Decadent Plays: Jean Lorrain and Remy de Gourmont
This post accompanies the launch of an audio recording from a night of rehearsed readings of decadent plays at The Albany theatre in Deptford, London, on 10 November 2021. You can find the recording in the ‘Films and Audio’ section of this site. For this event, we selected some of the most innovative scenes from Remy de Gourmont’s Lilith (1892), in a new translation by Dan Rebellato; the first act of Jean Lorrain’s Ennoïa (1906), translated into English for the first time by Jennifer Higgins; Djuna Barnes’s brilliant one-act play The Dove (1923); and a little-known text by Izumi Kyōka called Kerria Japonica (1923), translated by Cody Poulton. In this post, two of the translators commissioned for the project – Jennifer Higgins and Dan Rebellato – introduce their translations of Jean Lorrain’s Ennoïa and Remy de Gourmont’s Lilith, which were made possible thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England. They reflect on the supposed ‘un-performability’ of these plays, but they also encourage us to take up the challenge of what it might mean to stage them. In fact, the rehearsed reading of Lilith at the Albany was – as far as we are aware – the first time that this play had ever been performed, as Rebellato discusses below. The translators also discuss the prominence of the femme fatale in these plays, and the ways in which we might read both Ennoïa and Lilith not just as the eroticised products of the male imagination (although they were certainly eroticised by these writers), but as figures who also take on lives of their own, and who stand as early examples of feminist icons.
Jean Lorrain’s Ennoïa (1906): introduced by Jennifer Higgins
Fig. 1: Lithograph by Odilon Redon, published as an illustration for and homage to Gustave Flaubert’s Hélène (Ennoia) (1896). Public domain.
Ennoïa gives three glimpses into the existence of a woman condemned to be simultaneously desired and detested. She is sought after for her beauty but feared for the violence it provokes, and punished if she attempts to escape the fate dictated by the men who lay claim to her. The play was published in 1906, the year in which Jean Lorrain died at the age of 51, and Lorrain himself had lived a life of uneasy, conflicted interactions with society and with his fellow writers.
When Lorrain, born Paul Duval, left his hometown of Fécamp in 1880 to pursue a literary career in Paris, his parents asked him to change his name. Perhaps they sensed that he was about to re-cast himself in a role that they would find difficult to reconcile with his conventional upbringing, and Lorrain did indeed reinvent himself, plunging into fin-de-siècle Parisian literary life and becoming central to its most flamboyant, drug-fuelled social circles. At the same time, he alienated himself from these very circles, writing extremely popular scurrilous journalism about his literary contemporaries, many of whom were also his friends. He also navigated the ambiguity of his great success as a writer and journalist, and his marginalised, precarious status as an openly gay man.
The state of being simultaneously powerful and powerless, adored and highly vulnerable, permeates Ennoïa. The play is in three Acts, each introducing a new embodiment of the figure of Ennoïa. This mythical figure is not generally familiar to us today, but she appears in early Christian mysticism with many different names (including Prunikos, Sophia and Barbelo), and in different guises (such as Helen of Troy). She is usually depicted as an elevated figure, close to God, who sinks to earth and is unable to return. There, she is compelled to take on a series of mortal bodies, and wanders for centuries, dying and returning as someone else in an endless, decadent cycle. In every incarnation she is beautiful, and her beauty causes suffering as men fight over her. In Lorrain’s play, her beauty also leads to her own persecution and death, and he shows her very much as the victim of men’s desire and resentment, as well as their cause.
Lorrain shows us Ennoïa in three different incarnations: at the beginning of Act 1 she is simply Ennoïa, a ragged, enigmatic vagrant through the French countryside, seemingly living outside society’s constraints, but actually controlled and exploited by an old man who uses her beauty to ignite conflict. She soon becomes Frédégonde, a woman destined to be a destructive force: Frédégonde, or Fredegund as we know her in English, was the wife of King Chilperic (or Hilpérig in the play), a sixth-century ruler of Soissons, near Paris. Legend has it that she was manipulative, cruel and regularly murderous. In Act 2, Ennoïa has become Genèvre (Guinevere), who has betrayed King Arthur by having an affair with his groom and is simultaneously vilified for the affair and worshipped for her beauty. Similarly, as Lorelei in Act 3, her beauty leads men to fight over her, bringing their downfall, and hers. Unlike them, though, she will rise again, a power that she has no choice but to wield, again and again.
