Georges Rodenbach Research Articles

Dead Mirrors: Relics and photographs in Georges Rodenbach's

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.

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film, and the Arts

Book Review| March 01 2011 Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film, and the Arts Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film, and the Arts. Edited by Eckstein, Lars, Korte, Barbara, Pirker, Eva Ulrike, and Reinfandt, Christoph. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 425 pp. Cloth $115.00. Philip Mosley Philip Mosley Pennsylvania State University Philip Mosley, associate editor of Comparative Literature Studies, is professor of English and comparative literature at the Worthington Scranton campus of the Pennsylvania State University. He has published extensively on literature and on film, his most recent book being The Cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Responsible Realists (2011, forthcoming). He is also a translator of Belgian francophone literature, including Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte (2007), Maurice Maeterlinck's The Intelligence of Flowers (2008), and François Jacqmin's The Book of the Snow (2010). He was awarded the 2008 Prix de la Traduction Littéraire by the French Community of Belgium for his translations of Belgian authors. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (1): 96–100. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0096 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Philip Mosley; Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film, and the Arts. Comparative Literature Studies 1 March 2011; 48 (1): 96–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0096 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) by Paul Gorceix

242 Reviews Georges Rodenbach (1855-I898). By PAULGORCEIX. (Romantisme etModernite, 99) Paris: Champion. 2006. 273 pp. 50. ISBN 978-2-7453-I361-4. Paul Gorceix' s study is the only recent comprehensive essay on George Roden bach. Anny Bodson-Thomas's L'Esthetique de Georges Rodenbach (Liege: Vaillant Carmanne, 1942) remained for long theonlymonograph on the author ofBruges-la morte, until thepublication ofClaude deGreve' sGeorges Rodenbach in1987 (Brussels: Labor). One of themerits of this new critical work lies in its effective articulation of threedimensions ofRodenbach's identity, that is his life,his poetic and narrative opus, and-more originally perhaps-his critical works and his contributions to the late nineteenth-century reflectionon aesthetics and the place of literature in society. Gorceix has opted for a chronological approach, by contrast with thematic perspec tives thathave given precedence to the imaginaryworld informing theworks typical of the maturity of theBelgian poet. This isamost plausible option given theprofound relationship between thecultural background ofRodenbach, hismanifold interactions with the literary milieu of his time, and the literaryunfolding ofhis imaginaryworld. Notwithstanding his numerous and determining interactionswith the artistic and literarymovements of the late nineteenth century, Rodenbach remained an inde pendent creator: 'il echappe a toute tentative de definition et de classement' (p. I5). One of thehallmarks ofGorceix's work ishis demonstration of thispoint through a detailed analysis of the entire spectrum ofRodenbach's literaryoutput. The biogra phical approach introduces Rodenbach as an '&crivainengage', a characterization that complements and qualifies theportrait ofRodenbach as a contemplative poet entirely devoted to the exploration of the inner realms of symbolic imagination. Another important leitmotif developed by Gorceix throughout his critical study emphasizes theprofound foundation ofRodenbach's imaginaryworld in thephysical landscape of his life,his country, and his daily experience. This aspect echoes the characterization of Flemish creativity as being anchored inan original connection be tween the imaginative and visionary on the one hand, and themost physical realities on the other. Such an approach helps to qualify the strong critical emphasis on the idealist and symbolic bent ofRodenbach's aesthetics thathas informedmost of the critical discourse on his work. Gorceix stresses the fact that 'chez Rodenbach [. . lemonde existe', while situating Bruges-la-morte at the 'confluence du realisme et du symbolisme' since 'pour lui, tout se tient' (p. I4). This subtle interaction between the inner realms explored by Symbolism and the outer realities claimed byRealism isencapsulated byGorceix's observation concern ing the later poetry of Rodenbach, inwhich 'on ne peut plus discerner dans son poeme, si c'est l'aime qui anime les choses ou si inversement ce sont les choses qui retentissent sur son ame' (p. 226). Moreover, this remark relativizes the question of knowing whether precedence should be given to the subjective perception or to the material realm in the creative alchemy ofRodenbach's opus. What is certain is that Rodenbach's approach is less characterized by a vacuity of the subject (p. 228) (which would better be applied toMallarmes way of thinking) than by the indeterminate and unfathomable subconscious depth of subjectivity, as several critical studies have contributed to demonstrating (see, forexample, my Rodenbach: lesdecors de silence (Brussels: Labor, I990)). Furthermore, the fact that the poetic subject may become aware of himself by analogy with theoutside world isnot incompatible with a sense of unity between the two realms-quite to thecontrary, since in reality such a possibility presupposes an ontological and symbolic correspondence, ifnot fusion, between the inner and theouter. Gorceix's Georges Rodenbach will be an important addition to the library of scho lars of the late nineteenth-century literarymovements both as amajor and original reference on Rodenbach, and as an important contribution to a better understanding MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 243 of the aesthetic complexities of a 'generation-charniere a l'aube du monde moderne et de sesmutations' (p. 259). GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PATRICK LAUDE Fran_oisMauriac: TheMaking of an Intellectual. By EDWARDWELCH. (Faux Titre, 290) Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2oo6. 202 pp. ?40. ISBN 978-90-420-2I I2-9. In this important study Edward Welch makes use of a Bourdieusian framework to build a convincing case forviewing Mauriac as amajor intellectual figure inpost-war France. The firstof his fivechapters centres onMauriac's ambivalent relationship with La Nouvelle Revue Franfaise...

