Philothée O'Neddy was, along with Petrus Borel, one of the principal organisers of the Bouzingo group, and among its most politically and ideologically radical and outspoken. According to his friend Gautier, "In all he did the tone was excessive, the colouring extreme and violent, the utmost bounds of expression reached, the very originality aggressive, and the whole almost dripping with originality". He was known for his "absurd paradoxes, the sophistical maxims, the incoherant metaphors, the turgid hyperbole and the six-foot words." He wore his eyeglasses even in his sleep, claiming that without them he could not see his dreams clearly enough.
Gautier considered O'Neddy one of the most skilled poetic craftsmen of his generation: "Philothée was a metrical writer; he knew how to fashion a line on an anvil, and when he had drawn from the fire the incandescent alexandrine, he could give it, amid a shower of sparks, the form he wanted by means of his heavy and persevering hammering."
His father died in the cholera epidemic of 1832, several months from retirement after 29 years in public service, and his family was denied pension; O'Neddy began to live a double life, taking his father's job to support his mother and sister while continuing as a ringleader of the Bouzingo. While Fire & Flame, published the following year, was hailed by the extreme wing of the avant-garde as a Romanticist masterpiece, the psychological strain of this way of living began to burn him out as it did Borel. By the end of the decade, his spirit broken, he had reverted to his given name, Théophile Dondey, though he continued to published Gothic novels and occassional verse under that name, and to support the Romanticist community through his influence on the press co-owned by his brother, the 'Oriental Library of Dondey-Dupré'.
For nearly decade he fell out of touch with his old comrades; finally in 1848 he attended a banquet thrown for fellow Bouzingo Célestin Nanteuil, who had designed the frontispiece for Fire & Flame. Gautier, overjoyed, asked him, "when will your second volume of verse appear?"
'He gazed at me with his watery, frightened blue eyes,' relates Gautier, 'and answered with a sigh:--
"When there are no more Bourgeois."'
From this time he attended most of the Romanticist reunions until his death in 1875.
For more context and information, refer to the timeline of French Romanticism, posted below.
Translator's note by Joseph Carter:
Here is a translation that I have tried to keep as true to the source text as possible. While there may be contained therein much opportunity to have further anglicized some parts, syntax or expressions, I chose not to do as such on condition that it still made sense, and still conveyed what I felt the author was trying to express (in a manner still comprehensible to the English reader). I have done this in an attempt to give the English reader a clearer taste of O'Neddy's style, and also some exposure to the manner in which the French communicate in general. It is still, alas, my regret to inform you that despite my efforts, some of the originality, creativity, and beauty of the source text has been, as we so often say, lost in translation.
The punctuation, which is at times bizarre in my opinion, has been left unaltered; except of course that there are no spaces between words and: colons, semicolons, and exclamation marks. Also, my keyboard cannot make a dash, in its place I have used two hyphens.
Unless otherwise indicated, notes are by Carter; notes by Lindsann are italicized and marked (OL)
An author, head held high1, in his proud preface,2
To the public he insults though trying to cry out: Places!3
Long enough4, immobile and arms crossed on the front step of my pariah hut, have I contemplated, in idle admiration, the great adolescent walls of artistic and moral Babel which the elite with secret information of our age have embarked on edifying.
Having become5, at this hour, more profound, more imperious, more exalted, my sympathy ordains me to combine a little action with this contemplation, to go merge myself into the worker's crowd.
So, here I am: I bring to the gigantic slabs a puny handful of cement.
Strong and muscular workers, keep yourselves from pushing away my feeble cooperation; never will you have enough hands6 to erect such a grand opus7! And perhaps am I not quite unworthy to be named your brother. -- As you, I despise from the depths of my soul the social order and above all the political order which truly8 is excrement; -- as you, I mock the ancientists[sic]9 and the academy; -- as you, I pose myself incredulous and cold in front of the magnoliquence[sic] and the faded finery of the religions of the land10; -- as you, I have no pious yearnings but for Poetry, this twin sister of God, who allots to the physical world light, harmony and perfumes; to the moral world, love, intelligence and will!
Certainly, though incipient, she is already very well miraculous and grandiose, this Babel! Her belt of grand walls already tightly fit around myriads of stadiums. The sublimity of her towers already pierces the most distant heavens. Belonging to her alone, she has already more arabesques and statues than all of the cathedrals of the middle ages together.11 Poetry12 possesses at last a city, a kingdom where she may easily deploy her two natures: -- her human nature which is art, -- her divine nature which is passion.
