Bruges-la-Morte

By Alan Holinghurst and Georges Rodenbach

"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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
• Release date: Feb 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907650208

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Dedalus European Classics

General Editor: Mike Mitchell

Bruges-la-Morte

Rodenbach

Bruges-la-Morte and The Death Throes of Towns

Translated by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone

With an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst

Published in the UK by Dedalus Ltd,

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ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 82 6

ISBN e-book 978 1 907650 20 8

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Publishing History

First published in France in 1892

First published by Dedalus in 2005, reprinted 2007 and 2009

First e-book edition 2011

Introduction to Bruge-la-Morte copyright © Alan Hollinghurst 2005

Translation of Bruges-la-Morte copyright © Mike Mitchell

Translation of The Death Throes of Towns copyright © Will Stone 2005

Introduction to The Death Throes of Towns and photos of Bruges copyright © Will Stone 2005

The right of mike Mitchell to be identified as the translator of Bruges-la-Morte and Will Stone to be identified as the translator of The Death Throes of Towns have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty.

He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won the prize in 2004.

He lives in London.

MIKE MITCHELL

Mike Mitchell is a distinguished literary translator and one of Dedalus’s editorial directors, with responsibility for the translation programme.

For Dedalus he has translated the novels of Gustav Meyrink, Herbert Rosendorfer, Johann Grimmelshausen and Hermann Ungar as well as translating and editing The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy.

For other publishers his translations include detective novels by Friedrich Glauser, plays and poems by Oskar Kokoschka, the essays of Adolf Loos and the memoirs of Erwin Blumenfeld.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Prize.

WILL STONE

Will Stone is a poet, translator and literary journalist. His translation work includes Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval and Selected Poems of Georg Trakl to be published by Arc in 2005.

His poems have appeared in Agenda, the London Magazine and a number of other journals. He has contributed reviews to the TLS, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, Poetry Review, PNR, and Modern Poetry in translation.

CONTENTS

Part 1

Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst to Bruges-la-Morte

Prefatory note

Bruges-la-Morte

Part 2

Introduction by Will Stone to The Death Throes of Towns

The Death Throes of Towns

Rodenbach Remembered?

A Note on the Photographs

Acknowledgements

PART 1

INTRODUCTION

The Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855–98) is identified above all with the city of Bruges. It emerged early on as a subject in his poetry, and in his most famous book, the short novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a particular idea of the place – silent, melancholy, lost in time – found its most intense and influential expression. It led to something of a cult of Bruges in the Parisian circles that Rodenbach was by then inhabiting. Bruges became a destination, treasured for its antiquity and decay, and Rodenbach’s novel, illustrated as it was with numerous photographs of the city’s churches, houses and canals, itself sold very well there, as a souvenir of a particular aesthetic vision of the place. In the following years other Belgian artists explored the richly desolate atmosphere of the city, and Fernand Khnopff, in particular, made a number of mesmerising paintings which combine photographic precision with a mood of lonely Symbolist contemplation. As it happened, it was a moment when there was talk of reopening the city to the modern world after centuries of decline brought about by the silting-up of its old sea-canal (the new port of Zeebrugge would be the result). Many Brugeois resented seeing the epithet Morte attached to a city seeking a new commercial life. Rodenbach would address these dilemmas, and the possible desecration of his dream-Bruges, in his last novel Le Carilloneur (1897). Was the place to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death?

Rodenbach, as apologist for the beautiful death, was seen by Parisians as himself a sort of emanation of the city. In a memoir written by Paul and Victor Margueritte, who met him at Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings, he appears as a distinctly ‘northern’ type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and ‘blue-grey eyes – the mirror of his native skies – those eyes so deep and distant, the colour of the canals that they had long reflected, the colour of still water and moving sky’. In 1895 the French painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer produced an extraordinary portrait of Rodenbach, placing him in spectral close-up against a background of the city’s roofs and gables, with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. The writer’s grey shoulders seem to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. Rodenbach was an elegant, almost dandyish dresser, but Lévy-Dhurmer shows him with his shirt collar undone and with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief. Anyone who has read Bruges-la-Morte is likely to see this as a kind of double portrait, of the author and of his bereaved and obsessive hero, Hugues Viane, haunting the deserted quays, in strange subjection to his chosen city.

In the little preface which Rodenbach wrote to explain the inclusion of photographs in the book, he describes Hugues’s story as ‘a study of passion’ whose ‘other principal aim’ is the evocation of a Town, not merely as a backdrop, but as an ‘essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act’. The photographs are intended to help readers themselves to ‘come under the influence of the Town, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close to, experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers’. This elaboration of mere atmosphere into a principle of action is certainly the central curiosity and mystery of the novel; though it may seem odd that the author should have wanted to supplement his own verbal atmosphere, in all its obscure Symbolist refinement, with the illustrations of a Baedeker.

One needs to look at Rodenbach’s own life to understand why the city was able to assume this power of suggestion for him. His connexion with it was aptly both indirect and suggestive. Though Flemish, he was not himself Brugeois. His father was, and it is surely significant for the son’s work that he spoke constantly of the place to his children; but Georges was born in Tournai, and grew up in Ghent, also a richly historic city, but one which had adapted itself to the possibilities of modern industry and commerce (Rodenbach père was an inspector of weights and measures). Georges was educated at the Jesuit Collège de Sainte-Barbe, as were his exact contemporary and friend Emile Verhaeren, who was to become the leading Flemish poet of the period, and Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish writer who was to gain the most international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1911. (All of them, as members of the educated bourgeoisie, spoke and wrote in French.) Like Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, Rodenbach studied law at the University of Ghent; he then went, in the autumn of 1878, to spend a year as a young barrister in Paris. Once there he immersed himself in a literary culture which seemed to him a luxuriant antithesis to the sterility of Belgium. As he wrote to Verhaeren: ‘As for producing literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above all positivistic and material. It won’t hear a word of poetry … Whereas in Paris, one lives at twice the pace, one is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap rises and thought flowers.’ Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, characteristically titled Les Tristesses.

Back home, he worked for a further ten years in the law but involved himself more and more in the emerging new movement in Belgian literature, as reviewer, essayist and poet. His fourth collection of poems, La Jeunesse blanche, published in 1886, was the one in which he himself felt he attained maturity; it is certainly the one in which the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, explored in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation, is established: ‘To live like an exile, to live seeing no one / In the vast abandonment of a dying town, / Where nothing is heard but the vague rumour / Of a sobbing organ or a chiming belfry’ (‘Alone’, from the sequence ‘Soirs de province’.) Silence, he later said, was the thread connecting all his work, his poems being décors de silence, his novels études

Reviews for Bruges-la-Morte

[clfisha · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[deebee1_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lisa_emily_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[veilofisis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

‘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.

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.