Georges Rodenbach - Dream-like evocations of Bruges as a ghost city of silence and desolation, lost in time but nevertheless dictating the inevitably fatal events of the narrative

Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, Trans. by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2010 [1892.].

"Bruges-La-Morte, which first appeared to an unexpecting public in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the ‘dead city’, becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugues’ obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. Grotesque humour mingles with poignancy in this metaphorically dense and visionary novel, which is the ultimate evocation of Rodenback’s lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges. This is a new translation of the one of the great masterpieces of the symbolist period which also contains an illuminating introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. " - The Crack

"In 1892 Georges Rodenbach published his masterpiece Bruges-la-Morte. The short novel immediately was acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of the "decadent movement" in French literature, a vision of the Flemish city of Bruges that once was a depiction of Jerusalem and now was turned to doom by the evil forces of Satan, whose Pope was resident in this town...
Ostensibly, Bruges-la-Morte was the account of a doomed love affair that culminated in a bizarre murder, but even more important were its dream-like evocations of Bruges as a ghost city of silence and desolation, lost in time but nevertheless dictating the inevitably fatal events of the narrative.
The widower Hugues Viane has turned to the melancholically decaying city of Bruges to mourn; in his disturbed spirit Bruges-la-Morte is the image of his dead wife. To manage and endure his unbearable loss, he systematically follows, in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion, the mournful labyrinth of streets and canals.
At the beginning of the story we see Hugues setting out from his big old silent house for one of his solitary walks. In the drawing-room of his house are the mementoes of his wife: some pictures and a long tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case as a relic of love. Outside, his eyes "fixed on a very distant point, beyond life itself", he finds everywhere analogies to her and to his feelings about her: in the rain, the bells, the canals – until the whole city mysteriously begins to resemble her.
One evening Hugues goes into Notre Dame, where he is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy. Out in the street he again sees his dead wife… but now as a living woman, apparently her exact likeness. He follows her into a theatre where he takes his place in the stalls. He can’t see the woman in the audience and he is barely aware of what is performed on stage: Robert le Diable, the extravagantly romantic and supernatural opera of Meyerbeer.
Hugues decides to leave after "the scene with the nuns", but then the mysterious woman emerges as a dancer, the nun Hélène, who rises from her tomb – as his lost wife, resurrected – like Christ. Afterwards he recalls the scene as "a setting full of magic and moonlight", but it is in fact a satanic ritual, in which the devil’s disciple Bertram summons up the spirits of the nuns who have died in sin.
Hugues is instantly obsessed by the vision of the dancer, like "Faust, reaching out for the mirror in which the divine image of woman is revealed". The relationship between Hugues and the dancer has something of a diabolic bargain, culminating in psychological torment and a deranged murder.
Bruges-la-Morte is clearly a poet’s novel, marked by hypnotic repetitions, working in rhythm and pattern, image and suggestion, metaphorically dense and visionary in style, musical in its fatalistic circling.
The novel was an ultimate evocation of Rodenbach’s fascination with the enduring mysteries and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges. It was also a fable of the strange identity of the known and the unknown, of the mysterious equations of past and present, place and feeling, the visible and the invisible, one woman and another. It is the story of sexual imagination that turns on the fulfilment of dreams, of Flemish Catholic piety coexisting with pagan icons of female sexual power, and morbid eroticism.
Rodenbach included photographs in his novel and in the little preface he wrote to explain this, he described his work as "a study of passion" and "the evocation of a city as an essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act". The photographs were intended to help the readers to "come under the influence of the city, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close, to experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers".
Though Rodenbach was Flemish, he was not himself a Brugeois. He grew up in Ghent, studied law there and spent a year in Paris. Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, Les Tristesses. He worked ten years in the law, but got involved in Belgian literature, as a reviewer, essayist and poet. Then, in 1888, Rodenbach left Belgium for good, to spend the rest of his life in Paris.
Rodenbach gladly embraced his exile, married and became a kindly and discreet figure in the Parisian literary circles. He could have been the spiritual twin of his friend Joris-Karl Huysmans.
