It is a commonplace to remark that nineteenth-century England was a land without music. Yet French travel writers in the fin de siècle remark again and again on their astonishing, low-brow musical encounters in the nation’s capital. The present article examines such experiences in the writing of Jules Vallès and Hector France, as they turn their steps away from the refinement of Covent Garden to seek out more esoteric musical experiences in the music halls, tawdry bars, minor theatres and strip joints of London. These texts present an intriguing and ambivalent textual form to the reader. Though being based on – and structured as – travel anecdotes, they no less insistently reach beyond the anecdotal experience to extrapolate overarching conclusions about the English and their character relative to France. Yet in doing so, their texts reveal inconsistencies and contradictions as they try to reconcile these strange musical experiences with the stereotypes of Englishness that had solidified over the generations; these alien musical experiences resist conceptualization and challenge the tropes that had for so long underwritten French ideas of the English Other.
Beset by financial troubles, Jacques Marles and his wife flee Paris to find safe harbour in a dilapidated rural Château in En rade (1887). At first glance, this country setting seems well-equipped with the stereotypical features of pastoral fantasy; however, this article explores how Huysmans uses implicit urban rhetoric and imagery to create a wry subversion of the natural idyll. The comforts of nature are denied to the male subject as the countryside is stripped of its promise of escapism. This article examines, first, Huysmans's use of signifiers of urban unrest to turn nature's exuberance into a corollary for human, revolutionary violence. Secondly, it focuses specifically on glass and glassbreaking at the hands of an aggressive Mother Nature, evoking memories of urban destruction and Parisian civil strife. The association of nature with violence culminates in the invasion of the Château and its looking-glasses by green, the colour of natureforcing this distressing natural world between man and his own narcissistic reflection. Huysmans reveals that the natural world is no more an ally than the unruly urban masses, and confronts the reader with the inexorable violence of vegetation.
***When Joris-Karl Huysmans's Jacques Marles flees financial troubles in Paris, he and his wife Louise seek safe harbour with her peasant uncle and aunt, thedistinctly carelesscaretakers of a dilapidated Château in Brie. This country setting in En rade (1887) 1 seems at first glance to promise all the stereotypical features of the pastoral: picturesque ruins, flourishing nature, solitude, and a purer lifestyle in tune with the seasons. However, in this novel Huysmans attunes his taste for pastiche and parody to subvert the expectations of a generation brought up on Romantic poetry. The reveries of the protagonist in this country landscape provide none of the reassurance gained by rural wanderers like Hugo's poetic persona in 'La Vie aux champs' or Nerval's first-person narrator in
In Maupassant's short stories, as psychologically distressing events proliferate and his protagonists descend into madness, polychromatic modernity fades away to reveal a stark world of black and white. Such monochromism also engenders an anxiety-ridden reading experience. Black and white draw our attention beyond intradiegetic events to the diegesis itself, where Maupassant's play on textual shape and punctuation gestures towards the non-signifying white page beneath the comfortingly signifying black-ink words. This article explores Maupassant's dissolution of the spectrum, as he moves beyond the nineteenth-century's fascination with colour towards the bleak, monochromatic realm at the very edges of the symbolic.
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