Without a doubt, you recollect the fabulous confidence with which, straight after the fall of the last king of France, certain journals13 prophesied that this was being done with young14 literature, that it was entering the coffin at the same time as old legitimacy.15 -- Young literature has so little been in mortal danger, it has so well developed its vital principle, that not only has it managed to multiply tenfold its own strength, to put the finishing touches on its revolution16, but that it has yet known being rich enough, powerful enough gloriously to prelude a metaphysical crusade against society. Yes, now that it has completed all its beautiful reforms in the disguise17 of art, it devotes itself exclusively to the ruin of that which it calls the social lie; -- as the philosophy of the eighteenth century devoted itself to the destruction of that which it called the christian lie.18
Each day, many young people of patriotic convictions come to realize that, if political work has a Caliban type nature, it must directly be blamed on social work19, its mother; -- so, they put down republican fanaticism, and rush to enroll in the phalanxes of our Babel.
What is unbelievable, is that the powerful20 heads of the financial establishments, the sublime capacities who mock the knighthood and adore the national guard21, persist in denying the existence of this large intellectual fermentation. Because the exterior life, the material and positive life finds itself, thanks to our mathematically miserly civilization, somewhat reduced to the state of petrification, -- they are counting on an eternity of boorish calm; -- they do not see that on the other hand the interior life, the Romanesque22 and metaphysical life is as turbulent, as adventurous, as free as the Arab tribes in their solitudes.
Let them then remember that, on that very day before the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried very much alive two cities, Herculaneum and Pompeii, of ignorant naturalists, who must have been strolling not far from the edge of the crater, asking each other if it was very well true that the bowels of the mountain contained a volcano!...
I hasten, before closing this vile prose, to affirm to the honest people who will well want to let their ivory knife devirginize[sic] the pages of my book23, that I have not the slightest vanity in the world to believe the subsequent poems, at the level of the solemn preoccupations touched lightly by these preliminary lines.
This volume has no other pretension but that of being the body of my best schoolboy drafts; which consist simply of passionate reveries and of artistic studies.
It is very well true however that one finds here and there a few footprints of lycanthropy24, a few anathemas against the social lepers; though we would be wrong to take word for word25 these manifestations, which are, for the most part, but lively witticisms. -- One would be wrong to regard them as the absolute expression of my veritable sentiments. If it's given to me26 to publish a second work, it will be more logical, more in touch my nature as a thinker; inside it I will say my last word; -- so then, one will be able to judge me.
What if the bric-à-brac traders of civilization deigned to tell me in anger that no person is permitted to put himself outside of society, I would have the irreverence to make them observe that two classes of men possess this right in an imprescriptible manner; -- those who are worth more than society, -- and those who are worth less. -- I fall into one of these two categories.27
1front levé means either forehead raised or brow raised. In English a raised brow usually indicates confusion or suspicion. Here a reference to pride is intended.
2The preface was the traditional form of the Romanticist manifesto--other examples include Hugo's preface to Cromwell, Borel's preface to Rhapsodies, and Gautier's preface to Mlle. de Maupin.
3The only sense I can make from this is that he means this in the way that a director or choreographer might yell: ''Places everybody!'' (JC) This is epigraph is treated as quoted verse, but if it is I've been unable to trace the source, which means it's EVEN more obscure than everything else we're looking at here. If it IS a quote (or is simply meant to resemble one), it explains the superfluous capitalisation, for it implies the beginning of a new line of verse. It should be noted that elsewhere O'Neddy uses as epigraph a 'quote' attributed to his given name (employed there as a pseudonym!) (OL)
4I'm working from the assumption that tems is actually supposed to be temps and that this signifies nothing more than an innocent typo.
5Because in French adjectives agree with the gender of the noun, this sentence is very precise in indicating that his sympathy has become more profound etc. Plus, in French, the verb to become has a more obvious past participle, thus does not risk being confused with predicates of present tense or imperative. In an attempt to achieve the same clarity with minimal alteration, The auxiliary gerund (which is absent in the source text) has been added to the past participle of to become.
6Though O'Neddy said arms, I felt that hands woks better in English.
7If it is felt by the reader that opus is too specific to music, than it may be substituted for work.
8While the adverb truly was not used by O'neddy, it was added to convey the same emphasis indicated by the en in the sentence (a literal translation of which is impossible).
9I love these neologisms. This one would refer to the Classicist school, the arch-enemies of the Romanticists (and thus the Bouzingo, who were arch-Romanticist) intellectually and often ideologically. Classicism grounded creative activity and thought in abstractioin and the immutable logics discovered or laid down by the ancient Greeks, while the Romanticists grounded it in the particular and the constantly-changing prerogatives of society. Classicism was effectively the official ideology of the French Academy. (OL)
10The Bouzingo were without a doubt the most blasphemous and outrageously atheist of the Romanticists (Borel, O'Neddy, and Nerval in particular); rumour had them as out-and-out Satanists, though in fact most of them seem rather to have been atheist mystics and/or Voltairian skeptics who (immensely) enjoyed the aesthetic of blasphemy, having been raised on Gothic novels, the 'Satanic School' of British Romanticism (Byron, Shelley, etc), etc. Probably not unlike contemporary horror or death metal fans--atheists who enjoyed that particular transgression. (OL)
11There might be a sly little dry joke here; the Bouzingo were utterly steeped in things Gothic, both medieval poetry (esp. Villon, Rabelais, and the Minstrels), art, and architecture itself, and contemporary movements in painting and literature that revived and recontextualized the medieval, including Gothic novels whose conventions were a huge part of how the Bouzingo presented themselves to the world. The name of 'Romanticism' itself is a ressurection of the Medieval (Romanesque), and that's probably what's being indirectly refered to by 'arabesques'. The use of that term also carries a shade of the orientalism which was a part of not only the Bouzingo's mythologizing of the East, but also of Europe's past (and present, for that matter...). They were more medieval than the Medievals. (OL)
12Poetry is capitalized here not just because it's at the beginning of the sentence, but also because O'Neddy is still personifying it. One will notice in the source text that poetry is the second word and with an upper case p.