As his life flowered in Paris, an almost mystical nostalgia for Flanders and Bruges crystallised… and so Rodenbach evoked, from his Paris apartment, a dead city where he had never lived.
In those days, there was much talk of reopening Bruges to the modern world after the silting-up of its old sea-canal had resulted in centuries of decline, so many Brugeois, seeking a new commercial life, resented Bruges-la-Morte as Rodenbach did with the desecration of his imagined Bruges.
Georges Rodenbach was a distinctly "northern" type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and blue-grey eyes, deep and distant as a mirror of his native skies, with the colour of the canals they had long reflected.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer painted the poet in a spectral close-up against a background of roofs and gables and with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. His shoulders seemed to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. He was an elegant and dandyish dresser, but the painter depicted him with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief, as some sort of a double portrait of the author and his obsessive hero, Hugues Vianes, still haunting the deserted quays.
Rodenbach died in 1898, after finishing another prose masterpiece, Le Carilloneur, addressing the same theme: a city that had to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death, exploring the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation..." - The Lost Dutchman
"a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror .This is a little masterpiece." - Scotland on Sunday

"The translators remain faithful to the substance and style of the original, and Alan Hollinghurst's introduction is stimulating and heartfelt, explaining Rodenbach's idiosyncrasies without apologizing for them." - Daniel Starza-Smith

"I discovered the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach because of his tomb in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris – possibly the most nightmarish piece of funerary sculpture ever carved. It portrays the writer desperately trying to climb out of his own grave. My wife and I came across it when photographing tombs for a book we were doing on cemetery architecture. The tomb led to the books, which is what Rodenbach regarded his novels as anyway. He was obsessed with death.
His most famous novel, Bruges-la-Morte, has rightly attracted a lot of interest since it was republished recently by the excellent but now endangered Dedalus Books. First issued in 1892, it was a short but intense Symbolist novel about sex, lies – and Gothic architecture. The usually reliable Nicholas Lezard did a good review in The Guardian though he failed to mention that what helped make this book compulsive reading was the inclusion of 35 half-tone photographs (at least in the first edition). These depicted the shadowy canals, alleys and courtyards of the medieval city, and provided an atmospheric mise-en-scène to the events described. Mixing fictional text and documentary photography was resurrected a century later to great effect by W.G. Sebald. The Dedalus edition, translated by Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, dispenses with the original photographs and uses some modern photographs taken by Will Stone which work equally effectively. They are very effective.
The basic plot of Bruges-la-Morte – man’s wife dies, man later sees a woman who looks like her and recruits her to dress up as the deceased loved one, a fantasy game that culminates in murder – was adopted by composer Erich Korngold for his opera, Die todt Stadt, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo shares obvious affinities. It captures the heightened emotions and excesses of a certain kind of decadent fin-de-siècle literary style, and is replete with descriptions of gloomy bourgeois interiors and empty, funereal streets. The same is true of Rodenbach’s final novel, The Bells of Bruges, also republished by Dedalus, about a late 19th century Flemish nationalist and city architect, whose misguided marriage to the wrong one of two admired sisters again ends in betrayal, abandonment and self-destruction. The main protagonist is also the city’s bell-ringer, hence the title, and a man like Fabrice del Dongo in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, who is only happy when he is high above the world looking down.
You could read Rodenbach alone for the architectural detail alone, a sort of Pevsner guide to Bruges interspersed with febrile sex and mordant Catholicism. For the city was filled with convents in this period – or Beguinages as they were called – as well as narrow streets and canal-side buildings offering the temptations of prostitution and drink. In both novels the dying city is really the main character, exuding a deep fatalism as it sinks into lethargy, now cut off from the sea by a retreating river, and trading on the mysteries of its ancient buildings carved ‘from blocks of night’. Dedalus and their translators have done a terrific job in bringing these intensely-wrought novels to our attention. Goths will love them, but so ought lots of other readers." - Ken Worpole

"There is something very familiar about this story: a middle-aged widower, Hugues Viane, moves to Bruges as it is the town most suited to his melancholy. He desperately misses his wife; and in the cloistral, muffled, moribund city of Bruges he finds the perfect analogue for his grief. And then one day he sees a woman in the street who appears to be the exact double of his dead wife. He obsesses about her, pursues her, and eventually begins a relationship with her. But it turns out that she is not the reincarnation of his wife ...
