The Glamour of Strangeness by Jamie James

The Glamour of Strangeness by Jamie James

Author:Jamie James
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


The Empire of the Self

There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.

Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.

—Ezra Pound, “Song of the Bowmen of Shu”

(after King Wen of Zhou, ca. 1100 B.C.)

In 1905, Victor Segalen returned home from his twenty-eight-month voyage around the world. After the Durance passed quarantine, he went directly to Paris and commenced a formal courtship of Yvonne Hébert, the daughter of a doctor from Brest. It was an odd engagement: Segalen had plainly stated on many occasions that he had no intention of marrying, and no sooner were the fiançailles announced than “a certain anxiety about his conjugal vocation brought on a nervous depression,” in Henry Bouillier’s delicate phrase. It was Segalen’s second debilitating attack of nerves; in 1900, he had suffered a serious bout of neurasthenic depression. His fiancée allayed his fears, and the wedding, complete with a Catholic Mass, was celebrated on June 3. It must have been a full recovery: ten months later his son Yvon was born, the first of three children.

After his marriage, Segalen returned full-time to the literary life he had begun before his voyage, principally the completion of the manuscript of Les immémoriaux. He borrowed a thousand francs from his parents to pay the printer and for obscure reasons published the book under the pseudonym Max-Anély. Segalen had high hopes that it would establish him as a writer of repute. He entered it for the Prix Goncourt and made the customary calls on the members of the Académie Goncourt, but it is difficult to believe that his eccentric, didactic book was ever in the running.

Segalen published a series of essays based on his voyage in the Mercure de France, including “Gauguin in His Final Décor.” He went to Paris to meet Isabelle Rimbaud, the poet’s sister, and a few months later published “The Double Rimbaud.” After an emotional visit to the Gustave Moreau Museum, Segalen wrote a study of the painter, who had been extolled in À rebours (translated as Against the Grain and Against Nature), the quintessential Decadent novel, by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans was Segalen’s first literary hero and one of the principal subjects of his thesis at the naval medical academy in Bordeaux, about depictions of nervous disorders in French literature after Madame Bovary—an unorthodox subject, to say the least.

À rebours is a nearly plotless series of tableaux from the life of Des Esseintes, a hypersensitive aesthete afflicted by terminal splenetic boredom who seeks distraction in a series of exquisitely perverse pastimes. A Faust of the senses, he cultivates a garden of poisonous plants, experiments in exotic perfumery, encrusts the carapace of his pet tortoise with rare gems, and finds fleeting sexual diversion with mannish women and girlish boys. Des Esseintes owns Moreau’s painting of Salome and spends every night in rapt contemplation of its “symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties.” À rebours is the book that Dorian Gray read, in which “the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.



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