The Booty (pre-1893) – Georges Rochegrosse
Etched by Eugene-Andre Champollion, sourced here
Rochegrosse (1859–1938) is above all else the painter of Flaubert’s Salammbô, which he illustrated in great detail with absolute accuracy but a complete lack of understanding. The antique pictures which the artists of the fin de siècle offer us are more often than not laborious reconstructions and pretexts to depict nudes. Dreamers of Decadence, Philippe Jullian, page 140.
Dan Green of The Reading Experience does not like Stephen King. I’ve read this before, in fact, according to Google, it is the 24th time that he or one of his readers call upon Stephen to discuss the strengths of literary merit. Every time someone displays a patronizingly superior attitude towards Stephen King, my nobrow instincts rise up and I feel the snobbishness as if it was directed towards me. In his latest post Dan even goes so far to say that “film adaptations of [Stephen] King’s fiction such as Brian De Palma‘s Carrie and David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they’re based, which in my opinion don’t rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I’ve said it.)”
This is probably the first time I’ve read in a highbrow literary blog that a film is superior to the novel and it is of course — at least with reference to The Dead Zone and Carrie –, pure bollocks (there, I said it.). But at the same time I can understand Dan’s position. For example, I’d love to be able to watch the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than reading it.
But I wonder: why do I defend Stephen King? I defend him because I used to be an avid reader of King and because he writes in the tradition of the “limit experience”. The tradition of transgressive fiction. He writes about states of the human condition which transcend the everyday life. He makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about.
Now is a good time to be a bit more specific about the nobrow concept. Frank McLynn will come to my aid. He calls Kingsley Amis a phoney because he maintains that: “[it is] impossible to enjoy and appreciate Westerns, film noir or private-eye fiction of the Raymond Chandler kind and acknowledged literary heavyweights like Melville, Conrad, Dostoevsky and Zola.”
But is Kingsley Amis really a phoney because he feels that?
Being nobrow is about knowing the entire corpus of literature. If you only know two colors, let’s say green and blue, you can’t call yourself an expert on colors. Likewise, if you only know highbrow literature, you can hardly call yourself an expert on literature or literary merit. The first thing you need to know when you claim to have any taste at all, is the corpus. And this is indeed the big paradox of the nobrow position. You can only call yourself nobrow if you know the corpus of both high and low culture. And then you have to make your own choices. If you only know high culture, you are not nobrow. If you only know low culture, you are not nobrow. In practice, this means, that for being a nobrow person, you come from the highbrow position.
This, however, does not mean that I am against a canon of sorts. Being in education, I recognize the need for a canon, for a curriculum. And I suppose that we all want to define our own literary canons. And my plea is include King in the 20th century literary canon, just as we’ve included Bram Stoker from the 19th literary canon and Sade from that of the 18th century. Please do not exclude literature from the canon on grounds of its content.
I’m not saying that Dan and other Stephen King bashers despise Stephen King’s books solely on the basis of their content (otherwise critics such as Dan wouldn’t like the films based on his novels), but I do get the feeling that most of this rejection is for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria.
Which reminds me of Susan Sontag’s On Style:
It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature. … Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.
I watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events with the girls yesterday evening and loved it. Loved Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and even Dustin Hoffman’s cameo appearance.
The film is based on this series of comic books.
On its steampunk qualities:
Although the books can be classed as ‘steampunk‘, in that they involve young people struggling against great odds in an anachronistic setting, the addition, in later books, of the mysterious organization known as V.F.D. have begun to push the story into the new genre of post-steampunk (in the same way that later additions to the cyberpunk genre are now classed as postcyberpunk). –wikipedia
On its macabre and black comedy qualities:
The books can also be classified as absurdist fiction, due to their eccentric characters, quirky writing style and generally improbable storylines. Some might argue that these books could also be classified as black comedy, because of the mix of humorous and macabre elements.
In the words of my favorite Amazon critic Jeff Shannon and one of my favorite film critics tout court:
If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you’d surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Tim Burton didn’t direct this comically morbid adaptation … but there’s still plenty to recommend the playfully bleak scenario, … a variety of fantastical hazards and mysterious clues, some of which remain unresolved. Given endless wonders of art direction, costume design, and cinematography… –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
One more thing: loved the self referentiality of the intrusive narrator of the film (such as is commonly displayed in 18th and 19th century literature.)
The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo
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Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs is a horror story of a young aristocrat kidnapped and disfigured by his captors to display a permanent grin.
In the novel, Hugo gives his own account of the work of the Comprachicos:
“In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.”
This example clearly displays all of the most common elements of the legend: first, association with outsiders (the Chinese); second, the victim being a young child; and third, assertions of the methodology that stretch the limits of credibility but seem to remain within the domain of the possible. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprachicos [Dec 2006]
Certainly Faust is a reproduction of Don Juan. … Like Don Juan, Faust is a demonic figure, but at a higher level. .. —Either/Or, Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, who had been working up an abandoned project on the three great medieval figures of Don Juan, Faust and Ahasuerus (the wandering Jew) incorporated much of the work he had done into Either/Or.
