Asti Hustvedt

You have to hand it to the French. They know how to write about disease and decay with a particular flair. This excellent anthology published by Zone Books is over 1,000 pages and contains 27 prose works (7 novella-length) from 11 fin-de-siècle French writers: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Rachilde, J.-K. Huysmans, Villers de I’Isle-Adam, Jean Moréas, Guy de Maupassant, Catulle Mendès, Remy de Gourmont ,Jean Lorrain, Joséphin Péladan and Octave Mirbeau. What is most helpful for readers unfamiliar with these authors and the decadent aesthetic are the essays, one essay providing an overarching exposé and interpretation of the French decadent movement and an essay introducing each and every author and their writing. Most enlightening.

For the purposes of this review, I will focus on Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917). In her introductory essay, Emily Apter tells us the 5 short stories here “all employ sordid rituals of masculine humiliation as devised by emotionally indifferent femmes fatales. These early texts may be read as preparatory sketches or rehearsals for Mirbeau’s Orientalist chef-d’oeuvre of male masochism, ‘The Torture Garden’, in which lurid descriptions of carnal subjection are anchored in feminine cruelty.” Ms. Apter goes on to explain how the author’s themes of sexual perversion and sexual obsession along with his “long-standing anticlericalism and aversion to the army, his identification with the poor and distaste for charity, his contempt for bourgeois values . . . made him receptive to the anarchist and republican sympathies of many artists and intellectuals in his circle.” In a word, Mirbeau found the conservative norms and middle-class values of his day repulsive, particularly the norms and values defining the sexually-charged relationships between men and women.

Keeping all this in mind, let’s now turn to 3 of the 5 stories:

Poor Tom
The narrator tells us he loves his mangy, smelly, sickly old dog Tom, the dog that has been his soul-mate for the past 14 years. He even took Tom to bathe in medicinal waters for an entire season in an attempt to rid his beloved dog of sickness and suffering. The expensive baths didn’t help his dog and people thought him mad, but his love for Tom was so strong, so deep, so all-embracing, he was even willing to be taken for a madman. Then, a couple of months after the baths, he tells us he did something really mad – he married a woman named Clara.

Clara comes to live with him and her first experience after walking in the front door is seeing his filthy, smelly dog. Clara flies into a fit of rage, cracks a stick on Tom’s boney back and demands he get the ‘dirty beast’ out of the house. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the narrator consigns Tom to a barrel in the courtyard. The narrator goes on to tell us how for several months he was living without his dear old dog and living without a wife, all because Clara wouldn’t let him come near her since she accused him of smelling of dog.

Then one morning, after having breakfast with Clara, something astonishing happens, We read, “She had a new flame in her eyes; around her lips, which were red and slightly parted, there was a stray trembling that excited me. And all rosy and languid, in a barely audible voice, she murmured: “Kill him . . . kill the dog.” Clara then bates him with the voluptuousness of her body, undoing her blouse and letting down her golden hair.

Inflamed by passion, the narrator takes his old Tom out to the woods, shotgun in hand. The way Mirbeau depicts the protracted heart-wrenching scene between man and dog is deeply moving . The tragic deed done, the narrator returns home and speaks to his wife but is quickly cut off. We read, “Clara, joyful and enchanted, interrupted me, clapping her hands: “He quivered! . . . he quivered!” she cried, “he quivered! . . . Oh! Darling love, come quickly so I can kiss you!”” ---------- Usually I don’t reveal the ending of a story in a review, but, in this case, by way of example, I wanted to convey one aspect of what is meant by decadent literature’s theme of disease and decay.

The Ring
An old baron visits a doctor to ask about how much iron is in blood. And why is the senile, old French aristocrat asking such a question? Turns out, he wants to give the love of his life, a woman by the name of Snowball (you have to love this name Snowball; if it was modern-day America, her name would be Bubbles) a one-of-a-kind extraordinary gift – a ring containing iron made from his very own blood. The next day the baron goes to a chemist to have his blood extracted for the needed iron. The baron has the blood-iron ring made but there is a price: a few days later the baron is on his death bed. Snowball is called to his side. How does Snowball react to the baron’s sacrifice and gift of the ring? If you think in terms of a human counterpart to a rotten, decaying apple you will not be far from the mark. Decadence, anyone?

