things his words refer to of their spirituality and meaning, he leaves behind a desolate landscape littered with bloodless referents that his cleverness attempts to disguise. In Axël’s anatomy of Kaspar’s word-murder, he shows that he has understood Janus’s teachings on logomancy, that he distinguishes the power of le Verbe from the futile pageantry of la parole – “stérile,” says Lévi, “comme dans la moisson il se rencontre des épis vides.”70 Casually tending empty offers of “familiale amitié,” “dévouement à l’épreuve,” “aide cordiale,”71 Kaspar prostitutes language, cheapening the values it evokes immodestly and carelessly. As the silent subject is a shadow being awaiting verbal self-affirmation to be born, the impostor is a counterfeiter, circulating coins not struck in the image of what they redeem. Kaspar’s phrases are spurious money, stamped, as Axël says to the Count, “comme autant d’effigies de toimême.”72 Dissimulation, inflation, boasting – instruments of language 69

Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, p. 299. Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 13. 71 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 608. 72 Ibid. 70

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as spurious alchemy – fill the world that Kaspar peoples with “beaux mots-spectres.”73 Whereas Logos creates life, lies leave behind a hecatomb of word-cadavers. Reembodying what, for the initiate, symbolizes purity and wisdom, Kaspar prizes unregenerate matter. Rosicrucians and alchemists, whose secret teaching Sara studied in the convent, counsel renunciation of the quest for wordly fortune. Adopting the Gnostics’ view of the curse of physicality, Rosicrucians stress man’s suffering in imitation of Christ: “The cross is symbolic of the human body,” as Manly Hall explains, “and the two symbols together – the rose on the cross – signify that the soul of man is crucified upon the body, which is held by three nails.”74 Remarking on the esoteric etymology of the term “Rosicrucian,” Hall adds that “the word Ras means wisdom, while Rus is translated concealment.”75 Villiers’s drama is filled with encrypted meanings, hidden valuables, special knowledge that only a secret phrase can unlock. But to Kaspar von Auersperg, there is nothing inside the corporeal shell, nothing beneath the skin of appearance. Lust and vanity focus him on the material aspect of things, and he misunderstands the spagyrical aspiration to purity and transfiguration. Stories of the perversion of alchemical research – failed experiments, explosions, and murder – fill popular accounts of forbidden undertakings, from Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann to Huysmans’s biographical material on Gilles de Rais (Làbas). Lacking an appreciation of alchemical theory, Kaspar von Auersperg expresses only the vulgarity of his greed. As Hall affirms: “man’s quest for gold is often his undoing, for he mistakes the alchemical processes, believing them to be purely material.”76 Unlike Axël, who moves from the past of ancestral obligation to a present inaugurated by le Verbe, Kaspar occupies a fugitive temporality he experiences as frustrated desire and bitter regret. His hedonism and money lust make him idealize the lost paradise of youth and want to amass wealth needed to buy the pleasures for which money substitutes. As the consummate materialist, the Count enjoys nothing, coveting what Norman O. Brown calls “objects [that] have to 73

Ibid. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Association, 1977), p. 139. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 156. 74

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be seen as crystallized time in order to be possessed as property.”77 For Kaspar, the principle of transmutation is the capacity for enjoyment. Airily dismissing the seriousness of Hermeticism, he rails against “les souffleurs du Grand-Oeuvre” bent over their retorts. “Connais-tu l’or potable qui reste au fond du creuset?” he asks Axël. “Ta jeunesse […] Saisis-toi de la vie, telle qu’elle est, sans illusions et sans faiblesse.”78 Spurning the Count’s proposal to unearth the hidden treasure, Axël kills the interloper and, in so doing, climbs out of history’s dungeon. Earlier, in response to Kaspar’s threat to invade the land with an army of fortune hunters, Axël had retreated into a labyrinthine evocation of his impenetrable domain, a trackless landscape of bogs, rivers, and ditches, mined terrain encircling the castle, untraversable moats, murderous armed militias composed of the forest’s autochthons. In the place and its description, Axël asserts old defenses, trying to protect a self that must die in order to be transformed. Both Sara and Axël initially reject the ego death required of the initiate, and when asked: “Do you accept the fulness of Life, Light, and Hope?,” they decline in a single syllable. When they experience love, the couple’s entry into le monde passionnel is accompanied by an awakening to time. Once a shrine to a glorious past preserved as legend and duty, trophy heads of animals killed in the hunt, dusty tomes in a library of arcana, hoary attendants who are the veterans of old wars, Axël’s castle is the place where he had been immersed in esoteric teachings whose provenance was of indeterminate ancientness. Secure in his storehouse of the dead, Axël had still desired the riches he saw as a catalyzing agent, a principle of change enabling him to occupy a new form filled with energy and life. Janus, too, encourages Axël to shed an obsolete identity, to die to instinct and appetite and thereby be resurrected as knowledge: “Sois ta propre victime! Consacre-toi sur les brasiers d’amour de la Scienceauguste pour y mourir, en ascète, de la mort des phénix.”79

77

Brown, Life Against Death, p. 270. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 598. 79 Ibid., p. 638. 78

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The Rose and the Cross The image of the bird that dies in flame and is reborn from ashes recalls the materia prima which alchemical processes ennoble and refine. L’Epreuve par l’or et par l’amour, the subtitle of Villiers’s final chapter, refers to the spiritual aurefaction of the corporeal body. Corresponding to the transmutation of material in the crucible, death by fire is love’s sublimation as it elevates and immortalizes. Axël believes that by rejecting carnal pleasure in favor of a commingling of souls, he and Sara will vacate their fortress selves and be lost in a celestial realm spangled with jewels become stars. The antiphonal music of the duet of suicide may end in disembodiment, silence, and purity, but what becomes of the lovers after death is inexpressible in the words of Villiers’s text. The language of passion may free the couple from compromise, loss, and decay, but the place to which death delivers them must remain forever a mystery. The only speaking things that are left in the story are the corpses of money, longing, and literature. What Axël and Sara must rise above is conveyed by the Rosicrucian symbol of the tortured rose pierced by nails, as the beauty of the flower suggests the attractiveness of the physical form. Having steeped herself in occult teachings during her time in Saint Apollodora, Sara arrives at the Auersperg castle bearing the wilted flower of her former existence, carrying a rose she had found miraculously blooming in the Christmas snow. Anticipating Sara’s death to her terrestrial existence, the rose is a materialization of the Word, the “no” she speaks in response to the Archdeacon’s petition, an intuition of her ensuing mystical betrothal to Axël: “Cette royale rose, symbole de mon destin [….] C’était comme un avertissement merveilleux, image peut-être fixée d’une seule parole où je m’étais incarnée à l’heure précédente.”80 Indicating her transition from verbal asceticism, negation, isolation, and suffering to the liberating and affirmative domain of le Verbe, Sara, as Bettina Knapp writes, “places the rose on the cross of her dagger as a Sign of Recognition in accordance with Rosicrucian law.”81

80 81

Ibid., p. 665. Bettina Knapp, “Adam/Axël/Alchemy,” L’Esprit Créateur 18. 2 (1978), p. 40.

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Creating themselves as new beings, Axël and Sara divest themselves of yesterday’s roles, and in the marriage of rose and dagger, male and female intersect: “Le Voile et le Manteau, tous deux renonciateurs, se sont croisés,” Janus says. From the union of matter and suffering, body and weapon, purification is assured: “l’Oeuvre s’accomplit.”82 In the final section, Sara – apprized of the secret location of the Auersperg fortune – steals into the castle crypt, and, raising her dagger which she presses between the eyes on the death’s head of the family escutcheon, releases a flood of gold pieces and diamond necklaces that sparkle in the torchlight. To the couple burdened by history and obligation, the treasure represents materialized possibility. Freeing them of their debt to ancestors buried in the same place, the gold explains the mysterious Auersperg motto, as hope allows the resurrection of a higher, bejewelled self. Before Sara descends into the subterranean chamber, Axël’s words ring with a necrological finality. In prolepses effecting the death they anticipate, he speaks words denying the efficacy of speech, turning the “no” he had said to Janus into a general negation. “Cendres,” he says as he gazes on the burial site of his ancestors, “je suis la veille de ce que vous êtes.”83 No dialogue with the dead, the ensuing exchange between the rose and the dagger enables the lovers to live again in the freshness of their language. As Denis de Rougemont comments in his analysis of the Liebestod, passion – transcending the body and its appetites – expresses itself in song, as instinct sublimated into lyricism.84 Adumbrating the mystical union of the couple in death, their profession of love is a duet, as lust’s physical expression is sublimated into the gold of poetry. Discovering one another, they enter into a present unsullied by regret, a time in which the body is no longer a rose crucified by desire, but where the mouth produces sweet words as the breath and spirit of

82

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 646. Ibid., p. 651. 84 As it rises above the plane of instinct, passion, as Denis de Rougemont writes, manifests itself in lyricism, being “unamenable to rational, impersonal, and ‘objective’ exposition,” (Love in the Western World, p. 66). 83

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their partner: “Oh!” Sara exclaims, “la fleur de ton être, ta bouche divine!”85 Hungry to possess her as knowledge, Axël inquires about Sara’s past, the shadow time predating the life that began with their encounter. But, in answering, Sara insists that past time had been wiped away – that outside the interweaving of passion’s language, there is nothing, no more sorrow as the legacy of memory: “Depuis que je suis comme une impératrice d’Orient, je ne sais plus que toi. Je date d’une heure: ce qui précéda cette heure n’est plus.”86 In the drama’s remaining pages, the language of rapture becomes increasingly lyrical. The musical score of the outside world, long discordant and harsh, begins to harmonize with the lovers’ effusions, signalling a refinement of le Verbe, elevating it from expression to art. Revealing the Christmas rose, Sara’s speech is accompanied by musical strains of indeterminate origin, the sound of “[h]arpes redisant dans l’ombre le chant des Rose-Croix.”87 Whether actual music from an unknown source or an acoustic manifestation of the characters’ ideas, the harp strains suggest the illusionistic triumph of subjectivity, in which external reality reproduces the individual’s perceptions. Offsetting the diurnal repetition of rebirth, the light of sunrise from which Axël shrinks in aristocratic disdain, this music welcomes finality and transcendence. Liberating an old self once safe in its forest stronghold, the woodcutters outside celebrate the chopping down of trees, “grands arbres dont la mort nous donne le pain,” they sing.88 Rejecting the incarnated messiah, giver of daily bread, the lovers embrace the violence done to the forest sanctuary and to the body that had protected them. An epithalamium and elegy, Sara’s poetic invitation au voyage sings the world’s beauty, evoking the oleander of Cadiz and the porcelain abodes of Yedo. Narrating a waking vision, le Verbe expresses an ecstatic insight, a dream that discourages awakening. Transmuting profane into spiritual love, the language of love performs the alchemical operation that makes life superfluous. Passion as

85

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 660. Ibid., p. 661. 87 Ibid., p. 664. 88 Ibid., p. 676. 86

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suffering is the ordeal undergone in speech that refines instinct’s base material into the gold of disembodied union. As Lévi writes: “L’amour est un des grands instruments du pouvoir magique,” but if expressed in the sexual act, it fades like “un mirage imaginaire.”89 The trophy heads mounted on Axël’s walls symbolize desires that are mastered, impulses that are controlled, “[l]es animaux [étant] la figure de nos passions, […] les forces instinctives de la nature.”90 Transposed onto the level of discourse, the alchemical operation purifies erotic love, accomplishing an elevation of passion from lustful act to noble language. In Villiers’s final scene, passionate discovery is accompanied by a breach of the subject’s defenses as skin is pierced and trees fall, compromising the haughty inviolability of a character whose economy of language gives way to a flow of blood and speech. Translating desire into lyricism, le Verbe completes the process of purification. Depicted in “l’épreuve par l’or et par l’amour,” Villiers’s reflection on spagyrical operations explores a transformation that is at once corporeal, spiritual, and linguistic. It is in Villiers’ sense of the alchemy of suffering that he reconciles his tendencies toward occultism and Christianity. Abstaining from the act, the lovers undergo an ordeal that turns ordinary language into poetry, as the Word becomes an aurefying agent that uplifts and refines the speaker. It is against this backdrop that Villiers communicates the value of the text that survives, a material object that continues to speak after the lovers are silenced by death. Against the Suicide of Literature In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade explains that practitioners of the secret science modeled their work on Christ’s Passion. “All in all,” writes Eliade, “the alchemist treats his Matter as God was treated in the mysteries; the mineral substances ‘suffer’, ‘die’, or ‘are reborn’ to another mode of being.”91 Corresponding to the torture and resurrection of the initiate are the purification of matter and its conversion into gold, the elevation of speech and its 89

Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 94. Ibid., p. 58. 91 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible (Chicago: The Chicago UP, 1956), p. 150. 90

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transformation into song. As Eliade elaborates, the alchemists’ innovation was to project “on to matter the initiatory function of suffering” so that, just as the adept dies and changes, “the substance is transmuted, that is, attains a transcendental mode of being,” becoming gold which, as Eliade says, “is the symbol of immortality.”92 However, the lovers’ death brings a suspension of the operative magic of le Verbe, one supplemented by the remaining lines of Villiers’s text. Flown, the couple vacates the world for an uncharted motherland. When Sara speaks regretfully of the forfeiture of youth, freedom, the fulness of a breaking dawn, Axël challenges her, describing their unlived lives as already dead, an awaiting graveyard of disenchantment. Adopting the futur antérieur used by Janus, he describes the ineluctably bleak destiny of every mortal being. Sara’s exalted visions are money unexchanged for the shoddy merchandise of experience. Their words of love are the true alchemical concentrate redeeming the base substance of reality: “A quoi bon monnayer […] cette drachme d’or à l’effigie du rêve – obole du Styx – qui scintille entre nos mains triomphales”93 (672). The material symbol of the alchemist’s esoteric wisdom, the Auersperg gold is all that remains after the couple drinks the poison. A precious corpse, it is still of inferior worth to what escapes the phenomenal world. Glittering coins, pearl strands are the body of time that one can only rise above. At the end, Axël attains an understanding of Janus’s philosophy of asceticism, of riches won through detachment and impassivity. To Sara, he says: “L’homme n’emporte dans la mort que ce qu’il renonça de posséder dans la vie. En vérité – nous ne laissons ici qu’une écorce vide. Ce qui fait la valeur de ce trésor est en nous-mêmes.”94 Yet as concretizing of le Verbe, Villiers’s text is valuable precisely because it is a husk, the physical form remaining after his lessons are imparted to readers. In Villiers’s written word, le Verbe achieves its survival and continuance, as objects go on speaking after human speakers pass away, and the longevity of Villiers’s drama exceeds the duration of transient characters. It is in the author’s resolution to choose literature and life that he effects the divergence of the asymptote and curve. The blessed place where Axël and Sara hope 92

Ibid., p. 151. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 672. 94 Ibid., p. 674. 93

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to go lies outside the realm of language as written by Villiers and as spoken by his characters. The lovers may achieve a transcendence forbidden the author, but what is equally important is the world in which the writer remains behind with his audience. “Live?” as one might write in a paraphrase of Villiers. “Our literature will do that for us.” In his biography, Raitt chronicles Villiers’s struggle to give a Christian conclusion to his drama. Fearful of appearing to endorse the lovers’ suicide, Villiers resisted the temptation to redesign his work, correctly doubting that if he did so, “the resultant hybrid could have been aesthetically satisfactory.”95 Janus’ deprecation of the body and its weaknesses is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. But in Lévi’s conception of the operational magic of le Verbe, the act that the word performs leaves behind no material evidence of its accomplishment, and the risen Christ is spiritualized gold produced by the transmutation of his crucified body. With its emphasis on the visibility and material persistence of forms and things, Villiers’s text, in its final pages, assumes a more orthodox Christian stance. Sara is justifiably reluctant to leave the world of youth and happiness since neither her nor Villiers’s language can represent the state of being after death: “Nous savons ce que nous quittons,” she says: “non pas ce que nous allons trouver.”96 What is abandoned are the entwined cadavers on the floor of the castle crypt, gold embodying the pleasures that the lovers leave unenjoyed, the écorce vide of Villiers’ text that outlives his efforts to reshape it. An experience of the absolute described by the meeting of the curve and asymptote, the eternity to which the lovers escape is a place no literature can compass. As the Archdeacon remarks in his allusion to the Psalmist, one cannot enter the realm of the written word and still gain access to God’s kingdom: “Quoniam non cognovi litteraturam, introibo in potentias Dei.”97 When Lévi asserts that the philosophy of le Verbe is “la philosophie des actions et des faits accomplis,”98 he implies that, in their articulation, ideas destroy the evidence of their implementation. 95

Alan Raitt, The Life of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Oxford: Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 356. 96 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 674. 97 Ibid., p. 545. 98 Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, p. 13.

