Dusk and Dawn. Literature between Two Centuries

dusk and dawn

literature between two centuries

Eva Voldřichová Beránková / Šárka Grauová (eds.)

Dusk and Dawn

Literature between Two Centuries

Eva Voldřichová Beránková, Šárka Grauová (eds.)

This volume as a whole is a result of the research and editorial activity funded by the Czech Science Foundation as the project GAČR 14–01821S entitled Attempting the Renaissance of the West. Literary and Intellectual Climate at the Turn of the 20th Century, 2014–2016, implemented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.

This volume has been peer-reviewed by: prof. PhDr. Zuzana Malinovská, CSc. prof. PhDr. Petr Kyloušek, CSc.

Editors © Eva Voldřichová Beránková, Šárka Grauová, 2017 Translations © Pavlína Morgan, Tim Morgan, 2017 Copyright © Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta, 2017 Cover Illustration: Egon Schiele: Autumn Sun, 1912 All rights reserved ISBN 978-80-7308-704-3

CONTENTS Introduction ◆ Eva Voldřichová Beránková

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I. The positivist era: Affections and disaffections In search of new directions for European civilisation: The philosophy of the history of Russian Symbolism ◆ Vladimír Svatoň

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España, 1900: el renacimiento de la modernidad ◆ Juan A. Sánchez Fernández

32

Shadows in the backlands: The Brazilian regionalist short story at the turn of the twentieth century ◆ Šárka Grauová

87

American Modernism in broader perspective ◆ Eva Kalivodová

De l’énorme au hénaurme : le rire sans limites. Quelques observations sur les aléas de l’humour à la Belle Époque ◆ Václav Jamek

The “knights of the spirit” and their crusade against Verism: The state of Italian prose in the 1890s ◆ Alice Flemrová

The defence of poetry in Hispano­‑American Modernism ◆ Anna Housková

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107 162 182

II. Fin de siècle: People, places, myths and movements Hacia Eugenio de Castro en la galería de raros ◆ Gema Areta Marigó

Un naturalisme symboliste? Émile Zola comme critique littéraire ◆ Eva Voldřichová Beránková

The elitist conception of culture and literature in the essays and lectures of Georg Brandes and Knut Hamsun ◆ Martin Humpál Entre critique et fiction : comment écrire un roman en 1884? ◆ Marie­‑Françoise Melmoux­‑Montaubin

De l’un au deux : dans l’entre­‑deux. Symbolisme ou décadence? ◆ Catherine Ébert­‑Zeminová

Inadequacy and the bourgeois age: Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal ◆ Štěpán Sirovátka

Proust and literature: The elusiveness of the past against the “defeatism of the heart” ◆ Eva Blinková­‑Pelánová

Out in the open: The Pocket Book of Edward Thomas ◆ Justin Quinn

197 217 237 252 266 304 319

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D’Annunzio: Poet of paradox ◆ Jiří Pelán

The myth of the dead city in Portuguese fiction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ◆ Silvie Špánková My heart made a pilgrimage: The topos of the journey in Hispano­‑American modernist prose ◆ Dora Poláková

Laboratoire tardif du symbolisme : doctrine vitaliste de Tancrède de Visan ◆ Záviš Šuman Bibliography

Abstracts

About the authors Summary

355 386 406 421 459

491 501

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Introduction

“Aye, but each one must be the helping gardener of his own soul…”

Joris­‑Karl Huysmans (The Cathedral)

The turn of the century, that fragile equilibrium between dusk and dawn, is often characterised by a crisis of identity, by a battle royal between traditional poetics and their more avant­‑garde pretenders, and by a transformation of ideological paradigms which leads in turn to the strange co­‑existence of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions, and ultimately to the kind of creative chaos that terrifies the conservatives but offers the revolutionaries hope that they will soon see the arrival of a “new man”. Everything is in motion, old norms collapse while the new are yet to be properly established, and even highly cultivated readers find it impossible to follow the vast torrent of material that flows out from both traditional and newly founded publishing houses and innumerable ephemeral periodicals. There is, to all intents and purposes, an outbreak of the kind of “frenzied pointlessness” for which Antonin Artaud called throughout his life, and rare is the author who is able to resist the temptation to test – as provocatively as they will – the boundaries of the newly gained freedoms so hard won by stubborn rebellion against previous generations and of course unsanctioned by academic institutions.

The great variety of movements that fall under the general heading “Symbolism”, in the very broadest sense of the word, that is, from the last throes of Parnassianism to somewhere around the dawn of Surrealism, can certainly not be said to have a single common denominator: the symbolist and decadent rebellion against naturalist doctrine in France, Generation 98 in Spain, the Modernism of turn­‑of­‑the­‑century Hispanic America (in Britain, the USA, and also, for example, in Brazil the same term is associated with the avant­‑garde), Stilkunst in Germany, Clarism in Russia, Vitalism under the growing influence of Nietzsche, and across Introduction

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Europe, “Wagnerism”, neo­‑Romanticism, Impressionism, the Czech Modern Movement, Adamism, and all manner of weird, wonderful and decidedly tongue­‑in­‑cheek movements such as Hydropatism, Zutism, and even Jemenfoutism (“Je m’en fous”: I don’t give a damn). The aim of this publication is not to turn the exuberant vegetation of the fin de siècle into a manicured lawn of perfect academic definitions, but rather – and very much in line with the opening quotation from Huysmans – to highlight the depth and originality of the great variety of symbolist thinking which is, by its very nature, highly divergent and staunchly resistant to methodological categorisation.

Having said this, what emerges from the chapters of this monograph (and from the many lively discussions we have entered into over the past three years at the colloquia organised as part of the grant­‑aided programme “Towards a Renaissance of the West: Literary and Intellectual Resources of the Turn of the 20th Century”) is a group of common themes, points of reference, which enable us to look at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a more synthesised way, naturally, and without pretending to pronounce the “final word” from our vantage point a hundred years down the line.

