The Decadent Construction of Nature in Georges Rodenbach's L'Arbre

Abstract

The Decadent Construction of Nature in Georges Rodenbach's L'Arbre Robert Ziegler Montana Tech of the University of Montana Decadence, as Charles Bernheimer claims, may be defined by way of contrast with an imaginary wholeness that is seen as being lost. In fin-de-siècle fiction, "the categories of history and nature are constantly produced ... in the form of what one might call structural fantasies, oppositional strategies that construct decadence as a knowable negativity" (Bernheimer 58). Etymologically stressing its deciduous overripeness, its separation and fall from the norm from which it deviates, decadence denies a hope in temporal advancement since what is healthy, good, and worthy is relegated to history. Progress does not lead to enlightenment and happiness but to an increase in the distance from a past that is idealized. The culture of which decadence is the supreme manifestation regards itself as debris left after civilization's ruin. It nostalgically looks backward toward nature and tradition, which it implicitly acknowledges as illusory cultural constructs. A sense of dereliction in a disenchanting present leads Decadents to value what is historically irrecoverable and what is identified as a source of nurture that is forsaken in favor of art. Compensating for the Decadents' experience of exile is the reconstruction of their homeland as a literary topos. Yet their project of artistic preservation of the past may hasten the destruction of a picturesque bygone era. This phenomenon is evident in the fiction of Georges Rodenbach, the Belgian poet-novelist most famous for evoking the crepuscular canals, the tolling of church bells, the gloom and foggy silence that envelop Bruges-la-Morte (1892). Born in Tournai in 1855 and raised in the nearby town of Gand, Rodenbach later continued his schooling in Paris, where he attended Caro's lectures at the Collège de France, was escorted to meetings of "les Hydropathes," and there was indoctrinated in the principles of Symbolism. Upon returning home, Rodenbach joined "les Jeune Belgique" and, despite his formation in the French capital, proceeded to situate most of his major fictional works in his native country, whose traditional ways of life he believed were imperiled. Yet in Rodenbach, the literary Flanders of tradition, with its schiedam and 137 138Rocky Mountain Review Delft vases, its blond beer and graceful windmills, is more than just a cliche trope, an "epistemological lure" (Bernheimer 58), an oppositional construct defining the modernity it deplores. More than expressing a longing for what is genuine and historical, his text itself effects the loss of the object of nostalgia. Published in 1899, Rodenbach's novella L'Arbre is the author's last extended work of fiction. Coinciding with the end of the Decadents' infatuation with the immateriality of etherealized other worlds, Rodenbach's novel marks a change in fin-de-siècle aesthetics that hitherto had celebrated exoticism and artificiality. Thus, Jean Pierrot notes that, at the end of the century, a "redécouverte des paysages naturels" signaled a change in the traditional Symbolist literary setting, an abandonment of the "brumes nordiques" and the "paysages incertains baignés d'une lumière trouble qui apparaissaient souvent dans les textes antérieurs" (301). Yet while L'Arbre enacts the mythical conflict pitting nature against culture, the artificial quaintness of the themes the book recycles adapts the story's subject to its literary treatment and makes the idea of a natural world as sentimental and illusory as the Flemish culture whose transience it contributes to and documents. As this essay claims, Rodenbach's book is an illustration of the paradox that, in order to preserve the nature that it transforms into art, decadence must annihilate what it hallows with nostalgia. Set in the peaceful island of Zélande, whose inhabitants have not adapted to modern ways, Rodenbach's spare tale chronicles the romance of Joos and Neele, a couple who meet at the site of local lovers' trysts—beneath a vast oak tree into which their initials have been cut. Yet their traditional courtship patterns are threatened by outsiders whose brutality upsets the island's established way of life. Paralleling Neele's seduction by one of these outsiders and her betrayal of Joos is the story of "L...