13Journal in the sense of newspaper.
14The adjective new is arguably more appropriate, but I felt that young was in better keeping with O'Neddy's style (and it is, after all, what he wrote).
15This refers to the "July Revolution" of 1830, when the Bourbon Monarchy was overthrown in city-wide rioting, and another, slightly more liberal king put in his place by the Liberal opposition in order to forestall a proletarian republic. Borel and O'Neddy were not happy about this last-minute reinstatement of Monarchy. The 'Young Art' refered to by O'Neddy would of course be Romanticism, but more specifically O'Neddy is refering to the “Battle of Hernani”, the opening of Victor Hugo's Romanticist play where there had been a riot of physical brawling between Romanticists and Classicists; the rioting was in fact instigated according to a carefully planned and rehearsed programme devised by Hugo, Borel, and Nerval, and then spread through the Romanticist community in a remarkably organized way. It was planned as a literal coup d'etat of the french cultural establishment, with the 'battle' being the spectacular, newsworthy event which would secure Romanticism a voice and the support of the French people. It worked remarkably well. Presumably the Classicists (and Monarchists, since Romanticism considered itself a fundamentally democratic movement) were hoping that the political turmoil, and its termination, would spell the end of Romanticism as a cultural force. (OL)
16Although this has the nuance that I felt while reading the source text, it may well be more colourful than O'Neddy intended. To write ...to complete its revolution might have sufficed.
17He may have perhaps meant in a suit of art.
18It's rare to see this idea of art being primarily a mask for social and metaphysical revolt stated so explicitly in the 19th century. This paragraph sounds uncannily like something that the Situationists would have written 130 years later--see in particular Vaneigam's definitions of Poetry in Revolution of Everyday Life, which accrd closely with O'Neddy's use of the term. Reversing direction, he seems to be implying that he sees the Bouzingo's activity as a continuation of the project of Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., redirected from the Philosophical to the cultural realm. (OL)
19I suspect he does not mean social work the way we know it today.
20O'Neddy wrote strong, however I used powerful in the translation to avoid mistaking head for the anatomical version because he certainly did not mean to say strong heads as in stubborn heads, he is clearly using head as the synonym of leader.
21The National Guard had fought on behalf of the capitalist Liberals in the July Revolution. (OL)
22The very term 'Romantic'/Romantique is derived from 'Romanesque', though the relationship between the two in early 19th Century usage seems quite complex and we are not yet at the bottom of figuring it out. Certainly O'Neddy's use of the term would have borne heavy ovetones of the contemporary subculture of which he was an ardent spokesman. (OL)
23A reference to the knife used to seperate the uncut pages of a newly-printed book, in a metaphor also used by fellow Bouzingo Théophile Gautier. (OL)
24This is a reference to Borel, who was given the nickname of 'The Lycanthrope' within the Avant-Garde (as he mentions in his own preface); the term seems to have bled out to refer to the 'frenetic' or extremist wing of Romanticism, for which he was the principal spokesman, generally. Interestingly, O'Neddy here positions the Bouzingos' 'lycanthropic' behaviour to a response to social disease and social revolution (which, after all, had in fact occured only three years previous and would again in another ten). (OL)
25Prendre au pied de la lettre = To take to the foot of the letter, and this expression means to take some thing literally/word for word, or, in the case of a command or order, to carry out precisely as ordered.
26I suspect this translation is possibly a gamble. O'Neddy means more less given the chance. In my translation, chance or opportunity is implied, but I am not certain if this implication is evident enough (at least the way it is in the source text).
27If not both. This statement is reminiscent of the way that the Bouzingo lived and the way that they built their public face. They reconciled what were up to that time considered mutually exclusive opposites (aside from a few figures whom they had studied quite a bit, such as Villon, Rabelais, Caravagio, etc), being fiercely intellectual, individualistic, and careful of manner and appearance as befited an aristocrat (of birth or of intellect) worth more than society, while at the same time rowdy, over the top, proudly destitute, and immersed in popular subcultures as befitted reprobates and criminals, and perhaps the most exploited of the working class.
Posts
