Decadent Aesthetics in Jean Lorrain

THE SPECTACLE OF SELF: DECADENT AESTHETICS IN JEAN LORRAIN
Author(s): Robert E. Ziegler

Source: Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3/4 (Spring-Summer 1986), pp. 312-323
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

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THE SPECTACLE OF SELF: DECADENT
AESTHETICS IN JEAN LORRAIN
Robert E. Ziegler
Homosexual, "éthéromane," friend to such courtesans and "demi-mondaines"
as the notorious Liane de Pougy, Jean Lorrain, with his love of make-up and
disguises, scandalized the readers of his time with his forays into the suspect
world of wrestlers and "garçons bouchers," actresses and addicts. Apart from
his writings as a playwright, novelist and poet, Lorrain was best known for
his prolific journalistic output, his acidulous "Pall-Malls" that skewered pre
tentious social figures, and for his descriptions of "la pègre," the dangerous
inhabitants of the Parisian underworld and the uncharted regions of the city
that they frequented.1 Some contemporary readers see in him a probing social
critic of the time in which he lived. "Des présidents de la République à Sarah
Bernhardt, des écrivains aux cocottes, les grandes et les petites figures défilent
sur ce théâtre d'ombre qui est aujourd'hui une mine de renseignements sur
l'époque," as Pierre Kyria observes.2 Yet Lorrain has largely been regarded
since his death in 1906 as a kind of "déclassé," an incidental writer still too
infrequently examined by students of French literary history.
Despite his numerous connections to the world of letters and the theater—
Lorrain counted among his patrons Edmond de Goncourt, Barbey d'Aurevilly,

to whom he pays a form of comic tribute in Monsieur de Bougre/on, and the
Huysmans of the time of his writing Là-bas—Lorrain, because of his extrava
gant behavior and appearance, remained until the end the butt of ridicule,
the object of opprobrium and outrage. Yet it may be on account of his very
eccentricities that his work can be seen as deserving of more critical attention.
As both a journalist and novelist, Lorrain showed himself to be a kind of dou
ble man, one who lived to attract the disbelieving stares of others and at the
same time made himself invisible as a means of more faithfully observing and
reporting on the sordid social circles that he haunted. Perhaps it was his work
ing for the press that enabled Lorrain to function as a witness of and specta
cle for others and that makes his works worth reading, both for furnishing a
chronicle of "la Belle Epoque" 's less seemly side and for expressing a particu
lar mentality that characterized the era when he lived.
312
Robert E. Ziegler 313
Indeed, Lorrain's heroes are like many found in "fin-de-siècle" fiction,

characters torn between their physical exhaustion and appetite for new kinds
of stimulation and experience. As they contrived to live vicariously on the
sidelines of their lives, they epitomized the decadents' propensity for combin
ing excitement and detachment, their capacity to function as both illusionists
and dupes. Thus Prince Noronsoff in Le Vice errant (1902) has the sense of
traveling when he stays home on his fantastic Côte d'Azur estate. He pays
itinerants and sailors to come to tell him stories of their escapades in tawdry
seaport towns and can thereby satisfy his wanderlust while he never leaves
his chair. So congenially enfeebled and debauched that he hardly ever acts
on his own, he at the same time sees with painful clarity the mediocrity of his
life and the lives of those around him. Yet he tries to compensate for his sense
of emptiness by both listening to and taking part in the adventures that other
people tell him, adventures into which he projects himself in his imagination
but can never go beyond enjoying exclusively by proxy.

