"I just twist my heart to drip it into curiously carved beads."
No figure better represents Jules Laforgue (Montevideo, 1860 - Paris, 1887), his essence and his contradictions, than the melancholy lunar Pierrots painted in his poems, which have naiveté and innocence in their eyes, in which painful irony and rivers of melancholy coexist.
"The tattooed white heart
Of lunar judgments.
They have: < >
Like Evoé and by word of mouth.
When a virgin passes away
They follow his procession,
keeping the neck straight
How to hold a beautiful candle.
Very tiring part,
especially since they have no one
home that you rub them with a marital ointment.
Those dandies of the moon
impose themselves, in effect
Of singing < >
To the blonde and the brunette."
(Pierrot fragment, from Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune selon Jules Laforgue)
There are no more autobiographical characters in poetry than the white Pierrots who constantly parade through the verses of the French poet, sometimes called the greatest of the minor poets of nineteenth-century France (a somewhat ungenerous definition given the quality of his verse, and the influence on twentieth-century authors such as Eliot or Montale).
The Pierrots already present in the Complaintes become a recoiling presence in Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune selon Jules Laforgue with their monologues, laments to the moon, exponents of a breed of their own, just as Laforgue was a unique poet in his own right in the nineteenth-century French landscape.
The spleen that had become fashionable at the time, as well as his dandyism (and the Pierrots sketched are white dandies) are reflected in his obsession with the boredom that devours existence (the interminable series of Dimaches, funereal processions of Sundays that gray human existence and underscore its malaise).
"Here evening falls, sweet to the lewd old man.
Murr my cat sits as heraldry sphinx
He contemplates, restless, with his fantastic pupil
Travel on the horizon the chlorotic moon.
It's the hour in which the infant prays, where Paris-pipe
throws on the floor of the avenues
Her cold-breasted moths that, under the ghostly light
Of gas, the eye sniffing a random male.
But, by my cat Murr, I dream by the window.
I think of children everywhere, at this instant, being born.
I think of all the dead buried today.
And I imagine myself at the bottom of the cemetery,
And entering the coffins, I put myself in the place
Of those who will spend their first night here".
('The First Night,' from Hiccups of the Earth)
'Do something original at any cost' , this is the artistic purpose of Laforgue, who struggles prey to spleen and boredom in the much free time left to him by his profession as a private reader for the German Empress Augusta. A spleen that oscillates between the popular and the sublime, between ironic detachment and painful participation.
His is an open work, his poems chase each other, and are never considered complete, endless different versions of the same text follow each other, verses are taken up in other compositions, and works are disavowed.
Among the writings in his poetic oeuvre (Le sanglot de la terre, Les complaintes, L'imitation de Notre-dame la lune, Des fleurs de bonne volonté, Derniers vers), by his express wish only Les Complaintes (1885) and L'imitation de Notre-Dame la lune selon Jules Laforgue (1886), as well as the poem Le Concile Féerique (1886) were published.
Le sanglot de la terre, an ambitious project in which man falls prey to bewilderment and a sense of rebellion against creation, remains unfinished and outdated (and therefore unpublished) philosophically by Laforgue, who shifts to positions of painful acceptance of life and irony, his weapon of defense.
"Oh! More than among Baudelaire's bistro flowers,
more than in Chopin's autumnal refrains,
More than in a red Rembrandt a yellow ray blazes,
so fit for spleen are only the June sunsets“.
(Fragment of Rosette of Glazed, from Hiccups of the Earth)
Compared to the absolutism of the Symbolists, Laforgue adopts a more popular and singsong tone, approaching Corbiere and Cros; melancholy, irony, and jest coexist in him and in his verses, as well as the banal and the sublime, in a theater in which Pierrots and sunsets, moons and Sundays parade, and in the sound background unfailing Barbary organs and bells are heard.
In addition to his Pierrots, he ends up identifying with the figure of Hamlet (see also his prose work The Legendary Moralities), and develops a dramatic relationship with the figure of woman.
The rejection of the sexual and material sphere in women is a fundamental theme for understanding Laforgue and his poetry: Laforgue man remains childishly, candidly, and ideally stuck at the pre-adolescent stage, fails to accept carnality in the relations between the sexes, and yearns for a feminine ideal of purity.
The recurrence of white, therefore, as a symbol of this sought-after purity is not surprising, yet it is also painfully present in things that are absolutely material and in contact with materiality and flesh, such as linens, sheets, veils, bonnets, nuns' gowns, garments in contact with human secretions and therefore destined to become stained and lose their symbolic purity.
And so the poet constantly oscillates between this ideal desire and cold ironic accusations of women, on whom he rages by highlighting their flaws and vain, coquettish souls.
He therefore takes refuge in the moon, invoked and contemplated at a distance, taken as a romantic and melancholic symbol of an ideal to immaculate absolutes, a spell of white loves
In 1887, when he was only 27 years old, a year after getting married, he fell ill with tuberculosis and died on August 20 of that year. On June 16 of the following year, his wife will also follow the same fate.
Thus dies one of the most unique and personal poets of Symbolism.
Special edited by Ian