The biggest decision I had to make when beginning this translation was how to negotiate the fact that it’s written in verse. This isn’t unusual for the time, but it does have the effect of placing the play at a remove from ‘reality’, or anything approaching ‘naturalism’, or speech as it would actually be spoken. There are as many ways of bringing that into English as there are translators, which is true of any text, of course. The need to decide whether to replicate the verse or not initially felt momentous, but once it was made I found it a reassuring reminder that we make momentous decisions with every word we translate; it’s just that they’re not so striking most of the time. My approach has not been to translate into verse but to maintain an element of formal constraint by fitting the translation into a framework of lines of similar length. That constraint moves the translation in the direction of the formal language of the original without needing to grope for poetic or archaic language devised to ‘mimic’ that formality. Lorrain’s verse may not be anywhere near ‘real’ speech, but it is still fluent and accessible, and I wanted my translation to be the same.
Remy de Gourmont’s Lilith (1892): introduced by Dan Rebellato
Fig. 2: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866). Delaware Art Museum, the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935. Public domain.
Remy de Gourmont was a late-nineteenth-century polymath: a poet, a novelist, a critic, an editor, a prolific commentator on the ideas, movements and personalities of his day, and he was also a playwright. He came from a well-off, formerly aristocratic family, and received a Catholic upbringing which coloured some of his early writing, until the 1880s when he became influenced by the emerging Symbolist movement. His circle of friends included Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Rachilde, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Alfred Jarry (with whom he started a magazine). Catholicism, with its purple and its incense, was always fertile ground for the sensuous intensities of decadence, and his work moved in that direction, his poetry filled with the suffocatingly perfumed flowers, richly coloured jewels, and sonorous medieval incantations. His philosophical idealism led him to believe that all knowledge of the world was deeply subjective, leading to a voluptuous exploration of personal experience that became frequently erotic. Indeed, one thing that characterises much of Gourmont’s work is the still-startling mixture of Catholicism and eroticism, the sacred and the profane.
This was echoed in his private life. In 1886, he began a lifelong relationship with Berthe de Courrière, a former artist’s model, occasional occultist, who had a reputation for seducing priests, and, according to Rachilde, kept a bag of communion wafers in her bag to feed stray dogs. (She is widely regarded as a model for Hyacinthe Chantelouve from Huysmans’ 1891 novel Là-Bas). This mixture of sexuality and satanism may also have made her a model for Gourmont’s Lilith.
The figure of Lilith emerged as a solution to a Biblical puzzle. Genesis 2:22 describes the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, which is often taken to be the Biblical origin of womanhood. But earlier Genesis 1:27 has already recorded ‘So God created man in his own image [...] male and female created he them’, suggesting that there was at least one woman before Eve. Lilith had already existed in early rabbinical literature as a female demon, whose forceful sexuality is always prominent and disruptive. Towards the end of the first millennium, in the apocryphal work of Biblical commentary The Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith is identified as the first woman, Adam’s first wife who refused to be submissive to him in the marriage and in the bed. (She was, therefore, the first woman and the first feminist: there is a Jewish feminist magazine called Lilith). From there her fame spreads and by the eighteenth century she ends up in Goethe’s Faust; in the nineteenth century she appears in poems by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (who also painted her), Robert Browning, and Victor Hugo; Alfred de Vigny and Gérard de Nerval write about her; in 1887 Anatole France writes a short story, ‘The Daughter of Lilith’, and Marcel Schwob brings her squarely into decadence in his 1890 story ‘Lilith’ about a poet who rescues his love poems from the coffin – and from beneath the rotting corpse of – his lover, Lilith. In the last century she has made it into C S Lewis’s Narnia, the Marvel Universe, a swathe of video games, and she also gives her name to Frasier Crane’s wife.