Still this process of self-duplication that is so apparent in Lorrain is not a
feature that is peculiar to his works. In fact, it is a tendency that can be found
in many writers of the time. "Acteur et spectateur de lui-même et des autres,

il n'est jamais acteur seulement. . .," Maupassant remarks of the typical "fin
de-siècle" figure. "Tout, autour de lui, devient de verre, les cœurs, les actes,
les intentions secrètes, et il souffre d'un mal étrange, d'une sorte de dédouble
ment de l'esprit, qui fait de lui un être effroyablement vibrant, machiné, com
pliqué et fatigant pour lui-même."3 Rather, what distinguishes Lorrain is his
pursuing of the implications of this tendency in an innovative way: his inves
tigation in certain of his works of the harmful psychological effects of this
splitting of the self and his attempt in others to confer upon this process a
positive and new artistic value, one that did not lead to a man's exhaustion
and paralysis but offered him instead a better means to take possession of
himself.
Often Lorrain's characters seem at once repelled and fascinated by those
who can turn life into art, nature into spectacle. The concern voiced in his
works then is not with those who, in trying to escape the dualism that tor
ments them, wish simply to appreciate another's text, but endeavor to merge
with it and thereby make themselves a character in another person's fiction.
As a journalist, Lorrain himself served as a medium for his readers, creating

for them from the raw material of life a personal vision of his own. It is, there
fore, not unusual for his characters to have recourse to another who could
function as a go-between, who could articulate and represent for them a view
of things that they were both too lazy and too little gifted to develop on their
314 Nineteenth-Century French Studies
own. One might say that Lorrain's distrust of the press stemmed in part from
its ability to promote conformity, its tendency to foster certain ways of see
ing and expressing things that encouraged individuals to abdicate their right
to act and think and reach conclusions independently.4
Thus in Monsieur de Phocas (1901), Lorrain's most complex and best
known work, it is the emptying of all originality from language that first
causes Phocas to embrace as friend and healer the sinister Claudius Ethal.
Driven from society by his horror of clichés drawn from papers read in haste,
Phocas is easily convinced by his new friend that meaning can be found exclu
sively in art. As living people become machines that talk, dummies whose
mouths are made to move by the unseen hand of popular opinion, so the evi
dence of real intelligence is transferred to lifeless canvases and statues. What
does it matter, then, that Ethal kills his models by exposing them to the lethal
scent of rare and poisonous flowers? He pursues his aesthetic of morbidity in
such a way that the complexion of his subject is made more beautiful as the
time of her death approaches.

In Lorrain's works, speech is frequently what betrays a person's mindless
ness, while life is experienced through vision and is discovered in one's eyes.
In this regard, Phocas is shown at one point thinking of the spiritual deadness
affecting his contemporaries: "Les yeux modernes? Il n'y a plus d'âme en eux
.... Même les plus purs n'ont que des préoccupations immédiates: basses con
voitises, intérêts mesquins, cupidité, vanité, préjugés, lâches appétits et sourde
envie: voilà l'abominable grouillement qu'on trouve aujourd'hui dans les
yeux."5 The obsession of Phocas with sight is based on the same dualism of
the self that haunted many "fin-de-siècle" writers: their anxious view of life
as the spectacle of desires made unrealizable by their lack of energy and will.
Seeing for them entailed a consciousness of what they wanted and did not
have, and since Phocas's peers craved only pleasure or monetary gain, their
eyes had the muddy color of their sordid wishes or were simply empty because
of their own fatuousness and groundless self-esteem. But the man with eyes
that look sees there is something greater, more important than himself. Yet
rather than striving to attain it, he tries instead to kill his sense of incomplete
ness through acts of violence he carries out against both others and himself.
In this way, Phocas gives himself to the very guilty impulses that promote in
him the hate he turns upon himself and the helpless, fascinated loathing he
feels for Claudius Ethal.
Phocas despises those whose stupidity makes them want for nothing, who
are blind and therefore satisfied to talk about themselves. The reason he turns,
then, to Ethal is to hear another tell him what he wants and then direct him
to it. Ethal becomes the midwife of his disciple's secret promptings, the me
dium through which Phocas is revealed most clearly to himself. No longer

