Villiers De Research Articles

“Le domaine du Cant et du Puff ”: Villiers, Anti-Americanism, and the French Edisonades

Abstract This essay builds on recent scholarship on romans d’anticipation and the popular press to read French Edisonades by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (L’Ève future, Contes cruels), Alphonse Allais (“La Vérité sur l’exposition de Chicago,” “Supériorité de la vie américaine sur la nôtre,” etc.), and Gustave Le Rouge and Gustave Guitton (La Conspiration des milliardaires) as marking a fundamental anxiety about France’s slipping world-power status in the face of America’s industrial and economic ascendancy. In these fin de siècle technological fictions, the American inventor emerges as an ambivalent figure hovering between scientific genius and hucksterish humbuggery. The real-life rivalry between Thomas Alva Edison and Charles Cros over the 1878 invention of the phonograph led to satiric forms of resistance to the United States as a land of vulgar mercantile utilitarianism threatening to decenter Paris as the cultural capital of the nineteenth century. Although evolving drafts of Villiers’s metaphysical novel seem to highlight the divine creative potential of “le ‘Sorcier de Menlo Park,’” L’Ève future retains less idealistic references to Edison’s commercial side as a Barnum-like businessman from America. Meanwhile, Le Rouge and Guitton’s fantasy of French scientific triumph over American millionaires counters the troubling lure of technical wonder and speculative energy from the land of the almighty dollar.

Savants et savoirs à la fin-de-siècle

The Savant certainly represents one of the most popular figures in French literature at the end of the nineteenth century. A specialist of the various branches of knowledge, this emblematic figure seems to reflect the great passion for science that characterizes this particular historical era, in which progress and technological discoveries play an important role in everyday life.Savants of all kinds invade the literary fiction of these years, crossing the great multitude of literary genres that enriches the cultural panorama of the fin-de-siècle. Doctors, scientists, professors, inventors become the recurrent protagonists of literary productions, conquering the main literary scene, from Naturalism to Science fiction and from Symbolism the Decadent movement. In addition to these scientific figures, other types of Savants permeate fin-de-siècle fiction. Occultists, magicians and sorcerers indeed play an important role in the literary genres, thus embodying other forms of erudition: “occult sciences”.This article investigates the multifarious aspects of the figure of the Savant, using critical tools to analyze three emblematic novels of the fin-de-siècle literature: Le Docteur Pascal (1893) by Émile Zola, Le Vice suprême (1884) by Joséphin Péladan and L’Ève future (1886) by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. This study aims to identify the differences between scientific and occult Savants, but also their numerous analogies, which reflect the cohesion that exists between various literary genres during these years.

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Anarchism: A Legacy of the Paris Commune

ABSTRACT This article revisits Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's political affinities with fin-de-siècle anarchism through a reading of two of his late short stories, ‘Le Banquet des Éventualistes' and ‘L'Etna chez soi'. My re-evaluation involves moving away from l'ère des attentats of 1892–94 and returning to the Paris Commune as a key event for anarchism. Drawing on the work of Kristin Ross and Julia Nicholls as well as Villiers's own experiences of the Commune, I explore how Villiers situates anarchism within the Commune’s legacy, an act of political allyship that somewhat fittingly earns him an anarchist afterlife amongst his contemporaries and beyond.

Translation of Charles Cros, ‘process for recording and reproducing colors, forms and movements’ (1867) with an introduction

ABSTRACT This 1867 document, akin to a patent application for the US Patent Office, is among the first to describe processes for producing both motion and color photography. It precedes by 20 years Edison’s 1888 kinetograph/kinetoscope design, the earliest working prototype of cinema. Its author is Charles Cros, who also outlined a phonograph system in 1877, a few months before Edison displayed his working phonograph. Cros is mostly known as a poet, fiction writer and playwright associated with members of the French Symbolist and Decadent movements (Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam). Yet he was an accomplished technician and inspired media innovator who deserves reconsideration in media history. Evidence of his status comes for instance from his close collaboration with Jules-Adrien Carpentier, the very engineer the Lumière Brothers tasked with constructing their Cinématographe camera. Sent to and received by the French Academy of Sciences, this document is in three parts. The first describes with prescient specificity the photographic synthesis of motion. The second offers several ways of achieving the photographic synthesis of color using filters and projection (rather than pigment and print, as later achieved in the 1890s). The last and more cryptic section concerns an ambitious theory of perception. Unpublished in French until 1970, this document will be of wide interest to scholars of media history, cinema and photography studies, literary studies, and modernist studies. The introductory essay makes a strong case for rehabilitating Charles Cros as a key inceptor of modern audiovisual media.

