Editing the Text of Popular Opinion: Literature as Publicity in Jean Lorrain's Maison pour dames

Editing the Text of Popular Opinion: Literature as Publicity in Jean Lorrain's Maison pour dames Robert Ziegler Montana Tech Sickened by the snobbism and fatuity of the Tout-Paris savaged in his columns, the infamous Jean Lorrain in 1900 abandoned what he called "la ville empoisonnée" in order to take up residence in Nice, where he savored the pleasure of wandering through the city's old quarter with its redolence of cheeses, musk, and spice. Lorrain had tired of being harried by litigation and public censure, had grown impatient with being attacked in the anonymous letters flooding his apartment in Auteuil. And so the writer who, in 1885, had arrived in Paris, anxious like Rastignac to join in "la lutte du poète contre la capitale corrompue" (Jullian 47), finally found himself obliged, at age 45, to concede defeat and to go into exile in the South. Better known today as the ether-addicted homosexual who consorted with wrestlers and garçons bouchers, chronicler of les moeurs parisiennes, whose accounts of the demi-monde both titillated and scandalized his readers, Lorrain was also a prolific poet, conteur, and dramatist, a novelist whose fictions offered comment on the unhealthy notoriety that made the author a familiar but marginal figure . Generally neglected and forgotten since his death in 1906, consigned to a literary purgatory where his writings have languished for too long, Lorrain, né Paul Duval, was at once a conspicuous public figure, famous for his friendship with Sarah Bernhardt and for his duel with Marcel Proust, and a journalist who skewered social pretenders and poseurs in his abrasive Pail-Malls. Indeed, Lorrain's cynical depictions of Paris as a modern-day Babylon have often obscured his literary works that deal with the same themes. Published posthumously in 1908, Lorrain's novel Maison pour dames has been characterized by one critic as "une satire féroce des petits cénacles journalistico-littéraires" (Kyria 107). Yet apart from giving insights into the operation of a typical turn-of-the-century poetry review, with its cynical commercial maneuverings and exploitation of contributors, the novel also shows the author's identity becoming just another fiction sold to the public, a collaborative text whose meaning depends on its production as a publicity vehicle accorded a favorable reception by a distant and patronized readership. 183 184Rocky Mountain Review Anticipating the techniques of image management utilized in the contemporary media, Lorrain's work examines the practice of writing in terms of audience manipulation and market analysis. In Maison pour dames, the heroine, Emma Farmer, produces a collection of erotic verse that is less painstakingly crafted than the image that is confected by her literary handlers. Indeed, the attention withdrawn from the actual substance of her text is reinvested in the picture adorning the cover of the issue that celebrates her glory, in the gauzy tunic and myrtle crown she wears to the reception held in her honor. Overlaying her poetry is the author as visual text, the woman who is inscribed by the judgmental glances and jealous scrutiny of her predatory peers. As this paper argues, Lorrain's novel reflects his own experiences with writing, suggesting not only that an author's work shapes popular opinion, but that an image engineered to pique the public's curiosity is a promotional construct used to boost the sales of later books. In fact, the text induces Lorrain's reader to play the same role as that of an editor who judges a work by its author's notoriety. Once transformed into the ruby-emblazoned, velvet-draped coquette on whom all opera glasses are trained, provincial ingenue Emma Farnier becomes a poetess eclipsed by her provocative image as a public figure. Thus, she comes to learn that the function of a literary magazine is not to publish her works, but rather to foment the defamatory gossip that serves to increase its own circulation. More innocent than her author, Emma is a character untypical of Lorrain, whence the audience's tendency to confer on her a presumptive sophistication , to dress her in the corrupting finery of the jaded Parisienne and so assimilate her to her disabused creator. As Lorrain...