limited to the verbal narcissism of superficial discourse or forced to contem
plate alone the objects of forbidden urges, he sees with Ethal's eyes and is
articulated through his words.' "Ce mystérieux causeur me raconte à moi
même, donne un corps à mes rêves, /'/me parle tout haut, je m'éveille en lui
comme dans un autre moi plus précis et plus subtil" (Phocas, 123).
Lorrain shows that Phocas has apparently another choice than becoming
the mouthpiece of a sadist. Shunning the false autonomy of loving self-descrip
tion engaged in by his peers and the compulsive, horrified analysis of vices
nurtured in him by his mentor, Phocas is momentarily attracted to Sir Thomas
Welcome, who seems at first to offer both his friendship and a healthier, more
integrated way of life. But Welcome's promised remedy depends not on an
empassioned commitment to a given course of action, but on constant move
ment and detachment from all places and all things. The charm of travel Wel
come so extols arises from the fleeting sense of being here and its cancellation
by the lure of going elsewhere. Since he knows no one and need not stay in
one location, the voyager becomes anonymous and ostensibly has no self to
contemplate. With no other purpose to his actions than to effectuate a change
in his surroundings, he attains the artificial wholeness of the person who is
just a witness. The unity of self that Welcome praises is one that distinguishes
the spectacle-consuming nature of the tourist. It requires the individual to
amputate that part of him that contributes or participates in favor of the part
that simply watches. Yet Phocas finally feels no need to move, to pack his
bags and go. It is enough for him to leave on the imaginary voyages that Wel
come's recitations give rise to in his mind.
Indeed, Welcome's description of the pleasure of the traveler recalls the
attitudes and values of the cloistered aesthetes found in Huysmans, in their
penchant for provoking and assessing the intensity of new sensations. Both
aspire to the satisfaction of being "l'éveilleur averti de ses propres voluptés";
both indulge in the self-stimulation that results in "le coït intellectuel .. .
d'où naît l'idée refraîchissante" (Phocas, 209). So while the voyager contents
himself with taking life in as a spectacle, the object of his focus still remains
himself. The only difference is that the man who stays at home exhausts him
self in sterile self-analysis for want of any chance to develop or to grow, while
the traveler becomes revitalized through the constant changes he proceeds to
undergo.
Yet, in spite of Welcome's recommending that a man pursue firsthand
experience, undistorted by social prejudice and unmediated by people like
Ethal, it is precisely to Ethal that Phocas turns, to act as an agenda-setter for
him. It is Claudius who chooses what Phocas will see, who advises him of
what is genuine or counterfeit, who creates for him an ambience that is as all
encompassing as it is unhealthy and unreal. Claudius's world consists of waxen
busts of consumptive teen-age beggars, grotesque masks from remote, exotic
cultures, tableaux of noble ladies dying of exposure to noxious floral gases.

Yet the criminality and madness Ethal's vision fosters strike Phocas as being
preferable to what he leaves behind. It is better, as he sees it, to become the
play-thing of a monster than to go on suffering the process of "dédoublement"
by which his life was made the object of his own despairing scrutiny. Thus in
the actor-spectator dichotomy, Phocas vacates both roles and assigns them to
Ethal. He allows Ethal to direct and stage the spectacles he sees, from their
visits to bordellos and cafés and Gustave Moreau exhibits to the opium-trig
gered nightmare scenes that he beholds at one of Claudius's infamous soirées.
And not only does Ethal decide what the duke will be exposed to; he works
as well to condition how he views it. Welcome is accurate in more ways than
one when he accuses Claudius of being "un voyeur" (Phocas, 201), since on
the one hand he observes the moral sickness of the souls that he corrupts, and
on the other makes his recruits adopt a perspective of the world that dupli
cates his own. Instead of being "double" and divided, Phocas lets Claudius
usurp his right to initiate experience and becomes absent to himself as a result.
To reassume control of his own life, Phocas must rid himself of Ethal's
influence, must stop him preying on his growing helplessness. He has to carry
out the only act that can restore him to self-mastery: the murder of Ethal.
For Claudius, as Phocas's manuscript points out, is a poisoner of men. He cul
tivates in them a tolerance for vices. Yet for all that fact, they are never mith
ridatized. In order for Phocas to reverse the course of moral dissolution he is
following, he has no choice but to kill his would-be killer, to take a first step
on his own by which he might finally be detoxified.

