Pastness and Enclosed Space as a Disruptive Subtext in the Work of Georges Rodenbach

ABSTRACT

Rodenbach explores a vast imagery of enclosed spaces, from the heart as a room with closed shutters, or the aquarium with its interiorised transparency, to the isolated domestic interior. It is argued that these spaces function in Rodenbach’s work as critical subtexts. They are revealing of the particular nineteenth-century awareness of past and present as traces: the past is irrevocably absent and other, and the present is a fragile, highly elusive future past. Against this elusiveness, a variety of strategies of re-presentation emerge in order to vivify the past, disappearing or absent realities. These strategies were for example the panoramic theatre, the historical novel or the museum with its evocative power, that somehow established a sense of continuity and connection between past and present. Also the increasingly problematic notion of the subject as consciousness, as presence with reality and with the self, that is central to this essay, is part of this broader context of presentification, historical awareness, and representation.

The spatial imageries in Le Règne du silence and Les Vies encloses, in Bruges-la-Morte, Le Carillonneur, L’Arbre and L’Ami des miroirs, disrupt and problematize presentification. More precisely, through challenging the notion of the subject as an immediate, exhaustive presence with reality, caught in fixed, stable thoughts, Rodenbach testifies to the irreducible fragility of the present. Fixed thoughts dissolve and become elusive, and result from the ungraspable movements of the subconscious. In Rodenbach’s interior spaces, the subject thus becomes an elusive being that, through self-reflection, has incorporated in its very self the opaque depths of the subconscious.

KEYWORDS:

• Georges Rodenbach
• interior spaces
• domestic spaces
• enclosed spaces
• Belgian fin-de-siècle literature
• presentification
• pastness
• régime d’historicité

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dominique Bauer is a professor of history at the University of Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Belgium. She works in the field of comparative literature, cultural history and philosophy. Her research focusses on the imagery of interior spaces on the intersection of literature, the built environment and visual sources. In this framework, she is the academic editor of the recently established series Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective with Amsterdam University Press. Whereas her book Beyond the Frame. Case Studies (2016) focused on the interior and subjectivity, she is currently writing on past, absence and presence in spatial imageries throughout the nineteenth century and occasionally in contemporary sources. Place-Text-Trace. The Fragility of the Spatial Image, on the same subject, has just come out. An edited volume The Imagery of Interior Spaces is due on March 2019. A follow-up project takes the theme of space and history further into a study on space and imagination on the intersection of literary motif and the built environment. A volume Absence and Otherness. Imagination and Spatial Arrangement in Early-Nineteenth-Century France.

Notes

1 Focusing on periods of crisis of temporality, like that of the French Revolution, Hartog deploys the notion of régime d’historicité to analyse the awareness of past, present and future, the way they were lived and experienced.

2 Or, as Alfred de Musset ([1836] 1962, 20) wrote in his La confession d’un enfant du siècle: ‘Tout ce qui était n’est plus; tout ce qui sera n’est pas encore.’ Among the vast body of work on the changing attitudes towards past, present and future, the sense of otherness, change, loss and futility that characterised the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century, one can refer to Stephan Bann (Bann 1984), Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1985) and Reinhart Koselleck’s (1988) seminal Vergangene Zukunft that influenced François Hartog’s (Hartog 2012) work on the régime d’historicité and that of Peter Fritzsche (Fritzsche 2004).

3 ‘Notre existence est d’une telle fuite, que si nous n'écrivons pas le soir l’événement du matin, le travail nous encombre et nous n’avons plus le temps de le mettre à jour’ (Chateaubriand 1989, 352).

4 For a more extensive analysis, see Bauer (2016, 113–115).

5 'Alors ce fut un rêve comme son rêve de jadis. Il put imaginer longuement qu’il était dans sa propre maison, marié … et que cet être charmant et inconnu qui jouait du piano, près de lui, c’était sa femme' (Alain-Fournier 1913 [2001], 117).

6 Christian Berg in this respect very interestingly notes, in the framework of Schopenhauer’s influence on Belgian symbolism, that the phenomenal world is but the mirror of Will and what the subject immediately sees are but subjective reflections. The world can no longer be a mirror in which Divine Intelligence reflects itself, but is inhabited by ’une force obscure‘ that can be know by the subject ‘qu’en installant une distance entre elle et lui par un nouveau jeu de miroirs (my emphasis) (Berg 1982, 126).

7 Patrick Laude (1990, 43) in this respect interprets Les Vies encloses as the 'point culminant' of Rodenbach’s images of reclusion and solitude, such as also the canals, framed and fenced within their docks.

