Ghost stories: Redon’s ‘transmission’ of Gothic literature

Abstract

This article focuses on a rarely studied set of images: Redon’s album La Maison Hantée, published in 1896 (M 160-166) based on his friend and patron Philipon’s translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s story The Haunted and the Haunters: Or, the House and the Brain (1859). Bulwer-Lytton was regarded as a significant writer in the 1830s and The Haunted and the Haunters was a well-known ghost story that contributed to establishing some recurrent narrative strategies of Gothic literature. Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was an avid reader who believed in the power of reading to explore the imagination. While Redon claimed he was not influenced by literature, he mingled with many literary figures of his time and published series of drawings linked to Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert’s texts. Redon developed strategies to ‘interpret’ texts, rather than traditionally illustrate them, such as condensed narrative or the selection of existing drawings. Rather than base his works on narratives, he often sought another type of connection between the image and text, what he called a ‘transmission’. Setting itself in opposition to Leeman’s claims in his 1994 book that Redon’s images for this project are ‘reductive, purely illustrative visuals’, this article aims to show that there are essential and complex connections between Bulwer-Lytton’s Gothic text, its reception in late-nineteenth-century France, and Redon’s artistic production and interest in the occult at the time. Using Genette’s notion of ‘hypertextuality’ the article argues that this set of images is an exploration of Gothic techniques and tropes, a ‘transmission’ of Redon’s curiosity for occult practices and imagery.