Marcel Schwob preaches the Book of Monelle - the green girl led her by the hand to an unknown liberty

A week of writing about short books chosen as if at random, but no, all following some long-running Wuthering Expectations theme, I believe that is what I have in front of me this week.

First up is The Book of Monelle (1894) by French oddball Marcel Schwob, in the Kit Schluter* translation from Wakefield Press, a book beloved by Symbolists, Dadaists, Surrealists, in general by artists with sympathy for conceptual art.

Monelle is Schwob’s Beatrice, a muse and a saint, apparently the patron saint of conceptual art:

And to imagine new art you must break its forebears.  And thus new art seems a sort of iconoclasm.

For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but forms.

But you must destroy the forms. (7)

Monelle is the apostle of Modernism.  The above is from the first part of the book, “The Words of Monelle,” which per the novel’s title is a Biblical parody:

Monelle found me in the plain where I was wandering and took me by the hand.

“Do not be surprised,” she said.  “It is I, and it is not I”…

And Monelle said again: I shall speak to you of young prostitutes, and you shall know the beginning.  (3)

Then she reveals the prophecy of Modernist conceptual art to her true believers.

The last part of the book returns to the religious aspect of Monelle.  It is something like Dante’s New Life merging into Paradiso.  Monelle dies but is resurrected etc.  I am skeptical about this section.

The middle of the book, though, is amazing.  “The Sisters of Monelle.”  It is a series of fairy tales and parodies of fairy tales, mostly with characters whose lives are ruined, or perhaps saved, by believing in fairy tales.   Poor Ilsée, in “The Fated,” spends her life waiting for what she sees in her mirror.  It comes, eventually.  Poor Bargette, in “The Disappointed,” hitches a ride to the south of France on a barge, where she thinks she’ll find the South Seas – turtles, coconuts – even though the practical couple who operate the barge keep insisting that “’there’s going to be a bit of sun, but really, that’s all’” (35).

One girl wants to be Cinderella, another wants to be Bluebeard’s wife (“’This is going to hurt!’”).  Another, Morgane, has read about the mirror in Snow White, and also the mirror in Ilsée’s story.  She goes on a quest for her own magic mirror:

And further on is an underground city of black men who go unvisited by their gods, except in sleep.  They eat hemp fibers, and cover their faces with chalk.  And those who intoxicate themselves at night with hemp slit the necks of those who sleep, that they be sent to the nocturnal divinities.  Morgane was terrified of them.  (61)

Me, too!  Schwob’s fairy tales are on the scary side.

She opened the door and held her arm out into the night.  Just as Bûchette had once led her to the homes of man, the green girl led her by the hand to an unknown liberty.  (41)

The sublime, as readers of Wuthering Expectations well know, is the mixture of beauty and fear.

*  A good interview with the translator at 3:AM Magazine; another at The Paris Review.

The infinite lines and angles of Marcel Schwob

Perhaps the worst afflicted were the victims of disfiguring facial wounds, some of whom were so awful to behold that secluded rural settlements were established, where they could holiday together.  (John Keegan, The First World War, 1998, p. 7)

Keegan is describing France after World War I, while Marcel Schwob, in “The Sans-Gueule” (1891), is perhaps writing about the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.  The translator of French Decadent Tales says that he retained the French title, rather than calling the story “The Faceless Ones,” because of later connections made between the story and the results of the later war.

Two men have lost their faces in battle, along with any ability to speak, and along, inconveniently, with their identification tags.  “They were like two pieces of human clay” (194).  They heal, up to a point, but only regain their  humanity to the point where they enjoy smoking pipes.

Schwob is quite vivid about all this.  Or graphic, perhaps that is the word.

A “little woman with a mass of hair” claims that one is her husband, but does not know which one.  So she takes them both home, first to try to determine which is her husband, and eventually because she likes them both.  “They were her ‘two monkeys,’ her red mannikins, her two little husbands, her burned men, her meaty rascals, her bloodied faces, her holey heads, her brainless bonces” (197).  The story is really about the woman.  It is a perplexing love story.  The end is worthy of Chekhov, except I do not know of any piece of his so deliberately repulsive.

I had never read Marcel Schwob, although he is not especially obscure – I assume a number of people who glance at this post will have read something of his.  I plan to read more, although I worry about the proper dosage.

