“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another—writers who could not have read each other—still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.”

So writes Jeff VanderMeer in a searching, enlightening recent article at The Atlantic. Happily, he and his wife the amazing editor Ann, co-founded this site, Weird Fiction Review, for this very purpose: to explore enclaves of Weirdness around the world, Weirdness that may have developed outside of other influences, or braided garbled versions of such influences into its own traditions, or responded to reigning forms of Weirdness but not been heard in return—putting all these in conversation with each other. WFR is a showcase for the Weird in all its international glory, adding far flung members to the “gorgeous choir.” Here the Weird—its ancient and evolving records of encounters with radical alterities—dovetails with the very contemporary project of exploring the earthly alterities of other cultures, at once refuting and embracing universality, or else fractally complicating its older, easier models with new particulars.

A brief index, then, of my selected contributions to WFR since its inception in 2011: authors translated or profiled in the rich field of the French and Belgian Weird, to point your way to some of the rich reading to be found on this site. After all, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literatures, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. Even contemporary genrebending movements of literary fantasy like the New Weird (China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer) and New Wave Fabulism (Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem) cite the contes cruels and fantastique as forerunners. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? Consider this effort an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic.

These traditions, twinned at birth, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Seeing where they vary and diverge can only fertilize, diversify the conversation, and seed the ground for future exchange. The postwar fantastique, steeped in decades of surrealism, drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Kafka, Schulz), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Paz, Borges, Cortázar); and the frenetic inventiveness of a new field, genre fantasy. Contemporary French fantastical movements like La Nouvelle Fiction seek to rouse French writing from “the slumber of psychological realism,” and have much to offer recently renewed interest in the metafictions of Coover, Barth, and Barthelme. The Belgian School of the Strange is another domestically vibrant but internationally overlooked tradition on display here.

Francophonia features writers and styles, from classical to experimental, clever to vengeful, understated to outrageous, wistful to wicked. Here are Académie mandarins and contemporary hopefuls, one-hit wonders and the unjustly forgotten, bestsellers and writer’s writers, scholars and dabblers, outsiders and literati. Some are sui generis, some descended from long tradition; all are united in their use of the unreal. Together, they have won every major literary prize in France and Belgium, and many minor ones, several times over: the Goncourt (in the novel and short story categories), the Femina, the Renaudot, the Rossel, the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (for a single work and for lifetime achievement),  the Grand Prix National des Lettres. Six are Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters (and four of the Legion of Honor). Most of these authors have never been translated into English, while translations of the others are outdated, out-of-print, or obscure to begin with (tiny print runs from tinier presses).

Given the breadth of historical span, the variety of theme and subject, the diversity of form, you’ll find: refashioned fairy tales, insinuating fables, absurdist prose poems, macabre parables, mocking twists, haunting ambiguities, austere mysteries, gory histories, cunning disappearances, unforgiving metamorphoses, unbidden malice, crippling rue, singular creatures, terrible decisions, vertiginous terrors, glorious paradox (cerebrally Borgesian and playfully Lewis-Carrolingian alike), lonely reverie, outlandish ribaldry, radical subjectivities, subtle slippage, sudden madness.

“We like to think that we understand our universe,” writes VanderMeer, “but I came away from these readings with a sense of weird fiction as a potentially powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation of that idea.” There are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in our anthologies.

Some Belgians:

• Thomas Owen (1910 – 2002): with Jean Ray, regularly cited as a pillar of Belgian fantastical fiction, and the nom de plume of Gérald Bertot: criminal lawyer, art critic, mystery writer, and career manager of a flour plant. In more than 300 stories over the course of his lifetime, Owen refined the tale of supernatural horror to an almost anachronistic degree of economy and purity. His unsettling work has been compared to that of Poe and Buzzati. A consistency of worldview emanates from Owen’s oeuvre: an existential dread, one that Thomas Ligotti correctly identified (in a blurb where he name-checked Owen) as “the nightmare of being alive.” His story “Kavar the Rat”  and a nonfiction appreciation of Lovecraft are available here at Weird Fiction Review; his story “The Women Who Watch” is available at The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Audio versions of both stories are at Pseudopod.
• The only child of writer parents, Jean Muno was born in a Brussels suburb in 1924 — the year André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, as Muno is fond of pointing out. A schoolteacher for much of his early life, in 1955 he settled with his family in Malaise (Flemish: Maleizen), a hamlet of Walloon Brabant near Belgium’s linguistic border. For the rest of his life, Muno could not resist making jokes about where he lived, especially given the unsettling fantastical nature of his fiction. Consistent in these tales is a scorn for suburbia, its stagnant mores. Muno is adept at dissecting that morally bankrupt land of the averted gaze, and ventriloquizing the puffed-up bluster of its hypocritically indignant inhabitants. These days, the corruption of the suburbs has been done to death, but Muno was writing at the height of suburban social critique and expression of ennui. The plots kick off with some Cheeveresque trifle over stubbed pride, and yet beneath these one senses an abyss always yawning, of which sudden swerves of phrase or story make us abruptly aware. The good citizens — nosy neighbors in prudish provincial towns ruled by fear and vestigial Christianity — waver between ignorance and precarious comprehension. How paltry are things on which they stake their identity: front steps that “had the clean distinctness of a set of false teeth.” His tale “The Ghoul” is available at Weird Fiction Review.
• Anne Richter (1939 — ): anthologist, scholar, and formidable writer of fantastical short fiction, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Le fantastique féminin, named for her 1984 monograph on female contributions to the fantastical corpus, in which she asserted: “Women move at the heart of magic realism in a more spontaneous and concrete way than men; they do not reflect on it, they reflect it as though it were their natural and daily element… With neither argument nor pride, women enter easily into the supernatural, whose existence seems, a priori, indisputably obvious to them.” Her work has appeared online at The Collagist and is forthcoming in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology of feminist speculative fiction, Sisters of the Revolution.
• Eugène Savitzkaya (1955 — ) is a creature of limens, spaces of detente, unlikely juxtapositions. Belgian by birth of Ukranian descent, long admired but little known, Savitzkaya is generally classed as a poet despite having penned plays, essays, and more than twelve novels. And these novels — plotless, impressionistic, glories of language and consciousness, brief unchaptered bursts all from France’s leading avant-garde publisher, Minuit — surely they partake more of poetry than prose? Savitzkaya stands at the consciousness-expanding intersection of Weird and experiment. His work is available online at Drunken Boat and Anomalous, and forthcoming in Gigantic.
• Bernard Quiriny (1978 — ): heir to the Belgian School of the Strange, contemporary critical darling Quiriny synthesizes disparate fantastical influences from Borges to Calvino, Robert Louis Stevenson to Enrique Vila-Matas in his playful, prizewinning, postmodern takes on classically fantastic themes. He has also written two novels: Les assoiffés (Seuil, 2010), a satirical dystopian alternate history of Belgium as a feminist totalitarian state, and most recently Le village évanoui (Flammarion, 2014). A profile of the author can be found at the NEA Writer’s Corner. His work has appeared in English at Subtropics (with author interviews in English and the French), The Coffin Factory, World Literature Today, here at Weird Fiction Review, and Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2012. New work is forthcoming in Bengal Lights and Subtropics.

Some French:

• The early work of Pierrette Fleutiaux (1941 — ) was exclusively fantastical, and drew the admiration of Julio Cortazar. Her 1984 collection Les Métamorphoses de la reine, contemporary subversions of Perrault, won the Prix Goncourt for short stories. The first story from this collection, “The Ogre’s Wife,” was published in Grand Street (trans. Leigh Hafrey), selected for inclusion in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 1992 by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and also adapted into an opera.
• There’s something oddly joyous in the stories of Jehanne Jean-Charles, even at their most malicious. She’s been compared to Saki, Bradbury, and Matheson, but the wink of her trick endings is one not of smugness but of merry complicity — a wink from your stylish, daffy aunt, the absent-minded one who wears galoshes, knows magic, and has unmanageable hair. “Isn’t life grand?” she’s apt to exclaim, giddy in the face of blackest misfortune, as if the universe had in causing suffering merely proved its infinite variety and capacity for surprise. Which is not to say that tragedy in her tales lacks suitable solemnity, that moving moments don’t get their due gravity. But bad things do befall the bulk of her characters, without apology or redress, sometimes even without explanation. The famously taboo-breaking Jean-Jacques Pauvert, her editor, said of her, “If she were English, she’d be read the world over.”
• If Serge Brussolo (1951- ) is often called France’s answer to Stephen King, it is largely because of how consistently his countless titles (almost 200, sometimes at a pace of five or six a year) have become bestsellers. One of France’s most prolific authors, he has has worked with almost every major publisher in almost every genre: science fiction, fantasy, historical (WWII, Egypt, Middle Ages), suspense/thriller, horror, crime, and YA. Brussolo is most noted for his violent originality, the seemingly bottomless fecundity of his imagination, and the breathless sense of dread, a visceral fatalism, that pervades the worlds he creates. Brussolo’s protagonists, sometimes even entire communities, are often cut off from the larger world. Among his recurrent themes are the decay of social order, the illusory consolation of religion, imprisonment, and madness. His prose is marked by a density of playful neologisms, and an energy from feverish riffing on images and ideas that concretizes dreamscapes. His novel The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, forthcoming in 2016, will mark his English-language debut.
• André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–1991) was a French writer of the fantastic whose prolific output included poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. He also translated works by Yeats, Mishima, and Paz. Initially affiliated with Surrealism, he went on to be known for his flamboyant style and fascination with the erotic and macabre. His 1967 Goncourt-winning novel La marge was translated as The Margin (Calder & Boyars, 1969) by Richard Howard, and his novel La motocyclette (Gallimard, 1963) made into the film The Girl on a Motorcyle (1968) by Jack Cardiff. His story “The Red Loaf” is available at Words Without Borders.
• Noël Devaulx (1905–1995) is the secret master of the 20th century French fantastique. His prose has the shimmer of Mérimée and the seemliness of Flaubert; clearly, he keeps Nerval by his bedside, the better to read it by the light of a Baudelairean lunacy. In his hands, the Kunstmärchen—nine collections’ worth, over nine decades—is reinvented as the vessel of a personal metaphysics; evident in every one is his mandarin mastery of narration. Jean Paulhan, an early champion, famously called his hermetic, exquisite tales, oft-featured in the Nouvelle Revue Française, “parables without keys”: spellbinding, even when perfectly obscure, for the secret to his prose is promise.
• Writer, poet, and painter Pierre Bettencourt (1917–2006) was, despite coming from a prominent family, a retiring figure and lifelong outsider artist. He self-published his first works on a family-owned press during the Nazi occupation. He later published Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet. In the 1950s and 60s he was a frequent contributor to the Nouvelle revue française, and Gallimard later put out a volume of his selected works. He can be read online at Weird Fiction Review, The Collagist, and Anomalous.
• Marcel Béalu (1908–1993) was best known for the delicacy with which he explored dreams and the unreal in poetry, prose, and painting. A retiring figure, he ran a Paris bookstore by the Jardin du Luxembourg named Le Pont Traversé after a novel by his friend, critic and editor Jean Paulhan. There he held readings for a small circle of surrealist and fantastical writers; it is said Lacan, among his first customers, purchased Shakespeare’s complete works and forgot to pay for them. His 1945 novel L’Expérience de la nuit was translated by Christine Donougher as The Experience of Night (Dedalus, 1997). My translations of his work have appeared in Joyland, Anomalous, Unstuck, and The Café Irreal.
• Jean Ferry (1906–1974) was primarily a screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Clouzot, Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Georges Franju. A satrap of the College of ‘Pataphysics, he was known in his time as the greatest specialist in the works of Proust’s neighbor, Raymond Roussel. His only book of fantastical tales, The Conductor, was first published in 1953 and reprinted three times by various publishers, most recently in 2011 by Éditions Finitude.  Andre Breton called Ferry’s story “The Society Tiger” “the most sensationally new poetical text I have read in a long time.” I received a PEN America grant to translate his work, which has appeared in Subtropics, Weird Fiction Review, PEN America, Sentence, Anomalous, The Coffin Factory, Birkensnake, Gigantic, and The Café Irreal. In November 2013, Wakefield Press published my translation of The Conductor.