This 1892 novel has something archetypal about it, in the way that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or The Picture of Dorian Gray do. The chief differences lie in tone and the absence of the supernatural; there is also a far more ambiguous approach to metaphor. The Stevenson and the Wilde are indisputably great works, but no one's going to call them subtle. Bruges-la-Morte, though, edges away from allegory, or maintains a pious silence as to whether it is, or is not, allegorical.
It certainly is symbolist, though, in the sense that Georges Rodenbach's reputation is as a symbolist writer. He was an admirer of, and friends with, such Parisian luminaries as Mallarmé, the Goncourts, Villiers de l'Isla-Adam; Rodin offered to carve a sculpture of him in Bruges after his death. But the city fathers of Bruges, indignant that (a) Rodenbach identified the city with death and morbid religiosity, never mind how appreciatively and ecstatically; and (b) that he wrote in French rather than Flemish (although it would have been most difficult and counter-productive to do so at the time), refused. A note by Will Stone at the end of the book points out that this is still the case, and that you will have to go to Ghent to find a substantial memorial to Rodenbach. An admirer has put up a modest bronze plaque in Bruges, and that's it.
But there is so much to admire in this brief novel. Like many symbolist works, it has a modern feel to it, despite all those stylistic mannerisms we associate with the era - the most striking being those fainting-sensibility exclamation marks at the end of descriptive paragraphs.
But it is those descriptions that make Bruges-la-Morte so remarkable. As Rodenbach fully intended, the chief character in the novel is the town itself: and this, remember, was some time before Joyce had the same idea about doing the same with Dublin in Ulysses
It is fitting that Alan Hollinghurst introduces this novel, for he has used elements from it in his own fiction. His 1994 novel The Folding Star is itself a homage to Bruges-la-Morte, although he doesn't feel the need to declare so in his illuminating and sympathetic introduction. His narrator says of his lover: "I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room ..." Rodenbach imagines the mirrors in Hugues' house "needed only the merest touch with a sponge or cloth, so as not to erase her face sleeping in their depths".
This is one of the greatest novels ever written about grief, loneliness and isolation; and such subjects are, alas, always relevant these days. (Those suffering similar personal circumstances will find it remarkably consoling.) It is the kind of book, I kept thinking, that should have been turned into an opera by Debussy, along the lines of what he did with Pelléas et Mélisande, by Rodenbach's contemporary and fellow-townsman Maeterlinck. As it turns out, Erich Korngold did such a thing in 1920, but the Nazis banned it, and I'm not sure that he would have had the right musical attitude. If Debussy hadn't done it, Alban Berg would have been ideal.
I keep thinking about music so much because so much music resides in the words, even in (the very able) translation. This is a book which is not only richly, almost oppressively, atmospheric: it is about atmosphere, about how a city can be a state of mind as well as a geographical entity. It has its shocks and its melodrama: but it is a haunting, and a haunted work. Congratulations to Dedalus for reviving it." - Nicholas Lezard

"Bruges-la-Morte was written in 1892. It tells the story of Hugues Viane, aged 40, who came to live in Bruges after the death of his wife, five years before the start of the book. He likens Bruges to his dead wife; just as his wife was beautiful but is now dead, so Bruges was once a beautiful, vibrant city, but because of the silting up of the river that joined her to the sea, she too is now dead. Thus he wanders the streets of the city, constantly mourning his beloved wife. On one of his melancholy wanderings, he catches sight of a young woman who strongly resembles his wife; he eventually follows her, and sees her disappear into a theatre - she is a dancer. He begins an affair with her, a joyless affair, as he realises the likeness to his wife is only superficial. There is a sense of doom all through the book, and this is ultimately fulfilled.
