Gérard de Nerval

"Le Rêve est une seconde vie".  --Gérard de Nerval (above), Aurélia

"The Poet"
by Théophile Gautier
France, 1867

I'll probably get around to posting about the rest of Gautier's My Fantoms at some point, but I wanted to pause for a moment here to sing the praises of its concluding chapter first.  Although translator Richard Holmes insists on calling "The Poet" a "story" for reasons that are beyond me, Gautier's affectionate tribute to his lifelong friend (originally published simply as "Gérard de Nerval") is decidedly more factual than fictional.  Gérard de Nerval's own life was apparently not so clearly defined in his mind, a type of fiction in its own right that was spent shuttling back and forth between the dream world and cold reality until he finally decided to hang himself one night on the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.  If the poet's tragic end clearly traumatized Gautier, who was tasked with identifying the body in the morgue, you, the 21st-century reader with multiple reading choices at hand, need have no such fears on your part.  While the biographer's retrospectively aware of the many signs of madness that Nerval's friends were late to recognize "in those days of literary eccentricity" then in vogue in Paris (161), this doesn't stop him from illustrating Nerval's "otherness" with the choicest of anecdotes: the wonderful story about the big Renaissance bed that Nerval bought and restored in honor of his infatuation with a woman he was too timid to approach in person, the Frenchman's travels in Goethe's Germany and the "Mohammedan" Orient, the unforgettable day the poet innocently chose to walk a live lobster on a blue silk ribbon through the gardens of the Palais Royal.  Gautier's also splendid at evoking an insider's picture of bohemian Paris (for example, the riots at one of Hugo's plays) that fans of the City of Light and/or writing about writers won't want to miss.  In short, excellent reading for any of you tired of our own day and age's regard for generic but media-savvy authors who peddle their boring wares via blog tours and tweets on Twitter and the like.  Source: Théophile Gautier (translated by Richard Holmes).  My Fantoms.  New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2008, 151-173.  (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia & Other Writings (Exact Change) with that lovely illustration that haunts me all the more because my French version of the novella from Le Livre de Poche is so unbearably ugly.

"Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?" he used to ask quietly, "or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk?  I have a liking for lobsters.  They are peaceful, serious creatures.  They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do.  And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn't mad."  There were a thousand other reasons, each one more ingenuous than the last.
--My Fantoms, 163

The Priest (a/k/a La Morte amoureuse)

"La Morte amoureuse"
by Théophile Gautier
France, 1836

How it starts: "You ask me if I have ever loved? Yes, my dear brother, I have loved. It is a strange and terrible tale, and though I am now sixty-six years of age I hardly dare stir the ashes of that memory."
Priestly poetry: "Her eyes were like an epic poem in which every glance composed a new canto."

While I'm usually not that big a fan of this type of old school fantastic literature, I very much enjoyed my time with Théophile Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse," here titled "The Priest" in deference to its spiritually conflicted narrator. In this story, Father Romuald agitatedly recalls the period in his youth when he fell victim to a "singular and diabolic illusion" (p. 15) after setting eyes upon the scandalous temptress Clarimonde at his ordination ceremony. Unfortunately for the ill-starred couple, the love that might have been theirs in life will have to wait until after the beautiful Clarimonde's death--when the one-time harlot begins to haunt the prelate in his dreams. Confessing to a life in which he was in effect a priest by day and a dandy and a lover by night, Romuald's ardent recollections of his obsessive affair call attention to the Manichean tensions between the sacred and the profane in a text that also doubles as a sort of a supernatural twist on the effects of love at first sight. Fittingly, the tale's practically awash in the sort of carnal colors and vampiric imagery that brings the priest's temptations to life right before your eyes. Rating: 4.75/5 stars. Source: My Fantoms [translated by Richard Holmes]. New York: New York Review Book Classics, 2008, 15-52.

Là-Bas

Là-Bas [a/k/a The Damned, a/k/a Down There] (2001 paperback)
by J.-K. Huysmans
France, 1891
ISBN 0-140-44767-9

"Whatever you say about Charles VII pales into insignificance when you see Foucquet's portrait of him in the Louvre. I have often paused in front of that bestial face, a face in which I can clearly distinguish the snout of a pig, the eyes of the provincial money-lender and the sanctimonious, bloated lips of a prelate. The figure in Foucquet's painting resembles a debauched priest with a bad cold sunk in wine-induced self-pity! Skim off the fat and reheat the dish through and you can also see the same personality type--less salacious perhaps, more prudent in his cruelty, more obstinate and cunning--as his son and successor, King Louis XI. Nonetheless, this was the man who had Jean Sans Peur assassinated and who abandoned Jeanne d'Arc. I rest my case." (Huysmans, 38-39)

I think I first read parts of this deliciously juicy, odd, and truly cynical narrative fifteen to twenty years ago in one of my earliest encounters with the French proto-surrealist canon, but the Orbis Terrarum Challenge provided me with the perfect pretext to revisit its late-19th century world. While the work begins with an attack on the modern novel's naturalism-obsessed aesthetics that's halfway between a debate and a lecture, it quickly evolves into a scornful condemnation of the modern age itself--so pleased with itself for advances in medical science and inventions like electricity and yet further and further removed from the religious ecstasies and theological certainties of the Middle Ages. As if to accentuate this generational chasm, Huysmans wickedly introduces an age-old metafictional ploy, the presentation of a book within a book, in the form of a biography that's being written by the protagonist Durtal about a real-life 15th century soldier and mystic. His subject? None other than the infamous child murderer and heretic and one-time Joan of Arc loyalist Gilles de Rais, research into whom leads our fictional biographer into a shadow world of 19th-century fin-de-siècle Parisians engaging in Satanism, spiritualism, and other such occult practices in their own quest for some sort of spiritual meaning in the here and now. If this sounds like unduly heavy reading, not to worry. Huysmans' prose is full of an adjectival fury that's frequently hysterical to behold, and his characters, prone to constant diatribes against this, that and the other target du jour of their pre-blogging day and age, are rarely dull. However, this might not be the ideal book for you if you're offended by the notion of a sex scene taking place on a mattress strewn with communion wafers or bothered by the people of southern France being described as a race of "dull-eyed, olive-skinned chocolate munchers and garlic crushers" (41). In other words, a controversial classic!

• Huysmans, J.-K. The Damned (Là-Bas) [translated by Terry Hale]. London and New York, 2001 [1891]. (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

Fantômas, the Genius of Crime

Fantômas (2006 paperpack)
by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
France, 1911
ISBN 978-0-14-310484-1

I'm a sucker for a lurid cover, and the near-lookalike above (curiously missing my copy's montage illustration of an enormous Eiffel Tower looming over the city of Paris and not so curiously missing the original poster's menacing depiction of a bloodied dagger) was at least 90% responsible for luring me into the world of the notorious Parisian archvillain known as Fantômas. As luck would have it, my lowbrow tastes were rewarded with a highly entertaining thriller that worked despite mixing the implausible (male characters successfully masquerading as females for extended periods of time) with the even more implausible (Fantômas' unerring ability to escape justice by a variety of increasingly dubious ruses). While John Ashberry's introduction is probably spot on in appraising Allain and Souvestre as "two inspired hacks" (viii), I have to admit that their high cliffhangers-per-chapter ratio and that bad mofo Detective Juve (Fantômas' brilliant but humble nemesis) made this thing fly by pretty quickly. All in all, a fun, deliciously trashy read if not quite "the modern Aeneid" that some would have it! (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)