The first and most fundamental premise of all the “isms” of the end of the nineteenth century appears to be a radical revolt against positivism, or at least against the mechanical philosophy of its zenith (before Auguste Comte fell platonically in love with Clotilde de Vaux, suddenly recast his teaching on the “religion of humanity”, and published his utopian­ ‑mystical The Catechism of Positive Religion), which reduced human knowledge to “observation” and “experiment”, proclaimed the bright tomorrow guaranteed by the triad of “science”, “order” and “progress”, and subjected man, nature and the cosmos to the unrelenting (but all the better for that, predictable) laws of determination. While Zola­‑the­‑theoretician (so much less genial than Zola­‑the­‑novelist­‑poet­‑and­‑visionary) allows himself to become carried away by notions of the “necessary usefulness” of literature, which will lead humanity through the medium of scientific knowledge to the path of reason, truth and the good…

We show the mechanism of the useful and the useless, we disengage the determinism of the human and social phenomena so that, in their turn, the legislators can one day dominate and control these phenomena. In 8

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a word, we are working with the whole country toward that great object, the conquest of nature and the increase of man’s power a hundredfold.1

…in Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky’s protagonist maliciously cultivates his liver disease and – despite the best efforts of the renowned doctors and the engineers and architects of the “glass palaces” who long to prescribe him a better life than he is able to provide for himself – defiantly mumbles: I am a sick man… I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. […] No, sir, I refuse to be treated out of wickedness. Now, you will certainly not be so good as to understand this. Well, sir, but I understand it. I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my wickedness; I know perfectly well that I will in no way “muck things up” for the doctors by not taking their treatment; I know better than anyone that by all this I am harming only myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t get treated, it is out of wickedness. My liver hurts; well, then let it hurt even worse!2

Naturally, the form and general tenor of particular works differ greatly, so that the revolt against determinism can be, variously, caustically cynical, playfully humorous, morbidly decadent, militantly avant­‑garde, or even to some extent vitalist. But at the core of each work is the freedom of the individual and a welcoming of an excess to which the only limits are the limitations within the author’s own person.

Within this polemic, this reaction against positivism, we are able, then, to trace two contradictory trends: on one side is extreme individualism in the spirit of the technological optimism of the avant­‑garde (Apollinaire’s “new spirit”, which conceives history as an infinite succession of happy co­‑incidences), and on the other the more critical face of Modernism, which shares no illusions to historical justice and is only too aware of the risks that a new era brings.

1

See Émile Zola, Le Roman expérimental, Paris, Charpentier, 1880, p. 29.

2 See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Vo‑ lokhonsky), New York, Vintage, 1993, p. 3–4.

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This fundamental axiological dichotomy involves yet further contradictions. In a direct line from Baudelaire, Symbolism often plays with a radical opposition of body and soul, the angelic and the animalistic, and tortures itself with the ascetic demands of “eternal purity” and a fascinated terror of female sexuality (Baudelaire’s “black Venus”), which sometimes goes as far as extreme misogyny and even a fantasmatic rejection of anything bodily. Whitman’s followers, on the other hand, discover their modern individuality precisely through the sensual, through sensuous experience; for them, Mother Nature is a benevolent power which looks well on mankind, and from which they are able to create the central pillar of a new, non­‑religious notion of transcendence.

There is a decadent, dandyist trend in Symbolism which is sometimes taken to the limits of extravagant individualism (we think of Huysmans’ aesthete Jean des Esseintes and his morbid experiments with a jewel­ ‑incrusted tortoise), which abhors society and cultivates an imaginary aristocratism while locked away in its ivory towers; but there is also Ivanov’s communal Symbolism, which fosters “sobornost”, a collective and historical solidarity between people of the same spiritual tradition: The external form of collective union, the only form acceptable for mys‑ tical anarchism but all the more desired, would be a collective alliance which arose through being mystically chosen according to the law of homogeneity, in which the members mutually intuit that uttermost “so be it” lodged somewhere within their uttermost silence.3

At the end of the nineteenth century, many European countries exhibit a kind of nostalgic pessimism, as though desperately clinging to the spectre of the “twilight of the West”. Hispanic America, on the other hand, in its “new Renaissance”, rejects the French, British and (North) American models it had previously imitated and begins to realise its own cultural specificity. The prevailing “Nordomania” gives way to a vision of “our America”, full of faith in the future and the creative hopes of its “young people”: “I have faith in the betterment of humanity, in future 3 See Vjacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Po zvezdam. Borozdy i meži, V. V. Sapov (ed.), Moskva, Astreľ, 2007, p. 101.

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life, in the utility of virtue, and in you”, declares José Martí in his preface to the collection Ismaelillo, dedicated to his young son.4 We find a similar dichotomy in Brazil, where some symbolists consider themselves cosmopolitan Europeans who just happen to live “on the opposite shore of the ocean”, while others pursue regionalist genres, having accepted that the global spirit of Modernism dooms them either to perdition or to oblivion.

Literary genres mingle quite happily together in Symbolism, just so long as they are not explicitly denied, but the “supreme Poetry” (poésie suprême) to which entire generations of Mallarméans clung as the only salvation both of language and of man himself (“the world was made in order to result in a beautiful book”) is nevertheless swallowed up by a strange hybrid we could call the “novel­‑essay” or “a sort of novel” (Proust), or, in its shorter form, a “short novel bordering on an essay”.

For their philosophy, the symbolists read Schopenhauer, and of course Nietzsche, whose works even inspired Georg Brandes to write the concise manifesto Aristocratic Radicalism, an artistic revolt against the tyranny of mediocrity, bourgeois tastes and modern mass culture. In music, Richard Wagner and his concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk” – perceived not only as a “total work of art” but also as a more general aesthetic programme which applies to the whole of human life – ruled the day.