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Last week began and ended with work from the French–not my own, but translations by Kit Schluter and Katie Assef, doing wunderkind Weird precursor Marcel Schwob and twisted Belgian fabulist Nadine Monfils, respectively. Last week also saw the highlight of a classic favorite by Kelly Link, courtesy of Adam Mills (all hail Adam Mills!) who until recently was WFR’s very capable managing editor (he will be sorely missed–is already, in fact). Then on Thursday we took a turn for horror humor with a gory vampire redneck tale from proud South Carolina native Grady Hendrix, and on Friday finished up with some delectably perverse doings in Venice.

This week at WFR, I am proud to present J.W. McCormack’s visionary short novella Backwater, serialized in three installments. McCormack grafts his heady, pyrotechnic prose to the Biblical backbone of a rip-roaring Armageddon adventure in a Weird update of deep Southern Gothic featuring snake preachers, Cajun gamblers, cult compounds, and teenage runaways–all narrated by Hell’s own anglerfish, who gleans life stories from souls as he digests them. This will be accompanied by images from J.K. Potter, well-known for his covers and art for Subterranean Press.

Backwater will appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while Tuesday and Thursday will showcase an original sequence of weird prose poems by G.C. Waldrep inspired by the work of outsider artist George Widener.

Bringing the Weirdness,

e.g.

The post Summer Solstice appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Nadine Monfils was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1953. A novelist, short story writer, film director and producer, for many years she taught screenwriting at the Université Européenne d’Ecriture in Brussels and in prisons throughout France. As a journalist and film critic, she has been a regular contributor to Père Ubu, Focus, and Tels Quels. Her first book of stories, Laura Colombe, Contes pour petites filles perverses, was published in 1981 with illustrations by Léonor Fini and a postface by Thomas Owen, who was a champion of her work. Since then, Monfils has written over thirty novels and directed several films. She lives in Montmartre.

Katie Assef studied French literature at Sarah Lawrence College and recently completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at Brooklyn College. Her prose and translations have appeared in journals such as Whole Beast Rag, PANK, Alchemy: a Journal of Translation, Cerise Press, and Three Percent. She lives in Berkeley and is currently an apprentice with Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY.

Venice was my last island. A dream outside of time. It was the only place where I felt the waters formed a barrier between me and the world, protecting me from human stupidity.

Something in me was broken. I’d lost my appetite for love, along with all the rest. Sometimes when you can’t change your life, you try to change your look: I swapped my black dresses for colorful clothes and hacked off my long dark curls.

I was another person on the outside–only on the outside. Walking past a mirror, I found my reflection strange, but on the inside I still wore black and would often smooth my phantom curls.

Life had made me more and more withdrawn.

I had come here to escape my demons.

My short hair, jeans and boyish suspenders stood out against the ancient, forbidding scenery like a keepsake box floating amid ominous waves. I had the insolent gaze of those with nothing left to lose; only my reflection in the water could still make me lower my eyes.

I strolled down the narrow passageways around Piazza San Marco, and it took a few days before I felt the effect of the strange atmosphere, like a shadow’s veil that falls gently upon you and never lifts.

To love Venice, you have to cast off your old self, to overcome your disgust of the filthy waters, dive in and let them wash away your dead skin.

Despite my horrible fear of rats, I was convinced the greyish water would help me recover the little girl I had once been. Her laugh and naïve gaze–what ingenious armor! I left my clothes on some pier and began to swim. I didn’t leave the water until I was exhausted, my mind empty.

Someone had stolen my goddamn pants. The thief must not have liked my blouse, for it pined away on the embankment, its heart torn to shreds. Instead of panicking, I took this as a sign and sat calmly beneath the Rialto bridge, waiting for an angel to come along…

A bum approached me. His sour breath made me want to vomit. I tried to fight him off, but he had that madness that gives rise to strength. He pinned me up against the cold, damp wall, gripping my wrists in his right hand, and dug his knee into my stomach to keep me still. With the other hand, he unbuttoned his pants and tried to take out his soft penis. He grumbled. Suddenly, he grabbed a bottle of red wine that lay on the ground and shoved the neck up into me. It was the only skill he had left…

I experienced a strange, repulsive pleasure, something violent rising in my throat. He crushed my breasts and tried to kiss me, but I bit him. He yelled and slapped me, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. After kicking me in the shins, he let me go. I felt a little piece of meat stuck between my teeth! I should have bit his tongue.

He walked off, cursing. The bottle rolled on the cobblestone and the sound echoed like an empty cry. If I had to have been raped by a bottle of wine, I would have preferred it to be a grand cru! But it had no label.

A hand came down on my shoulder. I turned and saw an old lady smiling at me. She motioned for me to follow her. Her hair was tied up in a black scarf, and she walked with a limp. Her coat was the color of water, a stormy grey. She took it off to cover me and brought me into her house, a gloomy old place isolated at the end of a blind alley. The rez-de-chaussee resembled a warehouse filled with useless objects. Mismatched chairs were piled on top of one another between moldy crates. A paradise for vermin. We climbed a wobbly staircase to the poorly lit first floor. On a bare table, an oil lamp burned. An old magazine crumbled into dust on the floor beside a broken doll.

That was when I saw her, a tiny figure crouching in the corner.

The old lady murmured a few words in Italian, and the little girl stood. She wore a red dress, a red so intense it seemed unreal. Oddly, when she walked, blood seemed to trickle from its hem. She took my hand and led me into a windowless room. A large candle was all that illuminated the rusty iron crib, half-hidden by dirty curtains. She asked me to sit on the bed. The sheets smelled of urine. And not only that—a strong scent of men, too.

Exhausted, I finally fell asleep despite my nausea. When I woke the next morning, I found the little girl seated at my feet. She was watching me with her little marten’s eyes. I felt as if she was searching through my mind like an old scrapbook, trying to unravel some mystery.  She wore the same red dress as the day before, and I was still wrapped in the old coat.

The old lady came in and gave me a night-blue silk dress. The little girl watched as I slipped it on. I hadn’t seen her smile yet, but maybe she didn’t know how.

“It’s my mother’s,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Camarde,” she answered, with a strange glimmer in her eyes.

“You have a pretty red dress.”

She jumped off the foot of the bed and twirled several times like a music-box ballerina. Blood splattered my face and the walls.

The child stopped twirling and began to laugh wildly.

“You’ve got your period?”

“No. It’s my dress that’s bleeding. It bleeds all the time. Ever since I killed the first man.”

“What are you talking about?”

Just then, the old woman called for her in a harsh voice. I heard the Moors of the clock-tower strike their hammers nine times on the bell.

“Come on. My grandmother is waiting for us with hot coffee. We can’t dawdle or she’ll beat my legs with her cane, and that’s the worst!”

“Why do you stay with that mean old hag?”

“And where else should I go, in your opinion? Come on, hurry up!”

The old lady drummed her slug-like fingers on the table. She had a fat nose and the shadow of a mustache. She smelled like rancid butter. A true marvel of nature.

She explained that I’d have to put on some makeup and walk the street to bring clients into her establishment.

“The child’s mother used to do it, but that whore took off overnight. Providence sent you to us!”

What luck! I’d walked right into a mouse trap—the old crone and her bleeding granddaughter ran a brothel worthy of Madame Claude herself.

Well, I needed food and a place to sleep. And anyway, it would be fun to try.

Swaying my round derriere, my mouth painted like a porcelain doll’s, I transformed into a baited hook for dumbfish.

The catch was not miraculous, but I did reel a little something in. Rather pudgy, sallow-eyed, in a clerk’s suit. Garden-variety. Never mind, his shirt pocket was stuffed with bills.

I didn’t want to have sex with this guy, but if I had to, I wouldn’t make myself sick over it. All I had to do was close my eyes to be somewhere else.

The fat fish followed me to the house of the witch and Little Red Riding Hood. The old lady made him pay before going any further. She took the bundle of bills and slid a few into my cleavage. Then she motioned for me to lead the wolf into the sheepfold.

The child sat huddled in the darkest corner of the room. I could tell she was there because of the broken doll on the floor beside her. The man didn’t even notice. He undressed, murmuring some dirty talk to rile himself up. He had the bulbous nose of a wino and a pink stomach the color of vacuum-packed ham. Real appetizing. Beneath this jumble of folds was a little rod to distract from the rest. I let my dress fall to the floor and lay down, obedient, eyes closed. I was already on the islands of the Rising Sun, there where flowers are blown apart by a gentle breeze. I spread my legs and waited like I did at the dentist’s.

The fat man collapsed on me with a gasp.

Did he like me that much?

When I opened my eyes, I saw a large knife planted in his back. The little girl in red stood behind him. This time, she was smiling.

“My mum and I always did that together.”

Afterwards, she helped me drag him to the trapdoor.

“Here it is!”

She pointed to a latch in the flooring. The john was heavy, but the girl was surprisingly strong and together we managed to throw him into the hole. I watched him sink into the waters of Venice.

