Dead Mirrors: Relics and photographs in Georges Rodenbach's

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Georges Rodenbach was born on 16 July 1855 in Tournai, Belgium, and died in 1898 in Paris. As a youth he became friends with the poet Emile Verhaeren. He was a Symbolist poet, who supported himself as a lawyer and journalist. He published eight collections of poetry and four novels, as well as short stories, plays and criticism. He left Belgium in 1888, spent the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the Journal de Bruxelles, and became a close friend of the poet Mallarmé. 2 See Edwards for an excellent and informative discussion of the relations of text and photographs in Bruges-la-Morte. I concur in particular with his claim that the novel is about photography (71), his consideration of the immobilazation of time in the photographs of canals (79–80), and the connection of photographs and relics (84–86). For the relation in the photograph of the index to the real, see Iversen 113–29. 3 D'Entre les morts was published in French in 1954, and in an English translation by Geoffrey Sainsbury in 1956. It was reissued in 1997 as a paperback edition under the title Vertigo by Bloomsbury Film Classics. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac also wrote the novel that became Les Diaboliques (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot and the treatment for Franju's Eyes without a Face (1960). 4 A French translation by Émile Laurent and Sigismond Csape appeared in 1895 (Paris: Georges Carré). 5 For a sustained discussion of the relation between photography and film, see Campany. 6 It could be said that the “punctum” in Barthes’ Camera Lucida, making the image an object of fascination, connecting it to the life beyond biological life of the real, overcomes the deadness of the image as studium. 7 Some later editions add graphic illustrations. 8 For an analysis of the way that the figure of the Egyptian mummy has been used to discuss the photographic and cinematic image, see Rosen. 9 The following remark on Atget from Benjamin's “Little History of Photography” also applies to the photographs chosen by Rodenbach for Bruges-la-Morte: “almost all of these pictures are empty. [ … ] They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a dwelling that has not yet found a new tenant” (286). Of course in early photography is was impossible to convey moving subjects without blur, which might account for why empty topographic photographs were preferable. 10 Trans. Mike Mitchell, Sawtry: Dedalus, 2009. The new photographs of Bruges are by Will Stone. 11 For the relic as a piece of enjoyment, see Pelzer 178–203. In his seminar Encore, Lacan contrasts both desire and phallic jouissance with feminine jouissance that he approaches through the writings of mainly female mystics (76–7). 12 Constantinople was sacked by the Crusader army of Count of Flanders Baldwin IX in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade. Baldwin IX probably sent the Holy Blood, looted from the Byzantines, to Bruges shortly thereafter (the novel says Thierry of Alsace brought it). 13 In “Crisis of Verse” Mallarmé writes: “I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet” (210). For the new role of the page in the material spacing of writing, see Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard” (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) (1897). 14 For a profound discussion of images produced by contact, see Didi-Huberman. 15 For a brilliant reading of Vertigo in terms of the relation of the loss of the image and the image of loss, emphasizing the series of images over the relation of the image to the (lost or prohibited) object, see Cousins.