Rodenbach was a Symbolist writer - friend of the French poet Mallarme, amongst other Symbolist figures, and imbuing his writing with the hallmarks of Symbolism - melancholy, loneliness, death, all evoked with great beauty. And the novel is certainly beautiful - it has that smudgy beauty of Symbolist paintings, and in evoking so wonderfully the streets and canals and buildings of Bruges, it has a strongly visual element to it. Interspersed throughout the novel are photographs of the city - not the ones, nor, apparently, the quantity, of the original edition, but black and white photos taken by Will Stone, one of the translators (who also makes an impassioned plea for a memorial to Rodenbach to be set up in the city). Rodenbach was Flemish, but wrote in French, since that was apparently the refined, educated thing to do, and yet the Flemish quality of Bruges really comes to life, its brick buildings, its association with the great Netherlandish painters of the past, its famous Beguinage. There is a lot about the art of the past, Van Eyck and Memling, the tombs of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold, the Madonna by Michelangelo that was the only one of his sculptures to leave Italy during his lifetime - all adding to the sense of a glorious past now faded, a city in its death throes but with remnants of its former glory, as Hugues keeps the long braid of his wife's hair, cut off on her deathbed, in a glass casket and reveres it like an object in a museum - even the artistic glories are now displayed as objects from the past, they are no longer living contributions to the town's existence.
The novel has an intensity, again part of its Symbolist nature, but it is short, just over 100 pages. In the same volume is a short essay Rodenbach had written a few years beforehand, about 'The Death Throes of Towns', from which whole sentences are incorporated into the novel, and it foreshadows the novel in less blatant ways too:
'Towns are rather like women: they have their time of youthfulness and blooming, then comes decline and the cracks appearing each day along the walls, painfully increase the lines of their ageing. ...among such downfalls of history and that most lamentable distress that is a town in its death throes, it is Bruges, the dethroned queen, who today is dying the most taciturn and moving of deaths. For Bruges, now forgotten, impoverished, all alone with her empty palaces, was truly a queen in Europe in another age, queen to a sumptuous court of legend, beside the waves, a queen that Venice, envious beyond the far horizon, bowed down to like a less fortunate sister.'
It has to be said that it is 400 years between the demise of the Bruges he is describing and the writing of his essay! But clearly the image of Bruges as a dying queen gave him the inspiration for his novel, and it is a powerful metaphor in the book - the sense of place is integral to the mood and success of the novel. I do think it is a successful - a wonderful - novel, though it won't be to everyone's taste - it is gloomy, and the frequent exclamations about the grey streets of the town enhance this, it is intense, there is very little dialogue, it is a brooding, introspective novel, but one that does, for me at least, evoke sympathy and pity for Hugues Viane even in his misguided, self-pitying reaching out for comfort. There is a slight sweetness to it, but it is a melancholy sweetness, and some would lose patience, I am sure, even in only 100 pages!
One other thing to say about it is that it tied in unexpectedly and beautifully with another recent read. I had seen the film of Haruki Murakami's short story Tony Takitani, and then read the story itself - and that too deals with a man whose wife dies, and as part of his grieving he finds a young woman who resembles his wife, and gives her a job, on the condition that she wears his wife's clothes. Hugues Viane eventually asks the dancer to wear his wife's clothes, with disastrous consequences. Culturally, the worlds of Rodenbach and Murakami are far apart, but in both stories, this moment of the 'replacement' being asked to wear the dead wife's clothes is a crucial point, where the internal grief of the widower clashes with the external reality - both have projected their memories onto a living person, who is of course not a replica of their dead wives but an independent personality. This clash is quite differently rendered in the two stories, but beautifully done in each.
I love these kinds of links between books!