The literary characters that most influenced Kierkegaard were Don Juan (representing pleasure), Faust (doubt) and the Wandering Jew (despair); he used characters based on them in his writings. For example, both Don Juan and Faust personify the demonic in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Part One ..
“”Baudelaire en vers et Flaubert en prose” said Péladan in 1885: the analogy could not be juster and is today taken for granted. Baudelaire and Flaubert are like the two faces of a Herm planted firmly in the middle of the century, marking the division between Romanticism and Decadence, between the period of the Fatal Man and that of the Fatal Woman, between the period of Delacroix and that of Moreau.” —The Romantic Agony
Les Mémoires du diable (1838) – Frédéric Soulié
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Frédéric Soulié is another writer of the roman frénétique. In his time he was as well known as Balzac or Eugène Sue. His Les Mémoires du diable (1838) is mentioned in Colin Wilson’s Misfits and the Romantic Agony.
Who knows who did the painting on the Robert Laffont edition shown above? It looks like something done by Daumier.
Cover to Janin’s Dead Donkey
Inspired by The Romantic Agony, I bring you some 19th century cult fiction by the likes of Jules Janin and Charles Nodier of the “frenetic school”.
“The Dead Donkey” & “The Guillotined Woman” by Jules Janin, Honore de Balzac, Terry Hale (Editor), Tony Johannot (Illustrator)
Paperback – 168 pagesThis story features probably the most nauseating narrator in the entire history of literature.
In nineteenth century France there flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened ‘the frenetique school’.
The frenetique was at its peak in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Of this short-lived literary movement Jules Janin’s The Dead Donkey and he Guillotined Woman is one of the finest and certainly one of the most unpleasant examples. Jules Janin is supposed to have begun the tale as a spoof of the fashionable frenetique style. However, with its wealth of horrible incident and its sinister and claustrophobic atmosphere, it seems likely that the author actually fell in love with his subject. The bizarre duality of the novel is one of its most striking qualities.
This edition comes with Balzac’s extraordinary spoof sequel, Chapter XXX, published in an all-English edition for the first time. Masterly in-depth commentary by Terry Hale, and the celebrated illustrations by Tony Johannot. —http://www.theadamsresidence.co.uk/gothsoc/gothsoc.html [Nov 2006
Notes:
‘The frenetique school’: frenetic means fast, frantic, harried, or frenzied
In the category of “la littérature frénétique”, most frequently cited are Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly, Charles Nodier (Smarra, or the Demons of the Night (1821)) and Pétrus Borel. Its peak was the late 1820s and early 1830s.
La France frénétique de 1830: Choix de textes (1978) – Jean-Luc Steinmetz
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Some French language notes:
A côté du romantisme officiel qui occupe le devant de la scène existe un autre courant, encore marginal mais porteur d’avenir. Influencée par le roman gothique et ses images de caveaux humides, fantômes blafards et cul-de-basse-fosse ensanglantés, une certaine tendance friande d’horreur et de frissons s’épanouit en France, la littérature “frénétique”. Elle se teinte d’ailleurs assez vite d’aspects parodiques (Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly), ou alors accentue son côté sombre et pervers accompagné d’un humour très noir (Pétrus Borel “le lycanthrope”, 1809-1859). —http://gallica.bnf.fr/themes/LitXVIIIIk.htm
Every European country had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir (“black novel”, now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet.
Dedalus European Classics, who’ve also lovingly published works by Rachilde has Smarra by Nodier in print in what I think is a lovely painting by Gustave Moreau:
Smarra & Trilby (1821, 1822) – Charles Nodier
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Last night was the night when the wind came and changed autumn into winter, taking with it all the leaves that crowned the trees.
I’ve added a list of protagonists and themes/tropes to the page dedicated to Praz’s Romantic Agony, a remarkable book, especially considering that it was written during the late 1920s, when the decadent movement wasn’t even cold yet.
As far as its quality goes, it is way up there with Todorov’s The Fantastic, Colin Wilson’s The Misfits, Ludwig Marcuse’s Obscene and André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor.
Definitely one of my favorite works of literary criticism.
Todo: the thematic criticism of Jean-Pierre Richard (Littérature et Sensation, 1954) and the Geneva school as it applies to the works above. See theme. Maybe start here; or with Horst Daemmrich Themes and Motifs in Western Literature and with the criticism by Todorov on Richard?
Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto; Vathek; Frankenstein (1968) – Various
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The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings. This volume presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: “The Castle of Otranto“, published pseudonymously in 1765; “Vathek” (1786); and the story of “Frankenstein” (1818). Introduction by Mario Praz. The cover image of this Penguin edition illustrates one of the main tropes of gothic fiction: the isolated and haunted castle.