“The canal passes underneath. No one will ever know. It’s black as hell,” said the child.

“You’ve killed many like this?”

“Only the first one counted. The others, we forget.”

“And the old lady – she knows?”

“We told her they left by the back alley. But I think she knows and doesn’t care. As long as it doesn’t mess with her life…”

She began to twirl, projecting tiny stars of blood onto the walls. Then she took me in her arms and led me in a wild dance.

She roared with laughter.

The post The Red Dress appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

To Maurice Spronck

            Spadones! They were crouching on slabs of rock, with knees held together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes. Their saffron colored robes spread out around them, and an odor of cinnamon wafted from their skin. They reclined like this, sweating among the sauna boys, men dressed in scarlet plush who came around the baths with nets full of green playing balls, young people in red tunics with cherry colored belts, high tights, and long hair, and collared runners bearing the palanquins, where matrons with twisted hair and pumiced skin returned the greetings of the passersby.

The top of the sky was warmly blue, curtained by streaks of pink, and melted by degrees at the horizon into a transparent yellow, a very pale turquoise blue, and a delicate and trembling green. There were still criers in the street, offering up their snow water: aqua nivata, nivata! Curly haired Ethiopians sprinkled water all about with tiny pierced goatskins, like the women who pound the arena’s red powder, in the amphitheater.

Now, in the buzzing air, the eunuchs began to dream of the country whence they had come, of burning Syria, and of Iberia in the silver mines. At fifteen, they had run through pastures high and sparse with the sheep and billy goats, churning the milk, and pressing the hard white cheeses through which they ran sprigs of broom shrubs. They had loved little girls in big straw hats. They would watch out for them between the bunches of golden flowers when they were supposed to come around, and carve them whistles of elderwood. Often they carried chickpeas, which they had stolen from the barns. In those days, one would dig a hole with his bare hands and toss in dry leaves and twigs. The little girl would go find a burning ember in the nearest hearth; she would place it in her flat clog, which she shook constantly while running, to keep the coal from going out. Then, sitting gravely across from each other, they would roast their chickpeas on the end of pointy sticks. Or they would play king and queen. They would make a throne by piling up stones, somewhere in the shade. The queen would sit herself down there, as the king went off on an expedition to oversee his sheep. The queen, after listening to the cicadas, would sleep upon her throne. Then, when he had returned, the king would make her a pillow of moss, and lay her gently down upon it.

In the evening, the shadows were growing long, and the sheep were being led back down the trails edged with blackberry bramble. The bats were taking flight from the bushes. From the grass came a rustling of a snake in search off its hole; the cricket sang in the last golden flames of the dying day; the rocks were turning gray and the first chill of the night was shaking the leaves in the trees. A cool wind puffed up the coat and grazed the sheep’s wool; the dog, with its nose in the air, sniffed at the fragrant breeze, and the broom shrubs, swinging their yellow heads, rolled like the waves of the sea. Further down, rabbits scurried into the scrub and darkness piled up around the old oak trees. It was not far to the hut, the mother in the doorway, with a wooden spoon in her hand.

Where were they, Lords of the sky, these Spanish shrubs and the mountain hut, and the loving herd? They had come, the hardened Italiotes, with their heads shaved and their lips closed tight; they had burned the hut and eaten the herd.

They had taken the children in the highlands, near Osca. Along the Cinca the soldiers had marched down and crossed the plain of Sordau to take them to Ilerda. And from Ilerda to Tarraco, through the black mountains of Iakketa and Ilercao. In Tarraco, merchants had them drink a poppy tea, to mutilate them without pain. They had been loaded into ships like livestock and sold in the ports of call in Populonia, Cosa or Alsium. Others had come to Rome, by way of Ostia.

Traders dealing in flesh had purchased them, powdered their feet with chalk, covered their heads in caps of white fleece. Someone had rubbed them with turpentine, epilated their bodies with lamp and tong, curled their hair with irons. Someone had put them on display upon scaffolds, with labels. They had white teeth and black eyes, spoke Latin with throaty accents and high-pitched voices. Their buyers exposed them to gagate smoke, before paying, to see if they would not collapse from epilepsy.

And now, among the sail raisers in the ports, the conservators of silver dish ware, the bathers, the perfumers, the cooks, the trainers, the waiters, the tasters, the cupbearers, the green vested gatekeepers, the muleteers in revealing tunics, the water bearers, the chair slaves, the fan and parasol bearers, all were eunuchs, subdued by pitchfork, whip, or public torture at the Porta Esquilina. Their mistresses made them puff up their cheeks to slap them, and the intendants jabbed their necks with needles.

And unavoidably they went down Vicus Tuscus, where the depraved walk, to purchase fabric and ask after amphorae of nard, sealed with gypsum, from the pigment chemists, who sell hemlock, monkshood, mandrake, and blister beetles. They sang in the atrium, during the first course, bits of the Iliad and Odyssey, and, for dessert, some verses from the Book of Elephantis. They gazed achingly at paintings where Atalanta could be seen with Meleager. Some guests would kiss them as they passed, and this brought them suffering. Despite their fringed laticlaves, their golden rings with stars of iron, their ivory bracelets inlaid with metals, they watched the thick-lipped Libyan men, naked and black, with envy. They played nonchalantly with painted crystal pebbles on tablets of terebinth wood. They scarcely ate the fatty ortolan in moats of peppered egg yolk. Nothing could take their minds off their feeble dejection, not the caprices of their masters, nor those of their mistresses.

Drunk on pink wine, they would run past than the butcher stalls with the bloody, myrtle-garnished sheep, beyond the “popinæ” of roasters who sell fried walnuts and honeyed beets, and the taverns where enchained bottles dangle, toward the central darkness of the vaulted rooms where, amidst the chambers labeled with signs, naked women wander darkly. But the patron of the vaulted stone rooms recognized their saffron colored robes; and the bed straps would remain without mattress, for these men, drunk on pink wine, crouching upon the slabs of rock, rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes, were madmen—spadones.

The post The Eunuchs appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’ll be featuring two stories from Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press in a new translation by Kit Schluter: “The Plague” and “The Eunuchs.” The King in the Golden Mask has never been translated in its entirety, though a book of selected writings by Schwob was published by Carcanet Press in 1990 in a translation by Iain White, in which “The Plague” appeared. “The Eunuchs” has never before been translated into English.

Schwob, in his erudition, his taste for the exotic, his baroque prose style, may be considered something of a Weird precursor. We may be at the beginning of something of a Schwob renaissance in English, as his volume Mimes is currently the basis for an innovative translation project at the translation journal Asymptote. Schwob has long been something of a cult phenomenon in France; by way of an introduction for English readers, who may be less familiar with him, we present this peerless essay by Stephen Sparks, which previously appeared at 3:AM Magazine.

Marcel Schwob by Félix Vallotton, from Rémy de Gourmont’s Book of Masks

Historian and biographer Pierre Champion once characterized French writer Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) as “a man of the future.” It seems an odd assessment of a man who insistently looked to the past. Born into a family of rabbis and doctors, Schwob’s life was strongly marked by an obsessive fascination with bygone historical epochs: he studied Sanskrit; translated Catullus, Defoe, and Shakespeare; he spent his brief adult years studying, with the intention of publishing the definitive study of, fifteenth century outlaw poet Francois Villon. His stories, when not set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, are ripe with allusions to legends, lost customs, nearly forgotten mythologies and characters from the fringes of empire and art. Under the aegis of his uncle, Leon Cahun (great-uncle of the artist Claude Cahun), the curator and librarian of the famous Bibliothèque Mazarine, Marcel spent his formative years surrounded by a rich collection of books and manuscripts, including the Mazarine Bible, printed by Gutenberg himself. When he was sixteen, he wrote and abandoned a novel set in ancient Rome. It could be said that Schwob grew up at the end of the 19^th century, but came of age in antiquity.

Champion’s insight may have been less a characterization of Schwob’s gaze than his destiny. In the century following his premature death, Schwob appears to have been all but forgotten. This despite numbering among his admirers Jules Renard, Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry (who both dedicated books to Schwob), Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Borges, and Roberto Bolaño. Despite periodic dustings off—Solar Books published a translation, by “Lady Jane Orgasmo,” of his secretly influential Imaginary Lives a few years ago that is already out-of-print and difficult to find—there seems to be little reason to revise Roger Shattuck’s claim, made in 1955, that Schwob is a “singularly neglected figure.”

The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity? Unlike many forgotten writers, especially those aligned with movements, Schwob’s preoccupations were not too narrow in scope. He has not aged poorly or grown musty with time. Why, then, has it been his fate to suffer near total effacement?

Certainly, he died too young to cement his legacy. The last years of his brief life were marked by excruciating pain—the effects of debilitating stomach cancer—that made it difficult for him to work at any sustained level, and so he left behind a tantalizing list of incomplete or dreamt-of projects: the aforementioned biography of Francois Villon; a life of Saint Francis; a study of Angelique de Longueval; along with plays, translations, and tales. (Fleur Jaeggy, in a beautiful meditation on Schwob, lists a few evocative titles of his unwritten works: Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe.) Like his friend and correspondent Robert Louis Stevenson, about whom he wrote a perceptive essay, Schwob was forced to seek a better climate due to poor health. Unlike Stevenson, he was unable to work under the conditions imposed upon him by 19^th century sea travel. After a disastrous trip to Samoa, he returned to France and eventually settled down no further from Paris than an island on the Seine, the Ile Saint-Louis, where during the last two years of his life he regaled visitors, as health permitted, with informal salons, where by all accounts his prodigious learning was fully on display.

The most tempting and recurrent argument about Schwob’s obsolescence has been put forward by several of his admirers: namely, that Schwob’s learning was too great or specialized and his interests too esoteric for the mythical common reader. Scholar John Green stated as much explicitly in an essay on Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, characterizing Schwob as “a man of versatile talents and extraordinary erudition… which almost immediately carried him beyond the reach of the general reading public.” William Brown Meloney V, an early and imperfect translator of The Book of Monelle, makes a similar assessment of one of the writer’s satires, characterizing it as a masterpiece, but “too rare a feast.”

Although I think this argument does disservice to Schwob and serious readers, it would be would be foolish to dismiss it out of hand; Schwob was by any standard a bookish man. In John Erskine’s phrasing, he was given to “think much about experience before he had it, and to approach it with heavy prepossessions built up from his reading,” and while his work is ripe with obscure allusions, the course of literature in the twentieth century has prepared modern readers for just this type of literature. Borges, whose indebtedness to Schwob may not be obvious but is profound, is a writer against whom similar charges could be leveled.