The key topoi of the end of the century are journeys, pilgrimages, initiations, passages to “another world” or to an “inner reality” which the narrator or the poetic subject (who often betrays clear autobiographical characteristics) must undergo in order to find him or herself or to attempt, if only briefly, to behold the meaning of all being. There is also a notable rise in the number of sects and new religious movements, spiritualist séances and Satanic black masses, and of dreams, whether spontaneous or induced by various hallucinatory devices, and later, literary theoreticians will dispute long and hard over how much of the symbolists’ output represents an honest search for spiritual “enlightenment” and a pure aesthetic fascination with various rituals (the more theatrical the better), and how much is merely a manifestation of ironic hyperbole and the most extreme forms of black humour.

4

See José Martí, Ismaelillo. Versos libres. Versos sencillos, Madrid, Cátedra, 2001, p. 65.

Introduction

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Symbolists (long before Borges) love their libraries, intertextual references, galleries full of portraits (preferably of their ancestors, whether real or fictitious), ekphrasis, boudoirs crammed with orientalia, magical machines, artificial beings, sophisticated pleasures, “luxe calme et volupté” inside and the hustle and bustle of city life outside. They are fascinated by boulevards at night time, gas lamps, bohemian cafés, and women (or even men) with extravagant makeup. The countryside, on the other hand, everything “natural”, terrifies these night animals, although there are of course exceptions – particularly in Russia, but also, for example, in Portugal – who seek in simple country folk and rural tradition some kind of final echoes of their national ideals of Romanticism.

In terms of their politics, symbolists are almost impossible to classify as they span the entire spectrum of the political parties and movements of the day: aristocratic monarchists and convinced republicans, Boulangists and Dreyfusists, communists and would­‑be fascists, utopian socialists and indifferent opportunists, radical nationalists and complete anarchists.

Their position in relation to what will become the “isms” of the beginning of the twentieth century is, more often than not, highly critical, but when today, with the benefit of more than a century of hindsight, we evaluate all of the genres and the thematic, stylistic, psychological and philosophical novelties introduced by “Symbolism”, in the very broadest sense of the word, there remains one obvious question we should ask: Was it not Symbolism, in fact, that was the first true western avant­ ‑garde? We invite the reader to seek answers to this question in the chapters that follow.

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I. The positivist era: Affections and disaffections

In search of new directions for European civilisation: The philosophy of the history of Russian Symbolism Vladimír Svatoň

A terrible oppression came over him, a mortal fear in face of the inescapability of life.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal1

Two trends in modernist literature: Romantic roots In the world of literature and the arts at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are able to distinguish two separate but frequently converging trends that sought to come to terms with what was generally perceived as a crisis in European civilisation.

These were particularly those trends we would describe as “avant­ ‑garde”. Essentially, these trends continued the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment, proclaiming man’s universal liberation in the spheres of lifestyle, morality, politics and economics, and also reflected what it was that writers were seeking to achieve: to be free to indulge their sensual impressions (“sensations”) and spontaneous creative impulses, to abandon themselves to whatever fancy or fantasy took them, to wander freely through a stream of associations. The metaphorical interpretation of “facts” could now become as free as possible and the link between sign and meaning as distant as possible. Poets could consider themselves the lords and masters of language, play with the narratives, comment freely on their own writing, revel in associations, demon1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Tale of the 672nd night” (trans. F. Ryder), in F. Ryder and R. Browning (eds.), German Fairy Tales, New York, Continuum, 2002, p. 287.

In search of new directions for European civilisation

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Abstracts

In search of new directions for European civilisation: The philosophy of the history of Russian Symbolism From among the many characteristics descriptive of spiritual life at the turn of the twentieth century, this chapter focuses on the revival of the Romantic vision of the cosmos as an organic, dynamic and creative whole.

This vision served as the basis both for the epistemological reflections on the differences between the humanities and the empirically oriented sciences (W. Dilthey, W. Windelband) and also for “Anti­‑modern Modernism” in literature (M. Kundera), which developed alongside Avant­‑garde movements and continued the emancipatory efforts of the Illumination.

“Anti­‑modern Modernism” was deeply rooted in Russian culture, which since the beginning of the nineteenth century had responded critically to Western rationalism and individualism (I. Kireyevsky, A. Khomyakov).

This response found its strongest expression in the concept of sobornost, which attempted to capture the communal nature of individual spiritual activities. In the Symbolist era, this tendency is represented by the philosophers V. Solovyov and V. Ivanov (Ivanov’s concept of “mystical anarchism”). Historical events and everyday life were both seen as a manifestation of cosmic powers. Motifs typical of this vision were an intense feeling of connection to the Earth, the aestheticisation of life (upside down Dandyism), a fascination with relics and collections (A. Remizov, K. Vaginov), and the re­‑evaluation of the image of Saint Petersburg not only as an extraneous element in the Russian environment but also as a kind of familiar chaos.

Spain 1900: The renaissance of modernity The chapter focuses on the paradigm shift in Spanish thought which took place around the year 1900. A new conception of man’s place in the cosmos and of the function of art and literature created a rift between the realist generation (Galdós, Clarín, Valera, Pardo Bazán) and the generation of 1898 (Unamuno, Baroja, Azorín, Machado). The new literature is Abstracts

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characterised by the appearance of a number of distinctive features: the intellectual, and the intellectual as a character in the novel, as in certain works of Baroja and Azorín; existential and autobiographical themes; the conception of the novel as a device for wondering about existence and the intimate problems of the soul; the rejection of rhetoric as an insincere way of speaking about oneself; the collapse of reason, and the appearance of a new type of reason, influenced by Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and a new attention to the novel­‑writing techniques of Cervantes. These features weave a net of new references and introduce Spanish culture to the issues under discussion in Europe and in modernity. Around the year 1900, however, modernity in Europe is coming to an end. Spain therefore returns to modernity – to the modernity it never (quite) had – at the moment of its dawn.