The moment when Phocas takes hold of Claudius's throat and forces
between his lips the emerald that contains a drop of liquid poison is the last
time that he acts involuntarily. As he had all along been hypnotized by Ethal's
eyes, mesmerized by Ethal's speech, it is not surprising that he carries out the
murder in the same way as his earlier deeds, "sans savoir pourquoi, poussé,"
as he says, "par une volonté étrangère à la mienne" (Phocas, 330). It is worth
noting that the duke's rebellion is motivated by his refusal to see life super
seded any longer by aesthetics, by his revulsion at hearing Ethal praise the
beauty of his paintings while vilifying the character of his models. Nonethe
less, the fact remains that with Claudius dispatched, Phocas ceases acting as a
mere respository for Ethal's views and words and finds his presence of mind
quite literally restored. This single, fatal act undoes the whole of the duke's
history of playing the role of brainwashed spectator at Claudius's shows. The
meaning of the murder is signalled by the comment that he makes while stand
"
ing over Claudius's body, "Actum est, he solemnly declares [Phocas, 330).
So with the play's last scene completed and the deed irrevocably done,
Phocas again splits into the two component parts he originally had played.
Amazed by the sang-froid he exhibits at the police's inquiry, Phocas thinks to
himself: "J'étais comme dédoublé. Il me semblait assister en spectateur à un
drame judiciaire dont je dirigeais moi-même l'intrigue, les jeux de scène et jus
qu'aux gestes des acteurs" (Phocas, 335). Even when in control of his own
actions, Lorrain's character continues to regard his life as theater, a perfor
mance at which he serves at once as audience, player and director.
In Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897), the main character's mythomania again

introduces the idea of a life that must be verbalized or acted out as a way to
give it meaning. But unlike Monsieur de Phocas, who depended on another
to mediate experience, Monsieur de Bougrelon needs no one else to stage or
dramatize his story. If his life is like a spectacle, it is one to which he is the
only really necessary viewer. Monsieur de Bougrelon's advantage lies in the
fact that, while stylizing his own history, he is not reduced to contemplating
what is past or dead or out of his control. He can live his life anew and differ
ently each time that he narrates it.
At the outset, though, the atmosphere and tone seem much like those in
Monsieur de Phocas. Here the emptiness of spectacle is represented once again,

as Amsterdam, the setting, is mirrored in canals and waterways—"du noir, du
blanc se dédoublant dans l'eau"6—at the same time it is vaporized, made color
less by the mists that constantly envelop it. Here too the narrators are listeners
and tourists, intent on finding someone entertaining to distract them from
the pallor of their lives. Thus they gravitate toward a physically grotesque,
gaudily outfitted eccentric who captivates them by the incongruous bits of
wisdom that are sprinkled through his monologues. As Claudius Ethal in Mon
sieur de Phocas had derided his contemporaries for resembling hyenas, storks
and frogs, different kinds of ruminants and scavengers and predatory birds, so
does Monsieur de Bougrelon compare the members of his host country to
vegetables and fruits: "courges et melons, messieurs.... Quant aux teints, ils
sont d'aubergines" (Bougrelon, 386). Yet the deficiency of human life, a con
stant theme in Lorrain's works, is here offset by the fact that whereas people
are degraded by their smug obtuseness into things, lifeless things can be reha
bilitated by a person's attribution to them of some artistic meaning. Thus a
museum exposition of superannuated fashions evokes in the minds of visitors
the thought of wearers long deceased and makes the public hall into "un bou
doir de mortes," as Monsieur de Bougrelon affectionately calls it. Where crea
tivity is lacking in Lorrain, there is emptiness, inertia. Yet where art enhances
vision, as with Monsieur de Bougrelon, the inanimate is made to come alive.
As the old eccentric says: "Ici, il n'y a pas de natures mortes, car les natures
mortes sont vivantes" (Bougrelon, 406).

