Edmund Wilson described the symbolism as the second wave of romanticism. In this way, it would represent the final impulse of the enormous intellectual and emotional event that shook Europe and the United States between about 1770 and 1870, embodied in such literary peaks as Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Giacomo, and others. Leopardi and Edgar Allan Poe are a few of them. Although the symbolist narrative cannot compete with the poetry or painting to which the school in question is affiliated, some of its fruits survive as first-class aesthetic experiences. Bruges (dead) (1892) by Georges Rodenbach (Tournai, Belgium, 1885-Paris, 1898) can by itself claim to produce this kind of impact on the reader.
Rodenbach’s novel draws on some of the movement’s commonplaces: the appeal of death, the fetishization of love, the coded and esoteric reading of reality. Combining these elements, he constructs a sophisticatedly morbid funerary doll in which body and stone, woman and city, unite in an elegy of passion that is also a parable about the impossibility of resurrecting the past. The demon of parable directs the widowed hero named Hugues Viane to seek refuge in Bruges, the saddest of cities, to mourn the death of his lover. Viane built a memorial museum in her home, where the dead woman’s braid is revered as a perfect love bowl. Escaping from the sun, from the hustle and bustle, in short, from life, he closes himself into a world that rests next to him, full of bells and humidity, as beautiful as a chrome frozen in time, but therefore unaware of the future. and this is thought to be absorbed within it, creating strange forms of boredom in its inhabitants: a taste for sickness, a militant religiosity, wandering as a favorite way to kill time.
The appearance of a woman who bears an extraordinary resemblance to the deceased spouse triggers new and dramatic correspondence. Although the body seems to repeat itself, the characters and motivations of the twins are very different. Viane insists on resurrecting an exhausted existence. The price for this is first deception, then contempt, and finally tragedy. The psychic fiasco leads to death, the usual fate of all paranoia, and the beloved relic becomes an instrument of pain. In their own way, the dead are jealous of their situation, and the irreversibility of their situation should not be underestimated. If everything in Bruges is imbued with an unchangeable time perspective, introducing another story, a second love, into the streets and canals is a delicate matter.
In 1954, more than 60 years after the publication of Rodenbach’s work, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac returned to their dual obsession in From the Dead, which four years later became a major turning point in Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema history: Vertigo. These are secret and repetitive passages of a fascinating subject.