There is an interesting introduction by the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, and it has made me want to read his own novel, The Folding Star. I should also pay tribute to the translators - Mike Mitchell translated Bruges-la-Morte, and Will Stone translated the essay The Death Throes of Towns, and both have done a wonderful job. I bought this novel when havisham got us thinking about the crisis at its publisher, Dedalus, in the wake of cuts by the Arts Council, and I am glad to say that they did find new sponsorship and will survive, for the time being at least - I will definitely be exploring more of their catalogue, having only read a handful so far. I would like to read the other Rodenbach title, The Bells of Bruges (do you see a theme developing in his books...?!), but next is J.K.Huysmans' The Cathedral, which I already own - I will be visiting both Bruges and Chartres, the setting/inspiration for The Cathedral, within the next few weeks. The Rodenbach has given me a great feeling for Bruges and a longing to be there again, and some have called Huysmans' novel the best guide to Chartres Cathedral, so I am looking forward to reading that." - Big Readers

"The Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach (1855-98) is identified above all with the city of Bruges. It emerged early on as a subject in his poetry, and in his most famous book, the short novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a particular idea of the place - silent, melancholy, lost in time - found its most intense and influential expression. It led to something of a cult of Bruges in the Parisian circles that Rodenbach was by then inhabiting. Bruges became a destination, treasured for its antiquity and decay, and Rodenbach's novel, illustrated as it was with numerous photographs of the city's churches, houses and canals, sold very well there. In the following years other Belgian artists explored the richly desolate atmosphere of the city, and Fernand Khnopff, in particular, made a number of mesmerising paintings which combine photographic precision with a mood of lonely Symbolist contemplation.
As it happened, it was a moment when there was talk of reopening the city to the modern world after centuries of decline brought about by the silting-up of its old sea-canal (the new port of Zeebrugge would be the result). Many Brugeois resented seeing the epithet Morte attached to a city seeking a new commercial life. Rodenbach would address these dilemmas, and the possible desecration of his dream-Bruges, in his last novel Le Carilloneur (1897). Was the place to be loved for its life or for its beautiful death?
Rodenbach, as apologist for the beautiful death, was seen by Parisians as himself a sort of emanation of the city. In a memoir written by Paul and Victor Margueritte, who met him at Mallarmé's Tuesday gatherings, he appears as a distinctly "northern" type, with his light blond hair, pale complexion and "blue-grey eyes -the mirror of his native skies -those eyes so deep and distant, the colour of the canals that they had long reflected, the colour of still water and moving sky". In 1895, the French painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer produced an extraordinary portrait of Rodenbach, placing him in spectral close-up against a background of the city's roofs and gables, with the great Gothic spire of the church of Notre Dame in wintry silhouette. The writer's grey shoulders seem to rise out of the shadowy waters of the canal behind him. Rodenbach was an elegant, almost dandyish dresser, but Lévy-Dhurmer shows him with his shirt collar undone and with a wide-eyed expression of reverie bordering on grief. Anyone who has read Bruges-la-Morte is likely to see this as a kind of double portrait, of the author and of his bereaved and obsessive hero, Hugues Viane, haunting the deserted quays, in strange subjection to his chosen city.
In the little preface which Rodenbach wrote to explain the inclusion of photographs in the book, he describes Hugues's story as "a study of passion" whose "other principal aim" is the evocation of a Town, not merely as a backdrop, but as an "essential character, associated with states of mind, counselling, dissuading, inducing the hero to act". The photographs are intended to help readers themselves to "come under the influence of the Town, feel the pervasive presence of the waters from close to, experience for themselves the shadow cast over the text by the tall towers". This elaboration of mere atmosphere into a principle of action is certainly the central curiosity and mystery of the novel; though it may seem odd that the author should have wanted to supplement his own verbal atmosphere, in all its obscure Symbolist refine ment, with the illustrations of a Baedeker.
One needs to look at Rodenbach's own life to understand why the city was able to assume this power of suggestion for him. His connection with it was aptly both indirect and suggestive. Though Flemish, he was not himself Brugeois. His father was, and it is surely significant for the son's work that he spoke constantly of the place to his children; but Georges was born in Tournai, and grew up in Ghent, also a richly historic city, but one which had adapted itself to the possibilities of modern industry and commerce (Rodenbach père was an inspector of weights and measures).
Georges was educated at the Jesuit Collège de Sainte-Barbe, as were the poet Émile Verhaeren, a friend, and Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish writer who was to gain the most international renown, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1911. (All of them, as members of the educated bourgeoisie, spoke and wrote in French.) Rodenbach studied law at the University of Ghent; he then went, in the autumn of 1878, to spend a year as a young barrister in Paris.
