Told in the Mother's Voice: Jean Lorrain's Fairy Tales as Oral Narrative

Abstract

Nothing evokes more powerfully the Bachelardian sense of topophilia than Jean Lorrain's image of the nestled child to whom his mother tells a fairy tale. Reverting in his memory to the status of a listener, the storyteller again becomes the boy before the hearth, the dreamer who is transfixed by the embers in the fireplace and whose reveries are incubated by the stove's maternal warmth. Imagining the homeless lashed along by biting winds and blown down hard, paved streets by gusts that snatch at flimsy rags, the writer regresses to the protected nest of childhood, from which he leaves on cozy journeys into the landscapes of old books: combien il serait doux de pouvoir redescendre le passe, de pouvoir redevenir enfant et,... dans la tiddeur des chambres closes,... de se reprendre au charme des vieux livres d'images,... et de pouvoir croire encore aux contes! (Preface, Princesses d'ivoire et d'ivresse 7). Published in 1902, Lorrain's Princesses d'ivoire et d'ivresse is unlike the author's earlier works that had conditioned their reception. The Fecamp native, who escaped the humid greenery of Normandy and electrified Paris with his flamboyant eccentricities, had used literature as an instrument of remunerative publicity, crafting personae to promote the sale of his strange and shocking books. Accomplished scandal-monger, incarnation of le peril mauve (McLendon, Communities 7), Lorrain belonged to the notorious segments of the society he maligned. In his depictions of the underworld of crime and prostitution (La Maison Philibert), theatre society, the demi-monde (Le Triteau), the ruthless practices of publishers (Maison pour dames), Lorrain had shown the public its most unflattering public face. With their emphasis on sensationalism and contemporaneity, Lorrain's previous works engage attention as outrageous performances that model the disapproval they are intended to elicit. It is therefore surprising to find Lorrain thinking back to his own childhood, yearning for the days long past when he was the audience himself.