A 19th century phonetic poem & Frenetic Romanticist radical fiction from 1833!

Here's an excerpt from the novel "The Cunning of Trialph" by Charles Lassailly, one of the leading proponents of experimental neo-gothic Frenetic Romanticism. I've got three sections here:
  

1.) The text from the book's frontispiece, which needs to be considered an integral part of the novel; it includes another example of Romanticist sound poetry, not included in the mOnocle-Lash chapbook (though I may need to do a second edition...). It is arranged concretely in the form of a centered pyramid, and as you see is framed as a nihilist "profession of faith".
Interesting to note first that there are some other examples of phonetic/onomatopoeic epigraphs by Borel, Janin, and others, that I'm now considering part of this early micro-tradition, and furthermore that all of these examples of Romanticist sound poetry, including the epigraphs, come from specifically the Frenetic sub-current of the movement...
  

2.) The first section of the long preface, an unrelenting example of frenetic romanticism. The Preface was the Romanticist version of what the modernists would call a manifesto, and this is one of the most fully-developed manifestos of frenetic romanticism. Yes, this is the very beginning of the manifesto; in medias res.

   

3) Chapters 8 and 9 of the novel; these sections don't delve into the horror aspect of the movement as much as the radical political side of it. Lassailly's acidic satire is applied here to himself and his own community, and gives a cynical yet whimsical insiders-look into the radical political scene, focused on the Polish anti-imperialism movement which was one of the galvinizing issues for French liberals at the time. He was closely allied with the Jeunes-France Bouzingo group, and the conversation in Chapter 9 bears striking similarities to conversations at ultra-Romanticist "orgies" (think party+happening) recorded in O'Neddy's 'Pandemonium' and Gautier's 'The Bowl of Punch'. (a number of Frenetic Romanticists were technically medical students and thus possible candidates for the character here, including Gérard de Nerval and Hector Berlioz). 

There's some play with spacing and formatting that gets lost in this format; you'll have to wait for the eventual anthology of Frenetic Romanticism for which this is destined. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#1 TITLE PAGE:

[from Title Page]:
The 

Cunning
of
Trialph,
Our Contemporary Before his Suicide

  

  

Ah?
Eh! hey?
Hee! hee! hee!
Oh!
Hou! hou! hou! hou! hou!
– Profession of Faith by the author –

   

   

#2 FROM THE PREFACE

– Where are you going?
– I’m going to see death . . . While waiting, I’m fending off boredom by fashioning myself a book, of which my suicide will be the climax.
– On your word of honour, my dear despair, you’ll have the courage to play this tragic prank?
– Sure.
– Damn! the opus will sell itself . . . You’ve got debts?
– You better believe it.

–––

Even if I do desire to disabuse myself of living much longer, I’m nonetheless still more or less young. My head’s been plucked clean by the blasts of furious storms, but nowadays I prefer a bald skull: this makes you a philosopher in the eyes of our dancers, at a ball. And listen here, I still have more teeth on my mandibles than in the hollowed-out maw of certain cadavers. Then too, I swipe cigarettes from all my friends, and bouquets of violets from all my mistresses!
But, for example, among other things, I’ve ended up wearing myself ragged committing adulterous jokes, without consequence; and, constituted as I am to seek diversion at all costs, even to the point of crime, I set to work on two or three assassinations, without question solely to pass the time, and for the honour of the Gall system,[1] according to the lumps that a med student could most likely demonstrate upon the occiput of my skull.
Hence, today, I’m fleeing the justice of the community of men; and I’m rolling, seated in the carriage of a Stagecoach, toward the sea, where I’m headed to drown myself. You’re quite aware that I look down on the horrors of the Morgue in Paris, and that it’s more decent to extinguish myself in the midsts of the Ocean’s abysses, where nothingness shall clutch my bones.

–––

Right from the start I’m going to confess one thing to you, because I know how you love prefaces.
This one wouldn’t have a title: such are words or ideas which possess a mediocre value; but the money wouldn’t be minted with any effigy.
– Why? . . . –
Ask my century which the materialists of the French revolution have guillotined. For the head of humanity, it’s an idea: God!
Laugh it up then.
It’s your occupation to laugh ever since somebody rhymed the Virgin.[2] But transform into consequences.
You say: I am liberal, republican or carlist;[3] I’m thinking about the country, I desire the well-being of all . . .
Me, I respond: You are proper names; you never think about anything; you desire to live in order to live! . . .
Back to what I was saying. You are the frigid limbs of a cadaver. What you call Order or Liberty, it’s electrical stimulation. Flinch, you frogs!
In your disorganised society,[4] there need be no link between a cause and an effect, and forgetting to enter, hats off, into the logic of facts, you never wrap your head around anything but melodramas.
There are your slogans! There are your cartoons in silhouette! All of your literature, all of your political, moral and religious legislation, would rival one box of prints, along with a portfolio of sketches. Here: I’ve made this for you whilst my genius was sound asleep, the one that comes from on high!
  