For Monsieur de Bougrelon, the more trivial and commonplace the specta
cle the stronger the reactions it elicits. To the poverty of things that he can
see there corresponds the subjective richness of the way that he can see them,
so that the most intense experience is oftentimes the one that takes place in
the face of something that is not even really there. In this way, a marinated
pineapple contained in a glass jar holds out to him the lure of "une invitation
au voyage." It is the basis for inconclusive reveries of toppled masts of sunken
ships and tranquil seas of floating algae off the coast of Java. It evokes the
dreaminess of the exotic and the far away, as in its glaucous, yellow-green
solution resides "l'âme d'Atala."
At another point, as they proceed through "le Vestiaire du Souvenir,"

Monsieur de Bougrelon and his acquaintances pause in order to examine the
peignoirs and brocades of vanished ladies of the time of Louis XV. Their
thoughts then turn to disembodied loves: "nostalgiques poupées," as Mon
sieur de Bougrelon describes them (Bougrelon, 326). In the lonely, cold
museum, filled exclusively with ghosts, they absorb a spectacle that refers
them to an absence, experience desires without object: "hypothétiques luxu
res," Monsieur de Bougrelon observes (Bougrelon, 385). In this empty place

their reveries take on a faintly religious aspect, not because they are there to
venerate the dead or to marvel at the finery, but rather to admire the acuity
of their powers of invention. "Nous sommes ici dans une crypte et aussi dans
un oratoire," Monsieur de Bougrelon advises, "[mais] un oratoire quasi divin
où les christs surgiront.. . d'autant plus qu'il n'y a rien dans ces cadres magi
ques .. . que nos regrets et nos pensées" (Bougrelon, 375-376). Thus the spec
tacle Monsieur de Bougrelon enjoys above all else is the one which represents
the beautifying of his ideas.
In fact, for the subjective beauty of one's vision not to be impaired, he
must avoid too close a scrutiny of what he fixes on. He must not look too
closely lest what he sees supplant what he prefers to fantasize. It is better for
the narrators that Monsieur de Bougrelon remain a collaborative fiction than
for him to be revealed as nothing but a tawdry dock-side tavern violinist.
Furthermore, too longing or immoderate a gaze at any given object may run
the risk of conferring on that object an existence independent of the viewer's,
may give it eyes so that he who looks is degraded to that status of "chose
vue," or is blinded by what he contemplates. Thus Monsieur de Bougrelon,

who admiringly regards a pretty servant girl and casts upon her too covetous
an eye, comes close to losing it when she accidentally stabs him with her hair
pin. In Lorrain, the spectacle should enjoy a purely referential function,

should allude to something chimerical, illusory. Loquacious phantoms and
pictures of dead strangers are the favored subjects for the studies of these
solipsistic decadent aesthetes. But sometimes even these attachments are too
strong. As Monsieur de Phocas at one time had declared: "On devrait crever
les yeux des portraits" (Phocas, 79).

A different form of creativity dealt with in the text is that involving mem
ories, memories that are not attached to real people or events but instead are
reconstructions, freely shaped, to fit a character's aesthetic needs. The strange

and disconcerting figures Monsieur de Bougrelon evokes when recollecting his
own past seem spectral in much the way that he does. There is Barbara, the
pink-complected, blond and frigid beauty whose loveliness Monsieur de Bou
grelon commemorates by wearing yellow poodle fur which calls to mind the
color of her hair, and Monsieur de Mortimer, the dandy, whose name suggests
the mirror of still waters and the serenity of death. Thus the sphere Monsieur
de Bougrelon, the ghostly clown, inhabits is peopled by the shadows of his
memories. Yet these friends and lovers from his past are perhaps no more than
after-images and echoes. In this way, the problematic nature of experienced
reality is reflected in the narrative, as it treats the history of those that may
never have lived, spectacles of things invisible and events that may never have
happened to begin with.
Monsieur de Bougrelon rejects the present for its being too involving and
too close to be subjectively recast to suit his own artistic vision. Like many
figures in "fin-de-siècle" fiction, Monsieur de Bougrelon regards himself as an
anachronistic exile in a period when all was commercialized and cheapened.

He instead pays homage to the sacredness of personal history, feels a rever
ence for things gone by. Because the past is distant, vague, it can be rendered
as one wishes in his memory, is made into something to be contemplated
quietly in the museum of one's mind. Off-limits to the public, the past cannot
be profaned or vulgarized unless one goes beyond revisiting it in memory and
endeavors to return to it in person: "il ne faut pas revenir en arrière," as Mon
sieur de Bougrelon observes (Bougrelon, 425).

