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Bruges-la-Morte
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"Dedalus should be treasured: a small independent publisher that regularly produces works of European genius at which the behemoths wouldn't sniff. If the corporations did care to look at this new work, they would find, on the surface, a precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning and Tod Browning. Bruges, "an amalgam of greyish drowsiness", is the setting and spur; Hugues is a widower who finds a dancer nearly identical to his lost love. "Nearly" is here the operative word. This is a little masterpiece, from a brave publisher. If only Scotland could boast the same." S.B.Kelly in Scotland on Sunday
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a leerInformación sobre el libro
Bruges-la-Morte
Descripción
"Dedalus should be treasured: a small independent publisher that regularly produces works of European genius at which the behemoths wouldn't sniff. If the corporations did care to look at this new work, they would find, on the surface, a precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning and Tod Browning. Bruges, "an amalgam of greyish drowsiness", is the setting and spur; Hugues is a widower who finds a dancer nearly identical to his lost love. "Nearly" is here the operative word. This is a little masterpiece, from a brave publisher. If only Scotland could boast the same." S.B.Kelly in Scotland on Sunday
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A novella, published in 1892, dripping in symbolism and highly atmospheric. Hughes Viane, spend his days in mourning for his dead wife, living amoungst her things, venerating her dead hair, leaving his house to walk amongst the deathly, well preserved, religious city: Bruges. That is until he spots her likeness wandering the streets and becomes tragically obsessed. It's a short, very readable book full of heavy handed symbolism (to modern eyes) It doesn't bring the city alive but takes its parts (the constant bells, the silent canals etc..) to underline his grief. Interesting but not something I recommend until I realised that it was 1st published illustrated by many haunting photographs. Now that would be an edition to seek out, the images and text feeding off each other a joy to behold.So I recommend that edition unless you a lover of symbolism or the opera Die tote Stadt which is based on the book.
This novella tells a simple story: when Hugues Viane loses his young, beautiful wife, he decides to settle in Bruges because the town mirrored his own inconsolable grief. The city is gray and moribund, ideal for feeding his melancholy (this was set in the late 1900s; today, the town is lively, charming, and bustling with tourists reverting to what it was in the Middle Ages -- a prosperous trading town). In his morbid obsession to keep the memory of his wife alive, he turns his home into a "temple" to his wife. One day in the streets, he sees a woman who is the exact double of the dead wife. He pursues her, starts an affair, but is crushed to realise that she is not the reincarnation of his wife. It just goes more dark from there...Rodenbach writes very beautifully, one gets inside the isolation, the loneliness and the grief of Viane, and all this is heightened by Rodenbach's description of the town. In such a poetic way, he presents to us a tableau in black and white which are the colors of the clergy, in harmony with the dark waters of the canals, the white of the swans, and the gray skies. The contrast of black and white is a many-layered theme in the novella and symbolizes many things. It is most evident in the contrasting emotions in Viane's soul where he fights to preserve the "sanctity" of his wife's memory against the "blackness" he begins to see in his new lover. A beautiful novella, simple yet profound as it portrays the psychology of grief and pain toward a rather haunting end.
Rodenbach's languid prose matches the melancholic landscape of Bruges. The main character, widower Viane, meanders among the quais and deserted streets, around the old houses and churches, through the bereft town; mourning his wife's death. The decayed city becomes his psychology. Although cliche now in subject: the narrator's descent into debased and perverse morbidity, the novel is still am enchanting gem of th genre.
Georges Rodenbach's Foreword to Bruges-la-Morte makes clear his intent to have the setting of Bruges be a character in its own right, casting the city as a guide and shaper of the events of this story. It's a fine goal, one shared by Joyce with Dubliners and Ulysses, not to mention a plethora of films (from Lost in Translation, to Midnight in Paris, to Ghostbusters), but Rodenbach goes a little overboard with it here. Instead of an organic development of the setting, Rodenbach explicitly states what the city means to the main character, and has whole pages in this short work dedicated to describing the city and the psychological effect it's having. If Rodenbach had some great insight into the whole "city-as-character" idea then this would be fine, but his thesis seems to be little more than that cities "have a personality, an autonomous spirit, an almost externalized character...[e]very city is a state of mind." It's not very insightful, and moreover I think it's an overly-simplistic understanding as well- Calvino's take on this idea in Invisible Cities resonated with me much more deeply.
