Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: L’Amour, le temps, la mort (review)

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, as Giné-Janer reminds us, remains an ‘écrivain encore peu connu’ (p. 11). This detailed and insightful study offers a much-needed fresh look at the status of Villiers and his aesthetic principles within the context of the nineteenth century in France. Incorporating detailed textual analysis with incisive critical evaluation which takes into account the full range of Villiers scholarship to date, Giné-Janer draws out the relationships between the notions of love, time and death in Villiers’s work, demonstrating that these interconnected ideas are not just a chance thematic, but a central tenet of Villiers’s understanding of the future of literature. After exploring briefly the biographical elements of Villiers’s various failed or flawed relationships with members of the opposite sex (such as Judith Gautier or Louise Dyonnet), Giné-Janer moves on to explore the significance of the idealization of love in Villiers’s work which rebels—often through means of stinging irony—against the mundane and quotidian aspects of love. The dream of an idealized form of love is not just a (post-)Romantic commonplace, however: for Villiers, it is a dream which is able to ‘traverser les lois du temps’ (p. 184) in order to find the creative instinct which allows the writer to write and to overcome death. As such, Villiers, like Baudelaire, is attracted to the notion of a pre-lapsarian state which is not related to a specific (Christian) agenda, but which enables the writer to escape the pain of the present in order to rediscover the ‘rêverie d’enfance’ (p. 217) which had once fired his heart (and which is essential for literary creativity). Giné-Janer’s analysis takes great care not to present Villiers’s ideas on love, time and death as static or stable; rather, she explores the nuanced developments in his aesthetic stance over the course of his career, via his Premières poésies, Isis, the Contes cruels, L’Ève future or Axël, in order to demonstrate how Villiers contributes to an important renewal of literature which is now able to speak (with Mallarmé) of the eternal beauty of language itself, or, more specifically of ‘la parole d’avant les mots’ (p. 325). Unsurprisingly, L’Amour suprême takes pride of place in this study, with the opening pages of the text forming the epigraph for the book. With its notion of lovers who are pre-destined to sacrifice themselves ‘pour ne renaî tre qu’immortel’, L’Amour suprême stands as an important analogy for figure of the writer who invites his reader to join him on the quest for the (Wagnerian) ‘œuvre total’ (p. 356). In so doing, Villiers’s readers are invited to undergo a symbolic death by falling fatally in love with language and allowing language to resonate completely and fully within them, in a ‘synthèse cosmique parfaite’ (p. 333) between body and soul, between the mortal and the eternal. The depth of analysis in this study of Villiers shows him to be a writer whose contribution to nineteenth-century French literature has more far-reaching consequences than has been hitherto acknowledged.