8 Interestingly, in this novel Rodenbach radicalises the earlier theme in his work of the protagonist’s inevitable faith. Before Bruges-la-Morte or Le Carillonneur, Rodenbach had already explored the same parallel between the psychology of the individual and that of the mass in his autobiographic L’art en Exil (1889), where the death throes of Jean Rembrandt’s wife run parallel to the violent movement of the people in the streets on election day. ‘Maintenant l’agitation du dehors devenait bruyante et tapageuse; les bandes augmentaient; il en passait à toute minute, battant les murs d’un grondement de houle humaine emportée par les rues … Tout à coup il la vit se soulever, sans un cri, mais agitant les bras, violemment, comme dans une attaque de nerfs, […]’ (Rodenbach 1889, 190–191).

9 On the double as a second skin and its connection with interior space imageries, see Bauer (2016, 120–137).

10 Le Carillonneur is in this sense more explicit than Bruges-la-Morte. When Joris Borluut, as the newly elected carillonneur of Bruges, gets the keys to the belfry, he is suddenly overwhelmed by melancholy, ‘se sentit seul et inquiet d’on ne sait quoi. Ce fut comme s’il venait de prendre en main la clé de son tombeau.’ (Rodenbach [1897] 2000, 13–14). The tower will indeed become his tomb.

11 Also elsewhere is explicitly referred to Joos' unescapable faith: ‘Il eut des yeux sages, des gestes nobles, pour acquiescer à la destinée, déjà inévitable’ … Elle (la corde) cassera peut-être. Tant pis! C’est que c’est écrit. On ne peut pas changer le sort.’ (Rodenbach 1899a, 107–108, 111)

12 A full analysis of the double figure in L’Arbre, as both other and familiar, would exceed the scope of this contribution. It is however important to point out how Rodenbach touches upon the key tension that determines the core of the double as both a historical literary theme and as a psycho(patho)logical occurrence. In his 1919 Das Unheimliche, Freud would treat the double as an uncanny subject, while defining the uncanny precisely from the very tension that defines the double and that is also central to the double in Rodenbach’s L’Arbre: ‘Also heimlich ist ein Wort, das seine Bedeutung nach einer Ambivalenz entwickelt, bis es endlich mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfält. Unheimlich ist irgendwie ein Art von Heimlich.’ (Freud [1919] 1924, 377)

13 In his postface to the 1997 edition of Le Rouet des brumes, Alain Chevrier points out to the fact that the pathology of the mirror collector in L’Ami des miroirs, who does no longer recognise himself in his own mirror reflection, would two years later be described in psychiatry as autoscopie négative, by Paul Sollier in his Les phénomènes d’autoscopie (Rodenbach [1901] 1997, 233).

14 Speaking examples are Xavier Mellery (1845-1921) Nun with two cats, undated, private collection and Georges Le Brun (1873-1914), Le Vestibule, ca. 1909, Paris: Musée d’Orsay.

15 One can think of Mellery’s chronophotographic-like, frozen depiction of four beguines climbing the stairs, that creates the sensation of a simultaneous rendering of various moments in time: Xavier Mellery (1845-1921) Après la prière du soir/ Na het avondgebed, ca. 1912, Bruxelles-Brussel, Musée d’Ixelles-Museum van Elsene.

16 Constable in this respect referred to the sights in a panoramic theatre as 'those sights that ape the absolute presence of reality/Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land' (Prelude, Book 7, 232–234) (quoted in D’Arcy Wood 2001, 106–107)

17 On the narcissist structure of Hugues’ gaze in the mirror, see: Newman 2011, 27–43, 32.

18 On this long term development of the imagery of the interior space, see Bauer (2016).

19 Rodenbach ([1897] 2000, 33): ‘N’est-ce pas la fine volupté du collectionneur que son envie aille à l’infinie, … Ô joie de pouvoir, à l’infinie, reculer son désir’.

20 Rodenbach ([1897] 2000, 33): ‘Ignore toujours la possession total qui déçoit par le fait même de sa plénitude.’

21 Joris Borluut for example thinks of her as ‘si bien appariée aux vieilles choses, elle-même comme un ancien portrait (Rodenbach [1897] 2000, 45)

22 In his Warped Space, Anthony Vidler (2000, 31) mentions, regarding the peur des espaces as a mental condition, the case of an agoraphobic woman, Madame B., who stuffed her apartment with objects in her battle against the void: ‘[Madame B.] couldn’t cross large boulevards and empty squares … Once indoors she was never able to look out of the window onto the courtyard; she filled her room with furniture, pictures, statuettes and old tapestries to reduce their spaciousness … the void alone frightened her.’

23 On the development on the cabinet and its connection with the 19th century interior: Bauer (2016, 48–64).