Still, Bruges makes a good setting for what is a dark and melancholy tale of a man who has voluntarily trapped himself in the past, chaining himself with memories of his deceased wife. He has dedicated his life to worshipping his widowhood, to the extent that when he finds someone who looks identical to his deceased wife, he sees her more as a conduit of further worship for his deceased wife's memory than someone to rekindle his affections. At first, anyway- later Rodenbach inexplicably has him fall in love with this doppelgänger without a buildup that made it feel organic. Read Swann's Way, particularly the section concerning Swann and Odette, to see this type of development done masterfully. The main character's housekeeper is a devout Christian (along with nearly everyone else in the city), and she must react to her employer's scandalous behavior. It briefly seemed as though Rodenbach was drawing parallels between the housekeeper's religious devotion and the unnatural devotion of the main character to his deceased wife, but I don't think Rodenbach meant to suggest that religious faith is warped in the same way. Even if he did, that thread of the narrative never came to fruition.
Overall, and perhaps not surprisingly given how slim this book is, there's not too much going on in this story. If you want a tale that's a bit doleful, or one set in Bruges, look no further, but Bruges-la-Morte didn't develop the setting or story organically enough and didn't delve deeply enough into the psychological morass of the main character or his city to impress me.
Still, Bruges makes a good setting for what is a dark and melancholy tale of a man who has voluntarily trapped himself in the past, chaining himself with memories of his deceased wife. He has dedicated his life to worshipping his widowhood, to the extent that when he finds someone who looks identical to his deceased wife, he sees her more as a conduit of further worship for his deceased wife's memory than someone to rekindle his affections. At first, anyway- later Rodenbach inexplicably has him fall in love with this doppelgänger without a buildup that made it feel organic. Read Swann's Way, particularly the section concerning Swann and Odette, to see this type of development done masterfully. The main character's housekeeper is a devout Christian (along with nearly everyone else in the city), and she must react to her employer's scandalous behavior. It briefly seemed as though Rodenbach was drawing parallels between the housekeeper's religious devotion and the unnatural devotion of the main character to his deceased wife, but I don't think Rodenbach meant to suggest that religious faith is warped in the same way. Even if he did, that thread of the narrative never came to fruition.
Overall, and perhaps not surprisingly given how slim this book is, there's not too much going on in this story. If you want a tale that's a bit doleful, or one set in Bruges, look no further, but Bruges-la-Morte didn't develop the setting or story organically enough and didn't delve deeply enough into the psychological morass of the main character or his city to impress me.
I sometimes get the worrying feeling that nineteenth-century men preferred their women to be dead than alive. There is something archetypal about the repeated vision of the pale, beautiful, fragile, utterly feminine corpse. Beyond corruption, a woman who's died is a woman you can safely worship without any danger that she'll ruin the image by doing something vulgar like using the wrong form of address to a bishop, or blowing your best friend. It's a vision that crops up everywhere in the works of these fin-de-siècle writers, who were unhealthily obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe and with the figure of drowned Ophelia (for them, more Millais than Shakespeare).Bruges-la-Morte (1892) is the apotheosis of this kind of preoccupation. As my introductory para suggests, I find the general mindset a little problematic, but this is certainly a beautifully-written distillation of the theme. Hugues Viane, our melancholy hero, settles in Bruges after the death of his wife, and prepares to live out the rest of his days nursing his memories of her: he dedicates a room of his house to her portraits, and preserves a lock of her hair in a glass cabinet.When he's not staring at her pictures, he's out taking moody walks along the canals.Where, one day, he sees a woman in the street who looks identical, in every detail, to his dead wife. Is it a ghost? An appalling coincidence? His mind playing tricks on him?And might it be somehow possible to recreate his lost love…?Viane is the main character; but drizzly, grey Bruges is the real hero of the book. The city is portrayed as the necessary complement to Viane's feelings of loneliness:Une équation mystérieuse s'établissait. À l'épouse morte devait correspondre une ville morte.[A mysterious equation established itself. To the dead wife there must correspond a dead town.]The point is underlined by the inclusion of a number of black-and-white photographs of the city, looking still and silent, and often including unidentified figures. A modern reader can't help seeing the effect as Sebaldian.But anyway, however interesting this early use of photography may be, the real star is Rodenbach's prose. He finds a thickly atrabilious style to fit his story, rich in imagery, full of strikingly depressive turns of phrase. The city's canals are ‘cold arteries’ where ‘the great pulse of the sea has stopped beating’; the famous Tour des Halles ‘defends itself against the invading night with the gold shield of its sundial’; down below there are streetlamps ‘whose wounds bleed into the darkness’.This must be what people mean when they talk about ‘prose-poetry’. There are some paragraphs here that seem to be made up entirely of alexandrines. And then just look at a phrase like this:Les hautes tours dans leurs frocs de pierre partout allongent leur ombre.There is a progression of vowels here that slides forward through the mouth beautifully, ending with the wonderful dirge-like assonance of allongent and ombre; and the consonants travel too, from the silent h of haut, back in the throat, forward to the t of tours, on to one lip with the f of frocs, then both lips for the two ps, and finally the lips are pushed right out for the last two nasal vowels. Wowzer! (Translation: something like: ‘Everywhere the high towers in their stony habits stretch forth their shadow.’)Earlier this year I read Nerval's Les Filles du feu, and I kept being reminded of it while I was reading Bruges-la-Morte. There is exactly the same fascination with the ‘doubling’ of a love interest: one woman becomes two (or more), each taking on different attributes – one is blonde, the other dark, one is pure, the other degraded, one is a virgin the other is a whore, and so on. Some scenes, some lines, are almost identical: Rodenbach must surely have been a Nerval fan. He sums up the poetic essence of this tradition perfectly – indeed so perfectly that I found the formalities of plot resolution at the end of the book to be irritatingly drab and melodramatic by contrast. I guess that's the problem with turning poetry into a novel.Nevertheless, Bruges-la-Morte is obviously a high point of Symbolist writing, a book that's obsessed with death and always alert to new ways to externalise deep emotions. There is a brooding openness to the supernatural, and a looming architectural presence, which also has clear links with the Gothic. But more importantly it's just beautifully-written: every sentence drops balanced and gorgeous into your head.For best results, it should be read at dusk, preferably when it's raining outside. Just make sure you have a brisk walk afterwards.
