Lenses and pens. Bruges-la-Morte and the crossing of image and text.
I. An important, yet forgotten text.
If not for 19th century European literrature connoisseurs, the first photographic novel, or at least the first sucessful and paradigm changing one, Bruges-la-Morte, by Georges Rodenbach, remains little known. Although André Breton's Nadja, and contemporarily, Sebald's Austerlitz spring out as examples of, on the one hand avant-garde literature and on the other, metafictional method, their format as text/image novels probably owes a lot to Robendachs récit. To explore precisely how Breton or Sebald could possibly "owe" something to Rodenbach is beyond my reach, and would seem, anyway, improductive. It is better to find ressemblances between the authors, than actual "authority" over a method of literary composition. Either way, this question is an interesting starting point for a reflection on: first, the way in which text and image may relate - a theme dear, amongst intelectuals concerned with avant-garde, by Walter Benjamin -, and second, how literature and photography, and in a deeper level, images and words, overlap in producing meaning and a specific "portrayal" of the world. This takes us, furthermore, to a concern over the potential and genesis of a particular branch of visual culture that allows thinking on the history of literary and artistic forms (if photography is taken as art), as well as on the relation between such forms and the historical environment from which they unravel.
A representative of decadent, fin de siècle symbolism, Rodenbach's novel was largely re-edited until WWI, but it appeared, originally, according to Daniel Grojnowski and Jean-Pierre Bertrand (1998), as an experimental text. The book was first published in 1892 with '35 half-tone reproductions of original photographs supplied by the Parisian 'image banks' J. Lévy and Co. and Neurdein Frères' (Edwards, 200, p.71). Although all the later editions, until 1998, failed to reproduced the original clichés, the images are an essential element of Rodenbach's poetic work, which absence in the newer editions might have contributed to the marginality of Rodenbach's work throughout the twentieth-century.. Either way, the fact is that once one has the novel in hands it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine it without the photographs. In fact, it is not supposed not to present such photographs. Which makes of Bruges-la-Morte, as Paul Edwards (2000) rightfully said (and I do not think he was going "a step further" on this), a novel about photography, too. How exactly, and why, the novel would be about photography is beyond my scope here. I do not intend to explore how literature understands photography, or how in this precise novel Rodenbach did so. Instead, I would like to draw some considerations departing from the case of Bruges-la-Morte, to think how text and image convey as a form of thinking and producing knowledge. Definite for this, in the novel, is Rodenbach's conception, remarked by Paul Edwards (2000, p.72), according to which for novels whose topics were to be modern life, photography would be 'an element of reality, one more document'.
II. Between Naturalism and Symbolism.
It is interesting to notice how "reality" could have marked a distinctive feature for a Symbolist writer. But that is precisely what Rodenbach is, a symbolist who draws on realism to form the core of his narrative, which characters are never, in the end, shown in images. Photography, thus, is elevated to the same level as the written word, as both give shape to the components of the narrative. The measure of reality add by the photographs, in fact, is paradoxical. If on the one hand, they add a pictorial layer to the city described textually by symbolist technique, on the other, they reunite different elements of which an ideal "realism" succumbs. The photographs, mostly architectural, 'were taking using a bellows camera, with the lens shifted upwards so as to redress the verticals. This constitutes a first departure from ocular reality' (Edwards, 2000, p. 73). In second place, their abscence of colour - although, obviously, coloured photographs were not possible at the time - add a different athmosphere that cannot be exactly described as "realist", as no ripples are seen on the canal waters, just as clouds are completely absent..
In other words, verissimilitude, the realistic - not realist - effect of photography, is only partial. Likewise, the illustrative character of the images is cut by the absence of captions positioning the reader within the city plan.. Thus, 'l'iconographie suggère un lieu affecté d'um certain coefficient d'irrealité, une cité implantée quelque part, dans un espace qui désigne un Aiileurs que la pittoresque capitale de la Flandre occidentale: une ville qu'a désertée la vie' (Bertrand; Grojnowski, 1998, p. 17). Add to that the gray scale of the images and the reader is left with the symbolic representation of the main character's mourning and melancholy., a "de-coloured' life as white and black dissolve into shades of gray of the printed image.
