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A new translation of Georges
Rodenbach's
Bruges-la-Morte, by Mike Mitchell, with an introduction by Alan
Hollinghurst,
is published by Dedalus Press in March.
Bruges of sighs
The
atmospheric novels of Georges
Rodenbach created an image of the Flemish city - haunted, melancholy,
lost in
time - that endures today. Alan Hollinghurst celebrates his dreamlike
legacy .
Saturday
January 29, 2005
The Guardian
The Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855-98) is identified above all
with the
city of Bruges. It emerged early on as a subject in his poetry, and in
his most
famous book, the short novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a particular idea
of the
place - silent, melancholy, lost in time - found its most intense and
influential
expression. It led to something of a cult of Bruges in the Parisian
circles
that Rodenbach was by then inhabiting. Bruges became a destination,
treasured
for its antiquity and decay, and Rodenbach's novel, illustrated as it
was with
numerous photographs of the city's churches, houses and canals, sold
very well
there. In the following years other Belgian artists explored the richly
desolate atmosphere of the city, and Fernand Khnopff, in particular,
made a
number of mesmerising paintings which combine photographic precision
with a
mood of lonely Symbolist contemplation.
As
it happened, it
was a moment when there was talk of reopening the city to the modern
world
after centuries of decline brought about by the silting-up of its old
sea-canal
(the new port of Zeebrugge would be the result). Many Brugeois resented
seeing
the epithet Morte attached to a city seeking a new commercial life.
Rodenbach
would address these dilemmas, and the possible desecration of his
dream-Bruges,
in his last novel Le Carilloneur (1897). Was the place to be loved for
its life
or for its beautiful death?
Rodenbach,
as
apologist for the beautiful death, was seen by Parisians as himself a
sort of
emanation of the city. In a memoir written by Paul and Victor
Margueritte, who
met him at Mallarmé's Tuesday gatherings, he appears as a
distinctly
"northern" type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and
"blue-grey eyes -the mirror of his native skies -those eyes so deep and
distant, the colour of the canals that they had long reflected, the
colour of
still water and moving sky". In 1895, the French painter Lucien
Lévy-Dhurmer produced an extraordinary portrait of Rodenbach,
placing him in
spectral close-up against a background of the city's roofs and gables,
with the
great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette.
The
writer's grey shoulders seem to rise out of the shadowy waters of the
canal
behind him. Rodenbach was an elegant, almost dandyish dresser, but
Lévy-Dhurmer
shows him with his shirt collar undone and with a wide-eyed expression
of
reverie bordering on grief. Anyone who has read Bruges-la-Morte is
likely to
see this as a kind of double portrait, of the author and of his
bereaved and
obsessive hero, Hugues Viane, haunting the deserted quays, in strange
subjection to his chosen city.
In
the little
preface which Rodenbach wrote to explain the inclusion of photographs
in the
book, he describes Hugues's story as "a study of passion" whose
"other principal aim" is the evocation of a Town, not merely as a
backdrop, but as an "essential character, associated with states of
mind,
counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act". The photographs are
intended to help readers themselves to "come under the influence of the
Town, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close to,
experience for
themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers". This
elaboration of mere atmosphere into a principle of action is certainly
the
central curiosity and mystery of the novel; though it may seem odd that
the
author should have wanted to supplement his own verbal atmosphere, in
all its
obscure Symbolist refine ment, with the illustrations of a Baedeker.
One
needs to look
at Rodenbach's own life to understand why the city was able to assume
this
power of suggestion for him. His connection with it was aptly both
indirect and
suggestive. Though Flemish, he was not himself Brugeois. His father
was, and it
is surely significant for the son's work that he spoke constantly of
the place
to his children; but Georges was born in Tournai, and grew up in Ghent,
also a
richly historic city, but one which had adapted itself to the
possibilities of
modern industry and commerce (Rodenbach père was an inspector of
weights and
measures).
Georges
was
educated at the Jesuit Collège de Sainte-Barbe, as were the poet
Émile
Verhaeren, a friend, and Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish writer who
was to
gain the most international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize in
1911.
(All of them, as members of the educated bourgeoisie, spoke and wrote
in
French.) Rodenbach studied law at the University of Ghent; he then
went, in the
autumn of 1878, to spend a year as a young barrister in Paris.