‘The faces of the dead, which are preserved in our memory for a while, gradually deteriorate there, fading like a pastel drawing that has not been kept under glass, allowing the chalk to disperse. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time.’Bruges-La-Morte is the cardinal work of Symbolist literature: a haunted, profoundly intimate novel that explores the sacred obligations of grief, sorrow, and sin—and the way that a place, here the decaying city of Bruges, can inform the rhythm of life (as well as life-in-death) of the scattered, ruined souls that comprise its inhabitants. Written by a Belgian, Georges Rodenbach, in 1892, Bruges-La-Morte is a key component of the literature of the Decadence—as well as, perhaps, the most moving and acutely poignant work in its canon. Rodenbach’s prose, orphic and sensuous, could be labeled a sort of exercise in hypnotism, the spell achieving its greatest successes when, after coming up from the depths of an opium-dream, we are startled with the occasional interruption of painfully raw, near-caustic laconicism; these short, beautifully-woven sentences linger in the brain like a fever, inducing a rapture of agonized comprehension. This novel, curiously, is utterly empathic to the concerns of even the most jaded and stoic of readers: because it is a work dedicated to the study of human ‘analogies’—the strange, surreal comparisons drawn in the minds of all and torn to pieces within the obsessions, and eager fervor, of an unfortunate few. The plot is merely a gauze upon which to hang the ghosts of observation: it details the dream-like, funereal existence of a widower who, after ten years of mourning his dead wife—worshiping her possessions, photographs, and physical memories like the reliquaries of a saint—chances to meet a woman who, in outward appearance, is the very mirror-image of his lost love. They begin an affair: one in which our protagonist sees not the intimations of sin and betrayal against the dead so often experienced by the bereaved, but, instead, the literal continuation of his wife’s actuality: he is trying to recreate her existence, as if a thread had never been cut—as if it had only been interrupted. Obviously we can expect little but disappointment and tragedy from so misguided a notion; but the climax of this novel is triply-tragic, because three lives are shattered by the highest intentions of one.Bruges-La-Morte, as I said, is a novel of analogies; and the highest analogy is between the insistent sentience of the city and the way it mirrors—as a dead wife is mirrored by a stranger—the psyche of a citizen. Rodenbach, of course, illustrates this phenomenon best: ‘Towns above all have a personality, a spirit of their own, an almost externalized character which corresponds to joy, new love, renunciation, widowhood. Every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.’ And the ‘effluvium’ of dead, gloom-haunted, and weeping Bruges (which, arguably, remains the most important character in this novel) is rich with a paradoxical aura of contagion, comfort, and doom. Bruges-La-Morte is one of the dozen or so pieces of literature that have been instrumental in defining, refining, and directing my sensibilities as an intellectual and an artist; but it has also served to reflect my perception of the nature of love, sorrow, and decay, by crystallizing my notions of the ‘sacred sin’ that, ultimately, intimates salvation. The protagonist of Bruges-La-Morte is left to his own sins before we can glimpse his absolution: but if the trajectory of my philosophy, that we must rot before we ripen, is accepted as truth, Bruges-La-Morte, with its jarring tragedy and startling pessimism, casts a light upon one of the more troubling intimations of this school of thought: that salvation is relative: that sometimes decay is, in and of itself, the only salvation at all.