Фотогения революции

Drawing on the works of three authors, namely, Jean Epstein, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and P.A. Kropotkin, the article attempts to lay the grounds for what might be called a semiotics of forces. Jean Epstein, a filmmaker and theorist of the new art form, is the au­thor of an original concept of photogénie where cinema is presented as an instru­ment re­vealing the transformations of matter itself. Erupting Etna stands for the trans­formations in question. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is a symbolist writer, who also mentions Etna, associat­ing its explosive power with the chemical formulas of explosives. These formulas, inte­grated into his “least literary” novella, become special signs of social transformation: The writer, challenging the entire class of bourgeoisie that he deeply detests, makes use of the fear incited by the anarchists amongst it. Finally, P.A. Kropotkin, one of the leading theo­rists of anarchism but also an outstanding scientist and geographer, insists on the priority of transformative action over theory and every other speculation. In fact, he proposes his own version of the performative – of words changing the existing state of things – already at the end of the 19th century. In one way or another, all these writers are united by their understanding of the inherent connection between natural and social disasters (Kropotkin’s position is explicit). Described by Epstein and only once mentioned by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Etna becomes an element of a correlation, i.e., of a connection that is unapparent and necessary at the same time. What is implied is the relation between volcano and cin­ema as well as that between volcano and explosives. In both cases this relation becomes the designation of matter itself or, to be more exact, of matter in a state of flux and trans­formation. But this is also true of transformative action in the proper sense of the word (re­sulting in revolution, according to Kropotkin), whose verbal expressions always carry within themselves the energy of multidirectional forces. Etna is not merely a volcano and not just an element of a correlation; from the perspective of physics, it is synonymous with heat (scorching lava), which stands for changes in the properties of a substance, i.e., its transformation in purely physical terms. It is clear that transformation in cinema, literature as well as in social life cannot be represented directly; it is revealed only through a set of relations, namely, a semiotics of forces.

«Загадка, которую должна разрешить критика»: В. Брюсов о Вилье де Лиль-Адане

This publication concerned with the problems of Valeriy Bryusov’s critical works and his interest in French culture. The aim of the paper is to introduce into scientific circulation the Bryusov’s text relating to the late French Romanticist Au. Villiers de l'Isle- Adam. Our introductory article gives a brief description of the literary relations between the Russian poet and the French writer. It is noted that for a quarter of a century Brusov turned to the work of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam as an editor, as a translator and as a novelist, attentive to the creative search of his predecessors. The published materials are a draft of Bryusov's article, made after 1910. In this text Bryusov expresses his attitude towards the French writer in detail and turns to the analysis of his short stories. The critic sums up literary fate in Russia of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and other poètes maudits. In addition, Bryusov gives his vision of the level of the Russian readership and determines the degree of familiarity of the “average reader” with the French literature.

Черубина де Габриак: французские источники мистификации

The article shows what role M. Voloshin’s interest in the work of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam played in the creation of Cherubina de Gabriak. This famous mystification was planned by M. Voloshin and E. Dmitrieva in the summer of 1909 when the poet was translating Villiers’ philosophical drama Axel and writing an essay about the play and its author. Shared motifs and images that were discovered in Cherubina’s poems, Villiers’ drama and Voloshin’s essays, allow to treat the heroine of Axel (Sara de Maupers) as a literary prototype of the fictional poetess and to assert that Cherubina- Dmitrieva’s poetry was influenced by Villiers’ works and Voloshin’s interpretation of the former’s life. Also, it is important that Voloshin’s attention on Villiers’ novel Future Eve could serve as an impulse to creation of the ideal illusory poetess: an article about this work figured in Voloshin’s first projects for Apollon magazine, S. Makovsky wrote about the heroine of this novel in his memoirs of Cherubina.