By condemning Schwob to the category of the myopic scholar tracing obscure references through a series of increasingly arcane books and manuscripts, we risk overshadowing his emotional sensitivity, which is as keen as his erudition and is the mark of an artist who deserves a better fate. This sensitivity manifests itself in his curiosity about the individual, which is apparent in the preface to Imaginary Lives, a book once described, in a quaint (and, to modern ears, damning) romantic manner, as the “lives of some poets, gods, assassins and pirates, and several princesses and gallant ladies.” In a passage lamenting the inadequacies of ancient biographers—“Misers all,” he sighs, “valuing only politics or grammar”—Schwob emphasizes his belief in the necessity of an art that unclassifies rather than classifies, one that cares less for the sweeping generalization than it does in uncovering each individual’s anomalies:

Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique… consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its color variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one.

The particulars fix Schwob’s attention and demand in turn to be fixed in art, as they have come likewise to fascinate us in this egalitarian age of memoir. His belief in the necessity of art to convey what is “bizarre” in each human being—which perhaps is partly responsible for his affinity with the macabre, where the telling detail is of utmost importance—seems to me to be of lasting value. When he writes that “To the eye of a painter a portrait of an unknown man, by Cranach, is as valuable as a portrait of the great Erasmus,” he speaks as our contemporary. History records the deeds of Great Men, but each of us, Schwob argues, is by virtue of being alive worthy of attention; our actions may be forgettable, they may be consigned even before their actualization to the abyss, but alight with our obsessions, we love, we despair, we mourn. How could any of these emotions be so trivial as to be undeserving of recognition?

*

Schwob’s sensitivity is also manifest in his ability to locate the universal in the individual. This is especially apparent in the strange and luminous Book of Monelle, which was recently published in a new translation by poet Kit Schluter (Wakefield Press, 2012).

The Book of Monelle is a book of the dead. On a rainy evening in early 1893, Marcel Schwob, the passive scholar whose childhood was spent in dimly lit rooms amidst dust and daydreams and, according to Meloney, who had until this fortuitous night “lived solely in the realm of ideas and abstractions” met Louise, a tubercular working class girl and prostitute living in the Parisian slums. Little beyond the oblique evidence in The Book of Monelle exists of Marcel and Louise’s life together: a handful of letters to friends in which Schwob pours out his grief after her death and a single letter in Louise’s childlike hand (she wrote using colored pencils) that Schwob pulled back from the flames in which he otherwise immolated his love. From these remains, however, one can piece together a picture of a relationship that has been characterized as a flight into “a fanciful realm of unreality where they reduced all the events of their world into the simplicity of a child’s understanding”.

Captivated by Louise, Schwob entered a second childhood—though it might be more appropriate to call it his first proper childhood. The two colored the world in broad, simple strokes. They played games with neighborhood children, spun stories out everyday objects: a mirror and candle, a broken doll and toy sailboats. They attempted to live, as we convince ourselves children do, in what Schwob would later call the “untruthful moment.” Given the grim state of Louise’s health, it’s not difficult to imagine the feverish intensity of their fantasies. By the end of 1893, she was dead and Schwob was lost in the depths of a grief unimaginable to those who knew him, especially since most of his friends were unaware of the existence of Louise or the fervor of Schwob’s attachment.

The dead become things. We associate those we’ve lost with objects they treasured or places that evoke them. For a time, Schwob clung to the outward remains of his life with Louise: it was said that he visited his publisher’s office with a gang of children in tow. It comes as no surprise that as he came to terms with his grief, Schwob, a creature of the library, conflated Louise with books. They were nearly all he knew. As he mourned, Schwob searched for her in their pages, finding pieces, but never enough to do more than tantalize. “And tonight I went looking for her in books; but I look for her in vain,” he writes. This cruel realization—that no matter how much we cherish or cling to literature, it is always given to us from afar and speaks to and of us imperfectly—led to the creation of Monelle and her sisters. Unable to locate his beloved in print, he undertook to place her there himself.

The Book of Monelle is the result. Its existence is a testament of the artist’s ability to salvage from the wreckage of life something worthy of the love that preceded it. “Throw no debris behind you; may each put his ruins to use,” Monelle instructs, and Schwob does just that, assembling from his ill-starred, mysterious love affair a mosaic of fairy story, parable, and manual on grief. It is an unsettling work, a triptych in which the singular is transformed into the universal.

In the first and last sections, Schwob gives voice to Monelle—the appellation, notes Schluter, designates something like My-her, an amalgam wisely retained in the original French. Her “sayings,” which constitute the first third, drip with fin-de-siècle nihilism, and seem, in their refinement and haunted detachment, unlikely to have been uttered by a barely literate prostitute. However refracted through the prism of Schwob’s learning and grief they may be, the sayings ring with hard-earned, Biblical acceptance of the sorrows of life. “All construction comes from destruction,” she says, which could serve as the writer’s credo, the slow-beating heart of mourning. Destroy, forget, burn, scatter:

Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. Make space for your soul and all other souls.

Destroy all good and all evil. Their ruins are the same.

Destroy the old dwellings of man and the old dwellings of the soul; what is dead is a distorting mirror.

Destroy, for all creation comes from destruction.

And for higher benevolence you must annihilate lower benevolence. And thus new art seems a sort of iconoclasm.

For all construction is made of debris, and nothing is new in this world but forms.

But you must destroy the forms.

When a whole is lost, we find it scattered. The middle section of The Book of Monelle bears evidence of this. It concerns Monelle’s sisters, “who are myself,” she says. These girls, whose origins lie in stories Schwob dreamt up for Louise (which grew darker as her illness worsened), are representative of archetypes familiar to anyone who grew up with Cinderella and Bluebeard—the perverse, the innocent, the selfish, &c.—and stand in for Monelle in a series of beguiling fairytales. Schwob’s use of this form is not coincidental: fairytales, repositories of the universal, exist in a parallel realm, beyond the conditions of time. Yet with roots extending into a shared past, they connect us with our common humanity. In placing Monelle and her sisters there, Schwob establishes a haven from the merciless clutches of mortality. Monelle is here and not, in time—in the pages of a book—and not. The stories are effective precisely to the degree by which these paradoxes are retained. We can sense the living memory of Louise in its pages, even if she is obscured by veils of learning and sheltered by layers of mythology. It is Schwob’s struggle to find her through and in his own language that so haunts the modern reader.

This is not to say that Monelle and her sisters exist in an idyllic realm. It is a timeless place, but not a perfect one: one part fantasy, one part truth. The girls suffer and they cause suffering. Their world, like ours, is cruel and contingent, but importantly, placed within the confines of a book, they are beyond death’s reach. In what must have seemed a superhuman effort, Schwob marshaled everything he had—his erudition, his literary prowess, and his grief—to create a space where he could henceforth find his lost love. No more would he search in vain. The Book of Monelle exists.

And though it may be forgotten, though dust and mold will settle on its pages, Schwob was acutely aware of the fact that no book, once it exists, can be entirely lost. There always remains the possibility that someone will stumble upon it, or the memory of it, in that future alluded to by Pierre Champion.

Marcel Schwob by Emmanuel Guibert from Le Capitaine Écarlate, with David B.

The post Marcel Schwob: A Man of the Future appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a French symbolist author, remembered for his numerous and varied short stories, literary monographs, newspaper chronicles of fin-de-siècle Paris, and linguistic tracts on medieval slang, much of which sprang from his fabled devotion to archival research. While his work has fallen into relative obscurity, it was hailed in his day by writers as various as Colette, Remy de Gourmont, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the personal influence of his writing has been noted and explored by a number of modern luminaries, including Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Fleur Jaeggy. Wakefield Press recently published his 1895 work, The Book of Monelle, in a new translation by Kit Schulter.

As a translator, Kit Schluter has brought into English works by Pierre Alferi, Amandine André, Ghérasim Luca, Jaime Saenz, Alice Sant’Anna, and Marcel Schwob, among others. Recent personal writing of his can be found in Boston Review, BOMB, and the forthcoming Incident Codex from Inpatient Press. The two stories presented here figure into his translation of Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection, The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press.

Never before translated in its entirety, The King in the Golden Mask (French edition pictured above) was Marcel Schwob’s second book of fiction, and offers a full display of his mastery of the short story and the depth of his erudition: twenty-one tales of murder and suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, with eunuchs, Libyan embalming women, and Milesian virgins, all set in a variety of historical periods, from the Ice Age to the years of the Plague.

The author in his library, c. 1900.

To Auguste Bréal

CCCI e mille l’an corant

Nella città di Trento Rè Rupert

Volle lo scudo mio esser copert

De l’arme suo Lion d’oro rampant

CRONICA DEL PITTI

I, Bonacorso de Neri de Pitti, son of Bonacorso, gonfaloniere of justice in the commune of Florence, of which the coat of arms was dressed, in the year fourteen-hundred-and-one, by an order of King Rupert, in the city of Trento, with the golden rampant lion, I want to recount for my ennobled descendents what happened to me when I began to roam the land in search of adventure.

In the year MCCCLXXIV, being a young man without money, I ran from Florence on the great highways, with Matteo for companion. For the plague was devastating the city. The sickness was swift, and attacked in the streets. Your eyes would burn and grow red, your throat grew sore; your stomach distended. Then little pockets of irritating water covered your mouth and your tongue. Thirst possessed you. A dry cough would shake the sick for hours. Then your limbs would stiffen at the joints, your skin piebald with swollen red pocks that some have dubbed bubons. And the faces of the dead ended up swollen and white, with bloody contusions and mouths open like horns. The public fountains, almost dried up from the heat, were surrounded by men, hunched over and thin, trying to dunk their heads. Many dove right in, and those ones were pulled out by chain hooks, black with scum and with skulls cracked. The browning corpses littered the middle of the lanes down which stream, in season, the torrents of rain; the smell was intolerable, and the fear was terrible.

But Matteo loved to roll the dice, and we had quite a time right at the exit of the city, and we drank, at the first inn, some mixed wine for our health in mortality. There were merchants there from Genoa and Pavia; and we challenged them with dice cup in hand, and Matteo won twelve ducats. As for me, I invited them to a game of tables, and had the good fortune of walking away with a gain of twenty gold florins, and with these ducats we purchased mules and a load of wool, and Matteo, who had decided to go to Prussia, picked up a provision of saffron.