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It is this principle that converts matter into energy, auream into sapientia, creation into proof of the efficacy of the Logos. Opposing the occultist emphasis on the lovers’ ascension and liberation from the bonds of desire, Villiers returns to the Christian domain of suffering, matter, and time. Instead of foregrounding the Magus transformed by the power of his word, Villiers refocuses on the enuciatory source of language, the people and things that speak. Conflating the glint from the coins and the gold of the dawn, Villiers assigns the last word to the treasure itself, which, in his drama, is the real agent of transformation, capable of degrading or purifying. Returning to the time of desire – a present of anticipation and a future of hope – the image of the Auersperg gold brings the reader back to the realm of human temporality, the time of life in a body whose fate is to die: “Une pièce d’or tombe, roule et sonne comme l’heure contre un sépulcre.”99 By imbibing the poison in Sara’s emerald ring, the couple turns away from the voice of Creation. Choosing le Verbe contained in the infinite – “oublieux des autres paroles humaines”100 – they cease to see a world where a new day is breaking and where their attendants are preparing to marry. In death, they are silent, oblivious to “les mensonges qui éblouissent les yeux faits pour s’éteindre.”101 For Villiers, the treasure remains after the disappearance of the lovers who decline to enjoy it. Even after the world’s redemption by a martyred savior, his body is still visible on the cross. Chronicling the evolution of Villiers’s drama, Raitt describes Axël as a life-long project, one the author constantly edited, expanded, and amended in an effort to ensure its formal perfection. Undertaken as early as 1869, Axël, as Raitt says, “représentait pour Villiers une somme, à laquelle il voulait incorporer toute son expérience d’artiste, de penseur et d’homme.”102 Succumbing to the temptation to sublimate the textual body into the performative effect of la parole, Villiers often insisted on giving public readings from Axël, usually rambling, disjointed fragments that left his audience disoriented. As an épreuve passionnelle, the writing of Axël did not culminate in the author’s apotheosis, nor did it end with the meeting of the asymptote and curve. It was Villiers’s creativity that was subjected 99

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 677. Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Raitt, Introduction, p. 1409. 100

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to the torture of transmutation, like material purified by fire and refined in the crucible. For Janus, the initiate who is freed from the cycles of incarnation – who no longer suffers from “l’immense misère du Devenir”103 – is recognizable by his absence, having risen into the ineffability of “l’Intemporel” and become an “esprit purifié […] en l’Esprit Absolu.” But in Axël, only the lovers’ death affords an escape from the new day, and la parole tue is succeeded by a renewal of “le bourdonnement de la Vie.”104

103 104

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, p. 639. Ibid., p. 677.

Chapter Three Change Self-acknowledged palinodist, enemy of all political or aesthetic positions that risked fossilization or verged on sclerosis, Octave Mirbeau practiced art as an expression of self-liberating inconsistency – a form of anarchism of the kind he professed over the course of his career. Each novel Mirbeau wrote contained the germ of its supersession. Each novel was the locus of its decomposition and regeneration. For Mirbeau, the text was a machine “effecting its destruction as an object in order to generate the energy needed to conceive a newer model of itself.”1 Similarly, Rachilde’s oeuvre embodies the contradictoriness of gender politics, disclosing the latent misogynist inside the champion of strong women. Her female avenger’s hollow victories explain Rachilde’s later declaration Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe. In the realm of art as ideology, Decadence describes the divergence of the line and asymptote as authors use their writing as a means of transformation and renewal. For Mirbeau and Rachilde, the text is not the usual Decadent looking glass, in which an exalted subject gazes transfixed at a loveable reflection. If a literary work is a weapon in the war against oppression, it is also a principle of hygiene effecting salutary changes in the authors, ridding them of hateful impulses involving race and gender. In all of Mirbeau’s polemical writings on politics and art, he embraces a philoneism that legitimizes change. Mirbeau condemns the criminal bloodshed caused by Ravachol, the terrorist, but also acknowledges the detergent benefits of his violence: “C’est le coup de foudre auquel succède la joie du soleil.”2 Mirbeau’s endorsement of 1

Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), p. 13. 2 Octave Mirbeau, L’Endehors, May 1, 1892, Collection Pierre Michel.

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Impressionism, his enthusiasm for Rodin are as expressive of his antipathy for cultural institutions as they are indicative of his personal artistic predilections. Critic of colonialism, advocate for the indigent, Mirbeau espoused positions that invariably set him at odds with the status quo: “C’est l’histoire même de sa biographie,” as Christian Heslon writes: “rompre sans interrompre, […] se rebeller pour renouveler et non pour fonder à nouveau.”3 Beyond agitating for a state of permanent cultural upheaval, Mirbeau’s writings also showcased his struggle to make changes in himself. Rompre sans interrompre: Mirbeau’s fiction shows greater ideological continuity than often is suggested by his controversialist proclivities. An image better suited to the change at work in Mirbeau’s fiction is not the lightning storm but the hidden process of gestational development. Mirbeau’s novels make apparent that there is only a gradual evolution from the vehement anti-Republicanism evident in his Grimaces to the tolerance and utopianism toward which his later writings turn. Eléonore Reverzy focuses on the image of the fumier or manure pile as a metaphor for Mirbeau’s literature as slow and unclean transformation. With its filth and pestilential smell, the compost heap is an evocative figure, suggesting that healthy change results from unappetizing processes. The fumier combines the work of corruption and purification, as organic matter rots in order to fertilize the flower. The manure pile implies the homology of cleanliness and dirt, the scatological and sublime, base matter and the literature ennobling it. Since, as Reverzy remarks, “l’ordure est précisément ‘l’antidote de l’ordure,’ […], elle constitue […] un parfait oxymore.”4 It is as the site of the apparent convergence of the asymptote and curve – a display of anti-social themes in the fiction that expels them – that Mirbeau’s fiction is cleansed of its sordid motivations. The traditional isomorphism of Decadent authors and their characters is operative in Mirbeau only as he works out his old prejudices. Offal in the torture garden, the manure of misogyny and racism breaks down, releasing heat and miasmic vapors in Mirbeau’s novels. But Mirbeau’s 3

Christian Heslon, “Octave Mirbeau, un enfant rebelle dans les révolutions esthétiques,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 9 (2002), p. 174. 4 Eléonore Reverzy, “Mirbeau et le roman: de l’importance du fumier. De Dans le ciel (1891) aux 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901),” Un Moderne: Octave Mirbeau, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Eurédit, 2004), p. 104.

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work is unlike a conventional digestive apparatus, consuming the excrement of its material and voiding the purity of its treatment. In its subject matter, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre stresses uncleanness, shame, and secrecy. Yet while emphasizing hidden vices and soiled undergarments, the novel sanitizes coprophilia by incorporating it into fiction. Joseph is another gardener whose hands and character are dirty. He is the old Mirbeau still toiling in the soil of his bigotry. Célestine is similarly the archaic author of the diary of a chambermaid, a text wise in its cynicism but still unedited of its biases: contempt for the women whose sexual machinations are exposed, condescension toward the working class whose slovenliness is unromanticized. These characters are the stuff of their author’s longstanding prejudices, waste material which, as fertilizer, change hatred into tolerance. Rachilde’s writing also seethes with crude and violent energy, operating as a matrix of regenerative transformation. Catherine Bordeau in her analysis of La Marquise de Sade conflates Rachilde with a heroine unable to escape gender antagonisms. To Bordeau, Rachilde and Mary Barbe – the writer and her character – are simply women obliged to accept domesticity or “assume masculine roles that are abusive.”5 However, in Rachilde, the curve nears the asymptote only during the author’s transient identification with her heroine. The persistent sense of grievance caused by Rachilde’s professional humiliations, editors’ dismissal of the fledgling female novelist, are like the malodorous, black matter making up Mirbeau’s fertile compost heap. Revenge is toxic, dark, and fetid, acrid matter that enriches. But while it catalyzes change, it also contaminates and poisons. For Rachilde’s heroines, revenge equates the presence of dead enemies, the grotesqueness of their remains, with a rage that has not consumed its object. There is first the Amazon’s exultation over the cadaver of her adversary, then her unwillingness to relinquish the trophy of her fallen enemy. Either that or her nemesis proves feeble and unworthy so that her victim’s body is fetishized to mask the triumphant warrior’s emptiness. Since Rachilde’s hero cannot surrender the bitterness that animates her, she clings to the spoils of 5

Catherine Bordeau, “Women’s Environmental Influence and Social Change in Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade,” Romance Quarterly 50. 1 (Winter 2003), p. 24.

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her conquest, like Raoule to Jacques Silvert’s automaton, or like Mary to the transvestites she imagines piercing with hot needles. Unlike her characters, Rachilde uses writing to purge herself of vengefulness so that, by analyzing obsessive anger, she is able to let it go. In Rachilde’s practice of Decadent aesthetics, she is like her male contemporaries, rejecting the raw material of nature still unpurified by artifice. This crude and unrefined matter is the ineluctable datum of her sex, social constraints condemning her to be no more than who she is: an unwanted daughter, a submissive partner, an interloper in the world of publishing. In Rachilde’s representation of transformational aesthetics, women do not accept their gender but alter and embellish it in a way that authenticates their claim to dominance. Commenting on Rachilde’s heroines’ use of fashion to assert autonomy, Emily Apter describes the vestimentary code that expresses their aggressiveness. Apparel is a medium by which women contest male authority. “For lurking in the folds of the hyper-sexualized fashions of the femme fatale – the slashed fronts, pinched corsetry, bulging bustles, and mawkish ornamentation of dead birds and frozen nature – lies not the malleable coquette, but the weaponized woman, ready for battle in the bedroom and on the front.”6 In the utilization of fashion as a means to arrogate male power, Rachilde’s character can do no more than turn her oppressors’ weapons back against them. The apparel, jewelry, and fashion accessories that particularize her gender are redesigned to inflict harm on the men who had appreciated them. In Rachilde, garments wound, beauty punishes, and women have the look that kills. Ultimately, it is in the novel that Rachilde discovers the obsolescence of traditional tactics in the gender wars. As an author, she is able to transcend the unnegotiable fact of gender. Being a woman means acquiescing to the fatal decree of her biology. Being an author reconfers on her the prerogative to choose. Allowing the exercise of creativity, Rachilde’s fiction is the place where redesigning her identity becomes the inaugural work of art.

6

Emily Apter, “Weaponizing the Femme Fatale: Rachilde’s Lethal Amazon, La Marquise de Sade,” Fashion Theory 8. 3 (2004), p. 263

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Dogs, Parrots, Jews, and Women: Octave Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre Among the most outspoken and politically engaged writers of his generation, Octave Mirbeau displayed far different ideological sympathies at the start of his career. While he was later to become a fervent partisan of Dreyfus and an ally and defender of anarchist Jean Grave, in the early 1880’s Mirbeau displayed ardent anti-Republicanism, an indignation with the financeers he saw as pillaging the country. These sentiments were permeated with a vitriolic antipathy for Jews. As Mirbeau’s views became more progressive, his antiSemitism softened, at the same time that his misogyny grew less strident and obsessive. Often the violent subjects that distinguish Mirbeau’s novels seem like thematic residue of prejudices that were archaic yet unresolved. Impulses which creative work allows Mirbeau to bring to consciousness, they were discharged and evacuated through the therapeutic work of writing. The process by which Mirbeau performed this fictional selfhealing follows the asymptotic movement of approach and separation. Mirbeau apprehends the hateful feelings that are projected on a character whom he repudiates as an unacceptable aspect of himself. An initial identification with a misogynist or Jew-hater is followed by a dissociation redefining Mirbeau’s sense of self. The creative work of writing enables greater clarity and self-awareness, as Mirbeau judges the defects he externalizes in his work, then rids himself of attitudes that had inhibited his growth. However, in spite of his ability to purge these negative beliefs, a persistent sense of pessimism continued to color Mirbeau’s thinking, stifling his hope in humanity’s perfectibilty and discouraging him from entertaining utopian ideals. Mirbeau’s prejudices are fantasmatic characters who occupy a prominent place in his fiction – the rapacious maenad, the impotent artist, the cynical plutocrat, the Jewish speculator. These figures no longer are the object of Mirbeau’s horrified revulsion once they are analyzed and expelled through the dissociative process of fictionalization. As in the clinical setting, unconscious material ceases to exercise control when it assumes a recognizable form as a consequence of its

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expression. Mirbeau’s novels are archival storehouses for desires that are mastered, fears that are exorcised. An ungovernable impulse, evident as a textual gap or narrative syncope, assumes the flesh of language and then can be wrestled with and subjugated. In his most celebrated novel, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), Mirbeau assigns antipodal positions to aggressive impulses and creative elucidation. The monster in the story, a man both brutal and inarticulate, exists below the level of humanity and description. By creating the character of Joseph, Mirbeau shines a lamp on his unconscious; by embodying his darkest impulses, he uses his writing to be free of them. Characters as Developmental Stages: Joseph and Instinct More than in preceding works, Mirbeau’s fictional adaptation of the diary of a chambermaid takes as its subject the act of writing as the successive layering of analytical exposition. The most obvious purpose of Célestine’s journal is the revelation of dirty secrets, narrative disrobing of what ordinarily is dressed in silence or adorned with the euphemism of hypocrisy. Upper-class mistresses wearing gowns of probity are stripped of their pretense, made to stand exposed in the dirty linen of their vice. Yet while Célestine’s ostensible goal is to uncover and disclose, her writing, as Mirbeau comments, is too crude “dans son débraillé.”7 Her text is still pocked with shadows of ignorance and unawareness, lacunae which mark her failure to know herself or understand others. Her diary occupies the place between the inexpressibility of Joseph’s instinctual violence and the eloquent transparency of Mirbeau’s revisionistic explanation. Mirbeau’s book supplies an archeology of the author’s consciousness, as on the deepest level, the primitive drives are invested in the figure of Joseph. Identifiable by their resistance to linguistic formulation, Mirbeau’s vestigial anti-Semitism, his misogyny, and attraction to sensualist mysticism are imputed to Célestine, who occupies an intermediate stage in his development. Finally, the lucidity displayed by Mirbeau’s narrator – his ability to express, explain, and discredit violent prejudices – shows the 7

Octave Mirbeau, “Avertissement,” Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Oeuvre romanesque, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 479.