American Modernism in broader perspective The chapter explores a theoretical approach to Modernism, or modernisms, as individual or societal reactions to the experience of crises in the social order (values, systems and mechanisms that position people – individually and in groups – in communities, and that influence or determine their agency) in advanced, secularised modernity between the mid­‑nineteenth century and the 1920’s. Drawing on the argumentation of Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism (2007), it focuses on cultural and societal developments in the United States of America during the period in question. (The second decade of the twentieth century is used as “time marker”; modernisms may, by their very nature, extend beyond it.) The chapter considers the (unique) characteristics of American modernity that rise from the very beginnings of “Western” democracy. In the context of the “accelerated modernity” of the USA, the thinking and literary output of a number of representatives of the American Renaissance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville) are examined from the perspective of a possible modernist dynamic, while developments that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the Civil War, are interpreted as a result of the rise of capitalism (social, economic and cultural) in the northern states, which saw the concept of transcendentalist individualist achievement completely overtaken by materialism. The chapter compares and contrasts the literary and cultural reactions to these developments 492

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of “the Gilded Age” by writers of the genteel tradition (Edith Wharton and Henry James), and by those of American Naturalism (principally Theodore Dreiser), and seeks to explain the American “Progressivism” (political, social and cultural) of the early twentieth century as a manifestation of the popular belief that a reformation of modern progress is possible. Together with the Chicago Renaissance, these progressivist activities are interpreted as an attempt at modernist reform, social or aesthetic, of a society living in denial of what others saw as a period of degeneration. In contrast, the emigration – and literary works – of two American intellectuals, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, are interpreted as reflecting the need for the United States of America to undergo an existential and aesthetic modernist revolution.

Shadows in the backlands: The Brazilian regionalist short story at the turn of the twentieth century The intellectual and spiritual climate of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was torn between adherence to positivist certainties and an enduring interest in the mystery of the unmapped and the unsolved. In Brazil, endeavouring to get in step with the modern world, one particular zone of unexplored shadows was provided by rural communities and their archaic thought. This chapter follows the metamorphosis of the supposedly supernatural from the marvellous, represented by the short­‑story “Dance of the Skeleton” by Bernardo Guimarães, to the uncanny and fantastic proper, as represented by “The Haunted House”

by Afonso Arinos.

Laughter without borders. Some observations on developments of humor in the Belle Époque I call radical laughter any laughter that extends in any way the limitations which the society imposes on us. My chapter deals with the manifestation of this kind of humour in history of French literature with a special emphasis on the “Belle Époque” era in which the radical laughter developed in the strongest way. After a short recapitulation in which I characterize the status of laughter within the French Civilization by pointing out to Rabelais and more generally to the starting point of “laughter without borders”, my chapter evaluates and deals with the radical humour throughout the 19th century, from frenetic RomantiAbstracts

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cism and Lautréamont passing by collective activities of “zutistes” and “fumistes” to Alfred Jarry and his pataphysique. The chapter also analyzes critically the period’s theories and philosophy of laughter (Baudelaire, Bergson). They seem quite shocking to me because of their narrow and inadequate perspective and also due to their retrograde bias. They significantly contributed to neutralization of radical humour in France. The conclusion outlines briefly the development of radical humour in the French 20th century literature and it also offers intercultural comparison with Czech attitude towards humour in order to show, why and how the conceptions of it might differ within different social environments. The chapter focuses on the fact that there is an idea of “generally convenient” use of laughter (le bon usage du rire) and I don’t hide that the overriding aim of my chapter consists in a resolute defense of laughter against its imperious and gloomy detractors and preachers who are not able to laugh.

The “knights of the spirit” and their crusade against Verism: The state of Italian prose in the 1890s In the early 1890s, Italian writers begin to show an inclination towards the spiritualisation and aestheticism of art, a trend highlighted in the article “Knights of the Spirit” by Matilde Serao (1894). This chapter explores whether these authors created a genuine literary movement with its own poetics, or whether that movement simply represented a reaction to the fall of the myth of positivism, a reaction that contributed to the denial of the narrative method of Italian verismo. The chapter also deals with the influence of “fashion”, consensus and social contagion on literary works and how they are received. Authors symbolic of the realist­‑idealist controversy analysed in the essay include Giovanni Verga and Gabriele D’Annunzio, and their critical fortunes are traced up to the time of the First World War. The defence of poetry in Hispano-American Modernism It is possible to understand the parallel between the Renaissance at the beginning of the Modern era and the renewal at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as western civilisation’s cyclical ability to renew itself. The two periods have certain features in common: the rejection of previous philosophies (scholasticism, positivism), the expansion of the essay as the genre of free thought, the cult of beauty, the search 494

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for the kind of renewal that would herald a new era. The motive force behind the cultural and literary renewal in Hispanic­‑America was the Cuban poet and essayist José Martí, who refused to imitate the dominant civilisations in nineteenth­‑century Latin America and insisted on a turn inward, to the authentic self, a change in which poetry played a key role.

In Darío’s gallery of eccentrics: Eugenio de Castro The context of the initial publication of Darío’s essays Los raros (The Eccentrics, 12 October 1896) is “Buenos Aires: Cosmopolis”, as Darío called the city that held a place of special significance throughout his career.

In September 1896, in the Ateneo, Darío gave a lecture on Eugenio de Castro, the text of which he was to include later at the end of Los raros.