Toward the conclusion of the novel, the narrators depart from Holland,
regretting the need for taking leave of the old eccentric whose way of seeing
and describing things had given some artistic value to the dull, prosaic country
they had visited. One in particular looks back with fond nostalgia on the gar
rulous old man "qui faisait parler les portraits de Musée .... Lui dont... le
verbe prestigieux, l'emphase épique animèrent et peuplèrent. .. les brumes
d'Amsterdam et... la mer du Nord" (Bougre/on, 436). Sometime later when
the narrator returns to certain towns in Southern France, he has the sense
that his host of long ago is somehow there again beside him. And in fact,
Monsieur de Bougrelon appears to him once more, but this time only through
his disembodied voice. He tells the narrator that attempting to renew past joys
means disturbing the slumber of the dead: "tout ce que nous aimons [est] de
la poussière et du néant.. . et... hors de notre cœur, tout est un sépulcre ici
bas!" (Bougrelon, 442). Monsieur de Bougrelon comes back to say that remi
niscences alone are able to revive what experience has killed. Yet before his
voice is stilled, Monsieur de Bougrelon encapsulates his observations in one
last reference to memories: "un souvenir, Monsieur.... On se cloître dans
un souvenir, on se mure dans un bonheur éteint comme un moine, dans une
cellule!" (Bougrelon, 442-443). The solitary bliss that one attains when he
retires from the world and shuts his ears to other people's platitudes—the con
solation one discovers at the moment that he turns his eyes from the spectacle
of others' unintelligence—this joy recalls the longing for retreat that the char
acters in Huysmans often feel. In Huysmans too, one sees "the cloister image
frequently associated with . . . memories," as Victor Brombert states.7 The
need for self-immurement that Durtal and Des Esseintes experience can be
noted in Lorrain as well, but while Huysmans' figures are still sometimes
dependent on their libraries, their experiments with colors, sounds and smells
to stimulate their minds, in Monsieur de Bougrelon, the material for the spec
tacle is generated wholly from within.
To be sure, the affective memories Monsieur de Bougrelon holds sacred arise
themselves from earlier experience, but over time they lose their randomness
and incoherency. They are purified and converted into art. From the tiresome
ugliness of life the memory creates a thing of beauty; "elle arrange esthétique
ment le souvenir," as Gilbert Durand says.8 Unlike the paintings, clothes and
statues that Lorrain's characters usually examine, a recollection, as Monsieur
de Bougrelon regards it, stems not from the worthless aggregate of things with
which the world is encumbered, but rather is a pure "produit mental." As Du
rand adds: "la mémoire permet... un dédoublement du présent; elle donne
une épaisseur inusitée au morne et fatal écoulement du devenir, et assure dans
les fluctuations du destin la survie et la pérennité d'une substance" (Durand,
466). And what is this substance Durand mentions if not a life that is renewed
and reconstructed as one relives it in his mind, if not a spectacle whose value
and reality are there only for the person who remembers?
The doubling of the present through the doubling of the self: all the efforts
made by Lorrain's characters intend their extrication from a world in which
they function solely as the objects on which people make their impact. From
being victims of the things that simply happen, they seek to rearrange their
lives in such a way that what they hear and see and think is what they choose
to. In Monsieur de Phocas, however, which A.E. Carter declares "shows. . .
the decadent... at the point of hating his own decadence,"9 this tendency
to objectify existence as a thing to be appraised does not result in the charac
ter's enjoying greater freedom. Instead it makes of him a slave. For while
Phocas, duc de Freneuse, thinks he is handing himself over to an artist and a
healer, he hears rumors that his would-be counselor is in fact a ruthless, homi
cidal madman. Fie deludes himself by thinking Claudius can cure him and at
the same time offer him an ordered explanation of the world. Fie hopes that
as Ethal delivers him from his sickly fascination with vampires, masks and
other simulated life-forms, he will be able to recast his life as a personal artis
tic project or creation. Of course, once the duke relinquishes control and
assumes the values and the vision Ethal promulgates, what he actually expe
riences is a sense of his own alienation. He is given the necessary distance to
assess his life as spectacle but can view it only in the way that Claudius allows,
and what he ultimately sees leaves him filled with horror and revulsion. Pho
cas becomes the medium of a demented puppet-master who merely uses him
to reiterate his own inhuman attitudes and sinister ideas.
The figure of the puppet appears in Monsieur de Bougrelon as well, as the
narrators repeatedly allude to the denizen of Holland's galleries and bars as
"un fantoche." To some extent the description seems an apt one in the way
Monsieur de Bougrelon's behavior seems determined by the mechanism of his
habits, by his indulgence in revisionistic tales of his past exploits and acquaint
ances. In some respects, Monsieur de Bougrelon is like all of Lorrain's heroes
who are exhibitionists and liars. He, too, falsifies his profession and identity
and works untiringly at duping others and himself. Yet he clearly is more self
sufficient than the rest. Admittedly, he feels more comfortable when he can
dream his dreams in other people's presence. He is happier having silent wit
nesses around him who enable him to second his opinions and confirm for him
the ornamental dignity of his past. But apart from that, Monsieur de Bougre
lon emerges as pure visionary. Detached from his surroundings, he displays
disdain for the world's shallowness and vanity. The images he cherishes are not
attached to things, but are created from whole cloth, in his own imagination.
One can think of him subscribing to the statement that Sir Thomas Wel
come makes in Monsieur de Phocas: "L'importance est dans le regard et non
dans la chose regardée" (Phocas, 290). Indeed, it is Lorrain's description of a
way of seeing things that separates him from the other writers of the period.
If one begins with Des Esseintes, one can easily conclude how common it had
been for the characters in "fin-de-siècle" literature to view themselves as art
ists in their manner of consumption. What is different in Monsieur de Bougre
Ion is his imaginary recreating of his life, the way that he embellishes on the
grey procession of its days and then presents as a lively autobiographical
account events that are probably apocryphal. What seems deceitful in his con
duct is in fact a sign of creativity. Thus despite the presence of the narrators,
the text portrays Monsieur de Bougrelon as chief storyteller, the subject of
the drama and his own most avid listener all at once. The process of "dédou
blement" that Maupassant deplored in other "fin-de-siècle" figures emerges