We roamed the paths from Padua to Verona, we came back to Verona to furnish ourselves more amply with wool, and we traveled to Venice. From there, passing the sea, we went into Sclavonia, and visited the good cities up to the Croatian border. In Buda, I fell sick with fever, and Matteo left me alone at the inn, with twelve ducats, returning to Florence, where certain business was calling him, and where I was supposed to join him again. I lay in a dry and dusty room, on a bag of straw, with no doctor, but a door that opened directly to the drinking room. On the night of Saint Martin, there came a company of fifers and flautists, with some fifteen or sixteen Venetian and Teuton soldiers. After draining many a flask, crushing the pewter mugs and breaking the jugs against the wall, they began to dance to the sound of the fife. They peeked their ugly red mugs through the door, and seeing me laid out on my back, started to pull me into the other room, crying, “You drink, or you sink!” then made a fool of me, and finished by dumping me in the straw in the bag, which they stitched shut around my neck.

I sweated copiously, and this no doubt lowered my temperature, whereas my anger soared. They had tangled up my arms and taken away my basilar, otherwise I would have made a break for it, thorny with straw, amid the soldiers. But I carried on my belt, under my stockings, a short and sheathed blade; I succeeded in slipping my hand to it, and with its help, I broke open the fabric of the sack.

Perhaps the fever was still causing my brain to swell; but the memory of the plague we had left behind in Florence, and which had since spread to Sclavonia, mixed in my mind with a sort of image I had formed of the face of Sulla, dictator of the Latins, of whom the great Cicero speaks. He resembled, the Athenians said, a blackberry powdered with flour. I decided to terrify the Venetian and Teuton gendarmes; and when I found myself in the nook where the innkeeper locked up his provisions and the conserved fruits, I quickly slashed a bag full of cornflour. I rubbed my face with this dust; and once I had taken on a complexion neither yellow nor white, I gave my arm a good scratch with my blade, from which I drew enough blood to unevenly blotch the coating. Then I got back into the sack, and I waited for the drunken reprobates. They came in, laughing and staggering: hardly had they seen my white and bloody face before they started to crash into each other, crying, “The plague! The plague!”

I hadn’t even picked up my weapons, before the inn had emptied out. Feeling recovered, from the sweat these goons had forced out of me, I set out on the road for Florence, to join back up with Matteo.

⁂

I found my companion Matteo wandering through the Florentine countryside, and quite under the weather. He hadn’t dared go into the city because of the plague that continued to rage there. We turned back and made our way, on a quest for wealth, toward the states of Pope Gregory. Heading up toward Avignon, we ran into bands of armed men, carrying lances, pikes, and voulges. For the citizens of Bologna had just risen up against the pope, by request of those of Florence (which we didn’t know). We played joyous games of this and that sort with the people there, as many games of tables as of dice, so well that we won upwards of three-hundred ducats and four-score gold florins.

The city of Bologna was almost entirely devoid of people, and we were received in the bath houses with cries of jubilation. The chambers there are not covered with straw as in many Lombard cities; the filthy beds are not lacking there, although the straps are for the most part broken. Matteo ran into a Florentine girl he knew, Monna Giovanna; as for me, who didn’t think of asking the name of my girl, I was happy with her.

We drank in abundance there; of chewy wine from the region and of bitter beer, and we ate jams and tartlets. Matteo, whom I had told of my adventure, feigning to step out, went down into the kitchens, and came back disguised as a plague victim. The sauna girls ran away on all sides, letting out high pitched squeals, then reassured themselves, and came to touch, still afraid, Matteo’s face. Monna Giovanna did not want to come back with him, and stayed, trembling in a corner, claiming his forehead was warm with fever. Nevertheless, Matteo, drunk, lay his head down among the pots, on the table, which his snores caused to shake, and he looked like one of those colorful wooden faces street performers use on the sidewalk stage.

At last we left Bologna, and after diverse adventures, we came near Avignon, where we learned that the pope was having all the Florentines put in prison, and burning them, them and their books, to avenge their rebellion. But we were alerted too late; for the sergeants of the pope’s marshals surprised us in the night, and threw us in the prison of Avignon.

Before our interrogation, we were examined by a judge and provisionally put in the oubliette, until information, with dry bread and water, as is customary in ecclesiastical justice. I nevertheless succeeded in hiding under my robe our burlap sack, which contained a bit of polenta and some olives.

The floor of the dungeon was swampy; and we had no air, save through a grilled window that opened out to the level of the courtyard’s ground. Our feet had been passed through the holes of very heavy wooden yokes, our hands bound with fairly loose chains, in such a way that our bodies touched from shoulder to knee. The bailiff of the dungeon did us the kindness of telling us that we were under suspicion of poison, for the pope had found out through certain ambassadors that the gonfalonieres of the commune of Florence were entertaining a plot for his death.

We were thus in the blackness of the prison, hearing no noise, not knowing the hour of day or night, in great danger of being burned alive. I remembered then our strategy; and the idea came to us that the papal justice, by fear of our illness, would have us thrown outside. I waited painfully with my polenta, and it was agreed that Matteo would smear his face with it and would blotch his face with blood, while I would cry out to draw in the lackeys. Matteo made up his mask, and the raspy howls began, as if his throat were constricted. I invoked Our Lady, rattling my chains. But the dungeon was deep, the door thick, and it was night. For several hours we pleaded uselessly. I stopped my cries: Matteo, however, continued to moan. I nudged him with my elbow, that he might rest until the morning: his moans only grew louder. I touched him in the darkness: my hands felt nothing but his belly, which seemed swollen to me like a goatskin. And as he cried in a hoarse voice, “A drink! A drink!” until I seemed to be hearing the desperate calls of an unleashed dog pack, the pale disc of the rising daylight fell in from the little window. And then a cold sweat streamed down my limbs; for, under his powdery mask, under the blotches of dried blood, I saw that he was deathly pale, and I recognized the white scabs and the red oozing of the plague of Florence.

The post The Plague appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Alisa and André Breton at the Port-au-Prince airfield in December 1945. Paul Laraque (left of the Bretons), Mme. W. Lam, Dr. Pierre Mabille, le peintre Wilfredo Lam. On the right: René Bélance, Mme. Mabille, Regnor Bernard, Edris St. Armand and M. de Peillon, Ministre de France (photo from the Incomplete Works).

As Jacques-Stephen Alexis articulated in Paris, 1956 at the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, the Caribbean has always been a crossroads of civilizations, even before its multifarious encounters with Europe after Columbus. Published in the quarterly magazine Présence Africaine in the same year, Alexis’ piece “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens” covered a wide range of topics concerning Haiti, its history, politics, society, and culture, with the aim of bringing more international attention to Caribbean social realism and artistic expression. Through this discourse, he maintains that “primitive cultures” (as with Haitian art or “cousin” African art) possess a complex, visionary consciousness that profoundly engages the real world, inextricably bound to myth, symbolism, and the sacred.

While many are aware of the history of slavery and colonialism, until recently, relatively little recognition has been accorded to the study of post-colonial issues and the artistic expressionism stemming from it. In the case of the Antilles, it is crucial to understand how the merging of worlds led to a simultaneously collective and individualized consciousness of reality, which matured in the context of the surreal.

As Alexis discusses, the pre-Columbian Taìno peoples of the Caribbean integrated over a long period of time, gradually sharing and developing agricultural techniques, cultural traditions of art, music and dance, folklore, and religious beliefs. With the arrival of the French and the Spanish, an incredible diversity of African peoples were imported under slavery and exploited in the sugar cane fields to cultivate the major cash-crop of the region. The enslaved peoples of the islands and the imported African slaves reproduced an artificial version of the métissage that had occurred naturally before European interference: once again the Caribbean became a crossroads of cultural and linguistic exchange. With the “Code Noir,” the French empire established elaborate and strict rules to counterbalance the overwhelming ratio of slave populations to European colonists. Eventually this lead to increasingly violent conflicts, which lacked leadership until the Vaudou priest François Mackandal united a full resistance, whose legacy lived on long after being burnt at the stake, eventually culminating in the only salve rebellion to have succeeded in establishing independence – the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) – merely two years after the inspirational French Revolution.

While this seemed like an immense victory, the nascent “Black Republic” had its fair share of problems internally in addition to being denied recognition by any other nation for many decades. Isolated and alienated, Haiti struggled to consolidate power and revitalize its agricultural economy. By 1825, France had returned with a large fleet to seize the island once again, forcing the president at the time to pay a controversial indemnity of 150 million francs (later 90 million francs) in exchange for diplomatic recognition that finally came nearly a decade after signing the treaty. In the decades to come, Haitian politics and government remained incredibly turbulent during their independence. The two-caste system with a francophone Elite and a Creole peasantry had resounding effects across Haitian history and further impregnated the people’s consciousness with ideas of slavery, inferiority, and exploitation. This continued into the US occupation of Haiti lasting from 1915 until 1934. A major identity crisis reemerged among a French-educated generation of writers and artists, who equipped themselves with the means to confront the socio-cultural problems arising from the various forms of oppression by slavery, colonization, and occupation, engrained in the collective memory of these cultures.

Post-Negritude writers in Martinique and Haiti looked to Surrealism as a philosophical and psychological platform for reflecting on cultural identity, consciousness, and issues arising from post-colonialism in the Antilles. After a single edition of a publication called Légitime Défense, named after a short book by André Breton, the French state shut it down and more or less indirectly punished the Martiniquan students who took part in it. Their intentions were infused with Marxist dialectical materialism and surrealist ideas, which Breton himself is cited as having encouraged this group to engage with political and aesthetic ideas. While the publication and the group may seem inconsequential, it was the first time that colonial subjects used the language and medium of the oppressors to “talk back.” Almost contemporary to the Surrealists’ outrage at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, the resounding message of Légitime Défense would extend far and wide.

The above history served as the fecundation of the soil where surrealism would plant its seeds in the 1930s and ‘40s. Surrealism offered a method for reconsidering cultural identity. While Surrealism developed in post-WWI Europe, an unexpected chain of encounters occurred in the 1940s between Surrealists escaping a second European war and Caribbean writers, whose interactions further developed a long-running inquiry into the issue of alterity and cultural identity in the Caribbean, once again transformed into a crossroads of consciousness and poetry.  Writers from the Caribbean were interested in Surrealism from Europe because of its potential for providing a medium for articulating and reflecting on black consciousness – not necessarily for anything else. In the same way, European surrealists were interested in Haitian Vaudou because they saw in it confirmation of their own ideas on the dream, trance states, and automatism.