 
NOTES TO PREFACE:
[1] Franz joseph Gall was among the first researchers to identify various functional centres within the brain, inadvbertently establishing the groundwork for phrenology.
[2] Pucelle. Possibly referring to Voltaire’s or Schiller’s works aboUT Joan of Arc, both titled La Pucelle ‘Orleans.
[3] Liberal: support Constitutional monarchy, civil liberties, and a Free Market; Republican: support representative democracy; Carlist: Support an absolute monarchy and return to theocratic feudalism.
[4] The charge of the “disorganised” state of nascent Capitalism echoes the vocabulary of socialist discourse of the time.

 

#3 CHAPTERS 8-9
   
 

VIII

  
In the evening, it occurred to us to crack open a bottle of champagne, and a brilliant feast in honour of a people who had died for liberty. . . .
Moreover I’ll assert it explicitly in this story, numerous toasts were proposed. The banquet’s most distinguished members (there were deputies!) distilled, phrase by phrase, word by word, things perfumed with a peculiar charm. A lyre player sang tear to eye, couplets of a disorienting mind, which he recalled in his first vaudeville. A philanthropic subscription was voted on unanimously for an imminent ball, where one would find lovely women, charitable magicians who dance with crowns of flowers, necklaces of gemstones, and nude shoulders. To wrap up, the revelers drank in a manner altogether edifying to patriotism.
Ernest and I, we behaved ourselves in order to deserve graciously, along with the others, our citizens’ esteem and the recognition of the Polish, who were being assailed day and night, worn out by fatigue, starvation and thirst, under a hail of balls,[1] in the midst of their brothers’ cadavers. . . . . .
The hour having arrived, a fashionable youth, an contraversial opposition journalist, offered, we being his two neighbours, to smoke us up on some dried opium leaves and tablets from Constantinople in an exquisite chibouk which had been gifted to him, in the course of his journeys in Asia, by the beautiful vizieress,[2] who is the favourite mistress of the Great Sultan.
We couldn’t turn him down, not without too many regrets, this virtuous republican.
 
  

IX

  
I no longer recall what went down in this unorthodox orgy, apart from fantasizing about a conspiracy which was taken up initially by those who were drunkest.
One shouted out:
– I have a glorious plan in mind! . . .
Another:
– We shall avenge France!
Several of them:
–It must begin by doing away with the tyrant!
All together:
–I’m on board.
– Who’s going to kill him?
– Me!
– Me!
– Me!
– We’ll kill him for sure!
– I volunteer myself to prick him with a pin sharpened with prussic acid, by giving him a shake of the hand, as he’s generous with it to the vile henchmen who tramp out to greet his horse.
– This joke of a med student has spirit.
– I cede my invention to you, if you like.
– When shall you take action?
– I’d much rather suffer on foot no more: never would I make my escape successfully . . . . .
Here, there was a moment of silence . . .
I wanted to change the subject, and I howled vigorously in my turn:
–Friends of joy, which among you would lend me, just for this one night, one of his mistresses? I’d come pay her one visit, with no consequences for the future.
A handsome student on the right, fashionably rigged out in his cravat and his vest like a corset, turned to me:
– I have for some time had at my disposition the friendship of a young patriot who’s going to marry an old man, her benefactor, whom she detests for his opinions; but I confess that I promised her a dress two months ago; and my respectable father insists that I should be forced to eat cabbage soup with the family, quite simply because one semester I squandered six hundred francs on red and black[3] . . . . .
Ernest seemed to wake up in order to remark to me:
– Are you really clinging to procuring indecent distractions? The day before yesterday, at the Opera, I procured the fantasy of several murderous winks in the hall . . . . I lost no time, and captivated one downstage . . . The lover that I’d come to take to the bird-hunt, in her turn, kept busy by making her dark gaze work to perfection . . . I gave myself up to dazzling her a bit, by blowing her several teasing kisses . . . . . She tugged off her glove; and as my modesty would scarcely permit me to perceive the favourable implications of these responses from afar, I drew nearer with so much indifference . . .
– Listen up, citizens, let’s listen.
– Ah well! it seems that despite myself I’ve totally revolutionized her . . . her glove fell at my feet . . .
I became irritated with Ernest.
– What’s all this supposed to prove?
– I picked it up and handed it to her . . .
With that, Ernest scanned the group with shifty eyes :
Gentlemen, I drink to the virtue of your wives! but could a woman that you respect be named? . . .
– No, no, no!
– As I was saying . . . I handed her glove to her: it was a pretext for thanking me and blushing with modesty . . .She took advantage of it . . . As for me, I too took advantage of a trifling situation . . . For it just so happened that my name and address found themselves slipped beneath her fingers; and she didn’t write too badly, to reproach people for their impertinence, by inviting them to no doubt earn their pardon, at Rue Caumartin, No. 7, signed: mademoiselle Césarine B.
– Ah! ah! ah! ah!
– The century’s so corrupt!
– Long live the republic! . . .
– Is his story history?[4]
I took the ladle from the bowl of punch, and helped myself twice, up to the brim of my enormous glass.
Ernest tapped me on the shoulder:
– Crazy artist that you are, do you want to present yourself in my place? . .
– I renounce your protection for the moment.
– My boy’s got his whims.
– I’d rather be conspiring here . . . . .
One of these drunkards lifted up his head:
– And if the affair were serious?
Another tugged out a dagger hidden beneath his shirt:
– And if he only took action for nothing less than resuscitating liberty with one human life? . . .
– That would depend specifically, gentlemen, on the manner in which patriotism would do things. For a hundred thousand francs in annuity, I would massacre the tyrant should he be the most courageous man in the world; . . for a hundred thousand francs of annuity and dictatorship, how I would forget! . . . . Furthermore, gentlemen, I’m a terrible joker, of which you’ve no need . . .
My hasty departure made no impression on them; they still had drinking to do.
 