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ascendancy of Mirbeau’s progressive ideology over his pessimistic view of man as brutish, mute, and violent. Yet, despite the psychological evolution of Mirbeau’s thought, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre attests to Mirbeau’s longstanding anti-utopian convictions. The novel should describe a continuum moving from Joseph’s animal spontaneity to the author’s analytical clairvoyance, culminating in what should be a triumph of selfunderstanding and situational mastery. However, Mirbeau’s own progression toward social tolerance and self-awareness did not cancel his jaundiced view of humanity as flawed by selfishness and ignorance. For Mirbeau, attainment of a just society remained an impossibility. In Mirbeau’s fusion of sociology and physics, no political system or work of art can exist in a state of equilibrium. The state of artistic perfection or utopian balance soon collapses, giving way to entropic exhaustion. When energy is no longer expended and work is no longer performed, the immobility of harmony gives way to depletion, loss, decay. In the mythical figure of Joseph, in whom Mirbeau’s unconscious becomes language, the impenetrability of the character corresponds to the tautological indisputability of his worldview. Joseph’s glorification of tradition, hierarchy, agrarianism, and Catholic orthodoxy defines his attraction to what he sees as unalterable and self-justifying. Mirbeau’s fiction is structured by “un ordre déterminé par la contingence universelle et textuelle” – grounded “dans une origine chaotique/anarchique qui précède […] l’imposition arbitraire de tout système gouvernemental.”8 However, Joseph’s conception of the stability of France as motherland perpetuates an order that admits of no questioning and benefits from no improvement. The world of economic imbalance and class strife in which Joseph is a victim is also the world that he champions so insistently. As an agent of remediation and social change, Mirbeau bases his writing on the premise that every political system, every work of art is completed only so that its incompletion be discovered. In Mirbeau, perfection is an imposture that motivates the anarchist’s campaign to restore a state of fragmentation requiring efforts to move forward toward an approximation of unattainable justice. Célestine’s mis8

Enda McCaffrey, “Le Nationalisme, l’ordre, et Le Journal d’une femme de chambre”, Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 7 (2001), p. 103.

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tresses, pretending to be paragons of philanthropic beneficence, models of marital constancy, are exposed as wantons and prodigals. While, on the surface, Célestine’s diary aims to discredit superficiality, it also illustrates the reality of social instability and class interpenetration. Aristocrats are treated with less courtesy than their grooms; wealthy landowners demean themselves to earn the sexual favors of domestics. The more highly articulated a social system by social rank and semantic nuance, the more inevitable is its reversion to an undifferentiated muddle. Homosexuality, egalitarianism, xenophobia, redistribution of wealth by thieves and wastrels – all tend toward an original state of inexpressibility and sameness. A social order whose oppressiveness is revealed in Célestine’s writing is one whose pretensions to legitimacy and inherence are refuted by the confusion of high and low, the blending of public and private. There are no functional boundary markers or gender differences when Célestine’s mistress from la rue de Lincoln carries a dildo in a velvet case on her car trips, when a priapic gargoyle’s phallus is mistaken for a sacred relic, when a tidy old gentleman scours mud from his chambermaid’s shoes. No redemptive Logos is born of the union of Joseph and Mary (as Célestine is rechristened by employers), nothing that names and that, by identifying, divides and clarifies. While it normally acts as a lamp that illuminates deceit, Célestine’s text is a light extinguished when she succumbs to her attraction to Joseph. It is during her service to a former employer, the tubercular M. Georges, a consumptive whose morbid eroticism is enflamed by love for the poetry of Maeterlinck, that Célestine first discovers her literary vocation. An appreciation of the sublime born of selfless care and devotional passion had prompted, as Célestine says, “cet élan vers des choses supérieures […] à moi-même.” For the confidence to write, as she says, “c’est à M. Georges que je le dois.”9 Without hesitation, Célestine concurs with the invalid’s appraisal of the verses of Baudelaire. It is not the sophisticated, the experienced, the learned who most readily savor such beauty. Rather, in order to delight in the poetic image, “il suffit d’avoir […] une petite âme toute nue, comme 9

Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Oeuvre romanesque, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 2001), p. 476.

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une fleur.”10 More incredible than what Lucien Bodard calls, “le miracle de la femme de chambre transmuée en génie littéraire.”11 is Célestine’s acceptance of candor as the basis for literary sensitivity. A scatographic inventory of the depravity of employers and domestics alike, Célestine’s journal smells more of sulfur than of innocence and flowers. Whetted by Mirbeau’s cynicism, Célestine’s attacks are caustic and pointed, their purpose not to inspire but to puncture and deflate. Through the medium of his heroine, Mirbeau ridicules the rarefied preciosity of pre-Raphaelite poetasters like Frédéric-Ossian Pingleton and John-Giotto Farfadetti, poseurs with their masochistic soul communions. No paean to the purity of narcissus blossoms, the splendor of ocellated peacock plumage – no hymn to the sanctity of the Liebestod – Célestine’s journal splashes perverts with the corrosive lye of the truth. Notwithstanding her professions of gratitude to M. Georges, Célestine’s journal is incriminating and probative, not romantic and absolving. “Pour moi, c’est bien simple,” she writes, “je n’ai vu que du sale argent et que de mauvais riches”12 (402). Slashing veils and tearing off masks, Célestine aspires to prosecutorial hyperacuity. Incisive, penetrating, her language arraigns the fraud and disarms the charlatan. Incest, Sapphism, pedophilia, fetishism: Célestine has shown in writing all the vices she has seen, and that is why, in the presence of Joseph, her inarticulateness is so surprising. Célestine and the Failure of Self-analysis Occupying an intermediate stage of Mirbeau’s broadening consciousness, Célestine relates to Joseph as to feelings and attitudes still resistant to analysis. Exhibiting perfect lucidity when detecting others’ foibles, she is less sure and more groping when compelled to explain her own – as if interpretively paralyzed by her ambivalence toward her fellow servant. To Célestine, Joseph is the unutterable, the id, the beast, the child-murderer. He is a reflection of herself as a failure of language, the incapacity to explain. Joseph’s character is a

10

Ibid. Lucien Bodard, Préface, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1986), p. vii. 12 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 402. 11

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cavern no analysis can plumb: “vous et moi, dans le fin fond de l’âme, c’est la même chose,” as he advises her.13 The pleasure Joseph derives from killing animals is related to his hatred of the outsiders he stigmatizes as cosmopolitans. The poverty of his self-expression, the banality of his ideas, the inhuman neutrality of his living quarters place him outside the reach of language. In Joseph’s presence, the verbal assurance that Célestine normally demonstrates gives way to dumbstruck bafflement and stammering mystification. Usually discerning and intuitive, she is powerless to understand the raw destructiveness of Joseph or the fascination she has for him. In Célestine’s characterization of Joseph, she emphasizes the heaviness of his gait, the weight of an animal body that slows his walk and inhibits her analysis: he advances as if a ball and chain were welded to his ankles. Doubling the physical features of the visual object are the dulled perceptions of the viewer, making the one who looks like the one who is seen. Ponderous in the movements that Célestine considers, Joseph has a look that is “lourd à supporter.”14 Lexically impoverished, ungrammatical in his utterances, Joseph is rendered in Célestine’s diary in repetitious theriomorphic imagery: his neck is “un paquet de muscles dur comme en ont les loups.”15 His intolerance for the vagrants that he chases away from the Priory makes him “flaireur et menaçant comme un dogue.”16 Corresponding to “cette puissance musculaire, […] cette carrure de taureau”17 is the futile repetitiousness of Célestine’s analytical vocabulary. In the presence of M. Georges, words had flown in a sky of ineffable lyricism, powerless to capture things too high, too impalpable, too pure. When she moves into the shadowy sphere of Joseph’s influence, language sinks into an underground of atavistic imprecision. Joseph courts her, not with flattery, but with pheromonal emanations, the savanna idiom of musky animals that speaks to creatures in heat. Accustomed to the cleverness of bons vivants, the facile psychology of Paul Bourget, Célestine initially dismisses Joseph as a 13

Ibid., p. 514. Ibid., p. 504. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid 14

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dolt. Indeed, Célestine had described herself as “[q]uelque chose d’intermédiare entre un chien et un perroquet”18 and so had learned to emulate canine servility, the mimicry of talking birds. But eventually, Joseph’s male brutality addresses her with greater eloquence that the witticisms coined by bantering employers. With Joseph, Célestine’s usual talent for anatomizing imposture gives way to questions she is unable to answer. The journal becomes a mirror reflecting the absent face of the woman writing it: “je ne sais comment m’exprimer sur lui,” she writes of the object of her fascination.19 Conservative, totalizing, Joseph’s political ideology is silent on issues of social injustice and worker exploitation. Conversely, Célestine’s worldview is fluid and unstable, reflecting her perception of a society and self whose harmonious integration is illusory. As Carmen Boustani writes: “Mirbeau dénonce, en la personne de Célestine, la condition des domestiques au début du siècle, opposant la révolte qui démarque les bonnes […] à la soumission des serviteurs de l’Ancien Régime, représentés en la personne de Joseph.”20 Despite Joseph’s practice of criminality as subversion, he is an outspoken defender of hierarchy and order, advocating the individual’s subordination to the interests of the collectivity. Abdicating the prerogative of self-definition in favor of the institutions he supports – church, race, nation, gender – he equates an inviolable social order with the unassailability of his person. No fundamental reordering of society is necessary if one simply changes place with privileged oppressors. Mirbeau’s cynical conclusion has not been lost on readers, who see Célestine stop disparaging her shrewish bourgeois mistresses when she rises to their level. Spouting anti-Jewish slogans, she adopts the political position most useful in maximizing profit in her café. Figuring unconscious impulses which, in being expressed, are then dispelled, Joseph is initially unavailable to analysis and symbolization. Displaced onto Célestine as a representation of the author’s prejudices, Joseph’s views on patriotism, ethnicity, and sex are conundrums that cannot be articulated. If Joseph is anti-Semitism, 18

Ibid., p. 472. Ibid., p. 505. 20 Carmen Boustani, “L’Entre-deux dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 8 (2001), p. 75. 19

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misogyny, and bigotry, enthrallment to the torture of the weak and dispossessed – if Célestine is the irresistible attraction to these impulses – Mirbeau is the analytical clairvoyance that rids him of these feelings. The Anti-Semite Exhibiting the banality of the most intractable of hatreds, Joseph professes anti-Semitic notions of the kind that Mirbeau had advanced at the time of his writing Les Grimaces: stereotypes of the itinerant Jew unanchored in soil or tradition, elusive and ubiquitous with his portable wealth, insinuating himself everywhere, contaminating everyone with the seductiveness of his money, his guile, and his womenfolk.21 Different from fin-de-siècle Catholics likes Huysmans, whose anti-Semitism was grounded in religion and who regarded Jews as Christ-killers, writers like Lorrain and Mirbeau propagated commonplace superstitions of Jews as multiplying wealth through cunning, not work. While more moderate, images of Jewish bankers and investors adept in siring gold from gold appear in Mirbeau’s fiction as late as La 628-E8 (1907), where the narrator’s acquaintance, the metals trader Weil-See, carries to caricatural extremes the picture of the Jew as a statistician trafficking in probabilities, who takes matter and, through his intelligence, refines it into sophistries and numbers. Because the Jew is logomancy, he is exposed by the antiSemite, whose sincerity cannot be questioned and whose veracity goes without saying. From the standpoint of race, politics, sex, and metaphysics, Joseph’s world is a plenum impervious to modification. Unreceptive to meliorist notions of progress and construction, Joseph rejects the future as promise and embraces the present as satisfaction. Castration fears generated by antipathy for anything seen as incomplete, intolerance for imperfect states awaiting improvement or correction determine Joseph’s anti-feminism, his loathing of Jewish bodies and 21 In “L’Invasion,” an article of September 15, 1983, Mirbeau writes venomously of Jews: “Aujourd’hui ils roulent leurs sacs d’écus sur nos consciences et nos dignités. Paris s’est laissé envahir, puis conquérir par le juif qui l’exploite âprement: le mâle avec la toute-puissance de son argent, la femelle avec la toute-puissance de sa beauté” (qtd. in Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, Octave Mirbeau: L’Imprécateur au coeur fidèle (Paris: Séguier, 1990), p. 166.

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Jewish culture. Eschatologically, the Jew who hopes for fulfillment of the covenant experiences the present as empty, registering time as deferment and desire. This deficient temporality, the absence of an end point define Jews as bouts coupés as they are derogatorily referred to by Joseph and his friend, the sacristan. Despite his fulminations and threats of patriotic bloodletting, Joseph’s anti-Semitic rage is expressed in conventional racist iconography, as he memorizes anti-Jewish songs, collects and distributes defamatory pamphlets, and decorates his bedroom with portraits of Drumont and the Pope. Joseph’s bigotry expresses a kind of anti-art and is limited to disseminating images and repeating ideas whose noxiousness is attenuated by their unoriginality. The indescribability of Jews and people’s reasons for despising them explain the prevalent image of their protean stealth and mimeticism. Joseph universalizes Jews as the principle of their imperceptible alterity. One can recognize a Jew because he is indistinguishable from everybody. Because he is invisible, as Sandor Gilman says, the Jew is not the object of individual physical violence but of general persecution. For Joseph, Jews are collectivized as a people to be obliterated: “The Jew is attacked in his religious identity,” as Gilman elaborates, “in his history, in his race […]; every time a Jew is persecuted, it is the whole race that is persecuted in his person.”22 Since Joseph has no reason for hating Jews, they become his failure to identify them. They are the strangers who leave France imperiled because they cannot be named or seen. Joseph “englobe, dans une même haine, protestants, francs-maçons, libres-penseurs, tous les brigands qui ne mettent jamais le pied à l’église, et qui ne sont, d’ailleurs, que des juifs déguisés.”23 Joseph’s nominative impotence extends to Célestine’s inability to classify. She has heard that Jews are rich, yet she knows that there is only dirty money. She has been told that Jews are cunning, that they are acquisitive and avaricious but finds that excremental wealth also accumulates “dans les maisons catholiques.”24 The taxonomic exactitude of the diarist who catalogues perversions disappears when Célestine falls under the brutal groundskeeper’s sway. She differs from Joseph only in acknowledging that 22

Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 198. Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 465. 24 Ibid., p. 466. 23

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her language does not accommodate anti-Semitism: “lorsque je m’interroge sérieusement,” she says, “je ne sais pas pourquoi je suis contre les juifs.”25 Establishing a homologous relationship between mistresses and chambermaids, authoritarians and anarchists, Mirbeau shows Joseph resembling the treacherous Jew of myth – breeding trust, profiting from other people’s tolerant inattention. Joseph absconds with the inherited valuables of the genuine propertied class as he masterminds a scheme to steal the Lanlaires’ priceless silver service. In appropriating the symbolic power of the established ruling class, Joseph commits an act of aggression incurring the threat of punishment and exile. Corresponding to Joseph’s aspiration to be the Jew and his persecutor, the executioner and his victim, is Célestine’s perception of him as paradoxical and mysterious. Like the Jew, Joseph is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, seductive and repulsive, real and immaterial. As she watches from the laundry room while Joseph plants rows of vegetables in the garden, he is abolished, then reembodied; he disappears, then takes on form. “D’où vient-il? D’où sort-il. D’où est-il tombé?”26 Joseph’s ontological intermittency, the periodicity of his existence – his being there, then gone – reflects Célestine’s alternating understanding and bewilderment. Sometimes Joseph acquires the material weight of Célestine’s descriptions. Sometimes, when he is unrealized, he vanishes into the absence of her words. Although Mirbeau’s text never categorically establishes Joseph’s guilt, he is suspected by Célestine of raping and killing la petite Claire. While there are other possible perpetrators, Joseph’s evasiveness and cruelty convince Célestine that Joseph had disemboweled the adolescent girl. Sparking Joseph’s violence are unfulfilled promises of satisfaction, false harbingers of contentment. Joseph often feels betrayed by oral and sexual instruments of pleasure. Knowing that his hunger, once sated, will inevitably return, he continues to twist a pin in the brain of a duck being slaughtered for dinner, and is presumed to have commited a gratuitously violent act on a girl he leaves dead, exposed, and defiled. 25 26

Ibid. Ibid., p. 506.