Once there he immersed himself in a literary culture which seemed to him a luxuriant antithesis to the sterility of Belgium. As he wrote to Verhaeren: "As for producing literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above all positivistic and material. It won't hear a word of poetry ... Whereas in Paris, one lives at twice the pace, one is in a hothouse, and suddenly the sap rises and thought flowers." Before returning to Ghent, he published his first collection of poems, characteristically titled Les Tristesses.
Back home, he worked for a further 10 years in the law but involved himself more and more in the emerging new movement in Belgian literature, as reviewer, essayist and poet. His fourth collection of poems, La Jeunesse blanche , published in 1886, was the one in which he himself felt he attained maturity; it is certainly the one in which the mysterious accord between the soul and the city, explored in a mood of lonely withdrawal and silent contemplation, is established: "To live like an exile, to live seeing no one / In the vast abandonment of a dying town, / Where nothing is heard but the vague rumour / Of a sobbing organ or a chiming belfry".
Silence, he later said, was the thread connecting all his work, his poems being décors de silence, his novels études d'êtres de silence . The bells that measure out the silence were also to be a recurrent motif, in his poems, in Bruges-la-Morte, and of course in Le Carillonneur , where the great carillon of Bruges seems to voice the subconscious of the Flemish people.
In 1888, Rodenbach left Belgium for good, and spent the remaining 10 years of his life in Paris. Here was the real exile, gladly embraced, and doubly rewarding. He married, wrote, as a kind of two-way interpreter of French and Belgian culture, for both Le Journal de Bruxelles and Le Figaro, and became a figure - discreet, kindly and punctilious - in Parisian literary circles. As his life flowered in Paris, the Flemish subject, the almost mystical nostalgia for Bruges, crystallised for him. The indefinable mood of his poetry, generated from recurrent imagery of empty provincial Sundays, solitude, autumn and winter nightfall, took on a larger fictional form in the light of distance.
Rather like AE Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on Hampstead Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his Paris apartment. "One only truly loves what one no longer has", he wrote. "Truly to love one's little homeland, it is best to go away, to exile oneself for ever, to surrender oneself to the vast absorption of Paris, and for the homeland to grow so distant it seems to die. [...] The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable."
Such a dream dominates Hugues Viane, who finds in the dead city of Bruges a perfect setting in which to grieve for his dead wife. Rodenbach, in his quiet way the most monomaniac of writers, seems to have found in the unworldly Hugues the persona who could best embody his own obsession. At the opening of the story we see him, a widower of five years, setting out from his big old silent house for one of his solitary walks. Of the house itself we learn little, except that in its drawing-room are the mementoes of his wife, the pictures of her, and the long tress of her yellow-gold hair preserved in a glass case. Hugues, at the age of 40, has made a religion of his sorrow. Everywhere he finds analogies to his dead wife and to his feelings about her, in the rain, the bells, the canals, until the whole city comes mysteriously to resemble her, to be imbued, as it were, with her absence. He sees intensely but selectively, his eyes being "fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself".
This beautiful and refined analysis of grief is the stuff of a Rodenbach poem, but even a short novel needs an element of action, and it is this that is precipitated in the second chapter. Out on his evening walk Hugues goes into Notre Dame, where he is touched by the imagery of fidelity in the tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, and then out in the street again sees his dead wife: not the etherealised figure identified with the dead city, but a living woman, apparently her exact likeness.
Hugues, himself unwittingly a legend of fidelity in the town, follows her, and then loses her; but we see that an insidious temptation has crossed his path. The pursuit is resumed a week later, when he sees her and follows her again, this time into a theatre, where, conspicuous in mourning, he takes his place in the stalls, unable to see the woman in the audience, and barely aware of what is to be performed.
In fact it is Robert le Diable, the extravagantly Romantic opera with which the young Meyerbeer had had his first huge success in 1831, and which had launched the vogue for the supernatural in operas of the mid-century. Hugues decides to leave after "the scene with the nuns", but of course he has left it too late. Rodenbach is shy to exploit the Gothic potential of the situation he has set up, in which the mysterious woman emerges as a dancer, the nun Hélène, who rises from her tomb, and seems to the suggestible Hugues to be his lost wife resurrected.