Черубина де Габриак: французские источники мистификации

The article shows what role M. Voloshin’s interest in the work of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam played in the creation of Cherubina de Gabriak. This famous mystification was planned by M. Voloshin and E. Dmitrieva in the summer of 1909 when the poet was translating Villiers’ philosophical drama Axel and writing an essay about the play and its author. Shared motifs and images that were discovered in Cherubina’s poems, Villiers’ drama and Voloshin’s essays, allow to treat the heroine of Axel (Sara de Maupers) as a literary prototype of the fictional poetess and to assert that Cherubina- Dmitrieva’s poetry was influenced by Villiers’ works and Voloshin’s interpretation of the former’s life. Also, it is important that Voloshin’s attention on Villiers’ novel Future Eve could serve as an impulse to creation of the ideal illusory poetess: an article about this work figured in Voloshin’s first projects for Apollon magazine, S. Makovsky wrote about the heroine of this novel in his memoirs of Cherubina.

Une révolution vue d'en bas: L'épopée ordinaire du Tableau de Paris (1871)

Published under the pseudonym of Marius from 17 to 24 May 1871 by the communard paper Le Tribun du Peuple, the Tableau de Paris has long been a controversial issue in the history of French literature. In 1953 it was first attributed to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Three decades later, the editors of Villiers' OEuvres complètes in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" reproduced the article even though they seriously queried the attribution. Finally, in 2008 marxist publisher Sao Maï deconstructed their arguments by showing how fully supportive of the Commune Villiers was. Whoever its true author, the Tableau de Paris is in search of an epic manner based on the sense of grandeur. The epic is not centered on the battles against the troupes versaillaises. While the utopia of the Commune is coming to an end, it appears the grandeur lies in the everyday life and values of the Parisian people. (In French)

La caricature entre image et parole : Villiers de l’Isle-Adam rival d’Honoré Daumier

L'article propose d'analyser, dans une optique comparatiste, les objectifs et les spécificités de la caricature graphique d'Honoré Daumier et de la caricature littéraire de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Par son projet de vengeance satirique sur les bourgeois, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam se réclame de la méthode de Daumier, fondée sur l'ironie, et envisage de dépasser le dessinateur. Dans la présentation de l'univers bourgeois et des milieux choisis (journalistique, artistique) le dessinateur et l'écrivain élaborent leurs propres façons d'exploiter les ressources de la caricature. Tout en dénonçant les vices de la société, Daumier propose un type particulier de comique (dans lequel la légende joue un rôle secondaire) et développe l'aspect ludique de son art, tandis que Villiers se concentre sur la raillerie violente, même si sa caricature relève souvent de l'ambiguïté. Érigée en genre littéraire, la caricature villiérienne relie le portrait déformé à la caricature langagière et celle de situation, en élargissant ainsi les sens véhiculés par le dessin de Daumier.

Vera, un cuento cruel (1973) Josefina Molina. El cine de terror visto por una directora

Se trata de un análisis de dos productos audiovisuales, ambos dirigidos por una mujer, Josefina Molina: Vera (1971) y Vera, un cuento cruel (1973). El primero de ellos es un capítulo de la serie de TVE2 la “Hora Once” y el segundo es un largometraje cinematográfico de ficción de la productora Etnos Films. Los dos textos han sido co-escritos por Josefina Molina. Estas dos producciones audiovisuales se basan libremente en el cuento “Vera” de Villiers de L´Isle-Adam.
 Vera, un cuento cruel es la única película de ficción española de cine de terror del tardofranquismo dirigida y escrita por mujeres. Supone la única aportación realizada por mujeres al género de lo fantástico y del terror en su momento de esplendor en España. Su análisis resulta realmente significativo para entender el cine español de esa época marcado por una fuerte misoginia tanto en el sistema de producción como en la temática de las obras.