In the exotic gallery that is Los raros, his portrait of the great Portuguese cultivator of pure art – respected by conservative institutions – seems rather removed from those of “the cursed poets” (Lautréamont, Rachilde, Hannon, Richepin, Bloy, Villiers de L’Isle Adam) and all of the characters immersed in scandal (Max Nordau, Poe, Verlaine). Order is provided to the seeming labyrinthine heterogeneity of Los raros through the system of interconnections by which the characters create a continuous chain that twists and turns in an infinite spiral of names, sources, titles, predicates, criticisms, citations and translations. A similar kind of intertextuality affects the poems of Prosas profanas (Profane Hymns), which were headed by the dedication “To Eugenio de Castro”. Darío introduced his character as being a product of the Romance triangle of French Symbolism, the absence of pure art in a stagnating Spain, and the presence of Portuguese art in the intellectual movement of the day.

From Naturalism to Symbolism: The literary criticism of Émile Zola Zola’s theoretical thinking can be divided into three distinct periods. The first (1866–1871) is dedicated to the progressive assertion of the “naturalist” aesthetic. During the second period (1875–1881), Zola claims a convincing victory over his detractors and dominates Parisian cultural life. After 1882, however, the writer stops sending theoretical texts to French newspapers. He continues defending young intellectuals against censorship and accuses the military and political powers of the day of being guilty of criminal activity (the Dreyfus affair), but texts Abstracts

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about Naturalism itself become rare. By the end of his life, Zola is paradoxically approaching a new “symbolist” aesthetic and partly denying his former proclamations in favour of the experimental novel.

The elitist conception of culture and literature in the essays and lectures of Georg Brandes and Knut Hamsun The chapter focuses on the elitist nature of selected essays and lectures of Georg Brandes and Knut Hamsun, who contributed substantially to a major re­‑orientation of Scandinavian literature in the 1890s. The texts under discussion, from around 1890, represent an appeal for exceptional literary works written by spiritual aristocrats, and directly or indirectly dismiss contemporary Realism and Naturalism. Hamsun in particular argues that a truly valuable literature cannot be understood and appreciated by the ordinary reader, a standpoint which can be regarded as characteristic of many modernist writers.

Between critique and fiction: Writing a novel in 1884?

One of the major characteristics of fin­‑de­‑siècle literature, which defines art novel, was the ambiguity between a theoretically referential critique and a novel. This ambiguity is so significant that when in 1883 Huysmans presented his collection of critiques L’Art Moderne, he declared that he wished to write it “as a novel”. In contrast, in 1895, his novel La Cathédrale appeared to him as a complement to his “critical series”. Modes and challenges of this ambiguity are then analysed.

The Frailty of the Fracture: on Apostrophe in Mallarmé’s Hérodiade This chapter analyses the differences between Decadence and Symbolism. Recent research on the fin de siècle suggests that the border between the two movements is far from clear cut; the chapter seeks to contribute to this re­‑evaluation of the fin­‑de­‑siècle dynamic by demonstrating the subtlety of this frontier at its deepest level. The chapter centres on Stephane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade and especially the passage where the protagonist cries out to the mirror, “Ô Miroir!” The principal analytical tool is the concept of “nano­‑reading”, which is applied to certain binary and ternary patterns which focus on the artistic and gnoseologic preoccupations of the Fin de siècle (unity versus duality, the natural versus the artificial, temporal versus a­‑temporal, and so on), and which 496

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are all accessible through specular reflection. Such analysis shows how the boundary between Decadence and Symbolism becomes a topic with ontological implications, perpetually oscillating between the similarities and dissimilarities between the two aesthetics.

Inadequacy and the bourgeois age: Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal The chapter sets out to compare two fin­‑de­‑siècle German­‑speaking authors, Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and to offer a specific “German” interpretation of certain phenomena of the period, such as dandyism and aestheticism. Mann’s concept of the bourgeois age as a spiritual way of life is highly germane to the German­‑speaking world. It is a notion of a “middle way” that rejects any kind of excess and embodies a strong sense of moral obligation. German “Decadence” thus lacks any of the explicit anti­‑social element that we see in dandyism, and is merely one expression of the general process of Entbürgerlichung (de­‑bourgeoization).

Aestheticism is critically reflected upon, especially in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose early period culminates in an attempt at a new Dingpoetik in “The Letter of Lord Chandos”.

Proust and literature: The elusiveness of the past against the “defeatism of the heart” Considering the insoluble romantic conflict between the subject and the world, that we conceptualise as “defeatism of the heart”, this chapter shows Proust’s ideas on art as well as his fictional work. For Proust, the singularity of any being is still crucial but unlike the romantic point of view, it mediates – through a methodical creation of a work of art – the knowledge of what is universal; Proust talks about les lois mystérieuses revealed in a “classical” work. In Proust’s opinion, metaphor represents the embodiment of a dynamism between the singular and the universal: it associates two very important moments, analysis and mystery. What may guarantee a long lifetime for the work of art is author’s singular and individual literary style.

Out in the open: The Pocket Book of Edward Thomas This chapter compares the figurations of the English poetic tradition in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Edward Thomas’s The Pocket Book of Poems and Abstracts

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Songs of the Open Air. By adopting a new way of seeing the tradition, Thomas also enabled a new approach to the larger issues of English patriotism and nature poetry, as well as a way of departing from nineteenth­‑century political and cultural values, even while rejecting the direction taken by modernist writers. In conclusion, the chapter explores the political implications of Thomas’s new poetry of the English land, against the context of Modernism and Fascism.

