Monstrous Desire in the Paintings of Gustave Moreau
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Mythic Patterns in the Art of Gustave Moreau: The Primacy of Dionysus Jonathan F. Krell University of Georgia “A ceux que j‟aime, je recommande de visiter le musée [Gustave Moreau], d‟aller s‟enfoncer dans cette pénombre où flottent les constellations de pierres précieuses venues du gouffre des hantises érotiques et scatologiques, comme autant de promesses d‟une rédemption archangélique” (L. Pauwels, Les Passions selon Dali, 1968; quoted in Mathieu 1991, 13). “Il peint ses rêves, non des rêves simples et naïfs comme nous en faisons tous, mais des rêves sophistiqués, compliqués, énigmatiques, où on ne se retrouve pas tout de suite.” (E. Zola, “Salon 1876”; quoted in Chaleil 110) Gustave Moreau, “grand maître de l‟imaginaire décadent” (Pierrot 315), is not featured among the painters that Gilbert Durand discusses in his Figures mythiques et visages de l’œuvre: De la mythocritique à la mythanalyse. It is nonetheless fitting that Moreau‟s Le Poète voyageur should grace the cover of the 1992 edition. Durand, a disciple of Gaston Bachelard,1 founder of the Centres de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire and one of France‟s most distinguished myth critics, has ventured beyond traditional mythocritique, the branch of thematic criticism that elucidates individual authors‟ works through the mythical images that recur in them. Durand coined the term mythanalyse to describe his ambitious project: analyze the obsessive, repetitive myths embedded in artistic and literary works, in order to “decode” particular cultures or “moments historiques” (Figures 7-8). Durand‟s mythanalyse stems from exhaustive mythocritiques of particular periods and places. The myths that incessantly reappear in literary and artistic works are a compelling way, he argues, to characterize the general orientation of a cultural period. His theory is persuasive, and suggests an answer to some key questions that concern myth critics: “How does myth in, or as, literature evolve historically? Does a single governing myth, a „monomyth,‟ organize disparate narratives and dominate literary form?” (Reeves). And does myth extend beyond literature, as Northrop Frye implies in The Critical Path (103), to “ultimately connect with a larger theory of culture” (Reeves)? “L‟art est phénomène de culture,” writes Durand (Figures 126). Like literature, it is not a purely individual endeavor: it is a culmination of a “trajet anthropologique” (Durand, Structures 38), the constant interaction between a particular human imagination and its historical milieu. Individual artists thus shape and are shaped by the dominant myths of their times. In Figures mythiques et visages de l’œuvre, Durand applies his theory to nineteenth-century France, and concludes that the mythic pattern of that century is woven primarily by three fundamental myths. Early French Romanticism is dominated by the heroic, diurnal Prometheus, who yields first to the decadent, nocturnal Dionysus, and then at the century‟s end to Hermes who, as god of travelers and conductor of souls (Hermes Psychopompus) symbolizes the rite of passage that leads to spiritual fulfillment and redemption (Durand, Figures 264-65, 268-69, 308-10). A myth analysis of the work of Gustave Moreau, whose life (1826-98) spans three-quarters of the century, reveals that his career follows a mythic pattern not unlike the one that Durand attributes to the entire period. Promethean at the outset, Dionysian and Hermetic during his later stages, the painter‟s artistic evolution is in a sense a microcosm of his culture. Yet, I would suggest that Moreau‟s work never embraces Hermes as fully as it does Dionysus. His late Hermetic phase, its fervent Christian essence apparent in the painter‟s lengthy commentaries, strives to accept the 35 spiritual, redemptive figure of Hermes. Moreau fails in this attempt, however, and never escapes the irresistible erotic pull of Dionysus. In order to argue for this interpretation of Moreau, I will view each of the three stages of his art through the prism of several nineteenth-century writers: Victor Hugo for the Promethean phase, Emile Zola and J.