The Ricardo Vines Piano Music Collection at the University of Colorado at Boulder

Ricardo Vines (1875-1943) was a Catalan pianist who carefully amassed and cared for a substantial library of published and manuscript music. Because he was a leader in premiering new music during years from 1900 to 1930, his library is rich in works from this period. In addition to being remembered for his remarkable technique, Vines is recalled today primarily as a champion of piano works of his French, Spanish, Russian, and South American contemporaries. As noted by John and Anna Gillespie, Ricardo Vines have had a brilliant virtuoso career had he not ardently and actively promoted modern music. . . . Despite an indifferent, sometimes hostile public, Vines waged a lifelong crusade for contemporary music, repeatedly playing new music which no other pianist would even think of performing.1 His music library reflects large number of composers, both well-known and forgotten, who sent their music to pianist in hopes of having it performed. After Vines died in 1943, his music collection-including manuscripts, autograph dedications, and inscriptions-was scattered by his family. The bulk of his library, 836 pieces, was purchased by University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) in mid-1950s. Unfortunately, after purchase it was divided up as a seed collection. The purchase has recently been reconstructed as Ricardo Vines Piano Music Collection and is now located in Howard B. Waltz Music Library. This article provides a brief biographical sketch of Vines, describes history and reconstruction of collection, and highlights its contents. A list of selected holdings in collection describes some of most significant pieces individually, including those bearing inscriptions, dedications, and pianist's markings. Finally, a listing of all composers represented in collection is provided. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF RICARDO VINES Ricardo Javier Vines y Garcia Roda was born in Lerida (Lleida), Spain, on 5 February 1875. In 1885, he became a student of Juan Bautista Pujol in Barcelona. At suggestion of Isaac Albeniz, his mother brought him to Paris to study in 1887, where he enrolled first as an auditor, then as a full-fledged participant in Paris Conservatory class of Charles-Wilfred Beriot.2 There he met Maurice Ravel. The young composers, who were born same year, may have first met through their Spanish-speaking mothers.3 Vines quickly became one of foremost members of Beriot's class, and was invited to perform his teacher's own works-including a February 1893 performance of a piece he identifies only as the second movement of de Beriot's concerto, with composer playing orchestral reduction.4 This was probably second Piano Concerto, op. 46, judging from a heavily fingered copy of an early publication of that work in University of Colorado collection.5 In March 1895, Vines also performed Beriot's Sonata for Two Pianos, op. 61, at Salle Pleyel with Beriot as other pianist.6 Vines was an autodidact-probably a consequence of a pedagogical system in which young students were given little other than a musical education at an institution like Paris Conservatory. He taught himself English (specifically to be able to read Poe in original), mathematics, astrology, palmistry, and any number of other branches of occult sciences. He also read extensively from literature of time, ranging from symbolists including Maurice Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach, and Stephane Mallarme; to decadents Jules-Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; to Catholic mystics like Ernest Hello; and utterly unclassifiable authors such as Rosicrucian Catholic Josephin Peladan. Vines shared many of his books-notably Aloysius Bertrand's cycle of prose poems Gaspard de la nuit and works of Poe and Baudelaire-with his good friend Mauricio Ravel. In company with Ravel, reading two-piano or four-hand arrangements of orchestral scores, Vines discovered new music from end of nineteenth century, including works of modern Russian composers and symphonic poems of Cesar Franck. …

Depression and the logic of separation: situating Pierre Fédida’s ‘La Relique et le travail du deuil’ (The relic and the work of mourning)

This article introduces the work of psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida on the work of mourning, separation and depression. Fédida’s work is first examined in relation to works by Freud, Lagache, Mannoni and Laplanche. After explaining the importance of anthropology in the conceptualization of mourning, attention is then directed to clinical interpretation illustrated by Georges Rodenbach ( Bruges-la-morte) and Chantal Akerman ( Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). Attention is drawn to the role of substitutive formations, leading to an understanding of the mobility of psychic life such that the presence of unanalyzable psychotic kernels suggests not only limits to analytic experience but a corresponding presence in culture, too. From this, certain suggestions on temporality and depression - living the impossible death - lead, to a question relating to the renovation of cultural histories and studies. What should be the issue - visual culture, or a philosophical anthropology of culture and visuality where crisis and resistance become forms of the unanalyzability of the time of the other?

Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siecle French Culture (review)

Speaking through the character of bell-ringer Joris Borluut in Le Carillonneur (1897), Georges Rodenbach writes: "C'est la foule qui construit les monuments [...L]es cathédrales, les beffrois, les palais, ont été construits par la foule. Ils sont à son image et à sa ressemblance." As Elizabeth Emery argues in Romancing the Cathedral, senti-ments like Rodenbach's stem from Victor Hugo's successful rehabilitation of the Gothic cathedral as a democratic structure, one produced by the people and utilized by the people, "a stable edifice," writes Emery, "able to support an endless variety of artistic and civil liberties."

Oedipus as Reader in Georges Rodenbach's La Vocation

Oedipus as Reader in Georges Rodenbach's La Vocation

Oedipus as Reader in Georges Rodenbach's "La Vocation"

n his 1925 essay Resistances to Psycho-analysis, Freud pays tribute to Schopenhauer for acknowledging an intensely impressive passage incomparable significance of sexual life. Freud goes on to emphasize breadth of psychoanalytic definition given to sexuality, maintaining that it means more than the impulsion toward a union of two sexes or toward producing a pleasurable sensation in genitals, but rather it bears a resemblance to all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato's Symposium (218). Those interested in fin de sikcle cannot help but see irony in fact that Freud's praise of Schopenhauer coincides with a characterization of sexuality as a positive and ennobling force. What in Freud is sovereign principle of life signified for Schopenhauer man's tyrannical subjugation by a blind impulse to reproduce. What in Freud raises man up in Schopenhauer ties humanity to a world of illusion, shackling him to objects of his desire, constituting him as puppet of his will. Eros, Freud's enlightened ruler, remains in Schopenhauer a contemptuous despot, the true hereditary lord of world, as Schopenhauer calls him, who, when seated upon his ancestral throne ... laugh[s] at preparations which have been made to bind [him].I Freud's two most important foundational contributions to psychoanalytic theory - enumeration of stages of infantile sexual development and identification of Oedipus complex - had received considerable thematic elaboration in fiction of thefin de sikcle, at time influence of Schopenhauer's views had been most pervasive in France. Indeed, Schopenhauer's description of sexual desire as an oppressive king whose subjects are powerless to depose or imprison him evokes an image of Oedipal father who cannot be overthrown by his son. If today one looks through lens of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy at major tenets of Freud's theory of sexuality, one can clearly see that it is a deep-seated anti-feminism, depiction of woman as lure that prevents man's ascension to a state of detached equanimity and impassive contemplation

Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays

This collection of essays seeks to acquaint the English-speaking reader with the life and work of the Belgian novelist and poet Georges Rodenbach, best known for the novel Bruges-la-Morte.

The Origins of Vicente Huidobro's "Creacionismo" (1911-1916) and Its Evolution (1917-1947)

A detailed study of Huidobro's early works from 1911-1916 (including El espejo de agua), delving into the leitmotifs, images, themes, rhetorical and stylistic devices. The question of literary influences is studied in a chronological framework taking into account the gradual development of his style. The sources treated here have often been poorly studied or totally ignored in relation to Huidobro: the French Symbolists, the Cubists, the Spanish American Modernista Amado Nervo, the Spanish mystics Santa Teresa de J_sus and Fray Luis de Le_n, the American Transcendentalist Emerson, and the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach.

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

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...

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

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-siecle fiction, 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.

Fernand Khnopff, Georges Rodenbach, and Bruges, the Dead City

The image of the city of Bruges in the work of Fernand Khnopff, generally considered the most important of the Belgian Symbolist artists of the late 19th century, is here reinterpreted in light of the writings of the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach, whose influential novel Bruges-la-Morte not only made Bruges renowned as “the dead city,” but created for a generation of Symbolist artists and writers the quintessential image of the city as “soulscape.” Rodenbach's novel, along with his poems and essays, is shown to have greatly influenced specific depictions of Bruges by Khnopff.

Decadence in Villiers de I'Isle‐Adam and His Followers

Continental Decadence not only had an identifiable international literary rhetoric. Its rhetoric, without being self‐reflective or self‐referential, was its raison d'être also. A quintessential example is “Conte d'Amour” from Contes cruds by Villiers de l'Isle‐Adam (1838–89). Here rhetorical excess, both as redundancy and crypticism, conveys the typical Decadent gestus: morbid, gross and over‐refined, solipsistic. Such a rhetoric must be the medium for the label Decadent to be completely justified. As we follow the wake of Villiers' influence first outside French with Arthur Symons and Stefan George and next outside France (but in French) with Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe, and Georges Rodenbach, we find that each admirer selects features which reinforce his own bent. Symons follows Villiers most closely, using language to disguise and divert reality. George uses language to intensify reality. Maeterlinck, Van Lerberghe, and Rodenbach use language to reinterpret reality and, especially in the case of Rodenbach, to discredit rhetoric when divorced from reality. By the end of the 19th century, in prose the Naturalist verso of Decadence has pierced through the face; in poetry Decadence has modulated into Symbolism. But the full expression, found in Villiers, seems historically to have been necessary. There had to be cryptic statement and overstatement before there could be enduring statement.