By JAMES GARDNER [Wall Street Journal] – “Bruges-La-Morte,” a tale of obsessive love, is a Symbolist novel, perhaps the Symbolist novel. The movement (officially promulgated by Jean Moréas in his “Manifeste du symbolisme” of 1886) is best understood as a vague composite of moods and formal preoccupations that pervaded the music and art of that era, no less than its poetry and prose. Its spirit is elusive and disengaged, shy of emphasis and outright utterance. Perhaps its most concise expression is Paul Verlaine’s “Art Poetique”: “Seek that which is vague and dissolves in air, that which has nothing weighty or imposing…not colors, but rather half-tones.” But it can also be defined by its mysticism and morbid preoccupation with death, its swans and lilies, its obsession with women’s hair. These elements come together in “Bruges-La-Morte.”
[Georges] Rodenbach’s brief novel centers on Hugues Viane, a middle-age widower who, distraught at his wife’s death several years before, moves to Bruges. Here he lives amid the relics of his beloved—her clothes, her letters, a length of her hair. He leaves his house only to wander restlessly through the darkened and deserted streets. On one of his walks Hugues catches sight of a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife. Even her voice is identical. It turns out that she is a dancer. He courts her and for a time is happy. But eventually he comes to see that she is very different from his dead wife and far coarser. When finally she mocks him and dares to touch his wife’s hair, he strangles her.
“Bruges-La-Morte” is thoroughly modern in tone, theme and form. Almost nothing happens. Rather, the sum of its formal ambitions is to depict a human being in that state of radical introspection that, one generation later, would inform James Joyce’s depiction of Stephen Daedalus. In this regard, it falls within the realist camp of Symbolism, as opposed to the fabulistic strain represented by the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck.
At the same time, as Hugues walks relentlessly through the city, he comes to incarnate the Man of the Crowd, the archetype first introduced to literature in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the same name.
Continued at The Wall Street Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.