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Perhaps Joseph’s sadistic excesses derive from disappointed utopianism, an unrealizable dream of serving a just God and benevolent master, a wish to experience stability with a faithful wife and a plentiful meal. Castration fears underlie this insistence that what exists be whole and sufficient, and his rage explodes when he discovers objects that are defective, sham, or impermanent. The important theme of fetishism that Mirbeau showcases in his novel begins with the lampooning of M. Rabour, one of Célestine’s previous employers, who substitutes female footwear for the missing maternal phallus. Rabour is a comic forerunner of the silent, brooding Joseph, who hates everything unfinished: the circumcised Jew whom Joseph abhors and emulates, the woman whose genital lack triggers lust and horror, the animals whose weakness elicits muscular violence on the part of the person who tortures them. Joseph’s political and sexual ideals presuppose the existence of a lost world of harmonious relationships. It is because of women’s genital difference that men are exiled to a time of desire and dispossession, consigned to inhabit a torture garden where other beings disturb the peace and catalyze change. The Fetishist and the Coprophile If Joseph is the assassin and rapist that Célestine presumes him to be, his perversion manifests a form of fetishism that replaces the object with the object’s effect. Instead of the undergarment or shoe which, because of its position and form, substitutes for the phallus, it is the alleviation of castration anxiety that Joseph’s fetishism intends directly. The violent misogynist who attacks women rather than subduing his appetites desires, not orgasm, but equanimity born of sexual impassivity. With his blood-injected eyes and hideous leer, the man who delights in an animal’s death throes is serenely unresponsive to Célestine’s overtures. While acknowledging his hunger for Célestine (“Je rêve de vous, Célestine, de vous dans le petit café. J’ai les sangs tournés de vous),”27 Joseph displays a terrifying calm in her presence. What Joseph wants from Célestine is an end to wanting, an elimination of the disturbances and disruptions born of desire and frustration, a recovery of instinctual unity coming from desires ful27

Ibid., p. 515.

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filled and desires eradicated, a recovery of the tranquil immutability deriving from obedience to a pulsion de mort. When Joseph looks at himself, he no longer sees a puppet manipulated by seductresses who deserve a knife thrust. He discovers himself in Célestine, whom he calls “une femme d’ordre.”28 With its wide-ranging theme of hygiene, Mirbeau’s novel pictures the social reality of fin-de-siècle France as anchored in shamelessness and coprophily, dirt, stains, lapses, the relaxation of sphincters controlling the release of foul truths and malodorous secrets. On the other hand, the utopia of Joseph’s repressive order is achievable only through acts of violence directed at oneself and at others. The myth that the bourgeois cherish is that they occupy a world that is clean and therefore timeless: “il s’agit bien pour la bourgeoisie de se croire imperturbablement immuable, hors du temps, de la chair et du pourrissement, qui constitueraient sa perte, et la presseraient de s’examiner [… ] comme déchet face à l’inexorable cycle naturel.”29 On the one hand, Célestine exults in detailing the truth of her employers’ hidden vices. Images of foetor and filth evoke a fallen reality in which immaterial things are reembodied, accorded a hyperphysicality by being soiled and corrupted. Squalor topologized as its majestic hiding place takes up residence in the homes of the rich: “la sale bicoque où il vivent dans la crasse de leur âme, le château.”30 Beautiful containers conflated with the ugliness of their contents make the graceful body an abode for the vileness of the soul, a velvet jewel case the repository of an inadmissible dildo, the silky package of words wrapping the cheapness of the idea. Célestine’s journal aims to rearrange the relation of surface to depth, taking the impurity of an inside concealed by the impenetrability of an outside and changing their places. In the world of the chambermaid, inner virtues are quickly destroyed. Unborn children, innocence carried in the bellies of their degraded mothers, are aborted by Mme. Gouin, whose practice censors love’s body. After Sunday Mass, all the maids congregate in the shop of Mme. Gouin, and their language emits the stench of slander. Turned 28

Ibid., p. 512. Gaétan Davoult, “Déchet et corporalité dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Quelques remarques),” Cahiers Octave Mirbeau 11 (2004), p. 130. 30 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 405. 29

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into anuses, mouths are faucets opened to release sewage, materializing contemptible actions and contemptuous commentary as evilsmelling objects. Servants’ gossip flows like the unclean river of their masters’ laxity, as the offal, the scraps, the waste emanating from Mme. Gouin’s shop form a confluence of innuendo spilling from the women’s lips: “flot ininterrompu d’ordures vomies par ces tristes bouches, comme d’un égout.”31 Here again, Célestine’s journal reinstalls the metaphor in a body, situating moral abstraction in a place given physical dimensions and properties, as the shop overlooks a humid courtyard stinking of brine and fermentation, and the dirty water flowing from the égout turns into the narrator’s dégoût.32 The imagistic richness of Célestine’s style comes from the origin of speech in experiences of tasting and swallowing. Honeyed words denote the gustatory savor of their referents, while disgusting images spat out on paper are there for everyone to see. As a record of disapproving expectoration, Célestine’s journal is most powerful when outrage as expression envelops the outrageousness of others’ actions. Condemnation of Mirbeau by those who tax him with pornography confuses the contents of his document with the effects of its publication. Dirty secrets are not real if complicitous silence swallows them, but when Célestine airs her masters’ soiled linen, the stench still rises from Mirbeau’s page. The Believer Different from the ventilating function of the diary, where crude description is commensurate with the crudeness of its subject, there is a deodorized vagueness to the ideals that Célestine expresses. When released into the air, repressed material smells offensive. But when sublimations are still operative, there is no sensory manifestation, no lust that makes a lecher drool, no aggression against victims who, once assimilated, are deposited as waste. When she gropes in vain to convey beliefs whose origins are unexplainable, Célestine’s style is blank, unscented, uncommunicative. Religious faith, attachment to her Breton homeland, romantic notions about love, endorsement of the 31 32

Ibid., p. 422. Ibid.

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conventions of genital heterosexuality are values whose justification is as inexpressible as Célestine’s reasons for hating Jews. When Célestine describes attending church, when she remembers her childhood in Audierne – when she recalls her first sexual encounter with the hairy sardine factory foreman, Cléophas Biscouille – her accounts are unemotional, uncritical, and detached. Experiences one would expect to elicit incredulity or horror are recounted in language rinsed of affect. Célestine’s customary perceptiveness is limited to remarking on her placid incomprehension. Vaporous transports buoyed by hymns and homilies, Célestine’s religion is a form of sentimentalized aestheticism. Church is a place of meditative decorum and prayerful euphony, a refuge from the sordidness of domesticity and servitude. Célestine’s journal mentions no God, no dogma, no prescriptive rules of Christian behavior. She aspires to no heaven and seemingly fears no hell. Like Joseph, who fills his room with mass-produced anti-Jewish bric-a-brac, Célestine puts out her copper crucifix, her porcelain statue of the Virgin, devotional gewgaws she groups with her “petits bibelots et les photographies de monsieur Jean.”33 On questions of faith, Mirbeau clearly distances himself from his character, and the curve moves away from the asymptote. Indeed, much of Mirbeau’s early fiction attacks religion as a moral analgesic, ocean swells of organ music inducing mystical effusions that carry the worshippers out of the realm of critical understanding – spiritual ecstasies definable by their inhospitality to language. Mirbeau’s indictment of Catholicism is based on more than its repressiveness. What he condemns is religion’s dissolution of the individual in the congregation’s stupid bliss, religion’s narcotizing of man’s analytical faculties with liturgy and ritual that deaden awareness of real social and political evils. Religion’s aim is to elevate man to a higher level of consciousness, allowing experience that is ineffable, that cannot be rationally explained. Like love and anti-Semitism, faith is what cannot be spoken. Mirbeau’s use of fiction to exorcise religion’s influence as an instrument of behavior conditioning and mind control had been evident in his depiction of schoolboy Sébastien Roch, enraptured by music, intoxicated by prayer and poetry, brainwashed by le Père de 33

Ibid., p. 400.

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Kern, the Jesuit teacher who rapes him (Sébastien Roch 1890). It is seen in l’Abbé Jules’s denunciation of religion for perverting man’s natural impulses through its praise of asceticism and chastity (L’Abbé Jules 1888). Still, Mirbeau’s characters are receptive to religion’s message of consolation, its quietist teaching, the gorgeousness of its pageantry, its doctrinal imperviousness to rational appraisal. When Mirbeau claims that he is supplementing or correcting Célestine’s manuscript, he is articulating and clarifying feelings that his heroine cannot understand. Critical of the oppressiveness of other social institutions, she can only say: “On aura beau dire et beau faire, la religion c’est toujours la religion.”34 The Misogynist With regard to Mirbeau’s anti-feminism, one need only recall his characterization of Juliette Roux in Le Calvaire, or recall the painter Lirat’s representation of ghoulish womanhood, his image of flabby-breasted ogresses with carmined check and reddened lips. There is Mirbeau’s more nuanced picture of Clara in Le Jardin des supplices, a hybrid creature whose sexuality partakes of the luxuriance of blood-irrigated flowers and whose fascination with torture shows her admiration for the instinctuality of beasts. However, in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, Mirbeau’s emancipation from the nightmare of sexual enslavement is demonstrated by his use of Célestine as the heroine. As a speaking subject endowed with psychological complexity, she is more than the focus of uncontrollable male desire. Like her predecessors, she uses her sexuality for the purpose of self-advancement, kindling passion in employers she deftly manipulates. No descendant of Zola’s Nana, a furnace consuming her lovers’ dignity and fortune, exchanging their integrity for the baubles that she smashes and discards, Célestine distinguishes herself from prostitutes. The pleasures Célestine dispenses are not monetarily remunerated but are repaid by enjoyment of her lovers’ whimpers and their revulsed eyes. In the memoirs of his heroine, Mirbeau comments on the diversity of her love-making practices: the vampiric necrophilia seen in her liaison with M. Georges, her lesbian tryst with Clé-Clé, a fellow 34

Ibid., p. 415.

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resident at the home run by the Sisters of Notre-Dame-des-Trente-six douleurs. Despite her experimentation, Célestine is conservative in her opinions regarding sex, indulgently disapproving of her mistress’s auto-erotic gadgetry, professing shocked dismay at the unnatural predilections of M. Rabour, found dead of apoplexy with Célestine’s shoe clenched in his teeth. “Et où vont-il chercher toutes leurs imaginations quand c’est si simple, quand c’est si bon de s’aimer gentiment… comme tout le monde.”35 Perverts, Jews – all those whom Célestine criticizes for seeking God or pleasure in different ways – are shadow objects of the residual bigotry of Mirbeau’s heroine. No matter what you say or do, sex, after all is always sex. It is the circular self-justification of religious and sexual convention that Mirbeau’s book illuminates. Moving from the unconscious, which Joseph figures as instinctuality, to the attitudinal and emotional blindness of an otherwise lucid heroine, Mirbeau ends by analyzing his own once unexplainable impulses. Irrational attachments, unwarranted antipathies are mastered once Mirbeau recognizes the persistence of their influence. Authorship and Self-mastery From this perspective, the Avertissement with which the novel opens supplies a theoretical statement on Mirbeau’s function in the novel. Raw material whose analytical processing is unfinished, the diary is ordered and arranged, becoming “de la simple littérature.” It is the emotional sincerity of Célestine’s text that gives it its “grâce un peu corrosive,”36 but it is Mirbeau’s elevation into consciousness of previously repressed material that exchanges the inarticulateness of the protagonist for literary mastery by the author. As the novel moves towards its conclusion, Célestine exhibits diminished clairvoyance. Her emotional confusion is projected on Joseph, described as increasingly unsignifying and opaque. Figuring the unconscious as blank space, black interstice, epistemological gap, Joseph is the enunciative lapse in Célestine’s narrative. Accessible in his meaninglessness, Joseph is a mystery for all to see.

35 36

Ibid., p. 387. Mirbeau, “Avertissement,” p. 379.

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Célestine’s habit of decoding others through inferential study of their habits, their clothes, and their residences is blocked by her inability to elucidate the feelings she represses. Stealing into Joseph’s room, she explores his possessions while he is absent, and the neutrality of her description is as bland as the banality of his living quarters. Joseph’s furnishings, Célestine’s perceptions and phrases are plain in their symbolic poverty. Destitute of images to convey the ordinariness of objects in full view, Célestine’s language reflects white walls, open drawers, neat closets. There are no semiotic recesses, no hiding places or locked containers holding conjecturally inspirational secrets. Joseph, who professes a dutiful professionalism, conventional religiosity, generic patriotism is objectified as the yellowing pages of a missal, his polished rodent traps, the triteness of devotional imagery. Unlike the fiercely guarded mystery of the criminal’s hideaway or pervert’s lair, Joseph’s place is a gardener’s supply room, a little chapel, “un muse consacré à un nationalisme inarticulé.”37 With her words as silent as their subject, Célestine’s text is the dark space in the diarist’s consciousness. “Décidément,” she writes, “Joseph communique à tout ce qu’il touche son impénétrabilité… Les objets qu’il possède sont muets, comme sa bouche, intraversables comme ses yeux et comme son front.”38 Toward the end, Célestine’s perceptual acuity is dulled by passion and complicity. Like the fetishist’s disavowal of the absent maternal phallus, the premise of the journal is exposing the fraud of bourgeois completeness. But with her experience of Joseph as both everything and nothing, she abandons the effort to look, to doubt, to inquire. Rather than acting as a probe, her writing functions like a wall, an impediment thwarting attempts at penetrative analysis. Shunning the hermeneutic promise of clarifying a partial object, she operates instead within the realm of evidence. Religion is religion; heterosexual intercourse is itself. Célestine’s text suggests that domestics are not more complex than their masters. Ancillaries who upstage their employers do not demonstrate the universality of human vice. Instead she shows them as total beings whose merit no literature need prove.

37

McCaffrey, “Le Nationalisme, l’ordre, et Le Journal d’une femme de chambre,” p. 102. 38 Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 591.

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One of Célestine’s consorts, a horse-connaisseur named William, had been crowned with a hat mirroring the moving pageantry of the sky. William’s headgear is the perfect canvas, the global image, art as the impossible capturer of simultaneity and transience. “Oh! les chapeaux de William, des chapeaux couleur d’eau profonde, où les ciels, les arbres, les rues, les fleuves, les foules, les hippodromes se succédaient en prodigieux reflets.”39 Gleaming with the sheen of sweat collected from the brow of William’s valet, the hat is the missing thing, the foreskin, the magic fetish that restores integrity and leaves the wearer uncastrated. Able to deny the incontrovertible reality of loss, it returns the servant to utopia, raising him above his status as a dog or parrot. As a reflection of counterfeits, the exposé should normally reveal and duplicate the fragmentariness of its subject. Yet along with Joseph, Célestine aspires to bourgeois autonomy. To her, money does not bring the abolition of objects abstracted as their value. Instead, money is status, and status is everything. The miserliness of the wealthy who prefer possessions to enjoyment is seen in their reluctance to reconvert money into pleasure. Joseph’s plan to steal the Lanlaires’ silver, including the Louis XVI cruet, is designed to punish the cupidity and self-privation of the master class while rewarding the disenfranchised with riches and revenge. Like all phenomena that transcend rationality and selfinterest, criminality partakes of the transgressivity of the sacred. Like sex and anti-Semitism, it affects Célestine on an instinctual level; its appeal is inexpressible, as she writes in her fumbling prose: “je ne sais comment exprimer cela […] ce que je ressens n’influence, n’exalte que ma chair… C’est comme une brutale secousse, dans tout mon être physique.”40 The theft constitutes no political affirmation of social egalitarianism. It expresses no outrage at class hierarchy or injustice. Instead, it establishes an inverse correlation between Célestine’s erotic reverence and use of stolen property to finance acquisition of the Cherbourg café. Joseph’s denigration of Jews, the stridency of his militarist sloganeering appear at the end not to be direct expressions of the unconscious but a strategy intended to bring customers to his bar. 39 40

Ibid., p. 630. Ibid., p. 655.

