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Bruges-la-Morte is the story of one man's obsession with his dead wife and his soul's struggle between an alluring young dancer--his late wife's double--and the beautiful, melancholy city of Bruges, whose moody atmosphere mirrors his mourning. This hallmark of Belgian symbolist literature, first translated into English by Philip Mosley to great acclaim twenty years ago, is now back in print for the next generation of English readers to discover. With penetrating psychological force and richly metaphorical language, Bruges-la-Morte draws a haunting picture of love, grief, and murder in what has become a "dead city," severely Catholic and once proud. The source of the famous opera Die tote Stadt and endless inspiration for Belgian and French artists, this novella will enthrall both the imaginations and heartstrings of an Anglophile audience.… (more)
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Bruges-La-Morte is the cardinal work of Symbolist
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then
But the important thing in this work is not the characters, but the city itself. Rodenbach saw Bruges as grey, dying, solitary, religious, historic; "the peace of a cemetery reigns in those deserted districts and along the taciturn quais....the eternal weeping, the streaming and dripping of the gutters, the drains and the sporadic springs, the overflow from the roofs, the seepage from the tunnels of the bridges, like a great euphony of sobbing and inexhaustible tears."
It's a VERY strange book; the delusions of our hero don't entirely convince us, and yet....how much of a role does Bruges itself have in events? Although "it was for its melancholy that he had chosen it", nonetheless, Hugues' increasing dependence on Jane is partly due to his feeling "a horror at the idea of being left alone, face to face with this town, without anyone between him and it any more."
With atmospheric B/W shots of Bruges throughout...