The Octogenarian
The narrator tells us how an old mother, pious and poor, spend her last few coins to visit her son and his family in Paris. The son refuses to take his mother in or offer her any help, but, in a spark of inspiration, conceives the perfect solution: his eighty-year old mother can go to the studios and pose as a nude model. The story shifts and the narrator sees the old lady in a sculptor’s studio. Octave Mirbeau writes four paragraphs describing in precise detail what he sees. Here is a snippet: “In spite of the wrinkles on her neck, the creases of shadow that hollowed out her throat between scrawny tendons and protruding breastbones; in spite of breasts, straining ignominiously with a strange flaccidity over folds of flesh that encircled her torso; in spite of her broken-down thighs or the floating skin that flapped against her like an old piece of loose, worn-out fabric; it was possible to recuperate an elegance of line, a nobility of contour, a beauty still alive, scattered among all these blemishes.”

The author’s focus within a sculptor’s studio is no accident. The literature of the decadents finds its true home in the world of art and artificiality. To underscore this point, here is a quote from the introductory essay by the book’s editor, Asti Hustvedt: “The space best suited to decadent art is urban and interior: the artist’s studio, the theater, the masked ball, the boudoir, the laboratory, the dreamscape.” Take my word for it here – if you enjoy literary fiction, you will relish this book.

… (meer)

You have to hand it to the French. They know how to write about disease and decay with a particular flair. This excellent anthology published by Zone Books is over 1,000 pages and contains 27 prose works (7 novella-length) from 11 fin-de-siècle French writers: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Rachilde, J.-K. Huysmans, Villers de I’Isle-Adam, Jean Moréas, Guy de Maupassant, Catulle Mendès, Remy de Gourmont ,Jean Lorrain, Joséphin Péladan and Octave Mirbeau. What is most helpful for readers unfamiliar with these authors and the decadent aesthetic are the essays, one essay providing an overarching exposé and interpretation of the French decadent movement and an essay introducing each and every author and their writing. Most enlightening.

For the purposes of this review, I will focus on Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917). In her introductory essay, Emily Apter tells us the 5 short stories here “all employ sordid rituals of masculine humiliation as devised by emotionally indifferent femmes fatales. These early texts may be read as preparatory sketches or rehearsals for Mirbeau’s Orientalist chef-d’oeuvre of male masochism, ‘The Torture Garden’, in which lurid descriptions of carnal subjection are anchored in feminine cruelty.” Ms. Apter goes on to explain how the author’s themes of sexual perversion and sexual obsession along with his “long-standing anticlericalism and aversion to the army, his identification with the poor and distaste for charity, his contempt for bourgeois values . . . made him receptive to the anarchist and republican sympathies of many artists and intellectuals in his circle.” In a word, Mirbeau found the conservative norms and middle-class values of his day repulsive, particularly the norms and values defining the sexually-charged relationships between men and women.

Keeping all this in mind, let’s now turn to 3 of the 5 stories:

Poor Tom
The narrator tells us he loves his mangy, smelly, sickly old dog Tom, the dog that has been his soul-mate for the past 14 years. He even took Tom to bathe in medicinal waters for an entire season in an attempt to rid his beloved dog of sickness and suffering. The expensive baths didn’t help his dog and people thought him mad, but his love for Tom was so strong, so deep, so all-embracing, he was even willing to be taken for a madman. Then, a couple of months after the baths, he tells us he did something really mad – he married a woman named Clara.

Clara comes to live with him and her first experience after walking in the front door is seeing his filthy, smelly dog. Clara flies into a fit of rage, cracks a stick on Tom’s boney back and demands he get the ‘dirty beast’ out of the house. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the narrator consigns Tom to a barrel in the courtyard. The narrator goes on to tell us how for several months he was living without his dear old dog and living without a wife, all because Clara wouldn’t let him come near her since she accused him of smelling of dog.

Then one morning, after having breakfast with Clara, something astonishing happens, We read, “She had a new flame in her eyes; around her lips, which were red and slightly parted, there was a stray trembling that excited me. And all rosy and languid, in a barely audible voice, she murmured: “Kill him . . . kill the dog.” Clara then bates him with the voluptuousness of her body, undoing her blouse and letting down her golden hair.