here as evidence of Monsieur de Bougrelon's vitality as artist. It is a doubling
that is not equated with duplicity, or the pitting of a spectator that is hungry
for experience against an actor too exhausted to execute his role. In the spec
tacle that Lorrain's hero arranges for his personal enjoyment, he turns his
back upon the dull show of the world and finds restored to him the pleasure
that arises from the use of his own powers of invention. It is with this insight
that Lorrain makes his greatest contribution to the writing of his time and
there that his originality lies: in his pointing out the initiative and freedom
to be taken when one engages in the fictionalizing of the self.
Dept. of Humanities
Montana College of Mineral
Science & Technology
Butte, MT 59701
1. "Sa familiarité avec les mauvais lieux, sa passion pour les spectacles forains, sa con
naissance de l'argot lui permettaient de peindre exactement ces milieux criminels dont
rêvait la société décadente" (Philippe Jullian, Jean Lorrain ou le Satyricon 1900 [Paris:
Fayard, 1974] 165).
2. Pierre Kyria, Jean Lorrain (Paris: Seghers, 1973) 111.
3. Guy de Maupassant, Sur l'eau (1888; rpt. Paris: Albin Michel, 1 954) 109.
4. For a discussion of Lorrain's ambivalent attitude toward journalism, see Kyria, 105
and Jullian, 284.
5. Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas, Astarté (1901; rpt. Paris: Union générale d'édi
tions, 1974) 83. All further references to this work appear in the text.
6. Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Bougre/on (1897; rpt. Paris: Union générale d'éditions,
1974) 345. All further references to this work appear in the text.
7. Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 1978) 160.
8. Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, 8th ed. (Paris:
Bordas, 1 969) 466-467. All further references to this work appear in the text.
9. A.E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830-1900 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1 958) 116.

