REVIEWS 269

word or image on the other. This reflects back on the artists’ own poetic or painterly
practice, which becomes one not simply of claiming a non-mimetic superiority, but of
creating the value of the non-mimetic out of the internal contradictions of the
mimetic function itself. (The peculiar fictional nature of this value-creating process is
often figured by reference to money, and particularly gold.) The writers and painters
whom Goddard admires thus go beyond the Neoplatonic idealism of many symbo-
lists, and create an art in which the mimetic is as essential as it is inadequate. A new
twist is thereby introduced into the history of aesthetic rivalries, and a new similarity,
often unnoticed, between the arts.

PETER DAYAN

Downloaded from http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/ at State Univ NY at Stony Brook on March 16, 2015
doi:10.1093/fs/knt001 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France. By ROBERT ZIEGLER . (Palgrave

Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012. vi + 229 pp.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a mixed bag in France: science, its
fires stoked by Darwin, chugged forward; technology claimed ever more territory
from religion; royalists and aristocrats had become endangered species; and art itself,
thanks to movements like naturalism, yielded to the pressure of empiricism. Yet the
same period is marked by an infatuation with things darkly spiritual — from mag-
netism and table-turning to mysticism and the occult. In Satanism, Magic and
Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France, Robert Ziegler examines this life of the shadows, in
both its cultural and artistic manifestations. Each chapter is dedicated to a particular
type of fin-de-siècle figure: the satanist, the hoaxer, the magus, the mystic, and the
miracle-worker. Ziegler sees these categories as operating roughly in succession, al-
though they clearly overlap in definition and in time. J. K. Huysmans has pride of
place in the analyses: ‘one finds that — more than any other public figure —
[Huysmans’s] career followed the trajectory of fin-de-siècle occultism’ (p. 2). Most
prominent is his role as a representative of satanism (Là-bas (1891)), but Huysmans
makes his ghostly apparition in the other sections as well, for he engaged with all the
major hermeticists of his day. Whether in Huysmans or Stanislas de Guaı̈ta or Jules
Bois, satanism appears, paradoxically, as a re-energizing of religious power, as an
escape from the relentless materialism of the age. It gives rise to entirely authentic
anxieties, even when the gruesome practices of satanists are related as part of a
spoof. Accordingly, the second chapter focuses on the epic hoax played by Leo
Taxil, who fabricated the story of a devil-worshipping secret society known as
Palladism. Although his motives remain obscure, Taxil’s tales connected with the
popular imagination, readers falling readily for the outlandish descriptions of ritual
incest, necrophilia, and bestiality. In Chapter 3 the figure of the magus, best exempli-
fied in the writings of Joséphin Péladan, appears as a Messiah figure — the apothe-
osis of the aristocrat. In contrast, we have the mystic (Chapter 4), who believed in a
new form of Gnosticism, whereby higher knowledge might be attained through spir-
itual enlightenment, represented in the works of Eugène Vintras. Last of all, Ziegler
dedicates a brief fifth chapter to Huysmans’s study of miracles, focusing on the
novelist’s final book and spiritual quest. The strength of the study lies in its breadth,
including canonical writers like Huysmans and lesser divinities such as Jules Bois
and Ernest Hello. Yet some groupings feel a touch forced (nearly all figures are asso-
ciated — perhaps hastily — with Decadence), and the urge to cover so much leaves
little room for textual analysis or reflection. We would also have benefited from
more developed conclusions in most chapters. The chapter on Leo Taxil is a case in
point: it is a delightful romp through Palladism, but it leaves us hungering for more
270 REVIEWS

critical synthesis. That said, even if the parts are greater than the whole, Ziegler’s
book is nonetheless a trove of enticing parts.

SCOTT D. CARPENTER
doi:10.1093/fs/knt069 CARLETON COLLEGE

Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales. Edited
by NIGEL HARKNESS and MARION SCHMID. (Le Romantisme et après en France/
Romanticism and After in France, 15). Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. xiv + 324 pp.
This is an excellent collection of seventeen essays, written in honour of the late

Downloaded from http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/ at State Univ NY at Stony Brook on March 16, 2015
Richard Bales and reflecting the great breadth and depth of his research interests, as
well as his longstanding preoccupation with interactions between different art forms.
Proust is the central focus of the work, and most of the essays are concerned with ar-
ticulating Proust’s pivotal position on the threshold of modernity, whether in relation
to aspects of its nineteenth-century beginnings, or to symbolism and surrealism in the
twentieth century. The contributors include distinguished scholars from France, the
UK, Ireland, and the USA, and the book is divided into four usefully chronological
sections, within each of which the essays have been grouped with care so that their
echoes and differences emerge clearly. In the first section, entitled ‘Meditations’,
Catherine O’Beirne, Annick Bouillaguet, Timothy Unwin, and Marion Schmid each
discuss intertextual links between Proust and, respectively, Dante, Balzac, Flaubert,
and the Decadent poet Robert de Montesquiou. I found Catherine O’Beirne’s
nuanced argument that Thomas Carlyle may have served as Proust’s source in relation
to Dante’s Purgatorio particularly compelling. The second section, ‘Cultures of
Modernity’, brings together essays by Alison Finch, Adam Watt, Cynthia Gamble on
art nouveau, and Edward J. Hughes on nationalism. Alison Finch interrogates Proust’s
status as cultural historian by incisively examining his treatment of technology and
‘lowly objects’ such as the umbrella, and of the complex concept of ‘influence’ in his
work. Adam Watt’s witty discussion of the very ordinary nature of much of the matter
of the Proustian universe focuses on the use of the banal object in À la recherche du
temps perdu not as a starting point for metaphor and metonym creation, or for gaining
access to long-sought truths about the self or the world, but as something to be
resisted in order to maintain a cherished self-delusion. ‘Ontologies of the Modern’, the
third section, contains essays by Jack Jordan, Diane R. Leonard, Patrick O’Donovan,
and Jean Milly, each of whom explores aspects of Proust’s representation in his novel
of the ontological experience of the twentieth-century subject, such as the altered con-
ception of time and space, the subject as a fragmented, multilayered entity, affect, and
the experience of love with all its ambiguities regarding the concealment and revelation
of homosexuality. The essays in section IV, ‘Artistic Correspondences’, look beyond
Proust to consider connections between diverse systems of representation. Thus Nigel
Harkness reflects on the significance of sculpture and its deletion from the opening
page of Proust’s novel within the context of nineteenth-century literature, especially
Balzac, while Claire Moran looks at the influence of theatre on Belgian symbolists
Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor. Patrick McGuinness explores the relationship
between poetry and politics, and Peter Broome that between poetry and the visual
arts, before Bernard Brun’s insightful homage to Richard Bales and his groundbreak-
ing work brings the volume to a close. Broad in scope and meticulous in detail, this
beautifully presented volume is a valuable contribution to the field of Proust studies.

ÁINE LARKIN
doi:10.1093/fs/knt028 UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN