In a richly illustrated work, Evanghélia Stead shows that the end of the XIXe century, which we readily place under the sign of evanescence, is on the contrary marked by concrete mutations which are shaking up the editorial landscape. New modes of reading are established while the image imposes itself in all its forms.
In an issue of the magazine that she edited in 2002, Evanghélia Stead, a specialist in fin-de-siecle iconography, invited us to “ read with pictures “. Professor of comparative literature at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, which has become an important center in the history of publishing thanks to the energy of Jean-Yves Mollier, the author has long been taking advantage of this precept, as evidenced by his last opus, whose title is inspired, by a clever and productive diversion, from the famous verse of Mallarmé: “ The Flesh is sad, alas ! and I read all the books » (“ Sea breeze “). This abundantly and superbly historical work – extremely rare, concerning a volume distributed by university presses – immerses us, through fifteen scholarly studies distributed in five large parts, in the complex dialogue maintained, at the end of the XIXe century where the book becomes an object of art, the page and the board, writing and graphics, the letter and the drawing, the pen and the pencil, but sliding at the caesura of this binary, and sometimes conflicting, relationship , the book as a support and tangible element.
Evoking an abundance of French cultural productions, without being devoid of a “ European dimension » (p. 11), The Flesh of the Book not only embraces all the typographical activity of the time (books, the press, posters and other ephemera) but exhumes often forgotten texts, which he places on an equal level with those chosen by posterity, a difference in treatment renewed by the distinction between “ luxury book ” And “ poor book » (p. 15) ; the editorial landscape thus painted is colored with an unusual tint which reflects the variety, the nuances and, in the form of echoes from one writer to another, the favorite themes of fin-de-siecle literature.
Starting from the postulate that reading is not just an intellectual pleasure, but a multiple experience that summons all the senses, E. Stead analyzes books as container and content by focusing on their materiality as “ the carnal imagination » (p. 13) that they solicit, from their binding to the texture of their paper, from their frontispiece to their colophon, from their glyphs to their images. Along the way, she deciphers the obsessive presence, paradoxical to say the least, of Woman as a representation of the book and of reading: “ Almost excluded from the reading, the woman nevertheless powerfully personifies it. A stranger to the book, she comes to embody it. Chased out of the library, she haunts it » (p. 211). Two femme fatales, Salomé and Cleopatra, are at the center of this poetic and deadly device: they shake up the shelves, disrupt the literary universe with a troubled seduction which is due to the interference of forms as well as the disintegration of signs and imposes new decryption keys. The parallel posed at the opening continues through “ the association between reading cabinet and bedroom, volume and bed » (p. 211-213), so many spaces where the woman becomes the vector of a “ reading-temptation » (p. 212) which involves the eroticization of the book. No longer an inert and inanimate object, the latter is given a fantasmatic, labile and sometimes autonomous existence. “ Living body » (p. 13) both sacred and sensual, fragile and composite, he will willingly borrow, to express himself, the organic metaphors (specific to Art Nouveau) or architectural, the book henceforth being assimilated to a building (to starting with its frontispiece), a three-dimensional construction. In each analysis, the author subtly articulates with a poetic approach a material history of the media, unfortunately too often neglected by literary scholars.
Far from being confined to the Belle Époque – whose inventiveness is exercised, we see once again, outside the trivial mythology to which it has too often been reduced by exploiting the imagery of Paris, capital of all pleasures – the work opens up perspectives as stimulating as they are convincing on the avant-gardes of XXe century (Dada, surrealism, ready-made, cubism and conceptual art) and invites us to rethink the notion of modernity understood as the reign of amalgamation, hybridization and fluidity, leading to a claimed and assumed monstrosity.
Thus, behind black and white, the emblematic palette of the printed page, one represented by ink – and its multiple typographical and scriptural (mis)adventures -, the other by snow (image of silence), lies profile the most innovative abstraction and graphic attempts of the last century. From the XIXe century, numerous technical innovations, such as lithography and woodcut engraving, ensured the fortune of the illustrated book and established the reign of the vignette. The distribution of the book was then facilitated by its lower manufacturing cost, progress in publishing, the development of photoengraving which allowed the joint printing of texts and images, and the proliferation of periodicals as laboratories for these various developments.
Evanghélia Stead revisits the history of illustration (p. 77-83), an ambiguous term which seems to confine the image to a secondary and adventitious role, even though it imposes itself freely in the end book century, shaking up the layout, the linear reading, the message of the written word and consecrating the fruitful collaboration between the writer and the artist, whether it is Félicien Rops, Jules Chéret, Aubrey Beardsley, Odilon Redon or Henry Gerbault, to mention only a few to whom the book provided a privileged field of expression, as shown in particular by the chapters devoted to the overlap between “ THE visible » And “ THE legible » (p. 471), which also address the phenomenon of bibliophilia, consecrating the reign of beauty: precious papers, careful typography, sumptuous plates, luxurious bindings, modest prints reserved for a literate and esthete elite.
Inviting the decompartmentalization of disciplines and perspectives, this work which embraces numerous fields, although it is aimed primarily at specialists of the period considered and more particularly at researchers familiar with the authors “ decadent “, unfortunately almost absent from school literary anthologies, will also be of interest to historians of art, illustration and publishing because it allows, behind the abundance of titles, to bring to light the variety and originality of the bookstore 1900. Thanks to erudition nourished by interdisciplinarity, Evanghélia Stead masterfully takes us into the colorful, fanciful and daring world of creation end of the century, that it opens to us the doors of the writer’s study or the etcher’s workshop.
After having, by way of prologue, detailed the scandalous library designed in 1890 by the cabinetmaker François-Rupert Carabin, kept at the Musée d’Orsay (p. 11-39), then reconstituted that, singular, of Marcel Schwob, writer- erudite bibliophile (p. 315-334), she ultimately leads us towards experimental enterprises where the book, mistreated in its traditional aspect, is also transcended. This is evidenced by the motif of the fan which gives it its most poetic and evanescent form by collecting the “ beat of the verse » dear to Mallarmé. This trinket is the subject, under its bookish metamorphosis, of inspired pages, where the interpretations are supported by an iconography which presents documents of great rarity and great relevance (p. 407-467).
The fin-de- siècle book, less than a finished and static product, imposes itself as a laboratory of experiments in which the reader is invited, in a dynamic way, to enter, to circulate, in order to invest it with his own imagination, an approach which prefigures, all things considered, interactive reading as a learning method and others “ books in which you are the hero “. This is the great merit of this substantial essay which, beyond its bibliophilic dimension, offers numerous avenues for reflection based on in-depth studies that neglect no detail.