D’Annunzio: Poet of paradox D’Annunzio’s poetics is characterised by a certain inner tension: as a lyrical poet his primary interest is in autobiographical subjects, but those are systematically stylised according to the cultural trends of the day, as represented by the parnassianists, English Pre­‑Raphaelites and French symbolists. In terms of his themes, D’Annunzio is attracted both by a passive attitude to life – an onlooker’s indifference – and by a vigorous kind of activism that verges on the aggressive. An overview of his poetic works corroborates these constant changes. In stylistic terms, the development of D’Annunzio’s poetics may be charted as a journey from Parnassianism to Symbolism, while during the 1880s and 1890s the two poetics seem to come together. The parnassianist influence is evident in the collections from Primo vere to La chimera (1879‒1890), while the symbolist inspiration appears as early as Intermezzo di rime (1883) and came to a head in the period 1895–1904 in the books of poems from Elegie romane to Alcione. D’Annunzio develops three distinct variants of Symbolism. Intermezzo embodies Symbolism of the decadent kind, in which man is perceived merely as an object of biological determination and erotic enslavement. In the Symbolism of Poema paradisiaco, the poet rejects the power of the Schopenhauerian will and contemplates the flow of life from an exalted aesthetic stance. The most distinct variant of D’Annunzio’s Symbolism is that which culminates in Alcione: here his poetry resounds with a panic­‑stricken, lecherous, sensual vitalism, which has nothing in common with Schopenhauer’s Wille and instead finds a philosophical correlate in Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht.

The myth of the dead city in Portuguese fiction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries The chapter deals with the myth of the dead city and focuses on urban imagery in Portuguese fiction at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth 498

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centuries. The analysis of short stories and novels by Fialho de Almeida, Raul Brandão and Aquilino Ribeiro reveals a variety of urban forms: the city is by turns dying, suffering, buried, decomposed and submerged.

In the narratives of Fialho de Almeida, the real city of Lisbon, inhabited by people from across the whole spectrum of society, appears mostly as a dark space transformed by the prism of Expressionism. Almeida’s imagery is followed by the works of Raul Brandão, which focus on the pain, misery and tragic existence of the poorest of the poor. Finally, Aquilino Ribeiro offers a fantastical image of a submerged city. Each of these urban representations, in which particular attention is paid to the social world, anticipate the symbolic topography of Portuguese literature from later in the twentieth century.

My heart made a pilgrimage: The topos of the journey in Hispano­‑American modernist prose At the turn of the twentieth century, Hispano­‑American writers travel to many different countries and continents. But they also travel in time and undertake spiritual journeys, searching for God, the mystery of the Universe, or their own identity. Their eternal aim is the Beauty and Harmony which they fail to see in the world around them. “The journey” therefore represents a key topos in both their lives and their literary works. Using the example of Rubén Darío, his short stories and his unfinished novel The Gold of Mallorca (which has significant autobiographical characteristics), the chapter seeks to demonstrate how this topos both influences and determines modernist prose.

The Late Laboratory of French Symbolism: Tancrède de Visan’s Vitalism The chapter describes and evaluates the main aesthetical and philosophical criteria as they appear in those articles and books by Tancrède de Visan that deal with Symbolism. In his approach to poetry and more generally to literature two basic convictions are identified. First, that poets should aspire to a complete representation of the human soul, and secondly that they should thus refrain from a limited rationalist vision. Poetry should be given a mission which is not dissimilar to what Bergson calls “intuition”. This method shall lead a poet to a synthesis integrating both the senses and reason. Such aspiration to a synthesis is then seen as an Abstracts

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ideal means of expressing the complex nature of Life which constitutes Visan’s supreme and often repeated requirement. Based on these two criteria, Visan evaluates the achievements of Parnassian and symbolist poets, but his readings and evaluations are considered somewhat misleading. He seems to overrate the Parnassian call for objectivity and for exact imitation. These hasty assertions are no longer tenable, partly because they deliberately served the purpose of polemic. On the other hand, Visan’s analytical skills and his ability to clearly demonstrate the aesthetical criteria are still very convincing. In particular, Visan’s distinction between what he calls “vision périphérique” and “vision centrale” serves the characterisation of Parnassian and symbolist poetry very well and thus preserves its heuristic feasibility.

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About the authors

Gema Areta Marigó (b. 1961) is an eminent Spanish academic who specialises in Hispano­‑American poetry. She is a docent in Hispano­ ‑American literature at the Universidad de Sevilla, where she is soon to be awarded a professorship. In 1990 she received a doctorate at the same university; her thesis on the poetics of Peruvian poet José María Eguren was published in 1993. She is an expert on Cuban, Peruvian and Argentinian poetry, and has a special focus on facsimile editions of the avant­‑garde periodicals Verbum (2001), Espuela de Plata (2002), and Nadie Parecía: Cuaderno de lo Bello con Dios (2006). She was also editor of Ensayos selectos (Selected Essays, 2015) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, and has lectured at universities in Puerto Rico, Brazil, France and the Czech Republic.

Eva Blinková Pelánová (b. 1978) read Czech, German and Romance studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP). She was awarded the Prix Gallica for her doctoral thesis “Německá inspirace v díle Gérarda de Nerval” (German inspiration in the work of Gérard de Nerval), which was published in 2014. During her doctoral studies she lectured in modern French literature at the Faculty of Arts, CUP, and since 2013 has lectured at the Pedagogical Faculty, specialising in world literature. She has had numerous articles published, largely in the journal Svět literatury (World of Literature); she also translates fiction.

Catherine Ébert­‑Zeminová (b. 1968) is a writer and Romanist who specialises in twentieth­‑century French literature, with a focus on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm), Université Paris VII­‑Jussieu, and Charles University, Prague (CUP). She now works in the Department of French Language and Literature at the Pedagogical Faculty, CUP. She has had many articles published in Literární noviny (Literary News), Aluze, and Svět literatury (World of Literature), and is the author of two monographs: Textasis: Anagogie interpretačního vztahu (Textasis: The Anagogy of About the authors

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Interpretative Relations, 2011) and Texterritorium: V souřadnicích moderního francouzského písemnictví (Texterritorium: In the Co­‑ordinates of Modern French Literature, 2014).