Hugues Viane has retired to Bruges after the death of his wife of ten years; five years later, he is still unable to put her memory to rest. Indeed, he has sequestered himself in his home, erecting a shrine to his wife; in this room are gathered her portraits and various objects and trinkets, along with a tress of her hair which Viane has placed inside a glass box. Each day he caresses and kisses each item, and by night he takes to the meandering the streets of Bruges whose grey melancholy he feels in tune with, a kind of “spiritual telegraphy between his soul and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges.”
As in many symbolist texts, doubling is apparent here: not only is Viane’s mood that of the city, and therefore emphasized, but his grief is so obsessive that he chances upon a woman whom he believes to be the striking image of his dead wife. This act of doubling is one in which Georges Rodenbach is extremely interested in that it proves how the dead die twice, the first death being their physical death and the second being when our memories of them begin to fade, causing those mental images to which we cling to no longer be sources of recollection and comfort:
But the faces of the dead, which are preserved in our memory for a while, gradually deteriorate there, fading like a pastel drawing that has not been kept under glass, allowing the chalk to disperse. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time.
Bruges-la-Morte is very much concerned with the vacillation between states of intense joy and utter anguish. In his obsession over Jane, the woman who resembles his dead wife, Viane is embodying this idea of the dead dying twice. While there are moments of some melodramatic intensity characteristic of symbolist work, Rodenbach is also keen on exploring how the life of a small city reacts to a scandal, and it is both the solitary city scenes that drive home the despair of the protagonist and the scenes of townspeople gossiping in the city that demonstrate how the city works in different ways for its inhabitants.
Although he is under “the spell” of this double, and even though he hopes that the likeness “would allow him the infinite luxury of forgetting,” Viane can do no such thing, and soon finds himself at an erotic and psychological crossroads at which the “distressing masquerade” he enacts to quell his grief is not enough to sustain the memory of the dead.
Bruges is very much the main character in the novel: “He was already starting to resemble the town. Once more he was the brother in silence and in melancholy of this sorrowful Bruges, his soror dolorosa.” The novel is accompanied by photographs of the city to underscore the central role it plays in Viane’s state of mourning. Rodenbach is adamant about how living spaces breathe and affect those living there:
Towns above all have a personality, a spirit of their own, an almost externalised character which corresponds to joy, new love, renunciation, widowhood. Each town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.
This idea of the city having an emotional and psychological state of its own is also something Rodenbach explores in the short essay included in the Dedalus edition, “The Death Throes of Towns.” Bruges-la-Morte is a symbolist masterpiece; more than that, it is powerful novel about grief and mourning, as well as a treatise on how one’s city can reflect one’s emotional state, and vice versa.
As in many symbolist texts, doubling is apparent here: not only is Viane’s mood that of the city, and therefore emphasized, but his grief is so obsessive that he chances upon a woman whom he believes to be the striking image of his dead wife. This act of doubling is one in which Georges Rodenbach is extremely interested in that it proves how the dead die twice, the first death being their physical death and the second being when our memories of them begin to fade, causing those mental images to which we cling to no longer be sources of recollection and comfort:
But the faces of the dead, which are preserved in our memory for a while, gradually deteriorate there, fading like a pastel drawing that has not been kept under glass, allowing the chalk to disperse. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time.
Bruges-la-Morte is very much concerned with the vacillation between states of intense joy and utter anguish. In his obsession over Jane, the woman who resembles his dead wife, Viane is embodying this idea of the dead dying twice. While there are moments of some melodramatic intensity characteristic of symbolist work, Rodenbach is also keen on exploring how the life of a small city reacts to a scandal, and it is both the solitary city scenes that drive home the despair of the protagonist and the scenes of townspeople gossiping in the city that demonstrate how the city works in different ways for its inhabitants.
Although he is under “the spell” of this double, and even though he hopes that the likeness “would allow him the infinite luxury of forgetting,” Viane can do no such thing, and soon finds himself at an erotic and psychological crossroads at which the “distressing masquerade” he enacts to quell his grief is not enough to sustain the memory of the dead.
Bruges is very much the main character in the novel: “He was already starting to resemble the town. Once more he was the brother in silence and in melancholy of this sorrowful Bruges, his soror dolorosa.” The novel is accompanied by photographs of the city to underscore the central role it plays in Viane’s state of mourning. Rodenbach is adamant about how living spaces breathe and affect those living there:
Towns above all have a personality, a spirit of their own, an almost externalised character which corresponds to joy, new love, renunciation, widowhood. Each town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.
This idea of the city having an emotional and psychological state of its own is also something Rodenbach explores in the short essay included in the Dedalus edition, “The Death Throes of Towns.” Bruges-la-Morte is a symbolist masterpiece; more than that, it is powerful novel about grief and mourning, as well as a treatise on how one’s city can reflect one’s emotional state, and vice versa.