Nevertheless, this exchange was very rich for literary and artistic expression. Pierre Mabille was a doctor at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1940. Mabille’s pursuits in psychoanalysis and the hermetic sciences greatly influenced his involvement in and contribution to the Surrealist movement, providing it from early on with a strong undercurrent of sociology and anthropology. One of his legacies that survives in Haiti today is a multidisciplinary review, Conjonctions, which he established in 1946 concerning various topics within Haitian culture. Before being appointed as the French cultural attaché, he helped found the Haitian Bureau d’Ethnologie, seeking to call attention to the dynamic intellectual value of Haitian folkloric and Vaudou traditions. The Catholic Church, in league with the state, pushed back with anti-Vaudou laws enforced against practitioners. Ironically, this anti-Vaudou position of the Church and state ended up legitimizing evidence of the complexity of their beliefs and practices and sparked a further interest from a more international community.

In 1945, Mabille invited surrealist André Breton to Haiti to give a series of lectures that would inspire a generation of writers, poets, and artists. On the very night of his arrival, Breton’s own definition of surrealism was quoted back to him by heart from the renegade poet Magloire St. Aude. This was the first of many encounters that formed a surrealist crossroads that would have far-reaching implications for the writers and artists of the Caribbean and the political scene with which they were engaged. A mutual self-recognition occurred during Breton’s time spent in the Caribbean, where he articulated what had only implicitly been represented before his arrival. Breton’s self-exile underlined surrealism’s sensitivity to the issues of otherness, displacement, and inter-cultural relations. The eventual fall of the Haitian government, who attended his infamous talk at the Rex Theater, is increasingly attributed to Breton’s catalytic speeches.

Years later, J.S. Alexis argued that because of an overly constructed social conscious and adherence to modernization, people on a whole have only served to alienate themselves from what “primitive thought” engages in everyday life: authentic and culturally relevant forms of expression. The separation of the sacred and the mundane is what constricts the expansive and transcendent ideas alluded to in surrealist thinking. Alexis’s term le réalisme merveilleux, commonly understood as magic realism (the same term used by Alejo Carpentier), described the way that Haitian writers and artists see the world around them and experience social reality, the world, and modern life. Haitian consciousness, largely influenced by local tradition and Vaudou, does not differentiate the sacred from the quotidian. Some things can be simple, but as Mabille strived to show, Vaudou religion and Haitian thought recognize their own concepts that deny that same simplicity in the way that it readily synthesizes diversity, naturally translates the marvelous into a vision of reality, and revels in notions that defy duality through multiple-aspect deities, sympathetic magic and the paradox of the undead.

These ideas would find their home in the works of writers such as Magloire St. Aude and René Dépestre in their respective works featuring zombies: Veillée (1956) and Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988). Over time, zombies become a metaphor for Hegelian slave dialectic that is so prominent in Surrealism and it embodies a paradox we now so commonly recognize as the undead: soulless, enslaved beings with no right to live on their own. At the level of abstraction, the implied zombification of mankind can be seen in popular media today, as we are unable to die (that is, be transformed), so we continue in a condemned state of not being able to live.[1] In 1938, Mabille published Egrégores ou la vie des civilisations in response to major philosophical influences on Surealist ideas on the individual and human civilization: “Life is a continuum in which all things interrelate. Death as finality is denied because everything is capable of transformation, everything exists in a state of latent potentiality, capable of being realized or activated by desire.” [2]

While many of these writers remain untranslated, the growing recognition of Caribbean authors over the years has rendered some of their works available in English. Jacques-Stephen Alexis’ first book is available under the English title General Sun, My Brother (originally published in French, 1955) as well as some of his short stories from his collection Romancéro aux étoiles. The novel portrays the troubled life story of a laborer and his wife living in the slums of Port-au-Prince and working in the cane fields. Alexis’ marvelous realism depicts how the supernatural was a part of enslaved peoples’ everyday experience of social reality, while his short stories showcase the orality of Haitian storytelling, infused with references to Creole culture, Vaudou, and folklore.

In 2012, England’s Nottingham Contemporary presented an extensive exhibit on Haitian art named after the deity of the crossroads, Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou. The publication coming out of the exhibit contains a beautiful collection, spanning more than seventy years of popular art and documenting the influence of the Vaudou religion on the visionary imaginations and ingenuity of some of Haiti’s most significant artists. The illustrated publication is accompanied by a combination of recent and republished texts in English from a wide array of artists and writers. In the (roughly translated) words of J.S. Alexis, “Haitian art is indeed a presentation of the real followed by a procession of the weird, of fantasies and waking dreams, of mysteries and the marvelous…”

Included in that anthology is an extract from Michael Richardson’s book Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, which compiles a comprehensive history of the Caribbean, the development of Surrealism, and explores a number of writers, philosophers and intellectuals, many of which were yet to be translated.

Further Reading:

Pierre Mabille

André Breton

Alfred Metraux – Le vaudou haïtien (English translation available)

Caribbean Writers:

Dany LaFerriere

Edouard Glissant

Jacques Stephen Alexis

Aimé Césaire

Michel Leiris

René Depestre

René Ménil

Magloire St.Aude

Jacques Roumain
On the Caribbean and Caribbean Surrealism:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

Publications by Jean Michael Dash (Caribbean Scholar and Translator)

Bibliography:

Refusal of the Shadow (by Krzysztof Fijalkowski Michael Richardson)

Kafou: Haiti, Art, and Vodou (Nottingham Contemporary, 2012)

“Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” (Jacques-Stephen Alexis in Présence Africaine, 1956)

The post Surrealism and the Caribbean appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The plague takes slumbering images and latent disorder, and suddenly propels them into the most extreme movements. The theater, too, takes gestures and drives them to an extreme; like the plague, it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what has been materialized in nature…” ~ Radovan Ivšić, A Tout Rompre

Like its counterpart in fiction, the theater of the weird exists on the margins of mainstream culture, where its deadly accuracy when targeting the shibboleths of the cultural consensus can be safely muffled before its subversive potency does any visible damage. Although Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Raymond Roussel are the best- recognized creators in this domain, its roots go deep, and this tenacious theater would include works by such little known malcontents as the mocking blasphemer, Oscar Panizza, the “drunken Shakespeare” Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and their heirs in Dada and Surrealism. Although unjustifiably overlooked outside of Europe, the theater of Radovan Ivšić holds its own with the best of his peers in this domain.

In Radovan Ivšić we have one of the great rebels, one of les grands insoumis, of the last century. It is indicative of his refusal to compromise the ideals of his youth and make humiliating concessions to power that both the fascist and communist governments of his native Croatia banned his poetic and theatrical work with equal alacrity.

© Petar Dabac

Born in Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia in 1921, Radovan Ivšić discovered the works of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé as well as the publications of both the French and Yugoslav surrealists as a teenager, at a time when the clouds of war were gathering over Europe. He describes the atmosphere of that time as dazzlingly effervescent, but charged with shadows cast by the obscure presentiment of the looming debacle. Reason had foundered, and the radical prescriptions offered by these works seemed to be the only legitimate recourse to the growing threat of both physical and psychological violence.

It was during this time that he arrived at the realization that his vision of a poetry inseparable from life could best be embodied in the theater:

While poetry continued in my eyes to show proof of the mind’s non-submission to the force of things, I then discovered that poetry also involved the body, space, colors, shapes, and nature—in other words, that poetry is essentially and concretely connected to the fate of human freedom.

For Ivšić, theatrical space offers the ideal spot for opening that space within the spectator that allows experience of individual singularity not as a rupture, but as a vitally essential difference that makes it possible for the world to breathe. He saw the play as the result of a dark conspiracy between the world and the individual, who intentionally withdraws from this relationship in order to return by means of the Trojan horse of fiction. In his theatrical work, he strove “to open a space analogous to that of Greek tragedy, born from the exchange between the individual voice and the collective voice, inside of which individuals can be encouraged to see themselves in the violence of what connects them and what keeps them apart from the group and the world.”

His first play, Airia, already demonstrates the radically free use of language that would characterize all his plays. Ivšić recalled its genesis was inspired by the performance of a Strindberg play whose cries and convulsions he found overwhelming, combined with his innate sovereign indifference to what was passed off as reality. The primordial significance of love as a transformative agent but one supersensitive to oppression also sketches its first appearance here.

His radical use of language is characterized by a subversion of everyday syntax and the use of parallel monologues that favor evocation over description. This creates conversation in which the sense of each character’s identity is reduced rather than reinforced over the course of the play. In Airia, this erosion of identity is exemplified in the name of one character, a woman only known as !?… Yet paradoxically, as the characters’ identity is worn away like this, the space needed to reveal what makes them truly singular is allowed appear.

Crilice: It would be easier for me if you had a name.

!?…: But that’s impossible.

Crilice: Without your name, it feels like I keep losing you.

!?…: I am more naked this way. And if I abandon your embrace one day, I will not leave you with an empty name.

Étienne-Alain Hubert has observed that the stripped-down syntax characteristic of Radovan Ivšić’s poetry makes each word appear as if encased in a void, therefore granting each of them their maximum power to radiate. Brought to the forefront of the stage, Ivšić uses it to create the “corporeal writing” prescribed by Mallarmé. By providing a space for this corporeal writing, Ivšić felt the theater could offer poetry a vehicle that could open wide the horizons, but only on the condition that it rejected blind allegiance to the realist influence prevailing in contemporary theater in favor of a dream-lit veracity.

Eschewing conventional dialogues and stereotypes allowed him to imagine a space free of this realist or baroque gravity of language, gestures, and décor. Only by clearing the stage of these set pieces was it possible for his vision of an alchemical meeting of body and idea to materialize, essential for this kind of corporeal writing. The primal power of Greek theater, exemplified in the chorus, gave him the weapon he needed “to strike the world in its heart.” Radovan Ivšić stressed that the greatness of Greek tragedy lies in that crucial moment “when the individual emerges from the choir, when the speech of the individual begins to distinguish itself from the collective speech.”

Restoring this chorus was the impetus for the writing of Narcissus, which Ivšić viewed as a complement to Airia: “if Airia was the space, Narcissus was the heartbeat that supplied that space with life.” The choral recitation was entirely built around the different qualities of the voices involved, so that while the group was captured as the echo of the individual voice, the individual voice in turn returned as an echo of the group. He described this as being not only a poetic problem but a significantly political one. As a prime example, Ivšić points to the choirs of totalitarian societies in which the individual voice is annihilated by the monotonous chanting of the group in praise of their dictator.

