The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts LE LIVRE DECADENT: EDITER, ILLUSTRER, LIRE A Dissertation in French and Francophone Studies by HÉLÈNE I. HUET © 2015 Hélène I. Huet Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE DECADENT BOOK: PUBLISHING, ILLUSTRATING, READING A Dissertation in French and Francophone Studies by HELENE I. HUET © 2015 Hélène I. Huet Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 ii The dissertation of Hélène I. Huet was reviewed and approved* by the following: Willa Z. Silverman Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies Director of Graduate Studies, French and Francophone Studies Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Kathryn M. Grossman Professor of French Head, Department of French and Francophone Studies Bénédicte Monicat Professor of French and Women’s Studies James L. W. West III Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT Was Decadence a self-conscious artistic movement, or was it a publishing phenomenon – a movement created by publishers and critics for primarily promotional purposes? This is the question my dissertation seeks to answer. Decadence has typically been understood and studied as a movement of late nineteenth-century French literary and visual artists who found their artistic inspiration in notions of social and political decay. My dissertation, on the other hand, argues that several agents, such as the critics, played a major role in creating what is now thought of as Decadence. This is a major departure from earlier studies of the movement, anchored in literary scholarship, which have focused almost exclusively on writers and their texts, often in isolation from the networks of publishers, critics, and readers who produced, interpreted, and consumed the writers’ work. As a result, these studies have understated the role of cultural and economic factors – the need to effectively market books, for example, or the demands of a critical readership in shaping the movement. My own work approaches the subject from a novel interdisciplinary perspective. I use a methodology pioneered by scholars working in the fields of book history/print culture studies: a humanities and social sciences-wide project that imagines the book as a physical object, and considers how and why it was produced and circulated. Looking behind the text, we find a very different picture of Decadence than the one that emerges in the pages of books by decadent authors. Whereas literary scholars have emphasized the elitist pretensions of the authors’ work, a history of the book methodology suggests that Decadence may not have been a coherent intellectual and aesthetic ‘movement’ at all. The beginning of my work finds four French Decadent writers ̶ Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Marcel Schwob, and Rachilde ̶ complaining to their publishers about inadequate book sales. Decadent writers were in fact very much concerned with earning money and selling a lot of books. This was in contradiction with their elitist pretentions and their desire to write books ‘for art’s sake’, and in contradiction with what the movement was thought to be about. In the next section, I consider how critics shaped the Decadent movement by analyzing how the four writers were discussed in articles and book reviews. The way in which journalists and fellow writers talked about these authors and their books, I argue, was what made them Decadent. If Schwob, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Huysmans did not feel like they belonged to a specific literary movement, the reviews of their books nevertheless referred to their work and sometimes, to their personalities, as “decadent.” Publishers and critics, however, were not the only parties contributing to the creation of Decadence. The third part of my dissertation analyzes the role that illustrations in the authors’ books and therefore their creators played in shaping our understanding of Decadence. They did so, I contend, by rendering visually the Decadent themes described in the books. The artists creatively interpreted the texts, allowing readers to escape to a Decadent world of nightmares and dreams, femmes fatales, decay, and death. This world was complimentary, but by no means identical, to the textual world of Decadence: writers and illustrators interpreted and rendered iv differently what Decadence meant to them. They also used the illustrations to decorate the pages, linking intrinsically image and text, to the point that they become “un tout,” where one cannot read the text without reading the images. This connection enables us to better understand how the decadent aesthetic was diffused. Finally, my dissertation concludes with an analysis of Decadent reading and its relation to larger transformations in publishing. Like ourselves, people living in fin-de-siècle France were experiencing dramatic changes in the availability, price, and format of textual materials. Inexpensive, mass-produced editions of literature severed historical links between beautiful books and beautiful writing. Many elite French readers feared that books would no longer be cherished items and that the act of reading would be cheapened and changed for the worse. In response, Decadent writers developed a decadent way of reading, and their texts explain which books to read or how to read them, in opposition to a vulgarization of reading by the ‘masses.’ v SOMMAIRE TABLE DES FIGURES .................................................................................................................... viii REMERCIEMENTS ........................................................................................................................... x INTRODUCTION – Histoire du livre et Décadence ........................................................................ 1 Quel corpus choisir ? .................................................................................................................. 4 Redéfinir la Décadence ............................................................................................................... 9 Mouvement littéraire ? .............................................................................................................. 10 Un canon et une chronologie problématiques ....................................................................... 12 Un mouvement international ? .............................................................................................. 14 Des thématiques communes .................................................................................................. 15 La femme fatale ..................................................................................................................... 15 Pessimisme et dégénérescence .............................................................................................. 16 L’artificiel .............................................................................................................................. 20 Edition et Décadence ................................................................................................................ 22 Encadrement théorique ............................................................................................................. 26 Plan de l’étude .......................................................................................................................... 29 CHAPITRE 1 – Prestige et argent : les auteurs décadents et leurs éditeurs ............................. 32 De l’importance du réseau familial et du réseau amical .......................................................... 37 Le réseau familial ...................................................................................................................... 38 Le réseau amical ....................................................................................................................... 40 Localisation et stratégies économiques ..................................................................................... 44 Rachilde ..................................................................................................................................... 45 Marcel Schwob .......................................................................................................................... 47 Jean Lorrain .............................................................................................................................. 48 Joris-Karl Huysmans ................................................................................................................ 51 L’édition décadente : entre besoin d’argent et stratégies de vente ........................................... 62 Des réclamations continuelles ............................................................................................... 63 Les stratégies de ventes ............................................................................................................. 67 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 75 vi CHAPITRE 2 – « Ce livre morbide et glauque est décadent à souhait » : Le rôle des critiques littéraires dans le façonnement de la Décadence .....................................................................