  

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8-9

[1] A dark pun: the refugees persist in their misery in the midst of a hail of “charity balls” from the privileged and middle classes, which are not effective in stopping the hail of “lead balls” or bullets suppressing their relatives at home.
  
[2] Visir, an archaic alternate form of Vizir. That government position was always held by a male; it is unclear whether whether Lassailly is confused here about the foreign term’s meaning, or is attempting a feminization of vizir to designate the Vizier’s primary wife; I’ve opted for the latter.
  
[3] Not the book by Stendhal, but the gambling game of this name.
  
[4] In the French, the same word serves for “story” and “history”, hence the(virtual) pun: L’histoire est-il historique?
    
 
 
from Charles Lassailly, Les Roueries de Trialph, notres contemporain avant son suicide. 1833. Silvestre: Paris.

Théophile Gautier, "Sonnet VII" (1830)

Gautier played a central role in underground, experimental culture for over 40 years, and his influence on the literary avant-garde was both profound and problematic – so much that he was almost systematically erased from the avant-garde 's collective consciousness by the Surrealists. Yet he is ignored to our peril. The problem: he has been enshrined (especially in anglophone criticism) as the father of de-politicized, “Art for Art's Sake” (a term he tossed out when describing what he called the 'cult of art' in his massively influential Preface to Mlle. de Maupin). Gautier truly does have much to answer for here – in retrospect, we can see how he set a politically distanced pattern that was not shaken free of until the Modernists. However, when read carefully and outside of Walter Pater's critical shadow, even his famous Preface turns out much more nuanced and complex, if still flawed. I would propose (some other time) that the vision he proposes there is as close to Hakim Bey's Ontological Anarchy as Pater's Art for Art's Sake. In fact, he specifically espouses Fourierist socialism in that tract, giving the very same reasons that the Surrealists and Situationists would later offer. What he renounces is his belief in the “political” electoral plane as an effective vehicle for change. This poem from his 1st collection, is explicitly political and calls out the current "Liberal Monarchy" that took over after the July Revolution of 1830, the year of publication, and its suppression of multiple democratic uprisings in its wake. Four years later, in the Maupin Preface, he echoed the poem's point: “What matters it whether 'tis a sword, a holy-water sprinkler, or an [bourgeois-republican] umbrella that rules you? It's a stick all the same... it would be far more progressive... to break it and throw away the pieces.” In experimental fashion, even his syntax fractures here, along with his faith in positivist revolution.

    

Sonnet VII (1830)

by Théophile Gautier

 

Liberty of July! Woman of bust divine,

And whose body ends in a tail!

Gérard de Nerval

  

And this blind life of theirs is so debased,

They envious are of every other fate.

Inferno, canto III

  

With this disgraceful age tis high time that we break it;

The fatal finger placed upon its brow condemned¹

As upon hell’s gates: Hope depleted! – Friends,

Enemies, public, kings, all trump us taken in.

A budget elephant sucks gold by trunk taken in;

In their thrones yet a-quake from yesterday’s ascents,

From kinsmen overthrown they keep all, but rescind

The palm prompt with gifts and pomp breathtaking.

  

And yet in July, neath the sky’s indigo,

There where the cobbles lurched,² they proffered promises

Equal to Charles tenth’s overseen masses!

  

Alone, Poetry manifest in Hugo

Refused deluding us, of which palms divine

Enshadow our debris, destiny inclined.
  

– Trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
  

from Théophile Gautier, Poésies Complètes, Tome premier. 1884. Charpentier: Paris. p.107.
  

1 In the original, this line ends with a mis, “placed”, which is an exact homophone of amis, “friends”, in the next line. I have found it impossible to translate this wordplay.

2 Referring to the paving-stones of Paris being pried up to build barricades, a potent symbol of revolution in France throughout the 19th Century.