Once
there he
immersed himself in a literary culture which seemed to him a luxuriant
antithesis
to the sterility of Belgium. As he wrote to Verhaeren: "As for
producing
literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above
all
positivistic and material. It won't hear a word of poetry ... Whereas
in Paris,
one lives at twice the pace, one is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap
rises
and thought flowers." Before returning to Ghent, he published his first
collection of poems, characteristically titled Les Tristesses.
Back
home, he
worked for a further 10 years in the law but involved himself more and
more in
the emerging new movement in Belgian literature, as reviewer, essayist
and
poet. His fourth collection of poems, La Jeunesse blanche , published
in 1886,
was the one in which he himself felt he attained maturity; it is
certainly the
one in which the mysterious accord between the soul and the city,
explored in a
mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation, is established: "To
live like an exile, to live seeing no one / In the vast abandonment of
a dying
town, / Where nothing is heard but the vague rumour / Of a sobbing
organ or a
chiming belfry".
Silence,
he later
said, was the thread connecting all his work, his poems being
décors de
silence, his novels études d'êtres de silence . The bells
that measure out the
silence were also to be a recurrent motif, in his poems, in
Bruges-la-Morte,
and of course in Le Carillonneur , where the great carillon of Bruges
seems to
voice the subconscious of the Flemish people.
In
1888, Rodenbach
left Belgium for good, and spent the remaining 10 years of his life in
Paris.
Here was the real exile, gladly embraced, and doubly rewarding. He
married,
wrote, as a kind of two-way interpreter of French and Belgian culture,
for both
Le Journal de Bruxelles and Le Figaro, and became a figure - discreet,
kindly
and punctilious - in Parisian literary circles. As his life flowered in
Paris,
the Flemish subject, the almost mystical nostalgia for Bruges,
crystallised for
him. The indefinable mood of his poetry, generated from recurrent
imagery of
empty provincial Sundays, solitude, autumn and winter nightfall, took
on a
larger fictional form in the light of distance.
Rather
like AE
Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on
Hampstead
Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his
Paris
apartment. "One only truly loves what one no longer has", he wrote.
"Truly to love one's little homeland, it is best to go away, to exile
oneself for ever, to surrender oneself to the vast absorption of Paris,
and for
the homeland to grow so distant it seems to die. [...] The essence of
art that
is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is
distant,
absent, vanished, unattainable."
Such
a dream
dominates Hugues Viane, who finds in the dead city of Bruges a perfect
setting
in which to grieve for his dead wife. Rodenbach, in his quiet way the
most
monomaniac of writers, seems to have found in the unworldly Hugues the
persona
who could best embody his own obsession. At the opening of the story we
see him,
a widower of five years, setting out from his big old silent house for
one of
his solitary walks. Of the house itself we learn little, except that in
its
drawing-room are the mementoes of his wife, the pictures of her, and
the long
tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case. Hugues, at the
age of
40, has made a religion of his sorrow. Everywhere he finds analogies to
his
dead wife and to his feelings about her, in the rain, the bells, the
canals,
until the whole city comes mysteriously to resemble her, to be imbued,
as it
were, with her absence. He sees intensely but selectively, his eyes
being
"fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself".
This
beautiful and
refined analysis of grief is the stuff of a Rodenbach poem, but even a
short
novel needs an element of action, and it is this that is precipitated
in the
second chapter. Out on his evening walk Hugues goes into Notre Dame,
where he
is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold
and Mary
of Burgundy, and then out in the street again sees his dead wife: not
the
etherealised figure identified with the dead city, but a living woman,
apparently her exact likeness.
Hugues,
himself
unwittingly a legend of fidelity in the town, follows her, and then
loses her;
but we see that an insidious temptation has crossed his path. The
pursuit is
resumed a week later, when he sees her and follows her again, this time
into a
theatre, where, conspicuous in mourning, he takes his place in the
stalls,
unable to see the woman in the audience, and barely aware of what is to
be
performed.
In
fact it is
Robert le Diable, the extravagantly Romantic opera with which the young
Meyerbeer had had his first huge success in 1831, and which had
launched the
vogue for the supernatural in operas of the mid-century. Hugues decides
to
leave after "the scene with the nuns", but of course he has left it
too late. Rodenbach is shy to exploit the Gothic potential of the
situation he
has set up, in which the mysterious woman emerges as a dancer, the nun
Hélène,
who rises from her tomb, and seems to the suggestible Hugues to be his
lost
wife resurrected.
