Memory of Place by Trigg Dylan;

Author:Trigg, Dylan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DARK ENTITY

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.

—Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“He needed,” so writes Georges Rodenbach of the widowed protagonist in Bruges-la-Morte,

a dead town to correspond to his dead wife. His deep mourning demanded such a setting. Life would only be bearable for him there … in the muted atmosphere of the waterways and the deserted streets, Hugues was less sensitive to the sufferings of his heart.… 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. (2005, 30–31)

Rodenbach’s fin de siècle depiction of loss and love in a decaying Bruges plays on the thematic entwinement of embodiment, memory, and mimesis. In the process of mourning his wife, Hugues Viane establishes a “spiritual telepathy between his soul and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges” (2005, 60). This structural device, central to the novel, provides the opportunity for Rodenbach to explore the affective power of memory and imagination, manifest as actions able to morph a location to mimetically resemble the object of desire. The “sense of resemblance” prevalent in the book leads the protagonist to seek refuge in Bruges, in which his grief and loss are personified in the stone and material of the city.

What is peculiar to this reading is the extent to which place is assimilated by memory. The “thousand tenuous threads” that link the past with the present occur thanks to the specific environment of Bruges itself, which facilitates the spectral emergence of the dead wife through the figure of another woman, an actress named Jane. As a result of this meeting, Viane proceeds to clothe the actress, with the aim of modifying her behavior in accordance with the memory of his wife. Indeed, the strangeness of this story is precisely the reconfiguration of the past in another imitative guise, such that the familiarity of the past becomes dislocated by the alteration of the present. “Resemblance,” Rodenbach writes, “is the horizon where habit and novelty meet” (2005, 60). But resemblance, as Rodenbach presents it, never deviates from the position of the protagonist. Rather, Bruges the city becomes a spatial and temporal extension, and so expression, of Viane the subject, recalling Nietzsche’s account of the “antiquarian man”: “The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays, like an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds again himself, his force, his industry, his joy, his judgment, his folly and vices” (Nietzsche 1997, 73).

This narcissistic relation to the city is at the same time the necessary means for Hugues Viane to retain temporal continuity.

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