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Like Célestine – tricked out in “un petit décolletage guichant”41 – Joseph makes professions of nationalist sentiment in order to enhance his reputation as a proprietor. In Joseph, the ideological purity of genuine bigotry is exchanged for the businessman’s opportunism: “Et il n’y a rien comme le patriotisme pour saoûler les gens,” as he insists.42 It is as if, at the end of Célestine’s journal, in its elucidation of long-repressed feelings, the mystery of violent pathology, the prestige of true evil are made small and contemptible by being revealed as manifestations of selfish materialism. The torturer of animals, the supposed disemboweler of young girls loses the grandeur of the monster when he is shown to be a schemer. Rational analysis, as Mirbeau performs it, reduces the impressiveness of the devil to the paltriness of a petty criminal. The therapeutic aim of Mirbeau’s novel is not the exorcism of demons but the exploration of the neurosis he projects onto his characters and the resultant abatement of the symptoms they display. The terrifying person that exercised an irresistible magnetism is just a scarecrow that frightens those who cannot understand their feelings. If Joseph is the unspeakable body of instinct, and Celestine is a concatenation of conflicting emotions, Mirbeau is the diagnostician who resolves the problems his text poses. Le Journal d’une femme de chambre becomes a tool for authorial self-analysis, and as the process is completed, the curve grows distant from the asymptote. In this sense, Mirbeau’s work follows the familiar path of naturalist fiction, tracing the history of a character whose disorder is his difference, an anomalous trait whose treatment is the premise of the novel. The text supplies an etiology that changes evil into an illness whose cure marks the end of the story. Mirbeau’s book traces the movement from primitivism to reason – from the unconscious as sexual violence to a conscious examination of these impulses, whose understanding affords the author mastery and control. However, Mirbeau’s anarchist aesthetic is at odds with the dogma of naturalist theory and rejects implementation of a diagnostic method that ends in social homogeneity, creating a dull and intolerant world governed by obedience and egotism. 41 42

Ibid., p. 664. Ibid., p. 666.

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It is noteworthy that as Mirbeau succeeded in driving out his demons, their fictional embodiment became less frequent in his writings: the luscious nymphomaniac, the female engine of shame and ruin are figures that simultaneously disappear from Mirbeau’s plotlines and his psyche. The archaic social order whose injustices were the subject of Mirbeau’s criticism had been based on claims of moral authority, decorum, order, wholeness, and polish. If Joseph targets girls and animals, it is because he fears his animality is castrating. Rather than accepting the truth of human flaws, class oppression, and religious bigotry, he defends the institutions that have cast him as a victim, and then attacks the people that society has victimized. Joseph entertains the fantasy of his oxymoronic ideal, une femme d’ordre who protects against the disordering power of desire. He maintains that all is well in an undifferentiated Christian nation, despising Jews as outcasts since he fears he might be one himself. From the perspective of the Lanlaires, their heirloom silver is what matters. Salvation comes from the equation of ornament and value. Money is never spent or wasted, and a faithful servant is une perle. On the one hand, there is transparency, plenitude, false nacre; on the other, there is anarchic life exhibiting danger and dynamism. Gaéton Davoult notes that, in Mirbeau’s book, the bourgeois prize purity and reason, establishing an antiseptic world that is rational and inhuman. Despite pretensions to moral and vestimentary cleanness, their souls and undergarments are soiled. Intuiting that dirt is what identifies its producer, situating him in the biological time of mortality and decay, the bourgeois wishes to deny his descendancy from animals. As Davoult says: “l’intègre et l’impeccable, n’ayant pas de vécu, sont dans l’incapacité de se gratifier d’une histoire ou d’une mémoire, ils relèvent de l’inerte. Alors que le froissé, le sali, le fangeux inclut celui qui l’a porté. L’ancien et le ravage ont enregistré le passé et permettent de vaincre le temps.”43 Denying castration, the fetishist Rabour aspires to the inviolability of immortal bodies. His floors are waxed, his walls are dusted, his chambermaid’s boots are cleaned of mire. His world is like the Lanlaires’ silver, which is removed and polished annually. The Lanlaires cherish Joseph like a pearl because his service is everlasting. 43

Davoult, “Déchet et corporalité,” p. 123.

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Paranoiacs intent on marshalling armies of clerics, soldiers, physicians, and bedpan-emptiers, they seek to deny the reality of corporeity and establish the bourgeois culture of death. Yet, no matter how germ-free the subject is, there is the reality of his organicism. Dignity and hygiene are transparent masks that cannot hide the truth of human instinct. Even the irony of Célestine’s absorption into the propertied class signals the operation of a dynamic economy and the inevitable fact of class interpenetration. There are no stable hierarchies when grooms sport hats the color of sky, glistening with the perspiration gathered from their underlings. There is no unalterable social order when servants purchase their own businesses, then begin to abuse their servants and thereby reenact established patterns. The goal of Mirbeau’s novel is not to empty the unconscious. By ventilating secrets, one does not necessarily eliminate them. If Mirbeau entertains humanitarian aspirations concerning the reform of society, these involve assimilating people to animals endowed with the capacity for self-expression, allowing them to lay claim to the health of instinctual life. Opposing the bourgeois obsession with conformity and cleanliness is the individual’s invocation of his right to be deviant and different. The animals explicitly mentioned in Mirbeau’s novel are notable for their subservience to people. Zoomorphic metaphors for servants, dogs are valued for their servility, parrots because their speech is devoid of originality or thought. The Lanlaires’ neighbor, Captain Mauger, displaying the arrogance of species supremacism, tries to eliminate alterity by assimilating rare fauna to himself. Joseph’s wish to find une femme d’ordre is a wish to domesticate the female animal, taming his desire and the object it intends. In Mirbeau’s later novel Dingo (1912), the wild dog is glorious in its rebelliousness. Loyal, not obedient, Dingo is not an epigone of his master. Servants who cease to wag their tails and display their cringing sycophancy – who stop psitacistically repeating the language that oppresses them – are able to recognize their rightful place in society and seize the power they need to occupy it. Mirbeau’s admiration for engineers and technologists derives from his wish that man be unified, acting at once as the architect and the construct he imagines. Liberated from the chimera of metaphysical

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guilt and sexual repression, he ceases to be an animal whose depravity is thinking. It is remorse, not natural behavior that is wrong in Mirbeau’s estimation, a horror of reproduction, not the genital organs that is disgusting. Rejecting dreams of angelicism and disembodiment, man regains the harmonious integration of his body and intelligence. In Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, bourgeois women reject duality, professing to be virtuous on the inside, decorous on the outside, immaculate in their ball gowns and their souls. But morality is a masquerade, and Célestine, after exposing others’ imposture, puts on “un joli costume d’Alsacienne”44 to encourage patrons’ beer consumption. When Célestine is last seen serving drinks in A l’Armée Française, she has evolved no further in understanding her feelings or in being able to verbalize them. Still inhabiting the pre-scientific world of magic and superstition, she is enthralled by the infernal Joseph, whose charisma is bred of ignorance. Volitionally impaired, Célestine is under the dominion of the unconscious: “Au fond, je suis sans force contre la volonté de Joseph. Malgré ce petit accès de révolte, Joseph […] me possède comme un démon.”45 It is incumbent on Mirbeau to supplement the faulty lucidity of his heroine, necessitating that he intervene, “en y mettant du mien,” as he says.46 Inhabiting a world of supernatural agency, the characters in Mirbeau’s novel relinquish their self-determination. Wizards adept in the occult science of investment, servants of a false God, Jews are feared and persecuted. Like sorceresses skilled in sparking lustful thoughts in men, girls become the target of a campaign of defilement, rape, and murder. Unable to control their appetites any more than their chambermaids or footmen, the wealthy affect a moral narcissism, fashioning a public persona that is a lie and a mirage. The guilt and hatred they cast out are projected onto scapegoats: the young women, the cosmopolitans, the unbelievers, and the strangers. Mirbeau’s novel argues for throwing light into the cave of the unconscious, showing that the evil that lurks out there is the maladjustment that lives within. Once the world is emptied of its wicked influences, there are just unhappy subjects. 44

Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, p. 666. Ibid., p. 667. 46 Mirbeau, “Avertissement,” p. 379. 45

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The positive message of Mirbeau’s novel is that human violence can be overcome through analysis of the unconscious roots of antisocial behaviors. As the bête humaine, the inner devil wreaking havoc on people’s lives, Joseph is deprived of power once those he captivates succeed in understanding him. By studying his character’s motives, Mirbeau ceases to resemble him.Yet venality, materialism, inadequate self-knowledge can easily prevail over enlightened selfawareness. While too disabused to credit the perfectibility of human beings – too skeptical to entertain the notion of a utopia composed of self-reliant individuals – Mirbeau saw the chance of improving the health and dignity of people in their embrace of instincts regulated by sobriety and discipline. Mirbeau’s narrative ends by showing victims who perpetrate the same injustices, bowing before the money god they formerly had abominated. In order to escape the cycle of exploitation and submission, they must embrace the totality of what they are, becoming unashamed and confident. The coming man whose ascendancy Mirbeau both prophesied and doubted is an animal having self-awareness, intelligence, and strength – a designer and machine that conceives and wills its own performance.

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Baby Doll: Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade In the Avant-propos to Madame Adonis (1888), Rachilde expresses exasperation at the way a book is often refashioned as something other than itself. Having put down 3.50 francs for a novel “dont le titre l’amuse dans un étalage,”47 the bourgeois reader finds his purchase redefined by the journalists disparaging it. Superseded by critical commentary, the literary work is no longer the product of a desire to tell a story. It no longer comes from artistic inspiration, but, as in Rachilde’s case, is conflated with the femme de lettres’s unsavory reputation. The novel becomes equated with its own promotional strategy or is mathematized and abstracted as the number of its editions. Assigned a motivational anteriority, it becomes an instrument of auto-réclame. Thus, the book is not a point of intersection between its author and a reader but is equated with its occulted mechanism for shaping audience reception. Unsurprisingly, Rachilde’s feminist fictional corpus is seen as dealing with myths of women metonymized as their bodies. Compelled to engage in degrading intercourse with aggressive critics, the roman-puceau is violated by monocle-wearing secretaries, who murder the work and leave in its place the corpse of their review. Or if it is metaphorized as a love-child born of the union of talent and discipline, the novel as nouveau-né becomes another statistical infanticide, suffocated by a hostile press before it can draw breath in the bookstore. Despite the conventionality of Rachilde’s image of creation as gestation or childbearing, she also complains that writing is routinely subordinated to publishing. Like the book, which presumably conveys its author’s personality and views, the woman whose life is fictionalized should embody her subjectivity and selfhood. Instead, the definition of feminist writing becomes the prerogative of male interpreters, and literary women are subsumed to others’ often defensive perceptions. The femme de lettres can reappropriate her

47

Rachilde, “Avant-Propos,” Madame Adonis (Paris: Monnier, 1888), p. xii

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work only by trying to control reader antagonism, so that publishing ends by becoming what Rachilde calls “l’art de se faire injurier.”48 The issue of control that structures Rachilde’s relationship with her work – the shame and anger she experienced at being belittled by her critics, her desire for authorial mastery and revenge on her detractors – extends her concerns with power that are thematized in her fiction. In La Marquise de Sade, Rachilde elaborates different strategies of retribution, examining the dubious benefit of inverting the power relationship between the sexes, considering various escapist mechanisms for mitigating feelings of alienation. Ultimately, woman’s hunger for revenge affords only the most hollow satisfaction. Instead, the work of literature, in diagnosing the injury the writer suffered, allows her to bring forth a new identity healed by heightened selfunderstanding. By creating the character of Mary Barbe, Rachilde expresses her appetite for getting even. Describing an asymptotic path, she identifies with Mary’s retaliatory fantasies, then dissociates herself from her heroine in renouncing a literature of revenge. Expelling her character as an obsolete self, Rachilde marks the end of a stage of her authorial development and signals that art can henceforth be used as an instrument of creative reparation. The Warrior’s Daughter By 1887, when Rachilde completed the novel which, following Monsieur Vénus, earned her the greatest notoriety, her goal of exposing the discourses of power by which women were victimized had already been succeeded by a more constructive objective of telling a truth transcending sexual identity. Like Raoule de Vénérande, the sword-wielding heroine in Monsieur Vénus, Mary Barbe is undone by her thirst for revenge, becoming more the victim of her own obsessions than of the social institutions that exploited her. Titles suggesting the transgendering reinvention of mythic or historical figures – Madame Adonis, La Marquise de Sade – had showed the self-defeating consequence of trying to use the weapons with which oppressors had victimized the weak. The woman who perpetrates violence with the same impunity as the Marquis de Sade is pathologized as megalomaniacal, not celebrated as triumphant. 48

Ibid., p. ii.

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The identity of book and writer, of creation as authorial selfengendering, is reinforced in La Marquise de Sade by the novel’s affiliation with autobiography, itself a genre whose distinguishing feature is to beget the writer as her work. A character who, like Rachilde, was raised in the home of a military officer, Mary Barbe is the child of a father who voiced his preference for having a son and a mother who, like Gabrielle Eymery, was prevented by illness from performing her role as a parent. While the novel, according to Melanie Hawthorne, “offers both an autobiographical representation and a revenge fantasy,”49 it also raises the question whether the work can transcend its retaliatory purpose. In bringing forth her roman nouveauné, Rachilde seeks to create a new, undamaged self, a revirginized being unsullied by scientists, parents, and editors. Hawthorne reasons that, since Rachilde’s novel predates KrafftEbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, “it is anachronistic to expect the analysis of sadism to conform to the profile […] derived from the work of turn-of-the-century sexologists.”50 But just as sadism preexists its clinical definition, literary characters may display a perversion that only later would be diagnosed by psychiatrists, who themselves emerged as figures of controversy in the fiction of the Decadents. In Creativity and Perversion, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel argues that Sade’s demiurgic ambition is to undo the work of Creation – to cut up and break apart bodies and then reassemble them in monstrous new forms.51 Rachilde’s heroines’ violent impulses directed against men, her revolutionary image of redesigned women may express the same objective. La Marquise de Sade begins and ends with scenes of violence, smashing, puncturing, rupturing people who drink blood to compensate for the blood they leak. Surely, just as the most poignantly depicted loss in the novel is a violation of the child’s topological sense of herself, the most peremptory need is to reinforce walls protecting her against aggression, betrayal, and love. Because she is prematurely forced into a position of terrified vulnerability, Mary formulates a plan to punish her aggressors. 49

Melanie Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 188. 50 Ibid. 51 See Chasseguet-Smirgel’s discussion of Sade’s conception of hybridization in Creativity and Perversion, pp. 2-5.