Johannes Aavik ja vene kirjandus: biograafiline ja kultuurilis-ideoloogiline kontekst / Johannes Aavik and Russian Literature: Biographical, Cultural and Ideological Contexts

Johannes Aavik ja vene kirjandus: biograafiline ja kultuurilis-ideoloogiline kontekst / Johannes Aavik and Russian Literature: Biographical, Cultural and Ideological Contexts

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2017

Od Baudelaire’a do Mallarmégo. W poszukiwaniu ideału muzyczności

Artykuł podejmuje temat ewolucji w postrzeganiu ideału literackiej muzyczności wśród przedstawicieli francuskiego symbolizmu koncentrując uwagę zwłaszcza twórczość Baudelaire’a i Mallarmégo. Pierwszy z nich, uważany za prekursora symbolizmu, stosował prozodię, co można zaobserwować w jego twórczości łączącej różne sztuki i wykorzystującej tematy muzyczne do budowania metaforycznych ujęć malarstwa i poezji. Natomiast poezja Mallarmégo zbliża się do muzyki na poziomie formy. Wykorzystanie akustycznego aspektu tekstu, charakterystyczne dla poezji Verlaine, przechodzi przez sztuczny system instrumentacji słownej René Ghila. Z kolei, utwory Villiers de l’Isle Adama i Jules Laforgue’a pokazują, że tematy muzyczne są stopniowo marginalizowane, co otwiera drogę do milczenia. To zupełna cisza, która w najlepszy sposób przedstawia ideał muzyczności Mallarmégo jako cichy koncert, rozbrzmiewający w umyśle czytelnika.

L’Amour dans « le système symboliste » : prolégomènes à une future théorie de l’expression

Pierre Citti (1987) detects in fin-de-siecle French literature the existence of a “symbolist system”: a common way of conceiving art, of defining the author, the public, the work as well than the general rules of representation. The article sets out to examine the role played by passions, especially love, within this system of thought. Texts by Remy de Gourmont, Teodor de Wyzewa, Marcel Schwob, Andre Gide, Jean de Tinan and Villiers de l ’Isle-Adam are analyzed in order to establish a small typology of the roles played by love in fin-de-siecle literature. It is also demonstrated to what extent symbolist novelists anticipate in their works on future theories of expression, as well as on the current notion of “artialisation”.

"“VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM’S AS WRITER, STORYTELLER – IS BRILLIANT”: BRUSOV ABOUT ONE “DAMN POET”"

"The article considers different cases of Brusov’s response to the work of the French late Romantic Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s. As the author of the article clarifies, the poet’s interest to the French authoris also due to the originality of his literary reputation. Some intersections between Brusov's story and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's satire are noted, too."

Voice and Presence in L’Ève future and Le Surmâle

ABSTRACTWithin the western philosophical tradition, the human voice has long been intimately connected with the idea of presence. By dissociating the voice from its speaker’s body, Thomas Edison’s phonograph posed a philosophical challenge to this view at a time of rising secularism in France. This essay argues that in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future and Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle, phonographs allow the authors to examine the relationship between voice and presence in ways that operate within a historical context and speak to contemporary debates. Where Villiers sets subjectivism against a lingering faith in presence, Jarry dissolves traditional notions of the human subject. This essay suggests that the questions of consciousness, technology, religion, the body, and love which coalesce around the phonograph and mechanical ‘love machines’ in these two novels continue to resonate today: in debates surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence, critical discussions within the humanities, and in mainstream media.

Elove: What Does Fiction Know?

What does it take to make a machine that you may love and that has the potential of loving you back? It is the necessary conceptual components, as opposed to the technology involved, that I will explore. Luckily, fiction, literary and cinematic, unbridled by reality, has been exploring these conditions of possibility for quite some time. My main guides will be works by E.T.A. Hoffmann, E.A. Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Philip K. Dick, Pierre Cassou-Noguès and the movies Blade Runner and Her.