Afterwards Hugues recalls the scene as "a setting full of magic and moonlight", but it is in fact a satanic bacchanal, in which Bertram, a disciple of the devil, summons up the spirits of those nuns who had died in sin, who shed their habits and work themselves into a frenzy. Escaping from the theatre, Hugues feels himself led on by the vision of the dancer, like "Faust, reaching out for the mirror in which the divine image of woman is revealed". The relationship that follows is shadowed from the start by the idea of a diabolic bargain; though who will pay the price, and how, remains uncertain until the final scene.
Bruges-la-Morte is a very strange book, by turns both crude and subtle. One remembers it mainly for two things: on the one hand its distillation of mood, its poetic evocation of the impalpable, and on the other its bold, even garish fable of the sexual imagination. The two things are distinct, but not separable, and in a sense highlight the inherent paradox of the Symbolist novel: how is the inwardness, the fatalistic paralysis of Symbolist art to be wedded to the demands of narrative? Only perhaps in a story that turns on the fulfilment of dreams and a sense of the foreknown. There are of course many currents within Symbolism: the chaste northern reserve of Khnopff's paintings and Rodenbach's poems, with their hinterland of Flemish Catholic piety, coexists with a preoccupation, even in other Belgian artists, with pagan icons of female sexual power; and it is this tradition of morbid eroticism that Rodenbach, perhaps going a little against his natural grain, invokes in the figure of the dancer Jane Scott.
Some contemporary reviewers criticised what they saw as a vein of vulgar sensuality in Rodenbach's treatment of the affair between Hugues and Jane, which emerges as in essence that between a prostitute and an infatuated punter. But Rodenbach is characteristically discreet about the details of what passes between them; we are not allowed to witness any of those scenes between them that a more sensational kind of novel might have dwelt on. Similarly, Hugues's married life is recalled at the outset as one of unabating happiness, exploration and sexual fulfilment, but nothing concrete is ever said about what the couple did together, where they lived, or even what his wife was called. A deep privacy veils the very object of his devotions, which we are allowed to see only in symbolic form, in the proliferation of analogies.
Bruges-la-Morte was also criticised for the improbability of its subject, but a novel of this kind is not to be judged by its likeness to life, or indeed to most other novels. It creates a rarefied world, internalised and intensified by feeling. The conventions of realistic fiction are almost completely abandoned; the details of the modern life of the city - it has a theatre, shops, markets, gossips and scandals - seem to impinge on Hugues's dream world as if from another kind of novel altogether.
Above all, Bruges-la-Morte is the novel of a poet, who works in rhythm and pattern, image and suggestion. At its heart lies the essence of poetry: a simile. It is a book about resemblance, the strange identity of the known and the unknown, "the horizon where habit and novelty meet". The central resemblance, between one woman and another, is discovered by a man whose whole world is given value by resemblances, "mysterious equations" of past and present, place and feeling, the seen and the unknowable. The prose in which Rodenbach conveys such mysteries is marked by hypnotic repetitions and that liberal use of the exclamation-mark so typical of the period. If its effects are "poetic" they are also, in a loose sense, musical, and in its fatalistic circlings, its motivic repetitions, its tone both fervent and elusive, Bruges-la-Morte dwells, like much of the music of the fin de siècle, in an inner realm of refined and portentous subjectivity.
Since Hugues's first sightings of Jane culminate in the perfor mance of an opera, it is worth noting that the novel's last scene, with its off-stage procession, tumultuous church-bells and climactic murder, itself resolves a very inward drama in the conventions of grand opera. A fact not lost on the 23-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose opera Die tote Stadt (premiered in 1920) is based indirectly on Bruges-la-Morte, and is now the form in which the novel is most widely known. Its immediate source was Le Mirag e, the four-act theatrical version of Bruges-la-Morte which Rodenbach prepared at the end of his life, but never saw staged.
