Pastness and Enclosed Space as a Disruptive Subtext in the Work of Georges Rodenbach

Abstract

ABSTRACTRodenbach explores a vast imagery of enclosed spaces, from the heart as a room with closed shutters, or the aquarium with its interiorised transparency, to the isolated domestic interior. It is argued that these spaces function in Rodenbach’s work as critical subtexts. They are revealing of the particular nineteenth-century awareness of past and present as traces: the past is irrevocably absent and other, and the present is a fragile, highly elusive future past. Against this elusiveness, a variety of strategies of re-presentation emerge in order to vivify the past, disappearing or absent realities. These strategies were for example the panoramic theatre, the historical novel or the museum with its evocative power, that somehow established a sense of continuity and connection between past and present. Also the increasingly problematic notion of the subject as consciousness, as presence with reality and with the self, that is central to this essay, is part of this broader context of presentification, historical awareness, and representation.The spatial imageries in Le Règne du silence and Les Vies encloses, in Bruges-la-Morte, Le Carillonneur, L’Arbre and L’Ami des miroirs, disrupt and problematize presentification. More precisely, through challenging the notion of the subject as an immediate, exhaustive presence with reality, caught in fixed, stable thoughts, Rodenbach testifies to the irreducible fragility of the present. Fixed thoughts dissolve and become elusive, and result from the ungraspable movements of the subconscious. In Rodenbach’s interior spaces, the subject thus becomes an elusive being that, through self-reflection, has incorporated in its very self the opaque depths of the subconscious.