Le Roi fou
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- See Symbolism (arts)
Prose fiction
Je veux boire des poisons, me perdre
dans les vapeurs, dans les rêves!
"I want to drink poisons, to lose myself
in mists, in dreams!"
Diana, in The Temptation of Saint Anthony
by Gustave Flaubert.
Symbolism's cult of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours (English title: Against Nature) contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist esthetic. This novel in which very little happens is a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. The novel was imitated by Oscar Wilde in several passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Paul Adam was the most prolific and most representative author of Symbolist novels. Les Demoiselles Goubert co-written with Jean Moréas in 1886 is an important transitional work between Naturalism and Symbolism. Few Symbolists used this form. One exception is Gustave Kahn who published Le Roi fou in 1896. Other fiction that is sometimes considered Symbolist is the cynical misanthropic (and especially, misogynistic) tales of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the Symbolist vein.
Theatre
The same emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies have made Symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent tastes and trends. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama Axel (rev. ed. 1890) is a definitive Symbolist play; in it, two Rosicrucian aristocrats fall in love while trying to kill each other, only to agree to mutually commit suicide because nothing in life could equal their fantasies. From this play, Edmund Wilson took the title Axel's Castle for his influential study of the Symbolist aftermath in literature.
Maurice Maeterlinck was another Symbolist playwright; his theatrical output includes both Pelléas and Melisande, and L'Oiseau Bleu ("The Blue Bird"), another theatrical fantasy.