Narcissus was performed twice clandestinely before being banned by the fascist dictatorship that had taken power in Croatia and collaborated actively with the Nazis. The limited edition of 100 copies, which he printed privately in 1942, was not only seized by the government as “degenerate art,” but rumors circulated through Zagreb that the poem had personally put the dictator Pavelic beside himself with rage. Allegedly his response on reading it was to bemoan the depths to which Croatian poetry had fallen. This only confirmed to Ivšić and his friends that they were on the right path.

Ivšić’s next major creation, his play King Gordogan, reflects the murderous atmosphere of this time transposed into a fairy tale environment permeated by the darkest of black humors. Although it would be impossible not to see the influence of Jarry’s Père Ubu on this sovereign, Ivšić notes that Sade was equally influential in this work—primarily Aline et Valcour ou Le Roman philosophique, as this was the only work by Sade he had read at this time. In fact, he had obtained his copy in exchange for almost his entire library.  Explaining the play’s genesis to Charles Flamand in an interview published in the first issue of Le Surréalisme même (1956), Ivšić recalled how in February 1943 during the German occupation, when they were denied everything, even the possibility of “walking by moonlight and touching the bare night” he was indulging in “that gratuitous activity, or, if you prefer, that monstrous perversity that consists in coupling words.”  This opened up a world of oaths, imprecations, and proverbs for the poet such as “may a black hump swell up on your back,” that was not so much in imitation of Balkan folklore tradition but a new way of viewing his past experiences.

This practice gave Ivšić the key to creating a poetic core in which the creation of a curse or oath was accompanied by the emergence of an unexpected image. “May scabies ride you, you beaked bear!” He felt these proverbial expressions would lend themselves admirably to theatrical dialogue because of the extreme condensation required by the stage. The dialogue thus inspired became the first scene of King Gordogan, a bloodthirsty buffoon of a tyrant who lops the ears of his subjects so he knows they have paid their taxes, and has an eye removed from those who cannot pay. Later, he exults at the prospect of hanging his only son and describes it as one of his finest moments. A former stable boy who usurped the throne from his doddering predecessor, the benign King White, he holds the King’s daughter prisoner in a white tower at the edge of a forest. Indicative of how far from conventional moral standards Ivšić’s play is taking us, the princess holds no resentment of her captor but is grateful that he has taken on the onerous tasks of ruling:

“He reigns in my place and—he’s told me so—it isn’t easy to reign as it was in the time of my father, King White. Today, to maintain order in the kingdom, he has to strangle some ten thousand subjects a day with his own hands. Think for a moment what a lot of work that would be if I were queen! By the time I had strangled five, my white hands would be numb with weariness. And how many more would be left for me to strangle? Ten thousand minus five! Figure it out yourself, I’ve forgotten mathematics” (II, 4).

The king’s logic for eliminating poverty in the kingdom is of a piece with this for it will impose six time the burden on the poor while exempting the rich from any taxation at all. He is accompanied by his Royal Eyegouger and Royal Earsnipper on his tax-collecting rounds, which have become markedly less fruitful in gold coins or body parts as by the time in which the action of the play takes place (the three hundredth day of his reign), there are very few subjects left to supply either, as bemoaned by the Royal Eyegouger when commanded by his king for his day’s tally:

“Only twelve, my king, by my poor mother! Five blind men, five one-eyed men, and a couple of squinters.”

The only challenge to Gordogan’s rule is in the person of a strange knight who has recently entered the kingdom and who Gordogan believes has been foreseen in a prophecy as a potential troublemaker. Complicating matters is the fact that this young knight cannot be slain by anyone who has committed murder, which, as Gordogan’s Fool notes, makes him perfectly safe in their land. Gordogan evades this threat by giving the knight a draft brewed with the herb of forgetting. No longer distracted by duty, the knight falls in love with the wild woman of the forest, Joline, who inspires what’s left of the local inhabitants with dread. She lurks invisibly in the night, her presence only made known through her mad laughter (which Radovan saw as a violent rejoinder to the laughter of Moliere’s smug servants, who he believes, since they first stepped on stage, have occupied too much space in the theater with their healthy, good sense, and triumphant mediocrity).

As Gordogan prepares to hang his son, soon joined at the gallows by Princess White, the Fool scans the horizon frantically for the knight—the lovers’ only chance for rescue. His excitement on seeing the knight and Joline appear on the horizon causes him to fall from the roof, breaking his neck, the hangman does his work and the knight rides off with Joline, totally forgetful of his original purpose, desperately in love. Now alone in his kingdom, having “tsaffed” [slain] the last of his subjects, Gordogan contemplates his future: “May a tail sprout from my forehead if I know what I am going to do now.” An idea soon comes to mind and he heads off into the forest to cut the trees down one by one.

It is important to note that this play is not a political allegory like one found in the engaged theater of writers like Brecht. For Ivšić, it was supremely important that the critical dimension—eliminated by the needs of ideology—be allowed to emerge—without which no innovation in the theater would be possible. Ivšić points out that it is for this reason that plays written for an idea or an ideology are worthless—they close down the horizon rather than open them to the magic of coincidence and the unexpected.

Gordogan would not be performed live until French radio broadcast it on April 18, 1956. When it was finally staged for the first time by a French theater company, it was coincidence alone that dictated its opening performance took place at Sade’s ancestral castle, the Chateau La Coste.

Contrary to expectations, matters only grew worse after Tito’s communist government liberated Croatia from the Nazis and established control of Yugoslavia. The continued repression of his work by the new government, for the same pretexts announced by their predecessors came as a traumatic shock to Ivšić and his fellow poets. He was stupefied to find the communist authorities used the same justifications to ban his work as the fascists they had just defeated. He recounts how, at one point, he wondered if he was losing his mind, or just too stupid to grasp the subtlety of the new government’s cultural policies. It was soon all too clear that for the authorities, there was no legitimate artistic activity outside of socialist realism. Complicating matters was the great number of artists, including friends and people he had admired, who found it easy to turn their back on the past and take up positions in the new order. One of his cruelest disappointments was the sight of the former animator of Yugoslavian surrealism, Marco Ristic, turning into a mouthpiece for the new regime. The former comrade of André Breton completely renounced his past activities and was named ambassador to Paris.  Incapable of making such concessions, Ivšić found himself unable to mount his plays or publish his poems. He attempted to maintain his work in the theater with plays using puppets and marionettes for a time, but despite some positive results, it ultimately proved too disheartening to continue pursuing. He turned to translation to make ends meet. Among the authors he translated from the French were Maeterlinck, Molière, Rousseau, Proust, Apollinaire, Ionesco, and Breton.

In 1954, Radovan Ivšić finally managed to escape Zagreb and emigrated to Paris in 1954 at the age of 33. Within a few days of his arrival he met surrealist poet Benjamin Péret and, a short time later, André Breton. The latter, impressed by his reading of King Gordogan, which he described as a peerless work, “limned with the dew of primal innocence,” quickly invited Ivšić to join the daily meetings of the French surrealist group that were then held at the café Le Musset. From this time to the formal dissolution of the group in 1969, Ivšić was a prominently figured in all its activities. While his texts and photographs appeared in all their publications, he was also known for his work for sound. The sound system that he installed in the gallery that housed the international surrealist exhibition of 1959 on Eros created a stir for its unprecedented use of the sounds of lovemaking. As Ivšić recalled, unlike most openings, this one was unnaturally quiet as the guests were riveted to the recorded sighs and murmurs filling the gallery.

André Breton and Radovan Ivšić in 1954, by Sperry Lea

It was shortly after his arrival in France that Ivšić wrote Aquarium, a no act nightmare that never ends, inspired by a dream he had while still living in Zagreb. This dream had struck him so forcefully that he immediately noted it down under the heading: “Are we allowed to dream?”

Aquarium takes place in a concentration camp, one of the many claustrophobic bone mills of that time, to which a journalist has been sent to write an article to counter the lies spread by hostile elements about “the atrocities allegedly practiced in our exemplary camps.” He quickly becomes snared in the bureaucratic doublespeak of the camp’s authorities. They question the validity of his documents and seek proof of their suspicion that he is up to no good and should be incarcerated as an enemy of the state. He is blissfully unaware of the increasing hostility that follows his every move and word, because of the entrance of Plume, a former lover who still owns his heart. Here the violence is not that caused by a bloodthirsty tyrant, but is of a more psychological nature: it is the mind that is the prime target. Many of the camp’s brass are incapable of speaking lucidly from being continuously immersed in this doublespeak. All the dialogue goes round in vicious circles, thereby hollowing out and enclosing the theatrical space in an absurd and inescapable prison. The play ends with soldiers hauling Plume and the Journalist off the stage in different directions once his sole defense against their authority, his identity card, flies out of his shoe and falls to the stage. Before he can retrieve it, the Ear in the Leather Jacket, the prison’s representative of the secret police, pockets it, thus delivering him definitively into the world of the camp as a prisoner.

Jean-Paul Goujon, in his preface to the complete theatrical work by Radovan Ivsic published by Gallimard in 2005, describes Aquarium as embodying the tension and anxiety inherent in living in a country where there is no hope, and dreams themselves are hunted down like wild beasts. But Radovan does not mimic the doublespeak used by jailers of all stripes. Instead, he replaces it with an inane babel of talk on subjects, from offering cloves of garlic as if they were cigarettes to stamp-collecting, never omitting the fact that all these conversations are fed on the horrors of their speakers’ actions, only overtly made evident when a young woman attempting to escape the camp is shot and dragged off with no more ceremony than a slaughtered chicken. Here Ivšić uses poetic subversion to bring about what Péret called “a rectification of the universe,” to open wide the horizons that a simple realist depiction of this situation would leave depressingly shut.

If Aquarium can be seen as a kind of antithesis to the earlier King Gordogan with respect to the horrors that have defined modernity, Ajaxaja combines elements from both, and at the end brings us full circle in a bloodthirsty display that proved fully prophetic of the carnage that would dismember Yugoslavia a little under a decade after the play opened in Belgrade. (It ran a week before being closed definitively for “technical difficulties.”)

In Ajaxaja, we find ourselves in a world where it morally impossible to breathe because the words that give us breath have been poisoned. As Goujon notes, the language of assassins plays incessantly in the background like “a murderous litany.” The play’s tension is indicated in its subtitle, il moci reci, [pouvoir dire in French] which means both the power to speak, and the speech of power—the diktat. Being able to speak is relentlessly countered by what power speaks creating the fulcrum on which our freedom pivots. This power is first shown in the character of he director who is the dictator in the theater but a servile lackey to those in power. These Authorities, the Complete Works (they appear on the stage like a mobile bookcase of old tomes) regard him as a useful pet to whom they can toss a bone now and then in the form of a grant or cultural medal. Here the mental extermination at work in Aquarium has evolved radically in a world dominated by brainwashing and servile slogans  “If you are for progress, be for progress. All power to the power.” The last poet in his deep-sea diver’s suit is heard in a hushed silence constantly broken by the roaring thugs that protect the authorities. Incapable of even miming the doublespeak of their masters, in which an invisible poison has destroyed words by reversing their meaning, these mottorrors can only speak in truncated growls that more resemble the machinery they ride than language. The diver’s final soliloquy on the death of language is abruptly broken off when these motorrors cut his lifeline.