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Threatening his daughter’s sense of self-worth and security, Colonel Barbe is in command of a regiment subject to constant dislocation, as his men are posted to different locales and are viewed by others as intruders. Even the opening page of the novel conveys Mary Barbe’s feelings of itineracy as, in the company of her cousin Tulotte, she trudges down a dusty road in the pitiless heat of July, spying on the wayside oases “où une petite fille comme elle eût trouvé autant d’ombre et autant d’herbe qu’elle en pouvait souhaiter.”52 Parental abandonment is experienced by Mary as vagabondage and homelessness. This denial of shelter determines Mary’s later construction of a system of defenses, her strengthening barriers that cannot be breached by circumstance, misfortune, or malice. Mirroring the Marquis de Sade – opening wounds, tearing skin, shedding blood – Mary builds an identity designed to be impregnable. Identifying with animals to whom she assigns oxymoronic qualities – the treacherous candor of cats, the stupid wisdom of cattle, the sacrificial, soteriologically healing vulnerability of Christ-like lambs – Mary classes people according to the tragic binarism of rapists and victims, penetrators and bleeders, fathers equipped with sabers and whips and mothers left to languish and menstruate. However, the blood Mary sheds is never redemptive. As Christine Planté remarks: Mary “ne pourra jamais se penser ni être pensée sur le modèle de l’agneau pascal dont le sang rachète les péchés des hommes. Le seul sang qu’elle est appelée à verser (celui des règles, celui de l’enfantement), lui ferait perdre sur le plan symbolique de l’innocence d’agneau sans tache.”53 The fantasmatic association of hemorrhage and therapy, exsanguination and childbirth is precipitated by Mary’s witnessing the sledgehammering of cows in an abattoir, their blood shed to feed an infirm mother. This repeats the other primal scene in which a woman is attacked by her husband, impaled and assaulted by a man whose baby gains life by killing its mother. Rachilde describes porous beings for whom parturition means death and authorship ends with a strangulation of the textual new-born. 52

Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade (Paris: Mercure de France, 1985), p. 7. Christine Planté, “Les petites filles ne mangent pas de viande: Tuer, saigner, dévorer dans La Marquise de Sade de Rachilde,” Corps/décors: femmes, orgie, parodie, hommage à Lucienne Frapier-Mazur, eds. Catherine Nesci, Gretchen Van Slyke, and Gerald Prince (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 126. 53

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In Rachilde’s novels, women withdraw into fortresses of fashion, arraying themselves in the gaudy armor of their complicated dresses and their helmet-like hair, steeling themselves against the danger of incaution and tenderness. Her books bristle with defenses against apprehension and approval, hiding behind concertina wires of cynicism and taunting mystification. In the same way that Mary Barbe’s baneful seductiveness is not meant to elicit indifference, Rachilde’s fiction, despite her disclaimers, aims to cause more than the silence she wishes will greet her work. Systematically belittled and abused, Mary experiences no real childhood. More a regimental mascot than a beloved daughter, she is flogged, deprecated, and ignored, incessantly reminded of the undesirability of her gender, displaced as an object of solicitude by a pale mother who is the primary infant. Hawthorne compares Mary to Frankenstein’s monster, who she says “turns to anti-social behavior out of rage and frustration at not being provided for.”54 Yet, while Mary Shelley bids her work to go forth and enjoy a better fate than that of the monster, Rachilde expects no such nurturance of her book from the public. Experiences of deracination and disinheritance make Mary the child of no one, orphaned before her mother dies in childbirth and her father is killed in battle. Despite mistreatment by others, Mary maintains a sense of her own power. Compensating for her helplessness in the face of capriciously cruel adult behavior, Mary observes the superstitious causation governing the world of children, as her delusions of grandeur are produced in response to intolerable feelings of vulnerable inferiority. Accorded the terrible prestige of a demoness, Rachilde’s heroine is endowed with a supernatural malevolence worthy of the title’s namesake. During a visit, the wife of Captain Courcette, an officer in Colonel Barbe’s regiment, appears at Mary’s bedside dressed in a conical hat, rainbow-colored tunic, and transparent veil, pretending to be a fairy. Too disabused to believe in spirit helpers, Mary nonetheless lives in a realm where hateful fantasies come true, where fratricidal wishes born of sibling jealousy kill babies in their sleep. “See what you get,” as Hawthorne writes in an apostrophe to Mary’s parents,

54

Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship, p. 189.

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“for not being satisfied with the child you have?”55 Notwithstanding the calculating inhumanness of the adult Mary’s actions, she operates on an extra-rational level of confident autonomy that places her outside the reach of scientists and doctors, whose authority is codified as adult reason and maturity. Like all unfortunates whom life dispossesses, Mary turns to a religion that raises the fallen and empowers the weak. Having acquired “la curiosité des miracles,”56 Mary overlays her faith with determinist theory and empirical practicality, finding it reasonable “de faire un échange de sa raison de mortelle contre une cause divine.”57 Scrupulous in her adherence to devotional formula, Mary prays and prays in order to produce a miracle: hagiophanic manifestations, a message from the Virgin, celestial music that emanates from nowhere and that all at once is audible. But like the silence Rachilde wishes will greet her book, the God whom Mary turns to is unresponsive and unseen. Denied the illusion of omnipotence and the succor of angels, Mary ceases to resemble the savages who love the sun because the sun loves them.58 Mary has no need to introject a punishing father as the scourge of his disapproval. The vengeful tyrant who dispenses pain, the infant savior who dies in order to eternalize his survivors’ guilt are projected into the real world where, for Mary, cataclysm becomes commonplace. Denied the primitive faith of the child, Mary learns skepticism and self-reliance, reasoning that if God does not answer, she can act without conscience. Subjected to the murder of her childhood, Mary still enjoys a fleeting idyll that precedes the Fall. Having been steeped in Scriptural lore, she censors the story of her actual upbringing. Editing out her complicity in the death of her infant brother, she retreats from her loveless family, recreating a Genesis narrative in the floral Eden of horticulturist Père Brifault. By performing miracles and creating fables, Mary seeks to flee the world of suffering, as her fantasies manifest a rudimentary attempt at authorship as therapy. Yet her desire to withdraw to a realm of religious allegory and wish fulfillment proves futile in rescuing her from her status as a victim. 55

Ibid. Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 134. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., p. 135. 56

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The mythologized reality of Mary’s sojourn in a paradise of exotic roses – hybrids, grafts, the rosier de Chine with its yellow bloom striated in red, the rosier poupon whose pink blossoms are protected by a corolla of thorns, is a botanically demystified version of the Biblical garden Mary encountered in her catechism. Harmonizing science and fable, Rachilde’s chapter on Mary’s holiday in a sanctuary of pre-sexual innocence is told from the character’s viewpoint. Representing a massive repression of resentment, guilt, and fear, this dreamlike interlude is an allegory embedded at the heart of Rachilde’s naturalist fiction. Whereas Colonel Barbe is thunderous and volatile, Père Brifault is mild and merciful. Whereas Mary’s father deals in weaponry and war, the horticulturist nurtures existing life in order to create more beauty. Disowned by an intemperate Yahweh whose lash is his anathema, Mary finds shelter in a garden overseen by an indulgent caretaker. Already in Monsieur Vénus, gender was phylogenetically determined, as the ephebic Jacques Silvert is regressed to the level of the flowers he works with, and Raoule, like many of Rachilde’s heroines, assumes a position of predatory felinity. Alternatingly identifying with animal victims and aggressors, Mary is the slaughtered ox, the silkworm whose cocoon is impaled on a pin, her cat, Minoute, with its topaz eyes, golden claws, and switching tail, scintillating with silver flecks like “le couteau du boucher,”59 the tawny panther, and the beribboned lambs tormented by little boys at a children’s lawn party. In an inversion of traditional roles, men are blooms that can be picked and devoured, while women are consumers, changed from being fragrant objects into huntresses. Synesthetically, Mary is associated with the scent of the reseda, also representing the color green, symbolizing things both natural and treacherous. In an amnesiac withdrawal to a haven predating sin, Mary and Siroco, Adam and Eve, inhabit a vegetable world whose unintelligent profusion is corrected by science. Tended by Père Brifault, the rose world is suffused with innocence and provides for children’s needs. While Brifault survives on dry bread and water from the Rhône, Mary distributes brioche and barley candy to her soul-brother. In a scene whose symbolic content is manifest, Mary tempts her male counterpart, initiating the initial transgression, as she appropriates the 59

Ibid., p. 30.

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single thing the divine gardener has forbidden. As language places humans above their theriomorphic brethren, the capacity for feeling distinguishes the animal from the plant. And so in a rejection of the notion of female pulchritude as flower – of oral aggression as a masculine trait and sentimental passivity as a female one – Mary persuades Siroco to disobey the garden father and pick the flower, the virgin hybrid its creator had named Emotion. Privileging violence over sentimentality, preferring to harvest rather than cultivate, Mary pits the rebellious child against the providential father. She is therefore driven from paradise by the punishing horticulturist who, “pareil à l’ange exterminateur, levant son gourdin comme une épée flamboyante, désigna la grille du jardin à Mary.”60 Teaching the Doll to Talk Along with acting as a coming of age story, Rachilde’s novel anatomizes her heroine’s quest for revenge. In a study of the pathogenesis of retribution fantasies, Hilary Beattie traces the desire for revenge to narcissistic injuries suffered when the child faces the disparity between her vulnerability and illusions of power. “[O]ccasioned by humiliating attacks on the grandiose self,” the wish to punish comes from “a primitive drive for control and omnipotence through revenge.”61 Exposed as weak and contemptible, the damaged ego becomes the target of the child’s fury, as diminished self-love is registered as a loss displaced onto its author, with the result that “the now hated […] object gets located and attacked in the external world, rather than within.”62 The incommensurability of the child’s dreams of power and her experience of fragility, the limitlessness of the supernatural world and the narrowness of the empirical realm, explain Mary’s ambition to reign over the male domain of money, materialism, and medicine. Aiming to gain arcane knowledge and specialized skills in areas where fathers, officers, and doctors exercise control, Mary aspires to become a vengeful goddess in a world impoverished by rationalism.

60

Ibid., p. 99. Hilary Beattie, “Revenge,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 53 (Spring 2005), p. 515. 62 Ibid., p. 519. 61

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Spinners and child-bearers, sources of material shaped into infants and stories, Rachilde’s women use their bodies to escape society’s effort to define them by their bodies. At night, when liberated from the strictures of daylight and reason, Mary daydreams, imagining “énorme poupée qui marchait et parlait,”63 resurrecting her mother and murdered cats, exalting the women and animals once victimized by men she imagines with iron collars on their necks and swords in their chests. If the doll Mary imagines is a male idealization of woman as object, it is also the daughter the little girl treasures and trains, the artifact she animates and endows with the ability to speak. Like the baby, the roman nouveau-né is a body given the power of selfexpression: “Mystère insondable de l’être humain qui tire de lui-même des joies pouvant le ravir hors de sa prison de chair.”64 Estranged from God, banished from Brifault’s rose garden, Mary subsequently loses her father in war and so escapes her status an infantilized dependent. Using play to escape the adult realm of practicality and pain, she rehearses her future role as a woman able to mete out punishment. By staging scenes forming the backdrop of her dreams, Mary imaginatively retakes control over positions of subordination to which society had consigned her: the poupée becomes a mother, the automaton an authoress. In La Marquise de Sade, the rapidly advancing storyline of Mary’s tumultuous existence is occasionally frozen in a fashion tableau, as the clothes by which a woman is fetishized become the language with which she speaks. A doll selecting the apparel she puts on herself, Mary uses fabric, color, cameos, jewels, and laces as material allowing her to redesign an occulted self. Depersonalized as objects of male fantasy – as actresses, jugglers, mannequins, prostitutes – Rachilde’s heroines assume these identities the better to subvert their meaning. As with Jacques Silvert, whose body parts are integrated into a lifelike mechanism, men become lust machines operated by their former victims. In an early chapter, Mary is chosen by regimental acclaim to star in a staged military exercise. Representing le génie de la guerre, she is the stylized personification of warfare, an embodiment of the 63 64

Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 140 Ibid., 139

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science of violence. A pedophilic object of male aggression, the preadolescent girl, as the spirit of war, absolves men of their murderous proclivities. Men kill because of the beauty of a twelve-year old; rape fantasies are exonerated by deifying the object that inspires them. Imbued with the martial grandeur of Minerva, Mary is immobilized in Rachilde’s stylized descriptive pose. Cuirassed in selfimportance, haloed by her wind-blown hair, Mary is a chef d’oeuvre ordering and embellishing the chaos of the theatrical skirmish. Details of Mary’s costume – the violet silk maillot, the puffed pleats of her skirt, a ruby collar from which the head emerges “comme d’une cuvette de sang” – compound the theatricality of the scene by paradoxically enhancing its realism. The allegorical figure positioned at the center of the action is reanimated, acquiring an historical verisimilitude: “Le vent agitait ses cheveux noirs, lui donnant l’aspect d’une petite furie antique.”65 Choreographed battle pageantry, meant to showcase male intrepidity, is reappropriated by Rachilde’s heroine, to whom the conflict seems authentic. Mary makes it real and makes it hers with the intensity of the belief she assigns her starring role. As in “ces contes qu’elle se récitait,”66 imaginary narratives she invents, Mary uses her capacity for self-dramatization to recast herself as an author. The Science of Cruelty After being disowned by the regimental officer, Mary becomes the adoptive charge of her obstetrician-uncle – Célestin Barbe, whom Mary also regards as an assassin. Having saved her baby brother, Célestin had sacrificed Mary’s mother, confirming that the viability of a text comes at the expense of its creator. In the doctor’s cabinet/library, amidst anatomical texts and surgical instruments, Rachilde places the totem doll that Mary had visualized in her dream – not the living, speaking mannequin that bestowed life on itself, but the cut up beauty-victim vivisected by male analysis. Depicted as a gallery of scientific horrors, Célestin’s study is filled with nightmare implements, inchoate life forms bathed in jars of formaldehyde, glittering scalpels, a skeleton on whose bones 65 66

Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 139.

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are scribbled numbers, and “dominant ce chaos, une Vénus anatomique […] reléguée là comme une poupée devenue inutile.”67 As Mary had mastered military science by becoming le génie de la guerre, she assumes control in matters of sexuality by acquiring clinical expertise. Having eaten the rose of Emotion, she protects against attachment, love, and weakness by becoming proficient in the psychology of passion. Used by men in physical and analytic dismembering, scientific knowledge kills Venus by breaking her into body parts. Like the sword that pierces, analysis probes. By apprenticing with her uncle, Mary learns biology as prophylaxis, listening as Célestin explains the technical secrets contained in his book, L’Amour physique. This way, she ensures that by studying the mechanics of reproduction, she can avoid becoming an anatomical toy and can make herself a thinking doll whose learning confers mastery over the body. For Mary, there is little conceptual distance between the laboratory and the slaughterhouse. With its circular structure moving between succeeding generations of blood-drinkers, Rachilde’s novel conveys a sense of futility and entrapment, an impression that women cannot escape what Catherine Bordeau calls “a confining gender distinction.”68 By studying the body, Mary makes herself an efficient cruelty machine. Humiliating her uncle, whose clumsy sexual advances she parries with little effort – tormenting her husband, whom she converts into a clinical curiosity (“cas de satyriasis bien étrange,” says the physician who inspects his corpse)69 – delighting in inducing nosebleeds in Paul Richard, her husband’s bastard son – Mary monotonously wreaks havoc on the lives of men she knows yet finds few thrills in her malevolent calculations. Formally set off, the novel’s final section chronicles Mary’s exploits as a mature woman, recalling the mechanical compulsiveness of her patronymic counterpart. Mary seems as inescapably injured by her machinations as her victims. Her early identification with a mother whose vampirism she emulates explains her preoccupation with the body as a fragile container, porous, leaking the vitality and love that only ox blood can replenish. Mary’s insistence on appropriating the 67

Ibid., p. 180. Bordeau, “Women’s Environmental Influence,” p. 24. 69 Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 284. 68

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tools of male aggression, daggers, scalpels, analytic penetration intends protecting her against invasion from the outside, stopping the introduction of alien material inside the walls of her disdain. The bludgeoned cow, the sick mother produced no restorative elixirs, no milk. Their offspring are associated with hemorrhage, not resurrection. Longing to be the favored child, Mary directs murderous wishes at her mother, then dreads the retributive consequence of her dreams of usurpation. Motivated by infantile anxiety, as Melanie Klein affirms, “the little girl has a sadistic desire, originating in the original stages of the Oedipus complex, to rob the mother’s body of its contents, namely, the father’s penis, feces, children, and to destroy the mother herself. This desire gives rise to anxiety lest the mother should in her own turn rob the little girl of the contents of her body.”70 Given Mary’s resentment toward Madame Barbe, her experience of the mother’s hemorrhaging body, the fulfillment of Mary’s revenge fantasy may have produced a sense of power and guilt. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, Mary rejects the role that Rachilde assumes – as a source of life and art that female creativity brings forth. While unable to ward off her husband’s unwanted sexual advances, she declines to bear his children. She instead points to a galaxy of toxins that she refers to as her offspring, weapons she can use against any would-be attacker, or, if need be, against herself; “ce sont mes poupées, ces jolis poisons-là,” as she admonishes the baron.70 Authorship, procreation as reengendering a better self are spurned by Mary, who instead invokes her selfish subjectivity: “je suis assez, EN ÉTANT,” she asserts, “et si je pouvais finir le monde avec moi, je le finirais.”71 As the novel nears its conclusion, Rachilde rejects this nihilist philosophy, and the trajectory of the curve grows distant from the asymptote. While, for Mary, there is no Kleinian attempt at repairing the ailing mother, for Rachilde, the self that rage had broken is mended by the act of creation.

70

Melanie Klein, “Infantile anxiety-situations reflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse,” Psychoanalysis and Art: Kleinian Perspectives, ed. Sandra Grosso (London: Karnac, 1999), p. 40. 70 Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 216. 71 Ibid., p. 214.