-K. Huysmans for the Dionysian, and Charles Baudelaire for the Hermetic. Moreau‟s early Promethean penchant is illuminated by a consideration of Victor Hugo‟s characteristic use of antithesis. Pierre Albouy (86) and Durand (Figures 27-28) study the imagery of Prometheus in poems such as “L‟Expiation” (Châtiments), in which Bonaparte, defeated and exiled on Elba and later Saint Helena, assumes the titanic proportions of Prometheus, bound to a “roc hideux,” “[l]e vautour Angleterre . lui ronge[ant] le cœur” (Hugo 314).2 “Napoléon-le-Grand” (Bonaparte) versus “Napoléon-le-Petit” (Napoleon III) is but one example of Hugo‟s famous antitheses, which recall the trenchant dualism of what Durand calls the “diurnal regime” of the imagination. Here, we see structures of the “heroic” or “schizomorph” type, where poetic images clearly distinguish light from darkness, heroes from monsters. The hero‟s choice of weapon is the sword (one of the four minor arcanum from the Tarot deck), 3 which for Durand symbolizes the diurnal regime and the cutting, separating images that characterize it. This structure of the imagination recalls the confrontational narratives we see in many of Moreau‟s early paintings. In subjects such as St. George and the dragon, Hercules and the Hydra, and Apollo and Python, Moreau depicts typical diurnal images, in which a solar hero, armed with a blade, slays a “monstre femelle et chtonien” (Durand, Structures 179). The relatively young painter of St. Georges et le dragon (1858; copied from the early Italian Renaissance painter Carpaccio) is clearly Promethean.4 Objects are sharply delineated: Moreau has not yet developed the distinctive dreamy, mystical style that will characterize a watercolor in 1869 and an oil painting in 1890 on the same subject. As in other early paintings, he portrays few characters and paints “in a fairly tight and dry linear style” (Kaplan 52). In his Prométhée (1868) Moreau depicts the prototypical hero of Romanticism bound to a rock in the Caucasus, his liver being devoured by a vulture (Figure 1).5 As opposed to the many androgynous male figures that Moreau will compose in his Dionysian paintings, Prometheus is an unmistakably masculine, diurnal hero: his muscular physique and chiseled features communicate the stubborn, optimistic resolve that made him a symbol of the progress of the human race, armed with the mastery of nature that science brings. Julius Kaplan notes that Moreau chose to paint an alert, strong, and heroic figure rather than a suffering one (Kaplan 48). For this critic, Prometheus represents Moreau‟s belief “that man is an ideal figure who must combat the sensuousness and brutality of matter” (50). Moreau embraces a philosophy that is essentially Neo- Platonic, aiming, through a mystical art, to comprehend the pure absolute. He believes, as did the French Academy, that art can direct our mind “to lofty realms of grandeur, purity and the ideal” (Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts; quoted in Kaplan 9). In his notebooks, Moreau writes that the artist must “elevate himself to this superior region where even the most terrible passion, the most ardent forces free themselves from base sensualities to take on this divine and abstract character that ennobles and transfigures the soul. This is what one calls art” (Moreau, Notebooks III 120; quoted in Kaplan 7). One can also identify his ideas as “Gnostic-Manichaean, a system of belief which stresses the conflict between light and darkness, and the inherent evil of matter that the individual constantly strives to overcome” (Kaplan 86). Thus a strict dualism—in which the good soul and the corrupt body are clearly separate—dominates Moreau‟s early, Promethean period. Yet, together with the heroic, extroverted, conquering myth of Prometheus, which corresponds so well to this era of scientific and industrial progress, coexists a subversive, mystical, 36 introverted or “intimist” movement that ultimately, in the latter half of nineteenth-century France, finds its expression in the myth of Dionysus. The severing sword of Hugo‟s antitheses gives way to the combinatory, chemical weapon of Baudelaire‟s oxymorons, where flowers and evil enjoy an uneasy coexistence in the poetry of this “parfait chimiste” (Durand, Figures 272). The god of wine dominates Zola and the decadent writers who follow Baudelaire: their characters, often sexually ambiguous, stumble through a haze of alcoholic and orgiastic excess. Gustave Moreau participates fully in this movement: the decadents praise him as one of their own. Joséphin Péladan, for example, calls Moreau a “merveilleux poète qui conçoit comme un Goethe français avec une palette de Delacroix” (L’esthétique à l’exposition décennale, 1883; quoted in Chaleil 89). Huysmans marvels at this “artiste extraordinaire, unique. Abîmé dans l‟extase, il voit resplendir les féeriques visions, les sanglantes apothéoses des autres âges” (“Salon officiel de 1880”; quoted in Chaleil 38). As many critics have noted, the androgynous nature of the male characters he paints during his middle and late periods reveal a decadent aesthetic; moreover, many of his paintings express a powerful Dionysian desire, evident in works such as Bacchanale (1850), Messaline (1874), the Salomé series (1876), La Débauche (1893-96), and Pasiphaé (1897). One is struck by the number of Moreau‟s works that portray the mysterious horrors of monstrous love, the “titanic shame” (as he writes in his description