Tag Archives: surrealist

The Book of Monelle

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Book of Monelle [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Marcel Schwob, trans Kit Schulter.

Scwob Schulter The Book of Monelle

This short but impressive and important work makes Marcel Schwob a sort of fin de siecle decadent successor to Dante and Colonna, constructing a significant mystical text in memory of the lost Beatrice-Polia-Monelle. Wakefield Press, the publisher of the 2012 English translation says that it was adopted as the “unofficial bible of the French symbolist movement.” The book is divided into three sections, each in a different style.

“The Voice of Monelle” is the first part, consisting of spiritual imperatives. It reads almost like Kahlil Gibran on an absinthe bender. It is excellent stuff for anyone who wants another installment of Aleister Crowley’s “Liber Cheth,” although Schwob was of course writing seventeen years before Crowley’s reception of that “secret of the Holy Graal.”

“The Sisters of Monelle” are a collection of narrative vignettes, closer in form to Schwob’s previously-published work in The King in the Golden Mask. But these all feature lost or wayward girls for protagonists. Each story is named for a moral or psychological quality, such as “The Perverse,” “The Disappointed,” “The Faithful,” and “The Numb,” suggesting that they are allegories in which each story’s girl represents a different plight of the unenlightened soul.

“Monelle” per se is the third part, consisting of six short chapters in the voice of an unnamed narrator, and this section is presumably the one that draws most directly on Schwob’s personal memory of the girl Louise whom he had lost to tuberculosis in 1893. Even so, it is surreal and repeatedly floats across an ambiguous threshold of mortality.

Translator Kit Schluter’s afterword contains both a general biography of Schwob and a more particular study of his relationship with Louise, including a facsimile of the sole surviving correspondence from her to the writer, and an account of the composition of Monelle and her book.

(An Open Entrance To The Shut Palace Of) Wrong Numbers

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews (An Open Entrance To The Shut Palace Of) Wrong Numbers by Franklin Rosemont:

Franklin Rosemont's Wrong Numbers

 

Chicago surrealist Rosemont is not particularly coy about the fact that his book Wrong Numbers is an alchemical operation. The work transpires on several planes. On the most obvious, it is an effort to transform the base matter of accidental telephony into the gold of poetry. The book also contains a level of anecdotal autobiography comparable in some respects to Br. DuQuette’s My Life with the Spirits.

Yes, the book is actually about the “wrong numbers” of telephone misdialing. In addition to accounts of his personal experiences, the author sidles up to his topic from various angles: historical, cultural, psychological, and even magical. He champions the derided experience of the Wrong Number, not to rehabilitate it as an object, but rather to assail and transform the “miserablist” perspective of its detractors.

The text is complemented by a set of splendid drawings by Portuguese artist Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas, a surrealist comrade of Rosemont’s. The drawings too demonstrate an alchemical sensibility, in which beings and substances appear transformed, sublimated, and precipitated.

The heterogeneous details of the book, which manage to include multiple references to such disparate topics as Paschal Beverly Randolph, Bugs Bunny, and the IWW, should not obscure the fact that it does indeed express a single, magically puissant will to achieve “Freedom and the Marvelous, Now and Forever!”

Insightful, sincere, funny, and artful, this book would inherently resist being called “important,” yet it addresses the most fundamental dilemmas of our society. Read and enjoy. [via]

 

 

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