In dramatising his book he found himself driven to just those kinds of explication through dialogue that the novel pointedly avoids. Korngold, in following him, and in wrapping the play in his precocious mélange of Straussian modernism and Viennese schmaltz, prolonged and broadened the fame of this recondite novel - but at the cost of what makes it so singular and so unforgettable." - Will Stone

E x c e r p t :

Every evening Hugues retraced the same route, following the line of the quais. His gait was uncertain, slightly hunched already, even though he was only forty. But widowhood had brought an early autumn. His hair was receding, with a copious scattering of grey ash. His faded eyes were fixed on a distant point, a very distant point, beyond life itself. And how melancholy Bruges was, too, during those late afternoons! That was how he liked the town! It was for its melancholy that he had chosen it and had gone to live there after the great catastrophe. In those happy times when he was travelling round with his wife, living as his fancy took him, a somewhat cosmopolitan life, in Paris, abroad, by the sea, he had passed through the town with her, but its profound melancholy had not had the power to affect their joy. Later on however, once he was alone, he had remembered Bruges and had immediately and instinctively known he must settle there. A mysterious equation gradually established itself. He needed a dead town to correspond to his dead wife. His deep mourning demanded such a setting. Life would only be bearable for him there. It was instinct that had brought him here. He would leave the world elsewhere to its bustle and buzz, to its glittering balls, its welter of voices. He needed infinite silence and an existence that was so monotonous it almost failed to give him the sense of being alive. In the presence of physical pain, why must we keep silent, tread softly in a sickroom? Why do noises, voices, seem to disturb the dressing and reopen the wound? Those suffering from mental anguish can be hurt by noise too. In the muted atmosphere of the waterways and the deserted streets, Hugues was less sensitive to the sufferings of his heart, his thoughts of his dead wife were less painful. He had seen her, heard her again more clearly, finding the face of his departed Ophelia as he followed the canals, hearing her voice in the thin, distant song of the bells. In this way the town, once beautiful and beloved too, embodied the loss he felt. Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.

Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges, Trans. By Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2007.

"There are three loves in the life of Joris Borluut, the town carillonneur of Bruges. He marries the fiery Barbe, whose dark beauty is a reminder of Belgiums Spanish heritage. Repelled by her harshness and violence, he starts an affair with her sister, the gentle, soulful, fair-haired Godelieve. When her sister discovers their affair, Godelieve enters a Beguine convent and Joris devotes himself to his first love, the old city of Bruges. His opposition to a proposal to sacrifice part of the old town to economic advance loses him his position as town architect, and he withdraws to the belfry and his beloved carillon that, for him, expresses the soul of Bruges."

"…then sometime in the late 19th century, an architect called borluut wins the coveted & secluded carillonneur post. his love of flanders is fuelled by a weekly coterie of enthusiasm. he asks for the red-lipped barbara’s dark hand & sees that her flaxen sister loves him more. rodenbach’s man finds a step ladder to observe the obscene ‘bell of lust’ circa. 1629, filled with its engraved green-lace of carnal-passions. van hulle an antiquarian & father of borluut’s new wife & her sister, can never synchronize his precious time-worn clocks. nothing’s perfect. …& our man borluut, champion of his newly renovated lace museum project, lost out of love & only to face the last words of the white-mantilla-shrouded van hulle: ‘they will chime!’ borluut sees the love for his wife dissipate. godelieve (his sister-in-law) replaces that with a new passioned life. while still maintaining a ferocious solitude in the belfry & with the bells. …& yet a spaniard as a spouse in rodenbach’s eyes, retains a fire of the inquisition burning in her heart, still branded with sadistic fury in the fog-dense town. joris borluut with an impossible-to-exit marriage pact, has his fidelity made even the more onerous around autumn’s ‘octave of the dead.’ he easily sees the wilting northern clouds overshadow the doomed dalliance. the sickened wife implodes & charges with madness at the discovery of it all, leaving the sister/lover to retreat to a obscure béguinage. borluut fights along with an artist bartholomeus against the dim city planners & loses to keep his town as-it-is (as-it-was): ‘the queen of death.’ everything continues to fall apart. openly reviled at his broken home & on the lost streets, he agonizes for the crisp quietude & false peace of the unearthly belfry, bells pealing or not.
…& joris borluut hastened the end, he brought it all down in the ‘bell of lust.’ the bell carried his soul—in silence—there in bruges." - Aurelio Madrid