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Mary’s passage to maturity is marked by another ceremonial change of dress, in a hieratic scene where the terror of menses as exsanguination is significantly elided: “un matin,” Rachilde writes, “Mary se réveilla nubile, ayant quinze ans révolus, bonne à marier, revêtue de la pourpre mystérieuse de la femme.”72 Not yet instructed by her uncle in the secrets of reproduction, Mary is still unfazed by discovering soluble organs and permeable surfaces. Resolved to avoid the same fate as her mother, Mary directs aggression at others, eats the flower of Emotion, suppresses sentimentality and compassion, denies her humanity, and lays claim to the invincibility of a goddess. At a scholarly reception at Célestin’s Paris residence, Mary marks another stage in her emancipation by appearing again in one of Rachilde’s signature fashion mises en scène. Having ordered from her couturière “une robe couleur de souffrance,”73 she expresses hostility by wearing apparel having colors and patterns denoting cruelty: rose bushes whose vines are spiked with thorns, a pin whose point transfixes a bird, “a velvet lace bodice whose purple and blue reflections connote insect wings,” as Emily Apter remarks, “as well as the black and blue bruises to be inflicted on her future husband and lovers.”74 Contrasting with Père Brifault’s floral paradise, Mary’s gown shows a garden stripped of beauty, bristling with barbs suggestive of her name. Associated with vegetal passivity, Rachilde’s male characters are effete florists like Jacques Silvert, docile horticulturists like Brifault. Often feminized and hyper-sensitive, they are the emotions women dominate, the leaves and buds that Mary tramples in a jungle ruled by the lioness. When Mary is charged with caring for the plants in Célestin’s botanical garden, she scratches their epidermis, running her finger over petals, causing the flowers to tremble, shrink, and die: “Cela m’amusait de lui voir des tressauts parce qu’elle ressemblait aux ramifications des cerveaux humains qui sont coloriés dans vos gravures anatomiques,” she tells her uncle.75 Sensitive to skin whose abrasion facilitates communication with others, Mary treats Paul Richard as another of Célestin’s floral specimens. When there is an abatement in his nosebleeds, she begins 72

Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 196. 74 Apter, “Weaponizing the Femme Fatale,” p. 254. 75 Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 187. 73

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to prick his arms with pins, using needles to write the text of pain that Rachilde appropriates with her signature. Brandishing “une pointe de métal cuivrée, très mauvaise, elle le tatouait de ses initiales.”76 Able to alter the cautionary motto inscribed on her mother’s deathbed, Mary lives by the apothegmatic principle: Aimer, c’est faire souffrir. The Failure of Revenge Ultimately, while still constrained by social institutions, Rachilde’s heroine can do no more than wed adultery to incest, bedding her husband’s illegitimate son, then inducing moral debility in an uncle made idiotic by abjection. Increasingly frustrated in her hunt for worthy prey, Mary inflames the baron’s prurient imbecility, unleashes Paul’s tears, sobs, and entreaties, accelerates her uncle’s humiliation-induced senescence. Enslaved by her compulsion, Rachilde’s sadist is her own victim, incapable of escaping the game of titillation and denial, rage and retribution. The vexing Freudian conundrum of whether masochism precedes sadism is illumined by the hollowness of Mary’s satisfactions, vengeful acts that end by victimizing only herself. Designed by a powerful progenetrix, the baby doll that walks and talks is the unfeeling mechanical self Mary opposes to her damaged childhood identity. The poupée in whom feeling has been stifled is designed to inflict injury on Mary’s oppressors. But the sterility of ritual punishment – inflicted time and time again – only distinguishes the character from the author whom writing delivers of her obsession. Hatred and vindictiveness are wires and springs, the gears and cogs operating the sadism doll that Rachilde manufactures. Authorship liberates her of these sentiments, so that in delivering her newborn book, Rachilde is cured of the alienation that her writing diagnoses. Once freed of her despicable mentor, lecherous husband, and craven lover, Mary drifts into an aimless life of disappointed shock consumption, loitering in wax museums, haunting bondage clubs, crime-plagued neighborhoods, and the Morgue. Never slaking her thirst for the blood of glorious murderers, she is always revolted by the anemia of her cowardly contemporaries. While emphasizing the immaculacy of Mary’s emotional detachment, Rachilde shows her 76

Ibid., p. 272.

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heroine as a monster devoid of transgressive majesty, a malefactor diminished by the insignificance of her victims. In her desperate search for the frisson born of sacrilege, Mary is a derelict hunter, circulating “de bouges en bals de barrière”77 – “rouler en atome parmi tous les atomes de ce pays gangrené ne lui paraissait pas une mission,” Rachilde says of her vagabond protagonist.78 Subscribing to the tenets of Max Nordau’s Die Entartung, Mary inveighs against the moral flaccidity of the Decadents, too devitalized to achieve true transcendence in their infamy. The frustrated hunger for cultural apocalypticism is conveyed in Mary’s encounters with prudent murderers and moderate anarchists, thin-blooded creatures unworthy of the vampire’s bite. Mary’s image of the body as hermetic and inviolable extends to Rachilde’s representation of a society locked in its inescapable mediocrity, a novel modeling the hellish prison of its heroine’s existence. Rebellion against institutionalized male hegemony comes not through the character’s sadistic acts but through Rachilde’s analytical understanding. As Mary is increasingly masculinized in her capacity as avenger, her male nemeses are ungendered, becoming leaking envelopes, wounded flowers, whimpering infants, lambs for the holocaust. In a fin-de-sexe society where hierarchy yields to sameness, sluts and princesses are unrecognizable by behavior, dress, or principle: “tout était changé, une femme n’était plus une femme, tout roulait pêle-mêle dans une cohue pareille à ces foules de Bullier salies du reflet vulgaire de[s] globes multicolores”79 Rachilde’s ironic celebration of gender equality does not show women’s elevation but the general populace’s degradation. Mary’s encounter at the Bullier with an epicene cross-dresser, “un éphèbe, à tant l’heure, […] vêtu en pierrette en satin crème,”80 activates the huntress’s impulse to chase down the easy prey. Mary puts herself back again in the opening scene in the abattoir, but this time, she is the butcher occupying a central place at the sexual marketplace, competing with the others “réclamant leur morceau de

77

Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., pp. 288-9. 79 Ibid., p. 292. 80 Ibid. 78

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chair.”81 Mary’s fantasy of tying up a sexless victim with satin ribbons, stabbing him with heated pins is just another manifestation of perversion, no different from the aberrant pleasures enjoyed by other clients at the sex bazaar. Advocating a program of cultural detergency, Mary selfrighteously proclaims herself “la vraie femelle de l’époque,” but the sadist-deviant’s obedience to her appetite for bloodletting is not moral hygiene but a symptom of the disorder she claims to fight. After all, as Mary reasons, there are no longer any real women, only targets of the calumny that is processed into gossip columns: “Plus de mères, plus d’épouses, plus de jeunes filles… rien que la copie pour le Gil Blas,” Mary thinks.82 Rachilde fears that her wish for an enlightened reception for her textual newborn will be dashed when her novel is killed and then entombed in daily newspapers. La Marquise de Sade is superseded by poisonous journalistic criticism, her voice stifled by comments appearing in “la rubrique échos mondains.”83 Precious literature is excrementalized, turned into loathsome matter where mediocrities and masterpieces blend in “une boue […] enlisante, puante.”84 Rachilde mentions how one such vilification had triggered a response, la gifle which, when administered to an impertinent journalist, had only provoked further exchanges of venomous denigration. As with Mary Barbe, whose recriminations are unending and implacable, victims and attackers are locked in reenactments of their roles. Positions of dominance are functionally interchangeable with positions of subordination, and are alternately occupied by men and women, authors and critics. Rachilde publishes her novel, then hostile critics issue their habitual disparagement, and Rachilde responds by writing her “art of eliciting others’ insults.” Since no one can interrupt the ritual, and all keep going “au Gil Blas,”85 indignation only sets the revenge-machine in motion: “c’est un rouage électrique, il va de luimême,” as Rachilde says.86

81

Ibid., p. 293. Ibid., p. 292. 83 Rachilde, “Avant-Propos,” p. xxviii. 84 Ibid., p. xxx. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 82

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The homology between vengeful women and their abject, neutered worshipers universalizes the dehumanization of participants in the sex war. Like Frankenstein and his monster, Mary and her victims are joined in their self-hatred. Controlled by her obsession, Raoule de Vénérande is an automaton like Jacques Silvert. Mary aims to emasculate all those who spoiled her childhood, as she dreams of making herself a goddess from whose mouth come laughter and imprecation. But even she acknowledges the redundancy of castrating the sexless creatures at the Bullier carnival, the bejeweled, fan-waving specimens with their unctuous drawl and languid gait. Having been alienated from her family and driven out of Eden, Mary is a trespasser in the garden of innocence, a frustrated predator on the blood-washed savanna: “moitié la petite fille qui veut du fruit défendu, moitié la lionne qui cède à l’instinct.”87 Both author and heroine aspire to design a stronger self, a murder doll eradicating other babies competing for attention. But it is not the fictional neonate born of resentment and ambition that has the final word but the novelist who impugns the dream of retribution. Rachilde’s final image is another fantasy portrait of Mary Barbe as the fury who exterminates “ces mâles déchus […] le coeur tranquille, haut le poignard.”88 Armed with upraised dagger, not the pen that edits life’s misfortunes, Mary is fixed in her immutable position as a matricide and sadist. Illustrating a dialectic of disassembly and reconstruction, Rachilde’s novel communicates its heroine’s helplessness and fragmentation. Benevolent figures entrusted with promoting the child’s sense of confidence turn into persecutors who despise her for her selfreliance, sex, and power. Parents who are abusive, negligent, or demeaning become editors who tear down the child as literary object. Rachilde’s fiction is too vociferous, her complaints too shrill and angry to elicit “le silence le plus complet” she wishes for her writing.89 Assuming the role of mother as femme de lettres, she brings forth her book as a noisy infant, creating more than an ingenious counterfeit that simulates life and produces speech. Projecting a broken self as her detractors and assailants, Mary elaborates a system of violent strategies, defenses that enable her to 87

Rachilde, La Marquise de Sade, p. 296. Ibid., p. 297. 89 Rachilde, “Avant-Propos,” p. xxxi. 88

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evade reality and deny the truth of loss. But by exchanging the character’s paranoia for the mastery of the novelist, Rachilde harnesses her heroine’s destructive energy and channels it into the work of reparation. The terrible textual child that pleads for attention and screams in rage, once fictionalized, is freed of terror and its capacity to terrorize. La Marquise de Sade locates the expressive origin of Rachilde’s vengeance, showcasing an embryonic being who responds to injury with insult. Once fulfilled, however, Rachilde’s maternity delivers her of her burden, the doll whose speech describes the history of its unhappiness. Following publication/parturition, Rachilde is separated from her book, as self-understanding identifies her as different from the automaton. With creativity disengaging her from the violent machinery of compulsion, the story of the character’s disintegration recounts the author’s recovery of cohesion. The urge to empty the mother’s body of fertility and potential yields to the writer’s wish to fill her newborn work with clarity and truth. Rachilde’s heroine, the panther-goddess, is just a clamorous doll-like mechanism whose lust for retribution is the clockwork enabling her to operate. Recognized as an archaic self by the woman who produces her, Mary is an old pathology born anew in the fictional record of Rachilde’s cure.

Chapter Four Play Like play, creativity, as D. W. Winnicott describes it, is a universal trait, indissociable from being alive and being human. When one engages with his environment in a free, spontaneous way, creativity is involved, whether in the production of a painting, the preparation of a meal, or the baby’s “prolonging the act of crying to enjoy a musical sound.”1 Winnicott defines creativity as a third way of living. On the one hand, there is the unbounded subjectivity of autism or psychosis, where the individual produces only fantasy or hallucination. On the other, there is compliance, a coercive adjustment to the world’s demands, a recognition that the world is “something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation.”2 Winnicott situates creativity in what he calls potential space, the indeterminate zone separating the infant’s perceived sense of omnipotence and his graduation to object use that comes with “the change to the reality principle.”3 Winnicott’s revolutionary equation of creativity and play is valuable for understanding the Decadents’ view of art. Demoralized by the ascendancy of empiricism, the Decadents deplored the tyranny of reason, believing that science enforced compliance, required an acquiescence to dreary reality, stifled creative experiences of whimsy, and threatened independence. Where the incontrovertibility of fact could not be evaded or ignored, the Decadents fled into alternative worlds made unreal by exoticism. Rejecting history as an indisputable record, the Decadents reappropriated it as narrative play, one they believed was shaped by supposition, inflected by ideology, and improved by aesthetics. 1

D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 71. Ibid., p. 65. 3 Ibid., p. 85. 2

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In his analysis of the Decadent subject, Charles Bernheimer remarks on Flaubert’s widely shared belief in the Decadents’ paralyzing sense of historicism.4 Feeling crushed by the weight of a past that no one could assimilate or deny, they reacted to knowledge of bygone eras as to a record of their personal history. Constrained by naturalism’s methodological legacy, they felt that individual freedom was curtailed by heredity and that creativity was stunted by an awareness of history. While deprivileging social institutions and magnifying exceptional subjects, the Decadents also regarded the artist as burdened by unusual genius. The most unnegotiable datum was the artist’s received identity. Confined to a self impersonally molded by gender, family, and religion, the Decadent related to his identity as to an object whose meaning was predetermined. It is unsurprising that, for the Decadents, creativity-as-play involved a proliferation of personas, self-multiplying through role-playing, reclaiming the child’s lost sense of omnipotence through assertions of universality. Illustrative of the Decadents’ recourse to art as liberating play are comments by Paul Pruysser, who completes Winnicott’s map of potential space. Rejecting the binary opposition of pleasure and reality, Pruysser posits the existence of an illusionistic world, characterized by “orderly imagination,” “adventurous thinking,” and “inspired connections.” “Between hallucinations and actual entities,” Pruysser argues, every society “recognizes imaginative entities or events – the plastic arts, operas, liturgical acts, dances with masks impersonating historical or fictional figures, musical performances, all testifying to a rich cultural inheritance.”5 For the Decadents, cultural inheritance – like personal identity and social history – constitutes the artist’s raw material and can be creatively reimagined.

4

For Bernheimer, historical consciousness is conducive to a mimetic perspective like that adopted by Schwob in Vies imaginaires. “Well before Nietzsche,” Bernheimer writes, “Flaubert had recognized that an excess of historical awareness was a burdensome characteristic of nineteenth-century consciousness. Traveling in Egypt in 1850, he wrote back to his friend Louis Bouilhet: ‘Wretched that we are, we have, I think, a good deal of taste because we are profoundly historical, accept everything, and adopt the point of view of whatever we are judging’” (Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects, p. 33.). 5 Paul Pruysser, The Play of the Imagination: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Culture (New York: International Universities Press, 1983), pp. 66-7.

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Situated in an intermediate position between archival research and creative invention, Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires is an example of Winnicott’s transitional phenomenon. Using history as a ludic activity, Schwob alternately treats the biographer as a scribe and as an imaginative child at play. Like the transitional object facilitating the child’s separation from the mother, Schwob’s vie imaginaire marks the passage from transcription of the source to its independent reinvention. Critics who disparage Schwob as derivative and unoriginal assert he is too attached and reliant on the motherdocument. If so, Schwob’s relationship with his material mirrors the link between infant, transitional object, and caregiver. Able to renounce magic thinking and give up his belief in the universality of the self, the child accepts that objects no longer lie within his control. As Winnicott writes, the “interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness [is] just one more example […] of the interplay between separateness and union.”6 Combining playfulness and productivity, Decadent creation affords solitary pleasure for a subject while simultaneously enabling him to fashion objects consumed by others. Beginning as a private act of creative play, writing ends with the submission of a piece of work to the public who evaluates it. Paying tribute to Jacques Lacan who, in his analysis of mirroring and identity, sees the self as being constituted by the other’s totalizing gaze, Winnicott suggests that we create our self-image in order to match the way that others see us. As healthy narcissism depends on the mother and the loving appraisal in her eyes, one dismantles an obsolete identity regarded as discredited and sterile, then reforms it as a succession of new personas subject to constant revalidation. On the one hand, Decadents like Schwob and Lorrain enjoy similar fantasies of godlike self-engendering. Thus, they beget themselves anew as their fictional personas. Yet they also reconstitute themselves as objects whose integrality depends on a look, on assessments by readers whose opinion they both solicit and fear. The triangular structure existing between transitional object, child, and mother is recreated in the dynamic interaction between author, text, and audience. A fictional work is neither completely real 6

Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 99.

