*Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges
Alan Hollinghurst wrote in The Guardian of 29 Jan 2005:
“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.
Date circa 1887
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.
https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/artworks/portrait-de-georges-rodenbach-18099
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…
[“The genius of the nineteenth century is unable to proceed on its own road…The century has no decisive colour.” Grimschitz, Bruno. DIE WIENER RINGSTRASSE. Bremen and Berlin: 1938.]
…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 refinement, 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…
[Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A.E. Housman]
…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…
[“During the time of Symbolism in Russia—the so-called Silver Age (c. 1895–1910)—artists, writers and musicians gave unprecedented attention to the theory of artistic meaning and form. Suffice it to mention some of the names and institutions identifiable with the Silver Age to realize the extent and potential of its achievement: Sergei Diaghilev and the St. Petersburg World of Art group; the Moscow Blue Rose group; the artists Lev Bakst, Viktor Borisov-Musatov and Mikhail Vrubel, the poets Aleksandr Blok and Valerii Briusov; the Evenings of Contemporary Music supported by Nikolai Medtner, Alfred Nourok and Anton Skriabin; the Ballets Russes; the many private theatres with their repertoires of Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Schnitzler; and so on. These were all products of the Symbolist era and, however different in physiognomy, they shared very distinctive ideas and ideals.” John E. Bowlt]
[Warwick University, School of Modern Languages and Cultures:
FR262 Symbolism and Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Paris
Module Code: FR262Module Name: Symbolism and Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Paris Module Coordinator: Dr Clément Dessy (Not running 2024-25)
Module Description
From the 1880’s until after the first decade of the 20th century, the Symbolist and Decadent writers embodied aesthetical reactions against the contemporary times as well as they defended the prevalence of the individual against the group and the society. By leaning on theoretical lectures and text-reading seminars, this module will invite the students:
– to understand the literary life of the period by exploring how Symbolist and Decadent writers played an active role within many different cultural places (cabarets, cafés, salons and literary journals);
– to develop their abilities to interpret specific issues related to Symbolist and Decadent texts (including notably works by Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé or Joris-Karl Huysmans);
– to approach the different genres invested by these writers (poetry, novels, short stories, tales, shadow plays…);
– to observe connections between literary and aesthetical values, literary life and society.
Primary Texts
Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977)
Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1998)
Pierre Louÿs, La Femme et le Pantin (Paris: Folio, 1990)
Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires (Paris: Folio, 1977)]
…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 performance 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 Mirage, 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.”
Julia Upton 