Afterwards
Hugues
recalls the scene as "a setting full of magic and moonlight", but it
is in fact a satanic bacchanal, in which Bertram, a disciple of the
devil,
summons up the spirits of those nuns who had died in sin, who shed
their habits
and work themselves into a frenzy. Escaping from the theatre, Hugues
feels
himself led on by the vision of the dancer, like "Faust, reaching out
for
the mirror in which the divine image of woman is revealed". The
relationship that follows is shadowed from the start by the idea of a
diabolic
bargain; though who will pay the price, and how, remains uncertain
until the
final scene.
Bruges-la-Morte
is
a very strange book, by turns both crude and subtle. One remembers it
mainly
for two things: on the one hand its distillation of mood, its poetic
evocation
of the impalpable, and on the other its bold, even garish fable of the
sexual
imagination. The two things are distinct, but not separable, and in a
sense
highlight the inherent paradox of the Symbolist novel: how is the
inwardness,
the fatalistic paralysis of Symbolist art to be wedded to the demands
of
narrative? Only perhaps in a story that turns on the fulfilment of
dreams and a
sense of the foreknown. There are of course many currents within
Symbolism: the
chaste northern reserve of Khnopff's paintings and Rodenbach's poems,
with
their hinterland of Flemish Catholic piety, coexists with a
preoccupation, even
in other Belgian artists, with pagan icons of female sexual power; and
it is
this tradition of morbid eroticism that Rodenbach, perhaps going a
little
against his natural grain, invokes in the figure of the dancer Jane
Scott.
Some
contemporary
reviewers criticised what they saw as a vein of vulgar sensuality in
Rodenbach's treatment of the affair between Hugues and Jane, which
emerges as
in essence that between a prostitute and an infatuated punter. But
Rodenbach is
characteristically discreet about the details of what passes between
them; we
are not allowed to witness any of those scenes between them that a more
sensational kind of novel might have dwelt on. Similarly, Hugues's
married life
is recalled at the outset as one of unabating happiness, exploration
and sexual
fulfilment, but nothing concrete is ever said about what the couple did
together, where they lived, or even what his wife was called. A deep
privacy
veils the very object of his devotions, which we are allowed to see
only in
symbolic form, in the proliferation of analogies.
Bruges-la-Morte
was
also criticised for the improbability of its subject, but a novel of
this kind
is not to be judged by its likeness to life, or indeed to most other
novels. It
creates a rarefied world, internalised and intensified by feeling. The
conventions of realistic fiction are almost completely abandoned; the
details
of the modern life of the city - it has a theatre, shops, markets,
gossips and
scandals - seem to impinge on Hugues's dream world as if from another
kind of
novel altogether.
Above
all,
Bruges-la-Morte is the novel of a poet, who works in rhythm and
pattern, image
and suggestion. At its heart lies the essence of poetry: a simile. It
is a book
about resemblance, the strange identity of the known and the unknown,
"the
horizon where habit and novelty meet". The central resemblance, between
one woman and another, is discovered by a man whose whole world is
given value
by resemblances, "mysterious equations" of past and present, place
and feeling, the seen and the unknowable. The prose in which Rodenbach
conveys
such mysteries is marked by hypnotic repetitions and that liberal use
of the
exclamation-mark so typical of the period. If its effects are
"poetic" they are also, in a loose sense, musical, and in its
fatalistic circlings, its motivic repetitions, its tone both fervent
and
elusive, Bruges-la-Morte dwells, like much of the music of the fin de
siècle,
in an inner realm of refined and portentous subjectivity.
Since
Hugues's
first sightings of Jane culminate in the perfor mance of an opera, it
is worth
noting that the novel's last scene, with its off-stage procession,
tumultuous
church-bells and climactic murder, itself resolves a very inward drama
in the
conventions of grand opera. A fact not lost on the 23-year-old Erich
Wolfgang
Korngold, whose opera Die tote Stadt (premiered in 1920) is based
indirectly on
Bruges-la-Morte, and is now the form in which the novel is most widely
known.
Its immediate source was Le Mirag e, the four-act theatrical version of
Bruges-la-Morte which Rodenbach prepared at the end of his life, but
never saw
staged.
In
dramatising his
book he found himself driven to just those kinds of explication through
dialogue that the novel pointedly avoids. Korngold, in following him,
and in
wrapping the play in his precocious mélange of Straussian
modernism and
Viennese schmaltz, prolonged and broadened the fame of this recondite
novel -
but at the cost of what makes it so singular and so unforgettable.
essays and photographs by Will Stone
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