Decadent Aesthetics in Jean Lorrain

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THE SPECTACLE OF SELF: DECADENT AESTHETICS IN JEAN LORRAIN

Author(s): Robert E. Ziegler

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Homosexual, "éthéromane," friend to such courtesans and "demi-mondaines"

critic of the time in which he lived. "Des présidents de la République à Sarah

infrequently examined by students of French literary history.

Lorrain counted among his patrons Edmond de Goncourt, Barbey d'Aurevilly,

Huysmans of the time of his writing Là-bas—Lorrain, because of his extrava

As both a journalist and novelist, Lorrain showed himself to be a kind of dou

lar mentality that characterized the era when he lived.

Indeed, Lorrain's heroes are like many found in "fin-de-siècle" fiction,

of stimulation and experience. As they contrived to live vicariously on the

ing excitement and detachment, their capacity to function as both illusionists

but can never go beyond enjoying exclusively by proxy.

in many writers of the time. "Acteur et spectateur de lui-même et des autres,

pliqué et fatigant pour lui-même."3 Rather, what distinguishes Lorrain is his

pursuing of the implications of this tendency in an innovative way: his inves

tigation in certain of his works of the harmful psychological effects of this

with it and thereby make themselves a character in another person's fiction.

As a journalist, Lorrain himself served as a medium for his readers, creating

dence of real intelligence is transferred to lifeless canvases and statues. What

scent of rare and poisonous flowers? He pursues his aesthetic of morbidity in

time of her death approaches.

voitises, intérêts mesquins, cupidité, vanité, préjugés, lâches appétits et sourde

envie: voilà l'abominable grouillement qu'on trouve aujourd'hui dans les

feels for Claudius Ethal.

dium through which Phocas is revealed most clearly to himself. No longer

articulated through his words.' "Ce mystérieux causeur me raconte à moi

nurtured in him by his mentor, Phocas is momentarily attracted to Sir Thomas

integrated way of life. But Welcome's promised remedy depends not on an

empassioned commitment to a given course of action, but on constant move

contemplate. With no other purpose to his actions than to effectuate a change

in his surroundings, he attains the artificial wholeness of the person who is

come's recitations give rise to in his mind.

Indeed, Welcome's description of the pleasure of the traveler recalls the

attitudes and values of the cloistered aesthetes found in Huysmans, in their

aspire to the satisfaction of being "l'éveilleur averti de ses propres voluptés";

both indulge in the self-stimulation that results in "le coït intellectuel .. .

the traveler becomes revitalized through the constant changes he proceeds to

Yet, in spite of Welcome's recommending that a man pursue firsthand

experience, undistorted by social prejudice and unmediated by people like

Ethal, it is precisely to Ethal that Phocas turns, to act as an agenda-setter for

encompassing as it is unhealthy and unreal. Claudius's world consists of waxen

busts of consumptive teen-age beggars, grotesque masks from remote, exotic

cultures, tableaux of noble ladies dying of exposure to noxious floral gases.

preferable to what he leaves behind. It is better, as he sees it, to become the

play-thing of a monster than to go on suffering the process of "dédoublement"

gered nightmare scenes that he beholds at one of Claudius's infamous soirées.

For Claudius, as Phocas's manuscript points out, is a poisoner of men. He cul

ridatized. In order for Phocas to reverse the course of moral dissolution he is

on his own by which he might finally be detoxified.

history of playing the role of brainwashed spectator at Claudius's shows. The

himself: "J'étais comme dédoublé. Il me semblait assister en spectateur à un

actions, Lorrain's character continues to regard his life as theater, a perfor

mance at which he serves at once as audience, player and director.

In Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897), the main character's mythomania again

give it meaning. But unlike Monsieur de Phocas, who depended on another

to mediate experience, Monsieur de Bougrelon needs no one else to stage or

only really necessary viewer. Monsieur de Bougrelon's advantage lies in the

ently each time that he narrates it.

Monsieur de Phocas. Here the emptiness of spectacle is represented once again,

and tourists, intent on finding someone entertaining to distract them from

gaudily outfitted eccentric who captivates them by the incongruous bits of