Alice Flemrová (b. 1970) studied Italian and Spanish philology at Charles University, Prague, where she was also awarded her doctorate in 2004.

Her main interests lie in Italian literature from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (two monographs: Italo Svevo a jeho literární postava [Italo Svevo and his Literary Character] and Protagonisté italského modernistického románu [The Protagonists of the Italian Modernist Novel]; and articles in foreign publications), the authors of the Italian South (studies on Pirandello, Brancati, and others), and contemporary prose (postscripts to her own translations, and the anthology Hořký život [Bitter Life]). In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Prague she organised two international conferences: one on the poetics of laughter in Italian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century (2014), and the other on esotericism, occultism and the fantastical from the fin de siècle to the avant­‑gardes (2016). Šárka Grauová (b. 1965) studied English and Portuguese philology at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP), where she also defended her doctoral thesis “Překlad jako kulturní fenomén. George Steiner: Po Bábelu” (Translation as a Cultural Phenomenon. George Steiner: After Babel). She teaches Portuguese­‑language literatures in the Institute of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts, CUP. She translates from English and Portuguese into Czech (i. a. G. Steiner, Machado de Assis, M. de Andrade, V. Ferreira, C. Buarque), is editor­‑in­‑chief of the Luso­‑Brazilian Library series, which publishes translations of works by Portuguese and Brazilian authors, and chair of the Society of Czech Lusitanists.

Anna Housková (b. 1948) worked for seventeen years at the Institute for Czech and World Literature at the Academy of Sciences, and since 1993 has lectured at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. She is a former director of the Institute of Romance Studies at the faculty.

She specialises in modern Hispano­‑American literature, especially the genres of the essay and the novel. She has published two monographs, Imaginace Hispánské Ameriky (The Imagination of Hispanic­‑America, 1998) 502

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and Visión de Hispanoamérica: Paisaje, utopía, quijotismo en el ensayo y en la novela (Vision of Hispanic­‑America: Landscape, Utopia, Quixotism in Essays and Novels, 2010), and written a commentary on the anthology of Latin­ ‑American essays Druhý břeh Západu (The Other Shore of the West, 2004).

She has edited comparatist anthologies and is currently editor of the journal Svět literatury (World of Literature). She has lectured at a number of universities around the world and in 2006 was awarded the Spanish Orden de Isabel la Católica.

Martin Humpál (b. 1968) teaches Scandinavian literature in the Institute of Germanic Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague.

Apart from numerous articles, afterwords and book reviews, he has written the books The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun’s Novels Hunger, Mysteries, and Pan (1998), and, with Helena Kadečková and Viola ParenteČapková, Moderní skandinávské literatury 1870–2000 (Modern Scandinavian Literature 1870–2000, 2006; 2nd revised edition, 2013).

Václav Jamek (b. 1949) is a prominent Czech writer, translator, literary critic, commentator and university lecturer. He received the prestigious Prix Médicis and Globe européen for his prose work Traité des courtes merveil‑ les (Treatise on frail miracles, 1989). His collection of works of literary criticism, commentaries and dialogues entitled Duch v plné práci (Spirit at Full Work, 2003) was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize. He is an experienced translator of francophone literatures (Segalen, Perec, Tournier, Modiano, Bove, Michaux, Koltès). In 1999, he was awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Eva Kalivodová (b. 1957) has worked in the Institute of Translation Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP), since 1991. She specialises in American literature and culture, including from the perspective of comparative literature and the history of translation.

She is also interested in the gendered literary history, and questions of gender and translation. In 1998 she co­‑founded the Centre for Gender Studies at the Faculty of Arts, CUP, and worked as its director until 2002.

She has been on several specialist internships abroad. She is author of Browningová nebo Klášterský? Krásnohorská nebo Byron? O rodu v životě literatury (Browning or Klášterský? Krásnohorská or Byron? Gender in the Life of About the authors

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Literature, 2010) that combines perspectives of gender in translation, and gender in literary comparative history, and co­‑author of Ponořena do Léthé (Immersed in the Lethe, 2003), Tajemná translatologie (Mysterious Translatology, 2008), and Volání rodu (The Call of Gender, 2014).

Marie­‑Françoise Melmoux­‑Montaubin (b. 1965) is professor of French literature specialised in the late nineteenth century at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, and also head of the Department of Modern Literature. Her published works include numerous scholarly monographs and articles. She is a member of the editorial board of several prestigious journals, such as Romanesques, Rocambole, and Revue de lectures et d’études valésiennes, and regularly organises international conferences on French literature.

Jiří Pelán (b. 1950) studied French, Italian and comparative literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP). Since 1991 he has been teaching in the Institute of Romance Studies at the same faculty.

Between 1992 and 2015 he was head of the Department of Italian Studies, and was habilitated in 2000. He works in collaboration with the University of South Bohemia, where he was made professor in 2016. He was the main editor on the Slovník italských spisovatelů (Dictionary of Italian Writers, 2004) and has published three works of his own: Kapitoly z francouzské a ital‑ ské literatury (On French and Italian Literature, 2000), Bohumil Hrabal: Pokus o portrét (Bohumil Hrabal: Towards a portrait, 2002, 2nd edition 2015), and Kapitoly z francouzské, italské a české literatury (On French, Italian and Czech literature, 2007). He was awarded the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1991, the Josef Jungmann Prize for Translation in 1997, and the Italian Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1999.

Dora Poláková (b. 1978) graduated in international territorial studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague (CUP), and read Hispanic studies at the Faculty of Arts, where she received her doctorate in 2007. Her thesis was on the novel La saga/Fuga de J. B by Spanish author Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Since 2011 she has been an assistant lecturer in the Institute of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts, CUP, where she teaches Hispano­‑American literature. She specialises in the modernist era and the genre of the novel.