French Decadent Tales includes two of Schwob’s little Imaginary Lives (1896), fantasies about Lucretius and Paolo Uccello, “Paul of the Birds, because of the numberless painted birds and beasts that filled his house, for he was too poor to feed animals or procure those he did not know” (205).  Schwob transforms Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Uccello into a portrait of what we would now call an outsider artist.  Uccello’s obsession with the new technique of linear perspective is turned into artistic madness:

The truth was that Uccello cared nothing for the reality of things, but only for their multiplicity and the infinite lines and angles that form them; so he painted blue fields, red cities, knights in black armour on ebony horses with mouth aflame, and spears bristling skywards in every direction like rays of light…  The sculptor Donatello would say to him: ‘Ah, Paolo, you are neglecting substance for shadow!’  (205-6)

Uccello is an Impressionist, or Cezanne; he prefigure Matisse or perhaps Kandinsky.  Schwob ends the life by directly ripping off Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece:

And so Uccello knew he had accomplished a miracle.  But all Donatello had seen was a chaos of lines.  (208)

Uccello dies with his eyes “fixed upon the mystery revealed.”  Balzac thought his obsessive artist a madman and a failure.  Schwob saw an artist, maybe even an exemplary case.  He also saw the future of visual art.  Maybe he just got lucky there.

The whole Baudelairean aesthetic is brought to life again - some French Decadent Tales

Now I’ll write a post or two about a collection of stories titled French Decadent Tales that came out last year as an Oxford World’s Classic.  It is a gift from translator and editor Stephen Romer to curious readers like me, since it is full of samples of many writers whose names I have tripped across but never read: Léon Bloy, Octave Mirbeau, Remy de Gourmont, writers like that, all active in the last third or so of the 19th century, a few slipping into the 20th.

What does decadence involve?  Some combination of weirdness, Schopenhauer , repellent attitudes towards women, mental illness, attention to prose style, prostitutes, artists, over-aestheticized attitudes, and some move towards the destruction of human values – unpunished murders, that kind of thing.  No single story has all of these features, thank goodness.  Perhaps I most strongly identify Decadence with outrageous or at least anti-conventional sexual behavior.  There is plenty of that.  Two stories featuring Don Juan, for example.  As Jean Lorrain writes in “The Man with the Bracelet”: “[T]he whole Baudelairean aesthetic is brought to life again” (141).

Two points to a collection like this.

The lesser point is the one mentioned above, to allow the curious but non-specialist reader like me to quickly encounter a bunch of third-rank writers of period pieces, for context or to see how once-shocking ideas quickly turn into clichés or if nothing else to now have something to associate with Catulle Mendès when I come across his name, which has happened frequently.

Many of the stories in French Decadent Tales are period pieces, meaning interesting and useful examples of the kind of thing writers were doing in Paris in the late 19th century, which in turn helps me understand greater works of art, novels by Zola or paintings by Degas.  In this sense the collection is a huge success.

The primary purpose is to direct my attention not to useful and interesting art and artists, but to unusually good ones.  The book works here, too.  The most famous writer in the book is Guy de Maupassant, who is treated well, with three stories that emphasize his Weirdness, along the lines of “La Horla,” rather than his snickering smuttiness.  His snickering story about Schopenhauer disciples is also included.

But I knew about Maupassant.  Who else was especially good?  The best thing in the book is a longish – 19 pages, where most stories are five or six – fantasy by Jules Laforgue, who I had only known as one of France’s great poets.  Original and exquisite.  The five miniatures by Marcel Schwob are easily in a different category than most of the writers.  Better prose, more concentrated ideas, more frightening conceits.  Then there are the three stories by Jean Richepin, among the more obscure writers included, who is light and satirical but frightening in his own way.  Many of the Decadents are just goofing around, churning out the magazine fiction of their time.  Richepin, and Schwob, too, in their own ways take the Decadents' ideas seriously, and thus are harder to brush aside.

I got a lot of good out of 200 pages and 36 stories, enough to hold me for a couple of blog posts.  That Laforgue story, definitely.  Romer’s introductory essay is so good that the book might be of interest to some readers who could track these stories down in French.  I have borrowed and will borrow from it liberally.