Remy de Gourmont’s Lilith is a retelling of the Biblical creation story, incorporating a good deal of Jewish mystical writing, from the Alphabet to the Sefer Yetzirah. His characteristic blasphemy is visible in God’s weakness, irascibility, and his many failures. Gourmont’s characteristic profanity – and indeed his decadence – is visible in Lilith’s sexuality, which is sadistic, masochistic, even cannibalistic. Her capacity to embody and inspire lust even challenges Satan’s capabilities. God himself, in Gourmont’s telling, seems to take erotic pleasure from making Lilith. The play dwells on the aftermath of the Fall, alternating between deep mysticism and what appears to be comic satire, as Adam and Eve, cast out from the Garden, seem increasingly to have made themselves a cosy little bourgeois home.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the boundaries between the various Parisian avant-gardes were highly porous: the symbolists, the decadents, the aesthetes, the idealists, the hydropathes and bohemians overlapped promiscuously. Many of these were simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the theatre: drawn to it because of its ritual aspect, its intensity, and its capacity for poetry and transformation; and repelled by it because of its irreducible materiality, its tendency towards realism, and its institutional conventions. Many writers at the time wrote plays that were probably intended only to be read, preferring the magical word to remain untainted by the compromises of performance.
It is tempting to think that Lilith is one of those, particularly when you read a stage direction like this (it comes straight after Adam and Eve eat from the Forbidden Tree):
The Heavens tear open. The veil of the Universe is torn away. The sun rains burning fire down on Nature; the grass shrivels; the animals run frantically for the cover of trees – but the trees grow pale and, for the first time, the leaves fall. The sun laughs.
Such directions go beyond ‘challenging’ into something close to demanding something incompatible with theatre. At several moments, mid-dialogue, the text reproduces Hebrew letters, and it is fascinatingly unclear what Gourmont intended the actor to do with this – say its name? Utter its phonemic sound? Write the letter somewhere? Or privately allow it to inform the reading of the rest of the dialogue? All of this would seem to be thumbing its nose at the limitations of theatre, preferring the action to be played out in the theatre of the mind.
I started out thinking that, but as I was translating the play, other thoughts started nagging at me. First, despite its theological setting and discourse, the dialogue is often very strong, clear and punchy, sometimes even mordantly funny: the kind of dialogue you’d write for the stage, not the page. Second, he revised the script about fifteen years after its first publication, and made the dialogue even leaner and punchier, suggesting a practical wish to make the play stageworthy. Third, the most florid and literary sections occur near the beginning of the play; Gourmont wrote the play in two bursts of activity, in Winter 1889 and then late summer 1892. Between them his earlier play Théodat was performed on 11 December 1891 by the Théâtre d’Art (at the Théâtre Moderne), and one can see clear signs of someone who has learned practical stagecraft from that experience. The second half is much more direct and grounded than the first. (If Lilith is performed, I think the first scene is the only one that might need some dramaturgical surgery). When he published his revised version in 1906, he publishes it in an edition with Théodat, and at least one critic has suggested this might have been a hint that Lilith is similarly performable.
All of this meant that I tried to find an ornate but speakable, sometimes contemporary, English idiom for this translation, because it seems to me better to think of this play as one that is intended to be unperformable only in the conventions of the time and, by its very daring, to push theatre to reinvent its conventions as it also pushes a wider culture to reinvent its morality.
Given that the symbolists’ challenge to theatrical practice was met by all the innovations of twentieth-century theatre, it would be far more possible to produce this play now. That said, there is a great deal that is theatrically powerful and still shocking about Gourmont’s Lilith, and its challenge to theatre would even now require innovation, imagination and daring on the part of contemporary directors, actors and designers.
You can access the full ‘Decadent Plays’ recording via the ‘Films & Audio’ section of this site.