Inflamed by passion, the narrator takes his old Tom out to the woods, shotgun in hand. The way Mirbeau depicts the protracted heart-wrenching scene between man and dog is deeply moving . The tragic deed done, the narrator returns home and speaks to his wife but is quickly cut off. We read, “Clara, joyful and enchanted, interrupted me, clapping her hands: “He quivered! . . . he quivered!” she cried, “he quivered! . . . Oh! Darling love, come quickly so I can kiss you!”” ---------- Usually I don’t reveal the ending of a story in a review, but, in this case, by way of example, I wanted to convey one aspect of what is meant by decadent literature’s theme of disease and decay.

The Ring
An old baron visits a doctor to ask about how much iron is in blood. And why is the senile, old French aristocrat asking such a question? Turns out, he wants to give the love of his life, a woman by the name of Snowball (you have to love this name Snowball; if it was modern-day America, her name would be Bubbles) a one-of-a-kind extraordinary gift – a ring containing iron made from his very own blood. The next day the baron goes to a chemist to have his blood extracted for the needed iron. The baron has the blood-iron ring made but there is a price: a few days later the baron is on his death bed. Snowball is called to his side. How does Snowball react to the baron’s sacrifice and gift of the ring? If you think in terms of a human counterpart to a rotten, decaying apple you will not be far from the mark. Decadence, anyone?

The Octogenarian
The narrator tells us how an old mother, pious and poor, spend her last few coins to visit her son and his family in Paris. The son refuses to take his mother in or offer her any help, but, in a spark of inspiration, conceives the perfect solution: his eighty-year old mother can go to the studios and pose as a nude model. The story shifts and the narrator sees the old lady in a sculptor’s studio. Octave Mirbeau writes four paragraphs describing in precise detail what he sees. Here is a snippet: “In spite of the wrinkles on her neck, the creases of shadow that hollowed out her throat between scrawny tendons and protruding breastbones; in spite of breasts, straining ignominiously with a strange flaccidity over folds of flesh that encircled her torso; in spite of her broken-down thighs or the floating skin that flapped against her like an old piece of loose, worn-out fabric; it was possible to recuperate an elegance of line, a nobility of contour, a beauty still alive, scattered among all these blemishes.”

The author’s focus within a sculptor’s studio is no accident. The literature of the decadents finds its true home in the world of art and artificiality. To underscore this point, here is a quote from the introductory essay by the book’s editor, Asti Hustvedt: “The space best suited to decadent art is urban and interior: the artist’s studio, the theater, the masked ball, the boudoir, the laboratory, the dreamscape.” Take my word for it here – if you enjoy literary fiction, you will relish this book.

… (meer)

A first-rate and interesting book, about the neurology service at the Salpetrie in Paris unde Jean Charcot. The author has a degree in French literature, and has researched the histories of three of the famous patients in the hysteria ward. Charcot, a name revered in neurology for the clinical and anatomic correlations that defined multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, developed a fascination for the contortions and other dramas of the hysterics, hoping to find some correlate in neuroanatomy, and some rationale to the various presentations. The milieu, however, attracted individuals who found that good performances allowed them to retain privileges and make a living of their illnesses. Hustvedt gives the biographies of three of the famous hysterics, Blanche, the reliable preformer, Genevieve, the photogenic one, and Augustine, the one who furthered the theory that religious hysterias were nothing more than the medical hysteria. I noted several famous names, the handsome Joseph Babinski, Bourneville, of tuberous sclerosis, and of course Freud. Bourneville was particularly fervid to debunk stories of religious ectasy, especially a contemporaneous religious mystic Louise Lateau, subsisting on a daily communion wafer and water, bleeding unexpectedly. I noted the stories of the "convulsionists" a brief and violent cult of self mutilation surrounding a grave of a priest in Saint-Medard, and of the Ursulines at Loudun. The religious hysteria was often erotic, citing Bernini's sculpture "Saint Teresa in Ectasy"
After Charcot's death, most neurologist belittled and rejected his theories on hysteria. Of interest was that his late writings claimed that faith healing could be real, and he had directed patients to Lourdes. Hustvedt thinks that Charcot was right in treating hysteria as real, and in an epilogue discusses modern hysterias, including Gulf War syndrome. Altogether, a very interesting book, well-written, and professionally, to a neurologist, enhancing.… (meer)