As many as relations could be made to the use of photography as a realist or naturalist manifesto (they would well fit Eekhoud's Na Nouvelle Carthage, for instance), the Symbolist use of them in Rodenbach's novel is that which claims a manifold view of the city, which, in this specific case comes about as Bruges being 'a vision of la Morte' (Edwards, 2000, p. 74). As the main character roams the city mourning for his dead wife, whom we never get to know the name, the city takes the stage of the mourning play through correspondances between the death of the loved person and the death of the city, the stillness of the corpse, and the stillness of the canals. 'À l'épouse morte devait correspondre une ville morte' (Rodenbach, 1998, p.66).
Eventually, what the reader is left with, is the main character's inner monologue in the form of images. Just as the inner monologue had been introduced by Edouard Dujardin in 1887, and fiction had been mixed with adveturous genres by Maurice Barrès, in 1888, Rodenbach's récit-photographique came out as a response to the need for new forms of literary production, whether in aesthetic, methodologica, styllistic or genre terms. Remarkable, in that sense, were Huysmans À Rebours (1884) and Gide's Paludes (1895). If the first one marked the beginning of the "roman des Esseintes", breaking up, in the theoretical ground, with Naturalism, and the second marked the attempt to bring about the "romance without the romanesque", then Rodenbach's récit seems to fit somewhere in between as an unfolding of the symbolist elements of Huysmans and a predecessor of Gide, as it criticised and praised both symbolist form and naturalist elements, as they mingled in reciprocal conflict. Rodenbach does not follow the symbolist refusal to realist elements such as chronotopy and plot, and yet, it denounces the realism of images, as shown before, by putting them in the same level of the text, thus, by presenting them as a product of conscious choice, work and after-work, which compeal the reader to visualize the metaphors and symbols used throughout the narrative.
III. Learning to read and write with images or, how not to be deceived.
As a "reflexive romance" Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, attacks romance machinery in three ways, according to Bertrand and Grojnowski (1998). First, it diverts the finality of narrative techniques, 'ensuite, de mettre en crise la répresentation; enfin, de boucler le texte dans sa propre clôture fictionelle' (Bretrand; Grojnowski, 1998, p.37). Definite for the challenge presented here is precisely how Rodenbach is able to put representation in check, as it devoids images of a city of their socially embedded codes, which meanings can only be achievend 'à l''intérieur d'un ensemble des signes, des valeurs, d'"analogies" qui déplacent la grammaire habituelle du vraisemblable' (Bertrand;Grojnowski, 1998, p. 37). In other words, it is important to understand how Rodenbach is able to create new meaning by destituing images of their illustrative charcter and embbeding them into the narrative structure of the récit.
If Walter Benjamin was right on the difference between the epic poet and the novelist, according to which the former sits by the shore and admires the ocean, while the latter explores its waters (Benjamin, 1996), and if it is true that whereas epic poetry emerged from oral traditions, whereas romance is the apotheosis of oral tradition as a long-gone one, than one might assert that Rodenbach achieves the highest position as a novelist, as it moves away from orality and paves the path for the description of a human life lead to paroxism. If this would eventually lead to the theory of the "roman pur", in Rodenbach it leads to a reflexive novel in which psychologic individualism, through synedoche and metonymy, is expanded to the level in which individualism becomes the indvidualism of the stage wherein the plot unfolds. In that sense, tacking back an idea originating in German Romanticism, Bruges-la-Morte attempts to capture 'le toute dans le détail, partant de l'idée [...] que chaqque chose contient l'inscription d'un grand Tout' (Bertrand; Grojnowski, 1998, p. 43).
Finally, the crossing of image and text in Rodanbach's work must be interpreted and analysed further as it is an attempt to deal with the specificity of historically contextualized happenings (that is, the work itself in its relation to its moment), as they appear to us in, that is, as images. In that way, the form given to the récit must be analysed and interpreted further as a correspondance with the individual life of the novelist and its historical context. As Rodenbach gives life to the city, and 'speaks through the city' (Benjamin, 1996, p. 57), he transforms the individual existence of the charatcer into the individual existence of the social environment, as it is made up by its individuals, be they dead or alive.
References.
Benjamin, W. 1996. A Crise do Romance. Sobre Alexanderplatz, de Döblin. In. Benjamin, W. Magia e Técnica, Arte e Política. Obras Escolhidas Vol. I. São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Bertrand, J-P.; Grojnowski, D. 1998. Présentation. In. Rodenbach, G. Bruges-la-Morte. aris: Flammarion.
Edwards, P. 2000. The photograph in Geogre Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte (1892). In. European studies, xxx , pp. 71-89.
Rodenbach, G. 1998. Bruges-la-Morte. Paris: Flammarion.