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nor totally imaginary. The text, like the object collaboratively fashioned by the infant and his caregiver, is at first an extension of the self, then the “original not-me possession,”7 and finally an external object susceptible to appropriation by a reader. The path of the asymptote, which approaches the line of pleasurable illusion, fails to join it since the art work risks eliciting an audience’s hostile judgment. The piece of cloth, the blanket fragment is not snatched away by the mother. She does not empty it of magic by describing it as spurious. However, no such supportive covenant structures the relationship between author, text, and reader. In Schwob’s collection, the imaginary life, like an experience of make-believe, situates the work in the potential space between fantasy and reality. Schwob replicates his own role in the inventive biographies that he fashions, in the stories of the pirate Stede Bonnet and the novelist Petronius. Mythical demiurges, artists, religious fanatics, buccaneers, they rewrite themselves as beings existing outside boundaries and laws. In their game, they defy convention with impunity until a punishing parent seizes them and hangs them from a gibbet. The dialectical interplay between illusion and disillusionment – between creation as primary process and as awakening to reality – reappears in Jean Lorrain’s experimentation with producing short narratives as masks. A transitional object, the mask is magic until it is laughed at or removed, until a disbelieving viewer refuses to fall beneath its spell. A transitional object, the mask must not induce complete incredulity or belief. If a person identifying with a disguise convinces others his masquerade is real, his face disappears, or when the mask is taken off, he ceases to exist. A cross-dressing, cosmetically embellished public figure, Lorrain risked becoming the buffoon for which a disapproving public took him. If Lorrain interrupted the production of himself as ephemeral performances, he would be annihilated by the apathy or inattention of his audience. Masks of androgyny, disfigurement, or sincerity, Lorrain’s tales are apostrophes peremptorily demanding a response from others. In Lorrain, masks are equated with the faces they conceal. Metonyms for whole bodies, faces are people with personal histories which, when stylized, become narratives of imaginary lives. Bio7

Ibid., p. 4.

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graphies of the historic figures that he fleetingly resuscitates, Schwob’s vies imaginaires are masks worn for the time of the identification. For Schwob, the act of writing completes a journey undertaken in the mind. After the solitary pleasure of experiencing an imaginary life comes the creative work resituating him in the space of research and composition. For Lorrain, the consummately social being, the design of narratives and masks places him in the public realm of the spectators he seeks to titillate and shock. For both authors, the asymptotic curve returns from the play of pluralized identities to the generative center from which the writer’s avatars issue. As expressive play, creation – for Schwob, the scholar, and Lorrain, the showman – engages readers by inviting them to act as cocreators of illusion. By fashioning stories as playthings around which readers come together, they make objects that weave a spell and the next moment disenchant. While helping the author in fabricating his counterfeit personas, readers are full participants in propagating the pleasurable lies of make-believe. Donning the mask of colluder whose biography the author sketches, the reader sustains the spell that, for a moment, defines the parameters of the game. It is there, in potential space, that history is infinitely reimagined, that writers, disguised as fantasists, invoke the freedom to be anyone.

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Biography as Mask: Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires Heralded by Pierre Champion as “le grand livre de Marcel Schwob,”8 Vies imaginaires (1896) marks a crystallization of the author’s views on the inhibiting effects of truth and the liberating influence of fiction. In his Préface, Schwob propounds a theory of biography in which he opposes history’s emphasis on momentous events, “[l]es idées des grands hommes,”9 and the biographer’s concern with the singular traits, eccentricities, and idiosyncracies of the famous and insignificant alike. Whereas “[l]a science historique” stresses an individual’s impact on the collectivity, the artist eschews approaches that foreground resemblances, choosing instead to highlight any seemingly irrelevant quality “pourvu qu’elle soit unique.”10 In his insistence on enriching reader appreciation of humanity’s diversity, the biographer need not worry about questions of historical accuracy. “Il n’a pas à se préoccuper d’être vrai,” Schwob says in his sweeping dismissal of naturalist methodology. In a study of Vies imaginaires, Dominique Rabaté mentions Schwob’s assertion that he lacked imagination and that he never completed a novel, believing “[qu’il] construisait sur des documents et se fortifiait des disciplines de l’érudition.”11 Yet Rabaté also argues that a paucity of available documents is what ensured the vividness of Schwob’s creative reconstructions. From a fragmentary historical record, Schwob was able to build evocative accounts of the past whose brevity and allusiveness sparked both his own and his reader’s imagination. There is also a compelling possibility that a motive for Schwob’s biographical undertaking was not only to write, but also projectively to re-experience the events of his characters’ lives. An 8

Pierre Champion, Marcel Schwob et son temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1927), p. 120. 9 Marcel Schwob, Préface, Vies imaginaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), p. 53. 10 Ibid., p. 60. 11 Dominique Rabaté, “Vies imaginaires et vies minuscules: Marcel Schwob et le romanesque sans roman,” Marcel Schwob d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, eds. Christian Berg and Yves Vadé (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002), p. 183.

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armchair time-traveller, Schwob moved from Ancient Greece, medieval France, to Elizabethan England. A temporal vagabond, Schwob traversed innumerable eras. As Rabaté remarks, “il les a toutes vécues.”12 The imaginary life emerges for Schwob, not just as textual procedure, but also as an occasion for identification, surrogacy, vicariousness, and self-multiplication. The uncertainty of history is compounded by Schwob’s tendency to problematize the referential value of language. If reality cannot be apprehended by historians or novelists, any claim to circumscribe truth is specious and writers are chasing after chimera – what Christian Berg calls “l’infini engendrement des signes par euxmêmes.”13 Schwob is therefore faced with choosing to default on his authorial practice – living in his imagination the lives of all his characters – or peopling literature with his unique stories and inviting his audience to join him. The movement of the asymptote as it traverses Schwob’s collection describes the temptation he experienced to disperse into his characters or to remain apart as the imaginative source from which his subjects emanated. Schwob’s rebellion against ill health, intellectual precociousness, hyper-cerebrality, and historical detachment are what motivated his desire to join his often primitive, brutish characters. But by forgetting and sacrificing authorial distance and objectivity – by becoming like his characters – Schwob risked losing the selfawareness that accompanies creative play. The desire to join the curve and asymptote, identifying the writer and his character, carries the danger of directing the anti-social violence of Schwob’s subjects against the author. Since the appeal of universality brings the threat of anonymity, Schwob elects to continue exercising the discipline of authorship. Remembering who he is, Schwob separates from his characters and returns to the creative center from which his fictional personas emerge.

12

Ibid. Christian Berg, “Signes de signes: Marcel Schwob et le ‘rapport mystérieux des signes,’” Marcel Schwob d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, eds. Christian Berg and Yves Vadé (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002), p. 104. 13

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Biography as Fiction Schwob conceives of fictional biography itself as an asymptotic exercise. As the maker of literary characters with whom he establishes a relational identification, the story-writer inescapably authors vies imaginaires. By freeing an unstable self enabled to migrate from hero to hero, the novelist becomes anyone and so can act out his dream of universality. Unconstrained by truth or historical fact, the artist whom Schwob proposes as his model might be taxed with imposture. However, mythomania, impersonation, role-playing, compulsive selfreinvention are no more transgressions of the fictionalizer than they are flaws in children who play at make-believe. As the designer of the game, as the creator of imaginary accomplices, Schwob must still maintain his lucidity and distance to ensure the believability of his play narratives Many of Schwob’s stories suggest an underlying kinship between the sickly author and a child disadvantaged by immaturity and powerlessness. Both fantasize of compensating for subordination and lack of freedom by embarking on imaginary adventures that are violent and exhilarating. The pariahs who fill Schwob’s stories in many ways resemble children, pre-socialized, anarchic beings who follow instincts instead of laws. Unike the child who, in pretending to be a hero, wishes for the autonomy of the adult, Schwob’s authorship of imaginary lives was prompted by his vast historical knowledge and by its interference with the exercise of his creative invention. Schwob’s hostility to truth is what shapes his view of art grounded in the conflict between accountability and freedom, between responsibility for the accuracy of his documentary sources and his impulse to ignore the consequentiality of history. In Vies imaginaires, Schwob takes issue with all the unnegotiable facts of existence, ontological data to which the human subject does not consent. Why must one be who he is, accepting the unwanted and limiting legacy of family history, native language, class affiliation, and national origin? Much of Schwob’s creative work aims at problematizing these determinants, challenging contingencies that shrink the possibilities of life. In the Preface to Vies imaginaires, Schwob rejects the notion of history’s unalterability. The creative biographer need not proclaim the unimpeachability of his sources nor concern himself with momentous

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occurences or idées générales. Disregarding the immutability of recorded events, the creative biographer deals with unrealities that liberate. For Schwob, the writer of imaginary lives enjoys an experience of limitlessness before he starts to work and settles on his subject’s unique features. Like God, the author-demiurge works with the uncompassed disorder of the inchoate and increate, the primordial confusion of infinite possibility. Like God, the writer “doit créer dans un chaos de traits humains.”14 It is this original state of the creator’s indivisibility from his material that represents the convergence of the asymptote and curve. Schwob’s longing to return to this primordial unity is what motivates his writing works which end by disavowing this impulse. The duality existing between God and his creation, between an author and his work is what affords self-knowledge that enriches both the artist and the divinity. For Schwob, therefore, creation begins with separation and exclusion. As with God, who in creating the world, relinquishes the prerogative to make others, the biographer practices an art form that forecloses options. “[L]e romancier choisit,” as George Trembley says of Schwob. “Sur la nécessité de l’élimination, Schwob est catégorique.”15 As with God, who remains infinite only as long as he is uncompromised by creation, the biographer’s work is a form of limitation, moving him from unity, sameness, and coalescence to particularization culminating in an identification of uniqueness: “Ainsi l’idéal du biographe serait de différencier infiniment.”16 Unlike the divinity whose omnipotence depends on inspirations that are unrealized, the writer actualizes, and, in making something, dooms something else to go unmade. But while emphasizing the practical necessities of authorship, Schwob’s stories are also oriented toward an imagined anteriority – toward a moment before the curve begins to move off from the asymptote. Schwob’s writings express nostalgia for this idealized time of innocence – before his identity crystallized as an invalid Jewish scholar, before the versatility of the child at play yielded to the creative sclerosis of the adult at work, and before the innumerable imaginary lives that waited to be lived turned into a single authorial life made real in the act of writing. 14

Schwob, Préface, p. 53. Trembley, Marcel Schwob: faussaire de la nature, p. 102. 16 Schwob, Préface, p. 55. 15

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Being and Writing Vies imaginaires opens with the life of Empedocles, the 5thcentury philosopher, poet, and miracle-worker whose exploits become a recurrent theme in Schwob’s collection. Unaffected by the need for individuation, Empedocles is not subject to a fall into mortality, and so he celebrates the original fusion of creator and creation. The dissolution of others in the self is the love state to which all separate life forms seek to return: “Tous les êtres,” proclaims Empedocles, “ne sont que des morceaux disjoints de cette sphère d’amour où s’insinua la haine. Et ce que nous appelons amour c’est le désir de nous unir et de nous fondre et de nous confondre, ainsi que nous étions jadis, au sein du dieu globulaire que la discorde a rompu.”17 It is telling that Schwob begins his volume with Empedocles who, in his multiple incarnations, his various phylogenetic migrations, epitomizes Schwob’s ideal of the one articulated in the many. Always himself, Empedocles “ávait déjà passé quatre existences dans notre monde,” having been “plante, poisson, oiseau et jeune fille.”18 For God to know himself, however, he must be embodied in his creations, submitting to the law of fragmentation before reattaining the globular indivisibility of his preexisting oneness. What Bachelard calls the Empedocles complex (La Psychanalyse du feu) describes a similar annihilation, as the self-styled god who hurls himself into the mouth of a volcano does not remain behind as smoke or ash but is obliterated altogether. For Empedocles, there is no dichotomous opposition of life and art since his words are songs, both beauty and expression. Sickness manifested as the alienation of the Maker from his work is cured by verses recited in the style of Homer. Usually indicative of an absence of material plenitude, language becomes music endowed with narcotic properties, like the nepenthes “qui donne l’insensibilité.”19 This painlessness is evident in Empedocles’s love for his disciple Panthea, onomastically identified with the ubiquity of God’s creation. Imperturbable and majestic, Empedocles feels, not desire, but pity, the empathetic bond joining the self to the other. Liquefied passion, the lava in which Empedocles 17 Marcel Schwob, “Empédocle,” Vies imaginaires (Paris: Flammarion, p. 2004), p. 62. 18 Ibid., p. 61. 19 Ibid., p. 62.

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melts his body is a materialized expression of the wish de nous fondre et de nous confondre. But like the biographer, Empedocles is not a true god. He cannot create ex nihilo, but depends on preexisting matter. He produces no new life but, like the historian, only resurrects the dead. In work devoid of originality, he creates simulacra and facsimiles, mending existing things, healing the sick, speaking like Homer, not Empedocles. Schwob, too, consents to be, not a divinity, but a craftsman, dependent on the characters whom he creates so they can die, in order that Schwob himself might remain as the imagination that produces them. While it is critical that the writer acknowledge the importance of empathy in biographical studies, it is equally necessary that he not be absorbed into his subject. The negative model of the biographer is seen in Schwob’s picture of Petronius, whose life trajectory takes him from literature to experience. Like Schwob, Petronius had felt both marginalized by his ancestry and separated by his education from the riffraff he admired. Like Schwob, Petronius idealizes the disreputable and despised whom he describes in The Satyricon: “avide de cette liberté diverse, [il] commença d’écrire l’histoire d’esclaves errants et débauchés.”20 But unlike Schwob, who is likened to his characters, yet survives in the narratives he authors, Petronius writes first and then disappears into his material. For him, the curve that follows imagination joins with the asymptote of life. In “Pétrone, romancier,” the Roman chronicler is depicted as alienated by luxury, constructed as a pampered consumer of rare comestibles, collector of precious knickknacks and exotic flowers, foie gras statuettes molded in the style of Praxiteles, dog-faced monkeys barking inside their jewel-incrusted cages. Hypostatized by wealth as a god disconnected from creation, Petronius takes to writing in order to reappropriate reality, then populates it with the gladiators, mercenaries, and catamites who are as unwanted as he feels himself. The dualism of biographer and subject is overcome by Petronius’s decision to be what he imagined, to enact the union of the author collapsed into his text so that their uniqueness is eliminated. Graverobbers, prostitutes, and slaves are the objets hétéroclites fashioned by a god at play, comparable to the bibelots that had surrounded the young Petronius. His attempt to merge with the outcast menagerie 20

Schwob, “Pétrone,” Vies imaginaires, p. 87.

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evoked in his writing is motivated by a wish to be everybody, not just an author divorced from his work. Mixing with criminals and bathhouse boys, Petronius is assimilated to his book, attaining the unity of an objectified self identified with the world: “Pétrone désapprit entièrement l’art d’écrire, sitôt qu’il vécut de la vie qu’il avait imaginée.”21 There is a cautionary quality to the violent conclusion to Schwob’s narrative, suggesting a correlation between the character’s life of criminality and the author’s contemplation of killing his identity as an artist. It is only through vicarious participation in the violent lives of others that Schwob escapes the fate of a character like Petronius, found murdered in the open country, his throat cut by a drunken vagrant. In the biography of Petronius, the curve and asymptote remain separate so the author can live to tell the story of his character. Chaos, Humility, and Ignorance Schwob’s interest in creating transient personas as a form of play relates Empedocles’s claim of godhood to Cratès’s culti