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality

Stratigraphy of Andromeda: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Origins, and Originality Alessandro Giammei (bio) vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit —Ovid, Amores1 A large, cropped wheel with six bolstered spokes is bolted, firmly, to nothing (fig. 1). It looks ready to transfer the energy produced by a grounded pneumatic apparatus (an engine? a plinth?) to some other invisible mechanism, out of view to the right. It is impossible to understand how the slender system of pistons and levers is meant to work. While an aesthetic fascination for the absolute plastic quality of machinery is undeniable, this image does not represent actual technology. It seems that to produce it Francis Picabia used an engineering illustration as an objet trouvé and painted over it, highlighting some details while obliterating most of the functional context with his brush.2 As a result, the machine has no evident function. The two dominant hues underline the artist’s estranging gesture. The metallic body of the mechanical object is green, like the patina that surrounds antique bronze statues, while the background evokes the same ineffable golden flatness that abolishes space and time in Byzantine mosaics, Gothic altarpieces, and icons. Its two-dimensional, yet infinitely profound splendor isolates and absolutizes the enigmatic subject, eradicating it from history. Such a visual oxymoron is encapsulated by the title: Fille née sans mère (“girl born without a mother”).3 Critics agree on the material source of this title, which appears among the locutions latines et étrangères of the early twentieth-century encyclopedic dictionary Petit Larousse Illustrée: another [End Page 21] objet trouvé, a readymade-locution that echoes the modern dream of non-biological birth expressed in Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s early science fiction or in F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste (1909). However, I believe that its literary origin—Prolem sine matre creatam, a line from book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—should be considered more carefully. The same Ovidian line is also the epigraph of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, and therefore opens the foundation of modern political theory with the same bold implications (this work is unprecedented, there are no comparable models or sources) that informed Picabia’s title. Exactly in the same year in which Picabia painted his Fille, 1917, Guillaume Apollinaire coined the very term “surrealist” for the rewriting of an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Les mamelles de Tirésias. Another episode of the Metamorphoses gave the title, a year later, to Alberto Savinio’s multilingual and vanguardist literary debut, Hermaphrodito, while Giorgio de Chirico had been obsessed with the sleep of Ariadne (book VII of Ovid’s poem) since at least 1912.4 Even Marinetti, right before the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, blended his modernist imagery with the mythical one of the Metamorphoses by naming his own car after the winged horse born from Medusa’s blood: mon Pegas, “my Pegasus.” In the prime of Europe’s avant-garde, decades before Picasso’s famous illustrated edition, Ovid’s myths were a privileged interlocutor for modernity: a paradoxical influence that is perfectly visualized in the green bronze patina of Picabia’s machine, eternalized on its gilded untimeliness. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born without a Mother), 1917, gouache and metallic paint on printed paper, 50 × 65 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 2016. Photo © Antonia Reeve, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK. [End Page 22] Within the wide field of studies related to modernist reception of the classics, this article intends to interrogate the paradox embodied by the motherless mechanomorphic girl envisioned by Picabia: a fetishized emblem of modernity rendered as an ancient statue in an iconizing background, a work that claims to escape genealogies through a quotation from ancient poetry. The aim is to overcome the temptation of historicizing late modernity as the theater of a binary opposition between classicism and vanguardism, tradition and newness. Through Ovid, I will explore the problem of origins and originality in the multimedia work of Giorgio de Chirico...

Les émotions comme signe d’humanité ou les larmes dans le test de Turing

Since 1950, cyberneticists are used to basing their tests of artificial intelligence on the computer´s ability to imitate human conversation. If the speaker is not able to distinguish which one of his two partners is a computer, the employed software succeeded in the test, having “the same semantic appearance” as a human being. In his novel The Future Eve (1886), Villiers de l’Isle-Adam proposed a completely different version of the Turing test, based on emotion expressing. Hadaly, an artificial woman created by Edison, is successful in the Turing test and manages to be loved by Lord Ewald thanks to her ability to cry, touch her partner´s feelings and convince him. An analysis of this key passage, which played an important role in the development of the modern science fiction, will enable us to examine the general problem of emotions in The Future Eve. How to love a female android? And how to be loved by her? Is artificial emotionality the culmination of human evolution or a sort of morbid deviation that will contaminate man and the surrounding nature? What is Villiers´ answer to the Turing´s challenge?