The theater’s role as a cultural mask for an oppressive authority is shaken and finally cast down by the appearance of Ajax from ancient Greek theater and Xaja from a remote future. Their improbable love shakes the very foundations of this world and artist and dictator alike are consumed when the cultivated violence of the guardians of order is unleashed in a final frenzy that attacks all indiscriminately. As in King Gordogan, all have been slain in the last scene save for Ajax and Xaja, who have vanished in the distance like their counterparts the Knight and Joline, leaving but one bloodthirsty figure contemplating the carnage. Bringing the evolution begun in King Gordogan full circle, Ajaxaja ends with the character of a messenger, who has only appeared as an onlooker throughout the play, delivering the sole lines he has in this work. Calmly looking over the wreckage of the Complete Works and their minions who slaughtered each other in their blood driven frenzy, the messenger—an angelic young boy—stares straight at the audience and says with grim foresight of things to come: ”there wasn’t enough blood to suit my taste. When I grow up you’ll see what’s bloody.”

Radovan Ivšić’s work revolves around several key elements that can be broken down to Love, Liberty, and Language. They are intimately interdependent and like the plague contamination of one will quickly infect the others. Conversely, as Annie Le Brun points out, the radical health of one can rejuvenate the others. In these plays, it is in the figures of the lovers—Joline and the Knight, Plume and the Journalist, Ajax and Xaja who hold that power. They may not vanquish the horrors that surround them, but their shared uncompromising passion gives them the strength to desert thus preserving their freedom (Plume and the Journalist have the opportunity to escape but this is aborted when he turns back to retrieve his identity card, thus demonstrating his inability to abandon everything for love).

For Radovan Ivšić, freedom is impossible in a world where love is made impossible—and conversely, love that deserts “the ready-made formulas carved to channel it into an acceptable form” has the power to bring these oppressive systems crashing down upon their ears (as shown in Ajaxaja). But only a vital language that holds “the living words of our memory, the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals…” as Annie Le Brun puts it, has the strength to carry the analogical repercussions that give poetry its formidable presence. The doublespeak that holds the floor in all modern societies, whether of totalitarian or neo-liberal tendencies, is too limp and aseptic to give words that charge. In fact, doublespeak’s purpose is to ensure that words are unable to nourish anything but those activities that sustain the existence of the powers that be. For this reason, Radovan Ivšić states that:

The main question that arises today is how prevent the establishment of a coercive relationship to language? Are we going to successfully master language, in other words tame it, domesticate it, and ultimately enslave it in the same way we are trying to enslave nature?

This is echoed with even more chilling implications by Ivšić’s companion, Annie Le Brun’s question in her book The Reality Overload:

In the same way that grains and vegetables are tampered with under the pretext of making them more pest resistant […] among the words that we are led to believe are still capable of provoking excitement, there are no longer any that are not actively working against the ideas they allegedly express

For Ivšić and others who claim the insolent health of surrealist thought, the only space that can give individuals the strength they need to refuse the world such as it is—dedicated to reinforcing all that is unacceptable in the human condition—is the material presence of our imaginal space. When we recognize that words live in us as we live in them, we can gain access to what Ivšić calls a “strange freedom and gravity.” He follows this by saying:

Poetry is no longer the province of specialists or aesthetes: it is life tested by thought, it is thought tested by life; it is the body interrogating the imagination, it is the imagination interrogating the body.

As Alain Joubert notes,

For Ivšić it is of primordial importance to ‘restore language to its true life […] by leaping in a single bound to the birth of the meaningful,” something Breton recommended at an earlier time. He thus puts himself in the position to inspire the image by induction so that it will form—or not—in the mind of the reader, instead of being provided to him irrevocably on paper. A latent image then slowly appears downstream of language, allowing the reader to partially forge it personally, enriching it through its clarification, and causing it to magically move from the state of evocation to that of revelation.

As I noted in an earlier text [written for the performance of King Gordogan in New York in 1997] the true significance of Radovan Ivšić’s work lies in the fact that “desire never caricatures itself; that the misery that is in the world is not confused for the world; and that the unacceptable human condition is not the fruit of divine malediction but a subordination of the rhythms of desire to those forces that seek only to extinguish passion in the interests of their own smooth functioning.”

For poetry is always essentially different or it does not exist… it never follows its old footprints but is always in discordance with the dominant expression of its time. It is perhaps for this reason that Saint John Perse called the poet the “guilty conscience” of his time.

The authorities in Ajaxaja promised to erect “thundering stadiums” upon the ruins of the theater.” In a time when fear is promoted and an impossible security promised in return for our freedom to think and love as we like, Radovan Ivšić reminds us that the theater is dangerous, but it can only be so

Once it refuses to serve

Once it no longer lauds the all-powerful

Once it no longer bows to gold

Once it sings of love

Once it sings of life.

The post Theater as Plague appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916–2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His was the first French translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; he also translated Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Jonathan Swift. In 1948, along with Raymond Queneau, founded the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger, a literary prize for the best foreign novel. He was also an artist and art critic.

Born André Pierre Robert Dupont, Bay was given his pen name by his close friend, painter Mario Prassinos. Prassinos frequented Surrealist circles—his sister, poet and painter Gisèle, numbered among them—and it is likely that he introduced them to Bay. Among them was a writer named Lise Deharme (née Anne-Marie Hirtz, 1898–1980).

Deharme’s first encounter with the Surrealists is immortalized in Nadja by André Breton, who was so enchanted with her glove that he pinned it to the wall and dubbed her the Lady of the Glove. Deharme is remembered, in Marie-Claire Barnet’s words, as the “first impossible mad love dreamed of by André Breton,” but her reputation as an author in her own right has recently been recovered from oblivion by the vein of feminist scholarship that also restored the likes of Leonora Carrington and Gisèle Prassinos. According to Barnet, Deharme was a prolific organizer of Surrealist salons, and the founder of a subversive publication, Le Phare de Neuilly [The Neuilly Beacon],  which featured James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Jacques Lacan.

In 1937, José Corti published Le Cœur de Pic [Heart of Spades], a book of Deharme’s children’s poems paired with black-and-white photo-assemblages by Claude Cahun (brought back into print, after long years during which it was a collector’s item, by Éditions de MeMo).

The transgendered Cahun—artist photographer, poet, and writer—was the niece of fantastical symbolist Marcel Schwob, soon to appear in these pages. Cahun’s twenty illustrations, made from unusual juxtapositions of ordinary things, are compositions of miniature worlds that elevate ordinary objects—dolls, dollhouse furniture, flowers, leaves, seeds, forks, spoons, scissors—into the mysterious and extra-ordinary. Cahun herself was interested in objects domestic and Surrealist.

Man Ray once described Deharme’s house, where she held her salons, as “a rambling affair, filled with strange objects and rococo furniture.” After her book with Cahun, Deharme then became to be known in the Surrealist circle as “la Dame de Pique,” or the Queen of Spades, as in this photograph by Ray:

Deharme exhibited a wicked sense of humor in her supernatural writings, and Barnet claims the charm of her writing is that it is “more venomous than it first appears.”

But then Deharme in any of her Surrealist incarnations would bear as little resemblance as an incarnated card from Lewis Carroll (a favorite author of the Surrealists) to the terrifying creature André Bay describes in his mysterious and moody little fragment. If any readers out there have any more clues to the circumstances surrounding its composition, please do leave a comment!

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Night travelers step from the train. I’m freezing. Footsteps hammer the street, shaking white droplets loose. The gutters are streaming. Mice are nibbling on cobwebs. Cows moo in the mist. Everywhere, without speaking a word, they fear the Queen of Spades.

She is a woman, a monster, some claim; others maintain she is a gigantic insect; the truth is that all those who’ve ever come near her are dead.

I slip into a sewer, my shoulders smack the walls, I am a hunchback. I walk toward a light that is forever retreating. I seek the Queen of Spades; unlike the others, I have no wish to kill her, just to see her. The sewer widens and deepens, a hernia of rubber; soon I will no longer be able to exit the intestines of the Queen of Spades. Perhaps I am already dead, among those who vanish without a trace. The hernia swells, hardens, takes on a geometric shape, becomes an underground boulevard where I’m driving, borne toward a pale egress that keeps shrinking. Just before the fall, I brace myself and pull up short, barely making it. My limbs are icy. Everything is naked, strange, and lonely.

I sit down, feet dangling in the emptiness over a great misty plain, a vast yellow moonless sky. Not a sound. An empty space where distant forests trace the outlines of dark mountains. But from here I will see the Queen of Spades. I’m alone, I’m wearing shorts and clogs, I am ageless.

I see her—the Queen of Spades! She’s walking. Her black body lies somewhere in the valley, crushing the grass, but her shadow is slender as a tall mannequin’s—you can make out her spine, she has long stiff arms that toss mad hands about, hands that are hairs. For a head she has but a clump of bristling hair growing from a single root. This shadow grows, leans forward, stretches out, can suddenly turn out to be right overhead, and the terror of these substanceless limbs is paralyzing. Like all monsters, the Queen of Spades is alone. I feel almost friendly toward her, but at the same time, I’m afraid she’ll find me, follow me into the sewer. What would she do with me? I am with her, since I see her. But no—all I see is her living shadow, a shadow that no longer looks like her at all.

Peasants have told me that they thought they’d killed the creature by killing its great flaccid body, but their efforts were wasted. Now the villages are empty all around; those who remain have gone to ground in their houses. They hardly dare to go out in the daytime to gather food in the fields no one now owns. It is not certain that the Queen of Spades means its victims harm. They fear her like death, without knowing…

And yet I leaned forward to try and surprise her. But she seemed too far away, and I clung uselessly to the edge of the cliff. In the sewer behind me, I heard movement. When suddenly I turned around, my clog rang against the cast iron, and the vibrating sewer amplified the sound. The valleys made echo. I trembled, unable either to advance or retreat. Something hirsute, sticky, warm, took me by the shoulders, lifted me up before I had the strength to put up a fight. I fainted in the arms of the Queen of Spades.

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