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Justin Quinn (b. 1968) is an Irish writer, Anglicist and Americanist, and translator of Czech poetry. He lectures at the Pedagogical Faculty at the University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic, and also at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. He received his doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, and was made docent by Charles University.

He has published six collections of poetry. His collection Waves and Trees and the novel Mount Merion have been published in Czech as Vlny a stromy (translated by Tomáš Fürstenzeller, 2009) and Mezi vilami (translated by Tereza Límanová, 2016). He has translated the poems of Petr Borkovec into English (From the Interior: Selected Poems, 2008) and is now working on a translation of the verse of Bohuslav Reynek. His study Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 2015; the Czech translation, Ve dvojím ohni: Transnacionalismus a poezie studené války, is soon to be published by Karolinum Press, Prague.

Juan Antonio Sánchez Fernández (b. 1970) studied Spanish philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, and also studied at the University of Konstanz and at Harvard. He specialises in Spanish literature of the Golden Age (Celestine, Renaissance poetry, the picaresque novel, Quixote) and fin de siècle literature. In 2015 he received his habilitation from Charles University, Prague (CUP), for his monograph on Celestine and his lecture on Quixote and modernity. Since 2000 he has been working in the Institute of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts, CUP. He also translates Czech and German philosophy into Spanish. Štěpán Sirovátka (b. 1982) read Czech studies and classical philology at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. Since 2012 he has been a doctoral student at the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature in the same faculty, where he leads seminars on Czech and European Decadence, and is writing his doctoral thesis on the work of Jiří Karásek of Lvovice with a focus on the category of physicality. He is also interested in poetics from the perspective of the specific reception of Antiquity as represented in decadent literature, for example his article “Decadence and S. K. Neumann: An Attempt at a Classical Interpretation” was published in Mundo Eslavo (Journal of Slavic Studies) in 2013.

About the authors

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Vladimír Svatoň (b. 1931) studied Russian and Czech language at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP). He worked in the Institute of Czech and World Literature at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1969–1992). Since 1993 he has worked in the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature, especially in the doctoral studies programme, and also works in collaboration with the Institute of East European Studies.

He received his professorship in 2002. He specialises in the romantic current in Russian literature and Russian thought from Romanticism to Symbolism. He has published three monographs: Z druhého břehu (From the Other Shore, 2002), Proměny dávných příběhů (The Metamorphoses of Ancient Narratives, 2004) and Román v souvislostech času (The novel in the context of time, 2009). Since 1991 he has been editor­‑in­‑chief of Svět literatury (World of Literature). He initiated the publication in Czech of a number of works of Russian literature and literary science by authors such as V. F. Odoyevsky, V. M. Zhirmunsky, B. M. Eichenbaum, and L. S. Vygotsky.

Silvie Špánková (b. 1974) works in the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where she also received her master’s degree. She defended her doctoral thesis António Lobo Antunes: rozpětí románu (António Lobo Antunes: the Span of the Novel) at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. She specialises in Portuguese prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the novels and short stories of African lusophone authors. She has written numerous scholarly articles, postscripts and text books.

Záviš Šuman (b. 1979) read Czech and Romance studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP), where he also received his doctorate. He had scholarships at Oxford University and the Université Paris IV­‑Sorbonne. He now works as an assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, CUP, where he specialises in seventeenth­‑century French literature. His doctoral thesis Konceptualizace mores ve francouzském dramatickém básnictví: Studie o francouzské tragédii v 17. století (The Conceptualization of Mores in French Dramatic Poetry: A Study of the seventeenth­‑century French Tragedy) is soon to be published by Karolinum Press, Prague. He is an editor of the upcoming publication Sebrané spisy Jakuba Demla (The Collected Works of Jakub Deml). He won the Prix Gallica in 2013.

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Eva Voldřichová Beránková (b. 1975) studied French philology at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (CUP) and Slavonic literature at the Université Paris IV­‑Sorbonne as part of a joint doctorate (cotutelle).

Since 2013 she has been a docent in the Institute of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts, CUP, and head of its French department. She specialises in French literature from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literary theory, the history of film, and the francophone Quebec novel. She has published two monographs: La face cachée, dostoïevskienne, d’Albert Camus (The Hidden Dostoevskian Face of Albert Camus, 2002) and “Učiňme člověka ke svému obrazu”: Pygmalion, Golem a automat jako tři verze mýtu o umělém stvoření (nejen) v budoucí Evě Villierse de l’Isle Adam (“Let us make man in our image”: Pygmalion, Golem and the Automaton as three Versions of the Myth of Artificial Creation (not just) in The Future Eve by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, 2012).

About the authors

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Summary

Dusk and Dawn: Literature between Two Centuries This monograph, penned by an interdisciplinary team of philologists from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and their European colleagues, examines European and American literatures from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing not only the trends common to the whole cultural region but also the differences manifested in particular national literatures. The book is divided into two parts: the first explores the transformation of paradigms in literature and literary criticism; the second offers portraits of individual writers, figures and myths from the period broadly understood as the “epoch of Symbolism�.

The book attests very clearly to the fact that despite local differences, Euro-American literatures faced a common set of problems that included the crisis of modern culture, the confutation of Positivism, the relativisation of art forms and genres, and the problematisation of the subject.

The book makes a contribution to a re-evaluation of this period and to a greater awareness of its significance for self-reflection and a possible renaissance of modern culture.

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Eva Voldřichová Beránková, Šárka Grauová (eds.)

Dusk and Dawn: Literature between Two Centuries Published by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, nám. Jana Palacha 2, Prague 1 Cover and typography: Jana Vahalíková Fedra typesetting: Dušan Neumahr Printed by Togga Prague First edition, Praha 2017